On the first Wednesday of each month I chair the meeting of Sunniside History Society at Sunniside Social Club. Last week the speaker was Liz Purcell who spoke about the "Devil's Porridge". This was the name given by workers (mainly women) who were employed in the munitions factories in the First World War to the material that went into making explosives. An interesting meeting and fascinating
Jago Hazzard gives a thorough and entertaining history of this long-neglected, but now thriving, London station. I too have stood beside the Famous Cock and found that fragment of the original grand Victorian building. The North London Railway's City terminus at Broad Street has disappeared into history, but in the early Eighties I was a regular user. The London Chess League matches, in which I played for the Richmond and Twickenham club, all took place at the nearby Bishopsgate Institute. When my game was over, I would catch a late train from Broad Street all the way home to Kew ...
Gateshead Lib Dem executive last week looked at early plans for the local elections next year. We have had a number of new and newish members who are typically half my age but who are taking on much more of a role. This next generation will be taking a key role in the local election campaign. It was a productive meeting and as I head up the social media and literature campaigns, I had
[IMG: Bill Revans with Steve Ashton and Adam Dance] Cllr Bill Revans with Cllr Steve Ashton and Adam Dance MP. A local press release brings the news: Councillor Steve Ashton (Crewkerne) has joined the Liberal Democrat group at Somerset Council. Councillor Ashton was elected as a Conservative in 2022 and has been sitting as a non-aligned councillor since March 2024. Steve Ashton expressed his confidence in the Yeovil MP Adam Dance following his hard-fought success in the 2024 general election: The Lib Dems have shown themselves up to the challenge of running Somerset council in hugely difficult circumstances and the ...
It was both a pleasure and a privilege for Erica and I to show our Liverpool Care Leavers Forum around Liverpool Town Hall last week. Regular readers of this blog, and indeed my other social media accounts will be aware that my key themes as Lord Mayor of Liverpool are problems faced by care leavers and indeed the problems faced by the many other disadvantaged children in Liverpool. Some of those are disadvantaged because of physical or mental health problems and some of them because they come from disadvantaged communities from which it's often exceedingly difficult to break out. Over ...
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Last Thursday, I was working from home with BBC Parliament going in the background. I was only half listening but was impressed by a speech by a Welsh MP who had real empathy for those communities and told how his great-grandfather died after hours of working waist deep in ice cold water. It was only later on that I realised that this speech was made by our own David Chadwick. According to my husband who spent the first 20 years of his career working in various collieries around the country, David's remarks had been going down exceptionally well with former ...
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Hannah Forsyth surveys the history of the commercialisation of higher education and concludes: "Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose." John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses - of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally." "G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it's asking three ...
It's easy to do and it's here.
The following article is primarily concerned with how we approach Labour voters nationally and locally (outside Labour-facing seats). I have much respect for the many local parties, whether in Liverpool or Southwark, who have taken a strong fight to Labour and for whom much of the criticism here would not apply. The 2019 and 2024 General Elections made one thing clear - parties cannot control tactical voting, only voters can, and their decision is circumstantial. The reason it worked in 2024 without alliances but failed in 2019 with pacts is because voters were ready to do it in the former ...
Welcome back from the break! There were 6 principal council seats up for election last week: 4 Labour, 1 Conservative, and 1 Lib Dem defence. Labour continues to decline, holding only one seat while losing two to Reform and one to the Conservatives. The Tories also lost their seat to Reform, while the Lib Dems held their only seat of the week. In Wokingham BC, Cllr Chetna Jamthe secured over 50% of the vote and maintained a healthy lead over second place Conservative candidate. Well done and congratulations to Chetna and the team for the win in the Winnersh ward. ...
Britain is in crisis. The cost of living is spiralling, wages are stagnant, public services are collapsing, and trust in politics is at an all-time low. People feel powerless, ignored, and abandoned by those in charge. And when that happens, anger grows. Populists know this. They thrive on it. They don't want to fix the problems; they want to exploit them. They fuel resentment, offering easy scapegoats and simplistic answers that sound good but solve nothing. They tell people that migrants are stealing their jobs, that the NHS is broken because of bureaucracy, that the economy is failing because of ...
Alan Rusbridger has a very disturbing article in Prospect magazine in which he speculates on whether a a Donald Trump tribute act could sweep into power in the UK, trash the existing order and overwhelm the system with a series of outlandish and extreme measures before anyone had a chance to catch their breath: He says that there are two theories of British exceptionalism which we tell to reassure ourselves that this could never happen, one is the Good Chap Theory while the other is the Cable Street warm bath: The Good Chap Theory was coined by Professor Peter Hennessy, ...
DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL - WEEKLY ROAD REPORT REPORT FOR THE WEST END WARD - WEEK COMMENCING MONDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2025 Seafield Road, Dundee - closed from its westmost end (in cul-de-sac) extending for a distance of no more than 20 metres in an easterly direction to facilitate a site access for a new housing development until November 2025. Blinshall Street (Douglas Street to 50 metres south) - closed until August 2025 for construction works. Douglas Street (Blinshall Street to Brown Street) - temporary traffic lights until August 2025 for construction works. Brown Street (south of Douglas Street) - closed until ...
