Category Archives: Blog

Quench Direct

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This Lynne Featherstone visiting Quenchmorning I held my surgery – with a break in the middle to attend the awarding of a certificate to a local business in Woodside. Quench Direct is a small local company that was receiving the award. I was delighted to go to celebrate with them and see the certificate presented – especially as this small company employs some local people – and I am a great fan of small business enterprise. Very impressed with Denise and Denver who are absolutely lovely, enthusiastic and clearly going to make a huge success. The company supplies water stands and water – and is looking for more customers. If you are interested in learning more about them then you can contact them on info@quench-direct.co.uk

Then in the evening I zoomed off to the Civic Centre to celebrate Newroz – the Kurdish ‘new day’ which is a lovely annual event. Well – I say event in the singular – but there are in fact many celebrations with Mayor Ken holding one next Tuesday, and on April 1st a huge one which I hope to go to. I spend a fair amount of the time trying to persuade members of the community to get involved in the political process – whatever their politics. I am always keen to inveigle people from communities – especially women – into politics.

Visiting the Middle East

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Busy week so only just catching up on blog now – first there was a visit to the Middle East and then it was the Trident vote. So here goes with my retro-blog, part one…

I am not going to do a blow by blow account of my two days in Israel and one day in the West Bank. So instead here is an over-arching view of the impressions and information gleaned from the trip.

I was travelling with my Liberal Democrat colleague, Michael Moore, Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. We were going under our own party’s steam as we wanted to avoid any possibility of pressure from either side.

We had briefing after briefing after briefing – from military intelligence, to politicians, to journalists. On both sides, almost everyone we met had a different view of the situation.

What is virtually indescribable is the intensity with which each person we met gave us their briefing – as if a desperate plea for us to see it from their perspective. And the emotional intensity of such onslaughts was draining as for those three days I was caught up in the Middle East’s cauldron of troubles.

I learned a huge amount. This is my first trip as International Development spokesperson, and whilst I will constrain my travel to those areas where I believe it is important to visit personally – it was clear to me on this trip that for situations like this one, there is very little to compare with seeing for yourself and hearing for yourself – from both sides.

My key request for the trip had been to add in a visit to a school to see what aid was doing in terms of education in conflict zones – which I have made my priority for campaigning for the Lib Dems. Save the Children therefore arranged for me to visit the Kalandia School which serves the Kalandia Refugee Camp in Ramallah. They had arranged one of a series of workshops being carried out with a local partner – Pyalara (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation).

The class I met was a group of around thirty 15 year old girls. The idea was to empower young people to get their voices and issues heard. Two women from Pyalara were trying to get the girls to understand how to use the media to raise their voices about their problems. In an earlier workshop they had identified their biggest problem as early marriage. It stopped their opportunities and their futures – but culturally it was very difficult to speak up on the issue. Three of the girls in the class were married already. The workshop went through how to identify the key story, how to raise it in the media and how to campaign to get the issues around early marriage into the media etc.

It was such an eye opener in terms of how bad things can be, how much needs doing and how vital work is being done through aid agencies to build the capacity for the future.

More to follow soon … but in the meantime you can see some photos from the trip on my Flickr account.

Do parents have choice over Haringey schools?

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Met with Labour Council Leader George Meehan first thing. George says there shouldn’t be a problem for the 200 children without secondary school places as they will start to diminish as the choices get made and the places get filled. But only one in five children in Haringey got their first or second choice – and I remain concerned that not getting those choices mean that the Government’s ‘choice’ agenda is meaningless. Instead of getting the schools they have chosen, children and parents end up with schools that are far away across multiple bus journeys and which were put at or near the bottom of their list of choices. That’s not choice.

I remember one particular woman who came to see me at my surgery whose daughter had gone to a local primary school in Highgate. All the other kids from her block of flats had been accepted to one particular secondary school – and only this child had not. The girl instead had to go to a school that was near the bottom of the list of her choices and a difficult journey away; the girl was then (as the mother had feared) bullied and was now at home refusing to go to school through fear.

Perhaps if the schools published a map with dots on showing where all the children who get in come from (with an asterisk for special needs as they come from outside catchments) then we could all see for ourselves how ‘fair’ the system is and how far children are having to go if they don’t get their first or second choices. At the moment, there remains the suspicion that despite efforts to get it right, miscarriages of justice occur. The system needs to be fair and seen to be fair. Transparency and publication might help our confidence in the system.

Other topics I covered with George were on the use of the voluntary sector, the ‘restructuring’ of the library service; what Haringey Council is proposing to do following my discovery that both HIV infection and alcohol-related deaths in the borough are up substantially and also why my surgery poster is not allowed in schools!

Channel 4: about as wrong as you can be

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Yesterday’s Channel 4 programme – Great Global Warming Swindle – supposedly debunking global warming has got it all wrong. Now – I’m all for scepticism and testing out arguments properly. So just because nearly every reputable scientist in the field believes global warming is real and a major problem isn’t a reason to close our minds on the subject. But if you are going to question it, you really need to do better than recycle old arguments that have long since been debunked.

What did the show have then? New evidence? No. New arguments? No. Rather just the same old sensation-seeking half-stories that have been rolled out and debunked many times before. There’s a good summary of the details of all this at In The Green.

So sorry Channel 4 – you get an F for fail for that programme.

Dads and Doughnuts

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They’re Photo of father and childthe subject of my latest column:

In the end if our children run riot or fail to flourish then that is our own responsibility first and foremost. Yes – the government and various authorities have an important role to play to – and they may fail our children in terms of their schooling or us in some or many ways – but in the end we are the parents.

The recent UNICEF report on children’s well-being doesn’t paint a pretty picture of how we are doing – placing British children at the bottom of the heap in the twenty-one rich countries that they looked at.

You can read me thoughts on the solutions to these problems in the full article.

Lords reform

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Lordy! Lordy! Not for long. Yes – it was an historic day as the Commons voted to put paid to the bad old, bad old appointed Lords. Perhaps less of the historic and more of the hysteric. On a series of votes designed to find which proportion of appointed to elected Lords we will have in future – from fully appointed, through 20%, 50% 60% 80% to fully elected – we trooped through the lobbies.

To everyone’s shock – 100% elected got through – and with even a bigger majority than there was for 80% elected. The Lib Dem manifesto commitment was for a fully or predominantly elected House of Lords – so we are in a win / win on either of these. However – the shock was the 100% beating the 80%. And it is the result of shenanigans on behalf of some of those trying to distort the vote. Some who are wholly in favour of totally appointed Lords went through to support 100% elected in the hope that the Lords would be more likely to reject a 100% option than one of the lesser options. Lord knows what will happen now!

Solar cooker day

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Well – Lorely Burt, Annette Brooke, Lynne Featherstone, Jenny Willot and Lindsay NorthoverSolar Cooker Day dawned! And you should see the size of the one that we managed to borrow from ‘Engineers without Borders’ – from Imperial College. Thank you sooooooo much Imperial Engineers!

My researcher, Mette, spent six hours sewing green, white and purple ribbon together to make the colours of International Women’s Day – and then she and a helper carted the precious object to College Green (just outside Parliament). Whilst we had been going to do this outside the gates to Number 10 Downing Street, what with the size of the object and the vagaries of the blustery and rainy weather – we opted for a venue closer to the House of Commons.

A stream of Lib Dem Parliamentarians came to support the campaign and so now for International Women’s Day we will present a petition to Tony Blair to ask him to ensure that women in war-ravaged conflict zones are supplied with $2 solar cookers so that they do not need to go outside their refugee compounds and risk rape or murder any longer.

And of course, today is the first of two days of debates on Lords Reform. I just hope that we get a conclusion – and that that conclusion delivers an entirely or predominantly elected House of Lords!

Will Downing Street let a cooker in?

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On The Westminster Hour yesterday, Carolyn Quinn wanted to know what it is like being a woman in the House of Commons etc. This on the back of International Women’s Day coming up on Thursday and a debate on gender in the House of Commons.

Well – it’s still a boys school and we need more women. As to the atmosphere – water of a duck’s back in terms of the male testosterone being sprayed about. Having had my political baptism in the Haringey Council Chamber – three Lib Dems with me as Leader of the Opposition and fifty-four Labour members (then – it’s rather different now!) – the Commons seems quite sweet. However, there is a lot of pointing and jeering – by any other name at school this would be called bullying. And we are meant to have bullying policies at every school – so why not the House of Commons?

However, was grateful for opportunity to flag up the difficulty I am having with Downing Street. I want to deliver a solar cooker (looks like an oversized mixing bowl, covered with reflective silver foil) to Tony Blair. The point I am making is that these solar cookers cost around $2 and save women getting raped and murdered. This is because in many war zones when women go outside of the refugee camps to collect wood to make a fire to cook – they literally risk rape and murder. These cookers, which work of the hot sun, prevent them from needing to leave the safe compound.

So I am trying to deliver one to Tony, wrapped in purple and green ribbon for International Women’s day – but whilst I have permission to deliver a petition they will not let the cooker pass. I did threaten on radio to chain myself to the gates outside Downing Street (ever since the suffragettes I have been longing to chain myself to something for a cause) but that part was in jest!

But if the Downing Street media machine reads blogs – come on guys, let the cooker in: it’s not too much to ask.