Horse Nell 'stable' after canal rescue

Photo: Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service   

I may be in Shropshire, but our Headline of the Day comes from the BBC News Leicestershire pages:

Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service said they were called to Aylestone Meadows after Nell "must have decided to cool-off in the canal near the Packhorse Bridge" but suddenly became stuck in the waterway.

A technical rescue team from Southern Station and a crew from Wigston Fire Station were dispatched to the scene on Saturday evening, and working alongside local farmers they lifted the animal out and had her checked over by a vet.

A statement from the service said Nell now "appears to be in a stable condition" at home, adding: "You can lead a horse to water, but it can be a struggle getting it back out again."

The judges did find a Shropshire Star story to commend highly:

"The impact would be huge": Residents rally against plans for three new homes in Shropshire village

The Joy of Six 1563

"Toby Young stole his status and career. And in every sinew of his body, he knows that. For most people, imposter syndrome is an irrational insecurity; Toby Young should feel that way. He was an imposter at Oxford, he was an imposter in journalism, an imposter in New York, an imposter in education, and most recently has set himself up as the boss of an imposter 'Union', acting as if anyone can genuinely call themselves General Secretary." Apart from that, Mic Wright has a lot of time for him in this 2020 piece.

"Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that just when we need to be mustering competent researchers who can undertake the careful and time-consuming work of reviewing new submissions, academic publishers are pursuing rapid growth, which will provide ever more opportunities for fraudsters to find an outlet for their work." Dorothy Bishop finds that the rise of AI is making it increasingly difficult to identify fraudulent scientific journal papers.

Samantha Ward considers how climate change will affect zoos.

Anna Merlan salutes the vision of Paulina Borsook, who foresaw the right-wing, anti-government path that the moguls of Silicon Valley, who were once hailed as liberals, would take in her 2000 book Cyberselfish.

"The Venice-set Don’t Look Now remains one of Roeg’s most admired and influential works, and one of the few to be warmly received on arrival. An intelligent, harrowing and provocative adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s supernatural thriller in which a married couple (movingly portrayed by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) use a working assignment in a wintry Venice as an attempt to overcome a recent tragedy in which their young daughter has drowned, the film hints at the horrors that underlie domesticity in Roeg’s characteristically imagistic style." Jason Wood surveys the work of Nicloas Roeg.

Chris Arnade visits the beautiful, lonely city of Perth: "Right next to my apartment is a tidy pocket park, with playground, dog walk, bathroom, and a garden of plants that only could be found in Western Australia. It’s idyllic and as I passed it my first night I imagined spending my week sitting there, reading, watching kids play, making friends with the retirees, but since then I’ve never seen anyone in it other than solitary morning walkers anxiously scolding their dog for not defecating fast enough." 

Olly Lambert's The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke

Olly Lambert's three-part documentary The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which is currently on the BBC website, is a brilliant and horrifying piece of work. It's like a David Lynch film, every frame of which is true.

Lambert has written about the making of it in the Independent:

Last May, I sat in a Utah coffee shop with Chad Franke, the son of the infamous 'momfluencer' turned convicted child abuser Ruby. Once regarded as 'America’s mom', Ruby and her family’s former counsellor Jodi Hildebrandt are now both serving up to 30 years in prison for aggravated child abuse on Ruby’s young children. “My mom would always tell me I’d end up in prison,” Chad says casually, then turns to look out the window. “Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it.”

Eight months earlier, Chad and his family had become headline news all across the US and beyond. Theirs was a dark tale of a spectacular fall from grace, with Ruby’s mugshot appearing on magazine front covers and branded a 'Monster Mom' after her 12-year-old son was found in the haze of the Utah desert begging for food and water.

He was emaciated and covered in deep wounds, and would lead police to discover his youngest sister – mute and similarly malnourished – in a closet at the home of the family therapist. Medics later determined that the young boy would have died within two weeks had he not unlocked his own handcuffs and heroically sneaked out an unlocked door to get help. His actions undoubtedly saved his and his sister’s life.

Questions about what had happened behind the façade of this 'perfect' Mormon family still remained unanswered, and Chad, his sister Shari and their dad Kevin were keen to give their first, detailed account of what really went on behind closed doors and when the cameras were turned off.

I watched all three parts last week and was left with three overriding impressions:

• just how weird the Mormon faith is. It has taken the least appealing aspects of Evangelical Christianity and added bucketfuls of its own woo. And then imagine whole towns dominated by it.
• the immense damage to people that such high-demand religions and bad psychotherapy can do. All practitioners should be constantly aware of the dangers of what they are doing.
• the heartbreaking politeness of the abused child.

I hesitate to recommend something so dark, but this is a brilliant piece of work. 

GUEST POST Why has the HS2 project been such a disaster?

Peter Chambers goes in search of enlightenment about the ironic low-speed train crash that is HS2.

Most people I meet have an opinion on HS2. Different opinions. It has been expensive. It goes to Euston. It was a plot by Labour or the Tories. It goes too fast. Or not fast enough. It was a sop to the North or a scheme to divert economic activity to London.

What are the most useful points? Was it anything but a muddle? Some acquaintances have advised me to use these new GPT-LLM-RAG machines to produce a summary (AI). However, I know too much about how they work, so will politely decline. Instead I might read a human-written review of a human-written book that has been deemed somewhat informed. 

So off to the Literary Review for some opinion. Transport expert David Leeder reviews Off the Rails: The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson. I was looking for something with lots of numbers, geography, requirements, political objectives, strategy, analysis, risk-management, expertise and national benefit. Who am I kidding? It was Oxbridge debating with itself and Natural England being paid off one change at a time.

Leeder tells us that at least 40 per cent of the population (of what ?) lives in a quadrangle formed by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Leeds. The distance between London and Birmingham is only around 160km while London and Manchester are around 260km apart. It is proposed to operate HS2 at 320 kph. Forty-nine  minutes. Barely time to scan the Guardian, and tell the buffet assistant twice that there is no milk in Americano. There never was. 

We can skip the bits about Blair and Adonis (who?) and the aspersions about Roy Jenkins and claret. You might as well take Avanti West Coast from Euston and find a good forward-facing seat in Coach C. They have USB and the Project Reach cellular upgrade should be working in 2028, even at Piccadilly and Euston. It would take most of 49 minutes to get Teams working and find that the AI sent you the wrong meeting minutes document. Was that £38bn or £80bn? At least the No.1 circular bus at Manchester Piccadilly is both free and powered by electricity.

Much of the rest of the review takes on a tour of the group-think of the rotating cast of London-based decision-makers. Leeder describes them as "Britain’s political class, which comprises a narrow pool of upper-middle-class types who share many of the same vague assumptions." 

This seems plausible as the stated requirements used vague language and rotated with administrations. The very basic cost-benefit analysis that would link national growth with having a high-speed railway at all seems missing. The two most dynamic nations do not encourage us: the US does not bother with high-speed rail, the PRC has long distances between major cities and poor legacy transport networks. We do not compare with either.

Perhaps the most concise criticism is that the low productivity of most of the UK outside London and the Home Counties may well be due to factors having nothing to do with transport. A high pound, managed decline, class struggle, City bias, disdain for STEM, and the privilege of the Oxford Union will be suggested by a quick-lazy search engine. 

HS2 functions as a 'shiny' and could be useful as a distraction from unpalatable political action. It is rather expensive for that though.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

How Joan Aiken fought to defend the wolves of Willoughby Chase

For years the children's books magazine Books for Keeps published a series of interviews with authors – there was one of these 'authorgraphs' in each issue.

Here is the wonderful Joan Aiken from issue 39 (July 1986):

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first book to make money for me. I’d actually done two chapters just before my husband was ill but had put it away. Abelard Schuman, who’d published some short stories in America, accepted it (called 'Bonnie Green' then) but said it was too scary – could I prune it, take out the wolves? I said Never! 

My agent literally forgot it for a year, then apologised and sent it to Cape. It did quite well here, but after a lovely, whole-page review in Time it sold like mad in America, and so confirmed me in my mad resolution to freelance.

"Doubleday, who published Wolves, asked me (amazingly conveniently) about crime novels, so I interspersed children’s books with thrillers. ...

"Margery Allingham spoke of left- and right-hand writing, what you do for yourself and what you do to satisfy others: I suppose Wolves was for myself, and the Dido books – in fact, they’re probably too self-indulgent, full of dialect and adult word-play. But children’s books should be written on different levels, or there will be nothing for them if they read it again at a later age."

I blogged about the magazine's interview with Malcolm Saville a couple of years ago.

Steeleye Span with Peter Sellers: New York Girls

What was Peter Sellers doing playing the ukulele on a track on Steeleye Span's 1975 album Commoners Crown? 

Maddy Prior explains:

While sitting over lunch we were discussing what we need to sparkle up the track New York Girls. Ukulele would be good someone said. Anyone got one? Anybody know someone who can play one? Peter Sellers plays it says Bob. Pause. Eyes meet, why not? We could ask. He could only say no. 

So we spent another interesting afternoon with a rather diffident Peter Sellers. I don’t think he’d ever been asked to play on a session before and was apprehensive about the whole affair until he realised we were delighted to have him there. He loosened up as time went by and finally finished by adding, unprompted, some Goon voices. We were ecstatic.

Bluebottle writes: I like this game!

In which H.G. Wells sets out to fool his future biographers

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In her Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, this blog's heroine Marjory Allen records how H.G. Wells invited her to design the garden at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park:

He was seventy-three, already ill and dispirited, and visitors were not encouraged; but I spent many amusing hours with him.

One foggy afternoon when we were sitting in his study, he drew out of the shelf one of his own books and inscribed on the fly-leaf, "To my most adored Annie, from H.G." The joke appealed to him and, taking one book after another, he wrote more inscriptions: "To Muriel, the only woman I ever loved" and "For Helen, who was my wife in all but name".

After signing half a dozen copies he tired of the game, heaved a sigh and said, "That will fox them all when I have gone." I wonder if it has.

The Joy of Six 1562

"Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks." Doug Specht argues that we should reterg 'wildfire' in favour of 'landscape fire', stating the spark where it is known and explaining the conditions that allowed it to spread.

"Judge Paul McCloskey scanned a group of immigrant children, none of whom had lawyers present, in his windowless suburban Virginia courtroom this past Thursday. Where’s the 7-year-old?' he asked." Eric Bazail-Eimil observes immigration proceedings in Trump's America.

Anilya Krishnan on concerns about the 'wilderness therapy' programmes, which often set back families thousands of dollars and form part of the US's lucrative 'troubled teen' industry.

Christian Wolmar says cycling is a feminist issue.

"What really troubled them was that putting the story of William into the context of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents was creating a parallel between William as an innocent boy who was killed allegedly by the Jews, with the story of the boys under two years old in Bethlehem being killed by a Jewish king, Herod." Pat Ashworth on Norwich Cathedral's approach to its troubling unofficial local saint.

Alison Kerr celebrates Alastair Sim: "His rich, commanding voice and heavy-lidded, dark-shadowed eyes lent him an air of menace upon which he capitalised to memorable effect in Scrooge and as various other characters of dubious morals. Sim appeared to play these parts – the lecherous lodger (with dyed black hair combed over to one side) in London Belongs to Me, the initially frightening author in Hue and Cry, and the mysterious title character in An Inspector Calls – with relish and gusto."

Five reasons to stop our sending future leaders to boarding school

Piers Cross blends the psychological and the political to produce a convincing list.

I wrote about Richard Beard's book Sad Little Men in my first column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. I like its original subtitle 'Private schools and the ruin of England'.

Helen Morgan on the importance of external scrutiny of the NHS

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Helen Morgan has been interviewed by Healthcare Management about the Liberal Democrats' concern at government plans to reduce external scrutiny of the National Health Service.

She says:

"We know from polling back in 2024 there are people who feel their care has been poor, but they don't want to report that back into the NHS because they are dependent on that care, and they think it might impact on the care that they're receiving, and that's the value of Healthwatch because it's so independent of the NHS."

There are a number of changes involved, so it's all rather technical and involves a lot of acronyms, but this is certainly one of the most important current Lib Dem campaigns.

A Canterbury Tale, Richard Rorty and Stanley Kubrick

Guy Stagg understands A Canterbury Tale:

A Canterbury Tale suggests that love of country does not mean some romanticised retreat into the past, but rather drawing on England;s heritage to navigate the uncertainty of the modern world. 

As a result, the film floats free from its origins as wartime propaganda to become one of cinema’s most beautiful explorations of history and belief. 

Though the pace is slow and the plot dreamlike, it finds space for art and nature, friendship and love, nation and faith – all the things people sacrifice their lives for.

I'm reminded of something the American philosopher Richard Rorty said:

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Stagg does get something wrong though. He tells the always-moving story of how Martin Scorsese sought out Michael Powell, who by then was living in obscurity and near poverty, and told him his films had inspired a whole new generation of American directors.

But then he adds:

The best evidence of this influence is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film’s opening sequence, a prehistoric ape throws a bone into the air; as it falls, the camera jump-cuts to a satellite floating in space. 

The trick was lifted from Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which begins with a group of pilgrims making their way across medieval England. When a falconer sets a bird of prey into flight, it soars from his arm and sweeps through the air, to become a Spitfire diving from the sky. In a single cut, the viewer is carried from Chaucer’s England to the Battle of Britain.

I don't think Kubrick can have got this idea for his jump-cut from A Canterbury Tale. In a footnote to an article of his own on the film, Paul Banks says:

Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the "severely truncated and re-ordered US version", the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.

Still, Stagg's short post on Engelsberg Ideas is well worth a read.

The plague pits and passageways of Green Park

Jago Hazzard charts the evolution of London's Green Park station from its 1906 opening as Dover Street to its modern role as a major interchange.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

The Joy of Six 1561

"My husband, son, and I have been locked up for months – despite being permanent residents with no criminal record. It is an unendurable, unending nightmare." Maryam Tahmasebi writes from the hell of ICE detention.

Femi Owolade argues that Black academics suffer when life stories eclipse scholarship: "Academics are ... expected to have stories that capture attention. University websites, media profiles and press releases often lead with biographies before discussing research. Stories of hardship, resilience and unlikely success have become part of  higher education branding. The academic is no longer just a scholar but an integral part of the university’s public image."

"The UK’s Online Safety Act was sold as a 'world-leading' child-protection law, one that would establish the UK tech sector as a global safety-tech powerhouse. Instead, it has normalised the idea that governments can bolt identity checks and surveillance layers onto the internet. Now that blueprint is crossing the Atlantic, where authoritarian-minded politicians see it as ready-made kit for censorship and control." Heather Burns finds that a British law has inspired the Trump regime's attempts to censor its critics.

No, Harry Potter fans didn't force the rerouting of an undersea able to preserve Dobby's' grave. Dan Davies explains.

Meaghan Roddy says Frasier brought Nineties minimalism to the masses: "I’d hazard a guess that Frasier was the first time a giant swath of America came to experience interior design meant to represent wealth that wasn’t slathered in gold and marble. It was quiet and sophisticated."

Clayton Dillard celebrates John Schlesinger’s film Billy Liar (1963): "Though the film’s ending is outwardly celebratory as Billy strolls back toward his family’s flat, the fact that he’s opted for the familiar comforts of home feels like a questionable – even nightmarish – endpoint for this young person who so craves his autonomy."

Recycling centres to stay shut due to "high demand"

Yes, Leicestershire County Council is run by Reform. Why do you ask?

Anyway, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

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.

X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents

This is wonderfully bleak. So bleak it reminds me of Vanbrugh College snack bar on the original campus at York.

Nether Hambelton emerges from beneath Rutland Water

The remains of a lost Rutland village can currently be seen because of the drought, reports ITV News:

Low water levels at Rutland Water reservoir in the East Midlands have uncovered the remains of the buildings which were once part of the village of Nether Hambleton.

Residents in the hamlet, along with other small villages including Middle Hambleton, were relocated to other areas before the buildings were demolished and the area flooded in the 1970s to create the reservoir.

Lord Bonkers has been known to give those who believe the reservoir dates from the 1970s the disparaging label "Rutland Water truthers".

Stanley Unwin is now remembered by a blue plaque at his old home in Long Buckby

Here's the great Stanley Unwin on Pebble Mill at One in 1985. He had the sense to know that his unique act worked best in short doses. That way he kept his audience comftybold, two-square on their botties.

The latest news from Long Buckby is that a blue plaque has been installed on the bungalow in the High Street where Unwin lived for many years.

I once went to the village to photograph his and his wife's grave. I feel another journey coming on.

Eddie Waring's "Dark Satanic Mills End" was at Hilton Park, Leigh

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I've a memory of Eddie Waring, the BBC's rugby league commentator between 1949 and 1981, referring to the "Dark Satanic Mills End" at one ground. I thought it was Leigh's and, having found the picture above, I think I was right.

The photo was published in Picture Post in 1949, and the caption on Getty Images says:

A group of young supporters accompany Rugby League players Bill Kingdon and Cec Ryan across allotments to the Kirkhall Lane rugby ground in Leigh, Lancashire. In the background is the Parsonage Pit.

In 1947 Leigh Rugby League Club started playing their home games at the town's Hilton Park stadium, which is indeed in Kirkhall Lane. It can't have been a bad ground: three internationals were played there between 1954 and 1964.

Leigh added Centurions to its name for the 1995–96 season and, as part of this rebranding, the stadium was renamed the Coliseum. The club moved to Leigh Sports Village for the 2009–10 season and Hilton Park was demolished to allow housing development on the site.

I don't remember seeing pit winding gear at Waring's Dark Satanic Mills End, but I do remember a forest of mill chimneys.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Why not try writing one yourself?

It could be on where the Liberal Democrats should go from here, on politics more generally or… anything really.  Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history?

Please drop me an email if you'd like to discuss your idea first. I'd hate you to spend time on a piece I really wouldn’t want to publish.

Here are the last 10 Liberal England guest posts:

• Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem – William Lane
• Local councillors changing party: Augustus Carp’s review of 2025 – Augustus Carp
• Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
• The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers
• Lord Summerisle obviously took the Liberal whip – Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury
• To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it – Stuart Whomsley
• Political lessons from science fiction – Peter Chambers
• Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling day – Augustus Carp
• Why have the Lib Dems given up fighting most parliamentary by-elections? – Augustus Carp
• In praise of outgrounds: How cricket in small towns made a roaring comeback – Matthew Pennell

The Joy of Six 1560

"Every week I read of people seeking planning permission for children’s homes whose backgrounds are in real estate, building, motor dealerships, pubs, caravan parks and light engineering. The one thing they don’t have is experience in the care of children and young people." Illegal children’s homes are thriving because profit has broken the care system. argues Martin Barrow.

Russell Brandom says Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto shows exactly why people don’t like AI: "Even as Zuckerberg tries to paint a picture of the wonderful future abundant superintelligence will bring, he keeps reminding us of all the ways it’s likely to go wrong."

Erin Clabough on the reasons for student anxiety: "Grades aren’t the only source of pressure that students experience. Social comparison plays a role, too, along with the pressure to only answer questions when they’re already sure, to never seem confused and to stay constantly productive. Based on my experience and research, kids pick up on the message that they should keep their curiosity at a 5 out of 10 scale, instead of a 10 out of 10, especially if it strays outside the curriculum."

"The web had not yet become a pure retrieval machine. It still had a culture of exploration, and many services were designed to help users browse topical categories rather than fire a query into a universal index. In that world, a webring or directory was not a compromise. It was often the main event." Alan Bradley remembers life before Google.

"The suits don’t own cricket. The suits just manage the top floor. The soul of the game lives right here on the grass, kept alive by the people who simply care too much to let it go. And as long as there’s a Saturday afternoon, a cold drink, and a game to watch at Barnes, my heart isn’t going anywhere else." Elizabeth Ammon loves club cricket.

Nathen Amin travels to Lisbon on the trail of Perkin Warbeck.

James Fox is interviewed about his acting career in 1968

Another post that suggests I should have called this blog Twentieth Century Boy.

Click on the photo of James Fox here to be taken to an interview with him on the British Film Institute site. There you will see it billed like this:

Happy and relaxed dialogue with the then 28-year-old actor, covering his rise to fame and plans for the future.

After his role in The Servant (1963), James Fox was in demand. This interview, filmed four years later, has the young star in affable mood, freely admitting his lack of planning, love of California and thoughts about his craft. 

It predates his role in Performance (1970), after which he suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew from acting for eight years.

The film he starred in as a 12-year-old briefly mentioned at the beginning is The Magnet, a lesser Ealing comedy or a part of the Ealing Apocrypha, as I described once it in a post about the film.

Brazilian footballer falls down hole celebrating goal that was then disallowed

The judges are unanimous. Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Guardian.

How Bodhana Sivanandan became British women's chess champion at the age of 11

Not only does Britain have a 17-year-old chess champion, it also has an 11-year-old women's champion.

Yesterday Bodhana Sivanandan won a play-off with 14-year-old Trisha Kanyamarala to claim this crown. The women's title goes to the highest placed woman in the British championship, which is open to all. The two had tied, so a play-off was needed to separate them.

You can see Bohdana win the tense decisive second game in the video above. The first had ended in a draw.

Bodhana is a positional player, with a wonderful instinct for where each piece belongs. Shreyas Royal, who won the British championship, played her in the tournament and won by forcing her into a sharp position that didn't suit her so well. 

But she is improving rapidly and people are are already forecasting that she will win the British championship one day and also become the strongest women player in the world.

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.

Boy the home office tried to deport at 9 wins British chess championship at 17

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Shreyas Royal today won the British chess championship aged only 17. By my calculation that makes him the youngest holder of the title - he breaks Michael Adams's record by a couple of months, just as he broke David Howell's record to become Britain's youngest ever grandmaster at 15.

I first wrote about Shreyas in 2018, under the headline

The government is forcing Britain's best chess prospect to leave the country

There I said:

Nine-year-old Shreyas Royal has variously been described as “the greatest British chess prospect in a generation” (Malcolm Pein) and "the best prospect the country has ever seen" (Chris Ward).

But, reports the Guardian:

Shreyas Royal has lived in the UK since he was three but has been told he will be sent back to India when his father’s work visa expires in September.  

The home office soon relented, and all the claims made for Shreyas then turn out to have been justified.

Sadly he won't play for England at the forthcoming chess olympiad. The selectors went all Bazball and named their team of five early, at a time when Shreyas's form did not make him a certain pick, and he was one of the players who missed out.

But he looks certain to establish himself as Britain's strongest player within a year or two, unless one of the many talented juniors now coming through overtakes him before then.

The Joy of Six 1559

"Violence has prevailed against the freedom of the press. I was denied the right to report on the disgraceful acts which later unfolded after I left for my own safety – and that is wrong. Violence against anyone should be condemned, that's a fact. But violence against a person simply trying to report is an obstruction of truth." Henry Durand tries to report on the mob violence in Thetford.

Carole Cadwalladr introduces a timeline of The Nerve's investigation of Nigel Farage’s biggest funder, Christopher Harborne, and argues that Farage is a symptom, not a cause, of forces reshaping politics across the world: "Farage has never known anything like it. There are now questions which even he can’t dodge. Questions even the BBC is finally asking. And his luck seems to be running out. A hasty plan to throw off a parliamentary investigation by quitting parliament before he could be sanctioned has spectacularly backfired in the biggest own goal of his career."

Rebecca Nicholson reviews the pitch-dark documentary series Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which is currently on BBC iPlayer: "As a vlogger, she and her husband, Kevin, made a living from YouTube, posting videos on the popular channel 8 Passengers, now defunct, about Mormon family life and parenting their six children in the picturesque city of Springville, Utah. But in 2023 Franke was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison."

"This is a pattern seen repeated throughout our society and system: a government quick to make 'hard choices' that involve easy solutions, but seemingly entirely unwilling or unable to take on the tougher opponents and ... seek harder more essential solutions." Paul Rowlston argues that Britain's proposed social media ban for under-16s tackles a symptom while leaving the real problem untouched.

"Caricatures of the Luddites as history’s losers are simply false," says Brian Lewis. "We have not stopped talking about them ever since."

Giles Wilcock looks back to 1919 – the last time cricket's county championship faced a serious threat: "When the war ended, the Bradford League remained attractive, and the Lancashire League began hunting for star names to compete. And because of the unique circumstances of the 1919 season – two-day games and relatively low county wages – they were often successful."

The Coasters: Yakety Yak

Isn't this brilliant? It has everything, from a situation every Fifties American teenager would have been familiar with to an irresistible catch: "Don't talk back." 

Yakety Yak was written and produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were responsible for many great songs, and performed by the Black doo-wop group The Coasters.

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

The union of a black vocal group with two Jewish songwriters was one of the most propitious in rock history. Leiber and Stoller’s witty, street-smart 'playlets' were sung with sly, clowning humor by the Coasters and accompanied by the hot, honking 'yakety sax' of King Curtis. 

The Coasters parlayed their R&B; roots into rock and roll hits by delivering Leiber and Stoller’s serio-comic tunes in an uptempo doo-wop style. Beneath the humour the songs often made incisive points about American culture for those willing to dig a little deeper.

Leiber has described the Coasters’ style as "a white kid’s view of a black person’s conception of white society." In fact, their success showed how thin was the line between rhythm & blues and rock and roll in the Fifties. 

"Our songs…were R&B; hits that white kids were attracted to," Leiber said in a 1992 interview. "And if people bought it, it became rock and roll."