Last updated Thursday 30th July 2026 21:01 BST
Our Headline of the Day Award goes to an old friend of this blog, the Shropshire Star. When I showed the judges this photograph, which has the bridge in question at its centre, albeit in the background, they said: "Oh well, I suppose it will have to do."
The latest edition of my email newsletter about work in Parliament, A Lord's Eye View, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Welcome to my latest update on work in the House of Lords, this time taking a look once again at how slowly the state sorts out its payments for the running of elections. Why does it still take the state years to do something volunteers have to do in weeks? [IMG: Keir Starmer ...
Andy Burnham has rightly made fixing social care a top priority and seems, on the face of it, to be genuinely interested in reaching a cross party consensus. Social care has been a priority for Liberal Democrats for a long time as well – I shed more than one or two tears when I first saw some of our election broadcasts from Ed Davey talking about his experiences. The good news is that we don't need to wait for the Casey Review to conclude in several years – the answers are already out there. In 2019, the House of Lords ...
Thirty years after the then Government established the "Royal Commission on Long Term Care", five years after the 2021 Health and Social Care Act was to sort out social care once and for all, social care is still in crisis and, at long last. moving up the agenda of Government. The NHS and social care need radical reform, restructuring and cultural change based upon a whole systems approach to liberate the hardworking professionals from the constraining contract culture into an enabling leadership one. Taking out functional divisions along patient / user pathways to create "whole task, right sized, multidisciplinary, inter-agency ...
The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded £993,475 in development funding to Shropshire's Landscape Connections project. A report on the Heritage Fund website explains: The project brings together farmers, communities and young people to improve habitats and strengthen ecological networks across one of England's most treasured landscapes. With almost £1m in development funding awarded and the potential for a further £8.9m in delivery funding, the project will support long-term stewardship while helping more people connect with nature and heritage. Over the next decade, the project aims to work with more than 200 landowners across the Shropshire Hills, delivering four large-scale ...
I would point out that Lord Bonkers is more against Landlordism in principle than in practice, but my rent falls due on Lady Day. Saturday It was my old friend John Arlott who claimed that Manchester is the only city in Britain where they have lifeboat drill on the buses. No doubt the damp climate has encouraged its mayor to march on London to claim the crown - or at least the tenancy of 10 Downing Street. Yes, there is something Medieval about the whole affair; it's like an episode from a school textbook on the reign of King Henry ...
Andy Burnham has promised to 'fix' social care and to 'use some of his political capital on the issue'. The first steps are expected this week. Ed Davey, who has campaigned strongly on the issue, promises to work with him on a cross-party basis. All good. The problem is that people mean very different things by the 'social care' problem. The obvious priority is to help unpaid carers – around 6 million people, 1.7 million of whom provide care for over 50 hours a week – and those they care for at home. There are rather meagre carers' benefits but, ...
The latest edition of the email newsletter for my podcast, Political Fictions, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Welcome to the latest email for our podcast, Political Fictions: political drama on screen and on the page. Please do spread the word about the podcast to your friends, colleagues and even dastardly rivals who you want to distract from doing something else. They can all sign up here: Now, on to the proper business of ...
The Independent reports that an analysis by one of the UK's leading economic think tanks has concluded that Andy Burnham has been warned that he will have to raise taxes or cut spending if he wants to fund his new priorities. The paper says that economists at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) caution the prime minister and new chancellor John Healey that "there is no capacity to borrow any more" and that inflation will push up the cost of living much higher than the Bank of England (BoE) is forecasting: The warning comes amid questions over ...
This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence. His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented. Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures. Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning ...
This photo has been doing the rounds on Facebook. It is the ballot paper for the Clacton by-election. At this point in the contest the supply of jokes about this absurd contest have been exhausted. 34 candidates are competing for the crown, making for a ballot paper that is more like wallpaper.The jokes may be exhausted but it is still possible to engage in fantasy outcomes. The idea that
Last week, Andy Burnham became Labour leader and thus Prime Minister. Labour hope that his leadership will reverse the party's political misfortunes and poor polling under Keir Starmer, while many hope that his new policy priorities and governing style would bring about vital change. Electoral reform advocates hope that such change will include Proportional Representation, given his past and recent vocal support for it and the proposal of an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill calling for a National Commission on Electoral Reform. However, the latest speculated change, as reported by several outcomes, may come in the form ...
Lisa Smart, the Liberal Democrat cabinet office spokesperson, has referred Richard Tice to the parliamentary standards commissioner over an undeclared loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage's aide George Cottrell. The Guardian reports that Tice, the Reform UK MP for Boston and Skegness, received a loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage's aide George Cottrell some months after he was elected parliament. This transaction, says the newspaper's report, caused bankers to raise concerns with authorities. In her letter to the commissioner, Lisa Smart wrote: "Mr Cottrell is not merely a private acquaintance of Mr Tice, he is an official adviser ...
It is quite clear that if we carry on the way we are doing at present the problems of adult care, especially for the elderly, will continue to grow to a point where the finances to support them will no longer be sustainable. That is why I'm delighted to see both that Andy Burnham has issued an invitation to Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch to join with him to try and deal with this crisis and that Ed Davey immediately agreed to such talks. As Ed Davey himself put it, "There have been 22 failed attempts at reforming social care ...
"The idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile."Stephanie Brown says Andy Burnham's No 10 North has a precedent in medieval York. Nafeez Ahmed examines the links between George Cottrell's Reform UK network in Montenegro and sanctioned Russian oligarchs."When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children's services ...
Proof, I think. that Lord Bonkers reads this blog. The theory that Starmer was never meant to be prime minister, but was put in place as a move in Labour's civil war, comes from a Guardian article by Neal Lawson, and I have referred to it here more than once. Friday That Starmer fellow didn't amount to much, did he? Cook, with her generous heart, always thought the best of him and refused to "listen to incinerations"; for myself, there's an old Gypsy saying that holds... To be honest, I can't remember what it holds, but I know it would ...
John Lennon once said: "I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was Move It by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing." It takes an American podcast to take Cliff and the Shadows (as they soon became) seriously: We Say Yeah!
The Independent reports that Andy Burnham is set to unveil the biggest overhaul in education in England in 15 years with an end to a system which prioritises preparing children for university at the expense of technical training. The paper says that the changes are part of a new drive to tackle "a lost generation" with 1 million young people unemployed or trapped outside education: It comes after he revealed to the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg that he plans to bring down the welfare bill by making benefits conditional on people finding work, especially ones linked to mental health issues such ...
