The next Senedd elections will present a different challenge to the Lib Dems

A largely positive article about the Liberal Democrats by Jonathan Edwards for Nation Cymru points up an irony. We Lib Dems have become very good at first-past-the-post elections but rarely do so well in elections under more proportional systems:

However, in a Welsh context the strategy employed by the Liberal Democrats at UK level doesn’t work. Quite simply there are not enough Tory/Lib Dem marginals. In July it only yielded one seat in Wales where David Chadwick captured the new seat of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe. With the Senedd election in mind, Jane Dodds and her team are going to have to be more creative.

The D’Hondt electoral system isn’t the easiest to decipher; however the Lib Dems are going to have to improve their poll ratings if they are to achieve the minimum threshold required for a seat in the new Senedd constituencies. Their success in England last July was based on clever targeting of constituencies, and their strategists need to employ similar informed decision making for 2026 as opposed to a blanket approach.

A complicating factor is that the 2026 Senedd elections will be fought on new constituency boundaries. If the Boundary Commission proposals are accepted, one seat will stretch from Corndon Hill, which is almost entirely surrounded by Shropshire, to the tip of the Lleyn peninsula. Meanwhile, what is essentially the old Brecon and Radnor seat has somehow acquired a coastline.

Where does the word "gerrymandering" come from?

The Map Men explain, and also show how weird electoral borders can be used to deliver weird results.

The Joy of Six 1269

"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: As the deer graze beyond my ha-ha

We come to the end of a beaver-stuffed (and latterly badger-stuffed) week at Bonkers Hall. As far as I'm concerned, the new political season can't begin soon enough.

And don't forget to download the Conference issue of Liberator.

Sunday

On my way home from Divine Service at St Asquith’s, I called at the beavers’ lodge. I casually broached the subject of my family’s long feud with the Dukes of Rutland, emphasising what rotters they have been over the centuries. “Sounds like we’d all be better off without ‘em,” remarked the elected spokesbeaver. 

At this point I dropped the King of the Badgers’ theory about Belvoir Castle originally being Beaver Castle into the conversation. Just as I had hoped, this gets him properly riled. “I’m calling a meeting and shall recommend immediate direct action,” he said, the light catching his sharp front teeth. He must have got the required two-thirds majority, because later in the afternoon I saw the entire colony marching north, armed and looking Terribly Fierce. 

So I write these words in their jacuzzi as the deer graze beyond my ha-ha. I don’t know whether the beavers will succeed in retaking Belvoir Castle and drive out the Dukes of Rutland – though I did pass on to them a map showing secret ways into the cellars of the old pile that the King of the Badgers found in his library – but they will be out of my hair for a while. 

As for the lake… Well, it is rather pretty and I have never been that fond of croquet.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal
• Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other
• My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

GWR train service cancelled after two stowaway squirrels 'refused to leave'

ITVx wins our Headline of the Day Award with this bushy tale of life on the Reading to Gatwick line. Thanks to the reader who alerted me to this story 

The story below our winning headline informs us that:

The Great Western Railway service was cancelled at Redhill after the animals got on the train at Gomshall. 

Staff attempted to remove the animals but the squirrels "refused to leave" and the service later returned to Reading. 

A spokesperson for GWR said: "We can confirm that the 0854 Reading to Gatwick was terminated at Redhill after a couple of squirrels boarded the train at Gomshall without tickets, breaching railway byeclaws. 

"We attempted to remove them at Redhill, but one refused to leave and was returned to Reading to bring an end to this nutty tail."

In other rodent news, Cinammon, the escaped Telford capybara, has been located but not recaptured.

Jago Hazzard on the complicated history of Turnham Green

When I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) in the early 1980s, Piccadilly Line trains would stop at Turnham Green on Sundays, or at least for a part of them. There was a note to this effect on the London Transport Tube map.

So if I was coming back from a weekend in Market Harborough, I would change at Turnham Green, which added a little excitement to the journey. Would the train really stop?

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

Beavers and badgers. Badgers and beavers. It's all getting very confusing. How far this pair are correct in blaming Hegel for the societal organisation of the beavers and the impenetrability of T.H. Green I shall leave the philosophers to debate. In any event, Lord Bonkers is on record as preferring his brother, T.H. White.

The King of the Badgers is a character in the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, but the king who appears in the Bonkersverse - debating weighty matters underground - owes most to the badger in White's The Book of Merlyn. Let's hope Labour will reward his statesmanship by ending the badger cull.

Saturday

Feeling in need of a chinwag, I make my way to the royal chamber of the King of the Badgers, deep beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election. 

I find him in low spirits. His strategy of fighting the cull of his people through the courts while reining in the hotheads among the younger badgers has come to nothing. He is now inclined to let the young idea, as it were, shoot. 

Soon we are talking of the beavers, and the King suggests their guild-like organisation comes from reading Hegel, whom we agree is fundamentally unsound and responsible for making T.H. Green’s writing Such Hard Work. 

The King then tells me of a legend among the badgers that the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle is so pronounced because it was originally built by beavers, who were later driven from their home by usurping aristocrats. I shall make good use of this story next time I find myself talking to my new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails: it has The Ring Of Truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal
• Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

Shropshire zoo seeks runaway ‘beloved’ capybara

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges noted that the rodent in question is called cinnamon and has legged it from Telford's Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World. 

They added that if one of the dinosaurs had escaped then that would really have been a story.

Steve Winwood on working with Viv Stanshall

A reader sent me the link to this 2001 radio documentary about the great Viv Stanshall. As was inevitable in that era, it was presented by Stephen Fry.

Imagine my pleasure when Steve Winwood came on to talk about his songwriting collaboration with Stanshall. That's one of this blog's heroes talking about another.

I can see James MacCleary now the Rain has Gone: Lord Bonkers' foreword to the new Liberator Songbook

Journalists have been clutching their pearls for several days, but only now are Liberal Democrats gathering for the Conference Glee Club.

The event is nothing without a Liberator Songbook, and - or so the old brute tells me - a Liberator Songbook is nothing without a foreword by Lord Bonkers.

So here's the one he's written for this year's edition.

Bonkers Hall

Rutland

Tel. Rutland 7

Planning the Bonkers Hall International Arts Festival takes up much of my time over the summer, falling as it does just before the Liberal Democrat autumn conference. (For myself, I tend to fall at or immediately after the conference.)

This year’s programme featured the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who offered ‘An Evening of Aeolian Harmonies (no money returned)’, while the Well-Behaved Orphans put on their traditional gymnastic display. (Only three got over the wall this time.)

Earl Russell’s Big Band made a welcome return after many years, and the Sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Box offered their tribute to the Sex Pistols.

No, you don’t mess with those nuns. I shan’t forget the Mother Superior warning Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid London crime boss of the Sixties, that the convent was “her manor” and that she would “give a slap to anyone who got lairy”. You have to admit she’s got more go than the Revd Hughes.

And I found many talents within the greatly enlarged Lib Dem parliamentary party. Bobby Dean, for instance, enjoyed a successful career singing ballads (rather bland ballads, if I am honest) for white American teenagers until the Beatles changed everything. When I first met Roz Savage, by contrast, she was a member of an all-girl punk group.

Some songs, of course, were written about our MPs. ‘Olney the Lonely’ was occasioned by the writer’s sympathy for Sarah when she found herself joining such a small Commons group after winning her by-election. Johnny Nash, I believe, penned ‘I can see James MacCleary now the Rain has Gone’ after a showery canvassing session in Newhaven.

But enough from me. Enjoy the Glee Club and may you stay forever Claire Young.

Bonkers

John Wood: From silly-ass curate to world-weary genius

One of the great pleasures of Talking Pictures TV is spotting, with or without the aid of IMDb, British actors in their early years.

Take this vicar and silly-ass curate from the opening of Live Now Pay Later, a 1962 film that was shown the other day and is currently on the channel's online catch-up service. The vicar (on the left) is unmistakably Andrew Cruickshank, but who is his curate?

The answer is John Wood, a celebrated stage actor who paid the bills by taking small parts in a dozen British films of this era.

He then made an unexpected screen return, playing the world-weary genius Dr Stephen Falken, who has to be persuaded to try to attempt to save the world by Matthew Broderick, in the teen film WarGames.

I don't know how he came to be cast in a Hollywood film, but he was perfect for the part.

After that he appeared in a run of good films (Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ian McKellen's Richard III, The Madness of King George) and died in 2011 at the age of 81.

Live Now Pay Later, incidentally, tries so hard to entertain you that it becomes irritating. But you can see Ian Hendry (with hair) in the days when he got top billing, a miscast John Gregson and a generous handful of other British actors you can try to name.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

Quite who Lord Bonkers' scouts and agents are remains a mystery even to me, but there's no doubt that the old boy is very well informed.

The Rutlandshire trot-hound cropped up in one of the first of these diaries. It's a hunting dog noted for its stamina and very small ears - the latter mean that it cannot be made to fall into a deep sleep by its quarry reading left-wing pamphlets at it.

Friday

Labour members, my scouts tell me, are not happy with the early weeks of their government. Tipping buckets of cold water over old age pensioners and sticking out their tongues at Belgians is not what they thought they were signing up for. 

Conservative members, by contrast, are as happy as a Trot-hound with two tails because they are now attacking their real enemy: each other. Informed sources suggest their current leadership contest will come down to a fight between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch.

Jenrick, I am told, is a useful fellow to sit next to if you want a planning application approved, while Badenoch has been described as putting the ‘bad’ into Badenoch. Come to think of it, she’s put the ‘Enoch’ into Badenoch too.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal

The Joy of Six 1268

In an article stuffed with quotes from unnamed 'senior' Lib Dems, Harriet Symonds looks for possible future fault lines in our larger parliamentary party. Nimby vs Yimby? Tuition fees? Gender? Maybe we should stop using terms like Nimby and Yimby (and Terf and Gammon) - giving your opponents nicknames does nothing for the clarity of your thinking or your ability to win over uncommitted voters.

Sienna Rogers talks to Shockat Adam, the pro-Gaza Independent candidate who defeated Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South.

"The Government’s approach relies heavily on the private sector to deliver against its ambitions. But historically, direct public investment has been key: at the post-war housebuilding peak in 1968, nearly two-in-five homes were built through the public sector, compared to just under one-quarter of homes in 2023." The Resolution Foundation considers whether Labour will achieve its housing ambitions.

Anthony Burgess hated the Beatles but had more in common with them than he realised, argues Michael Shallcross.

Judy Stroud on the reintroduction of dormice to Rockingham Forest: "During the clearance of over 600 acres of the Purlieus between 1862 and 1868 dormice were sometimes found when men were grubbing up the tree roots.  No evidence of dormice was found there during the late 20th century but the wood met the criteria for a successful reintroduction. This took place in 2001 and monitoring by the Forestry Commission has shown a long-term success, with dispersal within the wood from the initial release site."

Bob Lynn introduces us to Mary Webb, the Shropshire novelist and poet whose work, steeped in nature and mysticism, found fame only after her untimely death.

Kiki Dee: Loving and Free

Kiki Dee is best known for her duet with Elton John Don't Go Breaking My Heart, which made number 1 in 1976, but she had been recording since the early Sixties.

Loving and Free was the title track from a 1973 album of hers, yet it wasn't issued as a single until 1976 - it was a double A side with Amoureuse, which I chose as my Sunday music video years ago.

When I remembered the song the other day, I was sure it came from my era of listening to Radio Luxemburg under the bedclothes, so maybe it got some play in 1973. But I doubt it was Tony Prince's Powerplay. Anyway, it still sounds good.

That wholesome image of Kiki Dee with a bicycle and basket reminds me of Felicity Kendall in Solo, one of her post Good Life sitcoms.

But if Kiki tried cycling in those 1973 flairs they'd have got caught in the chain.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal

"This stuff about the beavers is Dragging On A Bit," Lord Bonkers said to me. "Who wrote it?"

"That was you, sir. This is your diary."

"Humph. Should've told 'em something about Mr Asquith and Venetia Stanley. You could turn that story into a novel."

Thursday

The delightful Pippa arrives at the Hall and wastes no time in getting down to business. After listening to my concerns, she goes to talk to the beavers and is away simply hours. She comes back with the bones of an agreement, the long and short of which is that the beavers will agree to take on the maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal, but their lodge and lake will stay. Oh, and I can use their jacuzzi whenever I wish. 

Well, it’s not ideal, but it’s a good sight more than I achieved off my own bat, so I am minded to sign.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent

The railway wars come to Market Harborough

This mobile electronic billboard was parked in the Northampton Road this afternoon, and I later saw it driving down the High Street.

One of the big problems with the privatised railways is that they are, for the most part, monopolies. But if it's this much cheaper to travel to London from Rugby with London Northwestern Railway than to travel there from Market Harborough with EMR, then maybe it is a realistic alternative.

Your move, EMR.

Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale:

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation* of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar 'golden age' of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms."

I like Hamilton's take on the those women crime writers. There is rarely anything cosy about them - least of all about Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, predicated as they are on the theory that you can learn about every form of human depravity simply by observing life in an English village.

But Kind Hearts and Coronets is not a typical Ealing comedy, even if it's the best of them. Because there is little nastiness in these films: the criminals in The Lavender Hill Mob have our sympathy, while those in The Ladykillers are rendered harmless by their incompetence.

What the films tend to celebrate is the common good and its triumphs over individual ambition. This is seen at its clearest in Davy, a failed star vehicle for Harry Secombe, which is the last and probably the worse Ealing Comedy. In it, Secombe gives up his dream of an opera career to remain with his family's struggling variety act.

But then dreams of escape tended to come to nothing at Ealing, whether Alec Guinness's in The Lavender Hill Mob or those of a whole London district in Passport to Pimlico.

So I don't find the nastiness that Ruby Hamilton says she finds in the Ealing comedies. Am I missing something?

* 'Fetishising' would save one syllable and the rarer 'fetishing' would save two.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: In case they get peckish during Lent

Jonathan Meades says beaver tastes "like spaniel dipped in cod liver oil", so I don't see selling off the whole colony to a fishmonger as the way out of Lord Bonkers' troubles. You will say that he doesn't mention that possibility in this entry, but I know how the old brute's mind works.

Wednesday

What to do about the beavers? Back in the Sixties I might have asked Violent Bonham Carter’s boys to have a quiet word with them: “Nice dam you’ve got here. Pity if anything happened to it” – you know the sort of thing. But those days are gone, so I have instead been asking around to see who might be able to help. 

This morning I struck gold. It transpires that one of our new MPs from Cambridgeshire, Pippa Heylings, is expert at smoothing over the tensions that arise in communities when beavers are reintroduced, so I feel sure she will make them see reason. 

When I was picking the Revd Hughes’s brains the other day, he mentioned that our Roman Catholic friends count beavers as fish in case they get peckish during Lent. It sounded Rather Far Fetched, but when I phoned my old friend Father Alton he confirmed that it is the case.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers

The Lib Dems now have a local councillor in the Western Isles

The Liberal Democrats, says the Stornoway Gazette, have their first councillor on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the local authority that covers the Outer Hebrides.

Malcolm Macdonald, who represents the Stornoway North ward on Lewis, was elected as an Independent in the 2022 council election but has now adopted the Lib Dem label.

He told the newspaper:

“I am absolutely delighted to be representing the Western Isles as a Liberal Democrat councillor. As a party that champions communities and puts their needs first, they are a very natural fit for my own values.

“Whether it’s ferries, connectivity, health or population decline, people in the Western Isles feel that no one in government cares about the challenges in front of them. The SNP claim to be strong for Scotland, but they repeatedly ignore the issues that matter to people here.

“It doesn’t have to be like this. Liberal Democrats have a proud and long-standing tradition of standing up for rural communities. We are all about listening to people, understanding what they need and doing everything we can to make a difference for them. That’s exactly where my focus is as a Western Isles councillor."

There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers: The new Nottingham Broad Marsh

For 50 years or more, visitors to Nottingham have been funnelled through a bus station and a shopping centre if they wish to get from the railway station to the city centre.

I went to Nottingham today, partly for the pleasure of not doing that. Because the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre is no more. In its place is Nottingham's new Green Heart - an urban park and public space that is the first stage in the redevelopment of a significant proportion of the city centre.

And Broadmarsh seems to have become Broad Marsh as part of it.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My hereditary peer peers

"Beaver Castle" eh? I think I can see what's going to happen this week. 

Meanwhile, I am reminded that in the early days of these diaries Lord Bonkers wrote that the Duchess of Rutland "kindly showed me her Belvoir".

Tuesday

I have been touched by the number of people who have written to express their concern about my position if Starmer expels my hereditary peer peers from the House of Lords. Please do not upset yourselves: I hold a Rutland peerage, and thus under the Treaty of Oakham am guaranteed membership of the House of Lords in perpetuity. 

Sadly, the same treaty guarantees the pre-eminence in this county of the Duke of Rutland, even though he lives in Leicestershire. His home is at Belvoir Castle, which, by an irony I find in no way amusing, is pronounced ‘Beaver Castle’.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills

The last days of the Ilfracombe branch

I remember passing through Ilfracombe while walking the coastal path in the summer of 1988. Every bed-and-breakfast establishment had its prices in the window, trying to undercut the place next door. It was great for a walker on a limited budget, but not a sign of a prosperous resort.

My theory at the time was that the town had not recovered from the closure of its branch railway from Barnstaple. Certainly, reading about it now, I find that line generated lots of holiday traffic almost to its closure in 1970, but attracted too few passengers apart from that. 

The last stretch of the line into Barnstaple had become part of the coastal path by 1988. I can remember sitting outside the fence of RAF Chivenor listening to Test Match Special - every time the radar transmitter turned towards me there was interference with the reception.

It was the summer of 1988, so England were losing horribly to the West Indies. I fancy the test I was listening to was the one in which Chris Cowdrey (son of Colin and godson of the chairman of selectors, Peter May) captained the team.

His selection was described at the time by the great Matthew Engel as "a combination of nepotism and wishful thinking". Cowdrey fils did not prove a success and, after going down with a minor injury, was bundled out of the team, never to play for England again.

Where were we? 

The video above, narrated by Victor Thompson, shows the last days of the Ilfracombe branch and tells us something of its history. Thompson does have a thing about nasty accidents on level crossings, but it's a good watch.

As a bonus to make up for all that cricket, here's footage of the same line shot in 1898.

Minister for police’s purse stolen – at policing conference

The Guardian, which tells us that Diana Johnson was giving speech in which she said UK was in grip of an "epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting", wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Lord Bonkers Diary: The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills

Liberator 425 has been posted on the magazine's website in time for the Liberal Democrat Conference. You can download it free of charge.

With more Lib Dem MPs than ever, we have four writing for Liberator about how they see their role and what the party should do next.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it's time to begin another week with Lord Bonkers.

Monday

You find me seated in a deckchair, surveying my gardens and listening to the midsummer hum of insects (and to Meadowcroft grumbling as he works). Life is good: Freddie and Fiona are leaving me in peace (no more demands that I go canvassing in St Kilda) and Matron and the Well-Behaved Orphans have departed for their accustomed holiday at Trescothick Bay in Cornwall. 

There is only one fly in this fragrant ointment: a colony of beavers has turned up and is making free with my demesne. Take this lake I am sitting beside: it was, until last Thursday, my croquet lawn. Why, they’ve even rigged themselves up a jacuzzi! 

Now, I’m all in favour of rewilding – this is, I believe, the only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills – but one does like to be asked. Yet when I went to have it out with the beavers, they insisted I speak only to their elected spokesman, and his answer to everything was to say he had “the backing of the entire lodge” and refuse to give an inch.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Helen Morgan makes the case for reopening the line from Oswestry to Gobowen

Helen Morgan was granted a Westminster Hall debate today on the reopening of the railway from Gobowen to Oswestry.

BBC News gives the background to it:

The restoration of the link was approved last year as part of the Restoring Your Railway fund, but the new government confirmed it was cancelling the scheme.

That initiative would have funded 38 railway projects in total.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the cuts were needed to address a £21.9bn black hole in public finances and the Department for Transport would assess each individual project as part of a review.

The previous government had announced in October the Oswestry scheme would be fully funded to completion.

Helen, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, made the case for reopening in her debate:

Poor public transport removes opportunity. It hinders young people, limiting their options for further and higher education and restricting their access to culture and leisure. In short, barriers to mobility are barriers to social mobility. During a recent visit to the jobcentre in Oswestry, the brilliant staff there told me that the No. 1 barrier to people accessing work is poor public transport. 

Meanwhile, I have spoken to businesses in Oswestry that have reported real difficulties in recruiting. They need to be able to attract people to work from a much wider area than Oswestry and not just those who have access to a private car. That means we are in the ridiculous situation where employers cannot recruit and jobseekers cannot find jobs to match their skills because of the same problem of poor public transport.

In reply the transport minister Lillian Greenwood talked about the "£21.9bn black hole" and bus networks.

It's true the last government's Restoring Your Railway fund, which was talked up as a way of "undoing Beeching" by the ultras in a fit of nostalgic post-referendum euphoria, was never properly financed. But this government comes across as having little idea of how to achieve the growth it talks about beyond a promise of "stability".

And good public transport services look like a way of promoting growth rather than an obstacle to it.

The Joy of Six 1267

John Harris says the government needs to start giving people hope and quickly: "Among all the numbers, there is a huge story here about the everyday reality of people’s lives. What I would call ambient austerity – litter everywhere, overgrown grass verges, potholed roads, rusty slides and swings – is now deeply ingrained. It sits at the heart of the cynicism towards politics and politicians that is intensified by social media. It has also been a sizeable part of most of the political ruptures of the past 14 years, not least Brexit – and, at the election, the way that Reform UK seized on so many resentments in traditional Labour heartlands that it often finished second."

Continued austerity is a danger to national security, warns Tom Woolmore.

John Stewart on the history of the feeding of schoolchildren by the state: "Local activists revealed that recipients might be subject to deliberately humiliating treatment or be given sub-standard food.  Frank Field ... was thus moved to write reports with titles such as The Stigma of Free School Meals (1974) and Free School Meals: The Humiliation Continues (1977)."

Paul Salveson remembers Britain's biggest mass trespass in support of the right to roam, which was held at Winter Hill in 1996.

"As a star of numerous revues and sketch shows, she played just about every conceivable kind of female character, and made each one of them sound distinctive, amusing and, in their own peculiar way, believable. Her sheer range, and comic craft, were truly remarkable." Graham McCann celebrates the career of Betty Marsden.

For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD." But what is a cockatrice? Seana Graham finds out.

Tory MPs stride out in the wrong direction

OK, there's more to political leadership than having the right strategy, and Mel Stride has never been the most charismatic of politicians, but I can't help noticing that Conservative MPs have just voted out the leadership candidate who has so far made the most sense.

Here he is being quoted by the Standard yesterday:

"And what that is going to need is somebody that can lead our party over months and over years to get the right policy platform together that we can unite around to reach out to those voters that we lost to Reform, but equally not to forget those at the centre, those that we lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats."

It's not just Tory members who are growing weirder, Tory MPs are too.

The locomotive shed at Snailbeach

This is the locomotive shed for the Snailbeach District Railways, which you will find among the preserved mining buildings at Snailbeach. The line took lead ore away for smelting and brought coal to power the mining complex. The last locomotives ran here in 1946. 

I've visited this site many times, but I'd not noticed before this summer the loco shed is roofed with corrugated iron, the vernacular building material of the Shropshire lead-mining country. (Of course, the shed may once have had a slate roof.) The way buildings were thrown up in the mid 19th century gave its townships the feeling of the Wild West.

The Lucy Letby Inquiry and expressing concern about trial verdicts

Lady Justice Thirlwall's inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester while Lucy Letby was employed there opened today. 

Letby is a former neonatal nurse who has been sentenced to 15 whole-life terms after she was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. There has since been widespread concern about the safety of these convictions.

I was taken aback by Lady Thirlwall's remarks on this concern, as quoted by the Guardian:

"So far as I’m aware it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial. Parts of the evidence have been selected and criticised as has the conduct of the defence at trial, about which those defence lawyers can say nothing.

"All of this noise has caused additional enormous stress for the parents who have suffered far too much."

Setting the condition that you must have been at the trial before you can express concern at a verdict would have disbarred the campaigners against the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four.

Expressing concern at a verdict seems bound to involve criticising some of the evidence presented but not all of it, and dismissing such concerns as "noise" is surely too dismissive. We lay people are allowed to have opinions about the British legal system that go beyond mute admiration of the state of perfection to which it has been brought.

If you want to know more about what the Thirlwall Inquiry will and won't be looking at, I recommend the video by Alan Robertshaw above.

And, while I'm not suggesting anything here about the verdicts on Lucy Letby, I can also recommend the book Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust Prosecutions by David C. Anderson and Nigel P. Scott, which I've just written a short review of for Liberator.

Trust re-formed to fund repairs to Ludlow's town walls

In Ludlow last month I saw the failure, 12 years after a stretch collapsed, to repair its town walls as a metaphor for national malaise. (The photo above shows a section in a better state of repair.)

Now BBC News reports that the charitable trust that used to care for Ludlow's town walls is re-forming and will begin raising money to assist local authorities in carrying out the repairs:

"This blot on our landscape has been left unattended and it's now presenting a risk of further collapse," claimed Colin Richards, chair of the trust.

"What we're trying to do as a community is to come forward through the Ludlow Town Walls Trust to say look...we can help as a community."

Mr Richards was responsible for the wall for 24 years as a conservation officer with the former South Shropshire District Council.

The report also touches on the dispute over who is responsible for the upkeep of the walls:

The section of wall is owned by the Parish Church of St Laurence, Ludlow, as part of the Church of England estate.

However, responsibility for repair lies with Ludlow Town Council, according to the parish and Shropshire Council.

Ludlow Town Council has not responded to the BBC's request for comment, but earlier this year said it was still taking legal advice.