The Guardian reports on warnings by green campaigners that the defining issue of today's local elections will be the UK's soaring cost of living, and in particular the links between inflation and the effects of fossil fuels and the climate crisis. The paper quotes Ami McCarthy, the head of politics at Greenpeace UK, who says: "With people's bills and prices soaring from yet another fossil fuel crisis, these local elections have a global context - driven by the Iran war. Getting the UK out of the fossil fuel doom loop and on to renewables would secure a stable and affordable ...
Ed Davey has been giving interviews ahead of tomorrow's local elections: He spoke to Cathy Newman tonight. She asked him whether he got exhausted as a carer and if it all got too much. He said that he and his wife Emily wanted to use their privileged position to fight for carers. He said that Liberal Democrats were all about empowering people. Watch here: Liberal Democrats believe in empowering people: whether it's carers who feel exhausted and unheard, families struggling to get support, or communities failed by water companies. It's why we'll continue to stand up to Nigel Farage as ...
Geoff Marshall takes us to the Chessington Branch, visiting each station and then exploring beyond Chessington South to see where the railway would have continued. No one seems to know how much of this further extension, which would have reached Leatherhead, was built. Like and subscribe, my children. Like and subscribe.
Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business - the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies - in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable." "For a long time, peatlands ...
This Friday will be like Christmas come early for local government nerds like myself. It's a bumper set of elections this year thanks to a set of delayed County Council polls carried over from last year, mixed in with the usual scheduled English, Welsh and Scottish elections. It would appear these elections present an unprecedented level of choice to the voter - often five parties plus independents/localists, without any extra powers conferred on local government, or a PR system to accommodate multi-party contests. Much like last year there will be several winners voted in on little more than 25% in ...
I heard Say It Ain't So Joe on the radio in the Seventies only once and had to wait until they invented the internet to find out who had sung it and who had written it. The answer in both cases was Murray Head. Later I discovered this version. Daltrey keeps close to Head's interpretation, but he and his band, which includes most of the rest of The Who, add star quality.
This Scottish election campaign has been exciting from a Scottish Lib Dem point of view. For the first time in 15 years, we have a real chance of making significant gains in our representation. The polls are putting us anywhere between 8 and 13 from our current 5. Alex Cole-Hamilton has been brilliant at delivering our message. He lands it every time and somehow manages to make it sound fresh. He has been on fire. Watch him tackle John Swinney on ferries in the last tv leaders' debate: We are focusing on 4 key areas: Fixing health care so you ...
Augustus Carp offers something to whet your appetite - a curtain-raiser, a short not-too-dramatic offering before the Grand-Guignol horror show that awaits us as the results start to trickle in from late on Thursday night until the following evening. In the first four months of 2026, the procession of councillors resigning from the political parties that helped them to get elected has continued apace. So far, 299 "events" have occurred; not just defections, but also a few expulsions and suspensions. "Double-hatted" councillors who change their affiliation have been counted twice, as have councillors who resigned and then re-joined (48 hours ...
We are now a day away from the Birmingham City elections, which promises to be a momentous appraisal of the last four years of Labour rule in the second city. The party are set to lose not just their majority, but huge swathes of seats as residents have their say on the catastrophic failures presided over by the ruling group. Labour knows this, their disingenuous ploy to pretend to settle the bin strike – which has left areas of the city piled high with bags of rotting rubbish, fly tipping, and rubbish strewn streets for over a year – has ...
The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage's partner, Laure Ferrari, has refused to confirm how she paid for a house in the Reform leader and MP's constituency of Clacton, adding "there's more than one way to pay for a house". The paper says that in an interview with French publication Le Monde, Ferrari was questioned over revelations in the Guardian that she had purchased a house in her name in Clacton after Farage had claimed to be the buyer. They add that Farage initially said the arrangement was for "security" reasons but some months later, he told reporters that Ferrari came ...