Tears and celebrations as river 'wiggle' restoredThe judges have torn themselves away from England's World Cup game, and our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News. The headline stands above an encouraging story from Shropshire: An 18-month-long project to "re-wiggle" a river after more than a century has been successfully completed prompting "tears and celebrations". A section of the River Kemp, in south Shropshire, had been straightened by landowners in the 1800s, disconnecting it from its natural floodplain and reducing biodiversity. Now water is flowing in the meander again, after it was restored in a project led by Severn Rivers Trust and involved local ... (more) |
Vince Cable writes: Manchesterism and LocalismAndy Burnham's launch speech in Manchester raised hopes of a sustained plan to devolve power away from Whitehall. If the reality matches the rhetoric, that will be a massive achievement and will greatly improve our system of governance. But any Liberal Democrat who has been battling for decades for genuine local, community-based decision making and against the infantilisation of local government is entitled to some scepticism. My own formative experience is somewhat different: serving in the Coalition Cabinet which first launched the idea of devolving powers to elected mayors for city-regions broadly on the London model (prompted by a report ... (more) |
The Burnham Devolution.It is encouraging that Andy Burnham seems as enthusiastic about devolution now that he is likely to take over power at the centre as he was when he was just a regional mayor. Such consistency is to be admired. However, desirable as devolution is in our over-centralised state, it should not be confused with democracy. Devolution of powers from a central despot to a collection of local ones is an improvement, but will not necessarily be sensitive to the needs of the people allegedly represented, and very unlikely to engage them (us) in its administration. In my life- time local ... (more) |
William Wallace writes: What do Liberal Democrats have to offer the "left behind"?Regional redistribution from the wealthy South-East to Britain's poorer cities, towns and villages is a sensitive issue for Liberal Democrats. When Britain left the EU and English regions and the devolved nations lost their share of EU regional funding (part of the balancing gains to the UK that the Leave campaign successfully ignored) the imbalance of investment and funding between the wealthy south-east and the rest of the UK tipped further. Boris Johnson breezily promised to 'level up' the country, raising expectations that were shattered when he failed to follow through. Andy Burnham may be more serious about reviving our ... (more) |
Battling Burnham: a Liberal Democrat responseFrom Gladstone and Home Rule, Grimond and Regionalism, Ashdown and Devolution and even Daisy's plan to move the Treasury,decentralising the British state has always been a Liberal Democrat ambition. Glad to see Andy Burnham and the Labour Party are finally catching up. The right's Brexit warcry of Take Back Control can be repelled like a skilled Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and transformed from scapegoating minorities to truly rebalancing our country. However in our algorithm-driven age, the British people are unfamiliar with our approach to place, devolution,federalism or electoral reform. As Mark Carney has told us 'Nostalgia is not a strategy! We must ... (more) |
The Joy of Six 1541"Former MI6, counterterror, and police officials expressed disbelief at the refusal by the British authorities to countenance a full murder investigation into Perepilichnyy's death. 'It's so obvious that it's an assassination,' said Chris Phillips, the former head of Britain's National Counter Terrorism Security Office. 'There's no way it wasn't a hit. It's ridiculous.'" In 2017, Heidi Blake and her BuzzFeed investigations team published a seven-part investigation of suspected assassinations on British soil by the Russians government. Richard Kemp reposts a Byline Times article that condemns SLAPPs - strategic litigation against public participation - as a shocking abuse of the legal ... (more) |
Burnham, co-ops, and Grimond: my thoughts"If people in 1844 could form the co-operative movement... to lower the price of food, then why can't we now...?" This is an extract from Andy Burnham's speech at the People's History Museum in Manchester, in which he partially laid out his economic vision for Britain, focused on social democracy and cooperativism, or more specifically, "Manchesterism". Now, I'm not going to do a deep dive into Burnham's achievements and drawbacks as Mayor, as I'm sure someone else can do a much better job than me on that. But what I do want to draw attention to is how Andy Burnham ... (more) |
David McWilliams: The Days of Pearly SpencerWikipedia says this is about "a homeless man McWilliams had encountered in Ballymena," but when I heard this in the Seventies, I saw Pearly Spencer as a criminal figure, like Pinkie in Brighton Rock or an associate of Violent Bonham Carter, whose time and luck are running out. It's odd the things you read into songs. (more) |
Another Farage paydayThe Guardian reports that Nigel Farage received £270,000 from a gold marketer for which he is a brand ambassador, his single biggest payment as an MP. The paper says that the Reform UK leader has been criticised in the past over his £400,000-a-year second job promoting the idea for Direct Bullion that people should buy physical gold and put it in their pension pots. This latest payment is double his fee from 2025, was received in May and appears in Farage's latest entry in parliament's register of interests, published on Tuesday: Anna Turley, the Labour party chair, said: "He pretends ... (more) |
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