The judges have torn themselves away from England's World Cup game, and our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News. The headline stands above an encouraging story from Shropshire: An 18-month-long project to "re-wiggle" a river after more than a century has been successfully completed prompting "tears and celebrations". A section of the River Kemp, in south Shropshire, had been straightened by landowners in the 1800s, disconnecting it from its natural floodplain and reducing biodiversity. Now water is flowing in the meander again, after it was restored in a project led by Severn Rivers Trust and involved local ...
Andy Burnham's launch speech in Manchester raised hopes of a sustained plan to devolve power away from Whitehall. If the reality matches the rhetoric, that will be a massive achievement and will greatly improve our system of governance. But any Liberal Democrat who has been battling for decades for genuine local, community-based decision making and against the infantilisation of local government is entitled to some scepticism. My own formative experience is somewhat different: serving in the Coalition Cabinet which first launched the idea of devolving powers to elected mayors for city-regions broadly on the London model (prompted by a report ...
It is encouraging that Andy Burnham seems as enthusiastic about devolution now that he is likely to take over power at the centre as he was when he was just a regional mayor. Such consistency is to be admired. However, desirable as devolution is in our over-centralised state, it should not be confused with democracy. Devolution of powers from a central despot to a collection of local ones is an improvement, but will not necessarily be sensitive to the needs of the people allegedly represented, and very unlikely to engage them (us) in its administration. In my life- time local ...
Regional redistribution from the wealthy South-East to Britain's poorer cities, towns and villages is a sensitive issue for Liberal Democrats. When Britain left the EU and English regions and the devolved nations lost their share of EU regional funding (part of the balancing gains to the UK that the Leave campaign successfully ignored) the imbalance of investment and funding between the wealthy south-east and the rest of the UK tipped further. Boris Johnson breezily promised to 'level up' the country, raising expectations that were shattered when he failed to follow through. Andy Burnham may be more serious about reviving our ...
From Gladstone and Home Rule, Grimond and Regionalism, Ashdown and Devolution and even Daisy's plan to move the Treasury,decentralising the British state has always been a Liberal Democrat ambition. Glad to see Andy Burnham and the Labour Party are finally catching up. The right's Brexit warcry of Take Back Control can be repelled like a skilled Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and transformed from scapegoating minorities to truly rebalancing our country. However in our algorithm-driven age, the British people are unfamiliar with our approach to place, devolution,federalism or electoral reform. As Mark Carney has told us 'Nostalgia is not a strategy! We must ...
"Former MI6, counterterror, and police officials expressed disbelief at the refusal by the British authorities to countenance a full murder investigation into Perepilichnyy's death. 'It's so obvious that it's an assassination,' said Chris Phillips, the former head of Britain's National Counter Terrorism Security Office. 'There's no way it wasn't a hit. It's ridiculous.'" In 2017, Heidi Blake and her BuzzFeed investigations team published a seven-part investigation of suspected assassinations on British soil by the Russians government. Richard Kemp reposts a Byline Times article that condemns SLAPPs - strategic litigation against public participation - as a shocking abuse of the legal ...
"If people in 1844 could form the co-operative movement... to lower the price of food, then why can't we now...?" This is an extract from Andy Burnham's speech at the People's History Museum in Manchester, in which he partially laid out his economic vision for Britain, focused on social democracy and cooperativism, or more specifically, "Manchesterism". Now, I'm not going to do a deep dive into Burnham's achievements and drawbacks as Mayor, as I'm sure someone else can do a much better job than me on that. But what I do want to draw attention to is how Andy Burnham ...
Wikipedia says this is about "a homeless man McWilliams had encountered in Ballymena," but when I heard this in the Seventies, I saw Pearly Spencer as a criminal figure, like Pinkie in Brighton Rock or an associate of Violent Bonham Carter, whose time and luck are running out. It's odd the things you read into songs.
The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage received £270,000 from a gold marketer for which he is a brand ambassador, his single biggest payment as an MP. The paper says that the Reform UK leader has been criticised in the past over his £400,000-a-year second job promoting the idea for Direct Bullion that people should buy physical gold and put it in their pension pots. This latest payment is double his fee from 2025, was received in May and appears in Farage's latest entry in parliament's register of interests, published on Tuesday: Anna Turley, the Labour party chair, said: "He pretends ...
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Tue 30th
20:34
The Climate Clock Is Ticking: Reflections from the International Seminar on Culture and Climate Chan...
Thanks to a Brazilian friend, I had the opportunity to attend the International Seminar on Culture and Climate Change, which took place on Friday afternoon at Somerset House in London. The event was organised by several institutions, including a department of my alma mater, UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and was attended by His Excellency Antonio Patriota, Ambassador of Brazil (pictured speaking above). Given last week's heatwave, the seminar took place in a particularly warm room, with a humid atmosphere that created an almost symbolic reminder of the Amazon rainforest, which was central to many of the discussions. ...
The desire for a sense of control is a deeply futile effort, because despite being individuals, we find ourselves in a social paradigm, shaped by what is beyond our control - for example, where we are born. The person we grow into is also often a product of their environment, often not only inheriting their parents' genes, but also their ideas and mannerisms. We are all woven in a tapestry of human experience, for we were not born in the wilderness and raised by wolves, without any social contact. In our growingly atomised age, where our identities are now less ...
Here we are again, with the body politic latching on to another -ism that lacks definition yet carries allure for those of us desperate to see devolution and real localism really spring into life. I say this as a Mancunian now resident in the Scottish Borders, so perhaps you can forgive my instinctive pleasure at the notion of Manchesterism. When, as Andy Burnham pointed out in his gently jocular manner, even the Mayor of Liverpool was applauding when he said "This is Manchesterism" when setting out his first policy platform, you know that something is happening. Pleasure at the notion ...
Our report on last week's by-elections is a little late again. This is because there were an unusually high number of by-elections last week. There were 24 principal authority by-elections or countermanded election, across 23 wards, with several again counting on the Friday. It was a mixed set of results for the Liberal Democrats. In many places we didn't get the result our local teams deserved for all their hard work, but we still registered some strong results in seats that are up for election again next year, and we also achieved one excellent hold which is where we start: ...
What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger? I am very fond of a glass of wheat beer: German hefe weiß or Belgian wit, or a New England pale ale. Had someone offered me a cloudy beer when I was young, I would have laughed at them. You live and learn...
I don't tend to be the type to give more qualified people lectures about what to do and think, however in this case I feel it is of the utmost importance. As a party it feels that we forget what our politics is really about, Liberalism. We chase headlines and create policy as a result of emotion and popularity rather than using our liberal roots to form it. Whether it's Ed complaining about a banknote or a hapless policy of moving departments to Birmingham, we seem to lack core liberal ideas. As a young person I can see what issues ...
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. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: One of the powers open to Parliamentarians is to submit written questions to the government. Although there are plenty of ways that questions can be dodged, when there is a request for a clear piece of statistical evidence, it is harder for the government to obscure matters. Here's an example of what can ...
It is an ambitious agenda, one that many Liberal Democrats would endorse. Yes, there are some omissions, in particular closer union with the EU by rejoining the common market to promote economic growth and introducing fair voting for general elections, but the idea of decentralising power to spread wealth is very much a welcome one. The Guardian reports that Andy Burnham plans to set up No 10 North as the "nerve centre of a rewired Britain" to oversee a devolution of power and resources across the UK that he said would deliver the change the country desperately needed. The paper ...