Simon Hughes has been elected the next President of the Liberal Democrats, taking around 70% of the vote against fellow MP Lembit &Oumlpik.

I was backing Simon (although I’m sure Lembit would have done a creditable job) and look forward to his taking the party forward over the next two years under Charles’s leadership. Well done, Simon!

I have a lot of time for Steve Webb when it comes to pensions. Watching him in a panel debate on Newsnight a week or so ago, I was impressed with his grasp of ths issues.

Where I have less time for him is on issues of “social liberalism”. He was very much against the policy paper on censorship that was passed at the last party conference, and now he has come out with this nonsense.

He demands that civil servants caught viewing porn websites at work should be sacked without question. This is despite the fact that

“In the majority of cases where monitoring has picked up apparent inappropriate use, further investigation shows that staff innocently followed a link from another site and were unaware of its content.”

Sixteen people were sacked and one was prosecuted. This is the right course of action if they were breaking the law (especially if they were accessing child porn) or causing extreme offence to colleagues.

But it is not sensible for any organisation to dismiss staff for what is, after all, a relatively minor offence. Disciplining staff and making it clear that more serious action will be taken if they are found in breach of the department’s IT access policies again is a more pragmatic and sensible course of action. That sixteen people were sacked shows that the DWP is prepared to deal with the worst offenders and they should be allowed to do so in possession of the full facts rather than relying on an article in The Sun.

According to Steve, viewing any pornographic website is “assisting filth and paedophiles”. And we thought Mary Whitehouse was dead.

Our candidate in the Hartlepool by-election, Jody Dunn, today launched her blog, at www.jodydunn.org.uk.

The Guardian sees it as a little bit of by-election history. And before anyone suggests otherwise, she really does write it herself!

It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma (“Humphrey, I don’t care for that word”).

Martyn‘s uncovered evidence that the person or persons behind Gidley Watch has been campaigning with the LibDems in Hartlepool. Anders Hanson, on the other hand, quotes a “source in Hartlepool” who rejects this evidence, which puts us back to square one.

If (as reading between the lines on the website suggests), the Gidley Watch writer(s) are LibDem activists, I might well know them. If so and if you’re reading this, e-mail me 😉

Either way, I’m off to Hartlepool next week and will be taking my digital camera just in case La Gidley pays a visit at the same time so I can enter the photo competition being run by Gidley Watch (no sign of any entries so far so I may stand a chance). I doubt I’ll have the nerve to ask an MP to hold up an “I love Gidley Watch” sign for me though.

Update: I have replaced the relatively weak title of this entry with one that I hope is at least marginally wittier