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I found this mildly amusing. The BBC reports that Town planning blamed for obesity:

Poor town planning which limits opportunities for children to take exercise has been blamed for fuelling an increase in obesity.

I have an answer - more tower blocks with broken lifts!

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it.

I caught this on the BBC:

It is this last part that really gets me riled:

What utter bollocks, to use the technical turn of phrase, when applied to a parent. In the public gaze, there will be a parent taking a taxi with their child, acting as parent and under their authority alone as parent. The whole purpose of the CRB type legislation is to reassure those with primary caring responsibilities for vulnerable people, usually parents and other guardians, that others, when put in positions of contact or responsibility for their wards, children and relatives, have been checked out.

Do parents living in council housing have to be "CRBed"? Does a parent waiting with their child in an NHS medical facility waiting room have to be "CRBed"? Or even a parent stepping onto school property to deliver their child right to the door? In what way are those different from this case?

This month it will be ten years since I made a decision that would change my life. I joined a political party for the first time. Naturally it was the Liberal Democrats. Why naturally? Well I had been brought up in a Scottish non-conformist family all of whom had always, at least as far as I can remember of family discussions, voted Liberal. At least in my grandparents' day the Conservatives in Scotland were the party of the Kirk and the middle classes and Labour the party that the Papist working class were told to vote for by their bishops. So both sets of grandparents, Gospel Hall Brethren, had voted for that nice Mr Grimond.

Having been educated privately, however, mostly as a result of being predominantly either ex-patriate or just plain itinerant in my childhood, we were drilled not to vote Labour, because they would, obviously, close our beloved schools. And I certainly couldn't vote Tory in 1987 or 1992 in Birmingham, Edgbaston for that wicked old bat Jill Knight, sponsor of section 28 and staunch supporter of abandoning free eye and dental checks - an issue which was probably and somewhat surprisingly the first in my voting life which moved me to write to my MP (setting aside my eleven year old self writing to a lady called Shirley who was education secretary to complain about the punishments meted out - like not being allowed tuck - at the private prep school I attended!).

I instinctively wanted less government interference in our lives and choices. It's maybe hard to imagine for someone not affected by such seemingly arbitrary rules, but for someone growing up gay to feel that you're very being is somehow illegal, second class, it can be a powerful motivator (I'll never really understand gay Tories to be honest).

But that's not to say that my support for the Lib Dems was just a protest against the others. The issue that I remember most that clinched my vote though was a peculiarly wonkish one - PR. It had seemed to me during my teens that the sort of majorities enjoyed by the Tories under Thatcher were bad for politics and bad for the country. I had a sense that it didn't really matter what the policy agenda of different parties was so long as they didn't have an inbuilt monopoly on power and that dissenting voices had a fair shout in government. I had always been keen on devolution for Scotland also - I was always less convinced about the Principality for some reason! And this too seemed like Liberal policies. And personality wise, I just liked Paddy, as my parents had liked both the Davids, though especially David Steel, and my grandparents had liked Jo.

The demise of the ship-building industry that had given one grandfather his livelihood and the destruction of the coal (and steel) industry that had given the other his appalled me, as did the virtual civil war that caused, but I'm not entirely sure that I connected it with "government" so much as a general decline in heavy industry as other world industrial powers came on-stream - the era of Kobe Steel and Korean supertankers. I worked on the stock exchange through most of the period of the big privatizations and though I somehow instinctively liked the idea of widening asset ownership, I could see in the way that people cheated the system (at least in spirit) to get share allotments and then sell them for a quick buck that this great asset give-away was not necessarily the way to achieve that. Nor were taxes a huge issue. The poll tax had made me angry, but otherwise, whilst it was nice that they were falling, somehow I knew that death and taxes were inevitable and that they could go up or down all they liked and you'd still end up paying them.

Ultimately, even had I thought about voting for anyone else, the sleaze stories of the Major government repelled me and I could not quite trust Labour, riven as it had been through my formative years with the Militant battle. I had felt encouraged when the "Gang of Four" left Labour, believing that this was a chance to reinvigorate three party politics and break the duopoly of Labour-Tory dominance. I could probably have voted for a party led by John Smith, but never got the opportunity. It seemed to me however that New Labour had an innate artificiality about it. And this was reinforced when, during the 1997 election, I wrote to Millbank asking them about specific commitments on gay equality and was told there were none - manifesto commitments that is.

 I'm sure the celebration that followed Tony Blair's entry to Number 10 was genuine, if you were a Labour supporter, even at that point a broad left Labour supporter who may have hoped that "The Project" was a mechanism for getting into power that would be relaxed afterwards, but for me it seemed like insufferable arrogance. And so it was that in the September of 1997, I took a leap into the unknown and decided to put my money where my vote was and join the Liberal Democrats. I felt I didn't want to do anything else at first than be an armchair member, so I decided to make my subs the equivalent of a "recommended annual" subscription every month naively thinking that this would prevent me having to actually do anything, or at least allow me smugly to refuse to do anything! Eighteen months later - fifteen of which I had not engaged in any party activity locally - I was a City Councillor! And from a relative political bystander, it was suddenly a huge part of my life.

Next: Ten years; left, right but always liberal.