GUEST POST Reform and Labour are losing councillors fast

We’ve all enjoyed the regular resignations, defections and disgrace of Reform UK councillors, but the party actually gained councillors from by-election victories and defections, between May 2025 and May 2026. But now, as the latest post from the indefatigable Augustus Carp shows, the tide has turned for them.

The kaleidoscope of local government has continued to twist since the local elections in May, and with it a number of political allegiances have changed. Sometimes a councillor’s defection has little impact, but clustering in some authorities has led to significant weakening in control. For the first time since I started paying any attention to this phenomenon, all political parties have suffered a net loss of councillors, to the benefit of Independents and a number of new Localist groups.

Mark Pack’s website, which diligently catalogues the various defections, expulsions, resignations and arrests of Reform UK councillors, provides a lot of entertainment value, particularly for the type of person who likes watching slow-motion car crashes. But why isn’t anyone paying the same sort of attention to the Labour Party? In terms of defections, ReformUK has lost 48 councillors since the local elections in May. Labour has lost 42 – a similar number, which has received almost no publicity whatsoever. In both cases, there have been a number of councillors in the same political group who have gone at the same time, presumably for ideological rather than just personal reasons.

Seven Labour councillors have gone in Luton, four in Neath, four in Colchester and three in North Tyneside. In Luton, it’s reasonable to assume that the losses from the Labour group were significant in allowing the Lib Dems to form a new minority administration. (But to be fair, the situation there is complex, and the resignation of a senior Lib Dem complicates matters further.)

Four Independents have joined forces with the Conservatives in Braintree, but one has gone the other way. Four of the councillors in Sevenoaks who left the fold in May 2025 to form the West Kent Independent Group have now drifted back. Three others have left the party in Fife

The big losses for Reform UK have been in Durham (8, or maybe 9 councillors, including a suspension) and Plymouth (6) but four have joined in North East Derbyshire and three in Flintshire 

For councillors flying off in all sorts of different directions, have a look at Worcestershire. The Conservatives are unchanged, with two coming and two going, taking at face value their assertion that the national suspension of one of their number doesn’t apply locally. Likewise the Lib Dems are unchanged – one in and one out – but ReformUK are down three. The situation is similarly unclear in some of the District Councils covered by the County.

Across the nation, in the 18 weeks since the local elections in May, the net changes for the number of councillors defecting or getting themselves suspended is:

Conservatives       -6

Labour                 -44

Lib Dem               -15

Greens                  -4

Nationalists           -1  

ReformUK           -48

Independents   +118 

Let’s see if conference season causes any more movement.

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

The Joy of Six 1579

Dawn Butler lays bare the abuse that a Black female MP faces: "Followers of my social media know how bad it can be. I have a regular “block of the month” feature to raise awareness of the disgusting racist abuse sent to me every day – the N-word, “monkey” and “ape” are common insults. The deluge of abuse has a detrimental impact on my mental health, and on those around me."

"There is no reindustrialisation beyond heavily Government-directed industries such as defence and even pharmaceuticals without reversing Brexit. That will not be sufficient, but it is absolutely necessary. And yet, there is literally no mention of Brexit in the core arguments of Reindustrialising Britain." Anthony Painter reads a new collection of essays from Policy Exchange.

Milli Hill on David Walliams and his publisher: "It wasn’t until CEO Charlie Redmayne left Harper Collins in October 2025 and was replaced by a woman, Kate Elton, that decisive action was taken."

"Keynes was a liberal for our age: morally serious, hopeful for a better future, and yet reconciled to the expertly-executed compromises that must be struck to preserve a liberal order that is far more fragile than some would like to believe." Guillaume A.W. Attia says you should read John Maynard Keynes.

"It’s quite lonely and I hate this house because it’s so cold. I just wish I could speed up the process but I can’t. Some days I’m right on to it, and then other days I just can’t, because it’s very emotional – and I’m not really an emotional person." Stephanie Woods interviews four women about the ordeal of clearing a dead parent's house.

Francis Young looks at the importance of folklore to Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy.

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 Joy of Six 1569

Matt Gallagher reports that "the UK quietly sent one of its most senior security officials to a Trump administration summit which proposed to turn global counter-terrorism infrastructure against the political left."

"The values that translate to a modern Liberal success in terms of voting demographics are not simply responsible economics, but a commitment to individualism, social justice and equality; values that when communicated clearly can drive the support of those they affect most, alongside the conscientious urban populations, all of whom now flock to the Greens for these same reasons." Rose Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should stand for more than "business".

Josiah Mortimer on the problems with the government announcement that domestic plug-in solar panels are now allowed in the UK.

Samir Jeraj says cuts to council spending, including on adventure playgrounds, are jeopardising Leicester's recovery from the riots of 2022: "Staff, supporters and the local community are campaigning against the cuts and there are city-wide elections next year, which could reverse decades of Labour domination in the city. Opposition parties ranging from the Conservatives to the Greens are opposing the cuts to the adventure playgrounds and they could become a symbolic issue in the campaign."

"The digital sources barely scratch the surface of what exists in big archives, in tiny archives, in people’s attics. So save yourself the bother, save the planet, save the erosion of your cognitive faculties and learn to do it properly." Sophie Michell sees no role for AI in family history.

"There are six publicly known positive DNA results that match the leopard (Panthera pardus), two from recent years: from Gloucestershire in 2022, from a hair snagged on a barbed-wire fence in the vicinity of a sheep kill; and from Cumbria in 2023, when DNA was found on a carcass – again, of a sheep." Rick Minter makes the case that there are big cats living in the British countryside.

Will Labour back the reform of parliamentary elections next week?

Neal Lawson writes in the Guardian:

Next Wednesday, the representation of the people bill will come before parliament for its final stages. An amendment has been tabled to set up a national commission to look at which system of proportional representation (PR), which does match votes to seats, would best suit our country. It has huge backing in the Commons, in the Labour party and among the public. The prime minister, Andy Burnham, is also a longstanding supporter of electoral reform. The political conditions have never been more favourable to begin making changes to the voting system.

What, Lawson asks, could possibly go wrong? The answer, he rightly suggests, is the existence of: 

a minority but powerful view within the upper reaches of the Labour party, the cabinet and the party bureaucracy is vehemently opposed to PR and the plural politics of cooperation it demands. According to this tribal view, only Labour, governing alone, can represent the interests of "their voters". And so it is preferable to lose all power than to share it.

The remarkable thing is that many in the party cling to this view despite the fact that no Labour government has been motivated chiefly by representing the interests of working-class voters for 50 years.

So next Wednesday's vote is a chance to make progress towards the introduction of PR for Westminster elections. I wish I felt more confident that Labour will take it.

John Maynard Keynes: A very political economist

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Paul Addison reviewed Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard Keynes for the London Review of Books in 1993.

Keynes remains an attractive figure to British Liberals but, Addison suggests, a hard one to pin down:

As Skidelsky emphasises, Keynes was at all times a political economist: "He invented theory to justify what he wanted to do. He understood that theory had to be usable for politicians and administrators." 

But if so, what were Keynes’s political objectives and how radical was he? The ultimate objective of the General Theory was to save the capitalist system from the two intolerable alternatives of Communism and Fascism. It was addressed to the world, or at any rate to the United States, but Keynes also had in mind the situation at home. 

In party politics Keynes was a Liberal: but whether he was a Left-Liberal who sympathised more with Labour, or a Liberal of the Right who might ultimately have found a home in the Conservative Party of Butler and Macleod, is more contentious.

The most radical episode in Keynes’s career was his opposition, covert though it was, to the First World War. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a passionate expression of the indignation and guilt which he had bottled up while the war was in progress, was much acclaimed by the Labour Party. 

In later years, he was seldom in step with the Left but he did become, as a consequence of his investments in the City, a wealthy man with a fortune, in 1936, of £13m in today’s money. Skidelsky observes that as Keynes became more radical in economic theory he tended to become socially more conservative, setting himself up as the squire of Tilton, the house and farm he rented in Sussex.

Keynes wrote for the New Statesman, voted Labour in 1935, and kept in touch with the rising generation of Marxists in Cambridge. But while he praised their idealism he remained completely dismissive of Marxism and regarded the class struggle, even in the mild version propagated by the Labour Party, as futile and irrelevant.

Lib Dems fight to save independent scrutiny of the NHS

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The Liberals Democrats are fighting government proposals to reduce independent scrutiny of the National Health Service. Some of them were opposed by Andy Burnham as recently as last November, when he was still mayor of Manchester.

A press release from the party explains our concerns about its new Health Bill:

The Government’s Bill will remove the duty for the NHS to cooperate with the Care Quality Commission and provide key safety data, will remove automatic 'safe space' protections for whistleblowers, and result in the closure of local healthwatch organisations, which provide independent advocacy for patients and uncover failings. 

The Liberal Democrats have tabled amendments to the Health Bill that would cancel these changes and are urging the new Burnham administration to adopt them. They have vowed to robustly fight the Government in the House of Lords, where Labour doesn’t have a majority.

This comes as the NHS in England recorded 403 'never events' (serious, largely preventable patient safety incidents that should not occur if appropriate safeguards are in place) between April 2025 and March 2026. 

Many patient protections currently at risk, including Healthwatch and key whistleblower safeguards, were established following the major NHS hospital scandals in Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, and Basildon and Thurrock that took place during Andy Burnham’s tenure as Health Secretary and before that a Minister of Health.

Oversight by the healthcare regulator, the CQC, is under threat as the changes would remove the NHS’ "duty to cooperate". The CQC has warned this will restrict its access to safety-critical information, such as patient safety incident reports. 

NHS whistleblowers could lose key legal protections under the planned Bill. Currently, staff who raise safety concerns with the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) are guaranteed anonymity. But HSSIB is losing its independence, meaning cases will move to the Care Quality Commission, which offers no such guarantee.

Labour has previous on such moves. Tony Blair's government scrapped the community health councils that had been the main vehicle for public and patient involvement in the NHS since they were introduced under legislation passed by Ted Heath's Conservative government in 1973.

But a hierarchical organisation like the NHS needs whistleblowers and external scrutiny, because passing bad news up to your superiors is rarely the way to prosper there. The result is a world where senior NHS figures, and the health ministers they brief, are left with too rosy a picture of their organisation.

As the journalist Simon Carr once said:

It's not that politicians lie, it's that they don't know if they are telling the truth. They perceive the world through statistics that have been processed by collaborators who are more or less "subconsciously influenced" to manufacture the required facts. Everything from the inflation index to waiting lists is derived from data ontologically perverted by the political process.

Inside Southwark's Green/Lib Dem coalition council

BBC News has posted a positive write up by Susana Mendonca of the Green/Lib Dem administration that has run the London Borough of Southwark since May's local elections.

At those elections, the Green Party won 22 seats and the Lib Dems 12, then used their combined majority to take control. Southwark is the only London borough currently being run by such a coalition.

The Lib Dems secured three posts in the leadership team, including that of deputy council leader which is filled by their group leader Victor Chamberlain.

Chamberlain told BBC News: 

"The more we started talking, the more we realised that we had a lot in common, that we shared similar values and aspirations for our borough, and actually we wanted to build a borough that is more affordable, that is safer and that is greener.

"I think we found it really very constructive to work as two parties that both bring great ideas to the table."

The article also quotes the deputy leader of the opposition Labour group, who seems rather fixated on process:

"Apart from a number of meetings being cancelled, we've had two proposed cuts, one being the Nest which is a free mental health support for young people and a dementia service being cut, but it's been reversed because the Labour group, along with residents have pushed back.

"It's quite clear that they don't know what they're doing and actually this [coalition] was done in a rush."

The Joy of Six 1550

Jonathan Simons fears that Labour have picked a new leader who communicates well, but whose instincts are wrong: "This easy, reflexive tilt back to the left being about class, and steel mills and coalfields and shipyards and dockyards, and Northern men in Northern towns, is politically weird in 2026."

"Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign." Carole Cadwalladr on the way the media allowed Nigel Farage to operate without scrutiny for so long and why things have suddenly changed.

"The phenomenon of ever-bigger cars has not come about accidentally. It has been sustained by an aggressive marketing campaign, as they are far more profitable for manufacturers than conventional-sized vehicles. They are sold on the basis that they are safer. Extra safety for your family is a key marketing strategy. But while Daddy drives Olivia and Rufus to school in perfect safety, other pupils are in greater peril. And that risk is growing as the cars get ever bigger." Christian Wolmar calls for a halt to carspreading.

Karina Colombo and Elisa Failache find that the rapid expansion of high-speed internet in Uruguay led to a reduction in children's test scores in communication, problem solving and social skills. But it wasn't because the children were spending too long online: it was because their parents were.

"Each retelling reflects contemporary concerns about technological risk, climate uncertainty, social inequality, disaster preparedness, media spectacle and the ethics of dark tourism while maintaining the same underlying core narrative." Jonathan Peter Skinner explains our undying interest in the sinking of the Titanic.

Lucy Janes says the River Clyde is central to modern Glasgow’s identity. "It flows through the core of the city and, as you look downstream, a moment's reflection can lead your mind’s eye out to sea and the wider world."

Labour's weakening of local government will do nothing for voters' confidence in the political system

So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.

City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without. 

I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.

This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.

I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:

I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi. 

Tory fury at VAT on school fees is all about social class

There was a story the other day about dozens of Labour MPs failing to mention the private schools they had attended in their Who's Who entries. I wasn't surprised by this: if I find it difficult to discover which schools a Labour MP attended, I generally assume they were privately educated.

But what was striking was the accusation by the Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake that 

"Their hypocrisy knows no limits. While they plot around the Cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations. They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them."

Because it is a naked appeal to upper-class solidarity. If you benefited from an unfair educational system, it implies, you are duty-bund to ensure that people of your class can continue to enjoy that advantage.

In reality, there's nothing hypocritical about deciding that a system you went through yourself should be reformed or abolished. I'd say it is a sign of a mature intellect, and we expect the Labour Party, even the timid version of it we see today that never mentions social class, to believe in fairness.

But sending their children to private schools is what upper class people do. It's an important part of their identity. Question the practice, and the clang of closing ranks is resounding.

And that solidarity can take extreme forms, as Alex Renton discovered when he went public about the abuse he had suffered as a small boy at his expensive prep school:

The reaction to my story was immediate – and shockingly personal.  "You’re a class traitor," said one friend, whose son had just started at  Eton. I thought she might have been joking – but she wasn’t the only one.

A few days after publication I was at a smart Edinburgh art gallery  party, standing with a glass of free wine in a group of people I  vaguely know. "Don’t stand too close to Renton!" one of them, an old  Etonian businessman, suddenly announced, grabbing my arm. "He might put  his hand down your trousers!" Most of the group chuckled. 

You may disagree with Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees, but there's nothing hypocritical about the policy.

The Joy of Six 1543

"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Liverpool Lib Dem boss accused of using "sex appeal to build fanbase" in cover shoot

Today the Liverpool Echo walks off with our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges requested several copies of Attitude. #JustSayin

Labour and the Liberals in 1924 and today

Malcolm Petrie reviewed two books on the first Labour government for the London Review of Books a couple of years ago. The books were The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark and The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance.

In the course of his article, Petrie cast light on the relation between Labour and the Liberals – in 1924 and even, to an extent, today:

Rather than seeking to implement a distinctive socialist programme, then, the Labour cabinet had two main ambitions in 1924. The first was to cement the party's position as the progressive alternative to the Conservatives and to prevent a Liberal revival. 

It’s striking, given Labour's ideological debt to Liberalism, how visceral the dislike of the Liberal Party was among its senior figures. One reason for Labour’s emergence had been the unwillingness of local Liberal associations to accept working-class parliamentary candidates; in addition, Liberal MPs had tended to see their Labour counterparts as subordinate elements in the prewar Liberal coalition: useful, but not equal. 

The result was that Labour MPs felt, often justifiably, that the Liberals were unbearable snobs; and, in the case of Lloyd George and his followers, corrupt, dishonest hypocrites. 

As Torrance remarks, MacDonald thought he "could get on with the Tories": while there might be disagreements over policy, they ‘were gentlemen’; the Liberals, however, "were cads". There was also a sharp awareness that Labour and the Liberals were, in effect, competing for a single vacancy: if Labour was to have a long-term future as a governing party, the goal had to be, as Clark argues, "to destroy" the Liberals.

That point about competing for a single vacancy explains a paradox about the Liberals and Liberal Democrats. Liberal in the West Country often sound rather right wing to the rest of the party, yet they and the Conservative Party are at each other's throats there. Equally, Northern urban Liberals sound left wing, but hate the Labour Party.

And Labour's second attitude in 1924 reminds me of that of many Labourites and Liberals over my political lifetime:

The second objective was to repudiate the accusation, voiced most bluntly by Winston Churchill in 1920 when he was still a Liberal, that Labour wasn’t fit to govern. This explains the composition of the cabinet, and Labour ministers' willingness to appear in court dress, despite the unease this provoked on the political left. It is also the reason some of the party’s most prominent policies were discarded as soon as it became clear that Labour could form a government. 

The proposed wealth tax, the capital levy, was dumped: Snowden called it "an electoral millstone". Scottish home rule, a cause inherited from Radical Liberalism, was also abandoned. When, in May 1924, George Buchanan, the ILP MP for Glasgow Gorbals, introduced a Private Members’ Bill on the issue, it was talked out by Conservative backbenchers. 

Buchanan, backed by his fellow Clydesiders, pleaded with MacDonald to grant additional parliamentary time, but MacDonald, who was Scottish and had been a supporter of home rule, refused. Torrance, who makes excellent use of material from the Royal Archives, reveals that MacDonald, in his updates to George V, was happy to criticise, and even ridicule, the advocates of home rule.

Which suggests that the monarch had more political nous than his prime minister, as George V is widely reported to have said to MacDonald: 

"What fools we were not to listen to Gladstone on Ireland!"

We have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer and it may not be right anyway

I see a lot of people saying that history will be kind to Keir Starmer - much kinder than commentators have been in recent weeks.

Three points...

First, history is not a single agreed narrative but a collection of debates. History will say lots of things about Keir Starmer, some of them quite contradictory.

Second, we have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer, because his career will be seen in a wider context, much of which hasn't happened yet.

Andy Burnham may be lead Labour to defeat at the next general election, or he may win that election, bite the bullet and start the process of rejoining the European Union. How Keir Starmer is viewed by future will depend greatly on how Burnham and Burnham's successors fare in office.

Third, history may be wrong about Keir Starmer. History may be wrong about a lot of things.

There is an implicit assumption here that the judgements of future historians are bound to be correct, both factually and ethically. This blog's hero Karl Popper used to call this view "moral futurism", whether it was inspired by the Marxist view that socialism was historically inevitable or Liberal confidence in the inevitably of "Progress".

But these future historians will operate in a social and academic climate they have not themselves made. Imagine a far-right government coming to power in Britain – sadly it's much easier to imagine than it used to be.

We have seen the accommodations that American academia has made to please Donald Trump, and I see no reason to believe that its British counterpart would behave any differently Now imagine the sort of history that would be produced here after five or ten years of that.

And even without the intervention of a far-right government, there is no reason for us to assume that the judgements of future historians will be informed by years of moral progress.

So it's no use appealing to future historians. If there are any, we don't know what they will say and we might not like it if we did.

Lib Dem billboards attack Farage’s £5m "reward for Brexit"

The only person to profit from Brexit is Nigel Farage, who has walked away with a £5 million payout he described as his reward for Brexit, the Liberal Democrats claimed yesterday.

The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey launched a nationwide billboard campaign to mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. The campaign highlights how ordinary families across the UK are facing skyrocketing household bills in the aftermath of Brexit, all while taxpayers face a £90 billion hit every year.

Speaking at a rally held in front of one of the billboards in London, Davey said:

"After ten years of the Conservatives’ Brexit experiment, the British public have had enough. We are the ones who have had to pay for their lies.

"Nigel Farage pocketed a £5 million 'reward' for the damage he’s caused, while the rest of us are paying for it dearly. When he promised we would be better off, he clearly only meant himself.

"We are taking over billboards across the UK today to say enough is enough.

“Our message to Andy Burnham and the rest of Labour is clear: drop the damaging red lines on Europe, and drop them now. It’s time to end the chaos and fix our broken relationship with Europe.”

The Joy of Six 1537

David Howarth reminds us that both Tony Blair and Keir Starmer said pluralist things in opposition, only to go back on them in power: "Given that history, why should Liberals believe that Andy Burnham would be any different? He has already backtracked on his previous anti-Brexit pronouncements and his only promise on electoral reform is that he might include a 'pledge' on it in Labour’s next manifesto. We know what such 'pledges' from Labour are worth."

A deliberate strategy to push the British right – from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – into a radicalising auction over the mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens is being underwritten by the owner of 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"The party holds one seat in a chamber that has grown from 60 to 96 members, meaning their proportional presence is smaller now than at any point since devolution began." Elsie Jones asks why the Welsh Liberal Democrats underperformed in last month's Senedd elections.

Andy Bull looks back on Brendon McCullum's career in New Zealand: "All of which may, or may not, be a timely reminder that McCullum's dressing rooms have not always been the sort of free-and-easy open-to-all environments they seem to be when the team are winning. That, expert as he is handling his players, he is also a pretty ruthless dressing-room politician, a man who knows how to instruct a media team and even deploy his lawyers during a crisis."

Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn on popular music and on the gender sensibilities of The Smiths, Van Morrison and The Velvet Underground in particular. 

"I had never been so far below sea level, it was difficult to comprehend, the layers of rock, millions of years old above us." Neala shows that being an archives volunteer at Manchester Central Library is more exciting that you might expect.

Personality matters in politics: Starmer's lack of one did for him

John Harris's Guardian article on the resignation of Keir Starmer contains a key paragraph:

So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer's sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.

Harris is obviously a good judge, because that was very much what I was saying on Bluesky at about the same time.

The fall of Starmer is a reminder that personality matters in politics. He never gave the public the impression that he had much of one. The result was that not only did he fail to inspire or enthuse anyone, but also that the public invented an unflattering personality for him. 1/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

World events gave him almost weekly opportunities to address the nation and sound prime-ministerial, yet he rarely took them. But then he didn't even talk to the junior ministers he sacked. 2/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

I'd also say that not being the Tories, which was Labour's strong selling point in the election, does not of itself generate a coherent programme for government. Perhaps Sunak's early election caught them on the hop, but you do get the impression that they came to power underprepared. 3/3

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 22 June 2026 at 10:29

The Joy of Six 1536

"Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing 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 grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured." This seems a good day to air again this Neal Lawson theory.

Prem Sikka on the curse of the finance industry: "Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off."

Matt Gallagher says the Online Safety Act is forcing us to hand over personal data to unregulated overseas corporations with questionable privacy records.

"Behind every great director ... is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman." Bethany Elliott investigates a familiar dynamic in male-dominated Hollywood.

Carrie Marshall goes to see the B52s.

"She grows smaller. Was she approximately human-sized in her wearing-a-pinny-and-doing-the-laundry phase, but then hedgehog-sized at the end? In the final image, she is a completely naturalistic hedgehog4. She looks like a little brown aubergine. So it's possible that at the end of his story – shudder – Samuel Whiskers has grown bigger." Sam Leith is worried: how big are Beatrix Potter's animals?

The Joy of Six 1534

Keir Starmer should set a timetable for his departure from Number 10 and give his successor the opportunity to prepare for becoming prime minister, argue Hannah White and Alex Thomas.

"Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs." Lisa M. Given on what Britain can learn from Australia's attempt to ban under-16s from social media.

Ben Mayfield has seen a new film on the countryside access debate in England and Wales: "Our Land is a title with two meanings – private land ownership for the landowners v the campaign for shared rights in land. The film explores different attitudes to ownership as well as the physical borders between landowners and, in the words of access campaigner and contributor Guy Shrubsole, 'the peasants'."

John Drury names six mistaken ideas in crowd psychology that refuse to die: de-individuation, groupthink, mass panic, contagion, the hooligan, mob mentality.

"Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain." Boyd Tonkin pays tribute to Edwin and Willa Muir, whose translations made the work of Franz Kafka available to the English-speaking world.

David Hewitt looks back to Oxfam Walk '69 and Wembley Stadium's first concert: "Four-fifths of those who started the walk managed to complete it, and their total mileage was said to be equivalent to three trips to the Moon and back. The first of them arrived at Wembley at 3pm, where they were met by yet more celebrities. Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, told them they were 'the nation’s conscience' and 'one of the finest armies that has taken the field for many years'."