Adam Webster, full-time father and part-time Associate Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, argues that the government must rethink how Britain conceives work, care and family life. As he says in an 'expert comment' issued by the University of Oxford's media people, we have built a world where parents are expected to be simultaneously working and present for family. It's all good stuff, but I was struck by this sentence: In the 1950s, 80 per cent of mothers in the UK stayed at home and the school run was part of their domestic routine. ...
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is right about one thing: social care reform demands serious thought. But she is wrong to insist that the answer cannot involve asking those with the broadest shoulders (the very richest) bear the biggest burden and contribute a bit more through taxation. If we are serious about fixing one of Britain's greatest public policy failures, there will be a cost. We must be honest about that. For me, this is not an abstract political argument. It is deeply personal. In July 2022 my mum died two days after waiting eleven hours for an ambulance following a ...
Five principal authority by-elections took place last Thursday, across four councils. The Liberal Democrats were not defending any seats, and though we did not win a contest during this relatively quiet week we still came out with some very strong results. East Devon DC, Exmouth Brixington Conservative: 537 (35.2%, -2%) Lib Dem (Andrew Colman): 450 (29.5%, -3%) Reform UK: 439 (28.7%, new) Green Party: 101 (6.6%, -2.1%) Conservative HOLD Well done to Andrew Colman and the local team for a very strong second place in East Devon. Being only 88 votes off winning must have hurt. But keep your heads ...
Two recent reports have drawn attention to what human rights organisations and UN investigators describe as one of the defining features of Israel's assault on Palestinian life: the systematic targeting of Palestinian children. The first report, published by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, examines violations against Palestinian children since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. The second, by the leading Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, documents the killing of children by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank. While focused on different contexts, the reports paint a strikingly similar picture. They reveal a pattern in ...
As ever, Lord Bonkers was ahead of the curve on the climate crisis. Perhaps the sands at Trescothick Bay remind him of the deserts of southern Rutland? Wednesday They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don't have MPs anywhere else. But don't despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life - human life included. Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections ...
Parliament is now fully in recess until September – the House of Lords sat for an additional week – and now there's not much "politician on politician action" for five weeks, leaving the field open for commentators and journalists to speculate on what might come next. And, given that the line between reporting and comment is now so blurred, it becomes increasingly hard to separate the two. Now I'm not the sort of person who tends to don rose-tinted spectacles and opine about how much better things were in the past – improvement is very much in the eye of ...
The Times reports that Reform UK's bank account was frozen during the last election after the party received potentially illegal donations from the mother of George Cottrell, the criminal who bankrolled Nigel Farage. The paper says that the party was unable to make or receive payments through its account with Arbuthnot Latham, a London private and merchant bank, for a two-week period that included polling day on July 4, 2024: The Reform treasurer at the time repeatedly asked the bank for an explanation, urging it to unfreeze the account. However, Arbuthnot Latham refused. It said it could not unfreeze the ...
Embed from Getty ImagesOne of the many unmade Alexander Mackendrick film projects detailed in Philip Kemp's biography Lethal Innocence is an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros. An international success, the play was set in a French provincial town where, one by one, the inhabitants were turning into rhinos. It was a political allegory, based on the Romanian writer's pre-war memories of the way his friends gradually joined the fascist Iron Guard. And the person who Mackendrick wanted to play the hero Bérenger, the only character who doesn't become a rhino, was Tony Hancock. According to Kemp, Mackendrick said: "He ...
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 ...