Sandy 4 St Albans

I have been shocked to discover a catalogue of misinformation and potential mis-selling of St Albans to London return tickets by First Capital Connect both at St Albans station and on their website.
I discovered it by accident after Norman Baker MP, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, published a national “league table” of the most expensive [...]

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Thursday sees the Liberal Democrat leadership campaign coming to St Albans. 

Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne are both going to speak and then take questions at a hustings meeting at Marlborough Road Methodist Church in the centre of St Albans.  Dorothy Thornhill, LibDem Mayor of Watford is going to chair the meeting.

Given that sparks flew when [...]

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David Cameron meets Vaclav Klaus before the Czech President delivers a speech on ‘The Problematic Side of Global Warming Alarmism’ at Chatham House in London.

David Cameron’s favourite European leader has a totally dodgy record on all environmental matters.  Yet the Tory leader prefers to ally with him rather than with green Christian Democrat leaders like [...]

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Prime Minister Brown has been criticised for having nothing new in his Queen’s Speech.  That is slightly unfair.  He had the innovation of a pre-Queen’s Speech when he first took over the top job.  There is a lot of sense in having better fore-warning of legislation, rather than treating the Queen as a white rabbit [...]

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What does killjoy David Cameron have against "one-legged Lithuanian dance troupes" and their funding by the Arts Council?  We can all have bar-room rants about some aspect or other of arts funding but one legged dancers from whatever country sound great to me.  Back to the drawing board I think.

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I agree with Vince Cable that the Labour and Conservative parties competition as to who can be most hysterical about population is typically unhelpful and misleading.  Of course it is essential that immigration is efficiently managed; that we have a
properly resourced national border force (proposed by the Liberal Democrats long before the other parties); that [...]

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British parliamentary democracy owes a huge amount to Menzies Campbell.  It is hard to realise just how brave he and Charles Kennedy were in determining to stick to their principles and oppose the invasion of Iraq.  The last party leader to oppose the sitting government when it went to war was Hugh Gaitskell over Suez.  [...]

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When I first joined the old Liberal Party, they used to sell orange pencils with "Another good thing stolen from the Liberals."  John Maynard Keynes famously lamented that the Liberals provided Labour with ideas and Conservatives with cabinets.

There is nothing new in good ideas being "stolen" by other parties.  We should welcome it if good [...]

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Gordon Brown’s decision not to call an early General Election was absolutely the right decision but taken for the wrong reasons. 
As I said on the ‘Today’ programme last Thursday morning, an election held on November 1st or November 8th would have been seen by voters as Gordon Brown’s “trick or treat” election, coming hard [...]

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I attended the crowded AGM of the Abbey Line Community Rail Partnership at St Stephens Parish Centre last night.  I have never been a regular user of the line, but we used to walk with our children down the Ver-Colne walk from St Albans  and then catch the train home.  And 24 years ago I [...]

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