A portrait of the last days of independent Penge

A film made by the Penge Rotary Club in 1964. It provides a useful corrective to the view, widespread on Bluesky, that we all lived in shoeboxes and ate gravel until about 20 years ago, while showing us why the Sixties had to happen.

The former canal mentioned is the Croydon Canal; note too the children playing cricket without being organised by adults and an unexpected appearance by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

As to the palace itself, my father remember being woken as a small boy in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1936 to see the glow on the northern horizon that was it burning down.

Then steel yourself for an appearance by the feared Penge Formation Dancers, before the demise of Penge's council is mourned.

As ever in such films, it is the street scenes that are the most interesting.

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

Zack Polanski in a Yes to AV campaign video

I remember very little of the Alternative Vote referendum campaign except that it turned out to be a referendum on Nick Clegg instead. The only party that much liked AV was the Labour Party, and it campaigned against it.

So thanks to Josiah Mortimer for posting this video from the Yes side, which turns out to feature a young Zack Polanski in the days before he joined the Liberal Democrats. Presumably he turned up here because he was still working as an actor.

I don't imagine this video converted many people. Though it sets out to show that AV is simple, it risks making it seem rather complicated. Worse than that, I just don't care whether Zack and his friends go for a coffee, go to the pub or fall down an unmarked mine shaft. It's dull.

Perhaps it looks forward to the Bluesky assumption that anyone who does not share our politics must be stupid. But at least it sets out to educate them, rather than blocking them and then boasting that it has done so to its friends.

Another mercy is that it doesn't feature Stephen Fry, which it might well have done. Dan Snow, as fans of Liberal trivia will know, is Lloyd George's great great grandson.

Later. I'm told this video wasn't issued by the official Yes campaign but by an independent group of activists. They made it because they thought the official campaign material was so poor.

For an informed view of the Yes campaign, see this post by James Graham.

Saying Reform UK are "just the same old Conservatives" may not be the smart line some think

Reform reveal their new branding…. It’s clear: Nigel Farage’s Reform is just the same old Conservatives that ruined the country in the first place.

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— Liberal Democrats (@libdems.org.uk) 16 January 2026 at 14:19

BlueSky's hive mind has decided that branding Reform UK as "Conservatives 2.0" or something similar is a winning strategy, but I'm not so sure.

Perhaps because people who comment on such things online tend to be middle class and tend to be in the South of England - there's no real evidence for it, but it's scientific fact - the idea that Reform's voters are all drawn from the disaffected working class and backed Labour until recently has gained near-universal currency. These are people, the hive mind believes, who live up North somewhere among closed shipyards and whippets.

But as I pointed out in an article for Liberator last year, Reform swept the Tory shires in last May's local elections, and you don't do that on working-class Labour votes.

Telling these ex-Tory, newly converted Reform voters that their new party is "just like the Tories" is more likely to reassure them than alarm them. If we want them to think again, it would be better to emphasise how extreme Reform is and paint it as unpatriotic because of its dislike of British institutions like the NHS and the BBC, and its enthusiasm for Trump and Putin.

I think this is the "hopeful nostalgia" Josh Barbarinde was talking about the other day.

You could argue that Reform splitting the Tory vote will help more left-wing parties, but encouraging people to vote for far-right parties because you think it will help you in the short terms is a fool's game.

What I do like in the message from Lib Dem High Command above is "webuyanytory.com".

There is a tendency among politicos on Bluesky to announce that it doesn't matter how may Tory politicians join Reform or how disreputable they are, because most voters aren't even aware of it.

This view, too, is touched with snobbery. It may take the public a while to notice such things, but they do notice them, and once they've done so, it's hard to get them to unnotice them. It's also open to other parties to seek to speed this process, of course.

So let's stop calling Reform "Conservatives 2.0" and continue pointing out their extreme views and that they've recruited the very worst Tories.

Chris Dillow explains our incompetent political culture

When the centenary of Margaret Thatcher's birth was marked last month, the consensus view on Bluesky was that she had made everything in Britain worse. Not only that: it was all down to her personal wickedness.

Whatever happened to the left having a knowledge of the tides of history that is denied to the rest of us?

One writer who offers a more sophisticated analysis is Rutland's own Chris Dillow. In his latest post he looks at the travails of the government and the BBC asks why so much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

Here's the crux of his argument:

Good politics recognises that public opinion is not a fixed entity but is malleable, not necessarily by rational debate alone. Labour likes to present itself as businesslike. But decent businesses advertise their products, respect their customers, and don’t shout about the merits of their rivals. ...

Good politics also requires something else - a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out. Which is what we don’t have. Instead, we have a system which often selects for rather than against charlatans and incompetents. And, worse still, neither politicians nor the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it.

You can read the whole article on Chris's Substack. 

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks"

There was a Bluesky meme the other day asking you to post a song from the year you turned 12. I chose this one – Ian Hunter sings David Bowie.

Early on in it comes the lyric:

"And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks and Sparks."

When I was young, Marks and Sparks was both an affectionate nickname for Marks & Spencer and the abbreviation that everyone used. Today, everyone follows the company's own branding and calls them M&S.

I wondered when the change took place. The earliest use of Marks and Sparks I could find in the British Newspaper Archive is more recent than I expected: it dates from 1957.

Marks & Spencer dropped St Michael from its clothing labels in favour of M&S in 2000, and my feeling is that M&S was being pushed for some time before that.

I do remember using "Marks and Sparks" when I worked at Golden Wonder, which dates it to 1988 at the latest, and it had a retro feel to me even then.

What was the children's book involving Bourton-on-the-Water?

That news story about Bourton-on-the-Water, which provided a recent Headline of the Day, was everywhere. Not least, it provided liberal Bluesky with a target for the day's Two Minutes Hate.

But Bourton-on-the-Water put me in mind of a book I read at primary school. And a big of googling showed that I'm not the only one with that memory. Over to Mumsnet:

I read this book at primary school, when it was at the back of a dusty "free reading" cupboard and would love to find it again.

The story is, a group of children are out on holiday by themselves and someone offers to drop them off at an unknown destination so they can play at being explorers. They make their own names up for the towns they pass through and draw up maps etc. After a while they decide to pretend the "natives" are hostile and travel at night and/or hide in trees whenever someone comes past. One of the towns they went through they named "Million Bridges" At the end of the book we discover they've been walking through the Cotswolds (so I assume it was really Bourton on the Water or somewhere). ...

Anyone have the least idea what I'm talking about?

I remember it as "Hundred Bridges" or "Thousand Bridges", and am sure it did turn out to be Bourton-on-the-Water at the end of the story, but this is clearly the same book.

What I now wonder, given that our class library was also housed in a cupboard, is whether the writer was a fellow pupil at the old Boxmoor Primary School in St John's Road.

But what was the book called and who wrote it?

A boiler explosion at Stonton Wyville in 1862 killed four men

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After covering its lost gardens and the drought of 1947, we're going back to Stonton Wyville.

Reader's voice: At least it's not bloody Snailbeach again.

Jeremy Benson, who has visited every village church in Leicestershire and put together a Bluesky thread with photos of each one, told me Stonton Wyville was one of those villages where he struggled a bit to find something interesting to say.

But I think he found something very interesting, because he put me on to another forgotten disaster. Over to the Leicester Advertiser for Saturday 18 January 1862:

Dreadful Boiler Explosion. - Four men killed at Stonton Wyville

One of the most dreadful boiler explosions occurred on Monday last, the 13^th inst., at Stonton Wyville, that has ever been reported in this district. Stonton Wyville is a small agricultural village in the county of Leicester, about six miles from Market Harborough. 

Mr. Dunmore, a farmer, has a stackyard upon his farm, about half a mile from the village, and on Monday hired a small thrashing engine, which is owned by a man named Butcher, who resides at Debdale Wharf, Gumley. This engine was about three or four horsepower, but from the remains of it, it did not appear in working order, and this was confirmed by the evidence we could glean. 

It appears the pump as it is called that feeds the boiler with cold water, was in a bad state of repair, and had been repaired on several occasions. About twelve o’clock in the day they were obliged to stop working to again repair this pipe, and were wrapping it with string and red lead. nearly the whole of the men, 13 in number, were gathered round the engine while the repairs were going on and it was while they were thus engaged that the explosion took place.

The report goes on to give details of whose body parts were blown off and where they landed, which I shall spare you. But I can say that Thomas Lee, William Woodman and Samuel Ashby were killed at once, and George Woolman died a few hours later. The inquest was held at the Fox and Hounds Inn at Stonton Wyville - there is still a Fox and Hounds Farm there, so this was probably that building.

One point of interest about this inquest is that it had called for expert evidence about the condition of the boiler:

Mr. Gimson, engineer, of Leicester, was present, and made a thorough examination of the wreck of the engine, and will give his evidence at the adjourned inquest, so it would not be fair to give his opinion stated privately, at the present time.

Gimson and Co. was founded in 1840 by Benjamin and Josiah Gimson on Welford Road in Leicester. The firm, says Wikipedia, was listed as "Engineers, Ironfounders, Boiler Makers & General Machinists". it later moved to the still-standing Vulcan Works in Leicester.

So it looks as though the expert witness was Benjamin or Josiah Gimson, or perhaps another member of their family. This is the Gimson family that produced Sydney Gimson, who helped turn Desford Approved School, into a force in Leicestershire junior chess, and Boris Johnson's serial biographer Andrew Gimson.

The Leicester Advertiser report said the inquest was due to be reconvened on 29th January 1862. I'll see if I can discover what happened then.

Your chance to own J.W. Logan MP's cottage home for the children of men injured on his works

I posted this photo to Bluesky this morning on the #AdoorableThursday hashtag. The door is to be found at Deene Cottage in East Langton.

Over to the Victoria County History entry for the village:

In 1898 Logan erected a cottage home for the children of men permanently injured on public works, with preference for the employees of Logan & Hemingway. The cottage home is now a private house called Dean Cottage.

In fact it's called Deene Cottage. An auction notice in the Midland Mail for 9 November 1917 suggests that is when it ceased being a children's home, as all the fixtures and furniture are being sold off.

If you want to know more, have a look at the Strutt & Parker website, because Deene Cottage is currently up for sale and there are lots of photographs of it there.

Incidentally, Dene Cottage was not the inspiration for Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans. I had already dreamt that up when I discovered Mr Logan's establishment.

Later. It's sold.

Lord of the Flies: Had William Golding read Richard Jefferies?

Accounts of the writing of William Golding's Lord of the Flies tend to emphasise the influence of R.M Ballantyne's The Coral Island on the book. Golding both borrowed Ballantyne's plot and subverted his view of the world.

But I have lately come to wonder if Golding had read another Victorian novel: Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy. Because, in it, Bevis and his friend Mark maroon themselves on an island and live like explorers. Gradually, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they become convinced they are sharing the island with a beast.

Bevis and Mark were better organised than Golding's boys:

Poles were nailed across the open sides from upright to upright, not more than six inches asunder right up to the beam on two sides. This allowed plenty of space to shoot through, but nothing of any size could spring in. On the third, the poles were nailed across up to three feet high, and the rest prepared and left ready to be lashed in position with cords the last thing at night.

When these were put up there would be a complete cage from within which they could fire or shoot arrows, and be safe from the spring of the beast. Lastly, they went up on the cliff to see what could be done there. The sand was very hard, so that to drive in stakes the whole length of the cliff edge would have taken a day, if not two days.

They decided to put up some just above the hut so as to prevent the creature leaping on to the roof, and perhaps tearing a way through it. Bevis held the matchlock this time and watched while Mark hewed out the stakes, taking the labour and the watching in turn. With much trouble, these were driven home and sharpened nails put at the top, so that the beast approaching from behind would have to leap over these before descending the perpendicular cliff on to the hut. The fortification was now complete, and they sat down to think if there was anything else.

That's from chapter 45 of the classic Jonathan Cape edition of Bevis, which has illustrations by E.H. Shepard. 

But it was originally chapter 11 of volume 3 - a reminder that, though the book puts a child's perceptions at its centre in a way that was unprecedented in 1882, it was published as a novel for adults and in a form to suit commercial libraries.

Anyway, there's more about the beast in the next chapter:

At the water’s edge some flags were bent, and then the tall grass, as high as their chests, was thrust aside, forming a path which had evidently been frequently trodden. There was now no longer the least doubt that the creature, whatever it was, was of large size, and as the trail was so distinct the thought occurred to them both at once that perhaps it had been used by more than one. From the raft they could see along it five or six yards, then it turned to avoid an alder. While they stood looking Pan came back, he had run right through and returned, so that there was nothing in the reed-bed at present.

Bevis stepped over the bulwark into the trail with the matchlock; Mark picked up the axe and followed. As they walked their elbows touched the grass each side, which showed that the creature was rather high than broad, lean like the whole feline tribe, long, lean, and stealthy. The reed-grass had flowered and would soon begin to stiffen and rustle dry under the winds. By the alder a bryony vine that had grown there was broken and had withered, it had been snapped long since by the creature pushing through.

The trail turned to the right, then to the left round a willow stole, and just there Pan, who trotted before Bevis, picked up a bone. He had picked it up before and dropped it; he took it again from habit, though he knew it was sapless and of no use to him. Bevis took it from his mouth, and they knew it at once as a duck’s drumstick. It was polished and smooth, as if the creature had licked it, or what was more probable carried it some distance, and then left it as useless. They had no doubt it was a drumstick of the wild duck Mark shot.

The trail went straight through sedges next, these were trampled flat; then as the sedges grew wider apart they gradually lost it in the thin, short grass. This was why they had not seen it from the land, there the path began by degrees; at the water’s edge, where the grasses were thick and high, it was seen at once. Try how they would, they could not follow the trail inland, they thought they knew how to read "sign," but found themselves at fault. On the dry, hard ground the creature’s pads left no trail that they could trace.

I was reminded of the beast on the island by a Twitter account that was tweeting Bevis line by line. It stopped suddenly, which made me worry that Bevis and Mark had been devoured by the beast. But I've now found the service is being continued on Bluesky.

So let's end with a shocking reminder from Bevis of the delinquency of Victorian schoolboys as they assemble the provisions to take to the island:

Mark took care that there should be some salt, and several bags of flour, and two of biscuits, which they got from a whole tinful in the house. He remembered some pepper too, but overlooked the mustard. They took several tins of condensed milk. From a side of bacon, up in the attic, they cut three streaky pieces, and bought some sherry at the inn; for they thought if they took one of the bottles in the house, it would be missed, and that the servants would be blamed. Some wine would be good to mix with the water; for though they meant to take a wooden bottle of ale, they knew it would not keep.

"This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you"

I posted this cutting on Bluesky yesterday. As a couple of followers replied with a line good enough for me to want to steal it to use as a headline, I am posting it here too.

A TES story from 2017:

YouGov asked 2,060 British adults whether a list of things that have disappeared from British life “should or should not be brought back once Britain leave the EU”.

In total, 27 per cent said that corporal punishment in schools “should be brought back”.

However, there was a big difference in support for the idea between Remain and Leave voters.

Forty-two per cent of Leave voters wanted to see the return of corporal punishment compared to only 14 per cent of those who voted Remain.

Corporal punishment was outlawed in state schools in 1986, but remained legal in independent schools until Parliament overwhelmingly voted for a full ban in 1998.

A TES poll in 2008 found that one fifth of teachers supported “the right to use corporal punishment in extreme cases”.

Politicians on children swimming in sewage

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Here's the latest from Tameside Radio:

A Tameside councillor married to disgraced MP Andrew Gwynne joked about youngsters swimming in human waste on the 'racist and sexist' Trigger Me Timbers WhatsApp group.

Allison Gwynne made the comments as members of the group joked about someone falling into filthy water.

She posted: "Kids in Denton have always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage'.

Allison Gwynne, as the Guardian has pointed out, is a significant local politician in her own right:

Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.

When I heard that a Labour politician had talked of children swimming in sewage, my mind went back to a Conservative councillor from West Norfolk, Brian Long:

"When I spent my summers down at Northrepps and Cromer beach as a child, you could visibly see pipes that came out of the cliff side, staining all the way down and going straight into the sea," he said.

"Nobody was monitoring anything.

"We'd come out of the sea and have a cold shower to clean off before eating our sandwiches. I don't think anyone was harmed by it." 

Brian Long's remarks were silly rather than poisonous. He was looking back to a neverland where children had grazed knees, scrumped apples and got a clip round the ear from the local bobby. And, er, went swimming in sewage.

There was nothing in them of the contempt for people you see in Allison Gwynne. 

Class snobbery is alive and well on the right, but the left is more given to intellectual snobbery. Anyone who fails to share their political opinions is stupid. If you doubt me, just spend a few minutes browsing Bluesky or Twitter.

I'm reminded of the 1997 general election and the only time I have been canvassed by Labour here in Market Harborough. I said I didn't like the sound of their policies on workfare, at which I was told by the canvasser that she had a friend who was doing a PhD in the area and I was wrong.

My conclusion is that when a Conservative politician suggests it's OK for working-class children to swim in sewage, it may be out of a peculiar sense of nostalgia. When a Labour politician makes that suggestion, it's likely to be out of contempt.

The Joy of Six 1305

Zoe Crowther asks what the Westminster social media landscape will look like in 2025.

"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.

Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.

Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."

"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.

Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."

Proof that Bluesky is primmer than the Victorians

I'm close to completing that Book Challenge meme:

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

You can see my choices so far on Twitter and Bluesky.

One of them is Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. Not only is it beautifully written, it also reinforced a view I had come to not long before I encountered it: namely, that the Victorians were far less Victorian that we imagine. 

The caricatured view we have formed of them serves a way of congratulating ourselves for not being like that. Notably, while the Victorians were horribly repressed when it came to sex, we are wonderfully liberated.

In reality the idea of covering table legs for the sake of decency, for instance, was a joke that 19th-century Britons told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

So I was amused that the cover of Inventing the Victorians, which features a chaste Victorian nude, was flagged on Bluesky as 'Adult Content'. Users of the platform have to click on this warning to view the naughty image.

I've no quarrel with Bluesky doing this: you can override the setting if you wish and many people have signed up with them because they want a more civilised place to hang out than Twitter is now.

But this flag does tend to support the thesis of the book it is worried about.

Don't treat social problems as problems within individual children

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There was a good letter from Dr Lucy Johnstone in the Guardian earlier this week about the supposed mental health crisis among schoolchildren.

She wrote:

The "staggering" rise in anxiety among children (NHS referrals for anxiety in children more than double pre-Covid levels, 27 August) deserves a more sophisticated response than installing counsellors in every school, useful though that may be in some cases, and I say this as a mental health professional - a consultant clinical psychologist.

Well-meaning awareness campaigns that encourage us to translate every feeling into a "mental health issue" convey the message that children have an individual deficit, while obscuring the reasons for their distress. And yet research consistently shows that their feelings are understandable in context.

Your article mentions pressures from target-driven education, online bullying, poverty and uncertainty about the future. None of this will be resolved by funding extra mental health professionals, helplines and support hubs. Indeed, that is likely to perpetuate the cycle, since these are not fundamentally medical problems – they are social ones.

This is a point that I hope my fellow Liberal Democrats will bear in mind, as the call for a mental health professional in every school was in our general election manifesto.

There's is currently a vogue for imposing zero-tolerance behaviour policies on pupils in state schools, particularly in areas where many of them are working class or from ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, free from the ministrations of Ofsted, private schools now, as I once put it:

trade ("children can get muddy") on their freedom from the straitjacket imposed by the Gradgrinds at the Department for Education.

Will the new Labour government makes things better?

The signs are not promising. Pam Jarvis has pointed out on Bluesky that the DfE's new behaviour and attendance external reference group includes a police officer but not a psychologist.

Gustav Holst had a brother who was a Hollywood actor

In a Liberal England first, our Trivial Fact of the Day comes from Bluesky. Many thanks to Joanna Wyld over there. (You can find me on Bluesky too: @lordbonkers.bsky.social.)

The composer Gustav Holst was born Gustavus Theodore von Holst in Cheltenham in 1874. He had a younger brother, Emil Gottfried, who enjoyed success as an actor in the West End, New York and Hollywood under the name Ernest Cossart.

His greatest hour in London came when he appeared in the world premiere of Bernard Shaw's Too True to Be Good.

In films, where he found regular employment in the 1930s without becoming a star, he tended to play English butlers or Irish priests. You can see him in King's Row with Ronald Reagan, the 1940 American version of Tom Brown's Schooldays (not to be confused with the 1951 British version with John Howard Davies) and The Jolson Story.

Play the video above (staying on this site rather than going to YouTube) and you will see him in this last film as Father McGee.

The Joy of Six 1260

George Peretz on how governments can rein in Elon Musk: "There is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms ... That would in turn encourage all the users of X who currently use X to monitor government activity (journalists, businesses, many ordinary citizens) to open and use accounts on those competing platforms."

"Praising a recent Murray article, he said it was 'thoughtful, original, and generated more subscriptions than any other article we published this year'. There it is: hate sells. And since Murray’s opinions sell, sacking him would be bad for business. Those are the priorities." Brian Cathcart argues the Spectator can't defend Douglas Murray but can't afford to sack him either.

Phoebe Weston asks if we should intervene to accelerate the natural migration of tree species in the face of climate change.

"I was expecting to find that all graduates liberalise, but that those studying arts, humanities and social sciences ... become more socially liberal and less racially prejudiced than those studying more technical subjects (such as STEM subjects)." University graduates tend to be more socially liberal than the rest of the population - Ralph Scott summarises his research into why this is the case.

Dale Fox reports that more than half of UK school librarians have been asked to remove books from their shelves, with LGBTQ+ literature being disproportionately targeted: "One anonymous librarian, given the pseudonym Emma, described how she was instructed to remove all LGBTQ+ themed books following a single parent’s complaint about one title."

Carry On Spaceman. Carry On Robin [Hood]. Carry On Escaping. Retroboy is our guide to the 10 Carry On films that were planned but never made.

Bluesky: At last we have a serious alternative to Twitter

I caught the bus to Ludlow with every intention of taking lots of photos of the architecture, but didn't get the good weather I had imagined. Still, I did like this little industrial building near the station.

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— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) Aug 19, 2024 at 22:20

Elon Musk's determination to ruin Twitter has led a lot of people to explore an alternative, Bluesky.

I've had an account there myself for a while - you can find it here - and have been making more use of it since I got back from holiday.

Not only is the atmosphere more pleasant on Bluesky, it is also proving a good way of increasing the readership of this blog.

Twitter used to be great for that, but over the past year or two the number of Liberal England readers has dropped noticeably. I suspect that's because the changes Musk has made to the Twitter algorithm mean that fewer people are seeing my tweets.

But one retweet from a journalist on Bluesky has made my post on the Tories and foreign money the most read one on here for months.

So it looks as thought we finally have a viable alternative to Twitter in the shape of Bluesky.

I shall stick around on Twitter, at least for a while, but a fair number of civilised people have already closed their accounts. (You can also find me on Instagram, incidentally.)