Today I tried to travel from Westminster to Holborn, a journey I make frequently and for which I normally allow half an hour. There was a sign up in the underground indicating that the lines I would have used were severely delayed and others were closed. Indeed, passengers had to be evacuated from a stalled…
Living Below the Line 2012 – part 2, some reflections With over one billion people in our world living on less than £1 a day, the challenge of tackling extreme global poverty in our world can seem both overwhelming and, for many, far removed from our own reality. The solutions for this situation, like the…
Here, in my five-day diary, I reveal how I survived on porridge, water and vegetable soup as part of my Live Below the Line campaign 2012. THE RULES I have to live on £1 a day for five consecutive days. Worldwide, 1.4billion people live on this. Thankfully, my £1 a day is just food and drink, not everything…
It is now not unsual to see peers in the chamber checking their smartphones. Some now also make use of iPads. Baroness Butler-Sloss used hers instead of paper when delivering a speech recently. During the Second Reading debate yesterday of the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, Lord Knight of Weymouth was sat on the Opposition Front…
While looking at some online archived footage of the Lords, I noticed a message on the parliamentlive.tv site which stated that the authorities had, since 2009-10, been looking for ways in which they could feed the same video material to mobile devices. Curious as to what was taking so long, I put in a parliamentary…
Whatever you views about the Euro or about the EU it cannot possibly be in our interests to sit on the side-lines criticising and lecturing. I cannot think of any post war British Prime Minister,Conservative or Labour, who would have made the mistake of sounding like a petulant politician rather than a statesman. We are…
The Guardian on Saturday carried an article on women peers and included an interview with the formidable Baroness Trumpington (she of YouTube fame). Part of the interview read: “So what does she think about the government’s plan to reform the Lords? Straight-backed in her chair, she rolls her eyes. The coalition is, she says, a…
Having just got to the end of five days of living on £1 or less a day, I celebrated with two hard-boiled eggs, toast and marmite and some freshly-ground coffee. It tasted wonderful and was greatly appreciated. But this exercise has been an incredibly sobering experience for me. I have spent many years working in…
