As part of the redevelopment of Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cy.. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

It irritates me no end that the Council muck up Twitter like that – they use it just to duplicate a feed somewhere and they never care that their titles are too long for Twitter’s character limit. It means that the important word from that press release CYCLE or BIKE is totally missing from the tweet.

Still, that’s not where the success lies. I haven’t persuaded the media people to use Twitter correctly.

No, I retweeted their announcement, fixing it so that all the necessary words were included:

RT @NottinghamNews At Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cycle parking opens. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

And got an immediate query from a friend: how much does it cost? Is it free?

Good question. At the time of writing, the press statement on the Council website is silent on the issue. And because it talks of the investment and the cost – new facility, CCTV, solar powered LED lighting – it all invites you to think, ooh, expensive!

It seemed pretty likely to me that it would be free, so I phoned up an officer in Transport Strategy to check. Didn’t get the officer I know from committee, but the polite receptionist had exactly the same reaction as me – um, I expect it would be free, but I’d better check. She checked, phoned back. Yes. It is free.

So I phone the media department, and here it’s the same schtick: person answering phone needs to go away, but in a few minutes, the press officer who made the press release gets back to me. He agrees with my point. It is free. It would be a good idea to mention that in the press release. I’ll get onto that, councillor.

Hooray!

Five minutes and five phonecalls later this paragraph:

The facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

… becomes this paragraph:

The free facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

Can you spot the difference?

If I hadn’t had two copies of the statement open, I’d just have assumed I’d overlooked the word on the first time through. But that is not the case! Today, something good actually happened because of a suggestion I made.

*sigh*

In these Coalition days, you have to take your triumphs where you find them.

It didn’t go like that at all.

Questions didn’t go as planned because a number of people were missing – if either questionner or questionee is missing, the question is deferred and answered in writing, and that happened to two interesting ones. The Conservative chair of the Wilford and Clifton area committee wasn’t present to talk about his views of the A453 widening scheme threatened by government cuts; and a Labour councillor wasn’t present to ask a question that was essentially “Could the Labour leader please expand at length on how awful the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are?”

Cllr Collins’s material on that last topic wasn’t wasted, because at the last minute, we got an emergency report on cuts. The government has taken the extraordinary step of making in-year cuts to the council’s grant. Three quarters of local government finance comes from central government. Normally we get told good and early in the year how much to expect so we know how much to budget for, and what council tax to set to raise the remaining quarter. Once the figures have been set, they don’t change; normally government would tell us what to expect the following year. Telling us halfway through a year that we will not be getting as much as previously thought is an extremely unfriendly thing to do, and will have more serious consequences than letting us know that we will lose money for the next year’s budget.

The report we were sent sets out that we will lose about 1% of our budget – which doesn’t sound like much. It translates to about £4million pounds, which suddenly sounds a lot more.

So we debated that. The report itself has been drafted in neutral factual terms detailing what has been cut. The debate… well the debate was a good mix of factual explanation of the consequences, and political theatre making extreme points. I’m sure you will have heard pro-cuts / anti-cuts arguments in the public arena elsewhere so I shan’t rehearse them here again.

Then we moved onto petitions. Councils up and down the country have been told by the government how they should handle petitions in future. It’s a bit of a cheek that central government should tell local government how to represent local people, and Julia Goldsworthy once made a good joke about the irony of a government department that doesn’t accept petitions telling councils how to, um accept petitions. Anyway, the last Labour government made new rules on petitions that the Council just accepted, that generally will be a Good Thing. Now any petition in Nottingham getting over 5,000 signatures from people who live, work or study in Nottingham, will have to be debated by councillors in Full Council.

Finally, we moved onto my motion about blood donation. Happy coincidence meant that Full Council fell on World Blood Donor Day, so I tabled a motion celebrating that, urging as many people as possible to donate blood, and regretting that gay men can’t give blood.

Now I assumed that would be fairly uncontroversial within the Council. Perhaps I didn’t spend as long finessing the words of the motion. I assumed most people would be with me. The first few speeches went fine. Mine; then one from a Labour portfolio holder; then one from the Conservative leader, all making good points, all being supportive. So I settled back, took a few notes and got ready to make a summing up speech.

One of my group’s little habits with motions is it’s not enough to just have a motion saying X is a good thing – it has to get someone to do something. So we included in the final bullet point, an action that the Labour portfolio holder for Adult Services and Health¹ write a letter to the Blood Service saying the discrimination should end.

So I was expecting the Portfolio Holder to get to her feet, and talk to the motion. I was half expecting an amendment, as the Labour group are slightly control-freakie, and don’t like opposition motions to pass unamended.

But I wasn’t expecting the Labour party to delete the reference to discrimination against gay men. That came as a bit of a shock.

The Labour Portfolio Holder even used the infelicitous phrase “some of my friends are gay, but…”

The seconder of the Labour amendment carried on in the same theme. She drew heavily on this advice from Terrence Higgins Trust, who, in my view, are not on the side of the angels in this matter.

A third Labour speaker spoke to endorse their approach, saying our motion was flawed because of all the groups who are unfairly prevented from giving blood, we didn’t mention women who used to be sex workers but who had subsequently been given a clean bill of health.

My group leader got up to back me up and had an interesting extra nugget of information to add to the debate I didn’t know before we started – that his dad had once caught hepatitis from an infected blood donation. He underlined the importance of safety and screening of blood, and how our views about gay men should not undermine that.

Then it came back to me for my right of reply, and I had to give a speech I hadn’t prepared for one bit. It’s always a bit of a weakness that I don’t prepare for summing up speeches in the same way I get ready for introductory speeches. (And it was my weakness 20 years ago at school debate club, too). But even if I had prepared, I wouldn’t have had material for this.

Some of the points I made were these: my main point in putting the motion down was to celebrate blood donation generally. Getting into the gay debate was only one part of my plan. The main message to take away was that those who can give blood should do so, as often as they are asked to.

Then I picked up on a point made by the Conservative leader: that the health service discriminating in this way sent a signal to people with old fashioned views that it is OK still to discriminate. It reminded me of this post I read at JoeMyGod (adult ads and swearwords in the comments) where a lobbying group drew on the gay blood ban as “evidence” that it isn’t safe to let gay people serve in the military, which is presently a big hot topic in the US.

Then I drew a bit on personal experience. I’ve been tested. I can be more sure than many people that I am HIV negative. I take precautions. I also think that the aforementioned former sex workers are also more likely to have been tested for STIs and know they are clean, so they too should be able to draw on their personal experience and their personal knowledge when it comes to deciding whether they are safe to donate blood.

I also mentioned the thing that several NHS workers from doctors to have said to me – just lie. THT’s advice is that this is not a good idea, and I do agree with them on that.

The mood changed in the room, and it got a bit uncomfortable. This was perhaps a bit more personal than it usually is at Full Council.

Ultimately we got to the vote. One gay Labour councillor absented himself from the room shortly before the actual vote. And why is this? The Labour group in Nottingham is almost stalinist in the way they observe their whip. Labour councillors always vote together, en bloc. They discuss things privately in group, decide on a common line, and then stick to it rigidly. Things are different in the Liberal Democrats. We discuss things, come to a common line, and then normally vote that way. But if there are personal concerns, so long as they are raised in the group in advance, it’s not often a problem if people decide to vote their own way. This is to some extent a luxury of being in a small opposition group that may have to go by the wayside as and when we grow in numbers. But the point is, in Nottingham, the Labour whip is always rock solid.

But not this time. At the vote for the Labour amendment, at least five Labour councillors sat on their hands, and looked uncomfortable. Including three frontbenchers and a civic.

Good for them. Thanks.

The rest of them voted for the amendment, and it was enough to get it through.

The final motion as amended still encourages as many people as are able to donate blood. And that is still a good thing, and still something we were able to support. But it is a shame that our lines about discrimination against gay men did not make the final version.

MOTION IN THE NAME OF COUNCILLOR FOSTER:

“This Council…

1.Celebrates today’s World Blood Donor Day, which highlights the importance of blood donation.

2.Celebrates the work of phlebotomists across the UK, and everyone who keeps this vital life-saving service running.

3.Urges all those who are able to donate blood to do so regularly.

4.Regrets that the blood service in the UK discriminates unfairly against different groups in our society including gay men and bisexual men.

5.Pledges that the Portfolio Holder for Adult Support and Health will write to and lobby central government and the National Blood Service, urging them to scrap their discriminatory and outdated policy towards gay and bisexual men.”

Labour amendment:

“Points 4 and 5 to be amended to read:

4.Welcomes the Review started under the previous Government, to review criteria for the donation of blood through the Advisory Committee, SaBTO, which will ensure the criteria are clearly linked to the most current scientific evidence and international Best Practice.

5.Recommends the Portfolio Holder liaise with City MPs when the Review is published in the autumn, to ensure Recommendations are implemented, which will address concerns about discrimination in the current criteria.”

1. Adult Services is not as risqué as it sounds – the Government insisted that all councils that run social services make sure that education and schools are in the same department as child social services. That leaves adult social services separate in most places, and that becomes a department in itself

The agreement includes an awful lot of Lib Dem policies, including lots of versions of what appeared in our top 4: more money for disadvantaged children, lots on sustainability, lots on fairness in tax.

But just how this all works will only be revealed in the fullness of time.

And certainly many of us have grave concerns about what happens next. Can the Tory right really be kept happy with the agreement? And the Lib Dem left? and our own members?

We’re going to have to bite our tongues and wait and see. And we’re back to my call for patience – please don’t rush to judgement. Judge us on our policies

2 …

3 Erm…

That’s it.

The Liberal Democrats are a substantial party in our own right, and we are not simply numbers the other parties can call on if they fall short of the finishing post. We set out our priorities in detail months before the General Election. There are many things we think are important. The Lib Dems are not looking for personal glory, ministerial cars or cabinet positions – we want to deliver our priorities to make our country fairer and better for all.

Labour have lost. They cannot govern on their own.

Labour have lost so badly, they also cannot form a workable coalition. It’s just mad to think it would be possible to lump together every MP who wasn’t a Tory and expect that to win. Labour know they need that, and still can’t manage to be courteous to other parties. And even if they lump everyone together, they could still be voted down by the Conservatives.

And with all that, it’s a bit rich for the Labour party to start talking about electoral reform after having governed for 13 years without doing anything about it. And even richer still to think that AV is proportional representation.

So I simply do not think there can be any mileage in thinking about alliance with the Labour party.

Which leaves the Conservatives.

David Cameron has said he is prepared to talk to us. But in his speech on Friday afternoon, which was the last thing I have heard from him, the concessions did not go nearly far enough to be worth anything to the Lib Dems.

In order to form a coalition, the Conservatives have to agree to substantial parts of the Lib Dem platform. I agree with Alex Wilcock when he says this:

In one line – all four of our cast-iron priorities: deal. Anything less: no deal.

Lib Dem tax cuts for low and middle earners, with increased taxes on the rich to pay for them.

Breaking up the banks and a green economy.

Solid money to support poorer kids in schools.

Big money out of politics, elected Lords and above all STV.

If the Tories agree to that, I think we can deal.

If they don’t, I think they should try and run the country on their own. And they will have to amend each of their policies until it is acceptable to a majority of all parties in the Commons.

I do not think there is substantial appetite for another election. But the Tories cannot say “These are our policies, vote for them or not” and then blame the other parties if they are voted down. They will need to compromise – either hugely to get a coalition, or slightly less to get try and get a budget and Queen’s speech through a hung parliament.

As I might have mentioned, I’ve been booked to go and talk about election results on BBC Radio Nottingham from midnight til 6am, so I’m preparing myself mentally for that.

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea: I do tend to get weepy and morose once things come to an end. University shows always used to end in cast parties, when I didn’t necessarily behave. Past elections have left me tired and grumpy, and even when we win, I struggle to be nice to colleagues. And now they’re taking me when I’m at my weakest and putting me in front of a microphone.

Listen live here!

And what will I say? My experience is that turnout has been high and the competition has been fierce. There have been lots of young and new voters, but I’m not sure anyone knows which way they’ve been voting.

The exit poll is just reading out the results – 307 Con, 259 Lab and 59 LD. Exit polls are often wrong. Let’s hope for at least as many Lib Dem MPs as we had last time. Nottingham’s Prof Phil Cowley has just said he’s very sceptical and that exit polls are not good with the smaller parties.

And let’s not forget that a few months ago naysayers had the Lib Dems on under 40 seats.

(And that typing has not been enough to warm my hands up. Should I take gloves and thermal socks with me to the beeb?)

So I went to take a picture myself.

It’s a little tricky to read, so here’s a closeup:

.

I think the banner was there in response to a house over the way that had gone a little bit mad with Tory correx boards that dotted all over their house and wall.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to leave a proper Lib Dem correx board in our usual dayglo orange, so I tried to get in. They’re in a really nice converted cigar factory, and the blank plate of doorbells didn’t give you much of a clue which flat was where in the building.

So, I’m afraid, I rang bells at random. I hate doing that. I don’t like trying to get into flats even to deliver leaflets – because frankly, if you ring people’s bells at random and say, “Hi, I’m here to deliver leaflets” – and someone lets you in – why bother having buzzers and locks at all?

So I spoke to about 6 people before finally getting the flat who said they were the ones with the terrace and the banner, and they buzzed me in. When I walked closer to their inside front door, if you see what I mean, I was met in the corridor by a man who explained that it was not his terrace, but his neighbours, and he pointed out the right door, and then closed his own door.

I knocked the right door, but no response. Which left me standing in a locked corridor with a Lib Dem board but no pen and paper. I couldn’t go back to the car to get something to write with because the door would close behind me, and I didn’t want to try my luck at getting through the buzzer maze twice.

So I just left the board balanced against the front door, hoping whoever’s door it was wouldn’t find it too freaky the board had just turned up.

When I got home, I could cross reference the full address with the electoral register, and write to the people who really lived there, so I popped a letter in the post thanking them for their banner, urging them to use the stakeboard to augment it, and asking them to let us have it back when the election is done. (I’m a skinflint. But those boards are £15 each, and can only be bought in packs of 10. Nottingham Lib Dems only own 2, which the central party kindly gave us as part of the Green Tax Switch campaign)

Imagine my delight, when, a few days later, I get tagged in the same letter on Facebook. I was half expecting it – by and large the people who live in flats like that are definitely part of the digital revolution. What I wasn’t quite expecting was that the people who lived in the flat were friends of a new member in a completely different part of town who we recruited a few weeks ago. Small world.

If you’re my friend on facebook, you might be able to see it at this link. Not very sure how privacy settings work.

Once I’d been tagged in the photo, I commented on it, letting my social networking mugshot show up on the facebook page.

But if that wasn’t cool enough, the next stage in the story is that I was out canvassing this week, and someone who’d read the letter on Facebook recognised me on the doorstep. Small world indeed!

Then I remembered discussions with City Council Parks staff about plans for King George V Park in my own ward, and I’m pretty sure I know what they are doing.

They’re planting wildflower meadows.

This is not a new thing – they did it to my primary school when I was there in 1988. They weedkill a spot of grass, rotivate it to turn the earth up, and then sow wild flower seeds into the space.

They also did it to a roundabout in Chesterfield while I worked up there, and what I learned is that during the early phases, communication with local people is absolutely vital. It looks dreadful for the first few weeks. Then it looks untidy and overgrown, and everyone who sees it has real concerns about what the heck is going on.

Then, however, the flowers start to come out, and suddenly it all makes sense. The flowers look fantastic, and should be in bloom by the summer.

Come the autumn, all the Council has to do is essentially harvest the seeds, leaving enough onsite for the plants to come up again.

So, it looks scary now, but it really is a Good Thing. The wildflower meadows look lovely – particularly by the second summer. They allow for informal play. They’re excellent for biodiversity, wildlife and insects – in particular our troubled bee population that needs all the help it can get. And – whisper it – they’re cheap to maintain – they don’t even need mowing like the huge expanses of grass they replace.

So far I’ve seen the council preparing the ground in Woodthorpe Park and a little triangle of land in the Basford ward, near St Leo’s church, on the ring road. But more are planned across the city.

The scary thing is that the parks staff have told residents in my ward that the KGV Park will get one of the largest patches of meadow anywhere in the city. What they’ve done on Woodthorpe is already huge – so what they are planning for KGV must be enormous!

It’s my foot. It’s OK, as feet go – you’re not getting the worst of it in a photo, as it’s real downside is the smell, not what it looks like. It has a tough, tough toenail on my big toe that is increasingly difficult to cut through, even using my father’s cast-off, heavy-duty chiropody shears. They are not quite as blistered as perhaps they ought to be at this stage in a campaign in which I am foot-soldier. There’s something funky going on underneath my toes that leads to dead skin sloughing off periodically, and, as I said, they smell bad.

And you didn’t need to see them on my blog, and you didn’t need to read the description either.

Any more than you needed to read in the Daily Mail about the Prime Minister’s wife’s feet. I’m not linking the story because I don’t want to encourage them. The story is a disgrace – Sarah Brown went to a beautiful Hindu temple which required her to remove her shoes. The Daily Mail took a photo of her feet, then blew it up to enormous size and criticised the location of her little toe. Which no-one would have taken the slightest notice of if they hadn’t printed it in a big close up.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they then speculated on whether the Prime Minister’s missus’s toe problem is enough to give the Leader of the Opposition’s wife the edge.

[S]he unveiled a rather unsightly problem on her left foot – her little toe and fourth toe crossed over one another.

She has been placed in direct competition with David Cameron’s wife Samantha, and this will do little to boost her credential’s against ‘SamCam’.

In fact, it’s the kind of sight that will immediately put the Prime Minister’s wife into second place behind the Tory leader’s wife.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? What the hell do these people think general elections are about? This story is an absolute disgrace!

There are any number of reasons why the Prime Minister’s wife has a food that looks like that. She could have been born with it. She could have spent her life cramming her feet into the kind of stupid shoe that the Daily Mail thinks is what women ought to wear. She might have had some hideous foot accident that left her lucky to have what she has or she could have spent her childhood in painful surgery to get as far as having nothing worse than a slight overlapping toe issue.

In any case, IT’S NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.

IT’S NOT REMOTELY RELEVANT. TO ANYTHING.

NO-ONE WITH HALF A BRAIN SHOULD CARE.

IT HAS NO BEARING ON POLITICS, THE ELECTION, CURRENT AFFAIRS, WHO RUNS THE COUNTRY OR ANYTHING – ANYTHING -ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT SARAH BROWN CHOOSES TO PUT ON HER FEET.

AAAAARGH!

EDIT – Cllr Foster has had a slight aneurysm and has been removed to a place where he is not a danger to himself or others. He will be allowed back at the blog once the frothing at the mouth subsides.

My first is in today’s Post and, erm, well, doesn’t manage the wryly amusing bit terribly well, and clearly I went over the word count, as they’ve cut two bits, including the one that  makes the headline they chose make sense.

Here’s what the article looked like before the subs deleted lines and words they hadn’t heard before!

On the Campaign trail: Lib Dem army of ‘old ladies’

So the election has been called. Will that make a difference to party workers up and down the county?

Probably not. It’s not like the news of the election will come as a surprise to the party wonks workers who are planning elections.

We’ve been working hard trying to communicate our various messages for some months. I know the Lib Dems in the city have been knocking on doors and delivering leaflets at full capacity for some time – and my covert surveillance of the internet reveals that Tory and Labour activists have been boasting about their teams and the numbers of people doing likewise for both other parties.

In some cases, the Lib Dems have less money and fewer people to go around than other parties, so then, we have to concentrate our efforts on parts of constituencies, and on spending more time to knock on as many doors as possible.

There are some constituencies near Nottingham – including Ashfield where Geoff Hoon decided to stand down before he was defeated – where there is a real chance of the next MP being a Liberal Democrat.

And the scale of work they have to get through to convince enough people to vote yellow next time is terrifying. They will be people working full time, day in, day out to do all that is necessary. They need to recruit a team of people able to deliver 40,000 leafets in a week. They will be writing thousands of letters and making thousands of phone calls. There will be a small army of little old ladies sitting in a room somewhere stuffing letters into envelopes.

This is work that began long before Gordon finally went to see Her Maj, and will continue long after polling day. The campaign to get a whole constituency to vote Liberal Democrat is an enormous undertaking that takes years and years. General elections are just a little blip in the middle.

I’m very worried about the prospect of writing publicly about the election either in the paper or here on the blog after an incident in the last local elections where me shooting my mouth off ended up being quoted in Labour target letters as reasons not to vote Liberal Democrat. I’d recommend everyone votes Liberal Democrat!