Call this a Scottish breakfast, John Lewis? What are you thinking?

So, it's the first day in post apocalyptic Britain. We all seem to have survived the end of the world, so we can now look forward to a bright future, where we're all nice to each other, live in peace and harmony, make sure everyone on the planet has enough to eat and somewhere decent to live? We're going to take better care of the world around us? Sure we are.

But first, a little rant. Because this is important, obviously.

My friend Andrew Brown, known to you as @oneexwidow on Twitter, and author of The Widow's World is, as I write, tucking into what is laughingly described as a Scottish Breakfast, at John Lewis in Edinburgh. I say laughingly, because, look at this...

How can you possibly have a Scottish Breakfast with no tattie scone? It's a scandal! An outrage!

For those of you not from Scotland, the tattie scone is, in my opinion, one of our finest examples of Scottish fayre. A warm potato flatbread, a little bit salty, to soak up the egg yolk and give you an early morning carby hit is unmissable. And John Lewis is cheating its customers by offering a boring old hash brown.

A couple of miles away, in the Grosvenor Hilton at the West End, another friend of mine was simultaneously sitting down to a breakfast which did include a tattie scone. If one of the biggest US based multi-national hotel chains in the world can adapt its menus to cater for Scottish tastes, so can one of our iconic Princes Street stores.

Andrew has kindly allowed me to share his photograph of the offending breakfast with you all and has said that he will be sending a strongly worded letter of complaint. How serious he is,  I can't be sure.. I added that I wanted to see it debated in Parliament, but the last word goes to our lovely elephant's Daddy Richard who suggests a debate at Liberal Democrat conference, complete with tasting samples. Given that said Conference is happening in Glasgow in September next year, I'm sure that can be arranged....

But, seriously, John Lewis, sort your lives out. Give us some tattie scones. Please.

The Elephant tries to #Riggtheelection

If you do nothing else today, you have to read the lovely Elephant's reasoning for backing Jennie Rigg for President.

Just for starters, I love his scale of preference:

It OUGHT to be, and yet it's actually really easy to place my "one", "two" and "three", with the very important caveat that even my "three" is a sign of very high endorsement.

(For reference, Mr Ed Millipede should come in somewhere in the five to six billion range on this scale. Possibly even lower if humanity should encounter any space aliens!)

Like me, he wasn't impressed with the speech, then!

There is still time to get your nominations to Cowley Street - but you have to either post them tonight or fax them or take them to Party HQ tomorrow.

It's time to #Riggtheelection! 

David Miliband just doesn't get gender equality

Labour leadership candidate David Miliband has been boasting on Twitter about his five point plan for gender equality. Well three of the five points are internal Labour Party stuff, and the other two involve Parliament's working hours and nicking our policy on flexible working and sharing parental leave. He even qualifies that with an "over time".

Nothing about equal pay, tackling employment discrimination, body image issues, portrayal of women in the media, violence against women, all the things tackled in the Real Women policy document debated at last year's Liberal Democrat conference.

In contrast, Miliband's approach seems tokenistic and irrelevant. He really doesn't get it.

This is as good an opportunity as any to tell you of the amusing moment last night when the Elephant shamefacedly announced to Twitter that he'd had an invitation from David Miliband to join his campaign for leader. It must have been that rave review he wrote of Miliband's mentor's memoirs that did it!

My imagination is running wild with images of our fluffy friend holding a house meeting for Miliband. Would he break the control freaky rules and show a Doctor Who dvd? We'll never know.

An Alternative Vote and Gerrymandering Round Up

Labour's behaviour over the Government's plans for electoral reform has infuriated me. It's as if they think that shouting loud and using nasty words like gerrymandering will make mud stick particularly to the Liberal Democrats. Well, it's no substitute for the intelligent, reasoned debate that people are entitled to expect.

I was going to write about this in greater detail but on this occasion I'm bowing out because so many other people have already done it better. Instead, here's a round up of some of the best of the articles on electoral reform:

First of all, have a look at this video which explains AV:

Now everybody knows that the Liberal Democrat policy is for proportional representation and that AV is not proportional. I've long felt lukewarm towards it and have expressed the view that a referendum on AV isn't really that great. I still feel like that, although the lovely elephant's words do make me feel a little warmer to it, particularly the bit about politicians having to engage outside their natural voters. That in itself makes politics healthier. 

Fred Carver gave the opposite point of view on Liberal Democrat Voice and I found that I actually disagreed with him - politics is the art of the possible, after all, and at least this is a move away from first past the post which is really discredited as an electoral system.

On the other aspects of the Government's reforms, namely the equalisation of constituency boundaries, Mark Thompson gives Labour blog Left Foot Forward a right old fisking.

Martin Kettle writes in today's Guardian about the damage Labour is doing to its own credibility by the position it's taking on this Bill:

"Be clear, therefore, that Labour is not trying to protect fairness from those who would destroy it but to perpetuate an unfairness from which Labour itself benefits. Inequality of constituencies is not the only source of bias in the electoral system – but it is certainly one of them. For the past five parliaments it has been biased towards Labour. No amount of red herrings about the danger of reducing the number of MPs, or the inappropriateness of including more than one major change in the same bill, should be permitted to distract from the essential propriety of correcting that bias. To claim this bill should be opposed because it is partisan is not just opportunism, it is an Orwellian inversion of the truth."

Our own James Graham argues that Labour may actually have a point on some of the issues it raises about the equalisation of constituencies particularly in respect of the amount of casework there is in urban areas where registration is low, but that their current attitude precludes proper scrutiny and attempts to find a solution.

"So there are genuine social justice problems that need to be ironed out of this legislation. Unfortunately, by focusing on the false gerrymandering charge, Jack Straw puts party self-interest above the public good and only ensures that the debate in parliament becomes more heated. In doing so, the possibility of MPs working across parties to give the bill proper scrutiny recedes. It is at best self-defeating and at worse a deeply cynical attempt to derail the coalition which has nothing to do with the real issues that are at stake"

There is to me a certain irony in Labour shouting, nay, screeching, to anyone who will listen that we've abandoned our principles by going into coalition with the Tories while at the same time abandoning their own principles to try to destabilise the coalition and perpetuate a situation that benefits them.  I just hope that common sense prevails and that that the ensuing debate on these measures is serious and actually deals with the issues at hand. I won't be holding my breath, though.

Update: Do you know, some people! While I was actually writing this post Stephen produced a brilliant riposte in which he discussed how Labour are abandoning all their key principles and then backed it up with a personal example from West Lothian as to how Labour really care about keeping communities together.

2nd update: and still they keep on coming - although this from Cicero might well have been here earlier and I missed it. But it's good.

In which my vile day was brightened by an elephant

I have not had a good day. The bits of it I have been awake for have been vile. But mostly I have been sleeping.

I got up to pick Anna up from school and then spent some time working.

Now I am about to limp back to bed.

It would probably be better if I could learn to pace myself, but that wouldn't get the work done.

Anyway, one thing did cheer me up today. Actually, two.

If you are getting scared by what Gordon Brown and David Cameron are saying about a hung parliament, read these two articles. The first is by a very wise elephant who explains why the Tories are just wrong, and the second is by our favourite blogging bruiser James, for Comment is Free, who has a left hook for Labour.

Always keep in mind that 49% of pepole want to see a Lib Dem Government and would vote that way if they thought we could win. Well, we're second in most polls at the moment, and all the parties are pretty much within the margin of error. If there was ever a time for your vote to make a difference, this is it!

Confident Clegg launches #LibDems manifesto built on fairness for extraordinary people

And who exactly is extraordinary - in Nick's words "every single person".

I can't begin to describe how hideously bad I'm feeling so this is going to be more of a series of bullet points rather than an attempt at serious analysis. Luckily, someone else has provided some excellent words to describe what drives us as Liberal Democrats and where our principles come from so I'll let the man we elected as leader earn his money!

Every manifesto needs to have an idea at its heart. The basic idea that animates this manifesto is something I have always believed. I believe every single person is extraordinary.

The tragedy is that we have a society where too many people never get to fulfill that extraordinary potential.

My view – the liberal view – is that government’s job is to help them to do it. Not to tell people how to live their lives. But to make their choices possible, to release their potential, no matter who they are.

The way to do that is to take power away from those who hoard it. To challenge vested interests. To break down privilege. To clear out the bottlenecks in our society that block opportunity and block progress. And so give everyone a chance to live the life they want.

There’s a simple word for those ideas, and it’s a word this manifesto is built on: fairness

Nick's words were prefaced by a sombre Sarah Teather describe how a child born in a poor part of her constituency was likely to die 13 years before a child born on the same day in affluent Kensington. She specifically mentioned poor housing and the effect it has on health as one of the causes.

You can read the whole thing, or as many or as few of its sizable component parts here.

For all my Apple loving F1 friends, yes, there's an iphone app and a Blackberry one too, which I haven't yet got round to installing. Look!

What struck me was how much Nick has grown in confidence in his 2 and a bit years as leader. He's still the straightforward, genuine person I first met 12 years ago, but he really has got a lot better at fielding awkward questions from hostile journalists. Asked if we weren't soft on crime, he replied that, actually, with their policy of locking up young men who come out 92% likely to re-offend, the other parties were stupid on crime, not tough. Beautifully done.

Asked if he wasn't miffed that Vince was outshadowing him, he said with grace and humour that he was proud that the most trusted politician of the day was on our team.

Final point of the day - I loved the way Danny Alexander started off the elephant theme, talking about how the deficit was the "elephant in the room" that Labour and the Tories were ignoring.

The Almighty Vince then joked that this must make him the "elephant man."

I'm sure that this was not just a valid political point, but a tribute to our very ownlovable, original and highly articulate elephant.If you aren't reading every single word he writes, you are missing out.

Scots do well on Lib Dem Blog Award Shortlists

Those nice people at Lib Dem Voice have been messing with the fragile and egotistical heads of we bloggers over the last few days. They've been teasing us with hints of secrets for days on Twitter, whipping us into an anticipatory frenzy. They even gave us a couple of hours' notice that the shortlists were going to be announced at 11:25 this morning. They were on time, too and you can read the full list here.

I had never had any expectation of being included in any of the shortlists, so I wasn't surprised not to see my name in any of the categories - and then I was completely flabbergasted to discover that this blog on the shortlist for the actual Blog of the Year award. Imagine, a one in five chance of getting a BOTY. Mind you, I tend to assess these sorts of chances in the same way as John Diamond, the late and much missed (by me, anyway) Times columnist who wrote in his book C, Because Cowards get Cancer too about his feelings about being told he had a 80% or a 60% chance of survival or whatever. He said, no, actually, it was 50-50 - he'd either survive or he wouldn't. On that logic, I'm in with a 50-50 chance of victory:-)

So, having talked up my chances of winning by two and a half times, I am crushed that I am not going to be able to be at the glittering awards ceremony on Sunday night at Bournemouth. No Kate Winslet moment for me.

You know when they do the Oscars, or the BAFTAs, they do them very early in the evening, and probably for good reason, because they don't want the participants to have been drinking free booze for an extended period of time. By my the time the awards start at 10pm, all the participants will have been enjoying the delights of the Conference fringe for several hours. That's going to be fun. The spirited and opinionated Liberal Democrat nature is only enhanced by copious amounts of wine and beer so I hope that there's championship quality banter.

Seriously, though, I find myself on a list with exceptionally talented people:

the wonderful Costigan, king of smut, innuendo and tearing the Daily Fail to pieces, also up for best new blog, and with one for Best Posting;

the original and talented Charlotte, also nominated for best new blog and with two posts up for the Best Posting on a Lib Dem blog;

the man they call the Lib Dem Blogosphere's Tactical Nuclear Bastard, previous champion, with his post on the appalling reporting of Jo Swinson's expenses up for best posting, fierce, provocative, sweary and usually right;

everybody's favourite elephant - for a long time, I sported a Bloggers for Fluffy Justice banner on this blog after he was shockingly denied victory last year, cos he's brilliant as this posting on the Megrahi affair shows.

So there you have it - but what of the other Scots? Well, we've done really well, with two of our number up for the "Best Blog from a Liberal Democrat holding public office", Willie Rennie MP and Cllr Fraser MacPherson.

Alexander Ryland's Lamp of Liberty is shortlisted for best new blog.

Jo Swinson gets the nod for her fabulous tweets and use of Facebook for which she's already received public acclamation.

Finally, in the Best Non Lib Dem Political Blog, our own Mr MacNumpty makes the shortlist. Nominations were invited from all Lib Dem Voice readers and I nominated J Arthur partly because his diligent round up of Holyrood happenings every week takes some effort and is a valuable historical asset and because of posts like this , this and this. Sure, he often has a good go at the Lib Dems, but then I often have a good go about the SNP but we generally make up over a discussion on Strictly Come Dancing.

We have a lot to be proud of in the Scottish and Lib Dem Blogospheres as the various lists that have come out in this awards season have shown.