Bear 'not out the woods' after brain surgery

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. Congratulations to them and best wishes to Boki.

Tory Reform Group refuses to back Badenoch or Jenrick

The Tory Reform Group (TRG) issued a statement today saying it will not be backing either of the candidates for Conservative leader being put to party members in a ballot.

I don't know how unusual this is for the TRG, but their statement is strongly worded:

As the home of One Nation Conservatism since 1975, the TRG is committed to being radically moderate, values-driven, and focused on the future. Throughout the contest, we have sought to engage extensively with all the leadership campaigns in order to understand the views and approaches of the candidates. Unfortunately, we have been consistently disappointed by the lack of engagement from the two candidates chosen by MPs. 

TRG members were consulted throughout the process, and the results clearly show that neither candidate has secured widespread support from the majority of our membership. Both have used rhetoric and focused on issues which are far and away from the Party at its best, let alone the One Nation values we cherish and uphold. Therefore, the Board of the TRG has unanimously concluded that we are unable to endorse either candidate. ...

While the TRG will continue to advocate for those values as part of the Conservative family, we will do so by urging the final two candidates to recognise where the values of the British people lie, and to work for positive change rather than try to divide us. 

Look our for speculation - well founded or not - about moderate Conservative MPs joining the Liberal Democrats.

Roz Savage to table Climate and Nature Bill in the Commons

Roz Savage, the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds, has chosen the Climate and Nature Bill as her private member’s bill. She finished third in the recent ballot for these bills, meaning she has a realistic chance of getting legislation on to the statute book.

If passed, reports the Independent, the Bill would compel the government to adopt climate and nature targets, including "limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels".

Ministers would also have to draw up a strategy with yearly targets in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, halt oil and gas exploration and imports, and reverse nature decline so it is "visibly and measurably on the path to recovery.

The Independent report also quotes Roz:

"I’m really, really feeling that groundswell," Ms Savage ... told the PA news agency, adding she had already spoken with Labour MPs who have indicated their support.

"Every day really does count and it feels like since this Bill was first tabled, there’s been such a growing awareness of these twin crises of climate and nature that … its time has come.

"There’s such public demand, if my mailbag is anything at all to go by, I have had so much correspondence from people urging me to pick up the Climate and Nature Bill."

Similar bills were promoted in the last parliament by the former Green leader Caroline Lucas and the Labour MPs Olivia Blake and Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley), but none became law.

The Joy of Six 1276

Where do all those young right-wing media commentators spring from? Olly Haynes exposes the talent agencies funded by American fossil fuel billionaires.

Joe Ware on the campaign by Chris Packham and other celebrities who have challenged the Church Commissioners to rewild 30 per cent of their estate to "give British wildlife the salvation that it desperately needs".

Rebecca Jennings says that whether you want to be a published author or professional artist, you have to market yourself of social media: "Self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to 'build a platform'; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream - working for yourself and making money doing what you love."

"Although the judge has no sympathy for Black Power, he can’t help to some extent at least to be won over by Darcus. The courtroom just erupts in laughter when Darcus and the judge are trading quips." The Mangrove Nine were black Londoners tried for protesting against police harassment in 1970. They were acquitted, marking the first acknowledgment of racial bias in the police. Now, reports Richard Sudan, a recording of Darcus Howe's closing remarks in his own defence has been found.

Pat Nevin remembers his hero Pele: "Then there was the lay-off for the fourth goal in the final, scored by the captain Carlos Alberto. The build-up is phenomenal, and then it comes to Pele. He doesn’t just pass it, it’s the languid way in which he knows exactly where his team-mate is and he just strokes the ball so comfortably."

"Fiction discourse is a wreck, and we can't look away." Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi offer a glossary of bullshit writing terms.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Leonard Rossiter and at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester

There's no end in sight to the Guardian's commemoration of Leonard Rossiter's career. A 1969 interview with him by Terry Coleman from 1969 has appeared on the newspaper's website.

It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:

In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.

And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.

I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:

Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...

The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently. 

Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.

Sausage company launches free rural bus service

We have our Headline of the Day - and a possible solution to the lack of public transport in the countryside - thanks to BBC News.

Manuela Perteghella, Stratford-upon-Avon and John Profumo

Liberal Democrat Voice is doing sterling work posting the maiden Commons speeches of all those new Lib Dem MPs. It's a particularly valuable feature if you write a satirical column about the party that purports to be the diary of an Edwardian peer from Rutland who has somehow survived into the 21st century.

One of the new MPs featured today is Manuela Perteghella from Stratford-on-Avon, who reminded the house:

Although I am proud to be the first female MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, I am not the first to bring Italian heritage to the role. That distinction belongs to another of my predecessors, John Profumo, who beat me to it - although I plan on a much quieter stay in the history books.

This gives me a chance to recommend Bringing the House Down, David Profumo's book about his parents - John Profumo and the actress Valerie Hobson.

Accounts of the Profumo Affair often suggest that John Profumo was a future prime minister whose political career was ended by scandal. But David makes it clear that his father was not a good minister and had done well to get as far as he had.

But John kept his sense of humour through it all. As Tim Adams' Guardian review of Bringing the House Down records:

He recounts a telling little story of wheeling his father into Edward Heath's memorial service not long before his death: 'It's the great and the good - and us,' Profumo senior noted.

Scottish Lib Dems question use of live facial recognition technology

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From Scottish Legal News:

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have filed 40 parliamentary questions on Police Scotland’s proposed use of live facial recognition in a bid to force the Scottish government to explain how the measures are compatible with equalities and civil liberties concerns.

The party’s justice spokesperson, Liam McArthur MSP, asked the questions after Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell vowed to utilise artificial intelligence technology and live facial recognition technology as part of the service’s forthcoming six-year strategy, despite police services south of the border facing legal challenges over their usage.

Campaigners have identified a series of problems with the technology, from the possibility of misuse to the propensity for errors, particularly in misidentifying ethnic minorities and women.

Liam McArthur has spoken to the website:

"I am concerned that decisions that dramatically reframe the relationship between the police and the public are being treated as an inevitable consequence of the march of technology.

"There needs to be a compelling need, an appropriate legal basis and a proper public debate before the police can consider moving forward with measures like this. That simply has not happened.

"If the Scottish government share these concerns, then they have been awfully quiet about it. Certainly they are concerns that the Justice Committee heard loudly and clearly in the previous session of parliament.

"Ministers and senior officers need to set out why these decisions are being taken and answer for the consequences."

Liberty has a page on police use of live facial recognition technology with links to numerous briefings and resources.

The Joy of Six 1275

'We cannot sit by as the left denigrate our history and pull down our monuments,' said Kemi Badenoch last week: she and her colleagues’ wilful neglect of museums shows that such talk is absurd." John Harris is angry about the assault on local museums since the election of David Cameron in 2010.

Erica Lamberg introduces to the concept of 'resenteeism', where lack of advancement opportunities, a toxic corporate culture, an excessive workload and feelings of burnout lead to people feeling trapped in jobs they do not want. Not surprisingly, this affects productivity.

More evidence that nothing works properly in Britain any more because it's underfunded: We Love Stornoway reports on the end of the tourism service on the Western Isles.

Simon Matthews looks at the 1949 film Now Barabbas Was a Robber, which was based on a play by William Douglas Home: "There are flashbacks to their lives before jail, the corrupting effect of the war is shown (a topic of much thought at the time, with talk of crime waves and a much readier resort to violence) and, indeed much of it, with its succession of interior scenes and wardens, plays like a POW film. The dialogue, and acting, are impressive."

Jon Hotten remembers Brian Close, the controversial Yorkshire and England captain: "The length of time that Richards and Botham spent talking about Brian Close spoke of his influence on the game and on their lives."

"Witchcraft, and the threat of such could be found from the collieries of East Shropshire through to the Clun and the distant agrarian places, whose names feel like an ode to Middle earth. Witchcraft was the hidden threat, the force that you could not control but also that which you turned to for comfort, or help." Amy Boucher on an important aspect of the county's social history and folklore.

Jago Hazzard on the failure of Ludgate Hill station

Ludgate Hill station? Wikipedia gives the basics and Jago's video gives you so much more:

Ludgate Hill was a railway station in the City of London that was opened on 1 June 1865 by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway as its City terminus. It was on Ludgate Viaduct (a railway viaduct) between Queen Victoria Street and Ludgate Hill, slightly north of St. Paul's station (now called Blackfriars station) on the site of the former Fleet Prison. 

North of Ludgate Hill station, Ludgate Viaduct continued to the Snow Hill tunnel to connect with the then recently opened Metropolitan Railway south of Farringdon station to enable main-line trains to run between north and south London.

Passenger services through the tunnel ended in 1916, after which services ran only the few hundred yards (metres) to Holborn Viaduct station which had opened in 1874. Ludgate Hill became little used because of its proximity to the Holborn Viaduct and St. Paul's stations, and on 3 March 1929 Ludgate Hill was closed. 

The platform buildings remained derelict until they were demolished in the 1960s but the island platform remained until 1974. Remains of the street-level buildings and traces of the platform and staircase lasted until the whole station area and viaduct were demolished in 1990.

It's remarkable how long the Snow Hill tunnels lay unused.

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

Sue Gray: Beware of beat-sweeteners and source-greasers

Duncan Robinson, the political editor of The Economist, was never convinced by all those articles praising Sue Gray:

Her flaws as a civil servant. such as a near-sociopathic desire for secrecy, are brushed over, and minor talents are hailed. "She's pretty ruthless at timekeeping," noted one portrait. Often the tone is of a primary-school teacher sending a report to a parent: "One Labour figure said Gray had been a good listener."

There's a term or two for this sort of journalism, as Timothy Noah wrote when it was the team around the newly elected President Obama who were being enthusiastically profiled:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

Armed with these concepts, judge for yourself the worth of an article that appeared on the Guardian website a couple of hours ago:

Who is in Keir Starmer’s top team at No 10 after Sue Gray resignation?

Half Man Half Biscuit: Westward Ho! Massive Letdown

Reaching it a few days after Ilfracombe, I too found Westward Ho! a let down. You expect more from a resort that was named after a novel and has an exclamation mark.

But what's going on in the song? It's clearly a dream - "Why is Frank Ifield jumping up and down on a windmill?" - but where does the dream begin and where does it end? Was his girl married to a plasterer from Bacup all along? Does he even have a girl?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I will share this from a Half Man Half Biscuit site:

I am presently employed by an Examinations Board. Immediately after perusing this thread during my lunch break I opened a package containing the GCSE Geography controlled assessment work of a candidate from the South West. The piece of work in question was entitled “Westward Ho!”

It further transpires that the candidate barely scraped a grade F. What a letdown.

GUEST POST No sign of an end to defections in local government

Thanks to Augustus Carp for his latest bulletin on local councillors changing parties, though I'll have him know that I lived in Hemel Hempstead between the ages of 3 and 13.

Well, it's been three months now since the General Election, and in Parliament we have seen several expulsions from the Labour Party together with a rather sudden resignation. In my innocence I had assumed that people would have left their political parties before the election, rather than in the immediate aftermath, but the evidence shows that resignations have continued apace amongst our local councillors.

Since July, there have been 17 defections from the Conservative Party, 13 from Labour, 17 from the Lib Dems and 6 from the Nationalists. The net beneficiaries have been the Greens (up 3) and Reform UK (up 12). The balancing figure is described, perhaps not accurately enough, as 'Independents', who have picked up the remaining 37.  

If I had more time and patience I would no doubt try to do a bit of analysis of the various independents. I am using the category to cover ratepayers, residents associations, localists, single-issue hobbyhorse jockeys and people who are incapable of working within any sort of group structure, and many more besides.  

Some councils have one or more competing groups who fall into the Independent category. Note that councillors sometimes become Independent as a sort of casualty clearing station, where they reside after resigning from A before seeing the light and joining Party B.  

Of the 103 defections, only five councillors have made a direct swap between parties - 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Tory to Green, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour and 1 from Labour to Lib Dem.  

One trend that seems prevalent at the moment is a disproportionately high number of defections in Wales. Since July, 14 councillors have changed their colours – 5 from Labour, 4 from the Conservatives, 3 Independents (who have transmogrified into a Reform group in Torfaen) and a Liberal Democrat.  The situation is similar in Scotland – 4 each from the Tories and the Nationalists, 3 from Labour and 1 Independent. 

The dramatic move for the Lib Dems was the mass defection of eight female councillors in Dacorum, over allegations of sexism and bullying. 

It's a matter of conjecture whether personal grievances or political ideologies are the main reason for councillor defections – there might be a doctoral thesis in it for someone with a high pain threshold.  

Incidentally, the reason the local authority is called Dacorum is to prevent the residents of Berkhamsted from having to say that they live in Hemel Hempstead.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Al Pinkerton: "The Chagossians have been dispossessed again"

Al Pinkerton, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Surrey Heath, posted a thread on Twitter last night that gave a perspective that had been missing from the day's heated debate on the Chagos Islands. It was that of the Islanders themselves.

Here is the full thread:

A few weeks ago, I became a member of the Chagos APPG, Vice Chair of the APPG on Gibraltar and the Secretary of the Falklands APPG. It would be fair to say I have more than a passing interest in U.K. Overseas Territories and a fair bit of accumulated knowledge.

A few key points:

1. The Chagos decision has no legal bearing whatsoever on the sovereignty of the Falklands, Gibraltar or the U.K. Sovereign Bases. The prominent conservative commentators who are opportunistically making that claim play into the hands of counter-claimants.

2. It was the Tories (Truss and Cleverly, in particular) who began the process of negotiating away the Chagos islands following the 2019 ICJ advisory + the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Cries of “weak, weak, weak” are deeply hypocritical.

3. While the U.K.-Mauritius agreement announced this week is consistent with international law, it is, in my opinion, a disgraceful abandonment of the Chagossian people, who have been serially failed by the U.K. since the 1960s.

4. Dispossessed and forcibly displaced from their islands by the U.K. in the 1960s-70s, Chagossians have now been dispossessed again through the bizarre spectacle of the ICJ giving force to a kind of ‘judicial colonialism’ by Mauritius.

5. The U.K.-Mauritius deal may be a “triumph of diplomacy” (as Biden has apparently claimed), but it’s also a distasteful reminder that, in 2024, the rights of a people to self-determine their future can be still be merrily set aside for the maintenance of western geo-strategy.

6. MPs should be given time to scrutinise and debate this decision next week. The right of Chagossians (who are UK citizens, or have the right to be) to determine their own future deserves to be heard in Westminster. Anything less risks legalised colonialism by the back door.

Owen Bowcott has detailed the Chagos Islanders long struggle for justice in an article for the Guardian.

As so often, it's the continuities between the Conservative and Labour approaches to this question that strike you, not the differences. 

Morecambe and Wise and Leonard Rossiter

Following on from my post earlier today about Leonard Rossiter, here he is on the 1978 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show.

Stage presence is a strange thing. With Eric and Ernie, it was always Eric you watched. But here, right from the start, you can't take your eyes off Rossiter.

Welcome to The Shropshire Witches Podcast

Good news for lovers of the Shropshire supernatural: the first edition of The Shropshire Witches Podcast has gone live. 

Its writers and presenters, Alix Chidley-Uttley and Amy Boucher, warn us to expect witches, folklore, hauntings and all things with a superstitious and murderous history.

The first episode features severed penises, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General and a misogynistic king.

"In a very real sense Leonard Rossiter is with us here today"

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There's something about appearing in a successful situation comedy that makes an actor immortal. Leonard Rossiter is still a living presence to those who remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp, yet it's now 40 years since he died.

But he was far more than a sitcom actor, as the Guardian's superb survey of his career makes clear. He was a peerless stage actor and, because the best directors recognised his worth, he has a habit of turning up in films where you don't expect to see him.

I saw Rossiter in his final stage role as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, though I've forgotten how long before his death this was.

Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult, but I suspect that, as the Guardian article suggests, this was because he was a perfectionist about his own performance and expected no less from those around him.

When I talked to the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death, he said Rossiter had been a wonderful man. (Murray directed a Manchester production of Loot that created new interest in the play after it had bombed on its first appearance in the West End.)

I mentioned Rossiter's difficult reputation, saying something like: "He turned up for the first rehearsal word perfect and expected everyone else to be too." Murray, ever the director, bristled and asked: "What's wrong with that?"

Oh, and my title here is based on something the vicar said from the pulpit when Reggie Perrin was obliged to attend his own memorial service.

The Joy of Six 1274

Anthony Broxton looks back to Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference - and gives us a sense of the leadership the Conservatives now need but won't get: "In just one passage of speech, Kinnock flipped the trajectory of the party and, most importantly, the dynamics of party conference on its head. The left - for so long used to a monopoly on the righteous anger of leadership betrayal - was now being told to wear their own failures of the working class."

"A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbours." Anne Applebaum says Russia must be defeated.

"It is now indisputable that companies rigged safety tests with the complicity of the testing authorities, that politicians refused to act on safety concerns because to do so might have obstructed deregulation, that a social landlord which loathed its tenants ignored and concealed fire safety notices." James Butler reads the report of the Grenfell Inquiry.

Marlow Bushman reports that red squirrels are repopulating Aberdeen city centre.

"Few authors manage to publish bestsellers in one decade, let alone six. Agatha Christie managed to accomplish that feat, selling enormous quantities of her books throughout her career. Christie’s popularity kept growing throughout her life, but the settings of her novels changed with the times. When many people think of Christie’s books, they think of the interwar period, country estates, and quaint English villages; but during the 1960s Christie’s stories don’t fit these templates at all." Christie in the 1960s looks at her novels from that decade.

Books on the Line on the Crumlin Viaduct and the filming there of the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren film Arabesque.

The 'Silk Road' is a myth: Trade with the East went by sea and India was at its heart

In the course of his review of William Dalrymple's The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World in the London Review of Books last month, Ferdinand Mount quotes a passage from a book by Warwick Ball:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. 

Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. 

Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

That is from Ball's Rome in the East, which was published in 1999. William Dalrymple, according to Mount, takes a similar view:

He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story.

Dominika the roving Braybrooke skunk is found again - in Corby

Remember Dominika the Braybrooke skunk who, last month, escaped from her Braybrooke home and was recaptured around the corner from me?

I didn't tell you at the time, because it was too upsetting, but she escaped again shortly after she got home. 

But now there's good news again. Here's HFM News:

A pet skunk missing from Braybrooke has been found safe and well over 10 miles away in Corby after spending five weeks on the run.

Dominika escaped from owner Jayne McLaughlin’s home last month and had not been seen since a sighting in Market Harborough the following week.

The animal was spotted around a bin area in Hooke Close in Corby and after the sighting was shared on Facebook, Jayne was alerted and went straight to the area armed with some food.

There are lots of websites saying that skunks can make good pets, but none mentions wanderlust.

Anyway, this childhood favourite of mine sounds as though it might be a tribute to Dominika - sort of - so take it away, sisters.

Woodhead railway tunnels to Hadfield today

I first saw the Woodhead route - the lost railway from Sheffield to Manchester - in the summer of 1978. In those days Sheffield to Huddersfield trains used it to reach Penistone, running through the derelict Sheffield Victoria station on the way and also taking sweeping curves about the valley of the Don.

At Penistone you could watch a constant stream of goods trains taking coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield to a power station at Widnes or returning empty.

The class 76 locomotives were unique to this line and you could tell they had been designed in the 1930s, before the war put a temporary stop to electrification.

And I did manage to ride on the whole route shortly before it closed. In the winter of 1980/1 the Hope Valley line, the alternative way to Manchester that all Sheffield trains now use, closed for engineering works on Sundays and passenger services were diverted via Woodhead. I can still remember coasting past the reservoirs you see in the video on the way down to Manchester.

This is an excellent video from Trekking Exploration, showing the remains of the line between Woodhead and Hadfield today as well as some archive footage and photos of its last days.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The new political season has begun. What should Lib Dem strategy be in this brave new world? Is there a policy you would like to see us adopt? Any heretical thoughts you want to confess?

You're welcome to share your ideas in a guest post for Liberal England. 

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do get in touch first.

And, as you may have noticed, I'm happy to cover topics far beyond the Lib Dems and British politics.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• So far this year, 49 councillors have left the Tories and 42 have left Labour - Augustus Carp
• Singing the songs of the Cambrian Railway - Eric Loveland Heath
• Councillors changing party: general election update - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems achieved a wide and remarkably deep success - Alex Folkes
• The Lib Dems must meet the challenge of the Greens in the new political landscape - Anselm Anon
• This blog is not suitable for kids - Laurence Warner
• The future’s bright, the future’s orange - Stuart Whomsley
• An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough? - Stuart Whomsley
• The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club - Jo Colley
• An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart Whomsley