Our History Underfoot – like and subscribe, my children, like and subscribe – follows the course of the River Leen through Nottingham. Just as in John Rogers' London river walks, we are taken to parts of the city we wouldn't normally see.
Except that I have been to some of these places. To prove it, here are my photographs of the railway bridge – I was surprised at how low it was, but didn't guess the reason – and the start of the Tinker's Leen beside the Nottingham Canal.
"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.
Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."
John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.
"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.
David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."
This is fun. A compilation of 11 short clips of Kenneth Williams in films that aren't Carry Ons.
Williams, as he frequently pointed out on Round the Horne when he wasn't being properly serviced, was classically trained. When he was young he was highly regarded as an actor, and Maggie Smith acknowledged him as an influence on her own work.
Twenty years ago, I was in Shropshire during the 2006 World Cup and I can remember St George's flags in the upstairs windows of houses in some very leafy streets in Shrewbury. I expect the children of the house demanded them for their bedroom windows. This year in Market Harborough, there's nothing.
It looks as though the far right has put us off our national flag by making it a symbol their thuggish politics. They couldn't be more unpatriotic if they tried.
Writing about Blue Labour in Liberator at the start of year, I suggested that:
Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.
That makes him a modernist when set against Al Carns, judging by the defence minister's resignation statement in the Commons today.
Here's how Carns began:
As honourable members know, I came into politics for one reason. That was to enact change.
But to be able to work out where you’re going, we must realise where we have come from. The Labour party I joined is one that was chiselled out of the mines of the north-east. It was hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast. And it was forged in the factories of the industrial revolution.
Calloused hands, sore backs, people who did a hard day’s graft and asked for one thing in return – a government that has their back.
That’s the tradition I serve in this house, and it’s a tradition that shaped that decision I took last week.
Commercial shipbuilding had largely disappeared from Britain before Carns was born in 1980 – what remains is almost all in the defence sector. Brian Potter has mapped its demise:
Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90 per cent, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6 per cent to less than 1 per cent.
British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatised yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01 per cent of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.
Potter's whole article is worth reading. It provides evidence for the view that many of Britain's economic problems stem from the fact that our managers aren't very good.
Returning to Carns's speech, coal mining in the North East of England reached its peak in 1923, with the last deep mine in the region closing in 2005. And the Industrial Revolution is generally reckoned to have begun in the middle of the 18th century.
If these are really Carns's politics, then they have nothing to do with Labour's voters and members or with the British working class today. That class, forced to exist on temporary work and zero-hours contracts, are the very people who would be hurt by his enthusiasm for yet more welfare cuts.
So when Carns went on to talk about modernising defence, you feared he was going to demand that eight Dreadnoughts be built or call for an improved flintlock for the infantry.
In fact he had sensible things about the need to grasp how warfare is changing, which means we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't believe the first part of his statement either.
But he's not the only Labour politician who, when asked to explain it, makes their attachment to the party sound like a form of ancestor worship.
The notorious gender-fluid London gang boss of the Sixties gets a mention in a post from last year on the Herstmonceux Castle website.
BBC’s Fake or Fortune here at the Castle
On Monday, 21st July, viewers were treated to a fascinating episode of Fake or Fortune, much of which was filmed here at Herstmonceux Castle.
We thought Dylan and Claire acquitted themselves brilliantly on camera in the garden and amongst the archives.
The episode provided insights into a painting, seemingly by Winston Churchill, of his wife Clementine, as they were staying at Hertsmonceux Castle together with his mother and Violent Bonham Carter, as guests of Claude Lowther, in the summer of 1916.
I mentioned this to Lord Bonkers. He said that if Violent says a painting is kosher, it's prudent to agree with him.
"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.
Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.
"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.
"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.
Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."
It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.
My dad plays banjo - he had immersed himself in the Glasgow folk scene of the late 1960s, which was a hotbed of political fervour as well as music. When he left Glasgow and moved to Oban, he brought with him that interest in Irish and Scottish music, and a lot of the political affiliation within it. There were references from Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, as well as Irish republicanism, the Easter Rising, groups like the Dubliners, Planxty - all of which was politically charged.My mum is from Donegal. My dad is Scottish but his paternal grandfather was Irish, from Tyrone. I could feel that my bones were Irish. The Irish political situation was pretty full-on at that time. We would travel to see my family in Donegal and travel through the north of Ireland and experience all that tension. It was tangible, there was a war zone just across the water.
Mangersta Beach is a track from his 2006 album Sirius.
Kitty Melrose interviews Nova Reid about the creeping spread of book censorship in the UK. Reid says: "Non-fiction books about racism written to help readers learn about the topic and explore approaches to reducing racial injustice are labelled 'racist' as the reason for their removal. By closing discussion of racial injustice, one perpetuates the systemic harms of racism. If injustice for one group is dismissed and ignored, it gives license for other social iniquities to be continued too."
"Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative." Greg Constantine takes us to the Oklahoma communities gutted by ICE.
Larue Leglise and James Scott Vandeventer look at the barriers facing community energy projects in the Outer Hebrides, including ageing turbines and an application process that favours large-scale projects.
Mathew Lyons reviews Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: "Childhood stories and myths suffuse the book: Nonesuch is steeped in Edwardiana, and not always charmingly so. Spufford's world takes the overlap between Nazism and the occult seriously, and the antecedents of both lay in the esotericism of the late-19th and early-20th century. The Edwardian imagination wasn’t all treasure-packed attics, cosy burrows and curious rabbit holes."
"Of all the medieval women I have researched and written about, Aethelflaed is by far my favorite." Susan Abernethy is an Aethelflaed, Lady of Mercia, stan.
You can watch Out of True for free on the British Film Institute Site, and The Snake Pit is not hard to find online.
The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly
Olivia de Havilland is sitting on a bench in the sun. We hear a man asking her questions, de Havilland’s thoughts and then her replies. The camera pans a little, but we still don’t see the man. Suddenly a young woman is in shot, talking to her. Then we hear the voice of an older woman calling them both in.
They’re in an institution, but what kind? Seeing some open balconies with bars on the upper storeys, de Havilland decides it’s a zoo. Once inside, she fears it’s a prison. “How did I get here?” A kindly man tells her not to be afraid. She is reassured and explains she is a novelist, in the prison for one day and now it’s time for her to go home. The man asks what her name is and she finds she does not know. She’s in a mental hospital.
This is the opening of the 1948 Hollywood film The Snake Pit, which tells the story of de Havilland’s recovery thanks to the gentle psychotherapy of Dr Kik – her problems turn out to originate in early childhood trauma. How much of his reputation did Freud owe to Hollywood? His work suggested stories whose endings were as surprising and as neat as that of any detective story.
Dr Kik, it seems worth recording, was played by the British Jewish actor Leo Genn. Before the war he combined a stage and screen career with work as a barrister. His last forensic employment was investigating and prosecuting the war crimes committed at Belsen.
The ward from which patients can go home is Ward 1, but de Havilland falls foul of a nurse jealous of the attention the doctor pays her and finds herself dispatched to the most distant back ward of all, the snake pit of the title. There she is forced into a cold bath and then into a straitjacket.
******
De Havilland is rescued by her kindly psychiatrist and eventually taken home by a model American husband, but this was not the first time such scenes had been laid before the American public. In 1887, Nellie Bly, an ambitious young freelancer, doorstepped the editor of the New York World.
He turned her ideas down, challenging her to investigate instead the notorious New York mental asylum Blackwell’s Island. Bly accepted, feigning mental illness convincingly enough to fool the doctors and have herself admitted. What she saw there was revealed in a series of articles for the World and then collected in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.
The articles created a sensation – this is from a paraphrase in a rival newspaper:
Weak, shivering women were plunged into baths of ice cold water, one after another in the same water until the fluid was so thick that it had to be changed. … The bath over, the helpless ones were thrust into their garments wet and so they shivered through the long night. Nurses swore at the patients and beat them. Complaint to the physicians had no other effect than to increase the beatings in number and ferocity until the poor creatures promise to tell the physicians no more.
Bly spoke to as many women as she could and found many were immigrants who didn't understand English and had been sent there in error. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum.
Nurses, she reported, administered "so much morphine and chloral that the patients are made crazy," and “attendants seem to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do their worst". The asylum was also hopelessly overcrowded: 400 inmates had to sleep on the floor each night, and 300 had to stand while they ate.
Bly’s investigation brought about reforms at the asylum and then its closure seven years later.
******
For a few years after the war, the British censors were more relaxed than their American counterparts, yet The Snake Pit was shown over here in butchered form. Out went the straitjackets and scenes of what was decreed inappropriate humour – there had been a campaign to ban the film altogether.
In 1951 a British response to The Snake Pit appeared, made by the Crown Film Unit and sponsored by the Ministry of Health as a training aid and to raise public awareness. Out of True told the story of a woman who attempted suicide after a nervous breakdown and of her recovery in a mental hospital.
This is no Freudian detective puzzle: it’s clear from the outset that the woman’s problems are an overcrowded flat and the pressures of running the household. She is played by Jane Hylton, a graduate of the Rank charm school and a little too genteel to convince in the role. Her husband, puzzled but sympathetic, is better and his mother, who is living with them, is no caricature. She senses that her presence is one of her daughter-in-law’s difficulties and takes herself off to live with another relative.
The tone is hopeful, though it’s admitted that not every patient gets better and goes home, and the stigma of being a mental patient is acknowledged. I suppose we should not be surprised that Hylton is given ECT on entry to the hospital without warning, anaesthetic or any mention of consent. Her husband does question the treatment, saying it has affected her memory, but he’s told this is normal and she will soon recover.
Out of True can be watched on the British Film Institute website without charge.
******
Nellie Bly stopped acting when she arrived at the asylum, but the staff assumed her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity anyway. And if she had told them the truth, that she was there to research an article, wouldn’t she have sounded just like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit? The newspaper gave her 10 days as a patient before it informed the authorities of the deceit.
This vote, which took place on Monday, followed a public poll in which 86 per cent of those who voted supported the establishment of a new council. I was one of them.
The BBC report makes great play of the fact that only 24 per cent of those eligible cast a vote, but I wonder if this is such a bad figure for such a poll.
Given the possibility that Market Harborough will be governed from Glenfield in future – it would be Nottingham if Labour had its way – the existence of a forum where the town to debate and decide what it needs is vital.
"Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?" I asked when writing about The Exorcism.
To an extent, they have. Because here are the first eight minutes of a 1964 television production of Brecht's play Galileo, and it begins with a shot of the cast arriving with a microphone boom and its operator purposely in shot.
This production was shown on BBC1 on Wednesday 29 April 1964 and the translation of the play is by Charles Laughton.
It's a shame that only this short section of this production is to be found online, because Leo McKern's performance looks very promising.
The boy is Fergus McClelland, who had starred in Alexander Mackendrick's film Sammy Going South the year before.
The Reform UK chairman of North Northamptonshire Council has today stood down in response to an NN Journal investigation into his social media activity.
Cllr Maurice Eglin, who was appointed as chairman last month, has resigned this morning ahead of our investigation being published, saying he had in the past been guilty of being a "keyboard warrior". He has also apologised for his posts and said the language he used was "wrong".
We had uncovered a series of offensive tweets which include Islamphobia, support for far right groups and anti-trans views. The tweets predate his election as a councillor last May and are from an account that he shut down shortly before being elected.
"In a decisive summer for government, you can view the 'doubling' agenda as microcosm of the wider story. Some big decisions have been made and some vital groundwork put in place. Ministers now need to build on this with bolder, faster action if the impact is to be visible by the next election." James Wright on the government's commitment to doubling the size of the co-operative and mutual sector.
Alex Marshall is keeping an eye on the new Green administration in Waltham Forest.
Eli Davies questions a culinary shibboleth: "The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour."
"The police are on the trail throughout. Led by a grimly invigilating inspector they seem an odd bunch, varying from the para-military – pistols and rifles firmly clasped – to the quaintly Victorian, with constables wrapped in immense belted gaberdines and sporting cloche style helmets. A reminder, if any were needed, that Northern Ireland was a decidedly different part of the UK." Simon Matthews celebrates Carol Reed's 1947 film Odd Man Out.
Chris Dyson explores the streets and alleyways of Hull's historic Old Town.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day award with the tale from the West Somerset Railway.
The judges have declined to sign petitions calling for the banning of cider and trains.
Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote so many obituaries himself, is remembered in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright, the son of a fellow Yorkshire Liberal MP:
Michael Meadowcroft, who has died aged 84 after a short illness, was a Yorkshire Liberal politician and activist of great resource and flair. He constantly wrong-footed Labour in its former heartlands in Leeds as a nimble source of new ideas, closely in touch with voters and patient at working with them to get local problems solved.
He served as a Liberal party member of Leeds city council from 1968 to 1983, and then as an MP for Leeds West for four years.
Meadowcroft was famously the only MP in the city’s history who led a weekend jazz ensemble in the main shopping precinct, pausing between numbers to discuss political issues with passers-by.
Exuberantly self-confident, he was a natural challenger with less interest in becoming part of any status quo. But he was steeped in Liberal philosophy as well as being a rigorous organiser, central to the party’s adoption of "community politics" during its resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s.
This was released as a single in 1989 but did not become a hit until it was featured in David Lynch's film Wild at Heart the following year.
The council, which is run by a minority Liberal Democrat administration, says the scheme would improve accessibility for residents and visitors, support tourism and local businesses, and reduce reliance on cars.
Oliver Hemsley, the council's portfolio holder for environment and transport, told BBC News:
Rutland Water is one of the county's most valued destinations for both residents and visitors, and these proposals are about making it easier and safer for people to travel there by bike or on foot.
There's more information on the council's website.
Lord Bonkers has asked me to point out that the chances of being devoured by the Rutland Water Monster while visiting have been greatly exaggerated by an irresponsible media.
Here's Quentin Shaw writing in the London Review of Books in November 2022:
In September a camera trap monitoring hedgehogs in Kingston upon Thames caught an astonishing snap of a pine marten, the most elusive of English mammals.
There had been no confirmed sightings in England for a century until July 2015 when a naturalist in Shropshire took a photo. There, gambolling in broad daylight, was an animal from the wishful world of cryptozoology, a fantastic beast, previously no more substantial than a plesiosaur in Loch Ness or a big cat in Surrey.
There had been fleeting hints: a strange animal in the headlights on the A49, something scampering in the trees while a forester ate their sandwiches, but hard evidence was always lacking. Volunteers had cycled around country lanes scraping up roadkill and deep-freezing the flat carcasses for later identification, only to find that they were all polecats or mink. People had sniffed and handled strange scat, which turned out to be from foxes and badgers.
But now we knew there was at least one marten out there in Shropshire. A massive ongoing programme of camera traps has since revealed about a dozen more. Once in a thousand video clips there is a fleeting glimpse, usually of a marten already half out of shot before the camera triggered.
You can see a Shropshire pine marten in the video above, which is from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust site.
There you will also find discussion of the county's population of these rate animals:
Pine martens are a native species to England, but over-hunting saw them disappear in the country and the British population became restricted to the Highlands of Scotland. The last confirmed record of a pine marten in Shropshire was verified in 1894 (The Flora and Fauna of Shropshire). Anecdotal evidence suggested that a few may have clung on and other martens may occasionally have passed into Shropshire from a small relict population in Wales.
It is possible that escaped martens from private collections and illegally translocated animals could have also settled in Shropshire. Being a species that likes to roam over large distances, there is also potential for marten populations to spread from official release sites in Wales into Shropshire and surrounding counties too.
With work to provide pine martens good quality woodland, with improved connectivity, the future is looking bright for the species in Shropshire and it appears that now are now firmly established in the remotest corners of the county. But that is only possible if we work hard to protect them and create more space for nature overall.
Another site mentions Clunton and Lurkenhope, near Knighton, as places where pine martens have been seen. But how did one get to Kingston upon Thames?
Claire Jones analyses the creeping misogyny of Reform's agenda: "To enshrine women’s demotion to second class citizens, Reform has pledged to drop the 2010 Equalities Act which provides legal recourse for maternity leave, sexual assault, domestic abuse and employment discrimination. Reform also plans to ditch the ECHR thus thwarting it’s use by women as another court of appeal. You can hear the sound of doors closing."
David Eddy asks who is protecting our drinking water as an energy company seeks permission to drill through the chalk aquifer beneath the Yorkshire Wolds in search of gas.
"You may heard that if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. It's an adage supposing that individuals under 25 can’t think things through or make rational decisions, and so are less responsible than older folk. This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is... it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise." Dean Burnett takes aim at a scientific myth.
Oliver Bray has been to an exhibition at the Dickens Museum in London: "It reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated."
"On one level, this is a song about a man who, losing his mother, seeks to make his lover a surrogate maternal figure. On a larger level, it is about the need to find an escape, a haven, from the brutal realities of life. But it must be mentioned that this is a song about the power and necessity of movies... that was written for a movie." Another Paul on That's Why God Made the Movies, one of my favourite Paul Simon songs.
Geoff Marshall is our guide to the charms of East Finchley station before he contrives to arrive at one of a pair of little-used platforms there.
On Friday we saw D.H. Lawrence getting all Lawrentian about the Stiperstones: "It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers."
But when did he visit the area? The answer's in the video clip above: January 1924.
A paper by Lawrence Jones and Paul Simpson-Housley tells us something about Lawrence and Frederick Carter got up too:
They enjoyed a winter's walk together, which they began by climbing Cad's Hill. Later they crossed a narrow gauge railway and ascended the Stiperstones. The tiny Lord's Hill Chapel, located at the edge of the moors, and the works and smoke of Snailbeach came within their view. They then climbed Cranberry to the crest of the Stiperstones, at the southern end of which is located the Devil's Chair, an area of scattered rock.
Lead mining had ceased at Snailbeach by 1924, but the upper levels of the mine and the spoil heaps were being worked for barytes. Colonel Stephens had recently bought Snailbeach District Railways. Most of the line's traffic came from a quarry halfway along the line, but it was still open all the way to Snailbeach mine because that's where its locomotive shed was.
I've not read St Mawr, but Jones and Simpson-Housley say Lawrence combined the Stiperstones and the Wrekin to produce a symbolic landscape with a Devil's Chair and an Angel's Chair, the latter based on Heaven's Gate on the Wrekin.
So D.H. Lawrence visited Snailbeach. I'm sure Mary Webb did too, but did any other notable writers?
Under the scheme every household would receive an "Essential Energy Allowance", which would provide "enough to get by" and be charged at a discounted price.
There would be an extra allowance for families with more children.
Households that need more help, such as those on the lowest incomes, or with extra needs such as charging an electric wheelchair or a home ventilator, would receive a "discount on all their energy".
Cooper said her party estimated it would mean a saving of £100 a year on average for every household, with the poorest 20 per cent of families saving an average of £140 a year. Those in the most need would see the biggest benefits.
She said the plan would lead to longer-term savings for the state as the cost to the NHS alone of dealing with the consequences of people living in cold and draughty houses was £1bn a year.
It would be funded by the Liberal Democrats ordering the energy regulator Ofgem to "claw back" an estimated £5bn in extra profits they believe energy firms will make by 2028.
Cooper said domestic energy suppliers "operate as total monopolies" and her party believed the regulator should "force energy companies to pay back" what she said were windfall profits and not the product of investments they had made.
The Liberal Democrats also want families on low incomes to be able to insulate their home and install heat pumps for free.
They want to remove green levies on household energy bills and instead have a targeted windfall tax on banks, and to "break the link" between electricity and gas prices and invest in more renewable generation.
The party says these measures together with the new "Energy Guarantee" could save £900 a year from average bills by 2035.
You can watch and read the announcement on the party website, but I have a feeling that a few bullet points and a short interview with Daisy recorded on someone's phone would be of more use to activists.
Still, it's all good stuff and I'm pleased to see a bit of Liberal populism – consumers vs Big Energy – being promoted.
Community councils, which last operated in Southwark in 2016, are to be restored by the Green and Liberal Democrat coalition that took control of the borough from Labour at last month's elections.
Victor Chamberlain is the Lib Dem deputy leader of the council and holder of the neighbourhoods, strategic planning and wellbeing portfolio. He told Southwark News:
"This is something that both parties are very passionate about and making sure that we are supporting and empowering our diverse communities.
"That’s best done by bringing the council back into their neighbourhoods and making sure the council is visible and responding to different challenges.
"We have different challenges but by looking at those issues at a community level, we can create change in a more effective way and spend money more efficiently than presuming that everything is the same, which the previous administration did by being so top down and having everything run from this glass Town Hall on Tooley Street.
"But actually if we talk to communities, if we empower them again, we’ll be able to deliver better change and more long-term change for the communities."
Bringing councils closer to the people is an authentically Liberal agenda. Labour by contrast, has embarked on another round of centralisation in local government.
