Ready for Change….the video

Council Tax

This evening the Council met from 6.30 to 11.10 in a continuation of yesterday’s meeting. The revised budget did not pass and we will return on Monday evening.
Sorry this is a very brief post – as you can imagine I’m a bit tired now! Can’t promise to blog tomorrow as I have a very [...]

Tories vote to stop Labour squeezing Reading dry

Last night the Council gathered for the annual budget meeting. This is the meeting where the council sets the council tax for the coming year (2009/10). Last year, with elections looming, Labour opted for a 1.9% increase. This year, with residents increasingly affected by the credit crunch recession (let’s call it what it is, credit [...]

BBC news report on Reading’s Children’s Services

Here is the BBC’s latest report on this story.

Pension Annuities

One of the stories to catch my attention this week was the Conservative Party’s call for a suspension of the rules requiring people to take their pension annuities at age 75, or when they take the lump sum part of their pension. I think it is wrong that people should be forced to take out [...]

Back to normal

I am back from Birmingham and catching up with life outside the conference bubble.
Luckily I was able to get a good seat in the hall for Cameron’s speech and I will write up my reaction to it tomorrow. Sorry – today I am too tired after a late evening last night catching up with friends.

Tuesday

This morning we had Cameron’s unscheduled address to Conference about the economic crisis. I wasn’t able to be in the main hall to hear him, as I had a meeting just before he spoke so I wasn’t able to get into the hall early enough to get a seat. The organisers had helpfully laid on [...]

Monday at Conference

Things at Conference are a bit subdued because of the banking crisis, which put added pressure on George Osborne for his keynote speech on Monday. I thought he seemed a little nervous at the beginning, which is understandable, but he warmed to it and delivered a very serious address. There was plenty of Brown-bashing which [...]

Sunday at Conference

To my astonishment, I haven’t yet been to any fringe events. In my previous conferences I’ve always found the smaller fringe events to be much more rewarding than the main hall set piece things. But today I’ve actually spent most of the afternoon in the main hall. It helps that the seats in the hall [...]

Conference – Day minus 1

Conference doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but I’ve come up a day early as I had a meeting this afternoon. I was expecting it to be a fairly dry, party-organisation focused event (which it partly was) but the unexpected bonus at the end was a short speech and question and answer session from David Cameron.
This [...]