Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, Simon Hughes – Lib Dem MP for North Southwark and Bermondsey since 1983 – writes about his experiences as a constituency member of Parliament, and how a good and effective democracy is under-pinned by approachable MPs who deliver top-quality personal responses. (Peter Black recently blogged a letter

Many hundreds of thousands of patients are being treated in hospitals where at least 20 per cent of the staff have said they would not be happy with the standard of care if a friend or relative needed treatment, says survey.

After having embraced carbon trading to fight climate change, the European Commission is now eyeing an EU-wide trading scheme for sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) to improve air quality.

Motorists face a postcode lottery of road quality due to the failure of local authorities to agree a definition of what exactly constitutes a pothole.

Everyone’s buying submarines: Malaysia is spending more than US $990 million on two high-quality diesel-powered submarines, while Vietnam—which still cannot supply electricity to all its citizens—is committing more than $2 billion on Russian-made fighter planes and six submarines. Meanwhile, according...

Poor lighting can lead to more street crime. The Leader of Brent Council's Labour Opposition, Cllr Ann M John, OBE, who represents Stonebridge Ward has written to the Chief Executive and Director of Environment about the poor quality of street lighting in Stonebridge in general and Sapphire Road in particular. Cllr John has been lobbied by Hillside Housing Association, which has repeatedly co...

One more thing about the Bulger case: is it just me, or is there a certain 'motes and beams' quality to the left's sermonising about this case? You'd have to search for hours to find anything as unhinged as the average MSM liberal ranting about the coming vigilante holocaust. Hell, a whole week of Daily Mail editorials couldn't come up with something as utterly foul as this from Guardian moron Ste...

Britain's leading organisation for graduate employers has called on ministers to end the cap on university tuition fees to restore the quality of degrees

The government should step in and offer up staffing ratios for nurses commensurate with different patient dependency levels, and then ensure that Trusts put it at the top of their performance priorities. They should be required to so in the well-evidenced knowledge that high quality nursing care, by trained nurses operating at reasonable nurse: patient ratios does, act as an impetus to overall qua...

There's nothing wrong with being ambitious. Unfortunately though, it doesn't come for free. Many would rather have a slightly smaller BBC and a slightly reduced scope but an improvement in quality and service. Many others would rather the TV licence didn't go up faster than inflation.