The Joy of Six 1205

"The rule of law is being eroded because parliament is weak. The Executive is able to ride roughshod over political processes because legislators obediently follow the party-line. This majority needs to be diluted by replacing the First-Past-The-Post voting system with proportional representation, which holds out the possibility of creating an effective opposition in parliament. A written constitution must rebalance the powers of the government with those of the people and the judiciary." Prem Sikka argues that the rule of law has been captured by class interests and proposes a very Liberal Democrat solution.

Katharine Swindells reports on the legal loophole that leaves thousands of children in hostels, but not recorded in official data, because their accommodation is owned by local authorities.

"This gradually diminishing division between adults and children permeating deeply into western society, creating problems that we flail within, finding it difficult to diagnose what exactly is wrong, and how we might try to fix it." Pam Jarvis calls for an end to kidulthood.

Alwyn Turner on the Edwardian mystery of the hooded MP and the Eastbourne murder: "Horatio Bottomley ... didn’t identify the MP in question, only saying that he was a 'wealthy and degenerate representative of an important English constituency'."

Nicholas Wroe talks to the organisers of a new William Blake exhibition: "Yes, he was a great English artist just as he was a great English poet, but despite the fact that during his lifetime he barely left London and never left England, he was also subject to wider European intellectual and creative currents."

"Down by the railway tracks, hemmed in by streets of little houses, is this caravan encampment. Some of the dwellers in the old vans claim to be of pure Romany stock. Their ancestors came, so they say, year after year in the long ago when all around was Surrey countryside." A London Inheritance goes in search of the six Battersea locations covered in a 1951 book on Curious London.