It was Newcastle Pride today. After my ward surgery I headed over to Newcastle Civic Centre to be part of a sea of colour for the parade to the Monument. Good to see lots of people from Gateshead Council LGBT support network.One of the first people I bumped into was Cllr Henry Gallagher, mayor of Newcastle.
This article appears in the new Liberator - you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about. You can find The New Deal online. Lib Dem Narrative - The Search Goes On The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals' brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Survation 19% (-2) 25% (+1) 10% (-1) 8% (-3) 26% (+2) -1% (vs Ref) 22-24/7 UK YouGov 20% (-1) ...
Embed from Getty ImagesNeil Ascherson writes about Berlin in the current issue of the London Review of Books: Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity. Reviewing Ian Buruma's book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45, he says of the city ...
The new Liberator is out. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. And that means it's time to spend another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. When I first mentioned the Well-Behaved Orphans' summer holiday in the pages of Liberator, Marcus Trescothick was a 14-year-old playing alongside his father for the Keynsham club in Bristol. In those days the WBOs went to a different Cornish resort: Trebilcock Bay. Monday I write these words in a deckchair on the sands of Trescothick Bay, the Cornish resort where I always bring the Well-Behaved Orphans for their summer ...
This month gave us two AI stories that, read side by side, tell us something important about where we are and how little time, we must decide what to do about it. The first is unsettling in a very specific way. OpenAI admitted that during an internal test, it removed the safety controls on its own models to see how capable they really were at hacking. The models didn't stay in their sandbox. They found a flaw, broke out, and used it to hack into a rival company's servers, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to the very test they ...
There are growing signs that Donald Trump is preparing the ground for a challenge to close congressional election results in the mid-terms. Several election law experts have warned about Republican shenanigans. Scenarios range from the highly unlikely declaration of martial law and seizure of ballot boxes to attempts to delay certification of Democrat winners. The second possibility is regarded by most legal experts as the most likely and would be designed to influence the organisation of the House in the key early days of the next Congress. The Republicans don't need to challenge all the races. Only the ones where ...
A lot of well-known politicians have found themselves in Swansea at one time or another, but none of them had the sort of reception that awaiting British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Wales-on-line reports that he started his Welsh odyssey in Cardiff where his rally was peaceful, but the reaction was vry different in Swansea's Plaza Cinema that summer when Mosley took written questions from the audience: The crucial one was, "I work for a Jew. Should I change my employer?" Mosley replied: "I am disgusted that anyone should work for a Jew. You should be certain to find a more ...
Gateshead full council meeting was held last week. Quietly slipping in under the radar was Reform Councillor, Lindsay Atkinson. He was the winner of the High Fell by-election caused by the Reform councillor, elected in May, lasting only 11 days in the job. Atkinson's win went unobserved by Full Council. No mention by the Leader or Mayor. No opportunity for Reform to celebrate their majority of 5.
I had to go to Lobley Hill today for some stamps. The joy of popping to the Sunniside Post Office ended when the branch was closed a few years ago. Lobley Hill is therefore now our closest branch. The Lobley Hill branch is next to the Kular Stores which recently celebrated 50 years as the convenience store for the whole of Lobley Hill. I remember being sent to the shop 50 years ago by Mam
George Weeks posted the link to this the other day, saying: I love the BBC Archive YouTube channel. So much footage to enjoy. This one is possibly my favourite: The Trans-African Hovercraft Expedition of 1969-70. It's a cross between Biggles, Tintin, Famous Five and Fitzcarraldo. And he was right. This film was shot in Francophone Africa, and though I know from a recent rabbit hole that British Africa had all but crumbled by 1962 when Sammy Going South was released, but it's still tempting to place hovercraft beside flying boats and airships as new means of transport that promised to ...
Given how popular (and lengthy!) my list of Reform councillor departures after the May 2025 elections turned out to be, here is a new list, this time for councillors elected under the Reform banner on 7 May 2026, or in by-elections after that date, who have already departed the party for one reason or another. Jay Cooper, Sefton: declared "not welcome" by Nigel Farage following reports of him calling the Holocaust a hoax and then resigned from the party (May 2026). Stuart Prior, Essex: expelled by Reform and resigned as a councillor after "he was accused the week before the ...
When I wrote about the philosopher C.E.M. Joad last month, a comment suggested I read one of George Orwell's 'As I Please' columns from Tribune. In it (it was the column for the 27 October 1944 issue), Orwell defended Joad as someone associated in the public mind with Science and Rationalism (his capitals), unlike the religious right-wingers who tended to dominate debate on the BBC. But the column was mostly about C.S. Lewis and Orwell's criticism of his writing style and the quality of his arguments. It's worth quoting at length: Reading, a week or two ago, Mr C. S. ...
Ian Visits wins our Headline of the Day Award for what turns out to be a piece of good news: The successful trial gives London Trams much greater flexibility during the engineering works. Instead of forcing passengers onto the inevitable replacement buses, trams can be repositioned through the town centre to continue serving routes to New Addington, Elmers End and Beckenham Junction.
Five principal authority council by-elections this week, including Labour's first gains of the Andy Burnham era: Grays Town (Thurrock) Council By-Election Result: [IMG: 🌹] LAB: 37.0% (+5.3) [IMG: ➡] RFM: 27.0% (-7.8) [IMG: 🙋] Ind: 13.0% (New) [IMG: 🌳] CON: 12.3% (+1.3) [IMG: 🌍] GRN: 8.8% (-7.3) [IMG: 🔶] LDM: 1.9% (-4.5)Labour GAIN from Reform UK.Changes w/ 2026. — Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) 2026-07-23T23:26:37.505Z Thank you to Jim Corrigan for being the Lib Dem in this contest. (The Lib Dem vote the time before was inflated by an unusual and small candidate line-up.) For what all this means for the ...
The latest edition of the email newsletter for my podcast, Political Fictions, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Mr Smith Goes To Washington, with Aidan Byrne [IMG: Mr Smith Goes To Washington] Public opinion arrives in the Senate in Mr Smith Goes to Washington After messing around with football / broadening our cultural frames of reference (delete according to which one of us you agree with), it's back to hard core politics this time ...
The Independent reports that green groups and opposition politicians have criticised the government over its decision to fund its new £500m policy capping bus fares in England at £2 using the climate aid budget. The paper says that the new transport policy, which was announced yesterday, is set to reverse a cap increase to £3 that was put in place by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in 2024, and is being billed as a landmark measure intended to tackle the cost of living crisis. However, around £400m of the cost is set to come from switching government investment in international ...