With the 2026 Senedd election now around four months away, Welsh politics has entered a new phase. Campaigns are taking shape, narratives are hardening, and for the first time since devolution, both the electoral map and the voting system have fundamentally changed. Old assumptions about "safe seats" no longer apply. In Neath, that shift is particularly stark. Under the new boundaries, Neath now sits within the Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd, combining Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, Neath, and Swansea East into a single six-member constituency elected by closed-list proportional representation. Recent polling for this new constituency points to a fragmented outcome: ...
Photo by Jacqueline BanerjeeLike W.H. Auden, I have a thing about abandoned lead mines. So I was intrigued to learn that there is one in Crystal Palace Park. Subterranea Briannica explains: It is well known that Crystal Palace Park includes a number of Victorian dinosaur models, arranged in groups around the lower lake. Many of these species were recently discovered although not all the models are nowadays thought to be strictly accurate. Less well known is that alongside these animals there is a replica geological strata. This was built at the same time as an educational feature and was constructed ...
In 1989, the international norms that had held for decades. In the tumultuous autumn of 1989 the various governments of the Warsaw Pact fell in turn. "In Hungary it took six years, in Poland it took six months, In East Germany it took six weeks, in Czechoslovakia six days and in Romania it took six hours". Communism had collapsed under its own contradictions. As we read the headlines in January 2026, it is hard not to feel certain 1989 vibes. The end of Maduro in Venezuela, and now the explosion of unrest in the "Islamic Republic" of Iran. It is ...
No principal authority council by-elections this week, but ten coming up over the rest of this month. Across those ten, there is a welcome full slate of ten Lib Dems, up from the six Lib Dems the last time these wards were up. That matches full slates for both Conservative and Reform, while Labour are contesting nine. But perhaps most interesting is the seven Green candidates, behind all those other parties and no increase for the Greens (unlike the Lib Dems). That continues the pattern from council by-elections in the last quarter, which showed the Greens once again doing little ...
The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage has been accused of "parroting Kremlin lines" after saying that he would vote against any UK government plans to deploy the military in Ukraine. The paper refers to the statement by Britain and France that they would be ready to send troops to Ukraine after a peace deal, and that the Reform UK leader said he would vote against any such move to put boots on the ground: Farage's comments cast doubt on his commitment to the UK's national security, the cabinet minister Pat McFadden said. He accused the politician of taking a pro-Russia ...
If you follow what Reform UK are campaigning on, and I wish that I didn't, you know that many of their ideas come from thinktanks which slavishly follow a right-wing perspective. Reduce immigration, attack benefit claimants, penalise diversity - that sort of thing. But, taking immigration, if you've succeeded in restricting the number of new immigrants to virtually none, you've then got the problem of how you maintain the size of the workforce in what is likely to be an aging population, given that the rate of births per woman over lifetime has fallen below the replacement rate, something which ...
Corridor care: Govt has to treat this as a national emergency Davey calls on PM to rule out use of UK bases to attack Greenland Met vetting scandal: Lib Dems call on Conservatives to apologise for putting targets over public safety Business rates change "last chance" for "treasured" pubs Cole-Hamilton: £440m delayed discharge cost "utterly astonishing" Woman in Far North stuck in hospital for over 400 days waiting for care Corridor care: Govt has to treat this as a national emergency Responding to reports that corridor care has become so normalised hospitals are fitting plugs in hallways, Liberal Democrat Health ...
Nevill Holt Hall has been many things: the family home of the Cunards, a notoriously abusive prep school, the chief model for Bonkers Hall. But in the 18th century it was a fashionable spa. This feature from the Leicester Daily Mercury (Friday 21 September 1934) tells the story When Society Descended on a Leicestershire Spa The Doctor Bottled its Waters and Let His Imagination Go In a wood in one of the highest parts of Leicestershire, where wild pigeons seek the topmost branches of fir trees, rabbits scamper unheeding of alien eyes through an autumn carpet of leaves, and an ...
I was born in 1937, when, for the next two years I presume (I could hardly be aware) our politicians and diplomats were desperately working to contain the expansionary foreign ambitions of Hitler in and Mussolini. They failed and on the day before my second birthday war was declared on Germany. This War expanded to involve most of the world, caused between 70 and 85 million deaths, mostly Soviet and Chinese civilians, and was only ended by the dropping of two nuclear bombs by "our side" on two Japanese cities, together causing between 150 000 to 246 000 deaths. I ...
"Sounding like a mob boss when speaking at Trump's press conference at the weekend, secretary of state Marco Rubio told the world that the message of the Venezuelan intervention was that when this president says he is serious about wanting something, he gets it. The problem for Europe is that the one thing that this President covets above all is Greenland."Simon Nixon argues that Donald Trump's "Donroe Doctrine" poses an existential threat to NATO and Europe. Cliff Mitchell accuses Northamptonshire's two Reform-run councils of ignoring the reality of climate change across the county: "As predicted by climate scientists, Northamptonshire is ...
In December I stood for Shinfield Parish Council. I came fourth, nine votes behind Reform UK, ten ahead of Labour. I am 38, work full-time, and have two children under seven. My Conservative opponents—both elected—had advantages I could not match; but above all, the time to knock on doors while I was at work or putting children to bed. This is not a complaint about my own result. It is a diagnosis of a system. British local democracy has become structurally inaccessible to working parents. Borough councillors in Wokingham receive £7,784 annually—less than £150 a week—for what amounts to a ...
Keir Starmer's recent call for closer alignment with the EU was welcome. Naturally, he felt he had to add the qualification 'if it's in our national interest.' He couldn't bring himself to say that such an alignment might be 'in the interests of the UK and Europe as a whole.' Like John Major declaring 'Game, Set and Match' after securing an opt-out from the Maastricht Treaty, it still suggested an 'us and them' approach. But at least it was an acknowledgement that closer ties with Europe could be good for Britain, something that might seem obvious after a decade of ...
Nearly a year ago now, I blogged on the existential crisis facing universities in the UK. I was referring to a Guardian article that reported that nearly one in four leading UK universities are slashing staff numbers and cutting budgets, with up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses. The Guardian quotes the the Institute for Fiscal Studies who say that universities that relied on fees from international students have also been hit by the last government's visa changes, which set off a steep fall in the numbers coming to study in the UK. A freeze on tuition fees has not ...