In the Britain of 1940 cars were deadlier than German bombs

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Here's a remarkable quotation from a judge that I found in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (24 July 1940).

After a defendant had been found not guilty of manslaughter and of dangerous driving, Mr Justice Stable said:

"I hope this will be a warning to him and I hope that he and other members of the public will appreciate that during June the whole forces of the German Empire succeeded in killing exactly 100 fewer people in this island with bombs than were killed by motorists by accidents." 

Al Carns portrays Labour politics as a form of ancestor worship

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Writing about Blue Labour in Liberator at the start of year, I suggested that:

Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

That makes him a modernist when set against Al Carns, judging by the defence minister's resignation statement in the Commons today.

Here's how Carns began:

As honourable members know, I came into politics for one reason. That was to enact change.

But to be able to work out where you’re going, we must realise where we have come from. The Labour party I joined is one that was chiselled out of the mines of the north-east. It was hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast. And it was forged in the factories of the industrial revolution.

Calloused hands, sore backs, people who did a hard day’s graft and asked for one thing in return – a government that has their back.

That’s the tradition I serve in this house, and it’s a tradition that shaped that decision I took last week.

Commercial shipbuilding had largely disappeared from Britain before Carns was born in 1980 – what remains is almost all in the defence sector. Brian Potter has mapped its demise:

Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90 per cent, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6 per cent to less than 1 per cent. 

British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatised yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01 per cent of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.

Potter's whole article is worth reading. It provides evidence for the view that many of Britain's economic problems stem from the fact that our managers aren't very good.

Returning to Carns's speech, coal mining in the North East of England reached its peak in 1923, with the last deep mine in the region closing in 2005. And the Industrial Revolution is generally reckoned to have begun in the middle of the 18th century.

If these are really Carns's politics, then they have nothing to do with Labour's voters and members or with the British working class today. That class, forced to exist on temporary work and zero-hours contracts, are the very people who would be hurt by his enthusiasm for yet more welfare cuts.

So when Carns went on to talk about modernising defence, you feared he was going to demand that eight Dreadnoughts be built or call for an improved flintlock for the infantry. 

In fact he had sensible things about the need to grasp how warfare is changing, which means we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't believe the first part of his statement either. 

But he's not the only Labour politician who, when asked to explain it, makes their attachment to the party sound like a form of ancestor worship.

GUEST POST Local councillors changing party: Augustus Carp’s review of 2025

Augustus Carp finds the Conservatives are losing local councillors, but not as fast as Labour are losing them, and Reform UK are gaining.

Back in January we were solemnly assured by the nation’s leading political commentators that 2025 was going to be a tough year for the Conservatives, and a good one for Reform UK. 

That’s pretty much how it panned out, but why didn’t anyone predict that, when it comes to political defections, the biggest losers were going to be the Labour Party?

The figures are stark. The Conservatives lost a net 212 councillors in 2025, but the Labour Party lost a net 275. For the others, the figures are Reform +138, Greens +32, Lib Dems -14 and the Nationalists -5. The balancing figure is Independents on 336.

To be clear, my methodology treats every single change in status as a recordable event. So a councillor leaving Party A to sit as an Independent in January, and then joining Party B in August is regarded as two separate data points. Suspensions, expulsions and readmissions are all included in the tally.

By my reckoning there were defections in 271 local authorities during the year. Councils where eight or more councillors have changed their allegiance are 

Tameside                      20

Kent                       16

Dudley                      13

Durham                      10

Sevenoaks              10

Wakefield              10

Bolsover                        9

Buckinghamshire        9

Hounslow                9

Oldham                        9

South Kesteven              9

Tamworth                        9

Cornwall                       8

Dumfries & Galloway      8

Portsmouth                     8

Solihull                            8

The figure for Tameside is perhaps a bit misleading – seven Labour councillors had their status changed for them when they were suspended and subsequently reinstated after being caught up in the Shiver Me Timbers WhatsApp fiasco/scandal. Nevertheless there were other goings on there to ensure that Tameside would still rank highly in the table.

Kent and Durham have trouble retaining councillors within their Reform UK groups, and Dudley has seen movements from Labour to Independent and from the Conservatives to Reform UK. Wakefield saw councillors move from Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives to Independents, and a few suspensions and readmissions in the Labour Group added to the complexity there. Bulk defections have occurred in Sevenoaks (from the Conservatives) and in Buckinghamshire (from the Lib Dems).

Labour defections in the London boroughs increased towards the end of the year, once the reselection season started. Councillor defections in areas which still have two levels of local government (for example Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) might deserve more attention, as some councillors there wear two hats. 

Watch out in 2026 for problems with party discipline if local government reform is pushed through against local opposition, as has already happened in Suffolk.

It is very difficult to identify how many defections arise out of personality clashes rather than ideology.  There have been 92 defections straight from the Conservative Party to Reform UK, which would seem to be driven by ideology or the survival instinct.

There have also been 28 straight swaps from Labour to Greens in 2025, with another 14 councillors making the slow-burning transition from Labour to Independent to Greens. This, together with the number of ex-Labour councillors forming their own Independent groups, would seem to indicate that politics is more significant than personalities at the moment. That matters when it comes to fielding troops in a general election ground war.

As ever, these figures are provided on a best endeavours basis, so E&OE and DYOR. Perhaps if readers have any simple questions on the goings on in any particular authority, they could put them in the comments below and I will answer them if I can.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Bryan Ferry and Howard Kendall played together in the same school football team

I was convinced I had made this my Trivial Fact of the Day years ago, but I hadn't. So now I have.

Ferry and Kendall both attended Washington Grammar School in County Durham. The photo above, borrowed off of the internet, shows them together in the school's under-13 side in 1957/8. Ferry is under the left-hand arrow.

Howard Kendall, a midfielder, played for Preston North End in an FA Cup final when he was 17 and then joined Everton, where he won a Championship medal. He later returned to the club as manager, winning two league titles, an FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners' Cup. He died in 2015.

Defections from Reform in the North East of England

It's not all one-way traffic as far as Reform UK are concerned.

Jonathan Wallace writes on his blog:

Two of Reform's constituency chairmen in Gateshead constituencies have defected to Advance, the party that split from Reform and was created in the image of its founder Ben Habib.

According to an Advance news release, Damien Heslop, who was Reform's candidate in Gateshead Central and Whickham, as well as chair of Reform's constituency branch, has defected to Advance. He was the only Reform candidate in the local elections last year in Gateshead.

And in neighbouring Jarrow and Gateshead East constituency, the chairman Paul Milburn has upped sticks and defected to Advance as well.

So it's bye-bye Reform and hello Advance for Mr Heslop and Mr Milburn. They are not alone. The news release also lists three other Reform constituency chairmen in the North East who have jumped ship: Stephen Holt (South Shields), Gordon Fletcher (Cramlington and Killingworth) and Sam Woods-Brass (Houghton and Sunderland South).

Advance UK is a far-right party led by Ben Habib, who was deputy leader of Reform before he fell out with Nigel Farage – which everyone seems to do sooner or later.

As Jonathan says, its launch, or perhaps relaunch, is taking place somewhere in Newcastle on 27 September.

Tony Blair meets Phil Harding in 2003

One was a universally loved and admired figure: the other had been Pri...

You can see where this is going.

The Joy of Six 1250

Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss argue that the harsh sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil protestors are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest.

"In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for 'glorifying violence'. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'." Andrew O'Hagan went to the Republican National Convention.

"It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals." Susanna Rustin searches London for memorials to early feminists.

Ray Casey dreams of reopening the coastal railway line from Middlesbrough to Scarborough.

"A former miner, he recounted being trapped by a rockfall and waiting for hours to be rescued without being able to move a millimetre. There must be mental powers of concentration and stamina bound up with this experience which were probably transferable to the experience of playing endless frames of snooker." Conrad Brunstrom pays tribute to Ray Reardon.

Patricia Herlihy on the flowers to be found in her garden in July: "A few might seem to be weeds to some, but I find them to be useful as pollinator foods and very pretty as well."