The rest of us can learn from what the Welsh are doing with education....Two recent press releases have caught my eye. As PPC for North Devon, a rural economy where, on average, schools get £300 less per pupil than in the rest of England, I am keen on education reform. Key to that is ensuring good teaching and supporting our teachers. So I was pleased to see that Welsh Lib Dem Education Secretary Kirsty Williams has announced the single biggest investment in Wales' teachers since devolution. This is through a groundbreaking £24m package to help teachers deliver Wales' new curriculum. Kirsty says, This major investment shows how highly we value teachers' professional learning. ... (more) |
A Farcical Meeting but with largely the right outcomesAt yesterday's Council meeting we had a mixture of anger, dissembling and just misleading statements from the Mayor of Liverpool but eventually he revealed that he agreed with the Lib Dems on two crucial issues Where should I start with ... Continue reading → (more) |
Theresa May gets her Armada momentTheresa May has been compared to Elizabeth the First. Early in her tenure, Jacob Rees-Mogg lauded her as Gloriana – astride the domestic political scene, dominating the polls, scattering Citizens of Nowhere and Enemies of the People to the desert of irrelevance. No doubt Rees-Mogg regrets his early adulation. The reality of May's subsequent general [...] The post Theresa May gets her Armada moment appeared first on Radix. (more) |
Adrift in Soho ***Soho in the 1950s and 1960s was a magnet for young people tired of post-War England's grey atmosphere and grey food — a place where you could find a good, cheap French or Italian meal or sit for hours over a beer in the Coach and Horses or a coffee at the 2i's, and where [...] (more) |
Brexit withdrawal agreement: I called it wrongLast night I started to write a post arguing that the Tories would fall in behind the withdrawal agreement that Rabb and May had negotiated. I became too tired to finish it and didn't hit publish. This morning, looking at the utter chaos the strong and stable May government is in, I'm rather glad that [...] The post Brexit withdrawal agreement: I called it wrong appeared first on ten pence piece. (more) |
My tweetsWed, 12:56: Et si les Etats-Unis n'étaient pas entrés en guerre en 1917 https://t.co/FoRKXsgqHd Interesting alternate timeline.... https://t.co/4c7pgB3sdX Wed, 15:22: RT @DaveClark_AFP: If you're watching the thrilling live stream of the closed Number 10 door, check out this gripping screen grab of no-one... Wed, 16:05: Where the Bodies Are Buried https://t.co/PCsntQVFAd Long @NewYorker article about Northern Ireland - from 2015 so a... https://t.co/AJo23H27xm Wed, 18:06: RT @davidallengreen: With a Brexit text seemingly agreed in principle, what now? By me, at @FT https://t.co/NBRnSDZ823 https://t.co/YXgD... Wed, 18:39: Hybrid, by Shaun Hutson https://t.co/gmLmNQ22Yh Wed, 20:48: I never expected to be in the index ... (more) |
The Core VoteThrough the feeds of politics-internet I haven't been able to escape the BMG research on the UK's political clans (find out yours here). If you've managed to escape the discussion there's more information in The Independent (and a more in depth report here), but basically it splits people into ten values and identity groups and then analyses how each vote, essentially highlighting how fractured the current alignments are and how little the current party system reflects these clans. For liberals of all stripes, the initial findings can be disheartening. People with explicitly authoritarian beliefs make up the largest part of ... (more) |
Settling DisputesThe block over which the government are now stumbling is called 'dispute resolution'. There is substantial disagreement between the negotiators of the United Kingdom and of the European Union. On the one hand, the EU has proposed that the European Court of Justice should be the final arbiter in the construction of the withdrawal agreement and any future problems, because it says that the agreement will embody many provisions of EU law: the CJEU has declared itself to be the only binding interpretative authority of EU law. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has argued that it is unacceptable ... (more) |
Maghull Station – Rebuilding the Station Master's HouseAfter many years of decline, it looks like work has now started to rebuild Maghull Station's Station Masters House as part of the redevelopment and house building project behind the Liverpool bound platform. Here's a photo I took on Remembrance Day on my way into Liverpool:- It's said (by no lesser person than Les French Chairman of the Maghull based Frank Hornby Trust) that the railway buildings of Maghull Station were a probable inspiration for Maghull's world-famous toy maker Frank Hornby who lived just yards away from the station and who caught the train to work there regularly. On that ... (more) |
Brexit has destroyed Theresa May's majorotyThe most important consequence of Theresa May's Brexit deal has nothing to do with her future as Prime Minister nor even that of the Tory Party, it is the consequences for the UK. We find ourselves in the worst possible situation, effectively in the EU without a voice. It was an entirely predictable outcome and one that many of us warned about before the referendum and since. Quite simply it is impossible to disentangle the UK's economy from that of our European neighbours without significant and quite possibly disastrous consequences. Any politician who says differently is either misleading us or ... (more) |