Bromley LibDems have selected local councillor Ben Abbotts as their candidate for the pending Bromley & Chis by-election. I recall delivering leaflets with Ben in Orpington prior to the general election and he seemed a thoroughly nice chap – best of luck to him. He was our PPC in Sevenoaks at the last election and succeeded in overtaking Labour to move into second place in that seat.

The LibDem by-election HQ is now open on Bromley High Street.

Something I’ve learnt today, having never previously felt the need to read Matthew Taylor’s official profile. Turns out the LibDem MP’s dad is Ken Taylor, who wrote, among other things, the excellent BBC adaptation of Sleeping Murder. It’s one of my favourite Joan Hickson Miss Marples (yes, ITV, Miss Marple), with a particularly nightmare-inducing climax.

As mentioned earlier, I listened to James Graham on Resonance FM last night. As well as talking politics generally, he was promoting Hands Off Our Future, his new website (and forum) promoting the issue of generational equity. With pensions – erroneously often not considered a young persons’ issue – in the news today, it’s well-timed. With older people much more likely to vote, there is a danger of the country providing more and more benefits to well-off retired people at the expense (literally) of debt-saddled younglings who can’t get on the housing ladder. With plenty of pressure groups speaking for older people, it’s almost a taboo to suggest that – for example – free TV licences for the over-74s are a gratuitous subsidy for many comfortable septagenarians.

Of course, the issues aren’t as straightforward as that and stripping away all non-means-tested benefits for older people isn’t the answer, but there’s an important debate to be had about the legacy – environmental and economic – that future generations will be left with.

The highlight of the radio show for me, incidentally, was James’s conjuring up of a media-hungry Mark Oaten sitting at home working his way through a pile of KitKats in the hope of finding a golden ticket…

I listen to about half an hour of Today as I’m getting ready each morning. Occasionally, as yesterday morning, I end up shouting at the radio. In this case, it followed a report on whether or not Nottingham is the crime capital of the UK.

After some discussion about the statistics and where towns figured in the crime table*, John Humphrys asked (from memory): “But the Government say that crime is going down, don’t they?” What did that have to do with anything, I demanded from the stereo. The relative levels of crime in different places in a snapshot of time bears no relation at all to the change of crime frequency over time. The fact that you can produce a report calculating likelihood of being a victim of crime in different geographic locations says absolutely nothing at all about the overall crime rate apart from that there is some crime. Grr.

*The word “table” appears to be the 100,000th word on this blog. Woo.