Years ago, I was on a rare passenger working through Toton. The ranks of stored wagons and locomotives made it feel like an elephants' graveyard, As Our History Underfoot- the new name for the old Trekking Exploration account - discovers here, the vast yards and loco depot Toton are largely derelict today. This was to have been the site of the East Midlands Hub for HS2, but that won't happen now. Besides Toton, we see the River Erewash and some of the tangle of lines that makes Long Eaton a railway labyrinth.
Following a Labour councillor joining the Lib Dems earlier this week, now two independent councillors have also joined the party: Two Swansea councillors have joined the Liberal Democrats in their second switch since being elected four years ago. Former maths teachers Sandra Joy and Allan Jeffery said they felt the party had momentum and they could have more impact with a Liberal Democrat team behind them. The two Uplands councillors were unveiled at an event alongside Cllr Sam Bennett, who is seeking election to the Senedd in May... Cllrs Joy and Jeffery were elected as Uplands Party candidates in 2022. ...
It was a relatively early start with letter delivery this morning. 200 letters to deliver in to my constituents in Sunniside. It took me about an hour and a half. The letters were the same as those I delivered elsewhere in Sunniside yesterday. I would have liked to get more delivered today but I had Gateshead Council's budget setting meeting to attend instead.At current rate of progress, delivery
Thu 26th
18:53
The Chagos Agreement will secure the Chagossians' right of return. The Liberal Democrats must suppor...
The agreement between Britain and Mauritius over control of the Chagos Islands has become one of the most controversial topics of this Parliament. This is a sorry reflection on the state of UK politics. In more normal times, the Chagos deal would be viewed as a diplomatic success story - an example of two states working together to uphold the rules-based international order for the benefit of all concerned. But these are not normal times. Ever since the government of Liz Truss announced in November 2022 (with the backing of the Biden administration) that it was opening negotiations with Mauritius, ...
The absurd headlines it gives to Alister Heath's opinion pieces are one of the most florid symptoms of the Telegraph's sad descent into madness. Now, thanks to The New World, you can generate Alister Heath headlines yourself. But be warned: it's hard to replicate the craziness of the originals.
For four years I worked in His Majesty's Prison Service. Most of my time was spent with two groups: vulnerable prisoners, often those convicted of sexual offences who couldn't safely be located on normal wings, and men struggling with addiction. What I learned there shaped my view on drugs more than any political argument ever could. The truth is uncomfortable. If you are born with a tough set of circumstances, poverty, unstable housing, parents battling substance misuse, you are statistically far more likely to face those same issues yourself. The data backs this up. Around 46% of people in prison ...
This took Jackie Trent to number one in May 1965 - she wrote it with Tony Hatch, to whom she was married for many years. Their suburban take on Bacharach and David is very effective here. The song owed part of its success to its use in the television series It's Dark Outside, which featured Oliver Reed among its cast. But the footage in the video does not come from that but the film Four in the Morning. This ominous downbeat piece of late kitchen-sink suggested it could be grim in London too - Billy Liar might have been no ...
Thu 26th
10:19
My latest article for Central Bylines... Paddy Logan: Harborough's radical Liberal hero
I've had another piece published on Central Bylines this morning. It looks at the career of J.W. "Paddy" Logan, who was Liberal MP for Harborough from 1891 to 1904 and 1910 to 1916. Here he is speaking in the Commons in 1897: In the Board Schools the children were not taught to curtsey to the squire or to the parson. In the Church Schools the children were taught to fall down and worship the great god of the Clerical party - the landowner. Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but he knew what he was talking about. He saw it too frequently. ...
Labour started all this off, when they introduced a market economy into higher education, and now they are reaping the fallout from the way the Tories managed that system and their own failure to address the issue earlier in their administration, while making the situation worse by freezing the salary threshold for loan repayments. The Guardian reports that angry backbench Labour MPs have attacked ministers over the student loans crisis, saying graduates are being "outrageously scammed". The paper adds that during a Commons Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday, several Labour MPs joined calls for an urgent shake-up of the "unfair" ...
Gateshead Lib Dems have been working on a major project to produce 25,000 letters - and then deliver them to residents. Today I delivered a few 100 in Sunniside. I'm pleased to report that they were positively received, at least by the handful of people who stopped to talk to me in the village. I will deliver more tomorrow morning and also take bundles of letters to people who deliver them
Gateshead Lib Dems recently had an action day in Birtley but I was unable to attend. Instead, I agreed to take a couple of patches which I would deliver in my own time. The problem with that was that it took 2 weeks for me to take delivery of the Focuses. At the moment we have huge quantities of literature to produce and deliver so the handover of the Birtley patches to me kept getting
The Leader reports news of a new recruit for the Liberal Democrats: Labour councillor Fran Lister has defected to the Liberal Democrats after a series of disagreements with Flintshire's ruling Labour-led coalition over education policy... Cllr Lister's decision to join the party was 'not taken lightly' accepted Flintshire Liberal Democrat Group leader Cllr Andrew Parkhurst, but he added that her values were closely aligned with his group's. Cllr Fran Lister, who represents Brynford & Halkyn ward, added: The Liberal Democrats at Flintshire County Council are a strong and constructive voice within the council. They share my belief that politics should ...
At Kibworth library today in connection with a thing, I came across this report from the Leicester Chronicle (2 August 1873): The cricket match which took here on Saturday between the Kibworth and Gumley Clubs was wound up with a scene - we might almost say a tragedy - which, with the exception of occasional poaching affrays, is happily seldom heard of in the rural districts. It appears that a quarrel arose through some objections taken as to the fairness of certain individuals engaged in playing quoits. High words were soon followed by blows, and the pugilists were speedily reinforced ...
We have another illustration of the truth that governments are much nicer when they are afraid of losing. White-tailed eagles, pine martens and beavers will be released across England before the May elections as the Labour government attempts to staunch the flow of nature-loving voters to the Green party.Plans to reintroduce these lost species to the country have been mooted for years, but the previous Conservative government failed to get them over the line after opposition from landowners and its own MPs. Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, is understood to have told the regulator Natural England to dust off these ...
Scottish Lib Dem Women, the official Lib Dem organisation representing women, took a motion to Scottish Conference at the weekend which called on the Scottish Government to improve women's health care. Medical misogyny refers to the gender bias or discrimination women can experience when accessing healthcare. Instances of medical misogyny include the dismissal of pain as "normal", a lack of research into women's healthcare and a general lack of understanding among many GPs. Medical misogyny can lead to longer waiting times for gynaecological care, which have increased by more than 250% over the last seven years in Scotland. The motion ...
"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson. "'At the moment, you've got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net ...
Liberals should care about the collapse of serious conservative journalism. Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum. What has replaced these publications' particular brand of reactionary journalism is something considerably worse: reactionary journalism stripped of any pretence to intellectual seriousness. And that is bad for everyone. Let us be clear about what these publications actually were. The Spectator spent much of the twentieth century providing intellectual cover for policies that entrenched inequality ...
The Government agreed to a Lib Dem motion to release the files relating to the appointment of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as a trade envoy back in 2001. The commitment came during a Lib Dem opposition debate yesterday. The debate obviously couldn't focus on any of the legal issues surrounding anyone at the moment, but MPs from most parties took the opportunity to raise their concerns. It's good that the victims and the disgusting misogynist culture came in for criticism, but will this lead to meaningful change? Here are some of the highlights of the debate. It is highly unusual to hear ...
The Guardian reports that Lincolnshire's Reform party mayor, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has courted the head of an American oil and gas dynasty in the hope of bringing fracking to the county. The paper says that documents released under a freedom of information request reveal that when Egdon Resources, a British subsidiary of the US fracker Heyco Energy, announced a major gas discovery in Lincolnshire's Gainsborough Trough last year, Jenkyns reached out personally to the company asking how she "could help with your recent gas find in my county": Fracking was effectively banned in England in 2019 because of concerns it ...