Opened in 1866, East Brixton was a station on the South London line - now part of the London Overground's Windrush Line - served by trains from London Victoria to London Bridge. All went well until the opening of Brixton Underground station opened in 1971, when it lost many of its passengers. Then a fire at the station in 1975 destroyed its buildings and it was closed by British Rail in January 1976. Jago Hazzard tells us more about this history, looks for the scant remains of East Brixton station and discusses the possibility that it will be reopened. At ...
Mon 18th
22:41
The Lib Dems made a net loss of council seats outside the Westminster constituencies they hold
In this month's local elections the Liberal Democrats made a net gain of 175 seats where they hold the parliamentary constituency and a net loss of 20 where they don't. That stat comes from Nick Barlow on Bluesky. He doesn't give a source, but as he's a former Lib Dem blogger I trust him implicitly. It strengthens my impression that, however highly you rate Ed Davey's leadership, the party's current strategy has reached the end of its useful life. We never talk about it, but I can't be the only one to have noticed how low the Lib Dem vote ...
The former England cricket captain M.J.K. "Mike" Smith died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a middle-order batsman with Leicestershire and then Warwickshire, and also a rugby union player. He won a single England cap was at fly half against Wales in 1956, making him the last man to play both sports for England. His Guardian obituary says: His even-tempered approach was one of the keys to his success as a skipper not just with England, whom he led between 1964 and 1966, but with his county, which he captained from 1957 to 1967. Although the product of ...
By-elections can be something of an unpredictable business. A death, a career change, ill health are the typical causes. But this is the first time I've seen a by-election caused by someone standing down in favour of a candidate on a mission to become Prime Minister. The Makerfield by-election will cost over £100,000. Let's suppose Andy Burnham wins. He will then step down from his role of
It didn't take long! Today we have the first resignation from Gateshead Council of a Reform Councillor. Danielle Cavanagh served a whopping 11 days before she handed in her resignation. Number of official council meetings attended: zero. She made no appearance in Reform campaign literature in High Fell. She could have turned up at the Civic Centre and no one on the opposition side would have any
The celebratory yellow smoke from the 2024 general election may have cleared, but inside the local party branches of some of our major cities a very different kind of atmosphere is settling in. It is a thick, unmistakable sense of urban unease. Whilst the national narrative remains focused on the "Blue Wall" breakthroughs, a growing contingent of activists and councillors in our urban heartlands are beginning to ask a difficult but very necessary question: at what cost? As others have intimated on this website over the past week, in the wake of recent local election results the mood among urban ...
The above headline has been pinched without hesitation from Monty Python where an angry Mum pulled her son down a peg or two with the above comment. However, it is what I have thought continually as I have seen Andy Burnham and his mates plotting, intriguing and It is not often that I disagree with Labour MP Ian Byrne, we agree on more than we would want our Leaders to understand but he is totally wrong in his belief that Andy Burnham is the answer to either problems of the Labour Party or the problems of the country. Let us ...
The fallout from this year's local elections has sparked an important conversation about where our Party goes next. I was recently one of just eight Lib Dem candidates elected to the Council in Haringey, where we worked the soles off our shoes to win twenty-one seats from a base of seven. Without any door-knocking, the Green Party won one of our safest seats and set us back in others. Our experience has been mirrored in other metropolitan areas full of disaffected Labour voters, including other boroughs of London, Manchester (see Jonathan Moore's "What did the Greens have that we didn't" ...
After almost two years in office, and with the shadows lengthening around it, now seems a good time to attempt a fair assessment on Sir Keir Starmer's premiership. In broad-brush terms he has not led us into an illegal war, mishandled a pandemic or crashed the economy. By comparison with some of his recent predecessors, these must surely count as strong plusses. In addition he has played a respectable role in foreign affairs and steered a careful course in avoiding involvement in America's illegal invasion of Iran and promoting independent European security. In a recent (15th May) article on Guardian ...
"I saw a man wearing what seemed to be a hybrid of Hell's Angels and Crusader outfit, with horns protruding from his shoulders, but I can't be sure whether this was a political identity or Game Of Thrones fancy dress. Those two are very close together in the imagination of 'Western crusaders', judging from some of their on-line output."Discontinued Notes was in London on Saturday, the day of the Unite the Kingdom march. James Graham suggests Andy Burnham's attempt at a political heist may turn out more Fargo than Ocean's Eleven: "He's already watered down his commitment on rejoining the ...
CNN wins our Headline of the Day Award. The judges chose this one because of the clear picture it paints of the Trump administration: Before he joined the Trump administration last year, Christine was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. He has little public health experience and a history of far-right commentary and promoting conspiracy theories. He's said the Covid pandemic led to a wider government plot to control people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany and suggested the Covid vaccine had little effect in stopping the pandemic.
It is being reported that the our Council Leader in Colchester, David King, has called for a change of leadership. Talking to the BBC's Simon Dedman, he said; We need to let the party take the time to look to the future, and that's my appeal to Sir Ed. It's politely saying, time's up. Whether or not this is simply a reaction to disappointing results in Colchester – the Party lost Shrub End and Stanway wards to Reform – or indicative of a wider movement remains to be seen.
155 net gains in terms of seats, 3 net gains in terms of councils, more MSPs in Scotland were the headlines after the elections eleven days ago. On the face of it, it looked reasonably good. Not great, but another advance nonetheless. But, behind the headlines, it has become increasingly apparent that all is not well in terms of the Party's progress. So many contributions reached us from across the nations, highlighting tales of good campaigns and hard work overtaken by Greens or Reform candidates whose clear messages and perceived alternative to a failed status quo appealed to voters in ...
The Guardian reports that a row has broken out at the top of the Labour party over whether Britain should try to rejoin the EU after Wes Streeting said the country should eventually seek to regain membership. The paper says that Streeting, who resigned as health secretary last week in protest at Keir Starmer's leadership, kicked off a war of words after he argued on Saturday that Britain's future lay back in the EU: After the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, dismissed his comments as odd, Streeting's allies hit back, saying the government's lack of willingness to discuss the issue was ...
