Local Liberal Democrats received a huge boost last week after winning the Highgate by-election with a massive 67% share of the vote. The winning candidate, Andy Kaye will now take up his position on the town council. The Conservative candidate was relegated to third place, with only 12% of the vote. This result leaves the Conservatives in South Lakeland in further disarray.
Local MP Tim Farron today signed a parliamentary motion, EDM 693. The motion, entitled black, minority ethnic and refugee women and domestic violence, draws attention to the plight of immigrants who come to marry in this country, but are later subject to domestic violence, as well as women trafficked into the country. These women often have no access to support, benefits or protection, effectively trapping women in either destitution or violence.
Local MP Tim Farron has criticised the Government ahead of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces in March 2003 over the increasingly perilous humanitarian situation in the country. According to recent estimates, as many as 150,000 civilians were killed in the first three years of the war alone and there are signs at present that the provision of clean water and working sewage systems is getting more scarce.
Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hill Farming Tim Farron is today writing to Farming Minister Lord Rooker, in order to ask him to explain his uncorrected comments given to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee meeting on 3rd March. The minister admitted that there would have to be a "reordering of priorities and abandonment of some work streams," noted that the animal welfare arm of DEFRA would lose a third of its resources and, perhaps most damningly, that DEFRA had "no resources to do anything" with regards to the Veterinary Surgeons Act, which the department had claimed in the past was "in urgent need of updating."
Local MP Tim Farron spoke of his fear for communities in the developing world during a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons today. Mr Farron spoke of the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations, which include aiming to halve the proportion of people who do not have access to safe water by 2015, but are currently set to miss that target by as much as 600 million people.
Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron today wrote to Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco PLC, asking him to follow the guidelines of Tesco's own consultants, Promar International, who informed them that farmers should be paid at least 30p/litre of milk, in order to meet rising costs and re-invest in their business.
