Tag Archives: bob neill

Stephen Tall

Which Tory minister do you think is Talking Rubbish most? Spelman, Pickles or Neill?

By Stephen Tall | Wed 6th April 2011 - 11:55 pm

Friends of the Earth is inviting the public to help decide the winner of its Talking Rubbish Award to help debunk the myths peddled by right-wing newspapers and some Tory ministers who ‘like to trash recycling’. The three nominees are as follows:

    The myth: Recycling means everyone is terrified of the ‘bin police’
    “The iron fist of the municipal state has come down on people for the most minor of bin breaches.” Eric Pickles, Communities Secretary

    The reality:     Mr Pickles – and some noisy media commentators – give the impression that people live in fear of the ‘bin police’. In reality, studies show

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Posted in Local government | Also tagged , , and | 8 Comments
Mark Pack

Eric Pickles gets it right

By Mark Pack | Thu 24th February 2011 - 9:25 am

Not quite what Liberal Democrats always says about Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles, but his pronouncement this week about access to local government meetings was spot on.

His department’s press release says,

Councils should open up their public meetings to local news ‘bloggers’ and routinely allow online filming of public discussions as part of increasing their transparency, Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles said today.

To ensure all parts of the modern-day media are able to scrutinise Local Government, Mr Pickles believes councils should also open up public meetings to the ‘citizen journalist’ as well as the mainstream media, especially as important budget

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Posted in Local government and News | Also tagged , and | 10 Comments
Mark Pack

What happened to the 19 Conservative MPs who voted to keep MPs’ expenses secret?

By Mark Pack | Tue 9th February 2010 - 8:20 am

I’ve commented on the fate of the 21 Conservative MPs who voted against reform of Parliamentary expenses (in brief: nearly all of them have since had to pay back money or had an expenses scandal come to light).

That was one of two key votes where Parliament had had the chance to clean up its act before media stories and public outcry forced it to do so. The other was about whether or not MPs’ expenses should be susceptible to Freedom of Information requests. There was an attempt to change the law to keep them secret, via a Bill introduced …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , , , , and | 11 Comments
Mark Pack

Chairing a meeting, Conservative style

By Mark Pack | Fri 24th November 2006 - 10:01 am

You are chairing a public meeting with Ken Livingstone, put on to allow Londoners to question him about his job as Mayor.

Do you:

(a) Call half a dozen Tory councillors to ask questions rather than half a dozen more members of the public

(b) Not give away any indication that you know that any of Tory councillors you call to ask questions are indeed Tory councillors

(c) Both of the above.

If you’re Tory Bob Neill, the answer is (c). (And yes, they were all local Tory councillors he knows).

Hattip: Duncan Borrowman

Posted in News | Also tagged | 4 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Jonathan Parry
    This is an interesting article. One Nation Toryism never got going until the demise of the Liberals in the 1920s (Disraeli certainly never practised it). To t...
  • Peter Davies
    In Latin it may be a gerund but in English it's a noun. If I were to object to the Government's referending of the public, that would be a gerund....
  • Alex Macfie
    Except that "referendum" is not a Latin 2nd Declension Neuter noun. It's a gerundive; as such it is used in English differently from Latin so should take an Eng...
  • PM
    @ PM, It can be either. I do remember from my schooldays that the plural in Latin involved replacing the 'um' of a neuter noun by an 'a'. I must have managed...
  • Alex Macfie
    It's "referendums"....