Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety. "The magazine's extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don't belong in this country. They don't share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted."Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia. Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I ...
The ew edition of Liberator available Liberator 436 is out and can be downloaded for free here. You can sign up to be emailed when each new issue comes out here. What's in this issue? MAN OF MANY FACES John Leech assesses the Andy Burnham he knows from Manchester politics LIBERALS IN WONDERLAND The new Liberal Democrat strategy has plenty to say about the 'how' of politics but there's a loud silence about why people should support the party, says David Grace LIB DEM NARRATIVE – THE SEARCH GOES ON Jonathan Calder takes a look at the Yorkist pressure group's ...
Embed from Getty ImagesBBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from West Yorkshire. The judges were left wondering just how large the washing machines are going to be.
Yes, Jeremy Thorpe really did pester the voters from a hovercraft that summer and Paul Tyler was on board. Lord Tyler's lawyers have asked me to point out, however, that at no time did he turn into the Beast of Bodmin at full moon or devour his then constituents. I bet he did though. Tuesday Do you remember when hovercraft were all the rage? The boffins told us that within a decade we would have one each and use them to commute to the moon. As it turned out, they proved a great disappointment, but it was aboard a hovercraft ...
I have always been amazed at the vast amounts of money which are spent on elections in the United States of America. The money has always dwarfed anything that we can spend in the UK where there are, within reason, restraints on what we can spend both in the run up to an election and during it. This has come to the fore recently with The Dirty tricks which seemed to have occurred within the reform UK party about the people who have been making contributions to them. In the UK not only is there some control over the amount ...
"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies: One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived. They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English ...
Donald Trump Donald Trump has discovered the virtues of fighting forced labour—provided he does not look too closely at America's record. This week he slapped tariffs of 10-12.5 percent on 60 countries—including the UK—because they imported goods from countries that used forced or abusive labour. Well, so does the United States. In fact, several of its home-grown companies have, in fact, been prosecuted for using forced labour. And this is according to reports from America's State Department, the Department of Justice and the Department of Labour. But first the issue of importation. Trump is on reasonably firm ground using the ...
The latest edition of my email newsletter about work in Parliament, A Lord's Eye View, is out and you can also read it in full below. It's about the very long-running infected blood scandal. If you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Why can't the Cabinet Office do what other departments can? [IMG: The Cabinet Office on Whitehall, London] The Cabinet Office, apparently unable to do what other departments can do. Just before the House of Lords broke up for the summer we had a debate on the ...
The Independent reports that Andy Burnham's newly appointed housing minister, Angela Rayner, has indicated she does not expect Labour to meet its major manifesto pledge to build 1.5 million homes before the next election. The paper says Raynor has denied she was abandoning the commitment, but compared achieving it to her chances of "running the London Marathon": Ms Rayner was reappointed housing minister - a job she had resigned from in 2025 after a row over whether she dodged stamp duty - when Andy Burnham became prime minister on Monday. Ms Rayner said the housebuilding commitment was "very challenging" when ...
I've started on James Joyce's Ulysses. I've long enjoyed Anthony Burgess, and he was a great admirer of Joyce, so I suppose it was inevitable. I'm not trying to spot every reference, or look up every obscure word, but just to read it like any other story book. Analysis can come later, if I fancy, and my old copy of Burgess's Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader will no doubt come in handy. I see fiction as entertainment and escapism - you're not going to discover the meaning of life, or your place in ...
Filmed today.
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 ...