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) |
Adrianne Lenker: Real HouseMatt Mitchell wrote on Paste in 2024: As soon as I finished listening to Real House, the opening track from Adrianne Lenker's new album Bright Future, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say "I love you" but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. The song, easily Lenker's rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It's a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes - an archival of 22 years of Lenker's life as she remembers ... (more) |
Tom Arms' World ReviewTexas Watch Texas. Especially watch the Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton. Texas is a bright-red Republican state. Its Stetson-wearing inhabitants openly carry guns on their hips and year after year return a far-right Republican governor and legislature. A Democrat has not won a Senate seat since 1988. For that reason, the prestigious election-watching Cook Report has consistently classed Texas as "lean Republican." It has recently, however, changed its classification to a "toss-up." A big part of the change is cash. In America advertising wins votes. Advertising costs money so elections usually go to the ... (more) |
Sleaze, scandal and dodgy fundingThe Independent reports that an embattled Nigel Farage is fighting for his political survival as a major donations scandal completely overshadowed what Reform UK hoped would be a major comeback speech at its party conference in Birmingham. The paper says that allegations that the party arranged illegal donations led to the resignation on Friday of Farage's chief of staff and longtime aide Dan Jukes, as well as policy director James Orr, effectively knocking the party off-course from its planned agenda, and forcing Farage to answer questions on whether he could bounce back from another scandal: Metropolitan Police confirmed they are ... (more) |
Dangerous Exile (1957): Richard O'Sullivan and Vaughan WilkinsThe death of Richard O'Sullivan gives me an excuse to mention one of this blog's more obscure heroes, the mid 20th century historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins. Because, as a boy, O'Sullivan appeared in the only film to be made from one of Wilkins's novels. Dangerous Exile, which was directed by Desmond Hurst and released in 1957, was based on the novel A King Reluctant. It tells the story of the escape of the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from France to Wales and the attempts of the Revolutionary government to recapture him. The boy is played by ... (more) |
Why Holborn and St Pancras deserves our allIt is no secret that Liberal Democrats have become one of the first and foremost Parties in Local Government, having consistently made gains for the last seven years of Local Elections and this strategy was successful in giving us 72 MPs in 2024. But one place where we have suffered a great absence of success has been in Parliamentary by-elections, where we haven't made a gain since 2023. This is obviously bad for a few reasons, by-elections often indicate loudly and clearly to the public who has momentum, and seeing a major victory can translate into added strength, for example, ... (more) |