The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 outlawed "gross indecency" between but made no mention of relations between women. There's a story that Queen Victoria insisted that a provision about women was taken out of the act after parliament had passed it because "women could not do such things". But the story is obvious nonsense. British monarchs have never been able to go through laws passed by parliament and strike out anything they don't like. In theory they have the power to refuse to sign a whole act, but no monarch has done that since Queen Anne. There's another version ...
This is from Muriel Spark's novel The Girls of Slender Means, which was published in 1963 and set in 1945: These upper bedrooms looked down on the opposite pavement on the park side of the street, and on the tiny people who moved along in neat looking singles and couples, pushing little prams loaded with pin-head babies and provisions, or carrying little dots of shopping bags. Everyone carried a shopping bag in case they should be lucky enough to pass a shop that had a sudden stock of something off the rations.
British politics has been reshaped. Andy Burnham has consolidated the centre left, pushed Reform to the margins and made a progressive coalition government the new baseline. The right is fragmented and unable to command a majority. In this new landscape, the Liberal Democrats face a simple but brutal question: will we be the kingmakers who define the next era, or the footnote that history barely records? Current polling points to three possible futures. The difference between them is not fate. It is choice. The first future is collapse. If we enter the next general election without bold, memorable policies, with ...
Professor Russell Deacon Martin Shipton, friend of the Lloyd George Society and our recent after-dinner speaker, has written an article for Nation.Cymru, highlighting the decline in the number of Welsh Liberal Democrat peers. The outgoing Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, nominated five Liberal Democrats in his resignation honours list. However, for the 13th year in a row, no Welsh Liberal Democrats have been elevated to the House of Lords. The article also highlights that with the proposals that an age limit of 80 be phased in, the remaining four Welsh Liberal Democrat peers could be forced to retire. The ages ...
Forty-eight young curlews are being released back into their natural habitat in the Shropshire hills as part of efforts to protect the species. The scheme, which is run by the non-profit organisation Curlew Country, has seen eggs taken from wild nests and incubated, with the hatched chicks then raised in specially-constructed pens. Amanda Perkins discussed this 'headstarting' process with BBC News: "Our monitoring showed that no chick survived to fledging from any of the nests we looked at," she said, adding that the team "needed a desperate measure to try and hold the situation". Perkins described the process, which is ...
A lot of churches fall into disuse or are repurposed, but the many lives of St Paul's Church on St Helen's Road in Swansea must be unique. As Swansea Scoop reports, this church, opposite Joe's Ice Cream Parlour, was originally built in 1880 and remained a place of worship until at least 1972. They say that after the church's closure, a veteran of the cinema scene in South Wales, Lynn Thomas, bought the building and converted it into Studio Cinemas, which opened in 1977: Studio Cinemas originally had two screens, but when a third was added, the cinema changed its ...
Sunniside has, for decades, been suffering localised flooding. Before the village was built in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was agricultural land (much of it was my grandfather's farm). Most of the village has been built on a slope and given the increasing incidents of heavy rainfall and the increase in hard standing, the drains are no longer capable of dealing with the amount of water
The announcement today that Andy Burnham has been elected as Labour leader comes as no surprise. He was, after all, in a one horse race. So he therefore undergoes a coronation rather than a contest. I remain to be convinced that this is the right approach. We barely know anything about what he plans for the country. A contest would have brought our his policies and put them in the
The news story that caught my eye today was the appointment of 5 new Lib Dem peers. Among them is Dave McCobb. I have to confess I don't know the other 4. Dave is a former colleague of mine from the days I worked for Lib Dem HQ. He went on to be head of campaigns and oversaw the 2024 general election campaign which saw the Lib Dems grow from 11 to 72 MPs. So congratulations Dave, well done. The
Fri 17th
19:34
East Midlands Railway cancels 20 fast services a day because of problems with its new trains
East Midlands Railways has admitted that its problems with its new trains have not all been caused by the recent hot weather. BBC News reports: A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages. Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary". The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield. EMR did not say ...
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 Opinium 20% (+2) 22% (+3) 11% (-1) 14% (-2) 23% (-1) -1% (vs Ref) 15-17/7 GB Find Out Now ...
I worked with Andy Burnham as a member of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority for three years, so am perhaps uniquely placed to offer a personal perspective on what his super-charged run for No.10 means for us Liberal Democrats. As leader of Stockport Council 2022-2025, I was one of ten council leaders (nine Labour and me!) who formed Burnham's cabinet and met regularly under his chairmanship, arguably putting me in a good position to judge what makes him tick. The first thing to understand is that he is a skilled and collegiate operator with an easy, friendly manner on a ...
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Norfolk. A Savannah cat, like the one in the picture here, is a cross between a domestic cat and a small wild cat from Africa called a serval. So this one was probably rather on the small side for a big cat. But, as one of the judges remarked, this does prove that they're out there.
Fri 17th
17:12
"Palestine should be run by Palestinians" so why won't Britain reckon with what it did?
In the past year Britain has recognised Palestinian statehood, sanctioned violent settlers and extremist ministers, and committed £10 million to support Palestinian Authority frontline services. However, one line in Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper's recent statement caught my attention. Discussing Palestinian governance, she said simply: 'Palestine should be run by Palestinians.' She is right but the problem is that Britain spent three decades ensuring that this did not happen. When Britain controlled Palestine between 1917 to 1948, the rights of Palestinians were not accidentally overlooked but rather deliberately set aside. Britain has never acknowledged that suffering nor how the methods of ...
There were eight principal authority council by-elections plus a Police and Crime Commissioner by-election this week. Let's start the results round-up with another Lib Dem by-election win in a constituency gained by the party at the 2024 general election. [IMG: Calum Miller and Rob Packard] Kidlington West (Cherwell) Council By-Election Result: [IMG: 🔶] LDM: 58.8% (+13.7) [IMG: ➡] RFM: 18.9% (-4.3) [IMG: 🌳] CON: 13.3% (-4.0) [IMG: 🌍] GRN: 9.0% (-5.4)Liberal Democrat HOLD.Changes w/ 2026. — Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) 2026-07-17T08:59:21.529Z Thank you to Christopher Brown for being the Liberal Democrat candidate here. For what all this means for the ...
Artificial intelligence promises unprecedented prosperity. But that prosperity is becoming concentrated in remarkably few hands. A new generation of robber barons has emerged, prompting warnings of techno-feudalism: an economy in which a handful of firms own the digital infrastructure on which everyone else depends. A defining political question of the AI age is, therefore, not whether wealth will be created, but who will own it. The history of liberalism is, in many ways, the history of widening ownership. Nineteenth-century liberals challenged the concentration of land ownership because they understood that whoever owned the dominant asset of the age exercised disproportionate ...
Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story." A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such ...
On Wednesday night England went 1-0 up against Argentina, retreated to protect the lead, and lost 2-1. We invited the pressure, the pressure kept coming, and eventually it went in. Twice. On Saturday England play France for third place, the fixture nobody dreams about. I couldn't stop thinking about our party. We are 1-0 up. Seventy-two seats, our best result in a century, net gains in eight straight rounds of local elections. And the draft party strategy now heading to conference reads like a team protecting a lead. It even talks about consolidating our "fortresses". Parties that think in fortresses ...
An article in the Times by Hugo Rifkind hits the nail on the head about some of the language being utilised by Reform spokespeople following the tragic murder of Ann Widdicombe. He talks about his own experience as the son of a former cabinet minister and the protection officers who dominated his formative years, with emergency buttons everywhere and discusses the response of Reform politicians in particular, who, rightly or wrongly, believe that they are all targets and that nobody cares: Frightened people say foolish things but it's hard not to notice how closely Reform UK's response to Widdecombe's death ...