The foxes who visited London Zoo with deadly intent

Remarkable stuff from Robert Hanks in the London Review of Books  for 21 October 2010:

On 18 March last year a fox, or foxes, found their way through a damaged fence into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and slaughtered 11 rockhopper and blackfooted penguins. News of the massacre only appeared this weekend, after the Independent got hold of a report on the zoo from inspectors at Westminster Council; since 2007, foxes have also killed a flamingo chick, a chicken and two mara (which the Independent described as ‘rodents resembling small kangaroos’; they’re more like guinea pigs on stilts).

The papers were shocked by the news, though they had some difficulty putting their fingers on the reason. For the Independent, it was a story both about the need for London Zoo to invest more in its facilities and about the imperative to close down zoos altogether. For the Daily Telegraph, ‘The revelations are certain to reignite the row over urban fox numbers which was sparked earlier this year by reports that two baby girls were attacked in their home by a fox’ – and hence, as many commenters on the paper’s website spotted, it was really a story about the consequences of New Labour’s ban on foxhunting. The Daily Mail did better, wailing about a ‘bloodbath’ and a ‘trail of destruction’ but refraining for once from drawing moral conclusions.

Infiltration by foxes and other local predators is part of zoo life. It’s because of the foxes, apparently, that the Regent’s Park penguins now inhabit a somewhat drab, shallow-banked pond rather than Berthold Lubetkin’s elegant Modernist Penguin Pool: the Lubetkin pool was always bad for penguins (too small, poor air circulation, unyielding concrete surfaces), but its Grade I listed status made alterations impossible; the last straw came when a fox started raiding and the zoo wasn’t even allowed to put up chicken wire. In April this year a fox walked over ice to get to the flamingos at Helsinki Zoo, leaving 16 of them dead.

Coyote vs. Acme: "A warm and witty and weirdly moving film"

I went into Leicester yesterday to see Coyote vs. Acme – or "Coyote and Acme" as the lawyers are no doubt calling it.

As to my verdict on the film, I can't improve on the conclusion of Catherine Wheatley's review for Sight and Sound:

It’s a warm and witty and weirdly moving film, with a profoundly important seam of political satire running through it. 

Audiences should be grateful to Ketchup for rescuing it from obscurity after it was shelved in 2023 by Warner Bros Discovery, allegedly as a tax-write off, and only offered to tender for distribution after a public backlash. It’s a nice story: the people and the independent taking on the big boys to save the day, and one that’s mirrored in the film's final twist. 

And yet a matched pair of framing devices undercuts the film's own optimism: the use of The Clash’s I Fought the Law over the closing credits, and an opening title announces Ketchup as a subsidiary of – you guessed it – The Acme Corporation.

The Joy of Six 1577

Sam Bright says the government's indecision on how to meet the threat of Nigel Farage has cost us all: "Labour has been dismally slow at protecting politics from these predators – rebuffing calls in recent weeks for a cap on all donations, even from domestic sources. And now Reform’s war chest is bursting at the seams."

"In 2024 then mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham argued that net zero was 'the best chance we will ever have to reindustrialise the North of England, reduce inequality and close the North-South divide'." The mayor has had a promotion since then but what of his prediction?" Zachary Leader finds the reality has not lived up to the hype, but there are things his government can do to help.

"When the rain came, the earth in its baked state, was indifferent. Beyond thirst. Shut up from growing. Sculptural towers of cumulous cloud sailed north, into mute and tantalising lightning. The rain, and the return of the heat after, reanimated the only thing to wet the ground all summer: sheep’s urine. Undiluted and remaining on the surface, the smell of ammonia was sudden, heady and strong." Nicola Chester looks back on the extraordinary summer of 2026.

Rhian Jones on the pressure that the need to maintain an online presence puts on musicians.

Benjamin Riley investigates a "profoundly weird and concerning" American private school network: "As part of boot camp, Alpha School students apparently have their heart rates monitored as they watch recorded videos of their parents critiquing them. This activity takes place in front of their classmates, and students must keep their heart rates within 10 percent of their baseline to pass."

"It’s a pretty rotten old country on display here, with no end of respectable, well-spoken pillars of society turning out to be cheap little fakers and drug peddlers, using contemptible tricks such as pretending to be wheelchair-bound as part of a phoney persona." Discontinued Notes reviews Francis Durbridge's television thrillers.

The man in a coracle who retrieved the ball from the Severn for Shrewsbury Town

Shrewsbury Town's old ground at Gay Meadow stood beside the Severn, so loose shots could end up in the river.

This Nationwide report from 1975 is about the man who retrieved the ball when they did.

Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP

This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the  Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Work, play and creativity

An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:

It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.

 That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life. 

And another devoted to resources for creativity says:

We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.

Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.

The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?

There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.

And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:

“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.

“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”

*****

W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.

There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:

I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.

He was faced with just such a choice between machines:

One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.

The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.” 

"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.

******

So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.

The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.

Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups. 

I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.

GUEST POST Like a challenging computer game? Try the Government Digital Service

Mark Valentine tried hard to prove his identity, and the Government Digital Service tried hard to prevent him.

The other day I had to do business with the Government Digital Service (GDS). This is one of those jolly three-word English phrases that make the heart sink, like Family Fun Day, Rail Replacement Service, Celebrity Game Show and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I suspect I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert to tell you that the weakest spot, in a weak line-up, was in the word “service”. There isn’t any. 

This claims to be a “beta” service. Apparently, this is IT speak for “here’s something we put together from four tin cans, a roll of wire and a clapped-out mellotron from the Moody Blues’ last album, now let’s try it out on the suckers”. But the GDS are being unduly modest. Actually, what they are offering is an “omega” service. It is the end of all things, particularly hope.

Neither worked. Repeatedly

To use their identity verification service, you have to try two things. One involves them taking control of your phone to photograph your passport. The other involves giving the government your bank account details. Despite certain misgivings, I tried both. Neither worked. Repeatedly. Nor did it work for several other people who tried it. Repeatedly.

But not to worry, there is a telephone support service. The icy voice of a woman who made Servalan sound like everyone’s favourite Auntie by comparison intoned: “We are experiencing high call volumes. Call back later.” They must be inundated with customers ringing them up to congratulate them on their wonderful system. 

Never mind, you can also email them. Their reply was very quick. It had been devised by a machine that had cut-and-pasted random text from their website, Pilgrim’s Progress, Waiting for Godot and the lyrics to ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by popular music group Middle of the Road. 

I tried again. This time the reply, possibly from a near-human entity, was shorter. Had I tried rebooting? Funnily enough, I had, as this was the advice always offered to me by the young men with wispy ginger beards and smeared spectacles who always staff IT departments. If that doesn’t work, why not eff off it said. Well, it didn’t put it quite like that, it just referred me back to whatever benighted government department had started this whole fandango in the first place. 

As support services go, the GDS one is rather like being offered a boa constrictor in lieu of a truss. It crushes the life out of you. But if you like a challenging computer game at an ultra ultra level, go for it.

A 15th piece of evidence

The reason I had to use the service was because an arm of government wanted to verify my identity. I was surprised by this request. The taxman has always seemed cheerful about who I am when clawing away a chunk of my income, the Home Office were delighted to confirm that I was who I said I was when I bunged them £90+ for a passport, the Ministry of Transport are positively delirious when I send them money so I can road-test their potholes for them, and the NHS are so convinced by my identity  that they’ve devised a special Patient Access System whose chief purpose is to prevent me gaining any access to their services. 

When I counted up, there were at least 14 ways in which my identity seemed to be fairly well established. And that’s not counting my membership of distinguished bodies, genuinely useful, such as the National Trust, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Friends of Arthur Machen and the Network of Ley-Hunters.

Faced with this battery of existing identity evidence, the government agency involved came up with the obvious solution. What was needed was a 15th piece of evidence. And the best way of getting that was via the GDS, because government IT projects are well known for their unblemished history of successful implementation and their blissfully happy customers. Even better, if for some completely unpredictable and unlikely reason the GDS didn’t work, they had a fallback. They would use the Post Office! This was because of course the Post Office also has an unblemished history of—well, etc.

At this point I became suspicious. There is a devious business model taking hold which imposes complex, hard to understand rules, and erects difficult, nigh impossible methods of complying with the rules. This then enables the lucky organisation to rake in the fines. For cases studies, see private car parks, railway companies, postal services and the NHS Prescription Service. 

Perhaps this lot were in the early stages of implementing just such a wheeze. There was only one flaw in my theory. This would require them to exercise ingenuity, which, like competence and common sense, was not a quality so far especially conspicuous in their performance. Still, they might have stumbled on the idea by accident, in roughly the same way they conduct most of their business.

Head for the hills

Amazingly, when I visited the Post Office, in a last desperate gamble, the counter staff made their system work, eventually. You know your IT service must be bad when the Post Office can do it better. Of course, given recent history, I may yet find that I am prosecuted by PO officials for High Treason or Piracy on the High Seas and will need to conduct a fifteen-year campaign to clear myself.

There is an old Chinese proverb I have just made up which reads: “Count blessed the day when you hear from no official.” If you hear from the GDS, take my advice. Sell all your possessions, burn all your documents, change your name, and head for the hills. Preferably the Himalayas.

Mark Valentine is a writer living in Yorkshire. Please don’t ask him to prove it.

Mother Damnable and the curse of Camden Town tube station

Jago Hazzard takes us to Camden Town station and its curse: the most complicated junction on the London Underground.

Blame the witch Mother Damnable or Mother Redcap. The station was almost named after a pub that bore her name.

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

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Have you thought of writing one yourself?

It could be on where the Liberal Democrats should go from here, on politics more generally or… anything really.  Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history?

Please drop me an email if you'd like to discuss your idea first. I'd hate you to spend time on a piece I really wouldn’t want to publish.

Here are the last 10 guest posts on this blog:

• Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
• The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers
• Lord Summerisle obviously took the Liberal whip – Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury
• To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it – Stuart Whomsley
• Political lessons from science fiction – Peter Chambers
• Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling day – Augustus Carp
• Why have the Lib Dems given up fighting most parliamentary by-elections? – Augustus Carp
• In praise of outgrounds: How cricket in small towns made a roaring comeback – Matthew Pennell
• Why has the HS2 project been such a disaster? – Peter Chambers
• Doctor Who: The most golden era? – Peter Chambers

The Joy of Six 1576

Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, has discovered what happens when a politician loses her voice: "There’s a thing about: do I seem weak now? Like, does this make me seem weaker? Which is another reason to be really clear: I will do national media, and I will carry on campaigning."

"The council’s constitution, which sets out how it is run, says it must have a cabinet and a leader at the top and this is required by UK law. The local authority is also required to have an elected member overseeing children’s services. The absence of this and the length of time the council has had no one in charge is what has led officers to make the highly unusual declaration the council is breaking the law." Edward Barnes reports from Oldham, where the elected councillors have failed to agree who should run the borough council after May's elections.

Alazne Mountjoy says women suffer because of the systemic misogyny in medical research and practice: "Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female."

Anna Verhamme and John Britton, in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, say universities are their professional and support staff and then paying consultants more to provide these services.

"From Browne’s first instalment, featuring the character Sam Weller, sales for Pickwick rose and kept rising. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, and Pickwick – helped enormously by his comic illustrations – became a literary sensation that revolutionised Victorian book publishing." Michael John Goodman looks at the relationship between Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') and reminds us how strange it is that we now publish Victorian novels without their illustrations.

"Chris Isaak has carved out a singular career doing one thing so hauntingly well, it’s become his signature. He’s built a cathedral from heartbreak and despair, lit by the flickering neon of 3 a.m. regrets, and its served him well for over four decades." James Kenney on Chris Isaak and the art of staying sad.

John Pardoe, Margaret Thatcher and antisemitism in Finchley

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The photograph above is captioned on Getty Images:

British Liberal Party politician John Pardoe with his wife Joyce, UK, 24th September 1964. Pardoe is standing against Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher as the Liberal candidate for Finchley.

And Pardoe did very well at Finchley in the 1964 general election, putting the Liberals into second place and recording a seven per cent swing against the sitting Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher.

A Jewish Chronicle article by Robert Philpot from 2017 gives an important reason for this achievement:

When Mrs Thatcher was selected as Finchley's Conservative candidate in July 1958, she inherited a seemingly impregnable majority of nearly 13,000. She soon discovered, however, that the Tories had a little local difficulty on their hands. At its centre were the constituency's Jewish voters who constituted a politically significant one-in-five of the electorate. 

It stemmed from that most quintessentially middle-class of pursuits: golf. The previous year, a number of Jews – including Shirley Porter, then a young Liberal activist – had applied to join the Finchley golf club. Each had had their membership refused; not an uncommon occurrence at golf clubs at this time.

The club leased its land from the Tory-dominated borough council, and its officers included a number of prominent local Conservatives. Scenting an opportunity, two Jewish Liberals fought and won seats in Finchley’s wealthiest and most Jewish wards. 

Upon her selection, a horrified Mrs Thatcher discovered that, while the club had swiftly caved in and agreed to admit Jewish members, more lasting damage had been done: in the next year's local elections, the Liberals made further advances. "The Jewish faith," she worriedly wrote to Central Office, "have allied themselves to Liberalism."

The golf-club scandal had come to symbolise a cloud of antisemitism which hung over the local Tory association. That was not altogether surprising given the attitude of Sir John Crowder, the retiring MP, who privately grumbled that the national party was trying to impose a choice between "a bloody Jew and a bloody woman" as his successor.

Mrs Thatcher was, she later recalled, upset that her new local association had been "tainted" by antisemitism and moved swiftly to repair the damage. She prioritised the recruitment of new Jewish members and invited Sir Keith Joseph, the Tories' rising Jewish star, to speak locally. Her efforts appeared to bear fruit: in October 1959, she increased the Tories' majority to over 16,000. 

However, the Liberal bandwagon continued to roll. In 1962, the party made sweeping gains and a year later it seized control of Finchley town hall. Six of its 19 councillors were Jewish, including the new leader of the council and mayor. Drawing a parallel with the Liberals' recent dramatic by-election victory, the press dubbed Finchley "the Orpington of North London."

Mrs Thatcher knew exactly the source of her problems. "It’s the golf club… that’s where it all started," she told one journalist. Her finely tuned political antenna were correct: she held Finchley in 1964, albeit with a sharply reduced majority. However, Jews in the seat voted Liberal in considerably higher proportions than non-Jews, with Mrs Thatcher and the Liberal candidate, John Pardoe, each taking roughly 40 percent of the Jewish vote.

John Pardoe went on to become MP for North Cornwall in 1966 and represented the seat until he was defeated in 1979. In the Seventies he became the party's economic spokesperson and, along with David Penhaligon, one of my early Liberal heroes.

Shirley Porter, who died earlier this year, followed a different political career path.

Zoo advertises tickets for 'child predator tour'

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from Chester.

I am reminded of the glory days of Lord Bonkers' safari park at the Hall.

Connie Converse: Roving Woman

From an article on the BBC website by Thomas Hobbs:

Centring on an edgy, city-dwelling female protagonist unapologetically owning her sexuality, the brilliant song Roving Woman sounds like the work of a millennial musician. Evoking the smoky, airborne notes of a late-night Brooklyn bar, it contains lilting guitar harmonies that float in and out of focus like cascading cigarette smoke, while its melancholy vocal is reminiscent of popular contemporary folk musicians like Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen. "Someone always takes me home!" the lead singer swoons.

Yet the truly remarkable thing about this track is it was actually recorded more than 70 years ago. Roving Woman isn't the work of some lo-fi singer-songwriter in their early 20s, but is in fact the forward-thinking creation of Connie Converse. She was a bedroom musician who wrote the bulk of her songs in early 1950s New York, years before Bob Dylan came on the scene and sparked a new singer-songwriter movement.

But she pulled back from her musical dreams at the turn of the 1960s and then, in 1974, aged 50, disappeared completely – never to be heard from again. It was only this century that this mysterious artist's work was rediscovered and has found a devoted audience, stunned by just how pioneering she was.

And:

Another one of Converse's fans is Martin Carr, the English folk musician and lead singer of the band The Boo Radleys, who has written several songs paying tribute to her. "Connie had a dramatist's eye – the ability to conjure a fully inhabited world from a single detail," he explains. "The fact that she named a song after a J.M. Synge play, or was capable of lyrics such as 'Spring seemed to linger in a little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand', tells you she was reaching well beyond the American folk tradition."

Carr is also particularly impressed by Converse's guitar playing and believes it's extraordinary no matter what generation you come from. "Her guitar playing is phenomenal. I can't play her songs, they're too hard for me!" Carr enthuses. "Her playing reminds me of the way Paul Simon plays; orchestral arrangements for six strings. She was a true individual, an artist of no time."

Private school that suddenly closed after 'misconduct' allegations burns down

The Scotsman wins our Headline of the Day Award, though the judges said that in their day a school would have carried on regardless.

The Grimond Society and economic democracy

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The Grimond Society, a Liberal Democrat group that aims to build support for economic democracy and a more cooperative and mutualistic economy, gets a good write up on the Co-op News website.

It quotes the society's founder, Jack Meredith:

"The Liberal Democrats have always stood for the idea of liberty and freedom from poverty, from homelessness, from what Beveridge called the evils of society. And why would we stop at the ballot box? Clearly it makes sense that if we want to try and enrich people’s lives, and help them find meaning, why aren’t we supporting co-operatives more and being more vocal about them?"

The Grimond Society has a website, and you can also read about its ambitions in an article on Lib Dem Voice.

The Liberal Party's support for economic democracy was one of the things that first attracted me to it. That support dwindled over the Alliance years, when the most you heard was support for employee shareholding. 

This is a questionable idea – if things go wrong you can lose both your job and your capital – and behind it, I suspected at the time, was little more than a desire to make people work harder.

Since merger, we have heard little from the Lib Dems on the subject, so all power to the Grimond Society.

A website on Alec Guinness's two BBC series as George Smiley

Here's what we need: a website devoted to the BBC productions of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.

Guinness is Smiley explains:

The aim of this website is to publish fresh material about both series, identify some of the filming locations and signpost visitors to the wonderful content that is already out there. This website is not a commercial endeavour and will hopefully be of interest to fans of both productions.

I have my dad to thank for my love of these series.  He watched each episode beside me when they were first broadcast, but I understood only a little of what I saw back then. As an adult I have seen them many times and find them endlessly compelling and fascinating. The intricacies of the plot and the quality of the acting keep me coming back time after time.

Lord Bonkers had a similar reaction:

Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked "Top Secret: Burn Before Reading" that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown's best efforts, I never could quite get my head around Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. "What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?" I would ask him, and "So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?" 

Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.

The Joy of Six 1575

Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."

Dysfunctional council to be abolished after years of controversy and "all out civil war"

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Leicester Mercury.

I know things can get pretty het up on the city council, but the authority in question here is Witherley Parish Council. 

The village of Witherley lies on the Leicestershire-Warwickshire border near Atherstone, and we are able to bring you exclusive video of its most recent attempt to conduct a parish council meeting.

Good news about the Family Farm Tax

Farmers have been complaining for some time that the price of farmland has lost any connection with the income that be derived from farming it. And The Agri Brigade column in the new Private Eye suggests they have a strong case:

Average UK farmland prices have more than quadrupled this century, from just under £2,000 an acre to well over £8,000 an acre, according to statistics from land agents Savills. 

Over that time, farm profitability has remained poor, but farmland's IHT-free status drew many ultra-high-net-worth individuals into buying land as a convenient way of minimising their tax liabilities – the so-called "Jeremy Clarkson effect". 

By doing so, these buyers pushed up the price of farmland way beyond what many ordinary farmers can afford to pay for it (UK farmland prices are four times higher than those in France, for example).

For this reason, I argued back in January that it was the lack of inheritance tax on farmland that had caused causing farmers' problems.

But now, from the same Eye column, comes good news:

Evidence is emerging that the controversial withdrawal of 100 per cent Inheritance tax [IHT] relief on farmland is having the intended effects of cooling a previously overheated market and deterring those who are more interested in minimising their tax bill than producing food. ...

In 2025, the proportion of farmland bought by what Strutt & Parker describes as "lifestyle buyers" fell to 11 per cent down from 16 per cent the year before. At the same time, the proportion of farms bought by farmers rose to a seven-year high of 59 per cent. 

During 2025, the Knight Frank Farmland Index showed that bare agricultural land sold in England and Wales fell by an average of 5 per cent, the first time since 2017 that prices had fallen this much over a 12 month period.

The Eye speculates that, because they tend to represent the interests of their wealthier members, the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association (formerly the Country Landowners Association) will continue to campaign against inheritance tax on farmland.

But I hope we Liberal Democrats will quietly drop our campaign against what, strangely, we called the "Family Farm Tax".

David Alton, Andy Burnham and telescopic radicalism

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It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself. – Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

Mrs Jellyby goes in for what Dickens call "telescopic philanthropy", in that she devotes her energies to promoting a philanthropic project in far-off Borrioboola-Gha while her own children fall into the grate. We've all known political households like that.

You can also have telescopic radicalism. In the distant era when David Alton was a Liberal, then a Liberal Democrat, and a Liverpool MP, one commentator pointed out that he was idealistic about issues that were a long way away, but hard-headed when they were close to home.

It seems we now have a telescopic radical for a prime minister. 

Yesterday, Andy Burnham wrote a courageous article for the Guardian, explaining the sanctions his government is rightly imposing upon Israel for its illegal actions in the occupied territories.

But, back in Britain, masked, uniformed fascists are roaming the streets and closing down ports without a word from our new prime minister.

Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal shows the danger of the profit motive in the juvenile justice system

If you want to see the danger of introducing the profit motive into the detention of young offenders, watch this video on Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal.

In the first decade of this century, two judges in Luzerne County, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, accepted millions of dollars in bribes to lock up children and teenagers for trivial offences from the owners of for-profit detention centres. At least 2,300 young people were wrongly imprisoned.

And get a load of cuddly Uncle Joe Biden at the start of the video.

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Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

Bryan Ferry: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Bob Dylan glammed up sounds good. This is on Ferry's 1973 debut album These Foolish Things, and it reached no. 10 in the singles chart the same year.

Geoff Marshall asks: What are Britain's least served stations?

Geoff Marshall says in his YouTube blurb:

So we quite often talk about Least Used Stations ... but what about the Least SERVED - the stations the get the fewest services with just a small number of trains per week?

Since it's been 10 years since I rode Stockport/Stalybridge with Karl, we headed out to Lincolnshire to ride the line to Skegness to tick off three Least Served stations, and find out what the least served stations in the country are.

I'm so old that I can remember when Stockport to Stalybridge had a proper service and was a useful route. And when I rode the line to Skegness, it was on a Jolly Fisherman excursion train behind a pair of Class 20s.

Kent Police has admitted ignoring intelligence on Dover disruption

Kent Police has admitted receiving intelligence about a planned disruption in Dover four days before it took place, reports Metro:

A woman has said she warned police about the masked mass protest in Dover days before it happened, despite officers calling it 'spontaneous'.

Kent Police has been criticised for its 'slow response' after hundreds of masked protestors in balaclavas wearing all-black halted traffic at the port on Saturday.

The force defended their handling of the 'spontaneous protest', but Metro has spoken to an anti-racism campaigner who said officers should have been more prepared.

In a statement to Metro, Kent Police admit getting a tip-off late on Friday evening that a protest could take place in the town the following day – but that intelligence was not fully assessed.

Maz Garside, from Portsmouth, claims she told Counter Terror Police about action planned in Dover involving men in balaclavas, led by Tommy Robinson's 'right-hand man' Daniel Thomas, on the Tuesday before the protests.

And Hope Not Hate has posted an account of demonstrators massing in a Kent village the evening before the protest and talking freely about their plans in the pub.

Matthew Scott, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent has issued this statement:

Kent Police has acknowledged that an opportunity was missed that could have enabled the Force to mobilise sooner and bring the disruption to an end more quickly. Matthew Scott, Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner, said: 

"I welcome an independent learning review by the College of Policing. I have asked that this examines how information is triaged by the Force and the communications strategy the Force deployed in response to the event. I look forward to receiving the findings of that review. I will ensure that Chief Constable is held to account for any findings and recommendations that it makes. 

"It is essential that we understand how this happened, and that lessons are leant. 

"This is separate to the response of Officers, Staff and Specials on the ground, who did the best they could, in the circumstances they were presented with, to bring the disruption to an end as soon as they did."

Traffic Cop Nick Lovatt sacked after committing more than 20 driving offences

Embed from Getty Images

The Derby Telegraph wins our Headline of the Day Award.

On one occasion, the fellow officer who stopped him is reported to have said:

"Who do we think we are, sir? The police and crime commissioner for Nottinghamshire?"

Meanwhile in Staffordshire: The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance took place today. I can't find a video of the proceedings, so here's a short one from 2016.

Wikipedia explains:

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is a folk dance which takes place each September in the village of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, England. 

It is performed by ten dancers, accompanied by a musician playing an accordion and a youth with a triangle. Six of the dancers carry reindeer horns; the remaining four take the roles of a hobby horse, Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow. 

On Wakes Monday the performers dance around the parish all day, beginning early in the morning at the parish church where the horns are stored.

That entry also has plenty on the dance's history and possible significance.

Edward Woodward adds: Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!

New public square in Telford honours women who worked in Shropshire's coalfields

Betty Harris Square Telford. Photo: Telford Council

A new square has been named in honour of women who worked in Shropshire coalfields, reports BBC News:

The area in Telford has become Betty Harris Square, after her experiences "as a 'pit girl' became one of the most powerful accounts of women's working lives during Britain's industrial past", the council said.

It added while she was not from Telford, her story represented thousands, many whose names were unknown, who worked in east Shropshire coalfields.

More than 1,000 people voted for the name after residents were invited to vote from a shortlist of influential women connected to the area's history.

This gives me the excuse to quote from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman:

The Coal Mines Act went through with little trouble except for a struggle to keep pit-brow lasses their right to work. Masterman had made enquiries into the question when he had been to Lancashire ... and had also received a deputation of the lasses themselves, sturdy, strapping girls obviously in far better health than the majority of factory or shop girls; and was determined they should not go. 

He laid down the principle: that women should not be forbidden any type of work unless it was proved to be (1) unhealthy, (2) in a situation dangerous to morals, (3) of a degrading and degraded character, and that a Parliament in which women were not represented should be chary of excluding them from any work they wished to do.

I knew I had used that quote on here before and, I thought, quite recently. When I searched for it, it turns out to be eight years ago. Who knows where the time goes?

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Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute."

Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments.

Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But in 2026, it’s a far more humane vision, and better for it, than what her right-wing detractors have to offer."

"During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was 'not a Scotchman' and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan's racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military." Martin Spychal has researched the career of Peter McLagan, whom he calls "Scotland’s first Black MP".

"She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously 'do' Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while." Niela Orr celebrates the life and music of Dolly Parton.

The Secret Cricket Coach asks where the hell Rob Key is: "For years he was paid to tell us what was right and wrong with English cricket. Now he is responsible for much of it, but recently we haven’t heard much from him. England have had a difficult period, questions are being asked about behaviour, standards and leadership, and it is Joe Root who seems to be answering them. I find that quite strange."