Dizzy reports, and Iain has copies of, letters sent to three Labour activists who defaced the Countryside Alliance stall at last year’s Labour party conference. They’re being asked for £1000 each for the CA’s costs.

Now, I saw the damage to the stall. I also own (well, I don’t, but my employer does, and I look after) a similar size and make Nomadic display stand to that unfortunate one owned by the CA. The damage was not that extensive (one scrawled on, one split, as I recall), and replacing those panels is about £300 each. So the CA are making a tidy profit.

In any case, their presence was, to say the least, provocative, especially after the dead horse incident at Labour conference the previous year, and the incitement to vote anti-Labour at the general election four months previously. The incident was pretty bloody funny, too.

So, if anyone’s setting up a defence fund for the activists, I’ll chip in.

Every morning, I read the Oxford Mail and as much of the Guardian as I can on the bus to work. Today’s G2 contains an article about the final words of the 376 prisoners executed in Texas since 1982.

I should say now, that I am as implacably opposed to the death penalty as you would expect a Guardian-reading Labour feminist type to be. And then I read this sentence (preceding one included for context):

After a while, when you have read 100 or so of these final statements, they start to run together into a ghoulish mass of murder and rapine, so you start looking for the differences. The man who wanted to reassure the husband of the woman he strangled, raped and killed that she fought him to the end.

I’m not sure what it was that got to me about that sentence. Perhaps it was the patricharchal assumption of the murderer that it might comfort a man to know that even to death, his wife was not unfaithful. Just for a moment, I didn’t care that this man had been murdered by the state.

Andrew wrote a post earlier today about serious case reviews when children have been hurt or killed. He includes a fascinating comment on the difference between generalisations made by professionals and the facts. The speaker is a senior manager in charge of case reviews, interspersed with results from this survey of 40 cases printed in italics:

I have done four of these reviews and the same things keep coming up. It’s young mothers (9 of the 40 main carers were aged under 21 when the child was born) who are depressed (18 of the 40 had mental health problems) and simply cannot cope (for 16 children no concerns about their welfare had ever been expressed) with their babies (19 of the 40 children were aged less than 12 months) in poor living circumstances (in 23 cases there was no significant poverty or accommodation problems), especially when their situation is compounded by a violent partner (22 of the 31 current partners were known to be violent).

One of the new blogs I discovered yesterday was Rob Shorrock’s. Rob is a Labour opposition councillor on South Kesteven District Council in Lincolnshire, currently fighting stock transfer of council housing to an RSL. I particularly enjoyed this post on a subject close to my heart - being a councillor with a full-time job:

I have been convinced for a long time that that there is a conspiracy of convenience betwen councillors of a certain age that works against making the council more accessible to others, essentially people not like them.

Oh yes. At the first meeting of a new committee, I proposed that future meetings should start at 9am rather than 9.30am. Not a massive change, but one which would enable me and other members with full-time jobs to spend 50 minutes there before work. This was opposed by several other members on the grounds that their pensioner bus passes were only valid after 9am, even though, of course, the council would reimburse the cost of bus fares…

This is unbelieveable - and makes me glad that the rightwing UK blogosphere does fluffy things like compiling charts of bloggers.

Bill Clinton meets a selection of leftwing bloggers to discuss issues and organising online. He has particular reason to be grateful to them, following the cutting of sections of a docu-drama about the terrorist threat before 9/11 which, had it been broadcast uncut, would have severely libelled him and his handling of Al-Qaida as president. Following reports of the meeting online and in the press, what do the rightwing blogosphere in the US focus on? The physical attributes of one of the bloggers in a photo of the event. The breasts in question belong to Jessica Valenti…

I’d like to be asleep right now. So would Jo - she’s got to get up and go to work. Unfortunately, some kids on the road behind us have decided to have an all-night party. They have really terrible taste in music, and don’t like being asked nicely to turn it down - I know, I tried. So I’m sat here waiting for the on-call officer from Environmental Health to come out and record the noise. I’m sure Saturday nights used to be more fun than this.

Following on from my last post, I realised that I hadn’t come across the majority of these blogs before, and the pdf wasn’t helping me explore them, so here’s a handy link list for them all. Right, off to the pub now.

Iain Dale has listed his top 100 here - note, it’s a pdf. Yours truly (5) just scrapes past the beloved (6). Cheers Iain!

Iain notes:

I want to emphasise right from the beginning that this Top 100 and the rankings are my opinion and obviously opinions are subjective. But the list should at least generate a debate. I marked each blog out of ten on the following 10 areas: design; frequency of posting; writing ability; personality; comment; humour; range; interaction; popularity; independence of thought. This generated a mark out of 100.

The list is interesting: Jon Worth’s Euroblog is at 10, which I reckon is unexpected, but deserved for his rare position as a pro-European blogger. The most obvious omission is Let’s be sensible, which I rate highly.

I guess this is probably a good time to note that I’ll be blogging at least once for the New Statesman from party conference next week. I’ll post up a link as soon as I have it. In the meantime, if you’ve any ideas for what I should be blogging about - the brief is atmosphere, what delegates are discussing, feel and tone, rather than hard politics - please drop me a line.

Oh, and colleagues in NGO-world who are pressing their shirts and polishing their shoes to join the Lib Dems in Brighton this week - have fun. I’m so glad I don’t have to go there or to Bournemouth or to Blackpool this year.

Via John, innit, I came across Tabitha Kumalo’s speech at the TUC conference earlier this week. Tabitha, if you remember, is the Zimbabwean trade unionist that I heard speak earlier this year. She’s also now the most senior Zimbabwean trade unionist outside prison, as while she was in the UK, the rest of the leadership of the movement was beaten and imprisoned. I’d urge all my readers to write or fax the Zimbabwean embassy to demand their release. More details here.

I loved this article in today’s Media Guardian (hat tip to Tom at Fisking Central). I’m sure there were nods of approval at his choices all over the country.

I listen to Radio 4 for at least an hour between 7 and 9am every weekday, and at least another hour between 10pm and midnight most nights, longer at the weekends depending on what I’m doing. I was turned on to it as a student doing my finals - I wasn’t the most conscientious, so the rhythm of my day revising was set by Radio 4. Alarm at about quarter to twelve, in time to listen to the World at One. This was during the 2001 general election, so it was all about foot-and-mouth. Up, food, revising from 2 until 5. PM, food, then revising 7 til 10. Most of The World Tonight, then last orders in the college bar. Not quite sure how I got a degree, really.

Five years of Radio 4 has given me many, many pet hates, though…

The Archers, droning on interminably for hours so you have to get out of bed on after the entertaining Broadcasting House - I’m sure it’s a ploy by shops and supermarkets to sabotage the Sunday morning lie-in. I particularly hate that menacingly jaunty theme music - duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-da; da duh-duh duh da da; duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-da; duh da dada da da. It acts on me as an ejector seat disguised as a matress. And you’ve got to be careful turning on your radio at other points in the day, lest you be caught out and unwittingly start your Sunday morning routine…

Something Understood - yes, a straight lift from the Guardian’s list, but a worthwhile one. Again, hated purely for its impact on my Sunday. I’m good, committed to my job, preparing to rise and set off for the office with the birds; I’ve gone to bed early, enjoyed the Westminster Hour, found something interesting in the books or education programmes on at eleven, thought about going to sleep, and then that dratted programme starts, takes away all my relaxing thoughts, forces me to determinedly read my book in that clenched teeth kind of way until the midnight news, and then I’m awake, unable to sleep, having to sit through Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast.

If I had the patience, I’d detail my hates - but the fury means I’m only capable of a list: everything on Radio 4 at nine o’clock on weekdays; the absurdity of putting great Women’s Hour interviews on when everyone is at work; two-minute news bulletins on a supposedly-serious station; managing to schedule sport at just the moment I turn the hairdryer off in the morning; that indistinguishable mix of ridiculous panel game hangovers from the last century with the canned laughter, stupid-voiced announcer and smug self-satisfied contestants; Brain of Britain; the Music Quiz - timed just right for getting in from the pub, yet, inexplicably, all about classical music; the fact that next Thursday will be the first by-election morning without the UK theme; and the comedy, oh my god the comedy.