Six of the Best 949

"In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgements, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward. As one senior British government adviser put it to me, 'We’ve had our arse handed to us recently.'" Britain's performance on Covid-19 has been poor, but Tom McTague argues that we were failing long before the virus struck.

"The problem is that the Party’s democracy is performative, not real. We have elections, but accountability and scrutiny are poor. Finding out what the Committees do between elections is difficult – the various minutes are seldom published, very brief reports go to Federal Conference." Mark Valladares asks if the Liberal Democrats are governable.

Keith Melton is not a fan of the motion on the environment accepted for debate at next month's virtual Lib Dem Conference.

The way we talk on the internet is broken, but users are not the ones who broke it. It was the tech companies did that, says Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and they did it for profit.

Alison Campsie reveals that Scotland’s fishing towns and villages boomed from the sale of cheap salted herring to slave plantations.

"The film opens with a disembodied head warning a group of children about the dangers of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Steeped in religious language and projected against a starlit sky, the scene locates the film firmly in our collective imagination. This is neither the real world nor the world of books, it is somewhere in between," FilmJuice looks at Night of the Hunter.