Another book review I wrote for the Conference issue of Liberator (Liberator 425), which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website. Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust ProsecutionsDavid C. Anderson and Nigel P. Scott Waterside Press, £22.50 The possibility of false conviction is routinely deployed as an argument against the death penalty, but otherwise does not concern us as much as it should. Anderson and Scott look at three high-profile cases, those of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito (Italy), Stefan Kiszko (UK) and Darlie Routier (USA), and trace the factors they have in common. ...
Bobby Dean, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, argues that a return to austerity will not solve Britain's problems: "Starmer says he wants to end the politics of easy answers - and I agree. But on the exam question of 'how to fix Britain', he sidesteps complex answers in favour of a simple one that we have all heard before: we must tighten our belts." To keep his government on track, Keir Starmer needs to restore the clout of the cabinet secretary and stamp out Downing Street factionalism, says Alex Thomas. Adam Kucharski offers a guide to ...
Catching up on my reading, I came across this advice from "The Economist" from Wednesday. With the ongoing debate about overtaking the Conservatives at the next election, and with real questions about the political direction of the Conservative Party under a new leader, what, if anything, should we change as we face a Labour Party with a vast majority and emerging challenges from the Greens and Reform UK? The Economist sums its advice up thus: Britain has a two-party system designed, broadly, to produce one party more to the left economically and another more to the right economically. Labour has ...
Written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. I saw this film at the Renoir, an arthouse cinema near Russell Square in London, in 2001. I remember being attracted by a quote in the window, which I suspect was this one from Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review: This is a British film with pertinent things to say about contemporary Britain, urgently and powerfully expressed in a cinematic language far from the callow, Lottery-nurtured idiom of Tepid Britannia comedy thrillers. He might have added - as it was the year 2001 - that most of those tepid thrillers were directed ...
This weekend is ten years on from the results being declared following the Scottish Independence Referendum, and for those Liberals, like me, who voted Yes to Independence, much has changed since then. I read much of what was written about Scotland's Future in the White Paper and elsewhere, and wrote a number of articles at the time about my own thoughts. In the end, I decided that the SNP's economic forecast for an independent Scotland was complete nonsense, but still thought the risk was worth taking, of voting for an independent future, for a number of reasons. The first being ...
Whilst in Brighton, I found myself volunteering to help with the Suffolk County Co-ordinating Committee, a sinister group of Liberal Democrats working to elect more Liberal Democrats across Suffolk. Now, in fairness, I've been there before, and it wasn't exactly the most exciting thing that I've ever done. But all good people should rally around the flag, and I've become a bit better at political strategy (you'd like to think so after all these years, wouldn't you?). Besides, you really can't just stand back and leave others to do the hard yards. And so, I've spent part of an evening ...
The UK trans community is concerned and dismayed that some Lib Dem parliamentarians seem to be excessively supporting the Cass review. The Cass review might superficially appear to be reasonable and balanced, and few of us will closely read all 388 pages in order to form a different view than we are hearing from our broadly anti-trans media. But from a transgender perspective the signs of subtly biased language are clear from the start. Firstly, in the Chair's Foreword: "I have faced criticism for engaging with groups and individuals who take a social justice approach and advocate for gender affirmation, ...
Pennsylvania's is known as "The Keystone State." There are lots of reasons for this moniker but the one most pertinent at the moment is that it holds the key to the White House. It is generally agreed that whomever tops the poll in Pennsylvania will also pull in the vital swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by the narrowest margin since 1840. But then Biden didn't do much better in 2020. His margin of victory was only 80,555 out of a total of 6,725, 902 Pennsylvania votes cast. The Keystone State is a microcosm of ...
Back in March this year, Fraser had the pleasure of meeting the participants in Mary Veal's 'Clarsach for Beginners' class at Blackness Library, run through Friends of Wighton. It is a really great class and the members play lovely songs on the harp. The group meets from 2pm to 3.30pm every Monday (except the first of each month) at the library - all welcome! For more information, please contact Friends of Wighton's secretary at secretary@friendsofwighton.com
It's easy being in opposition. Any party spokeperson who doesn't have the responsibility of office is able to criticise the government of the day and put forward alternatives, and it is only reasonable that voters expect them to do better once they've become the government. Labour however, appear to have forgotten to apply this principle to themselves. There are two examples of this hypocrisy. The first is over Tata Steel. On this issue, Martin Shipton on Nation Cymru, writes that the outcome of the Labour government's negotiations with Tata Steel over the company's plan for its Port Talbot plant illustrates ...
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