Saterday 4th October at 2.00pm is the time for the first dance sessions at Littlecoates Community Centre with Tushy (Liam Reader). 

The Saturday afternoon sessions, funded by the NHS Health Promotions Unit, and supported by the Litlecoates and Laceby Acres TARA, are open to anyone aged 6 – 16 who wants come along and improve their dancing with Tushy. 

For those of you who have never heard of Tushy he is one of the dance teachers and leading dancers of the well known Saint Martin’s Dance Group who performed at this years Liberal Democrat Conference and at last year’s Dancemania. 

The dance sessions cost £1.oo for a two hour session, and if that is not cheap enough for you the first week will be free!

We are very lucky that Tushy is coming to Littlecoates as his teaching is always in great demand, and hope that we will see lots of you this Saturday for the first session.  Find out more by ringing Les Bonner on 01472 310855, or Michelle Buley on 01472 592070

A High Court Judge ruled today that Gurkha veterans who were refused visas to settle in the United Kingdom because they retired from the regiment before 1997 were treated unlawfully and the policy used to reject them was misleading. 

Five Gurkha veterans and a regimental widow had sought a judicial review of the refusal to grant them entry visas on the grounds that they had “no strong ties” to the UK.

In a damning ruling for the Ministry of Defence, Mr Justice Blake said that its advice to the Home Office on whether to grant settlement to the Gurkhas was confusing, resulting in “irrational and unlawful” restrictions being applied.  He also ordered the Home Office to pay 80% of the costs of the case.

Today’s ruling could open the door to more than 2,000 Gurkhas who have had their visas rejected under the misleading policy.

Greeting the ruling on the court steps, Martin Howe, the human rights lawyer representing the Gurkhas, called the ruling “a tremendous and historic victory”.

“It is a victory for common sense; a victory for fairness; and a victory for the British sense of what is ‘right’,” he said. “My clients, and the thousands of Gurkhas standing behind them, ask for nothing more from this country than the unfettered right to live amongst the British people – a people they have protected and loved throughout years of long and loyal service to the crown.”

 Citing the historic military covenant – which provides UK armed forces and their families with proper care, in return for asking them to risk making “the ultimate sacrifice for their country” – the judge said: “Rewarding long and distinguished service by the grant of residence in this country for whom the service was performed would be a vindication and an enhancement of this covenant.”

Five Gurkha veterans and a regimental widow sought a judicial review of the refusal to grant them entry visas on the grounds that they had “no strong ties” to the UK.

“Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said it was a “wonderful vindication” for those who had campaigned for a change in the law. “I’ve always felt that if someone is prepared to die for this country, then they should have the right to live in this country,” he said. “The key thing now is to look at the ruling in detail and to make sure that the government now translates that into action and doesn’t try and squirm out of it.”

Mr Clegg confirmed, following David Cameron’s appeal for party unity over the economic crisis, that the Liberal Democrats had been in contact with the government.

“I spoke to the Prime Minister last night, we agreed that Vince Cable and Alistair Darling would meet and they are meeting this afternoon.”

He argued that the government should offer voters a universal guarantee for all savings, similar to that offered by the Irish government.

“The absolute priority today is to is to give people, British people, a copper-bottomed guarantee that their earnings, their savings are safe.

“We would support the government in making a similar move here.”

However, he did argue that the government’s case-by-case method was improving.

“I think as it happens that the case-by-case approach appears to be working better over time. After Nothern Rock, the government reacted much quicker on the problems that afflicted HBOS and then much more precisely with the nationalisation of Bradford and Bingley.”

 Mr Clegg added later that cross party co-operation would foster the new ideas of how to tackle the crisis and prevent future difficulties.

If we have as many people as possible coming up with ideas of how to anticiapte not only today’s crisis but tomorrow’s problem as well

He also said that during the crisis was not the time to be underlining his party’s warning’s about the state of the economy.

“I don’t think that this is the time to start saying that our analysis was right and other people’s were wrong,” he said

He added: “Today the priority is people coming together … to provide reasurances to people that they have no need to panic that their money, their deposits, their savings are safe”.

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A tory plan to freeze council tax will deprive schools, OAP homes, poor families, and much-needed local  services of £3 billion, it emerged last night.

David Cameron’s shadow chancellor George Osborne claimed the freeze would save the average family £210, but there would also be a cost as Councils in England would be forced to cut services to keep their spending increases below 2.5% a year when inflation is at almost five per cent.

Any town hall which reached the arbitrary 2.5% target would then get extra cash from a Conservative government to prevent council tax increases.

The cost of the “cash for cuts” deal has been estimated at £3billion – £1.5billion from local authorities and the same amount from central government over two years.

They said they would pay for part of it by slashing government advertising budgets which pay for drink-drive and anti-knife campaigns, but Mr Osborne admitted to the Mirror it would be up to local councils to decide how they made the”savings”. He also refused to clarify what services would be cut or how many jobs would go. Mr Osborne merely said: “I think there is plenty of opportunity in local government to find savings.”

Some of the most vulnerable people in our communities would be hit hardest by the cuts, and thousands of local authority jobs would be lost to pay for the Conservatives’ pledge to restrict local government charges for two years.

George Osborne’s council tax pledge could only be introduced if local councils made big cuts in public services, but he has failed to set out where any savings would come from.  It is also clear that any cuts made would also hit the low paid and most vulnerable members of our society who would bear the brunt of any cuts in local services that are made as a result of these proposals

Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg yesterday called for the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol, to stop shops selling alcohol at a loss. Many supermarkets are selling alcohol such as spirits at such low prices – as ‘loss leaders’ – that the retail price does not even cover the cost of Duty and VAT.

Nick Clegg revealed the proposal today in a speech at the Sheffield Alcohol Conference. It forms part of a paper on alcohol and licensing that the party’s Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Don Foster, will publish in October.

Nick Clegg said: “It is unacceptable for retailers, especially big supermarkets, to run a coach and horses through alcohol duties in order to sell alcohol well below its cost.

“The immediate effect of below-cost alcohol is to tempt people to buy a lot more alcohol than would otherwise be the case.

“As a rule, I don’t believe governments should set prices, but when retailers are deliberately distorting the market we need to take action.

“That is why we should now look to the example of Ontario in Canada, where a socially responsible minimum price for alcohol has been successfully implemented.

“Alcohol related violence, disorder and illness is now one of the biggest problems we face. If supermarkets are not prepared to act responsibly it is time they are forced to do so.”

JK Rowling the author of Harry Potter recently donated £1m to the Labour Party, saying she was motivated by Labour’s record on child poverty.  

Now today, it has emerged that millions of children in the UK are living in, or on the brink of, poverty according to a report by a number of leading organisation. 

The Campaign to End Child Poverty says 5.5 million children are in families that are classed as “struggling” – 98% of children in some areas. 

The campaign classes households as being in poverty if they are living on under £10 per person per day.  

A government spokeswoman said it had lifted 600,000 children out of poverty and was committed to the cause.  

 The Campaign to End Child Poverty is a coalition of more than 130 organisations including Barnardo’s, Unicef and the NSPCC. 

According to its research, there are 4,634,000 children in England living in low income families, 297,000 in Wales, 428,000 in Scotland and 198,000 in Northern Ireland.

Campaign director Hilary Fisher said the figures were “absolutely shocking”.  

She said: “There are currently 3,900,000 children in the UK that are classed as actually living in poverty, which impacts on every aspect of a child’s life.  

“A child in poverty is 10 times more likely to die in infancy, and five times more likely to die in an accident. 

“Adults who lived in poverty as a child are 50 times more likely to develop a restrictive illness such diabetes or bronchitis.”

Commenting on figures released today by the National Housing Federation and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which show that the number of people on waiting lists for affordable housing in rural areas has soared in the last five years, Liberal Democrat Shadow Local Government Secretary, Julia Goldsworthy said: “The Government has already received two critical reports on affordable rural housing but it still has not acted.”

“Councils must be given the freedom to reinvest all their council tenant rent and be allowed to borrow to spend on new social housing.
 
“Unless action is taken urgently, social housing waiting lists will continue to sky-rocket. The Government pays lip service to affordable rural housing but doesn’t do anything and the Tories have nothing to say.”

This morning I received an interesting letter from Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader and Shadow Chancellor, which gives details of  the Liberal Democrat Fairer Future Economic Recovery Plan, which I have reproduced below:

Gordon Brown’s response to the economic crisis has been too little, too late.  For years I warned him of the oncoming economic problems. Unsustainable levels of personal debt, mostly secured against the illusory ‘wealth’ of rising, vastly inflated property prices. An economy based so heavily on debt was never going to be in a fit state to deal with global shocks like the credit crunch.And so it has proved. Gordon Brown is now facing the consequences of his years of inaction. The housing bubble has burst. Unemployment is rising fast. Tens of thousands of families are losing their homes.With people struggling with massive debts and fast rising bills it is now almost inevitable that the UK is heading for recession. Gordon Brown used to boast we were better prepared than our competitors for a downturn. Yet the OECD’s respected economic forecasters now predict we will fare worst among the world’s seven leading economies (G7) in the current crisis.

Commenting on Theresa Villier’s speech at the Conservative party conference, in which she called for a new high speed rail network and the scrapping of the third runway at Heathrow, Liberal Democrat Shadow Transport Secretary, Norman Baker said: “It seems the Tories have finally recognised the need for high speed rail and the scrapping of the third runway at Heathrow, which Liberal Democrats have long called for.”

“However, we will have to wait and see the small print before we know if this is just another of David Cameron’s empty promises.

“The policy is clearly at odds with Boris Johnson’s plan to build a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

“You cannot be against London airport expansion and for it at the same time. This shows the hypocrisy at the heart of David Cameron’s Conservatives.”

Commenting on George Osborne’s response to the nationalisation of Bradford & Bingley, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable said: “The Conservatives don’t seem to have a clue on what to do about Bradford and Bingley.  They say they oppose its nationalisation, but they want to hand it to the Bank of England, which is itself state owned.”

“It seems that they are still too haunted by the legacy of Thatcherism to be able to come up with any coherent solution to this banking crisis.

“George Osborne has shown that he still needs a few more years experience in the real world before he is ready to be Chancellor.

“He has also continued to flip-flop on hedge funds.  Last week he didn’t see a problem with them, and now he thinks short selling should be banned.  What does he really think?

“The collapse of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are prime examples of the disastrous policy of turning building societies into banks, which was pursued by the last Tory government.” 
 
Commenting on the confirmation of the deal between Santander and the Treasury over Bradford & Bingley, Vince Cable said:
 
“With Bradford & Bingley no longer a viable bank, its nationalisation was both necessary and inevitable.
 
“Like Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley spent years lending money aggressively and often irresponsibly, particularly in the buy-to-let market. It was clear from day one that its business model would not be able to cope with the credit crunch.
 
“With some banks finally coming clean about the state of their bad debts, the hope must be that the inter-bank lending markets will now start to unfreeze. (more…)