Tag Archives: flood defence

• Lib Dems call on Farage to intervene after Nottinghamshire Reform council bans local journalists reporting
• Davey calls on Blair to give evidence in Parliament following White House Gaza meeting
• Adult mental health waits stretching to more than 1,000 days
• Rennie comments on report showing bill for flood schemes is spiralling

Lib Dems call on Farage to intervene after Nottinghamshire Reform council bans local journalists reporting

The Liberal Democrats have written to Nigel Farage to demand he intervenes after Reform’s Nottinghamshire County Council Leader blocked his councillors from speaking to local journalists from Nottinghamshire Live and the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Liberal Democrat Culture, Media and Sport spokesperson Max Wilkinson has written to Farage demanding he step in and urge Reform’s council leader Mick Barton to reverse the “dangerous and chilling” decision.

Max Wilkinson said the move risks contravening local government’s code of conduct, which calls on elected officials to “submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure … accountability”, and prohibits information being withheld from the public “unless there are clear and lawful reasons for doing so”.

Max Wilkinson MP, Liberal Democrat Culture, Media and Sport spokesperson, said:

Reform’s move to block local journalists from reporting on their work is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. It’s a cornerstone of our democracy that politicians of all stripes are held to account — but for some reason Farage’s cronies think they can make themselves exempt.

This move sets a dangerous and chilling precedent for if Reform were to win power nationally and goes against our deeply rooted British values of freedom of the press. We must stand up to Reform’s assault on those principles.

Nigel Farage pretends to champion free speech: I’m calling on him to take some responsibility for once in his political career and demand that Nottinghamshire County Council Leader Mick Barton reverses this decision.

Davey calls on Blair to give evidence in Parliament following White House Gaza meeting

Responding to Tony Blair’s meeting at the White House with the Trump administration discussing the war in Gaza, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

Tony Blair needs to come before Parliament to give evidence about his discussions with the Trump administration about the ongoing war and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

If he has special insight into Trump’s intentions, it’s only right that Parliament and the Government are made privy to this.

Trump has a unique power to help end this war, get the hostages out, and get the desperately needed aid in to relieve the horrendous human suffering in Gaza. We must leverage all the information and resources at our disposal to make him do the right thing.

Adult mental health waits stretching to more than 1,000 days

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and health spokesperson Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today said that the SNP have no plan to fix the crisis in mental health after new research by his party revealed shocking waits for psychological therapies across many of Scotland’s health boards, including a patient waiting more than seven years to start treatment.