At Retford the line from Sheffield to Gainsborough and beyond used to cross the King's Cross main line to Scotland on the level. In 1965 a dive-under was constructed so this crossing could be removed. Our History Underfoot has been to Retford to tell this story and look for traces of the earlier arrangement. If you're interested in Midland railways this is a good account to subscribe to. Eighteen miles to the south of Retford, the King's Cross main line still crosses another line on the level. This is at Newark, where it meets the Nottingham to Lincoln line. The ...
Scottish Liberal Democrats launch election campaign in seat they will take from SNP Greene comments on Reform's Scottish campaign collapse Greene comments on latest wave of ferry chaos Labour missing golden opportunity to set up Port Talbot industrial supply chain EU-US Turnberry deal: Renew Europe backs Parliament's firm mandate Scottish Liberal Democrats launch election campaign in seat they will take from SNP Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today launched his party's campaign, setting out how his party can win ten constituencies to deprive the SNP of a majority and win big on the peach regional ballot in order ...
Christopher M. Cruz says US Democrats have failed to offer a vision of a liberal education: "This is not just bad for Democrats, but bad for the world as we have seen the country slip into chaos. If liberals want to see things change in 2028, they (and everyone else) should concern themselves more forcefully with the role of the liberal arts in educational institutions and invest to become the primary champion of books in the public square." "This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how I'm about to go on book tour for ...
Thu 26th
14:05
Recycled words of criticism are not enough: marine mammals must be protected beyond our shores
The hunting of cetaceans in the Faroe Islands has brought into sharp focus what many of us already understand – the health of our oceans matters to us all. The hunts, known as the grindadráp, see dolphins driven into shallow bays and killed in a practice that has drawn widespread concern for animal welfare. Images of these brutally killed animals sit uneasily with our ambitions for a more sustainable, humane, and internationally engaged future. And these ambitions do not have borders. Although some choose to defend the grind as tradition, all the evidence shows most Faroese people do not participate ...
Earlier on this week, ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service were deliberately attacked outside a synagogue in Golders Green, one of London's most established Jewish neighbourhoods. These were not military vehicles. They were not symbols of any state or government. They were ambulances. Vehicles whose sole purpose is to save lives, staffed by volunteers who respond to emergencies. They were targeted because they serve the Jewish community and this should shake every one of us to the core. This was not an isolated incident. It sits within a deeply troubling pattern. The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 ...
The Conservatives at the County Council having thrown a large chunk of public money at trying to persuade us that what Suffolk really needed was a Unitary County, the Secretary of State, Steve Reed, has concluded that the three Unitary solution proposed by the Districts and Ipswich Borough Council was his preferred choice. I have to admit that I'd rather have seen a rebirth of East and West Suffolk, as I was of the view that two councils, each serving around 400,000 residents, was probably more faithful to the criteria laid down by the Government and would offer two vaguely ...
This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator - no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. George Orwell: Life and LegacyRobert Colls Oxford University Press, 2026, £14.99 I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager because it felt like a moral duty and as a student regarded the four paperback volumes of George Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters as a sort of bible. So I wonder if Rob Colls (who taught me on my MA Victorian Studies course long ago) is right to say we are now living at peak Orwell. The imperative ...
If you heard jeering on you way into the spring conference at York, it appears from that it probably came from militant young badgers. And good luck to them, I say. Thursday I am summoned to the residence of the King of the Badgers, which is to be found on the Bonkers Hall Estate, beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to celebrate the victory of Wallace Lawler in the 1969 Birmingham Ladywood by-election. He tells me that the younger badgers have seen Ed Davey's video opposing the replacement of Winston Churchill by a badger (or other form of wildlife) ...
The Guardian reports that political donations from British citizens living abroad are to be capped at £100,000 a year from Wednesday, in a move that is likely to limit further funding from Reform UK's Thailand-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne. They add that the new representation of the people bill will also include a temporary ban on donations in cryptocurrency: Steve Reed, the communities secretary, said the legislation would be applied retrospectively from Wednesday subject to parliamentary approval, as the move was urgently needed to protect UK democracy. He said he was "not prepared to allow any window of opportunity for malign ...
