Jo Hayes

As various government members make promises about funding for flood defences, while wavelets lap gently against the interior walls of thousands of dwellings, my thoughts naturally turn to King Canute. I gather he was a real king (Cnut, Knutr, reign 1016-1035, Danelaw zone only). He seems to have been a very competent leader, so if it is true that he sat on his throne on the seashore and commanded the waves not to advance, I feel sure he did so to make a point to his courtiers about the futility of claiming power over nature, rather than because he actually expected the waves to take any notice. Perhaps there is a lesson for us here. I would guess that a modern King Canute would not trust entirely on grand engineering projects in a costly and perhaps futile effort to cope with forces whose scale was simply too great. I am no expert, but I have consulted people who are, and I am convinced that the key is prevention, or at least mitigation: to plant belts of trees on hilltops and sl...

I volunteered to deliver a round of Lib Dem leaflets in Berechurch Ward, Colchester, calling for a by-election. So on Sunday morning the leaflets, the dog and I set out from the town centre to the ward. It is a good thing that the dog and I like walking, because cycling being ruled out (the dog would not fit in), I had planned to go by bus, but none came, and later I found out there was only one per hour. So we walked there. It was quite a long way. We delivered the leaflets. We walked back. It took about four hours, all told. This is what Sundays are like for people without cars. The majority of houses on my round were semi-detached with open plan front gardens, a garage, and one, two or three cars and vans parked on the front area, some with a motor bike or three. This meant walking up one garden path, then hopping across to the other semi, then back to the street. So I went round a fair number of vehicles. They were of all kinds, including big, new gas-guzzlers, expensi...

Last Friday, as I walked through the new shopping mall at Cardinal Place, Victoria with its vast area of glass roof, I said to myself: "The runoff from this place must be phenomenal." Less than an hour later the exceptional rainstorm arrived. Later that day photos on the BBC news website showed Victoria Street, Westminster transformed into a lake. Which proves my point, I think. During the deluge itself I was in Embankment Gardens East, below the Savoy Hotel. I took refuge at the cafe there (a London treasure, but that's another blog). The waterfall gushing off the balcony roof was as if someone was pouring from a limitless bucket. When the storm passed, the tarmac path through the gardens was flooded, so I had to go along the Embankment, half of which had turned into a lake as well. A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter, as the rhyme goes (I don't know a metric version but I expect there is one - it probably should be in French). A large volume of wate...

I was a mere spectator of the kerfuffle in Ealing Southall, what with having had far too much to do in my own patch, plus a hectic time with the day job, plus a strained Achilles tendon, plus a belief that winning Haverstock Ward, Camden (where inspired Lib Dem environmental policies are going down extremely well with local people) mattered more in the long run than not winning in Southall. Was the blizzard of paper whizzing through those Ealing letterboxes really a good idea? I got reports that electors were fed up with the quantity of it, and obviously they were not enthused by it, because the turnout was low. And I empathised with them: I was not enthused, either, by the large number of texts and emails I received, urging various reasons why I should go and help. I fear it is counterproductive. And was it really a good idea for our MPs to cancel masses of other engagements for the duration? They have so much important work to do. Not much media time was spent on what the issu...

City of Westminster Lib Dems are campaigning to stop current proposals to permit a company to install five-a-side football pitches for private hire in Regent's Park, sacrificing trees, wildlife habitat and the popular tennis school for something that I have never heard anyone say they want. So we are having a picnic this Sunday afternoon (weather permitting, and bring your own refreshments) at the tennis school site to enjoy it while we still can. It's the thought of the rubber crumb surface and wire netting where scores of established trees and acres of wildlife habitat used to be that motivates me. To me, without the precious green space that remains, life in this city would be intolerable.

Any doubts about whether the Glasgow Airport attack was by Islamist ideologues or not were dispelled by the witness who reported that he heard one of the terrorists, his clothes on fire, shouting "Allah! Allah!" as he fought off the ambulance man who was trying to help him. This reminds me of something that happened to my father in World War Two. As he was an outstanding pilot, he served with Air Sea Rescue. One night he went out and rescued from the sea a Nazi who had been shot down. The Nazi then tried to shoot him. Islamists and Nazis seem to have a lot of things in common: loathing of Jews, baseless belief in their own superiority, a degree of reckless hate of which Tolkien's orcs would have been proud, are just three of them. It is not insanity because they are not delusional, in the sense of out of touch with reality. But it is something like insanity. I don't know what Gordo means by evil, but it seems to me that those who choose to destroy and harm in...