In a meeting with our lawyers to try and finalise our position on contract variations and delay payments to subcontractors. Pretty heavy going. The industry has a rather unpleasant culture of aggressive pursuit of unreasonable claims, with arbitration or court an early rather than a last option. For a naturally cooperative person like me I [...]

I am a strong supporter of proportional representation, by the single transferable vote. I believe it would open up our politics and roll back some of the corporatism that makes our national politics so unresponsive. The purpose of this post is not to argue that case; we can do that another day. Alternative Vote seems [...]

A great many people are asking me why I am not leaving the Lib Dems. Well, I am a party member because of John Bright and John Stuart Mill. I am not leaving it because of a nonentity like Nick Clegg. I am hugely angry over tuition fees. The policy itself, with the effective withdrawal [...]

I set out a comprehensive attack on the withdrawal of public funding from university teaching (for it is no less than that) here: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/10/a_poisoned_cons_1.html Now the actual figures have been released – £6,000 fees and up to £9,000 if you can prove you condescended to admit a few plebs – I do hope some Lib [...]

I am not at the moment resigning from the LibDems over the tuition fees issue. But I have seldom in politics seens anything as nauseatingly insincere as this statement from the Liberal Democrats Federal Policy Committee. Tonight, Wednesday October 13, the Federal Policy Committee of the Liberal Democrats held their regular meeting. During the meeting [...]