Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Have you thought of writing one yourself?

It could be on Liberal politics or culture or… anything really.  Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history? Perhaps you have a book to promote?

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 guest posts on this blog:

• In praise of outgrounds: How cricket in small towns made a roaring comeback – Matthew Pennell
• Why has the HS2 project been such a disaster? – Peter Chambers
• Doctor Who: The most golden era? – Peter Chambers
• Like a challenging computer game? Try the Government Digital Service – Mark Valentine
• Why Liberals must take power away from the media billionaires – Donnachadh McCarthy
• Reform and Labour are losing councillors fast – Augustus Carp
• Is Isaac Asimov's psychohistory fiction or reality? – Peter Chambers
• Stalling an Ambush and protecting more than the countryside – Emma Lee
• Rediscovering "proper Grimond Liberalism" – Paul Hindley
• Joe Meek and an old case of misattribution – Matthew Lawrenson

Pippa Heylings woos disaffected Greens as COP31 opens

Embed from Getty Images

"You have a home with us," Pippa Heylings has said in an open letter to Green members who feel environmental issues have slipped down the party's agenda in recent month reports, Politics.co.uk.

Heylings, who is the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on energy security and net zero as well as being MP for South Cambridgeshire, published her letter as COP31. the United Nations' annual climate change conference, got underway in Antalya, Turkey.

In it, says the website, Heylings (seen nearest the camera in the photo above) sets out five environmental commitments championed by the Lib Dems:

She cites the Sunshine Bill, which would require developers to fit new-builds with solar panels and heat pumps. The bill was brought forward by Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, in October 2024. 

The government declined to support the bill at the time, but Wilkinson’s campaign was ultimately successful. In June 2025, the government announced it would incorporate the mandate for solar panels on the "vast majority" of new build homes into the upcoming Future Homes Standard. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, described the move as "just common sense".

On water, Heylings said the Liberal Democrats were fighting for a regulator with "real teeth" to replace Ofwat, with water companies run "for the public benefit rather than shareholders".

The letter also vows a £1 billion uplift to funding for nature-friendly farming schemes, with support for regenerative farming and a national "call to store" programme to help farms withstand drought and flood. Heylings added that the party would seek a cross-party national plan for heatwaves, drought and flooding.

This is an impressive environmental programme. Greens who despair of Polanskio-Corbynism would probably be more at home in the Lib Dems than the Labour Party. And they would be good for the Lib Dems too.

The Joy of Six 1605

"The public’s disgust with Trump is now inextricably bound up with disgust for that other cult – the smug-maxxing techno-narcissists who think we all want to live in the world they’re designing." Tina Brown looks at America after the midterms.

Sol Gamsu finds that Britain's schools are segregated by social class – in London in particular: "For post-16 education, London’s state schools and colleges are very unequal. In affluent western boroughs such as Richmond upon Thames or Kingston, working-class students are heavily concentrated in further education colleges, with a larger number of more middle-class state schools."

Lindsey Blumell says the media ultimately exposed Russell Brand, but his fame and celebrity added to victims' trauma: "The trial is an example of the role media can play in uplifting the career of powerful people like Brand. This is both through platforming celebrities in 'puff' articles and TV segments, as well as in their failure to act on reports of unprofessional and illegal behaviour."

"There is a note of tragedy in all of this, I think. In the days before sinking to the level of ugly and disreputable grouches such as Brendan O’Neill and Richard Littlejohn, Pearson was first a reliably clever TV reviewer for the Independent, then a bona fide literary sensation." Ian Winwood accounts for the hurtle to the right of my old classmate Allison Pearson.

"Made at Ealing Studios, Dead of Night ingeniously weaves together the separate visions of four directors. And it is the hand of Alberto Cavalcanti that gives his short tale of a ventriloquist going mad – or being driven to madness by supernatural means – its peculiar and lasting power." Self-Styled Siren on the Brazilian who also directed Went the Day Well?

Giles Wilcock on the mystery of the Black cricketer who played for the MCC in 1902.

Small Faces: Itchycoo Park

Once, long before you were born, I played this over and over again on the jukebox of The Bird in Hand, Henstridge. 

The pub also had a bar billiards table, so it was a good evening.

Michael Moorcock and Iain Sinclair in conversation

From The Morecambe Fringe Festival Podcast:

In this episode writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair catches up with Sci-Fi author and Hawkwind collaborator Michael Moorcock in an exclusive Morecambe Fringe Podcast interview.

Click on the image above to listen to it.

The letter on Russell Brand that the Guardian declined to publish

Yesterday's Joy of Six included a post by Lucy Siegle about the Guardian's long and close involvement with Russell Brand in . In it Siegle, a former Guardian journalist herself, referred to a letter she had written to the newspaper.

As she expected, that letter has not been published, so she has included it in a new post on her blog:

The Guardian must examine its own role in enabling Russell Brand

Your editorial on Russell Brand’s conviction (The Guardian view on Russell Brand: his conviction sends a powerful message, Friday 6th November) rightly challenges the media culture that enabled his behaviour. But why does the Guardian apply so little scrutiny to its own role in the creating and sustaining of Russell Brand’s media power?

Brand is described, almost in passing, as someone who was ‘also once a Guardian sports columnist’. Yet the Guardian’s relationship with him extended considerably further. It serialised his autobiography My Booky Wook, gave him extensive editorial exposure and, as late as 2014, staged a Guardian Live event broadcast to cinemas across the country. He is not simply a former sports columnist. He is a celebrity whose profile, cultural authority and commercial appeal the Guardian helped cultivate. It is a matter of public record how much Brand cultivated and received The Guardian’s patronage. Apparently this ran both ways. In his ‘Farewell Readers’ sign off in 2015, former editor Alan Rusbridger included Russell Brand at Guardian conference as one of the highlights of his tenure. (By the way, there is a photograph commemorating this historic moment on your website).

I founded and ran the annual Observer Ethical Awards, 2004-2014, when the Observer was owned by Guardian News and Media. On several occasions through the Guardian’s commercial department it was suggested that I should add Brand as a celebrity judge. I refused because I had heard troubling accounts of his behaviour towards women. I can’t say who knew what, but the concerns that were circulating were certainly sufficient for me to decide that he should not be anywhere near my event.

Your editorial notes that the BBC and Channel 4 conducted internal reviews and issued apologies following the revelations about Brand. What examination has the Guardian undertaken of its own decisions to commission, promote and publicly associate itself with him?

It is easy to condemn the culture of male entitlement once a celebrity has been convicted. The harder task is to examine the institutional decisions that sustained his power when he was still commercially valuable. The Guardian should be prepared to apply that scrutiny to itself. Unhappily, this is not the first time that I have had to make this point to you.

Lucy Siegle
Former Guardian News and Media staffer, and former Observer columnist.

Both blog posts are worth reading in full.

Charlotte Cane, Malcolm Saville and the floods of 1947

Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely and East Cambridgeshire, has been elected chair of the all-party parliamentary group for sustainable flood and drought management, reports the Ely Standard.

And it's no wonder that she takes an interest in such matters. As Cambridgeshire Live once described, the freezing winter of 1946/7 was followed by something worse:

Swollen by torrential rain, the onset of a rapid thaw, and unusually high spring tides, all the major rivers burst their banks, inundating farmland, roads and homes.

A vast area of land was swamped, half of it prime arable land desperately needed to supply a population only just freed from the grip of war. Sowings of winter wheat and vast quantities of potatoes were submerged.

In the low lying areas close to the Great Ouse, Welland and Nene, the floodwater tore huge breaches in the river banks, and hundreds of families were made homeless. The sheer force of the water smashed fences, knocked down doors and destroyed walls, even those made of brick.

Thousands of pigs, cattle, sheep and poultry were swept away too – but miraculously no human lives were lost.

Local people were joined by Army men – and prisoners-of-war – in battling to keep the water at bay, but could do little to prevent further damage. Many of the embankments had been established way back in the 17th century by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden as part of the vast fenland drainage project.

Perhaps because of this miraculous preservation of human life, I sense that the floods of 1947 have faded from popular memory in the way that the East Coast floods of 1953 haven't.

But those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville will know all about them, because his book The Luck of Sallowby was set in the Isle of Ely against the background of these floods.

So here is Saville in mid-season form:

Now they were close against the wall they saw it was only a few inches higher than the rising water which stretched before them in a turbulent brown lake, whipped into waves by the gale. And these waves beat against the wall ceaselessly and the spray from them blew over the top and drenched the bags and settled in pools on the tarpaulins and made the blue clay slimy and almost unmanageable.

The sky was full of rain again but they knew now that even if it did not rain in the Fens the danger was coming from the water which fell many miles away in the Midlands and in Bedfordshire, and that the swollen rivers were still rushing down to the plain while the wind which fretted these floods into the banks, made a menace which it was very hard to fight.

So they worked on with them men, laughing and joking with them, until a shout and disturbance about fifty yards away broke the rhythm of their toil. They looked round to see that the water had found a weakness in the wall and was gushing through the cracks between the bags like a fountain. There was another similar leak nearer to them on their other side, and now the gangs plastered these leaks with clay without waiting to bag it.

Reader's voice: Have you by any chance written something about Saville's books recently?

Liberal England replies: Funny you should ask. You can read my Malcolm Saville and the children’s holiday adventure over on Lion & Unicorn.

The Joy of Six 1604

Lucy Siegle is not impressed by the Guardian's attempt to play down its long and close involvement with Russell Brand: "My favourite evidence suggesting a deeper relationship ... is the stuff on its own website including photographic evidence of young Russell perched next to former editor Alan Rushbridger at Guardian conference. This is framed as one of Alan Rushbridger’s highlights on leaving in 2015."

"As I started to step outside of the MAGA media bubble, I started to gradually realise that so much of what I believed turned out to be false. I spent a lot of nights in solitude with my thoughts going through this year-long personally tumultuous time, where I had to examine ... what had been sincerely held beliefs that were false." Rich Logis talks to Byline Times about the organisation he has created to help others exit from the extremist group.

"When you open Speed Grader to confront another bland but competent assignment, suspiciously devoid of grammatical or spelling errors, your heart sinks. You know that, in all probability, the document you're reading was composed not by your student (whose contribution likely extended no further than dropping the essay question into Claude’s interface and adding 'make it sound human'), but by a legion of absent (and, quite probably, deceased) authors, whose forgotten texts enabled an algorithm to stitch together an essay that is at least passable and often reasonably good." Jeff Sparrow on what AI is doing to universities.

Mira Ptacin speaks up for feral children: "These kids already spend most of their weekdays indoors, where bells regulate their movements and adults regulate their voices. The ferry ride is one of the few unsupervised stretches left in their day: 20 minutes on the ocean suspended between island and mainland when they can be loud, loose, ridiculous and wholly themselves."

Peter Asher looks back on his 60 years in the music business.

"It’s a magnificent sweep, hardly noticed by most passengers as they alight from their train – minding the gap between the train and the platform edge, of course – and hurry to the exit and whatever has brought them to York in the first place." English Buildings celebrates the curved trainshed at York station.

GUEST POST Joe Meek and an old case of misattribution

Everyone makes mistakes, says Matthew Lawrenson. Most are discovered fairly quickly and put right. But sometimes, they drag on for years and years with nobody bothering to correct them, despite all the evidence being available to do so.

Glenda Collins was a 1960s female singer with an ill-starred career. A contemporary of fellow London Jewish vocalist Helen Shapiro (though her recording career started a few months earlier), she released three singles on Decca in 1960-61 which flopped. Released from her contract, she had to find alternative arrangements.

Luckily, independent producer Joe Meek was on the lookout for new talent and signed her up in 1963. Every few months, Glenda would traipse up to Meek's studio on the Holloway Road in Islington to record a new track. Joe would work his famous magic and sell the master to a big label. When her new record was released, Glenda would be given a new haircut and a new outfit and be sent out on a promo tour. Sadly, all eight singles she made with Meek also flopped.

While the likes of HMV and Pye were happy to release Joe Meek's productions – Joe having paid for the recording and mastering himself – they concentrated their promotional efforts on their in-house artists and the likes of Glenda Collins got what was left.

As for why Glenda stayed with Meek for so long, well, apparently her father/manager was very protective. And whatever has been said about Joe’s proclivities, your attractive young daughter was always going to be safe with him. Glenda’s recording career died with Joe, on that infamous day in February 1967 when Meek shot his landlady and then himself.

All this is well-documented music history, so what’s the problem here? Well, Glenda’s penultimate single on HMV was Johnny Loves Me, a cover of the Shelley Fabares hit written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in 1962. Or was it? The credits on the label said it was.

That’s not the song Glenda recorded, so what gives? What we seem to have here is an example of record company laziness and inattention. As the Meek-made single wasn’t produced in-house, whomever did the admin at HMV in 1965 simply assumed it was Fabares's hit (no. 21 in the USA Cashbox charts). And on every compilation since, Johnny Loves Me by Glenda Collins has been credited to Mann/Weil. 

So, who really did the original version? Here it is.

This was released in 1963 in Sweden by Suzie, a Dutch/Swedish singer produced by songwriter John L. Finneran, an American who’d moved to Scandinavia after his USA music career faltered. And, as you can hear, despite Joe Meek’s much-vaunted innovation, he pretty much copied it for Glenda’s track. 

How he got hold of a song that was probably never released in the UK is not known, but my guess is that another of his artists, Michael Cox (who was huge in Sweden), brought a copy back after touring there with his song Stand Up.

John L. Finneran died in 1973. So if he ever found out his songwriting royalties were being diverted to Mann and Weil, there's not much he could have done about it after that. The small amount of money generated by Glenda’s track would have been dwarfed in 1965 by other, more successful Mann/Weil songs such as, say, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.

Me, I discovered this by accident a few weeks ago. I contacted the Joe Meek Society about it on the off-chance and they hadn’t realised either. Discogs and 45cat have been contacted and corrections made, and the Performing Rights Society will be informed and all future royalties diverted to the proper channels. 

We'll just have to wait to see if Barry Mann himself gets a letter delivered to his home in Los Angeles informing him that Glenda won’t be making him any more money in the future.

Matthew Lawrenson has been an amateur writer for over 30 years, in the sense that though he has produced hundreds of thousands of words, he has never been paid for a single one.

Abdul El-Sayed captained the University of Oxford lacrosse team

Embed from Getty Images

Lovers of trivia will know that Kris Kristofferson won a boxing Blue for Oxford, but our Trivia Desk has news of another American Rhodes Scholar who represented the university at sport.

It comes from England Lacrosse:

Former University of Oxford Lacrosse Club defender and men’s captain Abdul El-Sayed has become the first Muslim-American, first Egyptian-American, and surely first Oxford Men’s Lacrosse Club alumni elected to the United States Senate after victory in the mid-term elections on Tuesday.

 This is definitely our Trivial Fact of the Day.

It's Wednesday so it must be Much Wenlock

Tuesday was Ellesmere. But this is Wednesday, so it must be Much Wenlock.

I spent much of my time there enjoying the Abbey grounds, but here are some photos I took in the town. 

The half-timbered house above is the one where wartime evacuees are supposed to have come down to breakfast on their first morning and demanded to know who the children in strange clothes they'd been playing with were.

Madra Salach: Ribbon Factory

Madra Salach – Dirty Dog in English – are a contemporary Irish folk band and Ribbon Factory, released as a single last month, will be on their debut album when it comes out in January.

The Guardian says they bring 

a feral, snarling energy to the country’s latest folk revival. Their sound builds ably on some of the architects of that resurgence – the eerie shruti box droning and carefully layered instrumentation of Lankum, the shimmering wails of Lisa O’Neill. 

Add a hint of Liam Gallagher to the mix – frontman Paul Banks’s voice has an astonishing force and clarity, and he affects a tempestuous, attack-and-withdraw relationship with the microphone – and you’ve got a very exciting package indeed.

A stereotypical Irish reader adds: Yer da's been listening to Radio 6 Music again.

Do we have Elizabeth Anscombe to thank for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

When it comes to famous clashes of philosophers, Cambridge has Wittgenstein's poker and Oxford has the night that Elizabeth Anscombe bested C.S. Lewis in debate.

Reviewing A.N. Wilson's biography for the London Review of Books back in 1990, C.H. Sisson took seriously the idea that this rout had much to do with Lewis's turn to writing for children:

Lewis was unpopular ‘in the English Faculty in Oxford, and indeed in the University at large’. ‘He disliked his colleagues at Magdalen.’ ‘Even colleagues who were Christians ... noticed that his variety of Christianity did not extend to meekness, or even necessarily to politeness.’ 

A notable debate took place in 1948 in the Socratic Club, when Elizabeth Anscombe – represented by Wilson as being as tough and unscrupulous in argument as Lewis himself – ‘thoroughly trounced’ him in argument, and showed up his inadequacy as a philosopher. 

This occasion seems to have had an extravagant effect on Lewis, arousing ‘not least’, according to Wilson, ‘his fear of women’. ‘Once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size, he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch-like dimensions.’ 

Lewis, who is said to have preferred boys’ books in the second half of his life, became a real – if perhaps somewhat unwholesome – success as a children’s writer with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘being stung back into childhood’, Wilson plausibly informs us, by his defeat at the Socratic Club.

Going back to Popper for a moment, his reply to Wittgenstein was surely a joke. A joke by Popper sounds like no laughing matter, but I have been told that he was very aware when writing in English that it was his second language, so concentrated above all on making himself clear. His writing in German, by contrast, can be wittier and more allusive.

Elizabeth Anscombe and her philosopher husband Peter Geach eventually retired to Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, where Geaches can be found to this day. Anscombe was an acolyte of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy dominated the second half of the 20th century.

So was Norman Malcolm, who agreed with a point I made in the after-dinner discussion when we had him as a guest of out philosophy society at York. If felt like a laying on of hands from Wittgenstein himself - I get much the same feeling when Frank Muir's son applauds one of my witticisms on Bluesky.

The Joy of Six 1603

"More than 74,000 people have been killed in Gaza according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and up to ten thousand are missing under the rubble. More than a hundred thousand Palestinians have managed to leave. The survivors are corralled into a concentration area along the coast, living in dense tent encampments among ruined buildings, mountains of rubbish and rivers of sewage, under the constant hum of drones." Eyal Weizman reviews Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's film Naza.

Gaby Hinsliff says the Russell Brand verdict is a landmark in the judicial system's understanding of consent: "For too long, cases involving young women alleging rape after going initially willingly to the bedrooms of rich or famous men have ended in sour, uneasy acquittals. Well, not any more. This verdict upholds the vital principle that consent to one thing is not consent to absolutely everything; that women still absolutely have the right to say no, even if they have in the past said yes."

Victoria Collins, Liberal Democrat MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, on the future of public service broadcasting: "It is crucial that trusted UK public service broadcasters and trusted news providers remain visible and easily discoverable. We must ensure that audiences can continue to have easy access to the range of original content that public service broadcasters provide."

"For some people with disabilities, going swimming or attending an exercise class comes with a worry that many others would never consider: could being seen to be physically active lead to their disability benefits being stopped?" Toni Williams uncovers the 'activity trap' that is stopping some disabled people from exercising.

"Munro constructed a glittering, savage milieu, where the drawing-room hypocrisies of the upper-middle-classes are mercilessly exposed. His agents of chaos are manifold: some are elegant young men who admire buttonholes and cufflinks, and bear romantic names like Reginald and Clovis Sangrail. More often than not, the disruptors are young children or animals, ruthlessly unsentimental, and devoted to the remorseless logic of truth." Philip Womack has read a new biography of H.H. Munro, better known as Saki.

The Silver Locket introduces us to the joys of collecting early Penguins.

A promotional film for Northampton from 1965

Judging by the electrification work taking place on the West Coast Main Line at Roade, this film dates from 1965 or thereabouts.

Northampton town centre is made to look rather more prosperous in it than it does today. Much else has changed: there is no longer a convent and school in Abington Street, for instance, though the convent's graveyard is still there if you know where to look. I have some photographs of it and will post them one day.

GUEST POST Rediscovering "proper Grimond Liberalism"

Paul Hindley from The Grimond Society on the ideas of the Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond and its ambition to put cooperatives and mutuals back at the heart of Liberal Democrat politics.

One of the more eye-catching policies to come out of this year's Liberal Democrat autumn federal conference in Brighton concerned addressing the apparent malpractice of the water companies. Following a passionate debate, conference-goers overwhelmingly backed a policy motion entitled Restoring our waters: Britain's water company crisis. 

It commits the party to converting failing privatised water companies (such as Thames Water) into mutually owned companies, where water customers own the companies and have a say over how they are run. The profits of such water mutuals would be reinvested for the good of the company and its customers.

Mutualisation is a democratic and profoundly liberal alternative to nationalisation and privatisation. A mutualised company is one owned by its customers or employees (or both) rather than by state bureaucrats or by elite shareholders and private equity firms. Mutuals range from building societies and mutual insurance firms to consumer-owned co-operatives and traditional worker-owned cooperatives. They represent neither state ownership nor private shareholder ownership, but customer and employee ownership. 

During the debate in Brighton, Tim Farron, our party's environment spokesperson and former leader, described the water mutualisation policy proposals as "proper Grimond Liberalism". Jo Grimond's name might be seldom heard from conference platforms today, but the party’s leader from 1956-67, and again briefly in 1976, has left a massive intellectual footprint in the party. 

It was in homage to Jo, that a group of Liberal Democrat activists came together in July this year to found The Grimond Society. It has been formed to campaign to put cooperatives, mutuals, social enterprises and employee ownership more broadly back at the heart of Liberal Democrat policies. 

It is our ambition to submit a policy motion on co-operatives and mutuals to next year’s Liberal Democrat spring conference in York. We are also in the process of applying to become an affiliated organisation of the party. 

The Grimond Society is striving to restore "proper Grimond Liberalism" within the party. Under the historic radical liberal slogan of "ownership for all", we want the Liberal Democrats to once again become a bastion of workplace democracy, consumer stakeholding and economic cooperation. We want to build a liberal society where workers and consumers alike own and have a stake in the places where they work and the services they rely on. 

Grimond spent much of his political life advocating radical economic policies to distribute power, ownership and profits more equitably between bosses and workers. Leading a major party when British politics and voting behaviour was highly aligned along class identity, Grimond sought to bridge the divide between capital and labour. He sought to establish an economy of "worker-owners", where employees would have a guaranteed right to company board representation, company share ownership and some amount of power in their workplaces. 

Put simply, Grimond sought to apply liberal and democratic principles to the workplace and to the marketplace. Such ideas were radical decades ago and they remain radical and perhaps even more necessary today.

In his 1978 book, The Common Welfare, Grimond discusses his views of mutuals, especially co-operatives, in great detail. Much of his discussion of co-operatives centres on the success of the Mondragon Corporation, a worker-owned co-operative in the Basque Country of Spain. Grimond describes co-operatives as representing "socialism without the state". 

However, Grimond's "socialism" could not have been further removed from the top-down state socialism of the 20th century. He envisioned a situation where the employees of a firm, each as owners

Embed from Getty Images

with democratic power within their firm, would be loyal to the institution of their cooperative rather than the state. It represented democratic, horizontal power relations within the economy, rather than top-down socialist bureaucracy.

Following his observations in the Basque Country, Grimond notes how workers' cooperatives "seem to have gone some way to dissolving the antagonism between capital and labour while retaining a free society". He also writes that 

once the divisions between capital and labour, teacher and pupil, bureaucrat and client, governor and governed are blurred the very framework of modern society is altered.

In 1979, the year following the publication of The Common Welfare, Grimond supported Robert Oakeshott in establishing Job Ownership Ltd, which became the Employee Ownership Association. Ultimately, radical liberals have always seen employee ownership as a means of democratically bridging the class divide between capital and labour.

While Grimond sympathised with syndicalism and cooperative socialism, his view of the economy was neither fully syndicalist nor was it socialist. He envisioned a much more decentralised and democratic form of a competitive free market economy than the one we have been familiar with under neoliberalism. It would be one where the bureaucratic functions of the state would be greatly reduced and where the internal structure of the firm would be radically transformed and democratised.

Grimond’s political economy represented a radical alternative variant of capitalism; a competitive free market capitalist economy where property ownership and power within the workplace were distributed equitably throughout society. It was egalitarian in terms of the distribution of property ownership and semi-syndicalist in its advocacy of workplace democracy and worker ownership within the firm.

It is now the job of the Grimond Society, to translate Grimond’s support for cooperatives and mutuals (through Liberal Democrat policies) into reality. As Grimond said:

if you want a society in which every community gives as much satisfaction to its members as its circumstances will allow … you cannot ignore the organisation of work.

Our road to building such a society begins in York at next year's spring conference. We hope you will join us and support us in putting cooperatives and mutuals back at the heart of Liberal Democrat politics once again.

Dr Paul Hindley is a member of the Grimond Society and a Liberal Democrat activist in Blackpool. He was recently awarded a Politics PhD by Lancaster University.

James Earl Ray fled to London after he shot Martin Luther King

Sunday Express, 9 June 1968

Somehow I had managed to live until yesterday without learning that James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King in 1968, fled to London after his crime and was arrested there by the Metropolitan Police. Thanks to Rob Tyers for enlightening me in the middle of a thread on pubs called The Green Man.

There's a comprehensive Wikipedia article on the assassination, and BBC News has published one about Ray's journey to London. the people he met and the crimes he committed before his arrest.

You should read those for the full story, but in essence Ray fled to Canada after the shooting. There he obtained the birth certificate of a Canadian citizen, which he used to obtain a false passport, and then flew to Lisbon via Heathrow.

He had hoped to go on from Lisbon by sea to an African country that had no extradition treaty with the US. This plan came to nothing, so he flew back to London.

There he stayed at a couple of cheap hotels, but his money was running out. He tried an armed robbery at a jeweller's shop, only to flee when an alarm was set off, and then held up the TSB in Earls Court Road. He came away with only £100, which wasn't much to show for a bank robbery even in 1968.

It was enough to buy him a ticket to Brussels, but an immigration officer at Heathrow noticed that he had two passports. The police were notified and Ray was arrested – the British police knew by then the assumed name he had been travelling under.

Ray died in prison in the US in 1998 at the age of 70.

Sheila Hancock and Stratford Johns in the original London production of Annie

Here's The Stage reviewing the first London production of the musical Annie in 1978:

It says a good deal for the skill of Stratford Johns and Sheila Hancock that they manage to hold their own against the juvenile competition, but both give first-rate, amusing performances as Warbucks and Miss Hannigan, Stratford Johns surprising us with a melodious singing voice.

Sheila Hancock and Stratford Johns? Now that's what I call casting.

You can see Sheila Hancock in the video above and hear Stratford Johns, who shaved his head for the part, in the one below. Johns voice shouldn't have been such a surprise: he had recorded an album in 1965.

There's more of Sheila Hancock on stage in the wonderful edition of The South Bank Show about the staging from 1980 about the staging of the original production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The Joy of Six 1602

"His administration has been openly attempting to fund its allies in Europe. According to the Guardian, the State Department has allocated $15m (£11.2m) to three conservative groups in the UK. These grants form part of a 'slush fund' to boost likeminded organisations across Europe, with up to $3m (£2.2m) reportedly available to those focused on 'developing civilizational bonds' and 'defending rule of law'." Max Colbert and Sam Bright on the millions of dollars pouring into our democracy from Trump’s America.

David Henig argues that Brexit psychologically damaged a political generation – except one: "Andy Burnham was not an MP during the Brexit years. They didn’t talk about it so much in Manchester. This perhaps explains why he has felt able to move so far and fast to talk about rejoin, with some sign of coordination with a few senior folk in Brussels, and why he has received almost no strong support from colleagues."

Lottie Elton asks why, when councils are paying millions to private homes, children aren't receiving better care.

"One of the clearest findings from our research is the significance of authenticity. Staff from working-class backgrounds often face an unspoken expectation to adapt: to align with dominant norms of speech, behaviour and self-presentation." Iona Burnell Reilly and Jackie Carter say working‑class academics are still struggling to fit in at university.

Ed Simon marks the 300th anniversary of Jonathan Swift's famous book: "As the numbers of people who have actually read Gulliver’s Travels have dwindled, its name recognition holds on, though today the adjective 'Swiftian' just as likely calls to mind Taylor as Jonathan. A predicament to our own detriment, for Swift provides as full of a diagnosis of our own diseased era as his own."

"Clem Cattini called himself 'a musical navvie'. It was a humble description, but the records he played on say otherwise. Forty-three of them reached number one in Britain. He drummed on 'Telstar' and 'Shakin' All Over' two of the most important rock and roll records this country has produced." Jason Barnard pays tribute to Cattini, who died this week.

In which my second crack at a Dickens joke comes on live radio

Back in the early Nineties, which was the era when I was doing a part-time MA in Victorian Studies at Leicester, I turned up at a pub in the city to play a county league chess game for Market Harborough. Naturally, I had a copy of Great Expectations in my jacket pocket.

A member of the home team saw this and suggested it meant I was feeling confident about the coming game. Just when it was too late, I realsied that I should have replied with a self-deprecating "It's more likely to be a case of Hard Times, I'm afraid." L'esprit de l'escalier is a bitch.

And I was expecting hard times, because we were playing a team called Marten Inn and it included some of the best players in the city. They had presumably started off at the Marten Inn in Martin Street, but were now playing at the Town Arms in Pocklington's Walk. The Town Arms, which is now called Duffy's Bar, used to be a significant Leicester music venue.

As it turned out, I wasn't in for hard times at all as I won rather a good game. I don't recall seeing the scoresheet in the folder of them I still have, but I remember I played aggressively as Black, won the exchange and eventually returned it to transpose into a won king and pawn ending.

Fast forward to 2007, when I was still hosting the BritBlog Roundup. This was a weekly digest of British blog posts, compiled (at least when I hosted it) largely from the nominations made by its regular readers.

For a short while – I think I only appeared a couple of times – the Roundup host for that week would be interviewed live on a BBC Radio Five Live programme called Outriders. And I didn't dream this as it's still mentioned on the BBC website.

I went on air, I think that evening, to talk about the Roundup for 25 November 2007. One of the blog posts included was a football team chosen from Dickens characters. The link no longer works, but I discussed a few of the selections.

At the end, quite unbidden by me, the presenter said: "I suppose you could say this team has Great Expectations.

And I was able to give the instant reply: "Yes, but I'm afraid it might turn out to be a case of Hard Times."

Procol Harum: Pandora's Box

Though it was included on the band's 1975 album Procol's Ninth and released as a single the same year, this song was written by Gary Brooker and Keith Reid back in the psychedelic Sixties.

Caroline Voaden on what Shovegate tells us about Nigel Farage

Writing in the Guardian, Caroline Voaden tells us what really happened in the Commons altercation that Nigel Farage later used as his excuse for missing the John Healey's Budget speech:

On the day of the king's speech, MPs process through to the House of Lords to listen to it. Leaders of all parties, including smaller ones, lead the procession, but on this occasion Farage didn’t seem to get into place in time. So he was stuck behind a load of MPs also trying to join the procession.

I was on a flight of stairs and he demanded to get past. I told him to wait his turn like everyone else and he clearly didn’t like that, so he grabbed me by the arm and I ended up shoved to one side so he could push through. 

My colleague thought I was going to fall down the stairs, so he grabbed Farage and had a word with him about his behaviour. I reported it to the parliamentary authorities and they asked him to apologise in writing. That never happened – of course – and I chose not to say anything about it publicly.

So, yes, there was an altercation. Was it caused by "aggressive" Lib Dem MPs, as a Reform UK source later claimed? Hardly.

And she goes on to offer some penetrating observations on what the affair, and in particular on the way he dredged it up as an excuse, tells us about Farage and his approach to parliamentary politics:

I think it's a perfect reflection of the type of politics that typifies Reform UK. The politics of grievance, the repetitive mantra that the "establishment are out to get us", but, more importantly, the disdain for parliament and its traditions.

For a man who claims he wants to become prime minister, Farage's aversion to spending time in parliament means that he will go into the next election with very little knowledge about how the place works, how to leverage its power and what lies behind its traditions. 

He has spoken less in parliament than any other comparable party leader and voted about half as much as the average MP. He is a stranger in the place he aims to command.

The ghosts of Naseby Battlefield

This is a short video from the Cromwell Museum that catalogues the many places where the ghost of Oliver Cromwell is said to walk.

I have selected the section on Naseby Battlefield and the ghosts, Cromwell included, who are seen there. It lies seven miles south of Market Harborough,

The 2008 photograph said to show a Civil War soldier has managed to walk through the Telegraph paywall.

The old Pontesbury magistrates court and police house are for sale

For two days in February 1945 the eyes of the nation were on the little magistrates court at Pontesbury in Shropshire. It was here that the committal proceedings against the farmer Reginald Gough and his wife Esther on charges of the manslaughter of their 12-year-old foster child Dennis O'Neill were held.

At the full trial, held at Stafford the following month because feeling was running so high in Shropshire, Gough was convicted of manslaughter and his wife of the lesser charge of neglect.

As I have shown here, news from Pontesbury shared the front pages with news of the Allied advance on Berlin. That shows how the boy's death scandalised the country, even if many newspapers had only four pages because of wartime paper shortages.

The reason for this post is that the magistrates court, which closed long ago and was for many years home to an insurance company, and the old police house next door are up for sale. The old court is on the left in the photograph above and the police house on the right.

From the internal photographs on the properties' rightmove listing, you can see that the courtroom was on the first floor, with cells and other appurtenances beneath. 

This is certainly a project for someone – the listing suggests it would be ideal for mixed commercial and domestic use.

Let's end with a glimpse of what happened in that courtroom in 1945. This is from the Newcastle Journal for 15 February:

Mr. H.H. Maddocks, prosecuting, said that he could not possibly consent to bail for either. "There is another matter to be taken into consideration. A tremendous amount of indignation has been aroused, and it might be for their own safety if they were not allowed bail." 

An outburst of laughter among people at the back of the court followed this remark.

For more on the death of Dennis O'Neill, see my article for Central Bylines: The forgotten Shropshire tragedy that inspired The Mousetrap. 

The courtroom at Pontesbury (photo: rightmove)

The Joy of Six 1601

"This low-cost strategy of largely relying on conditionality and sanctions to get unemployed claimants into work has clearly failed, as numbers have gone up since 2016, and the binary nature of our welfare system pushes our ageing and increasingly impaired population to claim incapacity benefits over limited working with in-work financial top-ups." Paul Gregg introduces the new Resolution Foundation report What's Gone Wrong With Welfare?

Flynn Devine and Hannah Perry, meanwhile, introduce a Demos report on how the lack of impartial local news sources fuels asylum housing clashes and what can be done about it.

"But what a diagnostic label cannot do is tell a teacher how a child learns. Those of us who have taught in classrooms know that two autistic children may need very different support." Mark Mon-Williams and Karen Guldberg call for a shift from a "diagnosis-dependent" system of helping children with special educational needs and disabilities, to a "needs-led plus diagnosis" one, where support is not withheld while waiting for a diagnosis.

Francisco Garcia on the Student List's victory in Serbia: "From the start, the student movement was determinedly horizontal. There were no leaders and decisions were taken collectively at assemblies. Over time, the movement agreed on a few key demands, with elections chief among them."

Stephanie Seul introduces us to Avis Waterman, the woman who covered the First World War on the Italian Front for The Times.

"Pawlikowski does not make arty films in which the imagery stops the story to admire itself. But he depends on the force and the simultaneous distancing of black and white, the way it tells us we are seeing something that has been chosen." David Thomson praises Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland (2026).