Tag Archives: john dixon

Kirsty Williams AM writes: Getting down to business in Wales

The long running saga of the ‘Welsh Lib Dem two’ has now been resolved but not without some pain. While Aled Roberts was able to re-take his seat as an Assembly Member, it was clear in the National Assembly that John Dixon did not have the same support.

I would like to pay tribute to John Dixon. He has served the public diligently and with distinction on Cardiff Council. He would have been an enormously effective and hard working Assembly Member. He has paid a very high price and I would like to pay tribute to him for the dignity with which he has handled the situation over the past two months.

Aled Roberts too has had a difficult couple of months but he is now back in the Assembly where he belongs and we have wasted no time in getting down to business and I have been able to announce the team that will hold the government to account.

Posted in Wales | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , and | 1 Comment

Opinion: Why Wrexham Labour Party should be ashamed: The curious case of Aled Roberts

It’s estimated that well over 30% of the Welsh population speak Welsh as their first language – that is growing year on year. Hundreds of thousands more across the world speak it – even in a distant corner of Argentina – the valleys of a Patagonia. My partner from Rhosllanerchrugog and her family speak Welsh. They are fiercely proud of their heritage and would be absolutely disgusted with the treatment of Aled Roberts AM. It appears that they don’t speak Welsh at the Electoral Commission!

Now let me declare an interest, I don’t know Aled Roberts, I know his mum …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 21 Comments

Lib Dem John Dixon will not return to the Welsh Assembly

John Dixon, the Liberal Democrat Welsh Assembly member who was disqualified in May, will not be reinstated after an investigation said he had not read the relevant rules for candidates.

He will be replaced by the next candidate on the party’s regional list: Eluned Parrott.

From the BBC:

Liberal Democrat John Dixon stood down after May’s election when it emerged he was a member of a public body to which AMs cannot belong.

On Wednesday AMs will decide whether to reinstate fellow Lib Dem Aled Roberts who fell victim to out-of-date advice.

Mr Dixon was elected for the South Wales Central region, but had to stand down because he was still a member of the Care Council for Wales, which regulates social care workers.

On Tuesday, a report by assembly standards commissioner Gerard Elias QC said Mr Dixon had not read the regulations on proscribed organisations for candidates.

“Perhaps because he was lulled into a false sense of security by his experiences in earlier elections, he honestly believed that he was eligible to be a member of the National Assembly,” the report says.

Mr Dixon, 46, a graphic and web designer, has been a Cardiff councillor for 12 years and had been an assembly candidate at two previous elections.

The report states:

Posted in Election law, News and Wales | Also tagged , , , and | 3 Comments

Lib Dem Welsh AMs await their fate as report delayed

John Dixon and Aled Roberts (the ‘dangling’ Lib Dem Two) may have to wait until next week to find out whether they will be reinstated following their disqualification in May.

WalesOnline reports:

Members of all parties were due to receive a copy of an Assembly report yesterday afternoon into the case of Aled Roberts and John Dixon, who are accused of breaching rules by remaining affiliated to organisations whose members are barred from standing for office.

The report, by Gerard Elias QC, the Assembly’s Commissioner for Standards, was sent to party leaders over the weekend, and was due to go

Posted in Election law, News and Wales | Also tagged , and | Leave a comment

Kirsty Williams writes: Slow progress in Wales

We are six weeks from the elections and the Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Government getting on with the job they were elected to do – governing and legislating. The Scottish Government is demanding more fiscal powers and they are rocking the constitutional boat. Whether you agree with the SNPs policies or not, they are doing something. The story in Wales is different.

The first major government announcement in Wales came on Tuesday when the First Minister rose to his feet to outline his Welsh equivalent of the Queen Speech. This should have been a momentous occasion since the people …

Posted in News, Op-eds and Wales | Also tagged and | 3 Comments

Fate of John Dixon and Aled Roberts hangs in the balance

More details have come of how Welsh Assembly (Possibly) Members John Dixon and Aled Roberts have ended up in the predicament of having their election questioned, but the eventual outcome is still unclear.

Aled Robert’s stood for election despite holding a disqualifying post – with the Valuation Tribunal for Wales. He has since resigned from that position, but the reason he was not aware that it was a disqualifying post is that it was missing from much of the legal guidance available to election candidates and their agents. For example, the Electoral Commission’s official guidance made reference to the wrong …

Posted in Election law and News | Also tagged and | 6 Comments

Legal expert says Lib Dem Welsh AMs’ election is void

The former chief legal adviser to the Welsh Assembly, Winston Roddick QC, has said that two Assembly Members who have been disqualified cannot be simply reinstated.

When elected, John Dixon and Aled Roberts were members of public bodies to which AMs cannot belong. They have now resigned, respectively, from the Care Council for Wales and the Valuation Tribunal for Wales and it had been hoped that their reinstatement would be a technicality. However, the Lib Dem motion to reinstate the two was withdrawn last night when Labour refused to support it.

The BBC reports:

Mr Roddick, who was the

Posted in Election law and News | Also tagged , and | 12 Comments

Two Lib Dem Welsh Assembly Members step down on technicality

The BBC reports:

Liberal Democrats John Dixon and Aled Roberts have had to step down as it emerged they were members of organisations the law does not allow AMs to be part of.

They have resigned respectively from the Care Council for Wales and the Valuation Tribunal for Wales.

The pair expect to be readmitted to the assembly following a vote on Wednesday.

Under the National Assembly Disqualification Order 2011, AMs are not permitted to be members of certain organisations to avoid conflicts of interest.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Liberal Democrats said:

“Two assembly members had positions with outside bodies which technically disqualified them

Posted in News and Wales | Also tagged and | 7 Comments

Lib Dem councillor cleared of wrongdoing over Scientology tweet

Liberal Democrat Councillor John Dixon, from Cardiff, has been cleared of any wrondoing by the council’s Standards and Ethics Committee after calling Scientology “stupid” in a post on Twitter in 2009.

From Wales Online:

Members disagreed with the report of the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, Peter Tyndall, who said there was likely to have been a breach of the code because the Adamsdown ward member signed off his comments on the website as CllrJohnDixon when he criticised the church.

They concluded he was acting in a private capacity.

Coun Dixon, also executive member for health and social services, said: “I’m hugely relieved.

Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 9 Comments

Do Tweets win seats? – Micro-blogging and politics

Politicos use Twitter to communicate with voters, activists and the media. It’s sociable and fashionable. It’s useful but it has its limits.

And if this was Twitter I’d stop there, for the paragraph above is a 140-character summary of the popular micro-blogging service and its emerging role in politics. Having the luxury of a whole chapter, rather than a couple of lines, I can expound a bit. But sometimes I relish Twitter’s brevity and the way it gives me both the discipline and the excuse not to write at length.

Twitter was to the 2010 General Election what blogging had been to the previous one: novel, topical, conversational, personal. Blogging, in long and short form, is good for quickly spreading campaign messages, news and rumours and it’s freely accessible for anyone with an internet connection.

When I first subscribed to the service a couple of years ago, few news outlets or political candidates were tweeting, although the three main parties were already using it to link to party information and election results.

Over the past year, Twitter has been increasingly taken up by MPs and councillors, bloggers and journalists, even government departments, but crucially by thousands of people who are none of the above, but want to converse with them on an equal footing.

The parties continue to tweet, but now candidates, MPs and party leaders themselves are using the medium, with varying degrees of skill.

Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and | Leave a comment
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