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Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

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Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.

North Yorkshire anti-fracking campaigners welcome new Lib Dem climate and nature policy

The Liberal Democrats’ new Climate and Nature policy For People, For Planet, adopted at Bournemouth, has won approval from anti-cracking campaigners in Yorkshire, reports York Mix:

Chris Garforth, from Frack Free Coastal Communities, said: "Finally, a clear-cut, no-nonsense proposal from a major political party that leaves none of the wiggle room that oil and gas companies and politicians have been using to their advantage for so long.

"Time now for Ed Miliband and the Labour government to take a similar unequivocal stand for the climate, environment and economy."

This praise, explains the website, comes as North Yorkshire Council is assessing an application to extract gas at Burniston, near Scarborough using the proppant squeeze method. This has been described as "small-scale fracking" and is seen by campaigners as a loophole in the UK’s moratorium on fossil fuel extraction.

Tom Gordon on how to get more working-class people into politics

Tom Gordon, the Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, is the guest on the Spectator's latest Coffee House Shots podcast.

He talks to James Heale about his campaign to improve working-class representation in politics. Tom, newly elected in 2024, explains how getting his mum involved in local politics in West Yorkshire led him to think about the structural issues that exist preventing more people from getting involved in politics.

It sounds as though Tom would welcome contact from Liberal Democrats who share his interest in this important issue. 

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Britain's right-wing newspapers are offering uncritical support for Trump’s immigration policies, even though they infringe on civil liberties and the rule of law. So, asks Raymond Snoddy, are the Sun, Times, Mail and Express preparing to back Reform?

Nick Kemp argues that the government's English Devolution Bill undermines local government: "This Bill doesn’t restore power to local councils; it strips it away. Far from being a revival of local self-determination, it represents something more troubling: the franchising of central government, dressed up as devolution."

Jackson Lears looks at what the War on Terror has done to American society: "The hysteria provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center created an opportunity for Cheney and his ideological comrades to engineer what amounted to a coup d'état. In collaboration with the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, they fashioned a Washington foreign policy consensus committed to armed intervention abroad, overt or covert, anywhere US intelligence agencies decided that American interests were somehow at stake."

Yorkshire’s uplands are ecological deserts, drained and burned by big landowners. David Robson says it's time to demand restoration over destruction.

Ellen Peirsen-Hagger on the uneven economics of publishing: "A 2022 Society of Authors report found the median income of full-time authors was £7,000 a year, which, when adjusted for inflation, is a shocking 60.2 per cent drop on 2006 rates. The report also found that women and authors of colour earn less than their counterparts. What’s more, the top 10 per cent of writers were found to earn 47 per cent of all author income."

Sexy Beast was the last good British gangster film, insists Andrew Nette, who goes on to name 10 more.

Britain's worst road traffic accident took place 50 years ago today: The 1975 Dibble's Bridge coach crash

Today, 27 May, is the 50th anniversary of Britain's worst road traffic accident. In it, 32 coach passengers and their driver lost their lives when a coach lost braking power while descending a steep hill in North Yorkshire and crashed through the parapet of a bridge at the bottom.

The passengers, all women, were on a day trip from the town of Thornaby-on-Tees in North Yorkshire to Grassington in the Dales.

Strangely, I have no memory of hearing about this disaster on the news at the time, nor have I ever heard it referred to since. It's odd how some such events are remembered and others quite forgotten.

There aren't even any photographs of the aftermath of the crash on the Getty Images site, where I look for such things. So instead I have added a video made for Thornaby Town Council in 2019.

As it explains, the design of coaches has changed out of recognition since 1975, partly as a result of this accident.

The crash site is less changed though. It had been the scene of a similar bus crash in 1925, and the video tells of two cyclists who died here in separate incidents more recently after failing to negotiate the bend at the bottom of the hill.

Later. BBC News has an article today marking the anniversary.

Lincoln Seligman, who is interviewed in it and in the video above, was a barrister at the time of the crash and is now a sculptor. He was also a godson of Edward Heath - his father was a Conservative MEP and a strong supporter of Heath's leadership.

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"The idea of progression in prison is seductive but unachievable. Too many prisons are struggling to get men out of their cells for even an hour a day, there is little or no opportunity for education or work, the food is stodgy and there’s too little of it, contact with family is intermittent, and violence prevalent. How such a prison could possibly encourage people to go to non-existent work to earn early release is just pie in the sky." Frances Crook finds that David Gauke’s sentencing review tackles prison overcrowding but fails to challenge the system’s core flaws or offer a true path forward.

Lewis Baston says the Liberal Democrat by-election win in Sutton on Thursday underlines the trouble  that London’s Tories are in.

"The region that was the birthplace of rail has fallen behind Europe and the world when it comes to high quality rail network that meets the needs of the current age." Rob Naybour argues that it’s high time the cities and towns of the North of England were better connected.

Christopher Kaczor on the importance of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntryre, who died last week: "MacIntyre emphasised that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgments. 'We should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done,' he wrote in A Short History of Ethics."

Sean Wilentz takes us back to the winter of 1965/6 and the making of Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde.

"From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous." Lissa Evans recommends Emlyn Williams’ autobiography George.

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Emma Burnell reviews Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, and ponders the limitations of the Morgan McSweeney approach to politics: "All too often the project behind Starmer - and McSweeney in particular - seem not to see this. That poor culture and poor behaviour are poor in and of themselves – not excusable when it’s 'one of us' exhibiting it."

"Johnson and Truss at least had the grubby excuse that sucking up to MAGA Americans might be in their own financial interest - for the US market for disgraced former British PMs can be a lucrative one, there being no shortage of wealthy fools there happy to be taken for a ride. Jenrick did not even have that excuse. Nor, of course, does Kemi Badenoch, the party’s actual current leader." Alex Massie is merciless in his dissection of the rotting of the Conservative mind.

The government's agenda for local government is all about size and centralisation, but Jessica Studdert sees a "new local" emerging that involves power, prevention and place.

Daniel Jones and Martin Durham on the role of women in the British Union of Fascists: "If fascist policies were often reactionary or ambiguous, they were not always so. Like almost every other political force in the thirties, the BUF wanted to win newly enfranchised women as supporters and voters, and felt it necessary to put forward policies that would alleviate and improve the conditions of women’s lives."

Rafael Behr argues that Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy is an allegory of the current political crisis. Hear him: "Her heartbreak is a parable of political bereavement, describing liberal angst at the sudden unravelling of institutional and legal norms underpinning European security. (Plus sex and jokes.)"

Ampleforth Abbey has become the latest site to join the Dark Skies Friendly Community scheme run by the North York Moors National Park, reports Yorkshire Bylines.

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"Some strategists are agonising about us reaching a peak, because we’re only first or second in 99 seats - I’d say that’s a nice problem to have, considering where we were in 2015." Matthew Pennell looks at how the Liberal Democrat fared in 2024.

Maria Kuchapska says Russia is reviving Soviet-era punitive psychiatry in occupied Ukraine: "In the Russian-occupied Luhansk region, Pavlo Lysianskyi, the director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Security, stated that 31 minors had been sent to forced psychiatric detention this year alone. Echoing the 1971-5 Five Year Plan, new psychiatric penal institutions are being erected in the occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions."

Why were so many of last summer's rioters in their 40s and 50s? Sara H. Wilford studies the overlooked phenomenon of middle-aged radicalisation.

In 1968, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were the world’s most famous teens. In 2023, they sued Paramount for abuse. Lila Shapiro on the ethics of filming young actors.

Colin Speakman makes the case for reopening the railway from Skipton to Colne: "A youngster living in Colne or Nelson wanting to go to Leeds or Bradford University, or for a job in Skipton at Skipton Building Society, has exactly the same need for a fast, frequent train service as a kid in Ealing or Woking."

Rosemary Hill reviews a field guide to stone circles: "Prehistory moves constantly in dialogue with archaeology, which, until about 2000, was primarily concerned with excavations undertaken by bearded men with monosyllabic forenames who courted publicity."

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"Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him." Dorothy Bishop explains her decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society - she's talking about Elon Musk, of course.

Jim Sleeper uncovers the Classical roots of the US Constitution: "The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses."

Amy-Jane Beer is excited by the rewilding project at Castle Howard: "While most authorised beaver reintroductions in the UK have been in small enclosures, here the plan is to give them 450 acres to work with, alongside pigs and large grazers that will churn and prune and trample and further invigorate ecological processes. I cannot wait to see it."

During the Cold War, philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Cheryl Misak was part of a movement that included both Jacques Derrida and Roger Scruton.

 "Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses," says Luke Buckmaster.

Tim Rolls on the day in 1966 that Bobby Tambling scored five goals at Villa Park: "Looking at the TV footage a couple of things strike home. The quality of Chelsea’s accurate, incisive passing (particularly Osgood and Cooke) and speedy breaks, and the sheer inability of the home players to shut down their breaking opponents."

Sausage company launches free rural bus service

We have our Headline of the Day - and a possible solution to the lack of public transport in the countryside - thanks to BBC News.

The Mandrakes: No Face, No Name and No Number

This is a note-for-note cover of a song from Traffic's first album by a Scarborough-based band, recorded in 1969.

What's interesting about it is the identity of the lead singer of The Mandrakes. It's a 20-year-old Robert Palmer.

He was to join The Alan Bown! and then Vinegar Joe before enjoying his greatest success as a solo artist in the Eighties. Like Steve Winwood, the original singer of No Face, No Name and No Number, he was signed to Island Records.

Grandmother fined for climbing on freight train

BBC News wins our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

And there's a local angle to the story below:

A grandmother who climbed on top of a freight train as part of a climate protest has escaped a prison sentence.

Karen Wildin, 60, managed to stop the goods train as it travelled to Drax power station in North Yorkshire on 11 November 2021.

The wagons were transporting wood pellets which Wildin objected to being burned for fuel.

She appeared at Leeds Crown Court on Monday and was told to pay a £3,000 fine.

The private tutor, from Leicester, waved an Extinction Rebellion flag during the protest, which took place during the COP26 climate change conference.

This was clearly a principled protest rather than vandalism. Nevertheless, the judges were insistent that I post their favourite video again.

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Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss argue that the harsh sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil protestors are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest.

"In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for 'glorifying violence'. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'." Andrew O'Hagan went to the Republican National Convention.

"It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals." Susanna Rustin searches London for memorials to early feminists.

Ray Casey dreams of reopening the coastal railway line from Middlesbrough to Scarborough.

"A former miner, he recounted being trapped by a rockfall and waiting for hours to be rescued without being able to move a millimetre. There must be mental powers of concentration and stamina bound up with this experience which were probably transferable to the experience of playing endless frames of snooker." Conrad Brunstrom pays tribute to Ray Reardon.

Patricia Herlihy on the flowers to be found in her garden in July: "A few might seem to be weeds to some, but I find them to be useful as pollinator foods and very pretty as well."

Phil Willis opens new Lib Dem campaign headquarters in Harrogate

Proving there's Lib Dem life beyond the blue wall, The Stray Ferret reports the opening of our new campaign headquarters in Harrogate:

The constituency's former Lib Dem MP, Phil Willis, cut the ribbon on the premises on Westmoreland Street, flanked by party volunteers and accompanied by Tom Gordon, who will be challenging Conservative candidate Andrew Jones for the seat.

Mr Willis – who now sits in the House of Lords as Baron Willis of Knaresborough – won Harrogate and Knaresborough in 1997 and was re-elected with increased majorities in 2001 and 2005 before stepping down in 2010. 

Phil told the independent local news site:

The last time I did this was in 1997 and look what happened then. I believe when we look back, this will be seen as an important day for the Lib Dems and for Harrogate and Knaresborough.

Tom Gordon added:

Already we’ve had countless people walking in to collect posters and offering to volunteer, it’s clear we are building momentum and local people see us as the key challengers and alternatives to the Conservatives here in Harrogate and Knaresborough.

Former Lib Dem councillor from Harrogate arrested over tweets

The Stray Ferret reports that Pat Marsh, a Liberal Democrat member of North Yorkshire Council until she was suspended from the party after tweets she sent came to light, has been released from custody after being arrested yesterday.

It quote a statement from North Yorkshire Police:

"A woman who was arrested in connection with an investigation into anti-semitic 'tweets' shared on X has been released under investigation whilst enquires continue.

"She was arrested yesterday (Tuesday, February 20) on suspicion of displaying threatening, abusive, or insulting written material with intent or likely to stir up racial hatred.

"An investigation is underway however it is likely that enquires will take some time. Updates will be provided when appropriate.”"

Marsh chairs the council's Harrogate and Knaresborough area committee.