Adam Gabbatt reports from New York for the Guardian:The first sewer episode happened on 5 May, at 2am. Three people, wearing hip waders and carrying flashlights, walked to a manhole cover in the middle of the road, hauled the circular cover aside, and clambered down into the darkness. That was that, until Thursday 28 May, when a group of people shifted a manhole cover and climbed into the sewer in south Brooklyn. Hours after that, a group of people lowered themselves into a sewer hole in north Brooklyn. "I could tell they were up to no good," Aki Jakupovic, who ...
There seems to be a general expectation, at least in the "developed " world, that each generation can and should "do" better than the one before it. Parents expect that their children will have a "better time of it" than they had. At first sight that seems to imply a higher physical quality of life - more "stuff " - bigger house, kitchen refitted every five years, bigger cars changed more often, more foreign holidays, more gadgets, more bread and circuses. The more leisure that Keynes anticipated doesn't seem to have caught on, (other than more phone time). As I ...
Michael Meadowcroft at his final Lloyd George Society appearance in 2025. Last week, the Lloyd George Society was saddened to hear about the death of our friend and colleague, Michael Meadowcroft, after a short illness. I first came across Michael's name whilst undertaking the research for my PhD on the Welsh Liberal Party (WLP). (Although I was aware of him before this, it was here that I paid attention.) The WLP was set up in 1966 as a separate party which maintained federal links to the other Liberal parties in Britain. This new party faced considerable criticism from members of ...
Damian Collins OBE, Friend of the Lloyd George Society and former MP, will be talking about his book, Rivals in the Storm – How Lloyd George Seized Power, Won the War and Lost his Government, at the Hereford Military Festival. From the event website: Rivals in the Storm tells the gripping story of how David Lloyd George — controversial, brilliant and ruthless — outmanoeuvred his rivals to seize the British premiership at the darkest moment of the First World War. From scandalous beginnings and bitter Cabinet feuds to the bold decisions that turned the tide of conflict, Damian Collins reveals ...
David Green has delivered his first speech at Holyrood. All our seven newbies have now done so. Every single one of them made me cry, David more than any of them. Not just because he is the best of people and I've known him for pretty much half his life (which is a tiny proportion of mine), but because he represents where I spent my teenage years and, much further south, where my husband's family comes from. His constituency is massive, stretching from John O'Groats in the north, almost to Skye in the west. I've driven the long, long road ...
One of the changes to civil court procedure which was made following Lord Woolf's report in 1996 was to require a party's statement of case to be verified by a statement of truth. To put forward a case which you know to be a pack of lies, in other words, became a contempt of court and punishable by imprisonment. There have been any number of cases in the last few years where people have put forward lying and fraudulent personal injury claims, and the courts have taken a pretty stern line. Thus the Court of Appeal in Liverpool Victoria Insurance ...
Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it's easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can't always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish. Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, ...
Fair representation is the first pillar of constitutional renewal. Federalism is the second. The third and final pillar is fiscal federalism. Without financial autonomy, political devolution is incomplete. Without it, devolution is symbolic. With it, it becomes real. The United Kingdom remains highly centralised not only politically but financially. Most revenue is collected by Westminster and redistributed through complex grant systems. This creates dependency, weakens accountability, and encourages short-term decision-making. Governments often spend money they do not raise and raise money they do not directly spend. A durable federal settlement requires power, responsibility, and funding to be aligned. Under fiscal ...
Here's something I didn't know: this chart-topping Blondie single from 1978 is an elegy to a lost cat. Sunday Girl was written by the band's guitarist Chris Stein about Debbie Harry's lost cat Sunday Man. He once told Jools Holland: "The cat ran away and we were very sad. It was just a sort of plaintive, evocative number." This is not the first such record to feature here on a Sunday. Henry Gross wrote Shannon about the death of a red setter that belonged to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Sun 7th
10:53
Liz Saville Roberts to Give the David Lloyd George Memorial Lecture at Gwyl Cricieth Festival
Plaid Cymru's leader in the House of Commons, Rt Hon Liz Saville Roberts MP, will give the David Lloyd George Memorial Lecture at the Gwyl Cricieth Festival on Sunday 14 June 2026. The subject of the lecture will be "We'll always have democracy, won't we?" Tickets are available from https://criciethfestival.co.uk/david-lloyd-george-lecture/ From the festival website: About this event 'We'll always have democracy, won't we?' A lively presentation by the Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts who has been the elected MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd since 2015. Her constituency covers a large part of Snowdonia and contains the coastal towns of Pwllheli ...
Richard Rhys O'Brien, Margaret Lloyd George's biographer and friend of the Society, gave a talk to a packed audience yesterday in the aptly named 'Lloyd George Room' at the National Museum of Wales. Organised by the Friends of the National Museum of Wales, 70 people were held in thrall to stories about this remarkable woman. Members of the Lloyd George Society, including the Chair of the Society, Professor Russell Deacon and Gwyn Griffith, were in attendance. Outside, a statue of the former Prime Minister stood in defiance, fist raised as if to cheer on this celebration of his wife. Professor ...
AI Sitting next to Pope Leo XIV when he launched his controversial encyclical on AI was Chris Olah—co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. His presence was no accident. The Pope's 235 page "Magnifica Humanitas" calls for regulation of technology to protect the dignity of humankind. Olah's position is the same and he has made a name for himself by refusing to allow the Trump Administration to use Anthropic for military and intelligence purposes. Olah is on one side of a technologically-driven political divide in Silicon Valley. On the other side are figures such as Marc Andreesen, who has been involved ...
Yesterday I posted about a YouGov poll commissioned by Liberal Voice for Women. At the time I hadn't had a chance to see the full dataset, and from comments by LVfW members in other threads I'd got the impression it hadn't been published. It apparently had. Here's my assessment now I've seen it in full. The claims being made about this poll include that it shows "the majority of the party agree with us on single-sex spaces" and that "most actual party members are sex realists." Neither holds up. On single-sex spaces: every result LVfW are citing comes from questions ...
[IMG: Headshot of Baroness Alison Suttie] Thank you. As we mark Volunteers' Week, that's the message I most want to share with the hundreds of Liberal Democrat members who give their time to support our candidate approval and selection processes. As Chair of the Joint Candidates Sub-Committee, I see first-hand every week the extraordinary contribution our volunteers make. Whether you sit on approval panels, help organise assessments, support candidate development, serve on selection committees, provide mentoring, stand as a candidate or any of the other ways volunteers keep the whole process running behind the scenes, you are helping to build ...
The Guardian reports that Labour Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell has accused Reform UK of destabilising British democracy by spreading divisive material that is being amplified by bots and troll farms. In an echo of an essay by Oliver Bullough on Byline Times, which I blogged on earlier this month, the paper says that Lucy Powell has called for tighter laws on social media giants to tackle misinformation, arguing the online space was "open to wealthy individuals, and bad state actors": She also highlighted the multimillion-pound donations that have bolstered Reform's election war chest and "fund their powerful online campaigns". Arguing ...
