Jo Hayes

Today, or what's left of it, is Gregor Mendel's 189th birthday, and as he is one of my heroes, I feel the need to shout about it. Mendel was one of those people who led a modest life, saw and observed the same world as the rest of us, but did it so much better, more insightfully, more thoughtfully, and came up with an idea that is so simple, profound and right that the rest of us will spend the rest of time thinking: how come no one had thought of that before? In his case, it was a few rows of peas (round, wrinkled, etc) sown annually and the produce patiently counted and re-sown, plus maths, that revealed the solution to the bit Charles Darwin hadn't solved: how, from generation to generation, did heredity happen? The nuts and bolts of it? Nowadays we witter on about genes, DNA and all the rest of it, as though these ideas had always been there, but in Mendel's time hardly anyone had so much as a clue, and then Mendel wrote a clue. Some say he tweaked the maths, but e...

The Hansard report on bloggers a week or so ago got me thinking why I don't blog that often. Someone intimated that I did it all wrong, I didn't react quickly to events and it wasn't a proper blog unless it was a weblog, a daily (or more frequent) diary. So I was duly put down, until I asked myself: who are these people who set themselves up as experts on how blogging should be done? Like 6th century Latin grammarians. Good grief, it's only just been invented. So I will go on doing it the way I like, when a posting has ripened enough to be a fruit that someone somewhere might think worth picking.

After takeoff, as the aircraft gained height, Metro Manila gradually came into view: a grey jumble of human habitation punctuated by clustered skyscrapers, intersected by meanders of a noxious-looking, mustard-coloured river, sprawling across an enormous plain bounded on the west side by the sea and in other directions not at all, further than the eye could see, eventually obscured by pollution haze and clouds. Making life bearable in this monster megacity is just one aspect of the problems faced by President Aquino's government. Already it is home to upwards of 15 million people and it is growing all the time as the burgeoning Filipino population drifts to the cities in hope of making a living. As it grows, so do the problems. Is Metro Manila a premonition of things to come for our species? If global population growth proceeds as forecast, then yes. Population growth threatens to render all our efforts to tackle individual basic needs – food, water, housing, air fit to breathe, di...

Even to me, a foreigner, here in Manila the significance of President “Noynoy” Aquino’s government having made today a national holiday to mark the 150th anniversary of José Rizal’s birth is obvious. Rizal was a man of many talents and republican convictions who opposed colonial rule until executed by Spanish firing squad in 1896. The current President’s father Benigno (“Ninoy”) Aquino was the Liberal Party leader who returned from exile in 1983 to oppose US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos, only to be assassinated as he arrived at Manila airport. I suspect that for ordinary Filipinos both murdered men have hero status bearing comparison with President John F Kennedy for Americans. The current President took a little time off from affairs of state to welcome Liberal delegates from around the world to his palace last Saturday and give the keynote speech of Liberal International Congress. He seemed to me an unassuming man, and my impression is reinforced by reading that when asked what h...

What’s the real story of the past year in a nutshell? The country had had enough of Labour. Tired, bereft of ideas and saddled with an unpopular leader who had been in charge as the country blundered into the debt crisis, Labour was out of the picture. So the Tories and Lib Dems did the responsible thing – did a deal on what they could agree on, to get a workable stable government and avoid financial meltdown for this debt-laden country. If the country does not have good governance, all politicking over this or that policy is futile. But our opponents don’t want people to think about this. They are talking constantly the language of Lib Dem “betrayal”. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Labour wouldn’t say their party had gullibly let the City do whatever it liked under “light touch regulation”, spent public funds like there’s no tomorrow, and then left a note for the new chancellor saying there’s no money left, would they? But that’s what really happened. Labour betrayed the country....

Dear Nick, I believe that tertiary education should be available to everyone in the UK, rich or poor, especially poor, who can benefit from it. But I have never supported scrapping tuition fees. That would involve using State taxation powers to compel the lower-paid, who are less likely to have benefited from tertiary education, to subsidise the higher-paid who are more likely. I don’t think John Stuart Mill would have approved. People with degrees get paid more. It is only fair that a person who gets the benefit and is able without hardship to contribute to the cost, should do so. In view of the huge expansion in tertiary education, I believe scrapping tuition fees is unaffordable. It was unaffordable before the banking crisis. It is even less affordable now that the country is burdened with a huge deficit caused by bailing out the banks. That is my personal view but current Lib Dem policy, made democratically by vote at Conference, is otherwise. Scrapping tuition fees is party policy...

The Lib Dems are holding an awayday tomorrow on the coalition, which I can't go to because of my day job. As possibly the Federal Policy Committee's longest-serving member, I call on them to come up with a solution on how to handle our coalition partners (at Westminster level but certainly not at mine!) when they try to depart from the coalition agreement. A solution means stopping them from doing it. For me, it is hard enough to accept that we helped the Tories into Downing Street and are helping keep them there. I can accept it on the basis that each side did a deal whereby a mix of policies derived from each side would become the new programme, and that the coalition agreement sets out that deal. And an Englishman's word is his bond, or at any rate the best of them's is. But almost as soon as the ink was dry on the coalition agreement, the coalition started departing from it. I can understand this if a new unforeseen circumstance ("Events, dear boy, events...