Layla Moran on Gaza: "Starvation shouldn't be a weapon of war"

The senior Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has warned that people in Gaza face "unbearably cruel levels of destitution" and called on the government to match its recent tougher tone on Israel with action.

Speaking to the Guardian she said:

I remain frustrated that while the government’s words and tone have changed, in terms of concrete actions, not much has changed.”

She called on the government to recognise a Palestinian state, which would "safeguard Palestinian interests and also send a very clear signal to Israel that there are consequences to their actions". She also condemned the government for allowing trade from illegal settlements and for "still arming Israel when they shouldn’t be".

The report goes on to detail the suffering of the family of Mohammad, an NHS doctor who operated on her last year and whose elderly parents remain stuck in northern Gaza.

He describes conditions on the ground as a "slaughterhouse" and says people are on the brink of starvation.

Layla told the Guardian:

"Starvation shouldn’t be a weapon of war and it is unbearably cruel that it’s got to the levels of destitution that Mohammad’s family are describing, but their story is just one of millions that are now trapped in northern Gaza in a situation that seems even worse than at the beginning.

"It has to stop now and the UK government needs to redouble its efforts to make that happen."

Disney child star looks unrecognizable on Cannes red carpet 32 years after hit film’s debut

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In making our Headline of the Day Award to the Independent, the judges congratulated the online newspaper's editors on grasping the fact that children grow up.

Spyro Gyra: Morning Dance

In the summer of 1979 this track was everywhere. It made the UK top 20. It was radio friendly, Radio 2 friendly and made for use in television trails. But I wonder if I've heard it this century.

Spyro Gyra come from Buffalo in New York State. Morning Dance was the title track from their second album, which reached no. 11 in the UK charts - high for a jazz album in that or this era.

The unusual elements on it, like steel drums, make it more interesting than I have so far made it sound.

And Spyro Gyra are still going. Here's an advertisement for a gig of theirs at Buffalo State last year:

In 2024, Jay Beckenstein and band observe the 50th anniversary of what started as a diversion, something that was just for fun (and twenty-five cents at the door). It began inauspiciously when Beckenstein and a few musician friends in Buffalo NY organized a get together on their shared night off from working in bands that actually made money. It was a simple, humble idea with a name that was likewise simple and humble, "Tuesday Night – Jazz Jam". 

Fast forward 50 years and this jazz super group has released over 30 albums, garnering gold and platinum along the way. They’ve played over 10,000 concerts on six continents. Spyro Gyra has maintained its standards of excellence and that has sustained them on the "A list" of live attractions in jazz for 50 years.

The Joy of Six 1360

"If Morgan can beat the BNP in Barking, goes the argument, then surely he can do the same for Reform in Britain too. Yet in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far right, through deploying tough messages on crime and immigration, almost nobody has actually bothered to check whether it’s true." Adam Bienkov explodes the founding myth of Morgan McSweeney.

Nandi Msezane says migrant workers prop up the UK’s social care system, but are now being forced out.

Cameron Joseph argues that Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from other elected leaders who have used the tools of democracy to destroy it: "Would-be autocrats often move to eliminate structural checks on their power. They intimidate opposition parties, threaten potential dissenters within their own ranks, and defy the courts. Autocrats punish and bully the news media, protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists."

"There were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party." Seth Thévoz on the attempts to establish a London club for Labour parliamentarians.

"It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and - for some (for very many in the 1940s) - as a means of making a better world." Municipal Dreams looks at the at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.  

Katherine Stockton explores the problematic implications of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys.

St Paul's, Covent Garden: The Actors' Church

"George Smiley! Oh, but you lovely, darling man!"

Down in London on Thursday, I came across St Paul's, Covent Garden, which is known as 'The Actors' Church'.

I found some interesting figures remembered in the dedications on the churchyard benches.

Brian Glanville, greatest of football reporters, has died aged 93

The first things I can remember, as a child, reading with pleasure in an adult newspaper are Brian Glanville's football reports for the Sunday Times.

He was still teaching me new words when I was 16. I can recall his writing about England's 3-2 victory over Italy in the USA's Bicentennial tournament. England fielded two young debutants: Gordon Hill, a left wing from Tommy Docherty's exciting Manchester United side, and Ray Wilkins (often called Butch Wilkins in those days), the 19-year-old Chelsea captain.

He described Hill as an "urchin" figure and Wilkins - in a new word for me - as a "gamin". Wilkins had looked thoroughly at home in midfield, passing the ball like an experienced international. You can see England's starting XI in the image above.

This morning I heard that Glanville has died at the age of 93. Richard Williams is quoted among the tributes on the Football Writers' Association site:

Some of us are old enough to remember a time when colleagues often sniggered at Brian Glanville’s ability to pronounce the names of foreign footballers – particularly those of Italian players – correctly.

They stopped laughing when English teams were suddenly filled with foreign players, and the ability to avoid mangling their names became a necessary part of a football reporter’s skillset. 

Brian’s interest in the game as it was played in other countries sprang from his cosmopolitan nature; it turned out to be prophetic, and I often felt that the rest of us should have been paying him some sort of pathfinder’s royalty.

A sophisticate as much at home at the Chelsea Arts Club as at Stamford Bridge, he came from a time before football became gentrified but played and wrote about it with wholehearted commitment and without condescension towards those who’d come to it via routes very different from his own.

London's lost underground lines - with a note on the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club

Jago Hazzard is our guide to a collection of lost lines, repurposed lines and abandoned oddments, some of them 50 miles out of London and deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

One scheme that never advanced far enough to carry trains was the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway, which:

was authorised in 1865 to construct a pneumatic railway (that is, one where trains are pushed though a tunnel by air pressure) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo station. The single cast iron tube, 3.89 m (12'9") in diameter, would have crossed the river by being laid in a ditch dredged in the bed of the Thames. 

Though work did start, a general financial crisis prevented additional capital being raised, and the work was abandoned in 1868, with the company being wound up in 1882. The trench excavated at the northern end is now the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club.

That Reform UK programme for Leicestershire: Bus cuts and a consultants' bonanza

Reform UK won 25 of the 55 seats on Leicestershire County Council on 1 May and has now formed a minority administration.

What will they do with this power? It's hard to know. They didn't produce a local manifesto for the elections, and I'm not sure things are much clearer after the new council leader's interview with the Leicester Mercury.

A few extracts...

Q: Reform UK has promised an audit of the county council’s finances to identify waste and efficiencies. How are you going to fund the audit given the council’s difficult financial position?

A: We'll find that sort of money because it's vital. It's vital. We'll be able to do that, don't worry.

The Mercury could have pointed out the council's finances are audited internally and externally every year. So this sounds like a firm commitment to unnecessary extra spending.

On flooding, they want to solve the problems in the county, but don't seem to know what needs to be done or how much it will cost.

There will be not cuts in social care: apparently these new auditors are going to be "an external company of experts" and will tell them what to do.

This sounds very like the practice among Conservative councils of spending a fortune on consultants because you don't trust your own officers for ideological reasons.

Reform UK's clearest commitment seems to be cuts to bus services:

Q: What will you do to ensure rural communities have access to public transport?

A: If we've got efficiency and if we've got savings, we can then do something. But, we've got to review the buses because the problem was we had buses driving around with two or three people in and there was no take-up.

So when it suddenly goes, everybody wants to join a petition to say ‘yes we want it back’. So it's one of those, if you're not using it, you could lose it.

We've just had a major review of bus services in Leicestershire under the last Conservative administration, but, sure, let's have another consultants' bonanza. It's only taxpayers money.

The real test of what Reform UK are about will come when they discover there's not millions of pounds of wasteful spending to be cut or reallocated. But the early signs are not promising.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

The Joy of Six 1359

"Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets - are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage." Alex de Waal on starvation in Gaza.

Ben Jackson says the government must change direction on child poverty: "When governments are remembered after they lose office, their achievements are unforgivingly distilled into a few pithy bullet points. Does Keir Starmer really want one of his bullet points to be that he was the unusual Labour prime minister who presided over an increase in child poverty?"

Rose Dixon reports the success of Iceland's experiment with a four-day working week.

"The men would wait for the Germans to pass over them and then come out at night. Their role was not to fight the Germans face-to-face. Their brief was to hit the supply chain, causing enough chaos to slow down the German advance, blowing fuel and ammunition dumps, destroying railway lines, bridges, and convoys. Local country houses that had been taken as German HQs were to be destroyed and German officers and British collaborators assassinated." Andrew Chatterton explains how the British Resistance would have fought Nazi occupiers.

"Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be 'an ogre, a princess, an ass,' as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody." Michael Schulman tells the story of how Meryl Streep battled Dustin Hoffman, retooled her role and on her first for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Peter Black discovers an Edwardian mystery: The story of Violet's Leap.

William Wallace: Reading Biggles in Westminster Abbey

Liberal Democrat Voice has a thoughtful post by William Wallace - Lord Wallace of Saltaire - on the relation between Liberalism and religious faith.

But I was most taken by this personal reminiscence:

I grew up as a Protestant Anglican. I learned what I now understand as social liberalism from the sermons of Canon Marriott, preaching the 'social gospel’'in Westminster Abbey (putting down my Biggles book, which choristers were allowed to take in to keep us quiet during sermons).

Reform council leader thinks circumcision causes transgenderism

The new Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council has suggested there's a link between circumcision and transgenderism in children, reports the Jewish Chronicle.

In a now-deleted post on social media, Sean Matthews, who earlier this month became leader of Lincolnshire County council, said: “It's no surprise that children want to remove their penises and become girls.

"Most of their parents started the process shortly after birth, by chopping their foreskin off in the name of (insert deity).”

I'm not going to blog about every fruitcake, loony and closet racist that got elected as a Reform councillor on 1 May, but this guy is a council leader.

Incidentally, in the Britain of the 1930s, 35 per cent of boys were circumcised, with the practice being particularly favoured by upper class parents.

But I bet Mr Matthews will tell you there were no transexuals in the good old days.

Nick Cohen's podcast: Don't back any horses tipped by Nick Tyrone

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Nick Cohen's latest podcast dropped two days ago. His guest, billed as an expert on the Conservative Party, was Paul-Marshall-era Liberal Democrat turned Reform supporter Nick Tyrone.

In the course of their discussion Tyrone argued that when Robert Jenrick replaces Kemi Badenoch, as he surely will, he'll prove no more popular than she has.

He then suggested that the Tories should go for someone untainted by their 14 years in government and choose a leader from their 2024 intake of MPs.

Pressed for a name, he suggested Patrick Spencer, who was arrested the following day.

Spencer denies the charges against him and may go on to have along political career, even leading his party. But this exchange did reinforce the impression that Tyrone isn't the great political forecaster out there.

Because he has previous. Here he is in the Spectator on the eve of a 2021 by-election:

"The Chesham and Amersham by-election is on Thursday. Thank God it’s almost here — hopefully then we can stop hearing any rubbish about how the Lib Dems are set to tear down the Conservatives’ ‘blue wall’ in the home counties. As the campaign has demonstrated, the Lib Dems are miles away from being able to cause such an upset.

"Instead, the Lib Dems will lose on Thursday, most likely fairly badly, and they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to get back to being the by-election masters of old, they will have to do a lot better than this."

As you may recall, Sarah Green won the election for the Lib Dems with a 25 per cent swing from the Conservatives.

He was more confident about the Lib Dem performance in 2015:

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, Tyrone predicted that the Liberal Democrats would receive "17 per cent" of the popular vote and that the vote share for the two largest parties appeared "on course for an all time low". 

The two largest parties subsequently both increased their vote share, while the Liberal Democrats received 7.9 per cent.

Nor did he much admire Nigel Farage in the run up to the European Union referendum:

In 2015, Tyrone argued that fellow pro-Europeans should give their "gratitude to Nigel Farage for hanging around the British political scene just a little bit longer" as he believed it would ensure "the pro-Europeans win".

We all like to sound confident when we make predictions, but I wouldn't back any horse that Nick Tyrone tipped. 

Fleetwood Mac: Dust My Broom

Scintillating slide guitar from Jeremy Spencer. 

Thought for the Day: “We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it”

I first came across this saying in Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil's study of the artists Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones. If I'm remembering correctly, it was a favourite of the latter.

Looking for it online the other day, I found this formulation of it in several places:

A Pacific island chief was being bullied by a missionary about his beliefs.

"Have you, my dear, no conception of a deity?"

The chief replied: "We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it."

"Come back, Shane!" are not the last words spoken in the film

I've come across another Mandela effect online, this one involving the classic Western, Shane. Some people - and I'm one of them - are convinced that after calling out "Come back, Shane!" several times, little Joey Starrett's final words in the film are "Bye, Shane." 

This changes the meaning of the film's ending by turning it into something about growing up and the death of the old West. Yet any time you find this final scene online it seems to be missing those two words. Have we misremembered the film?

No, because here is the full version and you can clearly hear Joey call out "Bye, Shane". 

Do people posting clips online end the scene early because they've become convinced that the famous "Come back, Shane!" ends the film? Or has television's cavalier attitude to cutting films short to trail the next programme infected them?

I don't know, but I did once work out that Joey Starrett would have been 73 when Shane was released. And I have also written about the career of the boy who played him, Brandon deWilde.

And now we have the correct ending, another question arises. The last we see of Shane, he is slumped in the saddle and riding through a graveyard. Is he already dead?

You may say this is reading too much into the closing shot. But as someone pointed out, George Stevens spent 18 months editing the film, so nothing you see on the screen is there by accident.

New Leicestershire Reform councillor was sacked as a police officer last year

BBC News reports, nay reveals, that a newly elected Reform member of Leicestershire County Council was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in January 2024:

Andrew Hamilton-Gray won a seat in Loughborough for Reform, with almost 40 per cent of the vote.

It has now emerged that a police misconduct hearing in January 2024 found he had called in sick, to travel to Spain, when he should have been working as a PC.

The misconduct hearing found that was one of two occasions when he reported sick to pursue his outside business interests.

The BBC says Hamilton-Gray has told them he has been advised not to comment.

Alistair Carmichael: Labour is falling into the same trap the Tories did on immigration

The senior Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael has given a measured and Liberal response to today's intervention on immigration by Keir Starmer. I was pleased to see this following a disappointing press statement from the party this afternoon.

Alistair gave his response in a thread on Bluesky - here's what he wrote:

I fear that Labour is falling into the same trap that the Tories did - leaning on hostile rhetoric around immigration and damaging our public services and our economy in the process. 

We should not pander to the far right but instead fix the problems that enable them. If you feed that wolf eventually it will eat you. 

We need a flexible, dynamic legal migration system that works for our country and our economy, while treating everyone with dignity and respect.

We should have no truck with the demonisation of desperate people fleeing persecution, war or starvation, nor indeed of those who are on the frontline of our health and social care sectors. The last thing we need is to do more harm to our fragile public services.

 There will always be a need for integration and fair play in our immigration system, but we should not ignore the enormous benefits that immigration has brought to our country. These are our friends and neighbours, people who enrich our cultural fabric and help drive our economy across the UK.

My fear, if the government fails to get better at making its case, is that, at the next election, Labour will fall back on the argument that you have to vote for them to stop Reform getting in.

The danger then is that the voters will here this as: "If you want to get rid of Labour, vote Reform."

Three men held over suitcases stuffed with hermit crabs

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were relieved to find that the story below it is not about a novel form of torture.

To celebrate St Pancras Day: The Beatles at Old St Pancras and a 1983 Steve Winwood interview

Today is St Pancras Day. To celebrate it, here's another showing for this video recreating the Beatles' visit to Old St Pancras churchyard on their London Mad Day Out in 1968. You can read more about their time in the churchyard in an old Guardian article.

When you add in the fact that today is also Steve Winwood's birthday, it's clear 12 May should be a public holiday in the Midlands. 

Certainly, it's a big deal here on Liberal England. To celebrate, here's a 1983 interview with our favourite musician.

Winwood talks about his past with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith, and about his then burgeoning career as a solo artist.