The Joy of Six 1500"They should pivot to the centre-right - announcing a bunch of sensible policies that pitch the Tories as a fiscally and socially conservative alternative to Labour's meek leadership. But Badenoch won't do that. And here's why."Sam Bright explains the Conservatives' mystifying strategy. (Clue: follow the money.) Ruth Lucas reports on depressing but unsurprising new research findings: "Only 40 per cent of disadvantaged pupils identified as high-achieving at the start of secondary school go on to achieve top GCSE grades, compared with 62 per cent of their more affluent peers." Patrik Hermansson and Harry Shukman take us inside The Sanctuary in ... (more) |
GUEST POST Political lessons from science fictionPeter Chambers turns to Dirk Gently and Battlestar Galactica to help him understand what is happening in the world. The Electric Monk is a character introduced by Douglas Adams in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Monk is a machine intelligence in the service of an alien who visits Earth before life as we know it arose here. It probably looked like Julian Glover wearing an unconvincing rubber mask. It was about as diligent as a human. The alien had a problem. Its ship - shamelessly copied from the Dr Who serial City of Death - was ... (more) |
The reality of Reform in powerThe Mirror reports that they have been told that Reform UK is running a "horror show" at Kent County Council, with an aggressive atmosphere, political point-scoring and no improvements for residents. The paper has spoken to residents, charities and local politicians to understand what impact the party had made a year after they took control of the council: Reform ended a nearly 30-year Tory reign at Kent County Council (KCC) at last May's local elections. Party figures promised it would be a "shop window" for how a Reform government could govern in Westminster and Mr Farage promised a "new dawn" ... (more) |
Don't bring Reform chaos to Gateshead(more) |
Lib Dem boy bandI set myself the task of sorting through a filing cabinet of photos in my office at home this morning. All my photos taken since 2005 are digital. So the contents of the filing cabinet are something of a historic nature, being at least 21 years old. Some were over 40 years old. I did however find this photo which we decided to scan. It was taken in spring 2001. These 5 young people (I'm on (more) |
Peter Clarke on T.H. Green and the working manThomas Hill "T.H." Green Peter Clarke is the author or two books, Lancashire and the New Liberalism and Liberals and Social Democrats, that anyone interested in British Liberalism should read. Here he is back in 1980, reviewing Ian Bradley's The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism in the London Review of Books:The attention given to T.H. Green can be justified partly because he sought to present such a formula in philosophically cogent terms. "When we speak of freedom," he argued, "we do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is we like. We ... (more) |
Jane: It's a Fine DayThis is the record that Opus III were sampling, covering or something between the two. Sovering, perhaps. Or campling. Introducing interviews with Edward Barton and Jane Lancaster, who respectively wrote and sang It's a Fine Day, Bob Fischer explains: It's a Fine Day, the acapella single written by Edward Barton and sung by Jane Lancaster, is both haunting and enchanting in equal measure. Turned into a daytime Radio 1 staple after evening plays from - inevitably - John Peel, it later became the sampled source material for a deluge of 1990s dance hits: including the Pete Waterman-backed Opus III, who ... (more) |
Tom Arms' World ReviewSir Keir Starmer should be Britain's Foreign Secretary. His handling of foreign policy is first-class. Unfortunately, for a country's foreign policy to be effective, it needs a strong economic and political base and Sir Keir — as Prime Minister — has failed to produce that. But the world economic crisis created by Trump's attack on Iran and Iran's closure of the Straits of Hormuz means that the British Prime Minister now must focus on world affairs. He has decided that he — along with French President Emmanuel Macron — should take the lead in trying to find a diplomatic solution ... (more) |
The North Sea mythThe Guardian reports on research that has found that opening major new fields in the North Sea would make almost no difference to the UK's reliance on gas imports. The paper says that the Jackdaw field, one of the largest unexploited gasfields in the North Sea, would displace only 2% of the UK's current imports of gas, which would leave the UK still almost entirely dependent on supplies from Norway and a few other sources. They add that the Rosebank field, also in Scottish waters but mainly containing oil, would displace only about 1% of the UK's gas imports: Tessa ... (more) |