The most depressing thing is that, as soon as I saw the headline on the BBC News page, even though it was unattributed, I knew it was from a Lib Dem MP.

Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, is apparently to propose an amendment to weights and measures legislation, to make bars and pubs sell wine in smaller glasses.

Now, the reasons for doing this are pretty straightforward - to encourage people to drink less. And of course the health of anyone who visits a pub reasonably often would indeed benefit from drinking less alcohol.

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A flurry of emails has arrived to tell me that Apple have launched the MacBook Air - the latest incarnation of their supercool laptops (if you are reading this on a computer that is just a black or grey box with sharp corners, and running Windows, then you don’t known what I’m talking about…).

From its publicity, the MacBook Air does indeed look very cool indeed: its main feature is how thin it is (just three-quarters of an inch at its thickest point), but it also looks generally very smooth and sexy, immediately making even the mainstream MacBook look a lot like just a boring box.

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This is a difficult article to write. I’ve already written more than one full draft which had to be discarded because I didn’t think it put it quite right, and I don’t think this version will win me any friends either. But at some level I think this has to be said, because it’s so important for our party and for our politics.

There are two key things to say.

The first is that the under-representation of ethnic minorities within the Liberal Democrats is an ongoing near-scandal which we have clearly not really begun to make any serious inroads into tackling. If it were just a question of under-representation in a few scattered council groups, or at one tier of government, we could perhaps put it down to particular local factors in those cases. But it isn’t: it’s a failure across the country and across the board of our elected representatives - so it isn’t just an incidental issue, it’s clearly a systematic problem.

This problem is first and foremost one of ensuring government which is fully representative - a principle which is not only fair, but one on which the contract of peaceful governance depends.

But it is also a hard-nosed question of political pragmatism for us as a party: quite simply we can’t expect people to vote us if they don’t think we look like them.

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It seemed to be one of those perennial topics last year (not least on this blog!) - what the point of Facebook is.

I get the impression now, however, that there seems to be a consensus growing that one of the things it is most useful for is for maintaining occasional contact with people you don’t see every day but would like to keep vaguely in touch with - which is in fact very similar to some of what I was saying last year.

This came home to me again when I was sending out Christmas cards - something I tend to use for a similar purpose.

And the extent to which it has taken does seem quite extraordinary - and apparently there are now more Londoners on it than people from any other city in the world!

I can see its ongoing appeal, however. One of the things it really seems to get right is its format - and if you doubt that, then just take a look at some of the alternatives, from myspace to bebo to perfspot, to see just how badly the rest of them miss that!

Even though I’ve always been a strong enthusiast for the internet and especially email (someone once told me that everyone had a technological format that is “theirs” - SMS, letters, whatever - and mine is definitely email!), for a long time I avoided accessing the internet from my mobile. I’m not quite sure why - I think probably a vague worry that I’d very quickly run up very large bills.

However a run of particularly boring meetings last summer did the trick, and in one particularly dull one I managed to work out how to rig up the settings to access my email from it.

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Welcome to the blogosphere to my good friend Neil Stockley, who has now started his own blog. Neil is a very keen observer and commentator on (and in the case of the Lib Dems, participant in!) what political parties need to do in order to win - as is very clear already from his first few posts. He seriously knows what he is talking about on political analysis, and his blog definitely goes straight on to my “must read” list!

Like everyone else I’m enjoying watching the US Presidential race. However also like I suspect a lot of people I’m not really following it closely enough to know what the different candidates really stand for so all I’ve got is how I feel about it. I definitely (and have always done) feel more a Democrat than a Republican, and at the moment I feel Obama could really be something different for America, while Hillary’s been around too long, but this not a very informed view”¦(there’s plenty of those around the internet you can find!).

However as a member of a party which has also chosen its candidate for head of government over the last few months, I do doubt whether I’d be very happy with their system for selection. The stringing-out of the process with part of the election happening every week, certainly seems to increase media coverage.

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