The Joy of Six 1514Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business - the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies - in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable." "For a long time, peatlands ... (more) |
2026 Local Elections preview: A Liberal perspectiveThis Friday will be like Christmas come early for local government nerds like myself. It's a bumper set of elections this year thanks to a set of delayed County Council polls carried over from last year, mixed in with the usual scheduled English, Welsh and Scottish elections. It would appear these elections present an unprecedented level of choice to the voter - often five parties plus independents/localists, without any extra powers conferred on local government, or a PR system to accommodate multi-party contests. Much like last year there will be several winners voted in on little more than 25% in ... (more) |
Roger Daltrey: Say It Ain't So JoeI heard Say It Ain't So Joe on the radio in the Seventies only once and had to wait until they invented the internet to find out who had sung it and who had written it. The answer in both cases was Murray Head. Later I discovered this version. Daltrey keeps close to Head's interpretation, but he and his band, which includes most of the rest of The Who, add star quality. (more) |
Just peachy! Scotland needs change with fairness at its heartThis Scottish election campaign has been exciting from a Scottish Lib Dem point of view. For the first time in 15 years, we have a real chance of making significant gains in our representation. The polls are putting us anywhere between 8 and 13 from our current 5. Alex Cole-Hamilton has been brilliant at delivering our message. He lands it every time and somehow manages to make it sound fresh. He has been on fire. Watch him tackle John Swinney on ferries in the last tv leaders' debate: We are focusing on 4 key areas: Fixing health care so you ... (more) |
GUEST POST Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling dayAugustus Carp offers something to whet your appetite - a curtain-raiser, a short not-too-dramatic offering before the Grand-Guignol horror show that awaits us as the results start to trickle in from late on Thursday night until the following evening. In the first four months of 2026, the procession of councillors resigning from the political parties that helped them to get elected has continued apace. So far, 299 "events" have occurred; not just defections, but also a few expulsions and suspensions. "Double-hatted" councillors who change their affiliation have been counted twice, as have councillors who resigned and then re-joined (48 hours ... (more) |
Help turn Birmingham gold!We are now a day away from the Birmingham City elections, which promises to be a momentous appraisal of the last four years of Labour rule in the second city. The party are set to lose not just their majority, but huge swathes of seats as residents have their say on the catastrophic failures presided over by the ruling group. Labour knows this, their disingenuous ploy to pretend to settle the bin strike – which has left areas of the city piled high with bags of rotting rubbish, fly tipping, and rubbish strewn streets for over a year – has ... (more) |
Who paid for Farage's house in Clacton?The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage's partner, Laure Ferrari, has refused to confirm how she paid for a house in the Reform leader and MP's constituency of Clacton, adding "there's more than one way to pay for a house". The paper says that in an interview with French publication Le Monde, Ferrari was questioned over revelations in the Guardian that she had purchased a house in her name in Clacton after Farage had claimed to be the buyer. They add that Farage initially said the arrangement was for "security" reasons but some months later, he told reporters that Ferrari came ... (more) |
Stanley Kubrick began as a teenage street photographerBefore he was a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer. And he never lost his interest in photography. I remember Keith Hamshere, the first boy to play Oliver Twist in Oliver! and later a leading Hollywood stills photographer, saying he learnt to keep out of Kubrick's eyeline if he was on set during one of his films. If he didn't, Kubrick would notice him and say something like "Is that a new lens? How are you finding it?", the film suddenly forgotten. (more) |
Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and table legsLong ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here. I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. Victorians, modesty and table legs The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of ... (more) |
Final deliveriesWe are moving inexorably towards polling day. So here's a short round up of what I've been doing. On Saturday I was in Ryton delivering leaflets aimed at squeezing what's left of the collapsing Labour vote. On Sunday there was an action day in Dunston Hill and Whickham East. I was there to help deliver Focus leaflets. Monday may well have been a bank holiday but I was delivering Focuses in (more) |