On Monday I had lunch with an American friend who was visiting London. I mentioned that later that day I was co-sponsoring an event in Parliament with Labour MP Clive Lewis on the subject of defending UK democracy. Her expression changed immediately. "Please," she said, "learn from us." She wasn't talking about Donald Trump as an individual. She was talking about what has happened to the institutions of American democracy over the past few years, especially in the 18 months of Trump 2.0. "We assumed the system would protect itself. We assumed there would always be enough guardrails. We assumed ...
Embed from Getty ImagesBen Stokes's final text innings was embarrassingly self-indulgent. As Jonathan Riew says in a great article in the Guardian today, it "managed to capture in a single moment everything people dislike about this team". But he also looks far deeper into what ails English cricket. So he praises Stokes's "legendary" talent, endurance, ambition and competitiveness, and says those qualities could have inspired England to big series wins if they had been intelligently harnessed: Instead, English cricket was more interested in commodifying Stokes's talent than channelling it. Under the directorship of Andrew Strauss in the mid-2010s, and then ...
The recent (and long overdue) release of the UK's Defence Investment Plan (DIP) has only intensified the long-running debate about how to fund an increase in the UK Defence Budget, a debate that has already cost the Labour Government two Ministers. Cursory examination of the Government's plans soon revealed that rather than being "fully funded", the plan actually requires a further £4.7bn of cuts to other departments and £10.7bn of "efficiency savings" in the next 4 years, neither of which have yet been identified. It also fails to provide any budget for 2030 onwards, with that can kicked down the ...
Embed from Getty ImagesThis is a letter published by the Cornish Times: On June 13, a special gathering was held at The Story of Emily to mark the centenary of the death of Emily Hobhouse, the British humanitarian and peace campaigner whose work exposed the suffering of women and children in the concentration camps of the South African War. It was a privilege to attend this commemorative event and to join others in remembering one of Cornwall's most remarkable daughters. Born in the hamlet of St Ive, near Liskeard, Emily Hobhouse dedicated her life to humanitarian causes and the pursuit ...
When Oliver Smedley shot Reg Calvert, more was at stake than a row over a radio transmitter. According to a 2011 blog post by Adam Curtis- thanks to a reader for putting me on to it - theirs was a dispute about the very nature of liberty: A historian called Adrian Johns has written a brilliant book about Pirate Radio in the 1960s, called Death of a Pirate. In it he argues that Reg Calvert and Oliver Smedley represent two completely different kinds of "privateer". Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. ...
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: Welcome to my latest update on work in the House of Lords, this time looking at the government's continuing willingness to award business to Capita. Capita and the case for exclusion Capita missed the promised end of June deadline for sorting out problems with the civil service pension scheme, a crisis that I've ...
Nation Cymru reports that a Plaid Cymru Senedd Member has called out the "bullshit" and misinformation being spread about the Welsh Government's Nation of Sanctuary policy ahead of a Reform-led debate. The news site says that in a video posted on TikTok by Kiera Marshall she said it was "time to call bullshit" on disinformation and myths circulating about asylum seekers and refugees living in Wales: The MS listed a number claims made about people seeking sanctuary which she said were false. Speaking in her social video, Ms Marshall explained that refugees and asylum seekers do not get priority access ...
Lord Bonkers had no time for him, but Aleister Crowley has been crossing my path of late. So here's an esoteric walk across his London with John Rogers and Marco Visconti: This walking tour weaves a web of mystery and magick through a portion of central London forever haunted by the man known as The Great Beast. Starting at Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment we head up to Charing Cross, St Martin's Lane to Watkins Bookshop in Cecil Court which has been on the site for over 120 years. We then follow the magic thread to Henrietta Street in Covent ...
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 ...
