There's more than one Reform politician who believes in UFOs

This video has received a lot of attention today, but don't mock Councillor Kieran Lay too hard. Because he's not the only Reform politician to believe in aliens and their UFOs.

Regular readers will be familiar with Rupert Matthews, the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire. He was elected as a Conservative but later joined Reform UK.

And Matthews once told an American interviewer:

"The evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling."

Less amusing are Matthews' current plans for Market Harborough town centre. Rather than spend the money on more properly trained police offices or PCSOs, he's giving £2m to private security firms to provide street wardens.

This approach reminds me of an earlier post of mine about Matthews:

Rupert Matthews, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland, has paid £250 to put up a Victorian-style police station blue lamp in Uppingham.

"The blue lamp is an iconic piece of British policing history and symbolises not only law, order and justice, but safety and sanctuary," he told BBC News.

Trouble is, there is no police station in Uppingham, and the inhabitants of Rutland's second city are far from impressed.

I'm afraid I couldn't resist the headline... Rupert Matthews: The lights are on but no one's at home.

The Joy of Six 1489

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.

The lost streets of Park Hill, Sheffield

Any regular user of Sheffield station will be familiar with the Park Hill flats on the hillside above it. Until they were built between 1957 and 1961, this was an area of terraced houses, shops, pubs, a cinema and at least one church.

In this video Tour Obscure climbs the hill to see what remains of this old landscape. The really good news is that there are two more videos in this series.

Councillor quits Reform for second time in 2 weeks

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges wonder how our regular guest blogger Augustus Carp will cope with this when he posts his next survey of councillors changing parties.

Mark Pack will love it though.