Sunday, April 05, 2009
Q & A From the Convention on Modern Liberty
Iain Dale 7:38 PM
This was the Q&A session I chaired at the Convention on Modern Liberty. From left to right are Edward Garnier MP, Philip Leblond, Laura Sandys, Dominic Raab, Tim Montgomerie.
PS Do come back later, I will be writing up the Oxford debate I just had with Peter Hitchens and Ed Vaizey.A Weekend with Plaid Cymru
Iain Dale 2:13 PM
In Scotland, Alex Salmond has successfully created a broader church within the SNP. It is still a left of centre party, but it has dropped a lot of the anti Tory rhetoric and made itself more appealing to more nationalist minded right of centre voters. Plaid has made no move in this direction at all. Maybe it never can, but if ever aspires to lead a Welsh government it will certainly need, not only to widen its electoral appeal towards the centre and to the right, but also to break out of its northern and western heartlands. In south and eastern Wales Plaid has negligible support, barring one or two exceptions. What it actually needs to do is become a truly national party.
The conference itself was quite a fun experience. I spoke at a very lively fringe on blogging and was delighted to find out that such a huge proportion of the conference delegates seem to be avid readers of this blog. So to all those I met, thanks for making me so welcome and confirming Cardiff's status as one of my favourite cities in the UK.What If It Had Been A Muslim?
Iain Dale 12:01 PM
I am writing because in February a National Front member Neil MacGregor pleaded guilty to threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque, Scotland's biggest mosque and to behead one muslim a week until there are no more mosques in the country.
I haven't followed this case, and don't know the detail, but Yousuf does indeed have a point. If it had been an Islamic fundamentalist who was trying to blow up a Church of Scotland church I am pretty sure it would have featured on national news bulletins. Is it really right for the media to discriminate like this, or is there more to this than either Yousuf or I can see?
Despite this there has not been any media reports of this at all. We are trying to get this changed, not because this is any more important than other terrorist attempts but rather because it is equal and so should receive similar press treatment. After all, do you think the coverage would have been the same if it was a muslim trying to blog up Scotland's biggest church and threatening to blow up one church a week?
Irfan Ahmed has also taken up the cudgels.
Sunday 5 April 2009
The Plaid Cymru conference, which I attended over that last two days was interesting for a number of reasons, not least that you got the feeling it was a conference of a party in opposition rather than government. The party members seemed to be far more interested in slagging off Labour, who are their partners in government in Wales, than critiquing the Tories or LibDems. Perhaps it is because Plaid regards itself as a rival socialist party to Labour. And therein lies its main electoral problem.
A few days ago I received an email from a Scottish blogger called Yousuf Hamid.
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