I’m passionate that our local public services, such as the health service, should be as much part of their local community as possible – and indeed accountable to them.

So when the Whittington hospital started asking people to sign up as ‘members’ of it, as part of its bid to become an NHS Foundation Trust, I signed up. And when they invited local people to put themselves forward potentially to be on their ‘Council of Governors’, I submitted a nomination for that too. With about 3,500 members of the trust (excluding staff), and a huge area, containing the whole of Islington, Camden and Hackney, as well as parts of the City and Westminster, electing just six people to the Council, it was fairly obviously going to be a quite hotly contested election. But I was keen to be involved and play my part in ensuring that the hospital’s management are responsive to local people, and so I resolved to give it a try. And if you were one of the, er, one or two local residents that I asked to sign up as members too, thanks very much for doing so.

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It’s a year now since I first started blogging, so I felt it was more than time to move away from one of the Wordpress standard templates - so here is my new and more customised design! I’d always found the single column of text down the middle of the page, leaving lots of space at the sides of the page, somewhat strange, so I’ve ensured that I now use it all with most of the page used for text, as well as various other new features. Several friends I’ve talked about my blog too have said they struggle to catch up with websites but if you could sign up to receive blogposts by email then they’d do that, and there is now the chance to do that in the sidebar on the right hand side.

I’ve also used the opportunity to link up the design of the blog page with the other pages on the site (and put the whole lot into Wordpress, saying goodbye to my old friend MovableType).

With a little help I’ve come up with a design I’m pleased with and I hope you like it.

It’s become commonplace for people writing about the loss of our leader last autumn to refer casually to “the Lib Dems ditching Ming Campbell as Leader because he was too old”.

This is fast becoming accepted as the official history of what happened at the start of October 2007.

But in fact this is not what happened.

Yes, Ming was forced into a position where he felt he had to resign because there was a perception that he was too old.

But who was it who made this into an issue?

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On Friday the Conservatives launched a major advertising campaign and I think it’s quite an interesting milestone for showing where they have now got to in the development of “Cameron’s Conservatives”.

The top slogan for the campaign is “You can get it if you really want”, with ten individual promises in specific areas: health, schools, immigration etc.

This structure has taken some flak, for example from the Guardian, for emphasising different messages to different groups of people: so for example the immigration ad has gone in the Daily Mail, crime in the Sun and the education one in the Guardian.

This has been picked up by some (though not quite as explicitly as this by the Guardian) as further evidence that Cameron is willing to be all things to all men.

This doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right analysis.

Firstly, all political parties - indeed all of us all the time - say different things to different groups of people, without that meaning that we are inconsistent. It is hardly unreasonable for a party seeking to win votes to emphasise to particular groupings, their policies that they think will be of particular interest to that group. When this becomes a problem is when these messages are either explicitly or implicitly contradictory to each other, or (to a lesser degree) when it’s not possible to discern a linking thread between them.

Secondly it’s all very well to dismiss, for example, talking about education to Guardian-readers - but the actual messages they are putting across there are not the stereotypical messages you would expect Guardian-readers to love: the first headline here talks about splitting children up by ability (not quite the comprehensive ideal) and the second one emphasises discipline. These ideas may be right or they may be wrong - and the Conservatives obviously think they will appeal to Guardian-readers - but they cannot be dismissed as simply pandering to the lefty prejudices which this group of people are commonly supposed to have.

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I was extremely pleased to see the fuss that Lib Dem MPs, led by Ed, deliberately made yesterday about their call for a referendum on Britain’s future membership of the EU. It was an excellent way of drawing attention to this Lib Dem call (which I have strongly supported here).

The Lisbon Treaty is obviously the particular document under discussion at the moment - but the referendum that people really want, is on the key question of whether Britain should remain part of the EU or not - not about details such as exactly how many Members of the European Parliament there should be, or the exact number of weeks that national Parliaments should have to object to any proposed European legislation, which is the kind of stuff the Lisbon Treaty is made up of.

When people express their concern about the EU they are not talking about this kind of detail but fundamentally whether we should part of it or not. (Indeed many normal voters I have spoken to over the years have expressed this as “I don’t think we should go into Europe” which says a lot about the false chimera of a “federal Europe” that people are scared of, rather than the reality of a pretty federal Europe that we already now live in - but that’s a topic for another post!).

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We’ve been on a bit of a learning curve as a nation over the last few days, it seems to me.

On Thursday the headlines screamed “Archbishop of Canterbury says Sharia Law in UK is unavoidable”. The immediate image this conjures up - and was presumably meant to, by the headline-writers - was of a thousand years of English Law being swept aside for gratuitous beheadings and cuttings off of hands: Magna Carta out, Abu Hamza in.

It must be said that a second’s thought by anyone intelligent would have suggested that it was unlikely this was what the Archbishop of Canterbury was really suggesting - I think most people think he may be a bit academic, mystic and generally incomprehensible, but not completely barking.

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Yesterday was the deadline for making submissions to the Party Reform Commission set up by Nick, in conjunction with the party’s President and Chief Executive (Simon Hughes and Chris Rennard).

The team actually carrying out the review are Chris Bones (whom I don’t really know but has a very impressive management background, as well as a long party history), Duncan Greenland - a councillor and as Chair of the party’s Federal Finance and Administration Committee probably has a strong claim to be the most powerful person in the party that you’ve never heard of; Kate Parminter, who I had the pleasure to work with in the Meeting the Challenge group a couple of years ago, and has a long track record of successfully transforming party operations in the past, and Paul Burstow MP, the Chief Whip in the House of Commons.

I think having the review itself is a very good idea and hope it does what it has set out to, to reform the way the party does things, to help us achieve the aim that the new Leader set out, to achieve 150+ MPs over the next two General Elections.

There is some doubt over exactly what its remit covers and how broad it is - and I may say that a few conversations that I have had with people I would expect to know about this, have not necessarily helped to clarify this for me (rather the opposite, in some cases”¦). The review group itself has put various pieces of information, including their formal terms of reference, here - but these are perhaps necessarily not entirely specific.

For what it’s worth my own best take on what it is really intended to do is Read the rest of this entry »

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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