Mathew on Monday: Local Government Reorganisation welcomeAngela Rayner's announcement of a pause and rethink on much of the Government's local government reorganisation is welcome. For months, those of us who believe passionately in genuinely local government have watched with increasing concern as plans have developed which would abolish district and Borough councils in large swathes of England and replace them with March larger, more remote unitary authorities. Today offers an opportunity to think again. District and Borough Councils are at the heart of the communities they serve. They empty our bins, decide planning applications, support our town centres, provide leisure facilities, put on community events, and ... (more) |
Labour's Local Government Reform hits a roadblock...For those of us in local government at whatever tier, the Government's proposals for local government reform, requiring the abolition of principal authorities across England and their replacement with a smaller number of unitary authorities, have caused much activity. But the news emerging that the proposals are to be suspended and, in some cases, scrapped, will come as a huge surprise to many. We're waiting for an official response from the Party but, in the meantime, Justin Griggs, head of communications at the National Association of Local Councils, writes: Based on information released ahead of the statement, decisions relating to ... (more) |
Reform is winning because liberal Britain is not listening to its own societyLiberal Democrats will not stop Reform by warning people about it. To understand why people listen, we must understand what Reform offers that too many feel they no longer get from us. We have spent years failing young men — and by the time many reached adulthood, they had already spent years being failed as boys, especially when they were white and poor. Reform has noticed. It is turning our blindness into political support. Education shows how early that failure begins. Boys fall behind from the start, are heavily overrepresented in special educational needs, more likely to be suspended or ... (more) |
The Joy of Six 1573Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute." Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments. Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But ... (more) |
The thirsty businesses using billions of litres of public water in drought-hit EnglandThe Guardian reports that fewer than 1% of businesses in England use more water than the daily needs of 10 million people, as millions of households face hosepipe bans and three-quarters of the country is in drought. The paper says that businesses across England use 2.6bn litres a day from the public water supply, which includes potable and non-potable water provided by water companies. According to Mosl, the organisation that operates England's business water market, in total, businesses account for about 30% of public supply use, with two-thirds of their consumption in water-stressed areas: Tracking industrial water use appears difficult. ... (more) |
Demand for action over 100,000 "horror" sewage spillsScottish Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson Sanne Dijkstra-Downie has today written to the Cabinet Secretary Gillian Martin demanding that the SNP start taking the sewage crisis seriously as new Scottish Water monitoring revealed that sewage discharges last year were four times as high as previously recorded. This comes after Scottish Water published data from 1,009 newly installed sewage overflow monitors, which means annual monitoring data is now available for 30% of sites, compared to 6% in previous years. Figures published by the government-owned water company earlier this week show that in 2025 alone: 100,041 discharges were logged, up from 24,398 incidents ... (more) |
Joan Littlewood on Brian Murphy's This is Your LifeI've written several times about Joan Littlewood and her extraordinary influence on British theatre. Here is a short clip of her, recorded for Brian Murphy's This is Your Life. In the run up to it, you hear what an extraordinary struggle it was for someone from the working class, like Murphy, to get training as an actor. And after it, there's confirmation that Joan Littlewood didn't just have connections with ITV comedy (half the cast of On the Buses came from her Stratford East company), she had them with BBC comedy too. I've written about the 30 years of slog ... (more) |
The successful British economy of the 1970sEmbed from Getty ImagesThis is from a House of Lords Library paper on The UK Economy in the 1970s that was published a couple of years ago: Despite the macroeconomic turbulence of the 1970s, annual GDP growth still averaged 2.7% and living standards rose significantly. Growth in real household disposable income (RHDI) per head was either low or negative for much of the decade, but grew rapidly in 1972-73 and 1978-79, leaving RHDI per head almost 30% in 1979 than it was in 1970. This was a greater increase than was experienced in either the decade before (the 1960s) or ... (more) |
Ageing and Protein Production (the homeostasis of transcription)A really interesting new preprint was published in August by Nicholas Stroustrup's lab in Barcelona, Spain. Declines in mRNA synthesis set the rate of organismal aging looks at the way an enzyme called RNA Polymerase II (RNAPII) changes as worms get older. This particular enzyme is used by a wide range of species to read DNA and create mRNA. That process is called transcription. The paper is (more) |
Church could get first toilet in more than 700 yearsTo the great relief of the parishioners of St Giles's at Hartington in Derbyshire, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. (more) |