The Joy of Six 1523

Niamh McIntyre had been investigating the spike in racist AI videos aimed at British surfers: "It is often young, entrepreneurial men from south Asia. They tend to have zero interest in UK politics, but the content they create often boosts far-right talking points in Britain and contributes to the increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and British Muslims. They’re part of a booming cottage industry producing commercial AI slop."

Joshi Hermann advises us to stop looking for "Burnhamism". He's bee reporting the mayor of Greater Manchester for six years and has never been able to locate it.

"The culls were not only cruel: they were ineffective. Thousands of badgers died, yet bTB [bovine tuberculosis] rates in cattle remained high. But rather than end the cull or re-evaluate the policy, the government decided to roll it out to even more parts of the country." The Hunt Saboteurs Association welcomes the end of England's badger cull, which has seen nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped.

"It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me." The Urban Prehistorian condemns the treatment of the Bogleys Stone of Fife.

Melanie Williams has been researching Muriel Box, Muriel Sly and British women scriptwriters in general. "Medical comedy was all the rage in the fifties – from Doctor in the House to Carry On Nurse – but it seems an honest comedic look at pregnancy and childbirth may have been a little too far beyond British cinema’s comfort zone at the time."

The long career of E.J. "Tiger" Smith as Warwickshire and England's wicketkeeper, test umpire and batting guru is considered by Giles Wilcock.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Unpleasant scenes outside the hall

If you heard jeering on you way into the spring conference at York, it appears from that it probably came from militant young badgers. And good luck to them, I say.

Thursday

I am summoned to the residence of the King of the Badgers, which is to be found on the Bonkers Hall Estate, beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to celebrate the victory of Wallace Lawler in the 1969 Birmingham Ladywood by-election. 

He tells me that the younger badgers have seen Ed Davey’s video opposing the replacement of Winston Churchill by a badger (or other form of wildlife) on the five-pound note. The king, as ever, is a force for moderation (much good it has done him when it comes to the badger cull), but he warns me that feeling is running high and that some of the aforementioned younger bs are all for picketing the Liberal Democrat conference in York. 

I thank him for the tip and hurry away to telephone the leader of the Chesham Bois. During this call I emphasise that the party doesn’t want any unpleasant scenes outside the hall and, to ensure he complies, let slip that our British badgers are close relations of the fearsome honey badgers – you want to be wearing a cricketer’s box down the front of your corduroys when one of those fellows is around!

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

Earlier this week...

• In the corners, nooks and crannies
• “It’s not your aerial, it’s your constitution”
• Look out for the Chesham Bois

Now Ed Davey is implying that Nigel Farage is right

Early last week I sent off my latest piece for Central Bylines. In it I praised Ed Davey's willingness to challenge the right's claims to patriotism:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

By the time it appeared, Ed Davey had issued this video.

Winston Churchill helped defeat fascism in Europe. He deserves better than being replaced by a badger 🦡

[image or embed]

— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 11 March 2026 at 17:30

Far from challenging the right, this as good as admits they are correct. Yes, it implies, the country is run by an elite of woke politicians who hold everything we Britons love in contempt.

Ed even starts with "Now they're going to take Winston Churchill of our fivers...", which is a journalistic tactic designed to give the impression that the isolated incident you are writing about is in fact only the latest in a long catalogue of outrages. A hard-right commentator could have used exactly the same angle.

In this video, the Liberal Democrats are adopting Labour's failed strategy of telling people "Reform are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

I sometimes fear that some of Ed's advisers are a little too online. Remember when they wrote a tweet for him expressing his shock at the shooting of Charlie Kirk? Had Ed even heard of him?

Anyway, let me end with a photograph caption from James Hawes's new The Shortest History of Ireland that's relevant to those advisers' choice of music:

The past is a strange country: Howth gun-runners Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers aboard the yacht Asgard. From Limerick and Boston respectively, they – and Molly's novelist husband Erskine – were radical Irish Nationalists from the WASP elite: Mary's first cousin Cecil, author of the imperial touch-song I Vow to Thee My Country, was right then Britain's ambassador to the United States.

For Central Bylines: Ed Davey takes aim at the unpatriotic right

I have a new article on Central Bylines this morning:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

I wrote this before Ed Davey decided that Nigel Farage is right about badgers being woke and we have to have Churchill on our banknotes.

Badgers Blamed for Nuns’ Exhumation

Thanks to a nomination from a reader, the Hastings Independent wins our coveted Headline of the Day Award.

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

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

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

Gran 'scared to death' as grave-robbing badgers dump human skull and bones in her garden

Wales Online wins our Headline of the Day Award for this macabre tale.

The Joy of Six 1055

"It is already clear (I fear) that the next round of the contest between imperial Russia and its reluctant Western adversaries will take place in the Baltics. The rule book for that tussle is being written now. Bold letters, in thick black ink, please." Ed Lucas argues that Ukraine is buying the West time and we must use it wisely.

"The government’s steadfast adherence to a policy that fails to achieve its objectives while devastating the population of a beloved native mammal with potential knock-on effects for the broader ecology indicates the stranglehold that 'simple' lethal controls have on public authorities." Mark Jones says the badger cull is not affecting the rate of tuberculosis in cattle.

Kelli María Korducki looks at the rise in the number of adults looking to be diagnosed with ADHD.

"What good is it making someone safer if it merely makes them miserable?" Celia Kitzinger attends a contested hearing in the Court of Protection.

Imogen West-Knights watches the slow-motion humiliation of Piers Morgan: "By trying to aim at a global audience, the show ends up being directionless: Morgan can’t get into detail about contemporary British political talking points, so he’s restricted to a tired deck of cards from the culture war starter pack."

Pamela Thom-Rowe on the history of morris dancing in the Shropshire hills: "According to the court records ... Nicholas Millichap and Thomas Chelmicke had gone to the village of Abdon to fetch the communion cloth from the church to use as a flag for the morris dance."

The Joy of Six 1048

"In Sussex, the Liberal Democrat district councillor Ruth Fletcher has complained about how footpaths and bike tracks were removed from a proposed housing development in Horsham after police objections." Phineas Harper says police use of the Secured by Design initiative is damaging British cities and robbing them of greenery and public amenities while promoting fear.

Barbara Ortutay and Amanda Seitz remind us Twitter has been down the "free speech" road favoured by Elon Musk before and it didn't end well.

Milli Hill argues that concern over The Family Sex Show is proper safeguarding of children not a moral panic.

"In recent years there’s been an explosion of interest and claims of diagnosis of ... [multiple personality] disorder, coincident with the rise of Tumblr and TikTok, where there are thriving communities of adolescents who claim to have dozens of 'alters' and who refer to themselves as 'systems,' along with a whole boutique identity vocabulary that they’ve developed." Freddie deBoer is concerned at the online spread of the MPD diagnosis.

James Fair asks if it's time to kill the badger cull.

"Rather like Eliot’s Four Quartets, from which he quotes liberally, Davies transcends a mere documentary study of a particular place and time into a series of ponderings on the very nature of time, place and memory." Bobby Seal watches Terence Davies's Liverpool trilogy.

Six of the Best 994

The Liberal Democrats are making the same mistake that doomed the Liberals a century ago, argues Nick Barlow.

Ian Dunt says liberals can redefine national pride and reclaim the flag from nationalists: "Liberal patriotism ... It starts and ends with the individual. It is a personal love story which springs from within, not a slab of uniformity imposed from above. It therefore cares about every individual in the country."

Dominic Dyer on the politics of the badger cull.

"Next Thursday 18 February 2021, it will have been eight years since the town walls fell at the back of St Laurence’s. There is no sign of the repairs beginning this year." Andy Boddington suggests Ludlow’s collapsed town wall should be registered as a Monumental Failure and become a tourist attraction.

Chris Orton offers an appreciation of Moondial, the BBC children's drama series from 1988: "Children’s drama in this era was thought-provoking and intelligent, with real care and attention made during the productions. The BBC seemed to go to great lengths to produce high quality programmes that made children think, entertained them and which didn’t belittle them."

"She loved to perch herself on or near a windowsill, surveying the outdoors for hours. It strikes me now how quintessentially feline that behaviour is: a docile carnivore balanced on the border of a human home, alone and content, yet with all its senses tuned to the world beyond." Ferris Jabr asks if cats are really domesticated.

Six of the Best 902

"Modern medicine is increasingly called upon to address a spiritual, perhaps even economic and political, malaise." Sophie McBain looks at how loneliness became an epidemic.

Too many of our town centres have become hollowed-out, windswept deserts, argues Nicholas Boys Smith, but if we make them fit for people they will return

Lenore Skenazy on the worst and best Let Grow parenting moments of 2019: "Hard-boiled lawyers made sure no kids could participate in the University of California-Berkeley's campus Easter egg hunt without parents first signing a waiver acknowledging the potential risk of 'catastrophic injuries including paralysis and death'."

Johannes E. Riutta reviews books about the British government's extraordinary war on badgers.

"This is the best Christmas single of the 1970s, and that’s an objective fact," says Alwyn Turner of Wombling Merry Christmas as he concludes his month-by-month survey of the charts in 1974. Read how the Wombles brand was damaged that winter by a plethora of inferior stage shows.

Richard Williams pays tribute to Martin Peters.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Great Seal of Rutland dives in

So far things are going surprisingly well with the old boy's voyage along the Rutland Union Canal.

Wednesday

A splendid first day, though Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster, is in playful mood when we enter the first lock and almost capsizes us. Then we take a wrong turning and perform two laps of the moat at Bonkers Hall without Ashplant noticing anything amiss before the Great Seal of Rutland dives in to show us the way out. As we pass through villages, locals come out to cheer and warn us of shallows and shoals ahead.

We moor for the evening on a wooded stretch and soon meet the King of the Badgers at the head of a hunting party. He promises to Have A Word with the foxes who have been depredating my tenants’ chicken runs and in return I undertake to give Gove one up the snoot the very next time an opportunity presents itself.

Then we hear strange music and see lights among the trees. Who should it be but my old friends the Elves of Rockingham Forest? What an evening we have! The elves play their ancient songs (aeolian cadences and so forth) while I supply a selection of music hall songs upon the banjulele.

Ashplant then tells an amusing anecdote about two tribes of his acquaintance, and Tom, the aforementioned Well-Behaved Orphan and cabin boy, proves to have the sort of voice that moves elderly ladies to weep and dig deeply into their purses when the communion plate is passed around. I shall recommend him to the Revd Hughes.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The Rutland Union Canal
• A crew for the Flower of Rutland

Book Review... The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide

The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide
Wrights & Sights
Triarchy Press, 2018, £20

Formed in 1997, Wrights & Sites is a group artist-researchers, including Phil Smith who once wrote a guest post for this blog, whose work looks at people’s relationships to places and landscapes.

The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide is their manifesto for changing the world through exploring it.

They describe it as “a tool for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making” and “an invitation to engage”.

Here are some of their suggested activities:

Create top-secret bases with no agenda in obscure rural sites. Surround them with barbed wire to incentivise transgression and appropriation. 

Sometimes it is just a matter of leaving some space to the others. I mean the others who come out in the small hours, when everything in a small city closes down. The streets have generally emptied of pedestrians. At such at time, you might sit and watch, and wait, and see a badger to pull up treats from the ground. Fox slips by. A hedgehog snorts with the effort to get under a low gate. 

Hang a red rope between two brass stands in front of a random space. Unhook it and usher people through.

Some of it is fun, some of it is silly, some of it is a bit Yoko One. But in cities where every inch is privately owned and policed with security guards and cameras, this is the spirit we need.

My own explorations are too solitary and too driven by local history books to cut the mustard here. Maybe it is the walks I used to go on with the Malcolm Saville Society, searching for possibly non-existent real-life models for places we had known all our lives, that came closest to the thinking of the Wrights & Sights.

You can order The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide from Triarchy Press.

Badgers stop play at Dudley Town FC

Spare a thought for Dudley Town FC: there last two home games have been called off because badgers have damaged the pitch.

The Express & Star quotes the leader of the local council's explanation of what has been going on:

"We are having problems with badgers, who are digging into the surface of the pitch at the Dell to get at earthworms and other insect larvae and causing damage."

While the club's chairman says:

"We have never experienced anything like this before. We have had problems with Canadian Geese and Foxes but we have lost our last games as a result of the damage it has caused."

Despite what Owen Patterson once claimed, there is no evidence that the badgers have moved the goalposts.

Six of the Best 668

Examining the economic flaws and false assumptions of the Higher Education and Research Bill, Martin Wolf explains that universities are not supermarkets.

If you love wildlife and enjoy country walks, you've got the makings of a badger patroller, says Lesley Docksey.

Anoosh Chakelian reveals the secret anti-capitalist history of McDonald’s.

Amy Davies interviews Chuck Rapoport, the American photojournalist who recorded the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster.

On Saturday, it will be four years to the day since the town walls behind St Laurence’s church fell collapsed. Almost nothing has happened to get repairs underway." Andy Boddington reports worrying news from Ludlow.

"The outpouring of emotion when this news came out was like I had died ... but I was lucky enough to read the messages that people have sent to me." James Taylor talks about life since his hear condition forced him to retire from cricket.

Six of the Best 601

"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.

Martin Hancox on the insanity of the badger cull.

A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.

"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.

"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.

Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.

Leicester march to stop the badger cull

In Leicester today, as a citizen journalist, I went along to see people assembling for the march against the badger cull. Then I met someone I knew and decided to join in.

It's a good cause. The government's cull of badgers has more to do with placating the farming vote than it does with scientific evidence for the best way of eradicating bovine TB.

While we were waiting to set off there was a speech, which turned out to be chiefly about the junior doctors' dispute with the government, and a song. The latter, as far as I could tell, was about Liz Truss having blood on her hands.

One of the attractive thing about green campaigning is that it has the potential to decouple conservative voters from the Conservative Party. That possibility was far from the organisers of today's event, but then moderate conservative people do not organise marches.

We marched from Victoria Park down New Walk to the Town Hall Square and then Jubilee Square. In the two squares where we were addressed by Danny Dyer (Badger Trust) and Mark Jones (Born Free Foundation).

At Town Hall Square a couple had just got married and they insisted on having their photos taken with us.

Later, at Jubilee Square, someone was asked to the microphone to read a poem he had written. I became a citizen journalist again and slipped away.

Leicester march to Stop the Badger Cull 21 May

Full details on Badger Action News.

Badger creeps through cat flap, opens fridge and steals Bakewell tart

And still they come. Metro wins Headline of the Day.

Angry badger shuts down luxury Stockholm hotel after scaring guests with 'crazy' behaviour

The Independent takes us to Sweden for our Headline of the Day.

Is this badger, Liberal England wonders, any relation of the giant badger that caused hysteria at Folkestone School for Girls?