London's lost underground lines - with a note on the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club

Jago Hazzard is our guide to a collection of lost lines, repurposed lines and abandoned oddments, some of them 50 miles out of London and deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

One scheme that never advanced far enough to carry trains was the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway, which:

was authorised in 1865 to construct a pneumatic railway (that is, one where trains are pushed though a tunnel by air pressure) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo station. The single cast iron tube, 3.89 m (12'9") in diameter, would have crossed the river by being laid in a ditch dredged in the bed of the Thames. 

Though work did start, a general financial crisis prevented additional capital being raised, and the work was abandoned in 1868, with the company being wound up in 1882. The trench excavated at the northern end is now the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club.

That Reform UK programme for Leicestershire: Bus cuts and a consultants' bonanza

Reform UK won 25 of the 55 seats on Leicestershire County Council on 1 May and has now formed a minority administration.

What will they do with this power? It's hard to know. They didn't produce a local manifesto for the elections, and I'm not sure things are much clearer after the new council leader's interview with the Leicester Mercury.

A few extracts...

Q: Reform UK has promised an audit of the county council’s finances to identify waste and efficiencies. How are you going to fund the audit given the council’s difficult financial position?

A: We'll find that sort of money because it's vital. It's vital. We'll be able to do that, don't worry.

The Mercury could have pointed out the council's finances are audited internally and externally every year. So this sounds like a firm commitment to unnecessary extra spending.

On flooding, they want to solve the problems in the county, but don't seem to know what needs to be done or how much it will cost.

There will be not cuts in social care: apparently these new auditors are going to be "an external company of experts" and will tell them what to do.

This sounds very like the practice among Conservative councils of spending a fortune on consultants because you don't trust your own officers for ideological reasons.

Reform UK's clearest commitment seems to be cuts to bus services:

Q: What will you do to ensure rural communities have access to public transport?

A: If we've got efficiency and if we've got savings, we can then do something. But, we've got to review the buses because the problem was we had buses driving around with two or three people in and there was no take-up.

So when it suddenly goes, everybody wants to join a petition to say ‘yes we want it back’. So it's one of those, if you're not using it, you could lose it.

We've just had a major review of bus services in Leicestershire under the last Conservative administration, but, sure, let's have another consultants' bonanza. It's only taxpayers money.

The real test of what Reform UK are about will come when they discover there's not millions of pounds of wasteful spending to be cut or reallocated. But the early signs are not promising.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

The Joy of Six 1359

"Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets - are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage." Alex de Waal on starvation in Gaza.

Ben Jackson says the government must change direction on child poverty: "When governments are remembered after they lose office, their achievements are unforgivingly distilled into a few pithy bullet points. Does Keir Starmer really want one of his bullet points to be that he was the unusual Labour prime minister who presided over an increase in child poverty?"

Rose Dixon reports the success of Iceland's experiment with a four-day working week.

"The men would wait for the Germans to pass over them and then come out at night. Their role was not to fight the Germans face-to-face. Their brief was to hit the supply chain, causing enough chaos to slow down the German advance, blowing fuel and ammunition dumps, destroying railway lines, bridges, and convoys. Local country houses that had been taken as German HQs were to be destroyed and German officers and British collaborators assassinated." Andrew Chatterton explains how the British Resistance would have fought Nazi occupiers.

"Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be 'an ogre, a princess, an ass,' as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody." Michael Schulman tells the story of how Meryl Streep battled Dustin Hoffman, retooled her role and on her first for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Peter Black discovers an Edwardian mystery: The story of Violet's Leap.

William Wallace: Reading Biggles in Westminster Abbey

Liberal Democrat Voice has a thoughtful post by William Wallace - Lord Wallace of Saltaire - on the relation between Liberalism and religious faith.

But I was most taken by this personal reminiscence:

I grew up as a Protestant Anglican. I learned what I now understand as social liberalism from the sermons of Canon Marriott, preaching the 'social gospel’'in Westminster Abbey (putting down my Biggles book, which choristers were allowed to take in to keep us quiet during sermons).

Reform council leader thinks circumcision causes transgenderism

The new Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council has suggested there's a link between circumcision and transgenderism in children, reports the Jewish Chronicle.

In a now-deleted post on social media, Sean Matthews, who earlier this month became leader of Lincolnshire County council, said: “It's no surprise that children want to remove their penises and become girls.

"Most of their parents started the process shortly after birth, by chopping their foreskin off in the name of (insert deity).”

I'm not going to blog about every fruitcake, loony and closet racist that got elected as a Reform councillor on 1 May, but this guy is a council leader.

Incidentally, in the Britain of the 1930s, 35 per cent of boys were circumcised, with the practice being particularly favoured by upper class parents.

But I bet Mr Matthews will tell you there were no transexuals in the good old days.

Nick Cohen's podcast: Don't back any horses tipped by Nick Tyrone

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Nick Cohen's latest podcast dropped two days ago. His guest, billed as an expert on the Conservative Party, was Paul-Marshall-era Liberal Democrat turned Reform supporter Nick Tyrone.

In the course of their discussion Tyrone argued that when Robert Jenrick replaces Kemi Badenoch, as he surely will, he'll prove no more popular than she has.

He then suggested that the Tories should go for someone untainted by their 14 years in government and choose a leader from their 2024 intake of MPs.

Pressed for a name, he suggested Patrick Spencer, who was arrested the following day.

Spencer denies the charges against him and may go on to have along political career, even leading his party. But this exchange did reinforce the impression that Tyrone isn't the great political forecaster out there.

Because he has previous. Here he is in the Spectator on the eve of a 2021 by-election:

"The Chesham and Amersham by-election is on Thursday. Thank God it’s almost here — hopefully then we can stop hearing any rubbish about how the Lib Dems are set to tear down the Conservatives’ ‘blue wall’ in the home counties. As the campaign has demonstrated, the Lib Dems are miles away from being able to cause such an upset.

"Instead, the Lib Dems will lose on Thursday, most likely fairly badly, and they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to get back to being the by-election masters of old, they will have to do a lot better than this."

As you may recall, Sarah Green won the election for the Lib Dems with a 25 per cent swing from the Conservatives.

He was more confident about the Lib Dem performance in 2015:

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, Tyrone predicted that the Liberal Democrats would receive "17 per cent" of the popular vote and that the vote share for the two largest parties appeared "on course for an all time low". 

The two largest parties subsequently both increased their vote share, while the Liberal Democrats received 7.9 per cent.

Nor did he much admire Nigel Farage in the run up to the European Union referendum:

In 2015, Tyrone argued that fellow pro-Europeans should give their "gratitude to Nigel Farage for hanging around the British political scene just a little bit longer" as he believed it would ensure "the pro-Europeans win".

We all like to sound confident when we make predictions, but I wouldn't back any horse that Nick Tyrone tipped. 

Fleetwood Mac: Dust My Broom

Scintillating slide guitar from Jeremy Spencer. 

Thought for the Day: “We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it”

I first came across this saying in Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil's study of the artists Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones. If I'm remembering correctly, it was a favourite of the latter.

Looking for it online the other day, I found this formulation of it in several places:

A Pacific island chief was being bullied by a missionary about his beliefs.

"Have you, my dear, no conception of a deity?"

The chief replied: "We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it."

"Come back, Shane!" are not the last words spoken in the film

I've come across another Mandela effect online, this one involving the classic Western, Shane. Some people - and I'm one of them - are convinced that after calling out "Come back, Shane!" several times, little Joey Starrett's final words in the film are "Bye, Shane." 

This changes the meaning of the film's ending by turning it into something about growing up and the death of the old West. Yet any time you find this final scene online it seems to be missing those two words. Have we misremembered the film?

No, because here is the full version and you can clearly hear Joey call out "Bye, Shane". 

Do people posting clips online end the scene early because they've become convinced that the famous "Come back, Shane!" ends the film? Or has television's cavalier attitude to cutting films short to trail the next programme infected them?

I don't know, but I did once work out that Joey Starrett would have been 73 when Shane was released. And I have also written about the career of the boy who played him, Brandon deWilde.

And now we have the correct ending, another question arises. The last we see of Shane, he is slumped in the saddle and riding through a graveyard. Is he already dead?

You may say this is reading too much into the closing shot. But as someone pointed out, George Stevens spent 18 months editing the film, so nothing you see on the screen is there by accident.

New Leicestershire Reform councillor was sacked as a police officer last year

BBC News reports, nay reveals, that a newly elected Reform member of Leicestershire County Council was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in January 2024:

Andrew Hamilton-Gray won a seat in Loughborough for Reform, with almost 40 per cent of the vote.

It has now emerged that a police misconduct hearing in January 2024 found he had called in sick, to travel to Spain, when he should have been working as a PC.

The misconduct hearing found that was one of two occasions when he reported sick to pursue his outside business interests.

The BBC says Hamilton-Gray has told them he has been advised not to comment.

Alistair Carmichael: Labour is falling into the same trap the Tories did on immigration

The senior Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael has given a measured and Liberal response to today's intervention on immigration by Keir Starmer. I was pleased to see this following a disappointing press statement from the party this afternoon.

Alistair gave his response in a thread on Bluesky - here's what he wrote:

I fear that Labour is falling into the same trap that the Tories did - leaning on hostile rhetoric around immigration and damaging our public services and our economy in the process. 

We should not pander to the far right but instead fix the problems that enable them. If you feed that wolf eventually it will eat you. 

We need a flexible, dynamic legal migration system that works for our country and our economy, while treating everyone with dignity and respect.

We should have no truck with the demonisation of desperate people fleeing persecution, war or starvation, nor indeed of those who are on the frontline of our health and social care sectors. The last thing we need is to do more harm to our fragile public services.

 There will always be a need for integration and fair play in our immigration system, but we should not ignore the enormous benefits that immigration has brought to our country. These are our friends and neighbours, people who enrich our cultural fabric and help drive our economy across the UK.

My fear, if the government fails to get better at making its case, is that, at the next election, Labour will fall back on the argument that you have to vote for them to stop Reform getting in.

The danger then is that the voters will here this as: "If you want to get rid of Labour, vote Reform."

Three men held over suitcases stuffed with hermit crabs

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were relieved to find that the story below it is not about a novel form of torture.

To celebrate St Pancras Day: The Beatles at Old St Pancras and a 1983 Steve Winwood interview

Today is St Pancras Day. To celebrate it, here's another showing for this video recreating the Beatles' visit to Old St Pancras churchyard on their London Mad Day Out in 1968. You can read more about their time in the churchyard in an old Guardian article.

When you add in the fact that today is also Steve Winwood's birthday, it's clear 12 May should be a public holiday in the Midlands. 

Certainly, it's a big deal here on Liberal England. To celebrate, here's a 1983 interview with our favourite musician.

Winwood talks about his past with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith, and about his then burgeoning career as a solo artist.

The Joy of Six 1358

"Quite apart from winning Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire outright, the Lib Dems are set to lead Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Devon councils, with the possibility of a deal in Hertfordshire, and a long shot at power in Cornwall." Matthew Pennell reviews the local elections.

Rei Takver reports that the new Reform UK constitution gives its chair sweeping, unchecked authority within the party.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead on a report that shows women in the North of England face deep inequalities: "Northern women work longer hours for lower pay, are more likely to live in poverty, have fewer qualifications, and face a shorter life expectancy than women in other parts of the country. They are also more likely to take on unpaid caring responsibilities."

"International research has demonstrated that IM [independent mobility] benefits children physically, psychologically, cognitively and socially. IM allows children to explore their environments, at their own pace, based on their own decision-making processes. As such, IM increases children’s confidence, autonomy, social skills and capacity to move around public space while strengthening their bonds to and familiarity with place." Katherine L. Frohlich and Patricia A. Collins survey research on links between children’s right to the city, their independent mobility and public health.

"Well before the term 'nepo babies' entered the cultural lexicon, Bogdanovich cast a real father and daughter as Moses and Addie. ... Bogdanovich had recently worked with Ryan O'Neal on What’s Up Doc, though he actually approached the actor’s eight-year-old daughter Tatum to audition first, at Platt’s suggestion." Sara Batkie celebrates Peter Bogdanovich's film Paper Moon on its 50th birthday.

Jeremy Benson walks the canal towpath from Leicester to Market Harborough.

Lib Dems watch Reform: Reform watches the Lib Dems

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The Liberal Democrats have set up an internal "Reform watch" to monitor Nigel Farage’s party in local government, reports the Guardian. The paper quotes Ed Davey as saying Labour and the Conservatives are too scared of the threat from Reform to hold it to account.

The report sets out what the work of the unit will be:

A key part of the monitoring will be to see if and how Reform-run councils try to cut services, Davey said. Many families had been “alarmed” by Farage’s comments saying too many people were being diagnosed with special needs or mental illnesses, he said.

Other areas would include culture war battles, such as Reform barring councils from flying the Ukraine flag as a show of solidarity, and trying to cut back on climate and net zero-related work.

Davey said: "When you look at what councils do on climate change, the vast bulk of the work is insulating people’s homes. So is Nigel Farage essentially going to say to less well-off people: ‘We’re not insulating your home, you can pay higher energy bills, and that we’re pleased about that because that can make climate change worse.’ Is that the Reform position?"

It's clear that this work will be more substantial than the trawling of the social media accounts of individual Reform councillors for extremist or embarrassing posts. (If you enjoy that sort of thing, Reform Party UK Exposed on Bluesky is a good follow.)

The unit is being spearheaded, says the Guardian, by Amanda Hopgood, the leader of the opposition group in the Reform-run County Durham; Antony Hook, who performs the same role in Kent; and Mike Ross, the leader of Hull city council, who came second to Reform in the Hull and East Yorkshire.mayoral contest. You'd imagine they have quite a bit on their plates already, though.

Meanwhile, reports Conservative Post, a new website has been launched by Luigi Murton. The Post doesn't mention it, but he is a former Conservative HQ staffer who now works for Reform UK.

The report says Liberals Exposed will expose Liberal Democrat tactics and pledges

support ... for anti-Lib Dem candidates across the UK, offering digital megaphones, campaign muscle, and boots on the ground for those who want to take the fight to the doorsteps of Liberal control.

So far the website has three articles. One explains why we are so keen on getting those 'Lib Dems Winning Here' posters up: a second looks at inconsistent Lib Dem attitudes towards congestion charging.

And the third?

Bizarrely, this looks at the current Romanian presidential election and cheers on George Simion:

Deemed by some as 'Romania's Trump' due to his strong support for the US President and his Conservative views, Simion is offering a fresh direction and perspective for voters. 

How that will be any help in combating the Liberal Democrats in local government is far from clear. But it is a reminder that hanging Nigel Farage's admiration for Donald Trump around the neck of Reform UK is part of the work of defeating it.

Arthur Brown: Give Him a Flower

Before Arthur Brown released Fire, he released a single called Devil's Grip on Me. And this was on the B-side.

Give Him a Flower is a mixture of groovy Hammond organ, Kevin Ayres vocals and an early David Bowie novelty record.

An interview with Psychedelic Baby! reveals that Brown fits my ideal profile of a Sixties musician: he had a father who played jazz and he sang as a boy.

It also reveals that he was one of the first graduates on the scene - before then the expectation was that you would put away childish things like "pop music" when you went to university.

There's more about Brown's career in a Classic Rock interview from earlier this year.

When I saw Arthur Brown at the Harborough Theatre ten years ago, his show was all about looking back at his life and career:

Finding himself treated as a guru by some because of the themes of his songs, he felt a fraud and has dedicated his life since to seeking enlightenment.

And tonight the way brought him to Market Harborough.

But, wonderfully, despite occasionally setting himself alight with the flaming headdress he wears when he sings Fire, Arthur Brown is still with us and still touring as The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the age of 82. 

Catch him in York, Milton Keynes or Bromsgrove next month. He was one of the pioneers of combining rock with elements of theatre, circus and other arts, and we should cherish him.

I love Harborough in the springtime

I think it was the daily walks under Covid Lockdown that did it, but in recent years I've come over all Fotherington-Tomas about flowers and blossom.

So here are some recent photos from Market Harborough.

More good news from Shropshire: Plan to pollute the Onny dropped

Severn Trent Water has dropped plans to pipe treated sewage from Bishop's Castle to the River Onny.

The BBC News Shropshire pages report:

Severn Trent Water had proposed building a four-mile pipe to take treated sewage from its plant in Bishop's Castle and discharge it into the River Onny, which sparked a local campaign against the move.

The water company said on Friday that the plan would not proceed, as early modelling had shown it was not possible to guarantee that there would be no impact on the Onny.

This scheme was drawn up because this sewage is currently discharged in a way that eventually takes it to the River Clun, is protected by law as it is a conservation area. 

The Onny does not have the same status, yet it is home to otters, kingfishers and dippers. It also contains a strong population of brown trout and grayling, and is an important site for Atlantic salmon.

Geoff Hardy from Fish Legal said when the pipeline was proposed:

"Rerouting sewage releases from one river to another that is miles away but has less legal protections cannot be the way to solve pollution and planning problems in this country. This is illustrative of the whole mess surrounding water industry activity and regulation to protect our rivers.

'"On the face of it, this is a cynical 'gaming’ exercise by a shadowy cabal of regulators and the local council to get around current restrictions on adding more pollution to the River Clun. We want to know why other options were not prioritised and why the Environment Agency appear to have agreed to this given that their own latest fishery report recommended using the Onny as an Index river - a critical means by which fish populations are monitored."

The pipeline certainly sounded like an expensive way of getting round the letter of the law while evading its spirit.

The photo above shows the River Onny at Craven Arms. The only thing I will add is that when my mother died Severn Trent was the easiest and kindest utility to deal with.

Nick Tyrone comes out for Reform UK

"That I’m flirting with voting Reform might surprise you," writes Nick Tyrone at the start of his latest piece for the Spectator.

On the contrary, I don't think it will surprise anyone who has followed his recent career.

Gerrard Winstanley would love this: The councillor for Weybridge & St. George’s has joined the Lib Dems

One of the key sites of political radicalism during the English Civil War is now represented by a Liberal Democrat.

As Mark Pack reports:

Cllr Pippa Graeme, who has served as the councillor for Weybridge & St. George’s ward at Elmbridge Borough Council since May 2023, has announced her decision to leave the Weybridge & St. George’s Independents and join the Liberal Democrats.

After much reflection, Pippa expressed her belief that the values and approach of the Liberal Democrats align closely with her own, reinforcing her commitment to work collaboratively and effectively for the benefit of local residents.

Her ward includes St George's Hill, which is now an exclusive gated community. But in 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow Diggers or True Levellers invaded the land there to plant vegetables, intending to pull down all enclosures and encourage the locals to come and work with them. 

Gerrard Winstanley writes exclusively for Liberal England:

Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?

Market Harborough cattle market and retail market in 1992

This video makes it look a long time ago - it was a long time ago - but one of the major decisions Harborough District Council took while I was a member was the redevelopment of the cattle market site in Market Harborough.

It was a controversial decision and the farmers assured us the market was profitable. But when we offered them the chance to buy it, they went quiet. By all accounts, the new market site near Foxton did very well - having it in the town was not the visitor attraction that some claimed.

The idea of allowing a supermarket to built on the site was to discourage the building of out-of-town stores and keep trade in the centre of the town. That policy worked for over 30 years and is only now in danger of unravelling, with the building of a new Aldi store on Rockingham Road.

And we got a better retail market hall out of the scheme: you can see how unappealing the old one had become.

So enjoy this slice of Market Harborough history. I had forgotten the entrance buildings on Springfield and the headquarters building of the Leicester and Northamptonshire branches of the National Farmers' Union.

The narrator is Frank Berry, who was the chief executive of Harborough District Council in those days.

h/t Solar Pilchard on Bluesky. The video dates from 1992, not 1999.

The Joy of Six 1357

Gary Younge says the heroism of soldiers from India, Africa and the Caribbean is often airbrushed out of the history of the second world war: "About 2.5 million personnel from the Indian subcontinent, more than 1 million African-Americans, 1 million people from Africa and tens of thousands of people from the Caribbean fought for the allies during the second world war. Among them were people of almost every religion."

Tim Leunig warns that curtailing international student migration will make Britain poorer:  "In recent work with my Public First colleagues we discovered that there are over 100 constituencies where the local university is one of the top three exporters. No other sector is in the top three in more than 100 constituencies."

"As the western world closed its doors to Russia after the 2022 invasion ... Moscow somehow managed to retain control over key chess institutions, shielding Russia from sporting sanctions and allowing its players to continue competing internationally. It even hosted lucrative tournaments in the occupied Ukrainian territories of Crimea and Donbas." Daria Meshcheriakova investigates the links between world chess and Russia's war machine.

"There are so many dog whistles in those paragraphs that an audio version would sound like a rowdy day at Crufts." Mic Wright takes aim at my old classmate Allison Pearson.

Timofei Gerber reads John Stuart Mill's unfinished Chapters on Socialism.

"The ’60s left Ricky Nelson behind. He tried to branch out into other styles, he tried to shake off the Teen Idol thing. But in the era of auteurist singer-songwriters, or bands like The Beach Boys … Nelson just couldn’t compete. People wanted him for only one thing. His 'persona' was set in stone by the time he was 17 years old. He couldn’t 'grow up'. Nobody would let him." Sheila O'Malley on the fate of a teen idol,

Canals in crisis? A stretch of the Erewash Canal without water

Is the shortage of funds for canal maintenance starting to show? As the commentary on this video says, there have already been a number of serious breaches or failures of equipment reported this year.

Trekking Exploration - why not subscribe to this YouTube channel? - follows up reports of a stretch of the Erewash Canal without water, and finds they are right. Both the upper and lower gates at one lock are letting water through, so the pound above has run dry.

The Erewash stretches from Great Northern Basin at Langley Mill to the Trent at Long Eaton. It was built to connect local coal mines with the inland waterways system. 

Breaking...

Bargain Hunt expert charged with terror offences

Well that woke the judges up! Thanks to BBC News, we have our Headline of the Day.

The West of England has a Lib Dem deputy mayor

Kevin Guy, the Liberal Democrat leader of Bath and North East Somerset Council, will serve as deputy mayor of the West of England for the next year.

The appointment was made by the Labour mayor Helen Godwin, who was elected last week. The West of England is the vainglorious name for the area covered by three local authorities - Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset - and the deputy mayor post will rotate between their leaders.

Helen Goodwin told Somerset Live:

"I meant what I said during the election campaign. To get the best for all of us in the West Country, politicians must put politics to one side. That’s how we’ll lay the Bristol to Portishead Line, build new affordable homes, and help create the jobs of the future."

I'm surprised and pleased to see a Labour politician with such a sensible attitude. One reason I distrust the idea of elected mayors, particularly for counties rather than cities, is its Blairite enthusiasm for "someone who will knock people's heads together and get things done".

To me, the best traditions of local government are collegiate and are about reconciling different interests rather than macho management.

Quicksilver and Quince: Two cats who shared a bank account

This clip from 1973 is lovely. Two cats who share a bank account and use it to make donations to good causes.

If you wanted a picture of Britain in the Seventies, you couldn't do better than watch old editions of Nationwide. Yes, there were strikes, but there was much more besides - the rise of consumerism and environmentalism, and glorious pieces of eccentricity like this.

Thanks to Alix from the Shropshire Witches Podcast for posting this on Instagram.

Joni Mitchell: The Last Time I Saw Richard

This is the best song about disillusionment that I know:

And he told me all romantics meet the same fate some day
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe

And some trivia: Carole King was recording Tapestry at the same time as Joni Mitchell was recording Blue, from which this track comes. Both preferred the piano in one of the studios to the other, so it appears on both LPs.

The Joy of Six 1356

"From where I’m sitting, it seems inevitable that Farage will suffer the same fate as Johnson. They are beneficiaries of false advertising, who eventually become its victim. That is because they eventually have to deliver on their populist promises. And while they’re willing to turn on their chameleon charm prior to entering office - happy to play the role of anti-establishment antagonist - their natural instincts take over in the corridors of power." Sam Bright goes into the prediction business.

Tim Farron says UK immigration policy fails young people.

Luke Cawley Harrison, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the London Borough of Haringey, argues that Keir Starmer must stand up to Donald Trump: "The reality is his sycophancy has achieved little: Trump continues to publicly praise Putin, undermine Ukraine, and now suggests 'peace' should come from Ukraine surrendering the land Russia currently occupies from its illegal war. Meanwhile, the UK faces the same senseless tariffs as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the penguins in the uninhabited Heard & McDonald Islands."

"Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as 'modern mental health care'. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care." Jordyn Jensen on the return of psychiatric imprisonment to the US.

Jay Hulme visits Coventry Cathedral and takes some wonderful photographs.

"The Great Gatsby is a slippery text. It means different things to different people. To some it is a monolith of American literature - a key contender in the Great American Novel sweepstakes - whereas, to others, it has become a cartoonish portrait of a bygone era. Some read it as an excoriation of materialism, others as a vindication of excess. For some it is sibylline, for others, passé." Nick Hilton revisits a classic.

I Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp Has Been Cancelled

I heard this mentioned on a podcast about The Sound of Music and have now come across it online. It's by Melinda Taub and you'll find it at McSweeney’s.

It's the kind of piece you want to reproduce in full, but I have limited myself to a couple of short quotations:

I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says.

And:

While I was a bit startled to be thrown aside for someone who flunked out of nun school, I assure you that I will be fine, and my main pursuits in life shall continue to be martinis, bon mots, and looking fabulous. You’ll also be glad to know I have retained custody of the Captain’s hard-drinking gay friend, Max. Anyone who gets tired of sing-a-longs should feel free to look us up.

Illustration by courtesy of Monty Python.

The Family Farm Tax and VAT on school fees are here to stay

The National Farmers' Union has decided to wind down its campaign against the imposition of inheritance tax (IHT) on farmland, reports Bio-Waste Spreader in the current Private Eye.

The union has concluded that its protests simply haven't worked, as the government has shown no sign of making any concession to its demands. More than that, the union has concluded that these protests have become counterproductive:

Demonstrations, particularly in Westminster involving hundreds of tractors, generated unfavourable headlines involving multimillionaire celebrities such as Jeremy Clarkson, who, as he stated in an article for The Times, bought his 1000-acre farm in Oxfordshire to avoid IHT.

Can we expect the Lib Dems to quietly forget their campaign against the Family Farm Tax too?

Meanwhile, opposition to VAT on private school fees has dwindled, as none of the dire consequences predicted (by the Lib Dems among others) for the move have come to pass.

I'm relaxed about our becoming the party of Middle England - it's where I've lived all my life - but maybe we're going to have to get better at choosing which battles to fight on its behalf.

My MP Neil O'Brien is a poster boy for the decline of the Tory mind

My Conservative MP Neil O'Brien's X account is a bin fire. You would never know from it that in a general election less than a year ago his party lost half their vote and two-thirds of their MPs. And his only tweets on the local election have been about an 18-year-old Labour candidate in Burnley.

And there's lots about race, much of it designed to encourage the idea that it's white people who are discriminated against. No wonder he gets lots of like and retweets and follows from blue-tick accounts with even more right-wing views.

Are these even from real people? I smell Russian bot farms. And if they are real people, you can bet they live in the US and not Oadby or Market Harborough.

He wasn't always like this. Back in 2018, I praised a speech he gave to a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference and quoted a generous chunk from a Guardian report of it:

Neil O’Brien, who became MP for Harborough last year, noted that in the 2017 election there was a massive deficit between the Tories and Labour in terms of younger voters, and those from minority ethnic backgrounds. 

At the 2015 election, O’Brien said, the Tories lagged two percentage points behind Labour for voters in their 20s, and by four percentage points for those aged 18-24. Just two years later these deficits had shot up to 26 and 40 points behind. 

The party was also doing increasingly less well among other groups whose numbers were rising, such as those with degrees, people who were unmarried, and those who rented their homes or live in cities, said O’Brien, a former director of the Policy Exchange thinktank. 

"All these different social bases of Conservatism are being eroded," he said. “Either we have to do much better amongst these groups of people, or we’re going to go out of business as a political party.” 

Such structural changes would have an impact, he added: "It’s a bit like a beam that is rotting away, and eventually it snaps."

He was right. But now Neil O'Brien has become the sort of person he used to warn the Conservative Party against.

10,000 women may have been deported from Britain to Ireland in forced adoption scandal

Women and babies were deported from Britain and incarcerated in Irish state institutions because the mothers were unmarried, reports ITV News after a year-long investigation.

Its report on the scandal covers one such case and then adds:

From 1930 to the late 1970s the numbers making a similar journey were so high, officials in London called them PFIs – ‘pregnant from Ireland’.

The British authorities saw them as a burden on the taxpayer and put pressure on the Irish state to address the situation, while the Catholic Church in Ireland feared the children would grow up in non-Catholic families.

The result was a repatriation scheme – it was supposed to be voluntary – but women have told ITV News they were effectively deported from Britain and their journeys were organised and paid for by the state and the Church.

By analysing official records of the organisations behind forced repatriations, and speaking to experts in this field, ITV News has discovered that as many as 10,000 women and babies may have been deported from Britain to Ireland between 1931 and 1977

The children, now adults, often only found out they were British citizens decades later.

The involvement of the Catholic church does not surprise me: there's nothing like a hierarchical organisation for fostering human wickedness. And churches, like business corporations, tend to behave as badly as they are allowed.

There may even be something about an organisation set up to do good for others that makes it more likely to foster bad behaviour.

I remember a former chief executive at work telling me he had never met such Machiavellian people as when he worked for a health research charity. The reasoning, presumably, is that such a desirable end justifies any means.

No, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't copy A Canterbury Tale

This sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made came out in 1968, which seem strangely familiar to anyone who knows Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which was released 24 years earlier.

Was Kubrick influenced by the earlier film? Almost certainly not.

In a footnote to his article Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, Paul Banks writes:

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.

That seems pretty conclusive.

It's a lesson that just as technological innovations can take place simultaneously in countries that have no contact, so great directors can have similar brilliant ideas without influencing one another.

Why Snailbeach and the Stiperstones saw the best Lib Dem result last Thursday

The candidate who won the highest percentage vote in any contest last Thursday was the Liberal Democrat Heather Kidd in Shropshire Council's Chirbury & Worthen ward. She received 71.1 per cent of the votes cast, despite having Conservative, Labour, Green and Reform opponents.

Chirbury & Worthen is a large rural ward which takes in the western flank of - you know what's coming - the Stiperstones, including the former lead-mining village of Snailbeach.

But stay with me. This post isn't just an excuse for quoting some descriptive writing about Shropshire, because the second passage includes a bit of history that may be one reason that Liberals do so well in this corner of the county.

Nearer the Welsh border Chirbury & Worthen is lush and pastoral, but that's not so true of the area close to the Stiperstones.

Even today, Snailbeach has something of the feel of the Wild West - a shanty town thrown up to accommodate a mining boom. When I first knew it in the 1980s, before its startling white slagheaps had been landscaped, that feeling was much stronger.

Anyway, here is Malcolm Saville writing in the Lone Pine story Not Scarlet But Gold in 1962:

Between the lower, western slopes of the Stiperstones and two mountains called Condon and Stapley is a stretch of desolate country called by some "The Land of Dereliction".

It is well named, for from the heather of this lonely moorland, treacherous with bogs, the gaunt arms of ruined mine shafts rise through the mist above slag heaps and pools of stagnant water. 

The Romans mined all this land for lead long, long before man came back in the last century, to this haunted corner of Shropshire. These miners tore up the earth, built engine houses, sank shafts and buried the golden gorse under piles of rubbish which may still be seen today.

And in 1944, in his Quietest Under the Sun, John Wood wrote of "a tract scarred with the waste of disused lead and barytes mines". He added:

Sad to say, this became in the between-wars period one of the most utterly derelict areas in Britain proportionate to its size.

That I can believe. The district seems to have been too remote to interest even the scrap merchants, and once the lead mines closed it must have been hugely overpopulated. There wasn't much work, and it's not good farming country.

And here is the part that may help explain last Thursday's result:

It is a point of interest that when these now abandoned enterprises were developed the labour power was brought from the tin mines of Cornwall, and even today the descendants of those Cornishmen make the valley a strong Nonconformist and radical enclave in an Anglican and conservative countryside. 

The Joy of Six 1355

"It needs to restore its reputation for economic credibility, which means that it cannot deny the damage done by Brexit – and support measures to mitigate that damage by moving closer to the EU.  It should be willing to be very critical of Donald Trump.  And it needs to wholeheartedly make the case against Reform and Farage not on tactical grounds - 'vote Reform, get Labour' - but because it is a very bad idea to get Reform at all." David Gauke charts a path to recovery for the Conservatives, but doubts they will take it.

Simon Fletcher fears Keir Starmer's rightward shift is laying the ground for Nigel Farage: "It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments - and indeed left of centre governments around the world - is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support."

James Hawes argues that we should not be surprised that AfD polls so well in eastern Germany. For reasons rooted in history, voters there have chosen authoritarian parties ever since they got the vote.

"As a chartered psychologist, I decided to read Spare to learn more about a topic that deeply interests me; the adverse childhood experiences of children from materially privileged homes. This topic is thoroughly addressed within the text. However, I didn’t predict that I would be left with such an aching sadness for Harry, his brother and his mother and to some extent his father; normal, flawed human beings trapped and tormented within a crumbling, cruelly dysfunctional gilded cage." Pam Jarvis reads Prince Harry's book.

Simon Matthews watches Ridley Scott's The Duellists from 1977.

"The helmet was made of iron covered with silver and gilt, consistent with early Imperial Roman cavalry helmet types found on the Continent. Over 1000 coins in the same pit provide a mid-1st century date, suggesting that the helmet was buried at the same time as the coins in the entranceway. The reason why the helmet was buried within a British shrine remains uncertain – it may have belonged to a Briton serving in the Roman army, or was possibly a diplomatic gift." The Hallaton Fieldwork Group on the discovery of an Iron Age shrine outside this Leicestershire village.

John Rogers on an East London mystery: The Walthamstow Slip

John Rogers takes us on a walk along a curious strip of land that runs through Leyton in East London but once belonged to the parish of Walthamstow. His blurb on YouTube explains:

Known as the Walthamstow Slip, nobody knows exactly why this wide piece of land came to belong to the people of Walthamstow. There are some great stories to explain this curious anachronism, including the possibility that it follows the course of an ancient trackway. 

The walk starts on Leyton Flats, Epping Forest, near the Eagle Pond where this is an old stone parish boundary marker. We then skirt around the Hollow Ponds, over Whipps Cross Road then through the streets of Leyton. The Walthamstow Slip follows Capworth Street, past the site of a Roman Road, to Church Road where the grand Leyton House once stood. 

We then follow our ancient trail over Leyton Jubilee Park, and the East London Waterworks to where the path ends (or starts) on the banks of the River Lea.

John has a Patreon to support his videos and he blogs at The Lost Byway.

A Shropshire councillor has already been suspended by Reform UK

That didn't take long. Debra Edmunds, who won the leafy Hodnet ward of Shropshire Council on Thursday, has been suspended by Reform UK.

Reform UK Exposed has a Twitter thread about her. As they say, she has a bit of a chequered political past, but I've not yet been able to discover which part of it has upset her party's HQ.

Later. I think Jim Hawkins has found the answer.

Donna Edmunds, elected to Shropshire council as a Reform councillor for Hodnet on Thursday, has already been suspended from the party! Possibly because she unwisely posted in public, before the election, that she intends to defect to another party at the first opportunity 🤦🏻🙄🤦🏻🤣🤦🏻

[image or embed]

— Jim Hawkins (@jimallthetime.bsky.social) 4 May 2025 at 17:34

Anyway, here's the Twitter thread.

Reform UK have a bit of an issue on their hands. They just got Donna Edmunds as a councillor.

Here's a thread we did on her.@nigel_farage himself said about Donna Edmunds when she and he were UKIP: “Whilst we are a libertarian party this kind of ultra-libertarianism really… https://t.co/vMfSUaqfO2

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) May 4, 2025

The Shadows: Apache

Has there every been anything cooler, more bad ass, in British pop than Jet Harris smoking that cigarette?

Maybe Hank Marvin is too good natured to be cool or bad ass, but he manages to look as though he's just been got out of bed and is playing in his dressing gown.

And this is from 1960.

As well as recording hugely popular instrumentals like this  and Wonderful Land as a group, the Shadows also backed Cliff Richard - a much-traduced artist. Time to tell the story of how Marvin became the first guitarist in Britain to own a Stratocaster:

By 1959, Cliff, The English answer to Elvis, was a star. Hank was playing a Japanese-made Antoria guitar that he says had "a horribly bent neck," so Cliff decided to buy Hank a new and better instrument.

Unfortunately, an English musician could not easily buy an American guitar at this time because the British Board of Trade controlled imports from America, and no American guitars were available in the British shops. Cliff, however, was able to have a guitar privately imported, a consequence, no doubt, of having a top-selling single.

After spending the princely sum of one hundred and forty guineas, a 1959 Fiesta Red Stratocaster with gold fittings and maple neck duly arrived from the States in a plush red velvet lined case. That may sound cheap, but it is the equivalent of over three thousand pounds sterling today. This was reputedly the first Fender Stratocaster guitar in the United Kingdom, and with its clean Fender tones and fitted tremolo arm, it became the basis of the quintessential Hank Marvin sound.

And that guitar now lives with Marvin's schoolfriend and bandmate Bruce Welch in Australia.

One final point: Jet Harris died of a smoking-related disease, so don't try this at home kids.

The Lib Dems didn't just win Shropshire: They won Shrewsbury too

On Thursday the Liberal Democrats won a majority of seats on Shrewsbury Town Council for the first time. The council had been controlled by Labour since 2013.

Shropshire Live quotes Alex Wagner, who won Quarry and Coton Hill ward for the Lib Dems:

"This is a truly incredible result, more than we could have hoped for. We know that we now have a huge amount of work to do and a strong mandate to deliver change for residents.

"We’re going to prioritise protecting local services. Whether that’s investing in keeping Shrewsbury tidy, making our parks the best in Britain, or stepping up to fill the space left by the County Council as it goes through financial turbulence - we’re on your side.

"Thank you to everyone who supported us, and to everyone who turned out to vote in general. This is a mandate for change and ambition in how we deliver services.

"We fully intend to repay the trust people have put in us with hard work all year round."

And the report also gives the voting figures for the town council election:

Liberal Democrats - 10 seats, 8,158 votes, 37.1%

Labour - 4 seats, 4,440 votes, 20.2%

Reform - 1 seat, 4,280 votes, 19.4%

Green - 2 seats, 2,995 votes, 13.6%

Conservative - 0 seats, 1,689 votes, 7.7%

With the Lib Dems also taking control of Shropshire Council after making 29 gains, it was a truly remarkable day for us in the county.

Drunk, Pantless Man Told Police His Name Was "Charles Dickens"

Our Headline of the Day Award crosses the Atlantic and goes to The Smoking Gun.

The judges (who have been reading Wikipedia) explain:

The Smoking Gun is a website that posts legal documents, arrest records, and police mugshots on a daily basis. The intent is to bring to the public light information that is somewhat obscure or unreported by more mainstream media sources.

GUEST POST Dad’s Army and the decline of the Conservatives

Anselm Anon looks at the social changes behind the collapse of Conservative support in local government, with assistance from Walmington-on-Sea and its Home Guard platoon.

A recent theme on Liberal England has been to drawn attention to changes in the culture of local Conservative parties. This has happened over several decades, but the shift now seems definitive.

The norm for Tory councillors and activists is no longer local worthies (or busybodies), for whom politics is an extension of their citizenship. 

Instead they are angry culture warriors, actually contemptuous of "mending the church roof" (as Kemi Badenoch would put it). 

I’ve been involved in politics in my area since the 1990s, and have witnessed the same phenomenon: the balance of local Conservatives seems to have shifted decisively away from conservative-minded active citizens and towards online-radicalised crackpots. 

Part of the electoral problem for the Tories is that this is pretty similar to Reform, but the latter are much more effective at stoking online resentments. Local election results are still coming in as I write, but they seem to bear this out. 

The classic 1970s sitcom Dad’s Army, set in the Second World War, might help our analysis here. As late as the 1990s, local Conservative branches were dominated by the likes of Captain Mainwaring: the self-important bank manager who appoints himself commander of the Home Guard in his small town of Walmington-on-Sea. 

Both the script and Arthur Lowe’s marvellous performance show that Mainwaring is not a buffoon: he has some intelligence and integrity, although his manifest limitations mean that he is often the butt of the jokes. In the 1950s he would probably have become Conservative mayor, having had 'a good war'.

Nowadays, Captain Mainwaring is nowhere to be seen in local Conservative parties. Instead, they are dominated by of some of the other characters.

There is Private Frazer, declaring "We’re doomed, all doomed!" without offering any practical suggestions. There is Private Walker, the spiv, contemptuous of rules that apply to others, but probably canny at running a

Embed from Getty Images

committee room. And doing the bulk of the leaflet delivery is Private Pike, the simplistic mother's boy, now radicalised by spending too much time online with right-wing influencers.

One of the reasons for this shift is economic change. The class basis of local Conservative parties has been hollowed out by developments in capitalism, which now has much less need for people in the middle. 

Walmington-on-Sea probably no longer has its own bank branch. If it does, then its staff are low paid and unable to exercise their own judgement: they will have to follow the bank’s scripts and algorithms, and won’t have the opportunity to decide which local business gets a loan. 

Most locally owned businesses will in any case have been replaced by national chains, or by online retail and services. And doctors, headteachers and local government officials, will be relatively less well off, and have much less agency, than their predecessors. They may well be commuting to Walmington-on-Sea because they can’t afford to buy a home there.

Other factors are also present, but my argument is that capital no longer has need for many Captain Mainwarings; it no longer plugs them into local economies, and no longer gives them some agency and status in their locality. 

The ever-greater concentration of capital, and the growth of rentierism in land and finance, combined with technological change, means that the symbiotic relationship between capital and local agents has been broken. 

Reform is a much better fit than the Conservatives for this sort of capital: it's an online brand which requires fans rather than officials and doesn’t concern itself with providing any actual product or service. That has its own limitations, as will become increasingly clear as Reform has to run councils. But in the mean time, Captain Mainwaring is dead.

 Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.