Now Ed Davey is implying that Nigel Farage is right

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

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

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

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

[image or embed]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Keir Starmer's digital ID project is a techno-authoritarian’s wet dream, argues Carole Cadwalladr: "This is a policy that wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, that no party faithful campaigned for and that no voters were told about on the doorstep. Instead, after some brief ground softening by pet journalists in friendly newspapers, it appeared out of almost nowhere in late September."

David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."

Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.

"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.

Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."

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James Ball argues that the tech bros have outsourced social media moderation to British police forces – not surprisingly, they're terrible at it: "It shouldn’t become normal that the police get involved in social media disputes. They have better things to do, and it’s bad for freedom of expression – even if people aren’t actually being sent to the gulags, self-censorship based on fear is real and a problem. We should be trying to tackle this. And that means looking why it’s happening."

"I can understand why he took the job. I can understand why he left Meta after Donald Trump was elected. What I can’t understand is why he has written this book." Naomi Alderman reviews books by Nick Clegg and Tim Berners-Lee,

James Graham promises us a "defence of Liberalism".

Scarlet Cassock takes us behind the scenes of the scandal at Bangor Cathedral: "Many of us in the choir were, admittedly, recipients of their largesse and generosity, albeit with varying degrees of discomfort. They were always very clear that we relied upon their protection in order to maintain our position here, a claim made more tangible by the withholding of contracts of employment, agreed budgets and other types of paperwork."

"The concrete structures were built between 1900 and 1910, but Clee Hill was thriving with industrial activity long before then. Iron, coal, clay and limestone have all been mined here, but these crushers were built for the "Dhu Stone", a dolerite named after the Welsh word for Black. Demand for Dhu Stone dropped in the 1960s, and the quarry dwindled, but back in 1900 more than two thousand people were employed here." Shrewsbury From Where You Are Not takes us to the extraordinary post-industrial landscape of Titterstone Clee.

"Larkin’s prose is glorious, equally impressive in its portrayal of the nostalgic atmosphere of a bucolic English summer and its evocation of the bitterness of an unforgiving winter. Larkin is particularly strong when it comes to capturing life in an English town during wartime, an environment where people find themselves in rather diminished circumstances." JacquiWine reads A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin.

Pro-Palestinian campaign groups have their bank accounts frozen

At least two peaceful pro-Palestine organisations in the UK have had their bank accounts frozen, reports the Guardian.

The two examples the paper gives are the Greater Manchester Friends for Palestine and Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which have had access to their funds cut off indefinitely by Virgin Money and Unity Trust bank respectively.

The Guardian says of this news:

Coming amid the banning of Palestine Action earlier this month and the arrest of more than 100 people for showing support for the group, and the threatened arrest of a peaceful protester for having a Palestine flag and “Free Gaza” sign, it has amplified concerns about a crackdown on critics of Israel.

This has made me remember what I wrote when everyone on Twitter was hurhuring about Nigel Farage losing his Coutts account:

I'm uneasy with the enthusiasm for Coutts's decision to close his account.

Because, despite what right-wingers believe, the banks are not part of a woke blob. They are conservative organisations, and if they start refusing people accounts because of their politics, then it is left-wingers who will suffer more.

And I can see government and right-wing activists putting pressure on the banks. Why do Just Stop Oil activists have accounts with your bank? Ban them!

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"We don’t have a political system, more like the US, where people are more empowered to act for their area, to act independently. I think the British political system and MPs individually would rise in the public’s esteem if they were able to act with more independence on an everyday basis and say what they really feel. Maybe we’d have a more vibrant political debate if people went into interviews and said what they were feeling, as opposed to what they’ve been told to say." Andy Burnham talks to Hardeep Matharu from Byline Times.

Stewart Lee once described Twitter as "a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers". Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault come to much the same conclusion about more recent developments: "The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape."

Gary T. Gunnels reviews Hayek's Bastards by Quinn Slobodian: "Slobodian’s central thesis is that Hayek’s intellectual edifice, rooted in his arguments for spontaneous order and market mechanisms, has been warped by a group of unwanted 'bastards' into a justification for a racially hierarchical social order."

Kate Moore argues that, for many people, ageing means lost independence in a digital online world built without them in mind."

"I first heard of Baron from Iain Sinclair's description of him (and Gerald Kersh) as being amongst 'the Reforgotten' – British writers brought back in and out of fashion over the decades." Discontinued Notes on Alexander Baron.

Kelefa Sanneh considers the strange persistence of prog rock: "The genre’s bad reputation has been remarkably durable, even though its musical legacy keeps growing. Twenty years ago, Radiohead released 'OK Computer,' a landmark album that was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long. But when a reporter asked one of the members whether Radiohead had been influenced by Genesis and Pink Floyd, the answer was swift and categorical: 'No. We all hate progressive rock music.'"

Lord of the Flies: Had William Golding read Richard Jefferies?

Accounts of the writing of William Golding's Lord of the Flies tend to emphasise the influence of R.M Ballantyne's The Coral Island on the book. Golding both borrowed Ballantyne's plot and subverted his view of the world.

But I have lately come to wonder if Golding had read another Victorian novel: Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy. Because, in it, Bevis and his friend Mark maroon themselves on an island and live like explorers. Gradually, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they become convinced they are sharing the island with a beast.

Bevis and Mark were better organised than Golding's boys:

Poles were nailed across the open sides from upright to upright, not more than six inches asunder right up to the beam on two sides. This allowed plenty of space to shoot through, but nothing of any size could spring in. On the third, the poles were nailed across up to three feet high, and the rest prepared and left ready to be lashed in position with cords the last thing at night.

When these were put up there would be a complete cage from within which they could fire or shoot arrows, and be safe from the spring of the beast. Lastly, they went up on the cliff to see what could be done there. The sand was very hard, so that to drive in stakes the whole length of the cliff edge would have taken a day, if not two days.

They decided to put up some just above the hut so as to prevent the creature leaping on to the roof, and perhaps tearing a way through it. Bevis held the matchlock this time and watched while Mark hewed out the stakes, taking the labour and the watching in turn. With much trouble, these were driven home and sharpened nails put at the top, so that the beast approaching from behind would have to leap over these before descending the perpendicular cliff on to the hut. The fortification was now complete, and they sat down to think if there was anything else.

That's from chapter 45 of the classic Jonathan Cape edition of Bevis, which has illustrations by E.H. Shepard. 

But it was originally chapter 11 of volume 3 - a reminder that, though the book puts a child's perceptions at its centre in a way that was unprecedented in 1882, it was published as a novel for adults and in a form to suit commercial libraries.

Anyway, there's more about the beast in the next chapter:

At the water’s edge some flags were bent, and then the tall grass, as high as their chests, was thrust aside, forming a path which had evidently been frequently trodden. There was now no longer the least doubt that the creature, whatever it was, was of large size, and as the trail was so distinct the thought occurred to them both at once that perhaps it had been used by more than one. From the raft they could see along it five or six yards, then it turned to avoid an alder. While they stood looking Pan came back, he had run right through and returned, so that there was nothing in the reed-bed at present.

Bevis stepped over the bulwark into the trail with the matchlock; Mark picked up the axe and followed. As they walked their elbows touched the grass each side, which showed that the creature was rather high than broad, lean like the whole feline tribe, long, lean, and stealthy. The reed-grass had flowered and would soon begin to stiffen and rustle dry under the winds. By the alder a bryony vine that had grown there was broken and had withered, it had been snapped long since by the creature pushing through.

The trail turned to the right, then to the left round a willow stole, and just there Pan, who trotted before Bevis, picked up a bone. He had picked it up before and dropped it; he took it again from habit, though he knew it was sapless and of no use to him. Bevis took it from his mouth, and they knew it at once as a duck’s drumstick. It was polished and smooth, as if the creature had licked it, or what was more probable carried it some distance, and then left it as useless. They had no doubt it was a drumstick of the wild duck Mark shot.

The trail went straight through sedges next, these were trampled flat; then as the sedges grew wider apart they gradually lost it in the thin, short grass. This was why they had not seen it from the land, there the path began by degrees; at the water’s edge, where the grasses were thick and high, it was seen at once. Try how they would, they could not follow the trail inland, they thought they knew how to read "sign," but found themselves at fault. On the dry, hard ground the creature’s pads left no trail that they could trace.

I was reminded of the beast on the island by a Twitter account that was tweeting Bevis line by line. It stopped suddenly, which made me worry that Bevis and Mark had been devoured by the beast. But I've now found the service is being continued on Bluesky.

So let's end with a shocking reminder from Bevis of the delinquency of Victorian schoolboys as they assemble the provisions to take to the island:

Mark took care that there should be some salt, and several bags of flour, and two of biscuits, which they got from a whole tinful in the house. He remembered some pepper too, but overlooked the mustard. They took several tins of condensed milk. From a side of bacon, up in the attic, they cut three streaky pieces, and bought some sherry at the inn; for they thought if they took one of the bottles in the house, it would be missed, and that the servants would be blamed. Some wine would be good to mix with the water; for though they meant to take a wooden bottle of ale, they knew it would not keep.

My MP Neil O'Brien is a poster boy for the decline of the Tory mind

My Conservative MP Neil O'Brien's X account is a bin fire. You would never know from it that in a general election less than a year ago his party lost half their vote and two-thirds of their MPs. And his only tweets on the local election have been about an 18-year-old Labour candidate in Burnley.

And there's lots about race, much of it designed to encourage the idea that it's white people who are discriminated against. No wonder he gets lots of like and retweets and follows from blue-tick accounts with even more right-wing views.

Are these even from real people? I smell Russian bot farms. And if they are real people, you can bet they live in the US and not Oadby or Market Harborough.

He wasn't always like this. Back in 2018, I praised a speech he gave to a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference and quoted a generous chunk from a Guardian report of it:

Neil O’Brien, who became MP for Harborough last year, noted that in the 2017 election there was a massive deficit between the Tories and Labour in terms of younger voters, and those from minority ethnic backgrounds. 

At the 2015 election, O’Brien said, the Tories lagged two percentage points behind Labour for voters in their 20s, and by four percentage points for those aged 18-24. Just two years later these deficits had shot up to 26 and 40 points behind. 

The party was also doing increasingly less well among other groups whose numbers were rising, such as those with degrees, people who were unmarried, and those who rented their homes or live in cities, said O’Brien, a former director of the Policy Exchange thinktank. 

"All these different social bases of Conservatism are being eroded," he said. “Either we have to do much better amongst these groups of people, or we’re going to go out of business as a political party.” 

Such structural changes would have an impact, he added: "It’s a bit like a beam that is rotting away, and eventually it snaps."

He was right. But now Neil O'Brien has become the sort of person he used to warn the Conservative Party against.

Prime minister's questions: Have the Tories given up?

Kemi Badenoch has a problem at prime minister's questions. Every time she attacks Labour on the economy, Keir Starmer simply has to hang the record of the last Conservative government round her neck to win the exchange.

But she has another, as the Guardian live politics blog pointed out. She lacks support from her own side of the House:

Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. ... On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

You can get strange results from lotteries: the Tories did remarkably badly in the ballot for private member's bills held when the new parliament met after last year's general election.

But this lack of backbench questions may be a sign that the Tories have already written Kemi Badenoch off. Or it could be a sign they are simply demoralised. Or a sign they are too busy on Twitter reading the latest conspiracy theory from Elon Musk.

Whatever the reason for the Tories' lack of interest, it is telling that Josh Self chose to focus his piece about today's PMQs on the exchange between Starmer and Ed Davey on Trump and tariffs - and called it for Ed.

Politicians on children swimming in sewage

Embed from Getty Images

Here's the latest from Tameside Radio:

A Tameside councillor married to disgraced MP Andrew Gwynne joked about youngsters swimming in human waste on the 'racist and sexist' Trigger Me Timbers WhatsApp group.

Allison Gwynne made the comments as members of the group joked about someone falling into filthy water.

She posted: "Kids in Denton have always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage'.

Allison Gwynne, as the Guardian has pointed out, is a significant local politician in her own right:

Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.

When I heard that a Labour politician had talked of children swimming in sewage, my mind went back to a Conservative councillor from West Norfolk, Brian Long:

"When I spent my summers down at Northrepps and Cromer beach as a child, you could visibly see pipes that came out of the cliff side, staining all the way down and going straight into the sea," he said.

"Nobody was monitoring anything.

"We'd come out of the sea and have a cold shower to clean off before eating our sandwiches. I don't think anyone was harmed by it." 

Brian Long's remarks were silly rather than poisonous. He was looking back to a neverland where children had grazed knees, scrumped apples and got a clip round the ear from the local bobby. And, er, went swimming in sewage.

There was nothing in them of the contempt for people you see in Allison Gwynne. 

Class snobbery is alive and well on the right, but the left is more given to intellectual snobbery. Anyone who fails to share their political opinions is stupid. If you doubt me, just spend a few minutes browsing Bluesky or Twitter.

I'm reminded of the 1997 general election and the only time I have been canvassed by Labour here in Market Harborough. I said I didn't like the sound of their policies on workfare, at which I was told by the canvasser that she had a friend who was doing a PhD in the area and I was wrong.

My conclusion is that when a Conservative politician suggests it's OK for working-class children to swim in sewage, it may be out of a peculiar sense of nostalgia. When a Labour politician makes that suggestion, it's likely to be out of contempt.

Ed Davey: Summon the US ambassador over Musk comments

@libdems

People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain. It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown.

♬ original sound - Liberal Democrats

Well said, Ed.

There's also a party press release on this:

Responding to Elon Musk’s latest post on X in which he suggested that America should “liberate the people of Britain” and overthrow the government, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

"People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain. It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the UK government should be overthrown.

"This dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric is further proof that the UK can’t rely on the Trump administration, and it’s in our national interest to rebuild trade and security ties with our allies in Europe."

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Zoe Crowther asks what the Westminster social media landscape will look like in 2025.

"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.

Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.

Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."

"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.

Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."

Bertrand Russell: "First they fascinate the fools..."

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When asked how fascism starts, Bertrand Russell replied: "First they fascinate the fools. Then they muzzle the intelligent."

I have seen this tweet several times in recent days. As ever with quotations posted on social media, you have to ask if its genuine,

The answer is that there's no evidence of Russell having a conversation like that, but he did write something similar.

Quote Investigator alerts us to an essay - Freedom and Government - that Russell contributed to a collection complied by Ruth Nanda Anshen. It was titled Freedom: Its Meaning and published in 1942.

There Russell wrote:

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

This technique is as old as the hills; it was practised in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.

So Russell didn't say that, but he did write something very like it.

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James Crouch argues that the greatest challenge the Conservative Party faces is a lack of unity among both its members and its remaining voters.

"In their speeches to this week’s Labour Party conference, Rachel Reeves mentioned it only briefly and in passing, and Keir Starmer not at all. It’s absurd, especially as the guiding theme of both speeches, as of the government’s entire incoming communications message, is that of the dire inheritance bequeathed by its Tory predecessors. Brexit can hardly be excluded from that reckoning." Chris Grey says there’s still little sign Britain has accommodated itself to Brexit or has any idea how to do so.

"It’s night. I’m trying to sleep. I’m so tired. But a voice says, 'What time is it?'. It’s half two, Mum, go to sleep. Half an hour later again, 'What time is it?'. Mum, it’s night, that’s why it’s dark. Please be quiet and let me sleep. 'Oh, okay.' Ten minutes later, 'Mick, put the light on for me'. My brother Mick hasn’t lived in this house for over 40 years! Again, I calm her down. But it only lasts for a bit, and finally at quarter to four I give up on this night, get out of bed and start the day." Anna Schurer talked to a carer and describes her life in her own words.

Andrew Anthony reviews a new book on Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter.

"It was a seminal moment in chess history, comparable to the 1945 USA v USSR radio match when the Americans, quadruple Olympiad gold winners in the 1930s, were crushed 15.5-4.5 to launch 45 years of Soviet supremacy, interrupted only by Bobby Fischer." Leonard Barden on India's dominant performance in the chess Olympiad.

Jon Hotten remembers Graham Thorpe: "His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that."

Who else is in that photograph of John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck as boys?

This photo has been floating about social media for years, and I tweeted it myself the other day because Jimmy Tarbuck was trending. This led to some debate about who is in it.

I have always understood that the three boys from the left are the future journalist and newsreader Peter Sissons, John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck. I've also seen it suggested that the tall boy at the back is the future Everton and England centre back Brian Labone.

But it's not Labone. As he explains in the video below, it's Michael Hill. He was to remain a friend of Lennon's through their teenage years and grew up to become "a well-known figure in the international business of marine insurance," according to this page promoting a book he wrote about the teenage Lennon.

He also explains the photo's provenance. It was taken in 1951 on a Dovedale Primary School trip to the Isle of Man and not discovered until about the year 2000, when the teacher who took it died.

What made me nervous is that Hill doesn't mention Peter Sissons, who was a couple of years younger than Lennon and Tarbuck and to become a good friend of Paul McCartney's at secondary school.

But it is him. A reader kindly tweeted me the cutting above from the Mail, which names all six boys. (Apparently the Mirror had it first, but didn't get further than Lennon and Tarbuck.) And also in the photo are Ivan Vaughan, who was to introduce Lennon and McCartney, and the future professional footballer Jimmy Blain, who didn't make it at Everton but was to become an Exeter City legend.

There remains only for me to remind you that Frank Duckworth, co-deviser of the Duckworth Lewis method, lodged with John Lennon and his Aunt Mimi.

Proof that Bluesky is primmer than the Victorians

I'm close to completing that Book Challenge meme:

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

You can see my choices so far on Twitter and Bluesky.

One of them is Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. Not only is it beautifully written, it also reinforced a view I had come to not long before I encountered it: namely, that the Victorians were far less Victorian that we imagine. 

The caricatured view we have formed of them serves a way of congratulating ourselves for not being like that. Notably, while the Victorians were horribly repressed when it came to sex, we are wonderfully liberated.

In reality the idea of covering table legs for the sake of decency, for instance, was a joke that 19th-century Britons told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

So I was amused that the cover of Inventing the Victorians, which features a chaste Victorian nude, was flagged on Bluesky as 'Adult Content'. Users of the platform have to click on this warning to view the naughty image.

I've no quarrel with Bluesky doing this: you can override the setting if you wish and many people have signed up with them because they want a more civilised place to hang out than Twitter is now.

But this flag does tend to support the thesis of the book it is worried about.

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"It doesn't matter what statistics Musk does or doesn't announce, or which advertisers stay or which leave - this statistic is the real ballgame. Engagement numbers that can't even reach a dozen, for an account that boasts over 30,000 supposed fans, is an outright apocalypse." Hunter Lazzaro offers a post titled How to Kill Your Tech Company (Elon Musk edition).

Katie Rosseinsky claims Euston Station is hell on earth: "You stand, neck craned towards the departures board, squinting under artificial lights that seem perfectly calibrated to induce migraines. You dodge passengers who stampede like wildebeests towards platforms announced moments before trains are due to leave."

Simon Price says Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. Hear him.

"Art historians look carefully at images to search for incongruities. In authenticating or attributing a painting, we don’t just look at brushstrokes and pigments. We consider the painting’s ownership, the hands through which it has passed, and other information about the history that the painting has accumulated along the way." Sonja Drimmer suggests the profession will be invaluable in the battle against misleading AI-generated images.

"For many urban planners, desire lines are a sign of failure; evidence that a public space hasn’t quite met the needs and wishes of the people who use that space. And there’s some truth in that. But for me, they’re also a reminder that our cities are uniquely human places, and the ones that function best are those that are safely navigable not by private vehicle, but on foot." Laurie Winkless celebrates desire lines - the unofficial footpaths the public makes for itself by repeated use.

J.J. Jackson on the ticking time bomb that threatens south Essex: "The SS Richard Montgomery was a United States Liberty Ship. It was transporting explosives from the USA, to use in the war against the Nazis. She ran aground and broke her back off the Kent coast in August 1944. Salvage crews were able to remove 5,000 tons of explosives after the wreck. But they had to abandon the attempt, leaving 1,400 tons still on board."

Will that "free speech" disclaimer provide protection in law? And just how far can you go online?

None of the information posted or repeated on this account is known by its author to be false, nor intended to stir racial or any hatred of, nor cause psychological or physical harm to, any person or group of people (howsoever identified).

This disclaimer appeared on the Twitter accounts of various right-wing social media figures a few days ago.

Will it provide them with a Get Out of Jail Free card if they are thought to have overstepped the mark and incited violence or hatred against people? 

Alan Robertshaw thinks not, and also discusses the legal position on such prosecutions.

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George Peretz on how governments can rein in Elon Musk: "There is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms ... That would in turn encourage all the users of X who currently use X to monitor government activity (journalists, businesses, many ordinary citizens) to open and use accounts on those competing platforms."

"Praising a recent Murray article, he said it was 'thoughtful, original, and generated more subscriptions than any other article we published this year'. There it is: hate sells. And since Murray’s opinions sell, sacking him would be bad for business. Those are the priorities." Brian Cathcart argues the Spectator can't defend Douglas Murray but can't afford to sack him either.

Phoebe Weston asks if we should intervene to accelerate the natural migration of tree species in the face of climate change.

"I was expecting to find that all graduates liberalise, but that those studying arts, humanities and social sciences ... become more socially liberal and less racially prejudiced than those studying more technical subjects (such as STEM subjects)." University graduates tend to be more socially liberal than the rest of the population - Ralph Scott summarises his research into why this is the case.

Dale Fox reports that more than half of UK school librarians have been asked to remove books from their shelves, with LGBTQ+ literature being disproportionately targeted: "One anonymous librarian, given the pseudonym Emma, described how she was instructed to remove all LGBTQ+ themed books following a single parent’s complaint about one title."

Carry On Spaceman. Carry On Robin [Hood]. Carry On Escaping. Retroboy is our guide to the 10 Carry On films that were planned but never made.

Bluesky: At last we have a serious alternative to Twitter

I caught the bus to Ludlow with every intention of taking lots of photos of the architecture, but didn't get the good weather I had imagined. Still, I did like this little industrial building near the station.

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— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) Aug 19, 2024 at 22:20

Elon Musk's determination to ruin Twitter has led a lot of people to explore an alternative, Bluesky.

I've had an account there myself for a while - you can find it here - and have been making more use of it since I got back from holiday.

Not only is the atmosphere more pleasant on Bluesky, it is also proving a good way of increasing the readership of this blog.

Twitter used to be great for that, but over the past year or two the number of Liberal England readers has dropped noticeably. I suspect that's because the changes Musk has made to the Twitter algorithm mean that fewer people are seeing my tweets.

But one retweet from a journalist on Bluesky has made my post on the Tories and foreign money the most read one on here for months.

So it looks as thought we finally have a viable alternative to Twitter in the shape of Bluesky.

I shall stick around on Twitter, at least for a while, but a fair number of civilised people have already closed their accounts. (You can also find me on Instagram, incidentally.)

US money will drag leading Conservatives further to the right

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Suella Braverman has made £60,000 on the international speaking circuit, says the Guardian. Reading between the lines of its report, this money was made over the last parliamentary year.

Braverman is not taking part in the current Conservative leadership election, but for most of that year she will have been intending to do so. And she will certainly have her eye on the contest after this one.

And if such a lacklustre figure can earn this figure, think how much must be on offer to the few remaining big beasts of her party.

If you're not sure, the Guardian helpfully spells it out:

Boris Johnson in, 2023 declared an income of £4.8m within the first six months of leaving No 10, including an advance payment of £2.5m for an unspecified number of speeches.

Most of this money is American, and a study of Twitter tells us what the American right wants to hear about Britain at the moment. It's that we are ruled by mullahs and all live in fear of arrest for saying the wrong thing.

If you're old and worldly like me, you may say that saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another is one of the most important political arts. But it has become much harder in the age of the net and social media.

But the temptation to tell American audiences what they want to hear, and to earn the big bucks that this will bring, is will prove hard to resist.

Heard back in Britain, such sentiments will sound extreme, even unpatriotic. to most voters. And so the Tories' shift to the unelectable right will continue.