Another video from barrister-at-law Alan Robertshaw. One interesting point he makes is that the common courtroom assumption that a statement given immediately after an event provides the best evidence is mistaken.
I also like his favourite line: "cross-examination does not mean examining someone crossly". And there's a useful tip on how to dress if you're planning a robbery.
Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.
In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”
There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.
******
Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.
The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.
And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.
Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:
Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.
Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".
******
I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.
But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.
When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.
This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.
Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.
You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.
These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.
People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.
******
I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.
When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:
In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.
But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act.
What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.
So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.
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| Stamford, Lincolnshire: Nowhere near Newcastle upon Tyne |
Kemi Badenoch is bound to know more than most of us about politics – she's heard of Kemi Badenoch, for a start – but she's no better than the rest on geography. Over to John Crace and his Guardian sketch on her series of short interviews today with regional journalists:
Anna reminded Kemi she had been a minister at a time when health and education outcomes in the north were considerably worse than in the south. Why were buses so much more expensive and infrequent in Newcastle?
Kemi started talking about buses in Lincolnshire. "But Lincolnshire is nowhere near the north-east," Foster said, sounding completely bewildered. She had clearly expected someone with a working knowledge of UK geography.
"It is near the north-east," said Kemi. After all, Lincolnshire was quite a way from London so it might as well be near the north-east. In any case, it was all in the wilderness called "outside the M25". A nether world where people barely existed.
Anna had another go. How could she put this nicely? Lincolnshire was two and a half hours from Newcastle. Next time, could she speak to someone who wasn’t a halfwit? Thank you and good night.
It's worth adding that this ignorance on part of the south-eastern establishment is often an affectation – a way of signalling that they are of this class through and through.
Start talking knowledgably about the Midlands or the North and you will find people asking searching questions about what your parents do or which school you went to.
Body-worn video of a woman's "degrading" arrest, which police falsely told a court did not exist, has been shared exclusively with the BBC.
It shows officers in Northamptonshire throw metal spikes in front of Nadine Buzzard-Quashie's car and force her to the ground after responding to a concern for her welfare, whereupon she says her face was pushed into stinging nettles.
The Chief Constable of Northamptonshire, Ivan Balhatchet, was found guilty of contempt of court in November and fined £50,000 for failing to release the body-worn videos to her.
The police watchdog has started a criminal investigation into a Northants senior police officer and two staff over perverting the course of justice allegations.
The matter is in relation to a legal case, which last autumn saw Northants Chief Constable Ivan Balhatchet found to have been in contempt of court and fined £50,000. The civil case had been brought by Londonder Nadine Buzzard Quashie, who had been fighting the force for bodyworn footage of her arrest in Northamptonshire in September 2021, that she claims was unlawful.
The spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye.
That was me blogging the other day. And today I bought the new Eye and found that it has featured again:
One of Keir Starmer's first appointments as prime minister in July 2024 was that of Varun Chandra, head of the Hakluyt intelligence consultancy, as investment and trade adviser (while he retained a stake in the firm, as revealed in Eye 1629).
and:
As Mandelson's appointment worked its way through the clearance procedure, with everything hanging on the Foreign Office permanent secretary, who should arrive in this role? One Sir Oliver Robbins, fresh from a stint at... Hakluyt. He duly took the view that what he described last week as a "borderline case" could be confirmed, no questions asked.
and
After Mandelson's sacking last September, Chandra was, remarkably, on the shortlist of three to take on the ambassadorship. Starmer was then reportedly persuaded that recent events perhaps indicated that a professional diplomate might make on a better choice ... In January Chandra was nevertheless given the consolation prize of becoming the PM's "special envoy" to the US on trade and investment to go with his existing role.
After that, the news that I think Vaughan Wilkins' granddaughter, who has published under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan, has also written as Rose Wilkins may fall a little flat.
But let's get on to what this post was going to be about: a splendid reply by Vaughan Wilkins to a critic of his first novel, And So – Victoria, that was published in The Queen (23 September 1937).
l have read with amusement the letter in your issue of September 2nd, in which a simple-minded American correspondent upbraids me for saying unpleasant things in my novel And So – Victoria about the very unpleasant sons of George III. He – or she – chides me too for imagining conversations between historical personages.
"Boston" obviously has merely a superficial knowledge of the family of George III, or he would not leap to the defence of a creature like the Duke of Cumberland. It is true that on that sinister person’s tomb the customary laudatory inscription is incised – but when he became King of Hanover, the first thing he did was to abolish the constitution.
The Duke of York was a nasty, muddleheaded old man, whose mistress sold commissions in the army he nominally commanded. The Duke of Clarence was another muddle-head who unquestionably lived on the verge of mental derangement. The Duke of Kent was a pompous egoist and sadist. Let "Boston" read about the mock execution His Royal Highness staged in Canada; or in the Crevy Papers about his curious reactions to marriage.
"Boston" thinks (does he or she really mean it !) that George III was a nice kind fellow because he made an allowance to the last of the exiled Stuart Princes "out of his own private income". George IV could – and did – spend £300 on a single coat: he threw away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds in building himself palaces that were both hideous and unnecessary. He raced; he gambled; he kept harems; he drank – not out of his income, but out of contributions which time and again had to be levied for him by the State, He intrigued against his father; he abominated his mother; he persecuted his wife; he tormented (and hated) his daughter; he betrayed his friends; he could not keep his word; he did not pay his bills. This is not a novelist’s imagination: it is a matter of record.
Of course, I don’t know "for a fact the conversations that took place in the homes of George III sons”. But if "Boston" will not allow me to imagine them then I and every other historical novelist will have to shut up shop. The giants of the past, Dumas, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, must all incur "Boston's" displeasure. Anyhow, it is very odd to find a champion of the Hanoverian from the city of "The Tea-party"!
I suppose that when set against the depredations of the Hanoverians even Peter Mandelson begins to seem palatable.
"Real names becomes a tool for bullies online – and will force victims either to accept the bullying or avoid using the internet. This, of course, is not just true for bullies, but for overbearing parents, sadistic teachers and much worse. It is really important not to just think about good parents and protective teachers. For the vulnerable children, parents and teachers can be exactly the people they need to avoid." Paul Bernal argues that children need anonymity and encryption online.
Catherine Heseltine asks if we can build crisis care outside the mental health system: "Being violently locked away and forcibly drugged made my mental health crisis many times worse – an experience shared by far too many people who have been subjected to standard NHS crisis 'care'. Yet the mental health system seems to resist change like a train with no brakes."
Emma Peplow, with the help of the History of Parliament blog's oral history archive reminds us that Hannah Spencer is not the first new MP to remark on Westminster's drinking culture disapprovingly.
"Football Focus lasted almost two decades after its mothership Grandstand finally came off the air in 2007. The falling number of top flight 3pm kick offs certainly didn’t help though, and that trend might in time make it harder for even Final Score to endure, too." Richard Jones discusses what the BBC's axeing of Football Focus tells us about trends in sports broadcasting.
Londonist takes us to North Korea's London embassy, which stands just off the North Circular in Ealing
I loved this when I was a little boy in the Sixties and I still love it now.
The trumpet player here is John Walters, who went on to become John Peel's producer at Radio 1.
Three years ago Alan Bennett visited the BFI Southbank to discuss the influence of his northern roots in a conversation that formed part of the BFI's Northern Voices season.
The blurb on YouTube says:
Few writers have successfully mined Northern culture and specific northern speech patterns as Alan Bennett. Growing up in Leeds, he listened in on the chatter of his relatives, absorbing the patter of domestic conversation, which would emerge across a glittering and much-loved range of plays, particularly those written for television. Here, Bennett explores the way Northern culture is so integral to his creative process.
But how did the Guardian's Whitehall editor greet Morgan McSweeney when he was appointed? Those of you with strong stomachs, read on:
As the brains behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, McSweeney is credited with having brought the prime minister to power. He entered No 10 as head of political strategy, in charge of charting the party’s path to another victory in five years' time.
When it emerged there were rival power bases around McSweeney and Gray in No 10, few had any doubt he would survive any fallout. He has now emerged as chief of staff, with unrivalled influence, and is likely to bring a much sharper political focus to the job.
McSweeney is adored by many staffers, with some party figures retaining more affection for him than they do for Starmer. The highest form of praise in Labour HQ has been said to be: "Morgan loves it." However, he is something of a bogeyman on the left after leading the thinktank Labour Together in a campaign to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s influence.
After working in Labour’s attack unit in the New Labour years, McSweeney cut his teeth as chief of staff to the then Lambeth council leader Steve Reed, who is now a cabinet minister, and helped defeat the British National party in Barking and Dagenham. Born in Ireland, he divides his time between Scotland and Westminster. His wife, Imogen Walker, is Labour’s MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.
Why this unctuous tone? As I explained at the time, it was beat-sweetening and source-greasing.
And I got these terms from an article Timothy Noah published when Obama named his team after first winning the Presidency:
This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter's access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they've been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why.
My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.
This is why even the teams behind candidates for the leadership of opposition parties get enthusiastic write ups. They may just turn out to be the people the journalist wants to take his calls for years to come.
Our History Underfoot – like and subscribe, my pretties – takes a break from the railways to explore the enticing remains of Grace Dieu Priory in the west of Leicestershire.
You can read more on the Friends of Grace Dieu Priory website.
Another of Vaughan Wilkins's sons is the artist William Wilkins. His daughter Laura has published fiction under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan [and maybe under a third name too]. Powell and Vaughan are the middle names of her father and grandfather (who was christened William Vaughan Wilkins) respectively.
Vaughan Wilkins's only children's book, the interestingly of-its-period After Bath, was published in 1945. It is dedicated: "For Four Children with all my love: William, Christopher, Christine; and Richard."
So it looks as though he had at least one more child to investigate (that semicolon is intriguing), at least until the injunctions come in.
David Walker, the Liberal Democrat run Shropshire Council's cabinet member with responsibility for planning, tells the radio station:
"Nature underpins everyday life, from clean air and water to the green spaces that support our health and wellbeing, yet many species and habitats across Shropshire are still in decline.
"This strategy sets out a shared, locally‑led approach to turning that around. It’s about bringing councils, landowners, organisations and communities together to deliver real, practical improvements for nature. I’d like to thank everyone who contributed and the whole team who have pulled together such an excellent piece of work. The focus now is on turning this ambition into action on the ground."
An LNRS sets out proposals to help recover nature and improve the wider environment, but doesn't give anyone extra statutory powers to make change happen.
You can read the Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin LNRS on the Shropshire Council website and the BBC News report is worth reading too:
Dave Cragg, from Natural England, said "there's a lot that needs to be done" to address "the global biodiversity crisis".
In Shropshire, "there are definitely places where it is really good", Cragg said, noting the county's nature reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
The diversity of Shropshire's nature makes it special, he added, recalling "those brilliant hills, the Stiperstones, the Long Mynd" as well as "bogs, fens, and a brilliant river system".
"It's got a bit of everything really."
"There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so. No one in Britain played any part in choosing the parameters of the W93." Norman Dombey dissects Britain's nuclear subservience to the US.
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. But it's feared that this slice will come to dominate how humans communicate, report Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier.
Pam Jarvis offers a personal memoir of the Blair-era widening participation policy for higher education, which promised opportunity but left a complex legacy.
"It is impossible not to talk about The Reckoning in the same breath as Get Carter. Both films are about men who have left their working class roots to become successful in their various professions in London, and who are then forced to come home due to a family tragedy. Liverpool, like Newcastle in Get Carter, is depicted as a tough, rainswept working class town. And much like Jack Carter, Marler is intensely uncomfortable in its bleak surrounds, the tiny council house that his family still live in, with its wood panelling and flocked wallpaper, the raucous smokey pubs they drink in, with their bad torch singers and cheap bingo games." Andrew Nette watches Nicol Williamson heading north before Michael Caine.
Chris Baker on an 18th-century plan to build Britain a new capital – in Rutland.
The revised Shropshire Pevsner is honest about it:
Of 1855-6, the magnum opus of a local man, Robert Griffiths of Quatford. In the grossest Italianate with an angle tower with typical Victorian-Italian roof. The material is yellow brick, blue brick and red brick. For Pevsner the whole seemed artless and tasteless, though not over decorated. Yet for all its bombast it fits well into the varied fabric of the town, and the tower tells in the town silhouette as a minor accent midway between the major ones of the two churches. (In practical terms the Market Hall was a failure. When it opened traders refused to move in, and still today the Saturday market takes place in the High Street.
Ludlow had a similarly uncompromising Victorian market hall - it was demolished in 1986, shortly after scenes from the BBC's adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape were filmed there. Its loss opened up a welcome space in front of the castle entrance, now used as a market space, but I wonder if the town would be quite so gung-ho about razing it now.
Anyway, Griff Rhys Jones in in no doubt the we should prevent the loss of Bridgnorth's hall:
"No, no, no. Come on. They are building huge enclosed shopping centres which threaten the high street, and here is a purpose made building on the high street standing by and perfect for small shops, cafes and a new life.
"This is the centre of town. This is the centre of urban life. Stand by and make something of it."
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| Eyebrook Reservoir Dam: John Fielding |
And here's an interesting snippet from it about a nearby reservoir:
For several months in 1943 up to a dozen Lancaster bombers regularly used Eyebrook Reservoir as a training ground prior to setting off on the famous Ruhr "Dam Busters Raid".
Initially the low flying night flights caused considerable disturbance to the surrounding villages. However local residents, who recognised their sleep would be interrupted, regularly congregated around the lakeside to witness the spectacular rehearsals.
Discover Rutland says:
Practice flights took place from the 3rd May 1943, with a full ‘dress rehearsal’ on the 14th May of 14 Lancasters "attacking" the Eyebrook Dam.
The reservoir, which straddles the border between Leicestershire and Rutland, was built between 1937 and 1940 by Stewarts & Lloyds to supply water to its Corby steel works.
Someone posted a track by String Driven Thing on Bluesky the other day and I wondered why I knew the name. And then I remembered this.
It's a Game was covered by the Bay City Rollers in 1977 and provided them with their last top 20 hit. But I already knew the song, so this original version by String Driven Thing must have received airplay in 1973, even though it didn't make the charts.
String Driven Thing began as a folk trio, but were encouraged by their record company to adopt the folk rock sound that you hear on It's a Game. They toured America, supporting Lou Reed at one point, but never troubled the singles chart there or here.
Their Wikipedia entry reveals rapid line up changes, and also the interesting destinations of former members. These include being the guitar technician for Steve Winwood and Jeff Beck, and membership of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
Just that I really hated the Bay City Rollers.
It's a pretty village, though perhaps without quite as much character as Hallaton or Medbourne, and it still has a pub and a little coffee shop. So it was well worth the visit.
Dan Reed, who directed the explosive documentary Leaving Neverland seven years ago, has come to a sad conclusion: "People don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care."
"It makes sense to try out Kantian ideas here, because the issue touches on questions of a good future, humanity and a decent life. The question of hope arises in this crisis because, on the one hand, we know that we must remain capable of acting in order to improve the situation. On the other hand, in view of the size of the problem, resignation or even despair can quickly set in." Claudia Blöser says the philosopher Immanuel Kant can help us face global crises today.
Rowan Thompson introduces his new book on the Air League, the Navy League and organised militarism in Britain between the wars: "To foster sea- and airmindedness among the nation’s youth, the leagues were active in schools and universities, while they also formed their own uniformed youth branches – the Sea Cadet Corps and Air Defence Cadet Corps."
Ian Mansfield visits the new V&A East Museum at the Olympic Park in East London.
"Popular supposition is often that the Chelsea and Leeds rivalry emanates from the 1970 FA Cup Final and, particularly, the replay. Not quite true. A few games in preceding years appear to sow the roots of the mutual antipathy." Tim Rolls on the long history of enmity between the two clubs.
This land sits right next to the Furness railway line - a vital transport link to both BAE Submarines in Barrow and Sellafield nuclear power station. That’s why I made representations to ministers asking whether this sale would be compliant with the UK’s sanctions against Russia.
— Tim Farron (@timfarron.bsky.social) 24 April 2026 at 15:37
[image or embed]
A story peeks out at me from behind the Financial Times paywall:
Russian businessman and his daughter have triggered national security concerns by seeking to buy a golf course located next to the railway that serves the UK’s main shipyard for nuclear-powered attack submarines.
As Tim Farron points out, the line also serves the nuclear site at Sellafield. You may not be surprised to hear that the deal collapsed this week after government intervention and enquiries from the FT.
My first thought on reading this was of the old joke in Whoops Apocalypse about a Soviet submarine being found in Staines reservoir.
But nothing should surprise us in a country where we have a Lord Siberia sitting in the upper house of our parliament.
By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.
And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.
Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.
The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".
Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:
Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.
If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
"There has never been anybody like her. To say that she loved acting just would not be enough. We realised only recently when we were looking at some old clippings that newspaper banner headlines had called her London’s greatest actress."
This is the Northampton-born artist Henry Bird paying tribute to his wife Freda Jackson when she died in 1990.
My latest article for Central Bylines pays tribute to them: Northampton's arts power couple.
It turns out to have been written when the poet was 18 years old and to be included in the collection W. H. Auden. Juvenilia: Poems 1922–28. It also seems that the young Auden's chief acquaintance with Jefferies' work came via the biography of him by Edward Thomas.
I can't find the whole sonnet online, but here is an extract:
What more? When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn.
Tanya Park defends Lib Dem South Cambridgeshire and its four-day week: "Its staff complete 100 per cent of their work in 80 per cent of the time, for 100 per cent of the pay. The government told them to stop. They didn’t. The results came in: £371,500 in annual savings, a 120 per cent rise in job applications, a 40% fall in staff turnover. Services maintained. Budget improved. Staff retained."
"Building more homes is necessary. But announcing that the mechanism for financing this expansion will unlock £53 billion of additional private lending into the housing market is not a break from the pattern. Channelling more bank credit into residential property is the pattern. If the credit mechanics are left intact, developers and existing owners will capture the gains while affordability ratios drift further from wages, exactly as they have done after every previous supply intervention." Vincent Gomez analyses Rachel Reeves' attempt to make housing more affordable.
"To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm." Gabrielle Bruney on the disappearance of benches from public space and what it means.
Henry Jeffreys supports the right of English whisky producers to do things differently from the giant Scottish whisky industry: "There are now 69 whisky distilleries in England, up from 61 in 2025, with 40 having mature whisky available for sale. It seems bizarre to tie this tiny, fledgling industry so closely to its northern behemoth."
Marc Morris slays some myths about England and St George - he didn't gain popularity in England until the 15th century, and Richard the Lionheart had nothing to do with his adoption as our patron saint.
Dave Mason, one of the founding members of Traffic, has died. Steve Winwood, now the only one of the four still with us, paid this tribute:
We were deeply saddened to hear of Dave Mason’s passing.
Dave was part of Traffic during its earliest chapter, and played an important role in shaping the band’s sound and identity during that time. His songwriting, musicianship and distinctive spirit helped create music that has lasted far beyond its era, and continues to mean so much to listeners around the world.
Those years remain a special part of the band’s story, and Dave’s contribution to them is not forgotten. His place in that history will always be remembered, and through the music, his presence endures.
At this sad time, our thoughts are with his family, his friends, and all those who loved him and his music.
It's no secret that there were tensions between Mason and Winwood – indeed between him and the rest of the band. While the other three liked to jam and allow songs to emerge organically, Mason sat down on his own. wrote songs and had firm ideas about how the other members should play on them.
And, while Traffic are best known in Britain for Mason's Hole in My Shoe, his home-made take on psychedelia was not the way the rest of the band wanted to go. So for these reasons he was pushed out by them.
Mason would probably have replied that they were happy enough to use his songs on their second LP when he made the first of two brief returns to Traffic. And maybe he got his revenge by turning up as a black-hatted bad fairy on English Soul, the BBC documentary about Winwood's career.
Mason enjoyed a long career as a singer and songwriter after Traffic. He also played the acoustic guitar at the start of Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower and produced the Leicester band Family's first album Music in a Doll's House.
The video here shows the four founder members of Traffic playing at the Christmas on Earth Continued happening in 1967. I like to think that the second track, Giving to You, is how they sounded when they were jamming at the cottage where they got it together in the country.
Leaving aside the unfortunate episode when she briefly crossed the floor, she has consistently been one of the most impressive members of the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party
I can confirm that Jennie is in good health: she has a nice wet nose, as I learnt when she booped me on her way into the Glee Club at last year's Lib Dem autumn conference. I felt honoured.
Photo from Steve Darling on Bluesky.
High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Arts and Music Scene
Join Leicester author and curator Shaun Knapp, author, curator and graphic designer Joe Nixon, musician Kenny Wilson, and the University of Leicester’s Colin Hyde for a discussion on the arts and music scene in Leicester during the 1960s.
I talk to Kenny Wilson sometimes in my favourite coffee shop in Market Harborough and Shaun Knapp turned out to be a member of Gypsy (who were called Legay earlier in their career), a Leicester band of the late Sixties and early Seventies who some rate higher than the more celebrated Family.
At one point discussion turned to the Mods and Rockers. We are used to reading of pitched battles between them, but Kenny Wilson cast new light on their relationship for me.
The Rockers were older than the Mods. Because they had done National Service they were also much harder. So conflict between the two tribes tended to consist, not of fighting, but of the Mods annoying the Rockers and then running away.
You can read more about such matters on Kenny Wilson's blog.
But having been inspired to write posts by the BBC's Secret Shropshire and Secret Leicestershire pages, I though I would have a look at Secret Northamptonshire. And this is the story that caught my eye:
Northants' "Grandest and Most Perfect" Structure
The Harringworth or Welland Viaduct is one of the longest of its kind in Britain.
Stradling the picturesque Northamptonshire valley, it is a magnificent example of Victorian construction and ambition.
But the story of its construction is even more remarkable... and terrifying.
Helen Blaby tells that story.
Heather Stewart analyses Labour's crabwise approach to closer economic ties with the EU.
Richard Kemp condemns the snobbery behind the use of classical music to disperse groups of young people: "I have instead asked the Council and Police to support the 'In Harmony' programme of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic which is taking music playing into some of the most deprived areas of Liverpool both during the day and evening. During the day they ensure that every child in three schools gets to play a musical instrument for an hour a week for three years."
"I hope what comes across at the end is an invitation for people to consider the aspects of British culture that they want to celebrate. Albion can't be determined by me; this is a personal quest and a personal vision of the aspects of Britishness that I feel need to be celebrated. It's an invitation for people to say: "I have a stake here, and what do I want to champion?" Zakia Sewell talks to Michaela Makusha about her first book, Finding Albion.
Rob Hakimian reports on a scheme to use the Grand Union Canal to transfer water from the Midlands to London and the South East.
"I have a soft spot for Waddon (1937). Beneath garish commercial signage is a striking Modernist building which can hold its own against any inter-war Tube station." Daniel Wright takes us on a tour of the South London railway stations built between the wars to rival the striking architecture of those on the Underground.
