The Press Association reports:

MPs should no longer be able to claim for their mortgages or employ family members at the taxpayers’ expense, the long-awaited report by the standards watchdog has said…

In future, MPs should only be able to claim for rent or hotel costs…

Now, correct me if I’m wrong but I cannot understand this. A search on RightMove for the cheapest three bedroom accommodation available in Battersea shows a flat for rent at £330 per week.

I’m assuming here that our MPs are frugal types and that they will choose to pair up to share a flat with one spare room so that they can each host a family member or two at the weekend.

The cheapest three bedroom accommodation currently for sale in SW11 that my short search discovered costs £219,950. At present, the taxpayer only funds the interest on an MP’s mortgage payment. Unless interest rates rise above 7.2%, we appear to be about to lose out significantly. (For reference, over the last eight years or so our household has paid less than 5.5% interest on the mortgage.) At present rates of interest (3.9% according to uSwitch.com) the taxpayer would currently be paying just £714.84 in interest on the above flat.

I assume also that there is probably a link between mortgage interest rates and rental costs.

Do we really want to be paying twice as much for our MPs accommodation?

"We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheromone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now." The world's first ant colony to achieve sentience calls off its search for us.

After a month or more of campaigning, the Fishwick by-election concluded yesterday in a rather substantial victory for Labour county councillor Jennifer Mein.

It would be dishonest of me not to own up to feeling rather deflated but I’ve learnt a lot, received a tremendous reception from others on the ward and feel I can deservedly view the whole experience as a fine springboard for May, when the seat once again comes up for election.

To be beaten by Labour’s leader on Lancashire County Council and by the woman who, up until last year, represented the ward for the Liberal Democrats is no disgrace.

But next time I shall have to remind my agent to wear his lucky yellow socks.

Tonight was a hustings meeting for Fishwick by-election candidates at JALGOS, a sports and social club in Preston city centre. Neither the Labour nor the Conservative candidate were able to attend.

The Conservative (who lives just down the road) claimed she didn’t receive the invitation until Monday (three or four days after the same postman delivered the same letter to me). She also had a prior engagement.

The Labour candidate claimed the chairman of the meeting (the independent councillor for the Town Centre ward) would not be independent and that she had a prior engagement.

Preston North End lost 5-1 to Spurs tonight.

JALGOS has spent 46 years quietly serving much of Preston’s Afro-Caribbean community (which is certainly not to say that it is a closed group). It is a club which has hosted the wedding receptions, christenings, wakes, 18th birthday parties and family reunions of hundreds of people.

The club offers a dining club for its elderly members and delivers meals to those who are housebound.

It regularly hosts visitors from across the country and, indeed, the Commonwealth including the Jamaican High Commissioner.

If this club were called a community centre no-one would dream of sending in the bulldozers. If this club had an altar, it would certainly be safe.

Yet it would appear that the plans to redevelop Preston’s city centre have now changed such that the building will need to be flattened in order to create a bus turning circle.

JALGOS is the beating heart of a significant proportion of Preston’s community. It must be saved. Join Preston’s Liberal Democrats in campaigning for this asset to the city to be saved.

I’ve just sent the following to BBC Complaints and have written to my local MP to encourage him to sign Richard Burden MP’s EDM. I would encourage my reader to join me.

I have been greatly impressed by the BBC’s impartiality over the years and applaud the Corporation’s continuing efforts to be impartial. However, I am horrified that the Corporation can consider the DEC’s Gaza appeal to have any partial political aims. People in that area, who have no means of leaving, are dying. This despicable decision of the BBC’s is perhaps the strongest argument in years for the abolition of a compulsory licence fee.
I am heartened that MPs are today acting by tabling the following EDM:

That this House is astonished by the refusal of the BBC and other broadcasters not to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza Crisis Appeal; notes the unconvincing and incoherent explanations given by BBC spokespeople for the decision; and draws attention to the fact that people wishing to contribute to the Gaza appeal can contact the DEC by calling 0370 60 60 900, writing to DEC Gaza Crisis, PO Box 999, London EC3A 3AA or visiting www.dec.org.uk.

I trust that the BBC will reconsider.
Yours sincerely, Luke Bosman

I love cycling. Some people may have noticed this. I love the freedom, the pain, (perhaps more particularly, the sensation when the pain stops at the top of a climb), the speed and the countryside. I love having to think about what I’m doing in traffic. I love the great feeling of being alive that comes from a good cycle ride. There are two kinds of people: those who love cycling and those who are wrong.

I don’t love plastic hats, yet a tedious number of people who risk their lives by eating too much for their sedentary lifestyles, by not exercising enough or by stressing about other people’s wellbeing, seem to think that I and other cyclists am stupid for wearing a stylish cycling cap (well, I think it’s stylish) to keep the sun out of my eyes (at the moment the sun seems to be wet and forming puddles), rather than a plastic hat to act as some form of talisman.

If you are one of those people, please read on.

Dr. Mark Porter in The Scotsman writes:

Boris Johnson was recently pilloried for cycling without a helmet, but what sort of impact has their introduction really made? How much safer is Boris now that he reluctantly coats his cranium in carbon-fibre?

It may seem counterintuitive, but the benefits are far from clearcut. On the positive side, there are numerous reported cases where helmets appear to have protected cyclists from serious head injuries that could have left them permanently disabled or dead. Yet, on the negative side, these cases appear to be the exception rather than the rule, and need to be weighed against the fact that the wind-in-the-hair sensation appears to be one of the attractions of cycling, and that forcing cyclists to wear protective headgear discourages them from using their bikes.

[...] The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation estimates that the average cyclist would have to pedal the roads for more than 3,000 years to suffer a serious head injury, let alone one that would be mitigated by a cycle helmet. And children are four times more likely to suffer a head injury as a pedestrian than when they are on their bikes (so why don’t we make them wear helmets when they are walking along the pavement?)

I’m not sure that I have ever in my life been truly impressed by the actions of a serving Tory MP (the Blue in the title of this blog refers to my footballing affiliations and has no connection with my political thoughts). However, as the Government continue to turn their backs on the dream that was their 1997 Manifesto, I was overjoyed to see David Davis taking a principled stand before our nation sleepwalks into being a police state. I’m not at all surprised to find that Mark Hendrick voted for 42 days detention without trial.

I was surprised this morning to receive an unsolicited letter from my MP, Mr Mark Hendrick, accusing me of posting unfair criticisms of him. He claims to have been assiduous in responding to my communications and asks that I be big enough to accept that [he has] been responsive to [my] enquiries. He then suggests that given the nature and the content of your website, it would appear that this is not the case and you would appear to wish to peddle fiction rather than fact.

I have asked Mr Hendrick to clarify quite where he believes I have been unfair or have resorted to fiction. As usual, I await his response with unbated breath.

The February half-term weather having been unusually kind, I set off for my third 50km ride of the week in cool, almost windless conditions under a glorious blue sky armed with six Geobars, a multitool and inner tube, a credit card, a car key, my trusty Garmin Edge (and paper map in case of technical difficulties), a waterproof and contrasting Rapha sportwool jersey and arm warmers. Read more

I blogged the best part of eleven months ago about various of my feeble reasons for not cycling and followed up by suggesting that I might achieve an Eddington number of 30 by the end of last summer.

Read more

Straight from Andrew Collins’ blog, this is The Manners Manifesto (edited here, in full on his blog).

It’s time for a return to— or a formalisation of— good manners. Here’s how we do it: Read more