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 ...
The passage below is from W.G. Hoskins' Midland England. Published as part of Batsford's The Face of Britain series, that book captures the charm of this part of the world better than any other I know: There is, for example, the green deserted country around Knaptoft in the south of Leicestershire, where the pastures of central England hardly touch five hundred feet above the sea and yet they are the watershed between Trent and Severn; and streams gather here that end in the Humber, the Wash and the Bristol Channel. This, more than anywhere, is the very heart of England: ...
A news story on the Shropshire Live website has put me in mind of one of Liz Truss's early triumphs in the House of Commons. That story begins:Police are reminding the public that drones are forbidden in the airspace over HMP Stoke Heath and surrounding villages. The prison is a men's prison and young offender institution on the outskirts of Market Drayton, and there are currently robust plans in place to respond to sightings of drones and any suspicious activity near to the prison. Drones are often used to drop illegal contraband into prisons, contributing to issues within the facility ...
Sat 6th
15:28
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
I did not know whether to be amused or appalled by the comments made, very publicly, by the half-witted Vice President of the USA, Mr Vance. Appalled, because it is not right that officials from one democracy should publicly criticise one of their allies over domestic policy. Amused, because no-one in this Country needs to take lessons from a corrupt government led by a convicted felon which is openly looting the people of America. Historically the USA with its open carrying of arms and easy access to weapons is a much more dangerous place for people of all colours than ...
New Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP Andrew Baxter made his first speech in Holyrood this week. He looked very happy about it, as well he should given that he represents what I think are some of the most beautiful places in the world, especially my happy place, Rosemarkie Beach. He paid tribute to the "resilient" communities of his constituency and set out his desire to be a voice for the Highlands on issues like building public services that are accessible, reliable and closer to home. I was in tears when he talked about the lady whose husband had been put ...
Once per Parliament, the Federal Board is obliged to put before Conference a party strategy. Article 5.1 of the Federal Constitution states: The Federal Board shall have the responsibility periodically, and at least onceper Parliament, for preparing a document outlining the Party's strategy, inconjunction with the Leader's political strategy, for submission for debate and agreement by Conference. The Board's plan is to bring a strategy to Autumn Conference. If the anger following the local elections is anything to go by, members will be looking for a commitment to developing a nationally relevant message to re-establish us as a viable national ...
Embed from Getty ImagesThe Liberal Democrats are undergoing an overhaul of strategy and policy, "with key areas of discussion including the economy, welfare, and, as the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, a bolder stance on the European Union", reports PoliticsHome. Unusually for such articles, which generally rely on anonymous senior Lib Dems and party strategists, this one by Matilda Martin and Zoe Crowther has quotations from named MPs. One is Tom Gordon from Harrogate and Knaresborough: Lib Dem MP Tom Gordon said that while the results last month were generally positive for his party, losses in the North ...
I think Nigel Farage is right. We do have two-tier policing. No, let me finish, as the man himself is fond of saying. A couple of years ago, Lucy Connolly, a troubled and not especially clever individual, posted an unpleasant and inflammatory tweet in the aftermath of the Southport murders. She thought better of it and deleted it after a few hours. And it is difficult to believe that anybody sought to set fire to anything simply because of what an obscure woman from Northampton posted on Twitter. What Connolly wrote was deeply unpleasant, but I can't help feeling that ...
Marco Rubio says the next month's NATO summit will be one of the most consequential in history. He is right—but not for the reasons he imagines. President Trump has spent years demanding that Europe take responsibility for its own defence. The Europeans have finally agreed. The problem is that they have also concluded that they cannot rely entirely on Washington. That realisation is likely to dominate the summit. The immediate result will be more defence spending. The long-term result may be the emergence of a European military-industrial complex capable of challenging America's dominance of the global arms market. If so, ...
If you were to go into Swansea City Centre today, you would find that a large part of it is fenced off while building work carries on there. This is Castle Square, an open space in front of the city's historic castle that is undergoing its second transformation after a major revamp in the 1990s saw it mostly concreted over. The square itself has evolved from a medieval Norman settlement to a bustling Victorian commercial hub, and finally into a central civic space. After being flattened during the 1941 Blitz, the site was transformed into public gardens as illustrated above, ...