The Joy of Six 1485

"Yet again, we’re all caught up with the fame-encrusted stories of rich, powerful men. The women and their reported life-scarring encounters with Epstein and his set are an afterthought. At best, they’re treated as a salacious backdrop to the fortunes of men whom society has lionised and – with epic irony – thought better than the rest of us." Michelle Cook says the reaction to the Epstein files spotlights how badly we are still failing women and girls.

"As DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] expands its footprint, it’s making its cruelty manifest in suburban areas like Roxbury – towns that might have once felt insulated from the brutality and chaos that immigration agents have unleashed in US cities." Schuyler Mitchell reports that the suburbs are fighting back against ICE's plans to turn warehouses into detention centers.

Peter Kellner writes an open letter to Labour's next prime minister: "It will be crucial to learn from Starmer's mistakes. Listing them is the easy bit. The crisis that has engulfed him deserves an explanation. How did he end up disliked by so many voters and alienating so many of his own MPs?"

Martha Gill argues that enthusiasts for apprenticeships haven’t worked out they fit into a modern economy: "The story of apprenticeships is a long struggle to make a scheme built for a time of trades and manufacturing fit into a modern flexible service economy – a wobbly journey of correction and overcorrection."

"One of the biggest barriers he sees for aspiring cricketers is that their parents often struggle to afford the prohibitive cost of kit, which can quickly spiral into hundreds of pounds." The former England bowler Saj Mahmood talks about making cricket to all with Chris Britt-Searle.

Chris Lovegrove has a site devoted to the world of Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles.

"Like trying to do geometry with blancmange": My Liberator article on Blue Labour

Move over Lord Bonkers: I have an article in the new Liberator (issue 344). You can download the whole issue for free from the magazine's website.

Nor for the first time, I am led to reflect on how hoary my cultural touchstones are growing. The first series of Reggie Perrin was originally screened 50 years ago - it's as though there had been a Liberator contributor when I first joined the editorial collective whose articles relied upon his readers having knowledge of comedy from the early Thirties.

But don't blame me: I've been waiting for a new generation of young Radicals to sweep us to one side since at least 1990, but they have never appeared.

A Better Yesterday

I’ve finally worked out who it is that Blue Labour reminds me of: it’s Doc Morrisey from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. In the classic sitcom written by David Nobbs, Perrin, deep in the throes of a midlife crisis, seeks help from Sunshine Desserts’ company doctor. They have the following conversation.

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can't finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can't stop thinking about sex, can't start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during Play For Today?

Reginald Perrin: That's extraordinary, Doc! That's exactly how I've been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is? Take two aspirins.

Blue Labour, though some MPs claim to owe allegiance to this tendency, is largely Maurice Glasman, and Maurice Glasman is entirely Blue Labour. And the only coherent thread running through the pronouncements of Maurice Glasman (Lord Glasman – he was made a peer by Ed Miliband in 2010) is an ill-focused, Perrinesque nostalgia for the past of his country and party.

Even that is being kind to him when you consider the misshapen catch that comes up when you trawl for his recent media appearances. Among the views he has expressed are that “in order to be truly radical, Labour must recognise its debt to Jesus Christ”; that the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target is a fantasy that should be abandoned in favour of new fossil fuel extraction while the national grid is taken over by the Ministry of Defence; and that Shabana Mahmood is like Elizabeth I – “She’s devoted to her job. She’s unique.” If Glasman were a social media account, you would have muted it long ago.

Visit the Blue Labour website in search of more intellectual substance and you will be disappointed. The featured post there is What Is to Be Done, which dates from October 2025 and is written in a semi-apocalyptic style: “The hour is late.” Nevertheless, there is something in its analysis that Keir Starmer won a “loveless landslide” and came to power without much of a legislative programme or analysis of the country’s problems behind him.

The trouble with What Is to Be Done is that it’s full of grand statements like “We should bring public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel, back into public ownership,” but short of any practical proposals for how such ideas can be put into action. And when it does get close to making such proposals, what we get is an agenda that will be familiar to anyone with a very online Conservative MP: “drastically” reduce immigration, curb the powers of the courts, tell the police to concentrate on repeat offenders. Explore the Blue Labour website and you will find the same high ambitions and shortage of detail in other documents, even its Plan for National Reconstruction. 

All of which makes it a surprise to find Compass publishing a document billed as making “the case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour politics”. It’s Soft Skills, Hard Labour by Frances Foley, who was until recently the group’s deputy director. A surprise because, though it is affiliated to the Labour Party, Compass’s emphasis on cross-party working and support for proportional representation has meant that Liberals tend to feel quite warm towards it. So sensible is it that it’s chair Neal Lawson has been threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party.

Enter Compass

Lawson, incidentally, shares Glasman’s sense that Keir Starmer lacks direction. In a recent Guardian piece, he suggested that Starmer was promoted as Labour leader by people who decided he was the man to drive Corbynism out of the party. They assumed there was no chance of the Conservatives being defeated in 2024, so didn’t worry about his shortcomings as a future prime minister. He would be gone before Labour got in again. Yet so rapid was the Conservative collapse that Starmer found himself in Number 10. It’s a neat mirror image of the Labour left-winger who said in 2015: “If we’d thought we had a chance of winning the leadership then Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t have been our candidate.”

There is no such clarity to be found in Soft Skills, Hard Labour. Foley’s method is to look at different tendencies within Soft Labour and Blue Labour and then map how they complement each other or conflict across the divide. So we have chapters titled “Postliberal Democrats’ challenge to the Rules-based Majoritarians” and “Democratic Communitarians’ challenge to the Rights-based Liberals”. It’s a brave effort, but her two main concepts are so diffuse to begin with that it’s like trying to do geometry with blancmange.

It may be that Blue Labour has more to it than Glasman’s eccentricities – his other recent contributions to debate include apologising to Nigel Farage live on GB News after Keir Starmer said the Reform leader’s immigration policy was “racist and immoral” and claiming that progressive liberals “don’t want you to enjoy anything, not even sex with your wife!” There is an essay collection edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics – but it was published in the very different world of 2015, where it billed itself as seeking to “move beyond the centrist pragmatism of Blair and Cameron”.

Iconoclasm

Frances Foley is attracted to the appetite she sees in Blue Labour for iconoclasm, which is an attraction I imagine anyone who works in the very on-message world of pro-Labour think-tanks is likely to feel after a while. She may even be demob happy: her brief biography in Soft Skills, Hard Labour reveals she is leaving Compass “to set up a new programme matching young people with jobs in climate, whilst training them in political organising,” which sounds more valuable than what most think-tanks produce.

Whatever the reason, she is right to say:

The word “progressive” strongly implies that change is always for the better, rather than to be questioned or resisted. It also suggests that “progress” is a meaningful – and crucially agreed upon – political concept.

That is why I try to avoid using this concept, though a stronger reason is the argument put forward by Simon Titley, late of this parish: 

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

Similarly, when Foley writes of what she terms “Rights-based Liberals”:

They tend to assert the primacy of rights as a priori, not as social constructs created by citizens, but as a first order framework that sets the parameters for what is politically viable. In this sense, Rights-based Liberals see rights as trumping pure democratic sovereignty, setting limits on what democratic societies can decide. 

she is right about the attitude of many on the left towards rights: we should never forget they are human inventions and not somehow ordained by nature. 

There is a better, more pragmatic argument for human rights: by inventing them we increase the chances that government will treat us well. A good example of this is the right to petition for a writ of habeus corpus – a right hoary enough, surely, to win the support of even Maurice Glasman. Nor is it clear how the working class will benefit from any abolition of rights: it’s the powerful who benefit in a free-for-all, as we see in news reports from the US every evening.

But then it’s often hard to see how the working class will benefit from any Blue Labour policies. The only mention of education you’re likely to come across in Blue Labour circles is vocational education: you rarely get the sense that they are much interested in the number of working-class university students or entrepreneurs. What they are telling working-class young people is that somewhere there is a lathe with your name on it and I remain unconvinced that is what all of them want.

Nostalgia

It's easy, and it’s largely justifiable, to dismiss Blue Labour as offering nostalgia for a vanished industrial world, but too much comment on social media from people who like to think they are on the left treats the past as something to point at and laugh. Such comment is all about the performative adoption of approved cultural opinions: nowhere will you see it mentioned that the Fifties saw full employment and record levels of trade union membership or that the Seventies saw the greatest income equality Britain has ever enjoyed. 

One thing Blue Labour has got right is that many self-styled “progressives” aren’t much interested in the working class: it’s just that I’m not convinced Blue Labour is much interested in the working class as it exists today either. Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

Treating the past as a reminder that our current economic and social arrangements are not set in stone and things could be and have been different is sensible. But demanding we return to this past, and demanding it without so much as making a gesture towards providing a route map, is ridiculous. I didn’t get where I am today without knowing the difference.

Sultana accused by Corbyn allies of encouraging 'ultra leftists' to disrupt Your Party conference

The judges' verdict is in: Sky News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The Joy of Six 1437

Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."

"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.

Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.

"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.

Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."

"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.

A conspiracy theory from Neal Lawson: Keir Starmer was never meant to be prime minister

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Their influence on the far right means I don't enjoy conspiracy theories as much as I used to, but let's give a hearing to Neal Lawson in the Guardian:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured.

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn't going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. 

Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour's accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

This theory is firmly unsourced, but I have always been puzzled at Labour commentators confidence that Starmer would make a good prime minister when he had such a slight political record to be judged on.

The Joy of Six 1405

Adam Barnett itemises Nigel Farage's long history of support for Vladimir Putin: "On the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion, Nigel Farage ... argued for ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine – an odd time to do that – and when the war started he called it 'a consequence of EU and NATO expansion'. Last year he called on the west to negotiate with Putin, adding that 'the relentless insistence on continued war is worrying. Whose insistence, Nigel?" 

"There are few fundamental political differences between Corbyn and Sultana. There is a clash instead of style, but this could well be used to their advantage. The conflicts are many when it comes to the wider group involved, however." Sienna Rodgers takes us the power struggles attending the birth of the proposed new left-wing party.

Francis FitzGibbon on the threat to jury trials: "Juries decide​ the outcome of about 1 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales, and yet the jury system is permanently under threat. The latest threat comes in Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts."

"The problem has always been where to place him. Unlike Monsarrat he wasn’t published in the 1930s, so can’t be ranked alongside early social realists like Graham Greene and George Orwell. Two decades later he was older than the proto-Angry Young Man writers John Wain and Kingsley Amis. Nor did he write about life outside London, like William Cooper, John Braine and others." Simon Matthews explores the life and works of novelist and TV dramatist Alexander Baron

"As luck would have it, the club had arranged Mick Channon’s testimonial match for 3 May, and so two days after the cup triumph, fans were still in a celebratory mood as they packed into the Dell to see their heroes. The FA Cup was paraded in front of an official attendance of 29,508 that night, although those who were there would probably tell you there were a few more than that. Spare a thought for the hundreds outside who could not get a ticket." Historic Southampton tells the story of The Dell.

Andrew Nette watches a favourite political thriller. "The Day of the Jackal spends a hell of a lot of time just showing things being done and the minutia involved. For Jackal this includes creating and sourcing a false identity and designing, ordering and learning how to use a bespoke lightweight sniper rifle. ... The mechanics of the police investigation into Jackal’s identity and whereabouts is also painstakingly rendered and I love every minute of it."

Zack Polanski: More left-wing populist than Green?

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Simon McGrath makes an interesting observation on Liberal Democrat Voice:

Looking at his statement when he was elected, climate and environment barely feature and his Twitter feed tells the same story: the Green Party has chosen a leader who doesn’t seem especially interested in green issues.

And a glance at Polanski's Bluesky feed does little to change this impression. There is lots of left populism, but rather less about the environment.

Going after the old Corbyn vote - young, urban, left wing - is a perfectly valid strategy for the Greens, particularly as Corbyn's new party is not guaranteed to fly. But you do wonder how it will play in Herefordshire and Suffolk.

If Corbyn or Polanski or both do make serious progress in the cities, that will make it harder for the Liberal Democrats to break out of their redoubts in suburban and Southern England.

The Joy of Six 1390

John Oxley says it will be hard to assemble a successful new party to the left of Labour: "Building an effective left populist bloc requires having both electoral breadth (so you are a threat in multiple seats) and depth (so you might win some of them). ... It's presently hard to see how any of the existing groups do this. They have too many incompatibilities between their support and are focused on too narrow a niche – how to pull together affluent progressives in the south and poor, second-generation migrants in the Midlands and North?"

"My report calls on TfL – and outlines proposals – to ensure our streets are properly inclusive, safe and convenient for everyone to use. At a time when practical measures to reduce danger are all too often framed as 'anti-driver' rather than as helpful interventions to ensure everyone gets home safely from work or school or a trip to the shops, TfL must address the polarisation of debate about measures to reduce danger on our streets." Caroline Russell, the Green AM, launches Changing the Narrative: Ending the Acceptance of Road Death in London. 

New research suggests individual people can be tracked with a unique "fingerprint" based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals, reports Thomas Claburn.

Kev Nixon on the decline of the working-class musician: "Recent research from the Sutton Trust reveals a stark truth: younger adults from working-class backgrounds are four times less likely to work in creative industries compared to their middle-class peers. In music, nearly half of the UK’s top-selling artists went to private school. The door to the music industry is not just closing for working-class talent – it’s been slammed shut."

"In Gogmagog, the Buried Gods (1957), the archaeologist and Anglo-Saxon specialist T C Lethbridge described his excavations in search of a lost chalk giant cut into the hillside at Wandlebury Ring in the Gog Magog Hills south of Cambridge. His methods were controversial and the archaeological establishment of the time turned against him. His book is a heartfelt response to that criticism and a statement of conviction in his own work." Michael Smith uncovers an old controversy in archaeology.

Michael Hann goes in search of the one-hit wonders of 1980s package-holiday pop.

The Joy of Six 1383

“I couldn’t shake the fear that future generations might never experience the world as I had, that we might go down in history as the generation that knew exactly what was coming, but chose to look away. That’s what brought me into parliament.” Roz Savage explains why she supports statutory targets on climate and nature.

Alfie Steer considers the prospects for a new party to the left of Labour: “Peter Mandelson is once reported to have said that disillusioned left-wing Labour voters simply had ‘nowhere else to go’. But Sultana and Corbyn’s left party may be the biggest challenge to that theory that the Labour Party has ever seen. Despite all the problems that face the new party, it would be the absolute height of complacency for the Labour Party leadership to underestimate it.”

John Hyde on the publication of the first volume of the report of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry: “Sir Wyn Williams said it was ‘indefensible’ that the government refuses to pay for claimants in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme to speak to a lawyer before deciding whether to accept a fixed offer of compensation.”

Generative AI is like a friend who's a psychopathic liar, except it's not actually like a friend, says Steve Lane.

“I’m fascinated by this story, partly because I’m fascinated by all alleged liars and the question of why they lie; and partly because it rings bells, reminding me of a strikingly similar story from a century ago, in which another female writer also gained fame through a fake ‘nature cure’ narrative.” Rachel Hewitt offers a different take on the Salt Path scandal.

Stuart Heritage complains that television episodes have become too long, stretching the limits of the medium and reducing our enjoyment in the process.

Zarah Sultana quits Labour to found new party with Jeremy Corbyn

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It's a development that's been rumoured for days, and earlier this evening Zarah Sultana send this tweet to confirm that it's happening.

Today, after 14 years, I’m resigning from the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.

Join us. The time is now.

Sign up here to stay updated: https://t.co/MAwVBrHOzH pic.twitter.com/z91p0CkXW0

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) July 3, 2025

A lot depends on how many MPs and members the new party attracts in the days to come, but my immediate reaction is that the Greens in general, and Zack Polanski in particular, have had their fox shot.

This just in...

EXCLUSIVE: I understand Jeremy Corbyn has not agreed to join the new left party with Zarah Sultana yet

He is furious and bewildered at the way it has been launched without consultation. https://t.co/zEKwC8YUuk

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) July 3, 2025

Zack Polanski's first encounter with the Corbynite left

Zac Polanski's pitch for the leadership of the Greens is centred on the idea of attracting the sort of urban, left-wing voters who were enthused by Jeremy Corbyn.

Which makes this Buzzfeed news story from 2016 unexpected reading:

The man who heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally on Wednesday evening is a Liberal Democrat activist who stood for the party in last month's London Assembly elections.

Zack Polanski told BuzzFeed News he decided to interrupt the meeting of Corbyn supporters because the Labour leader's "passivity and ambivalence for Europe" had contributed to Britain voting to leave the EU in last week's referendum.

The rest of the crowd reacted very angrily to the heckle, with one man stood in the crowd next to BuzzFeed News shouting, "You Tory heckler! You piece of shit!"

But what would a Polanski leadership mean for Green attitudes to Europe in 2025?

I'm no expert on the internal politics of the Green Party, but Polanski wants Britain to withdraw from NATO, and it's fair to say that the Greens have often not always been as pro-EU as they appear today.

Caroline Lucas began as a Eurosceptic, while Jenny Jones wrote an article for the Guardian on the eve of the EU referendum that was headlined 'The EU is an outsized behemoth beyond reform – the Green case for Brexit'.

Jones has since partially recanted, but there is no guarantee that the Green Party will support Britain rejoining the EU if it makes the pitch for left-wing voters that Polanski promises.

But for the mean time, this appears to be his position...

Brexit has been a disaster. We campaigned against it and it's turned out even worse than we feared. Deregulation in particular is a huge risk. Rejoin customs union & eventually rejoin when conditions are right.

— Zack Polanski (@zackpolanski.bsky.social) 27 April 2025 at 12:50

Conservative Home's strange view of the party's "Lib Dem problem"

When I saw that Conservative Home has a post today about sorting the Conservatives' Liberal Democrat problem, I was curious and a little worried. 

Have the Tories finally noticed that they lost dozens of seats to us at the general election last year? Quite a few of them were sort where they used to weigh their vote rather than count it.

I needn't have worried.

The article is written by a former Tory activist and parliamentary candidate who has joined Reform, and it's about what his old party would have to do before his new one would even consider forming a pact with them.

Its author Dan Barker writes:

I have a question for all those Conservatives who are calling for a pact with Reform UK: If you are serious about ‘uniting the right’, then what may I ask are you going to do about your Liberal Democrat problem?

When I say Liberal Democrats, what I mean is the faction that call themselves ‘One Nation Tories’ (Thatcher’s ‘Wet Liberals’) who are aligned politically with the Liberal Democrats somewhere left of centre and possibly left even of the current Starmer Cabinet. They are arguably the single faction within the Conservatives most responsible for the party’s historic decline and ineptitude.  

They are the dominant faction in the party and have chosen or heavily influenced the selection of many of the recent leaders and prime ministers.  They proudly describe themselves as ‘radically liberal’ – whatever that means – it doesn’t sound conservative in the slightest.  

Perhaps it is this very same ‘radical liberalism’ that is to blame for Net Zero, mass immigration on steroids, the bloated state, historically high taxes, the wokery and the war on freedom of speech that has prospered and flourished under the last 14 years of successive Conservative governments?

The Conservative Party's strength used to be that it had no time for the left's politics of purges, recognising that its ideology was a broad and rather nebulous one. Now its being driven by just that cast of mind.

Momentum's answer to any critic of Jeremy Corbyn was to tell them to "Fuck off and join the Tories". Now the self-appointed True Conservatives - who are often members of a different party - tell anyone who questions their views to "Fuck off and join the Liberal Democrats".

Lord Bonkers' Diary: His mother’s rosehip vodka makes an excellent Molotov cocktail

The King of the Badgers pops up here from time to time. As I've explained before, the name comes from the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, while his character comes most from the badger who appears in T.H. White's The Book of Merlyn. He, in turn, must owe a debt to Kenneth Grahame.

Lord Bonkers' old friend, however, surprised me here by contributing some bitter political comment that is all his own.

Sunday

You find me in the state sett of the King of the Badgers. Time was, I would have brought a bottle of Auld Johnston, that most prized of Highland malts, with me, but the Dowager’s rosehip vodka blows a fellow’s socks off (whether he is wearing sock suspenders or not). 

The King is in a dark mood: “I hear that Jeremy Corbyn has called for peace talks between the badgers and the gunmen who are culling us. I expect his followers think this makes him a saint. If there are talks, I know what will happen. In one year or perhaps two, the gunmen will turn their attentions to the foxes or the weasels. Then Corbyn will call for peace talks between them, and his followers will think that makes him even more of a saint.” 

Though the King is careful to keep the hotheads among the younger badgers in check, he has no intention of abandoning his guerrilla campaign against the cullers. It happens that his mother’s rosehip vodka makes an excellent Molotov cocktail.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The board of Thames Water, Mauricio Pochettino and Nigella Lawson
• They could most fairly be described as "repentant headhunters"
• Mr Gladstone with his dander up
• Right up to the day they cut his head off
• Set in the deserts of Southern Rutland
• Past Christmases and old friends

GUEST POST Many liberal Conservatives are becoming conservative Liberals

Buddy Anderson traces his path from Conservative voter to Liberal Democrat councillor - and a Liberal Democrat councillor in Market Harborough at that.

       One flew east, one flew west,
       One flew over the Conservatives nest.

Like many who perhaps now find themselves more like conservative Liberals, I once was a liberal Conservative - a title that David Cameron had imposed upon himself even before his bromance with Nick Clegg. 

Something resonated with me back then at that idea. Labour had supposedly spent all our money, and everybody was jolly fed up. 

Along came the new 21st-century Tories who apparently didn’t hate poor people and were going to balance the books for us. What joy!

Fast forward 13 years and my friends on the left will cry "same old Tories!" at every opportunity they get. I don’t agree with that, because it wasn’t always this bad. There used to be Tories you could work with, as the Coalition proved for better or for worse. 

Boris Johnson and the Brexit civil war purged almost every Tory with a shred of decency out of the party. Liz Truss tortured the survivors. 

So where are the liberal Conservatives now? Well, many, like me, have found a new home in the Liberal Democrats.

When I joined the Lib Dems I was sheepish about my previous voting record. I was never a Conservative Party member, but I was worried about how my new friends would react. 

To my surprise they barely battered an eyelid. The Lib Dems are truly a broad church, a middle-ground for the politically homeless, and not just for disillusioned blue voters. 

Some of my colleagues used to be Red - too sensible to vote for Corbyn, too progressive to vote for Starmer. We don’t care where you came from, what matters is why you are here. I have never felt more at home.

To those of you who voted for a party you no longer recognise, you were not wrong to follow your heart at the time, but you are very much welcome in the Lib Dems. 

We do not agree on everything, but we are compassionate and pragmatic, with a shared disgust for selfish career politicians. 

Liberty, freedom and equality are at the forefront of our social policy. But we also understand responsible fiscal policy, as the only party to have a full-costed manifesto in 2019.

Take it from me, there is a home to be made in the house of yellow.

Buddy Anderson is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Market Harborough. Follow him on Twitter.

The Joy of Six 1158

"Basic Income was proposed by Paddy Ashdown as a fundamental component of his Radical Agenda for the 1990s, a book published in the late 1980s. It is liberal because it recognises the agency of the individual and their contribution to society. A Basic Income, he said, 'gives security to each individual', and will also 'liberate power in the hands of the citizen'." Jane Dodds is encouraged by the success of a Basic Income in Wales and dismayed by Liberal Democrat backsliding on the policy.

Richard Sanders on the way the 2017 general election has been written out of Labour Party history because it does not fit into the narrative promoted by the party's current leadership.

"A very senior insider told me that there ‘has never been any proper management and accountability of the project. There have been constant changes to the specification with no understanding of the cost implications’. Remarkably, there is no overall budget, the business case has not been reviewed despite the changes in specification and rises in costs and the accounting is carried out, bizarrely, in '2019 prices’ - a subterfuge to disguise the soaring expenditure." Christian Wolmar explains why HS2 is costing so much.

Sarah Bakewell recommends five book on existentialism.

"Last year, I joined a group of intrepid plant hunters descending into the depths of the last remaining bomb site in the City of London. We climbed all the way down into the hole until we reached the level of the platforms of what was formerly part of Aldgate East Station, until a V2 bomb dropped nearby in the Second World War." That was The Gentle Author blogging in 2018.

"Typically set in a sprawling country house and populated by a cast drawn from the landed gentry and the well-to-do, 'Golden Age' detective fiction is not the most obvious genre in which to find two of the country’s leading socialist intellectuals." The Society for the Study of Labour History recalls G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, whose 28 detective fiction novels and four collections of short stories helped the publisher Collins achieve great success with its Crime Club imprint.

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Julian Le Grand makes the case for universal basic capital: a £10k grant for every 18-year-old.

"Seventeen minutes in, after presenting evidence of an 'orchestrated campaign' against Corbyn, the narrator, Alexei Sayle asks: 'But if it was an orchestrated campaign, who was in the orchestra?' There follows a silent montage showing the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, and the Israel Advocacy Movement. As a professional film-maker I recognise this wordless presentation of a controversial idea not as an accident but as a technique: using captions and pictures to state what, if spoken aloud, could be accused of anti-Semitism." Paul Mason reviews The Big Lie, the controversial film that alleges a conspiracy against Jeremy Corbyn.

Lenore Skenazy on an American mother's bafflement at what to do when her young son made a new friend and brought him home: "Parenting has become such a landmine that instead of doing something hands-on and simple - like calling the other parent or walking the boy home - parents feel dicey about any interactions with kids who are not theirs." 

"The Geese and Fountain in Croxton Kerrial, Leicestershire has everything I love about a pub. A wonderful space with a beautiful beer garden. Delicious homecooked food with many ingredients sourced from right there in the village. Dog-friendly, family-friendly – the team is welcoming to all." Laura Hadland says Britain's pubs been help before it is too late.

Jack Hutchcraft visits Rage and Revolution, a Leicester exhibition on the punk movement, and talks to the people behind it.

"In 2021 four young English spinners - Dom Bess, Matt Parkinson, Mason Crane and Amar Virdi - were brought on the tour of India. Two and a half years later, Bess is the only member of the quartet to regularly command a first-team spot for their respective county sides in first-class cricket." The problems with English spin bowling go deeper than the wound in Moeen's finger, argues Yas Rana.

The Joy of Six 1078

"It appears those who called Friday’s mini-budget a “special fiscal operation” had it right. Not just because of the subterfuge involved in undertaking a full-scale budget under the guise of a 'Growth Plan 2022 speech,' but also because of the government’s inability to foresee its self-destructive consequences." Robin Niblett explains why markets don't buy the government's growth plan.

Will Lloyd witnessed the eclipse of Jeremy Corbyn's supporters at the Labour Party Conference.

"Looking for the reasons for children's behaviour is often equated with 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', lack of responsibility and chaos. Here's why that's a mistake." Take it away, Naomi Fisher.

Harry Cheadle opposes Style Guide Liberalism, which he defines as "a fixation on terms and language that is well-intentioned but inevitably creates a murky layer of jargon between speaker and listener, writer and reader. However egalitarian its aims, it inevitably results in an in-group and out-group."

Corporal punishment can still be used in schools in 19 US states. Jamie Davis Smith looks at its long-term effects.

"It was the photograph that did it. Joe Root pictured on a Scottish golf course while Yorkshire supporters were coming to terms with relegation. Root, the epitome of Yorkshire cricket, grinning broadly alongside Michael Vaughan, Kevin Pietersen and Piers Morgan (none of them particularly renowned for checking the county cricket scores), on a day that had reduced many White Rose loyalists to dismay." David Hopps says there's a danger that professional cricket is being asked to redesign itself for the benefit of established players who rarely play it.

Claudia Webbe's sentence cut so there will be no recall petition

Claudia Webbe, the MP for Leicester East, today lost her appeal against a conviction for harassing a love rival. But her sentence was reduced to a community order for 80 hours' unpaid work with no custodial element, so there will be no recall petition.

She was elected for Labour in 2019. Though she was born in Leicester, many regarded the Islington councillor Webbe as a candidate imposed on the local party by the Corbyn leadership. 

Resigning from the Labour after her selection, the Leicester East constituency chair called it "a fix and a disgrace".

Webbe was expelled from Labour after her conviction and has since sat as an Independent.

Before she was elected in Leicester, Webbe - and I'm not making this up - was chair of the panel that oversees Labour’s disciplinary cases.

GUEST POST Carry On up the Brexit

Stuart Whomsley on the psychodrama that was Brexit.

Ten years ago, Europe was not an issue for the vast majority of the people of the UK. The right wing created this psychodrama, created this problem, this crisis that was never there and now see themselves as the ones who have heroically solved it.  This represents a fine piece of manipulation.

However, we can start to consider this issue with the role of New Labour. I remember when Blair was still PM, my saying that though I thought it was the case that the UK needed migrants and they add to our society, the way Blair had overseen such a rapid arrival rate of migrants would stir up racism, as the UK was still a racist society. 

I was told at the time that the UK was not a racist society any more and there was nothing to worry about. Probably by the same people who were saying we were now a meritocracy, class conflict was over and everyone was becoming middle class.   

But migration was the impetuous to turn a fringe issue, our relationship with Europe into what it became.  It allowed Farage to sculpt UKIP into the cloaked racist anti migrant party that it became. And to turn it into the threat that it became to the Conservative party leading to Cameron putting the offer of a referendum in their manifesto, never thinking that he would win so well. 

Unfortunately the Sun did more than blow the bloody doors off Milliband's chances of winning in 2015 with its sandwich eating shot, so that Cameron won outright. Without the restraint of being in Coalition, no Clegg to hold him back, he was forced to hold the referendum as promised.  Well complacent Cameron feeling he was Mr Lucky messed up at that referendum, as we all know.

Johnson actually a pro-European saw that his only route to the job he so craved was to support Leave and to make sure Leave won. His charisma and affable clown persona helped push Leave over the line. Cameron at this point instead of showing character and fulfilling his responsibility and getting a deal and taking it through parliament instead went off in a huff to Chillax. 

May as the new PM immediately showed one of her flaws of character, that of not being able to work well with others, and decided to go it alone instead of taking a cross party approach to build a consensus Brexit. In a failure of self-confidence and judgement, thinking she did not have enough of a majority to get what she wanted through, when it would have turned out that she did, went to the polls.

At the polls she did so badly that now she was in the position where she did indeed not have the majority needed to get what she wanted through. She lost her majority by rather than playing safe and having a neutral manifesto that would focus on getting Brexit done instead put forward a reckless radical vote losing manifesto. Yet May still managed to put together a very shaky Brexit deal to put to a vote.

The sensible thing for pro-European MPs to have done at that time would have been to have cashed out on the May deal. But they did not.  For some it was the hope that kills you, the hope of a People’s vote that stopped them taking the option of the May deal. On the Labour side who knows what machinations were going on with the objective of bringing down Corbyn being prioritised over the European issue.

So in came the Johnson premiership on the mantra that he would get Brexit done and that as this was now the democratic will of the people, to do anything else would be an attack on democracy, an attack on The People.  How far we have come in ten years from our relationship with Europe being a marginal issue to it having been such a central and divisive one.

Brexit is now done, well sort of.  With vast amounts of money spent, with our national political life having been directed towards this issue above all others for four years, until the pandemic arrived, and with the union of the four nations put at risk, with a deal that does in fact look worse than the one we were in whilst part of the EU, the questions we now ask are:

• Was it worth it?
• What psychodrama will the UK head into next?

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

Six of the Best 961

"A basic income will be the best, fairest and simplest way to safeguard the most vulnerable in society and care for those who need it." Christine Jardine writes for the Daily Mirror.

Stephen Bush reviews two books on Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

"I’ve been threatened numerous times during the course of my career but now face a daily barrage of abuse - from being threatened with rape to personal attacks on my appearance. I live in the community I work in, as do many of our reporters. Yet we do not feel safe." Behind Local News reveals the onslaught of online abuse journalists now face.

Rachel Aldred and Anna Goodman find that the low-traffic neighbourhoods scheme implemented in outer London has led to decreased car ownership and use and to increased active travel.

"The most remarkable features of the ‘vision’, apart from a failure to mention the original purpose of the National Trust and the reasons for more than a century of bequests to it, are an insulting assessment of its public, a blithe confidence in its powers of clairvoyance, and a slick, obfuscatory jargon." Nicholas Penny is not impressed by the National Trust's new vision.

"So Andrey Tarkovsky loved Star Wars?" The director's son talks to Max Dax.