A Memoir of Jane Austen (Cambridge Library Collection - Literary Studies)
Giles McNeill (Free subscription) | yesterday
Local Parliamentarian, Edward Leigh MP, Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, has today written an angry letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling MP, demanding to know why the £61.6bn loans to Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have only just been made public. Mr. Leigh has asked Alistair Darling to clarify if this is the case. His letter...
John Ward in Medway (Free subscription) | yesterday
Another big story at the moment is the previously-concealed huge loans to the banks HBOS and RBS, totalling some £61 billion. Not exactly peanuts!It appears that the only this has been divulged even now could well be because something happening next week would have brought it out into the open anyway.Conservative MP Edward Leigh, who is the chairman of the parliamentary Public Accounts Select...
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 24/11/2009
There has been the predictable uproar from the British Press at the appointment of the new EU President, but is he such a bad chap as all that? A man who is a devout Christian, who goes on a monastic retreat every month, enjoys Japanese poetry and likes nothing better than a camper van holiday [...]
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
I went along to the Chamber and found out that the Government had run up the white flag over Lord Waddington’s free speech amendment on the Coroner’s and Justice Bill. This is a great victory for free speech which in a democracy should be paramount. In the evening I debated at the Oxford Union alongside the Bishop [...]
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
Public accounts committee calls on government and the Post Office to improve consultations over future closures to prevent the process being brought into 'disrepute' The government was accused today of showing a "real lack of concern" for people affected by the thousands of post office closures in recent years. The public accounts committee called on the government and the Post Office to...
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
Clearing through some old papers last weekend I came across two old copies of The Times, one for Saturday 20th January 1996 and another for Friday 4th February 2000. I must have saved them for some particular reason though looking through them now I can’t now imagine why. Thirteen years is not a long time but [...]
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
The Government has got a lot on its plate at the moment. Several Bills look perilously close to running out of time before prorogation, including this one. Yet here we are wasting precious time debating whether to crush a safeguard for free speech. I would have thought the answer was obvious. Our default position should [...]
National Death Service (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
While rates of MRSA and Clostridium difficile are falling, after scandals over major outbreaks, other potentially fatal infections which receive less attention appear to be soaring, the Commons public accounts committee will say. Around 300,000 infections are diagnosed in English hospitals every year – but many more potentially fatal bugs may be going undetected, because of a lack of surveillance,...
rhetorically speaking.. (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Cath Elliot at Liberal Conspiracy sketches out the details of the ridiculously minimal reform of sex education and touches on the knee-jerk responses falling from the mouths of self-appointed family values campaigners. It's never been quite clear how these supposedly moral crusaders square their morality with a track record of - with the full support of certain newspapers - lying, transparently and...
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
So Ed Balls is going to force kids to have sex education whatever their parents think. When will these centralisers ever learn. I am not going to get into the merits or otherwise of sex education. I don’t need to. Because the truth is that you can’t and shouldn’t seek to impose your ideas from [...]
Giles McNeill (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Update to "Three Charges of Sexual Assault Denied by Lib Dem" . Dentist and former district councillor, Adrian Heath, is due to appear in Lincoln Magistrates Court again today charged with two further offences of sexually assaulting female patients. Dr. Adrian Heath is due before magistrates in Lincoln – and also faces an additional charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice....
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
So France’s Europe Minister Pierre Lellouche thinks that British Conservatives have “castrated themselves” and that William Hague’s European policy published yesterday is “autistic”. I am a great Francophile. Both my parents were brought up in France. All my children went to the French Lycée in London for part of their education, as did I. I speak [...]
The Cornerstone Group (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
In all the furore over Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, the voice of the moderate right has had little chance to express itself. The first truth is that the Labour government itself has given a tremendous boost to the BNP with its immigration policies. The careful controls such as the Primary Purpose Rule which had [...]
Silicon.com (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
Parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee has branded the implementation of the National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis) a failure. Chair of the PAC, Edward Leigh, said of the programme that was designed to implement a single database between the Prison Service and the National Probation Service: "Even we were surprised by the extent of the failure of C-Nomis",...
computing (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
Tom Young, Computing , Tuesday 3 November 2009 at 10:23:00 Public Accounts Committee unleashes fresh salvo against beleaguered prisoner's database Delays and overspend in the delivery of an offender tracking database were the result of over-optimism and lack of accountability in Whitehall, according to a report from the Public Accounts Committee this week. The system was designed to track offenders...
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