Good morning and welcome to Thursday’s Daily View.
There’s a huge chunk of exciting things that happened today in history, so it’s an auspicious day to welcome a baby Cullen. Our technical editor Ryan has been tweeting progress, and as I write this there’s a lot of pushing going on. Best wishes from all at LDV to the Cullen family – I’m sure LDV Towers will soon get used to night feeds. I’m dusting off my copy of Gina Ford as I type.
So, today in history: the US Congress met for the first time in 1789. In 1790, France was divvied into départements. In 1797, John Adams succeeded George Washington, the first ever peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in modern times. Chicago was founded in 1837; Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake premiered in Moscow in 1877 and in 1882, East London saw Britain’s first electric trams. The first Daimler car was unveiled and in 1933, the first woman joined the US Cabinet.
March 4th birthdays include Vivaldi, in 1678, Sir Patrick Moore, and Nottingham novellist Alan Sillitoe (I was at the meeting of Nottingham City Council that made him an honorary freeman of the city, incidentally)
2 Big Stories
Evil Gays update
Civil partnerships – gay marriages – could soon be registered in places of worship – something currently expressly banned by statute, which is particularly unfair on those faiths which don’t have a problem with gay relationships, including Quakers and Reform Judaism. The Times has one version of the information; the Telegraph on the other hand manages to paint a far more bleak version of the havoc that could be wrought by litigious homos.
Meanwhile, David Cameron has averred that his party’s tax breaks, maternity and paternity rights planned for married couples will also be available to their civilly partnershipped brethren. Not quite sure how this tallies with last month’s pronouncement that would be no new gay rights under the Tories.
Evil Lib Dems update
The Independent has the shocking scoop that a wealthy Liberal Democrat hoping to get elected has spent a lot of money on campaigning.
The money has been donated by Chris Nicholson, who is standing for the Liberal Democrats in Streatham, south London. Keith Hill, who is stepping down as Labour MP for Streatham at the election, told the Commons that nearly all of the money had been spent on campaigning in the constituency.
The rotter!
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
- James Graham: Scientologists to proselytise at Conference
- Jonathan Calder: on the last living member of the 1945 Parliament
Michael Foot RIP
A number of Liberal Democrat bloggers wrote about the death of Michael Foot yesterday.
For me, perhaps the most striking thing was that he lead the Labour Party through a general election when he was 69. How times change – the press wouldn’t let Menzies Campbell do that.
Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.
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2 Comments
Strange that the Indy article doesn’t actually give any information as to where the donations went, even though for donations of that size it is a matter of public record if they went to the constituency party (i.e. were spent locally) or the central party. All significant central party donations to local parties are also reportable. The Indy used the availability of these statistics when it did its interesting report on where the Ashcroft money was going.
All it says is this: “Mr Nicholson is one of the biggest donors to the Liberal Democrats, who lag far behind the Tories and Labour in their ability to raise funds. He gave the party £57,300 in 2007, £104,894.64 in 2008 and £125,700 last year, a total of £287,894.64.” I know that the Electoral Commission’s search function is not perfect, but it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to find all the relevant information.
In fact, the register is here for all to see. (N.B. two of the donations on the list actually come from Baroness Emma Nicholson, who is no relation as far as I know.)
Mr Nicholson has given £47,994.64 to Streatham Liberal Democrats since his first donation on 7 May 2006 (14.5% of his total donations to the Liberal Democrats since 2003 of £330,599.64). The bulk of his donations went to the federal party, with a number going to the Kingston Borough party (where he was a councillor).
Moving to the reportable donations received by the Streatham party, it has received £63,319.64 of reportable donations since 2001, none of which came from the federal party – in fact all donations were from individuals. Thus three quarters of the local party’s reportable donations came from Mr Nicholson, but none of his money has been recycled through other parts of the party to be spend in Streatham.
So there’s all the information; judge him as you will. Can I have a job at the Independent now? I can clearly do a better job than their researchers…
Oops, I thought the links would go to the pages I had up. Just select Liberal Democrats from the drop-down menu and search for “Nicholson” (not anything else) in “donor name” for the first link; for the second select Liberal Democrats and search for “Streatham” in the “Received by” box.