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Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

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.

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Writing in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah White says our political institutions are dangerously underprepared for a multi-party future.

Jane Green and Marta Miori argue that the electoral challenge Reform represents to Labour is widely misunderstood: "Focusing on Labour voters misses the much bigger threats to Labour from Reform, which is Reform overtaking the party in Labour councils and constituencies by continuing to capture Conservative voters and 2024 non-voters – the latter small in proportion, but currently larger in size than for other parties. This is made likelier if Labour’s vote continues to splinter broadly, to ‘undecided’ and to the left, and is a threat to the party in the many seats they won on lower vote shares in 2024 due to fragmentation on the right."

"Cambridge and Oxford are often spoken about as a pair – two high-achieving university towns with highly educated populations, cutting-edge firms and high average incomes. Both are prosperous, yet both struggle with tight housing supply. But beneath these similarities, differences are emerging." Xuanru Lin finds that Cambridge has pulled ahead of Oxford on jobs, productivity and housing.

"Historically, the psychogeographer became associated with the 'flaneur', a lone male wanderer who is able to move unheeded through the city. This romantic idyll doesn’t reflect the reality for many of us, and there are many barriers stopping folk." Morag Rose on exploring cities as a disabled woman.

Clare Bucknell visits the Joseph Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery: "Tenebrism, the 17th-century Caravaggist method of illuminating figures and details against a deeply shadowed background, was admired by connoisseurs, but little practised or understood by Wright’s British contemporaries. Mastering nocturne painting, being able to replicate the way skin glowed in warm or cool light or colours changed in the dark, was a means for the young artist to distinguish himself."

"The club whose sustained excellence made the argument for change most powerfully will now discover that the goalposts have been replaced entirely, swapped for financial sustainability assessments, commercial strength metrics, governance frameworks and geographic strategic value criteria that Ealing were never given the opportunity to meet." James White reacts to the Rugby Football Union's decision to end promotion to and relegation from the Premiership.

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David Howarth knows how to make the BBC less afraid of Nigel Farage: "Proportional representation would free the BBC from fear, but more than that, since under PR many parties would enjoy a reasonable prospect of entering government and so of supplying the secretary of state for culture, the BBC would have better incentives to maintain impartiality among democratic parties."

"Calling Andrew entitled is beside the point. He was raised with no economic purpose and now he finds himself as a connector to whom no one wants to be connected. 'I have no idea who he will socialize with,' one Norfolk grandee told me. 'All his friends are Chinese spies.'" Tina Brown claims to have the inside story on how King Charles pulled the plug on Andrew.

AI is supercharging abuse against women journalists, but Megha Mohan argues that it doesn’t have to be that way.

"For a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally inclined was the drawn-out danse macabre of serial murder. This was especially true in America’s Pacific Northwest, where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated." James Lasdun on the serial killers of Seattle.

Stephen Prince introduces us to the 1970 book Filming the Owl Service (1970), which is "long out of print and rare as hens' teeth to find second hand, which is a shame as it is a fine companion piece to the series, full of rather lovely photographs, artefacts, anecdotes, background story, prop sheets and designs from the filming and the series itself".

Robert Hartley explores the Leicestershire connections of George Stephenson, the father of railways.

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Sienna Rogers says No. 10 sleepwalked into a crisis on welfare cuts: "The media rounds of ministers only deepened the frustration of dissatisfied MPs. Cabinet members repeatedly stated that the threshold changes to PIP eligibility were about getting people back into work, yet employment does not preclude receiving PIP; in fact, PIP was seen by the rebels as a key way of enabling disabled people to work."

Jenna Corderoy and Peter Geoghegan report that British police forces are hiding their collaboration with the US spying technology firm Palantir: "In both 2024 and 2025, multiple FOI requests about Palantir’s police contracts  - including from Liberty and the Good Law Project - were referred to the CRU [Central Referral Unit], which advised forces to withhold information."

"The shifting sands of politics are making electoral reform more likely. But almost certainly not before the 2030s. And much will depend on how the party system evolves in the years to come." Alan Renwick reacts to the rising support for electoral reform in opinion polls.

Russia is waging a silent war across Europe, not with tanks, but with propaganda, disinformation, AI and political influence, says Tetiana Toma.

"Like many enduring classics, Jaws - while in essence a rootin-tootin creature feature - is ideologically malleable, capable of meaning different things at different times. Is it a post-Watergate rumination on political malfeasance? A comment on laissez-faire capitalism? With the film now 50 years old, this month marking its half-centenary anniversary, it surprises me that more hasn’t been made about it as a commentary on responses to the climate crisis, given how strikingly this fits with its core messages." Luke Buckmaster argues that Jaws predicted the politics of climate inaction.

Elizabeth Ammon lists six things we learnt from the first test against India.

GUEST POST Forget your two-horse race: Increasingly it's a cavalry charge

Augustus Carp wanders off from his usual subjective enquiries into councillor defections to consider some objective examples of real voters casting real votes for real candidates in the recent local elections.

If you are a regular reader of this site, you are probably well aware of the iniquities of our election system. You don’t need a lecture from me or, probably, anyone else on the subject, but you might like to consider some of the more unusual results thrown up in the recent county council elections.

To set the scene, in order for a candidate - or party -  to succeed using the current system, the procedure for nearly the last 100 years has been to engineer public opinion to regard the contest as being between just two parties. 

That way, Party A can tell the voters that it’s a straight contest between them and Party B, and that it’s the duty of the electorate to recognise that a vote for Party C is a wasted vote. Verily, “It’s a two horse race!”, say the leaflets, and no other considerations are required.

However, the political world is changing, and changing rapidly. The number of two-horse races has declined, to be replaced in some contests by veritable cavalry charges, with a handful of candidates all vying for the voters’ attention with almost equal success. There are some extraordinary examples from 1 May.

Some 1405 contests took place for the English County Councils. Remarkably, in 32 contests, five candidates all managed to get over 10 per cent of the vote. 

In some cases, the result was still clear. For example, in the Leamington Milverton Division of Warwickshire, the Liberal Democrat got 53.5 per cent, with four other candidates getting 14, 13, 12 and 10 per cent. In Bedwardine (Worcestershire) Reform won with 41.5 per cent, the other candidates getting 24, 14, 10 and 10 per cent. Clearly, the winning candidates had a solid core of support. 

But what about Heavitree and Whipton Barton in Devon? There the Green won with just 26.2 per cent of the vote, the others getting 25.6, 25.4, 12 and 11 per cent. Or over in Alphington and Cowick, in the same county, where Reform won with 26.8 per cent but two other candidates both got over 25 per cent? 

How do people still justify the use of First Past the Post elections, particularly for local government elections, which produce results like those?

However, the Joint Prize for the Most Indecisive Result has to be shared by Bierton, Kingsbrook and Wing Division in Buckinghamshire, and Truro, Moresk and Trehaverne Division in Cornwall. There, six candidates all managed to get over 10 per cent of the votes each. 

The Conservative in Buckinghamshire won with 26.5 per cent of the vote, and the Lib Dem in Cornwall won with 18.9 per cent - not so much a ringing endorsement as an indication of grudging tolerance.

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

Vince Cable nails Labour's "big mistake" in opposition

The University of York student newspaper York Vision has an interview with the city's famous son Vince Cable.

Asked for his reaction to Rachel Reeves's budget, Vince says:

"It was necessary to have a substantial increase in taxation because public services are in a very poor state. I think people have to get used to the idea that if they want good public services, they have to pay for them. That means taxation. So, yes, I agree with that.

"I think the big negative thing, which is not about the budget itself, but the preparations. I think the Labour Party made a bad mistake in opposition, not being honest about the need to raise taxation substantially. And they should have said to people that you’re going to have to pay more VAT, more income tax.

"But as a result of not doing that, what they’ve got into looks a bit sneaky, and they’ve got into bad taxes. This national insurance for employers looks like a victimless tax but it’s actually going to hit consumers, it’s going to hit workers indirectly. It’s not the best way to raise taxation."

Asked what the Liberal Democrats should do to become the official Opposition in Parliament, Vince stressed the importance of Europe, local government and climate change:

"I think they need to be a bit more explicit about Europe and the commitment to Europe. I would be much more outspoken in saying Britain needs to have higher taxes for better public services, and I think particularly areas like education.

"I think the Lib Dems should be ... pushing very hard to get more funding into local government rather than central government, because ... councils are closer to the public. At the moment, they’re disempowered, and many of them are bankrupt, so I think reforming local government  would be a high priority."

And on electoral reform, he had no time for the argument that the rise of Reform should make Lib Dems reconsider their support for it:

"We do need electoral reform. The fact that you get more people from Reform is neither here nor there. They exist as a force. We’ve seen with Trump, we’ve seen in Germany that populist parties are very, by definition, very popular. Just sweeping them under a carpet and pretending that they don’t exist is the worst kind of response."

When I was a student at York in an earlier life, there was only one newspaper on campus, Nous. Judging by its website, it is still going strong.

59 Labour MPs support Sarah Olney's electoral reform bill

Today the Commons voted to give Sarah Olney leave to introduce her 10-minute rule bill to bring in "a system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections and for local government elections in England". The vote was won with a majority of two - 138 to 136

The bill is unlikely to proceed further, as it does nor have government support. But the vote was still significant, because 59 Labour MPs voted in support of Sarah's bill. Sarah is the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park.

Introducing her bill, she said:

We are also seeing record levels of disillusionment with the political process, with citizens becoming increasingly disengaged. This is reflected in the fact that turnout in the 2024 general election was the second lowest since 1918 at just under 60 per cent. 

Over 40 per cent of registered voters in the UK thought so little of the political process they did not think it worth expressing a preference for one candidate over another.

The next Senedd elections will present a different challenge to the Lib Dems

A largely positive article about the Liberal Democrats by Jonathan Edwards for Nation Cymru points up an irony. We Lib Dems have become very good at first-past-the-post elections but rarely do so well in elections under more proportional systems:

However, in a Welsh context the strategy employed by the Liberal Democrats at UK level doesn’t work. Quite simply there are not enough Tory/Lib Dem marginals. In July it only yielded one seat in Wales where David Chadwick captured the new seat of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe. With the Senedd election in mind, Jane Dodds and her team are going to have to be more creative.

The D’Hondt electoral system isn’t the easiest to decipher; however the Lib Dems are going to have to improve their poll ratings if they are to achieve the minimum threshold required for a seat in the new Senedd constituencies. Their success in England last July was based on clever targeting of constituencies, and their strategists need to employ similar informed decision making for 2026 as opposed to a blanket approach.

A complicating factor is that the 2026 Senedd elections will be fought on new constituency boundaries. If the Boundary Commission proposals are accepted, one seat will stretch from Corndon Hill, which is almost entirely surrounded by Shropshire, to the tip of the Lleyn peninsula. Meanwhile, what is essentially the old Brecon and Radnor seat has somehow acquired a coastline.

GUEST POST The Lib Dems must meet the challenge of the Greens in the new political landscape

How can the Lib Dems continue to grow after last week's historic advance? Anselm Anon argues that, to do so, we must meet the challenge of the Greens.

There is plenty for liberals to celebrate in the general election: the end of a wretched Tory government, lots of splendid new Lib Dem MPs (including one in Wales), third-party privileges in the Commons and idiosyncratic politics in Leicester which will continue to enliven Liberal England. 

Despite some frustrating near misses, and the loss of an Alliance MP, overall the news is good. But we shouldn’t lull ourselves into thinking this is a repeat of 1997, and not only because we secured only 12 per cent of the national vote, as opposed to 16.8 per cent.

The results bring into focus a serious and growing problem for the Liberal Democrats. We are no longer the UK’s third party, but one of three middle-sized parties. To summarise:

Reform              5 MPs 4 million votes

Lib Dem     72 MPs 3.5 million votes

Greens           4 MPs 1.9 million votes

Although Reform are morally and politically objectionable, they don’t appear to be depriving the Lib Dems of seats or votes in any numbers. If the Lib Dems had (unwisely) focused on maximising national vote share rather than seats, we could have overtaken Reform’s total, at the unacceptable cost of sacrificing dozens of MPs.  

Doubtless Reform’s leadership would gladly swap their seat:vote ration with us. But the Greens are another matter.

In much of the country it is the Greens rather than LibDems who are now attracting liberal-minded voters and activists, and building networks in new areas. By my sleep-deprived calculations, the Greens secured more votes than the Lib Dems in at least 267 English constituencies (out of 543). 

In most of these, neither party will have been working hard, but this just illustrates that latent Green support is similar to ours, if not higher.

Unlike us, the Greens have shown the capacity to grow at the expense of both Labour (from whom they won Bristol Central) as well as the Tories (from whom they won two other seats). The Lib Dems failed to advance in Sheffield Hallam, our only realistic prospect against Labour.  

We now have no MPs in big cities outside London and Edinburgh, and only four seats in the north of England, three of which are demographically very similar to our southern English strongholds. 

Alex Folkes has explained why he is hopeful about our prospects of holding our gains, but Liberal England’s list of potential targets contains only one Labour-held seat (Burnley).

The Greens secured numerous double-digit percentage vote increases against Labour, and will be in a good position to win seats from them as Starmer's government becomes unpopular.  

They also have political momentum across a wide range of demographics, which is difficult for us to match outside those areas where we already have an established network. “Pick a Ward and Win It” is currently far more achievable for Greens than Lib Dems. 

Crucially, the Greens convey a distinct sense of their own political profile. They are seen as anti-Tory, but also associated with a distinct political approach. This doesn’t appeal to everyone, but being all things to all people is no route to lasting political success.

Much Lib Dem success in 2024 relied on opposing the Tories. The challenge has now changed: we have sensible and popular policies, with some clear differences from Labour, for instance on Europe, electoral reform, water companies and ending the two-child benefit cap. 

We can be more sensible and more popular. Articulating and developing clear liberal policies, based on our radical and social liberal approach, is essential. Otherwise the Greens will flourish at our expense.

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

Changing to FPTP won the Tories up to a dozen PCC elections

Writing on University College London's The Constitution Unit Blog, Alan Renwick examines how the change to the first past the post system in May's mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections affected the results.

He concludes it made no difference to the mayoral elections, where Labour won nine out of ten contests. But it was a very different position in the PCC elections:

The shift in voting rules had a big impact. While it did not change the outcomes in any mayoral elections, it switched at least four PCC races, probably seven, and conceivably as many as 10 or 12. That is a remarkably large effect from a simple tweak to the rules.  

Furthermore, because the left in British politics is currently more fragmented than the right, the switch from SV [supplementary vote] to FPTP favoured the Conservatives over Labour and other left or centre-left parties. By changing the voting system, the Conservatives significantly reduced their losses.

In a second post, Renwick examined the government's rationale for this change and concluded:

SV is clearly more democratic than FPTP for single executive offices. All the major parties – including the Conservatives – seem to recognise that by using transferable vote systems (or closely related multi-round systems) to elect their leaders. The change to FPTP harmed democracy.

If the incoming Labour government is going to retain police and crime commissioners - I hope it won't - the it should restore the supplementary vote for the ballots that elect them. 

It should do the same for mayoral elections, which it certainly will retain, but I have no confidence that it will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"If the introduction of proportional representation is a Lib Dem red line, then the party needs to work out now how it would secure the political commitment to change, and the process for achieving it." Jess Sargeant says the Liberal Democrats must learn from their failure to achieve constitutional reform during the Coalition years.

Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Taylor McNeil about his career as a philosopher and his hopes and fears for the future: "AI systems, like all software, are replicable with high fidelity and unbelievably fast mutations. If you have high fidelity replication and mutations, then you have evolution, and evolution can get out of hand, as it has in the past many times."

"It isn’t brave to say you hate classical music so much as bog-standard normal. State publicly that you don’t like classical music, and you’re cool, funny and 'relatable'. State publicly that you don’t like popular music, and you’re a weirdo or a snob." Alexandra Wilson dissects a Twitter row.

Christopher Hilton on Benjamin Britten as a campaigner against railway branch line closures.

PsychoNottingham investigates one of the city's lost cinemas.

"An emerging leitmotif in much of Aiken’s subsequent work for children makes its appearance here — the resourcefulness of its young protagonists against the machinations of adults who wish them ill. It’s not surprising that Wolves has shown itself a popular choice with younger readers: it has the right amount of jeopardy, a bit of safe distance is created by its being set in the 19th century, and expectations are high that, like a fairy tale, all will come right in the end." Calmgrove offers an appreciation of Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

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"Both ideologies involve a shocking indifference to evidence and data. They reflect a bulldog belief that Britain will always be better off pursuing its own path, rather than engaging with supranational negotiations and institutions. They share a distaste for 'experts' - economists in the case of Brexit, the world’s scientists in the case of climate change. In many instances, Brexiteers and ecosceptics express the same paranoid suspicion of 'global elites' and 'globalist conspiracies'." Tory Eurosceptics are becoming ecosceptics, says Matthew d'Ancona.

Peter Wrigley thinks delusions about Britain's standing in the world mean we aren't tackling the many political and economic problems we face.

"A first-time reader of the Investigations may be struck by the frequency of the appearance of children. It is possible to read the Investigations as a reflection on how time spent in the hustle and bustle of a working schoolroom transformed his conception of what language really is - and therein what we really are. And even, then, as a kind of confession." Calum Jacobs sees Wittgenstein's experience of teaching in schools and at Cambridge as central to the development of his later philosophy. (Margaret Masterman, mentioned as one of his favourite pupils,was the daughter of this blog's hero Charles Masterman.)

Linda Flanagan looks at what young people gain from studying ethics in school.

Herbie Russell uncovers Southwark residents' memories of the lost Grand Surrey Canal: "Children would salvage debris from the blitzed ruins of houses and warehouses and make rafts to sail up and down the canal: 'Where the bombed houses were, we used to take the doors off and put them on the canal and use a bit of wood for a paddle and away we went… we had quite a good time in there!'"

Kenneth More's best work was seen in the theatre and on television rather than his films, argues Stephen Vagg.

Three Leicester Labour councillors to be disciplined for opposing mayoral system

Last week Leicester City Council debated a motion to abolish its current elected mayoral and return to a traditional committee system. It was defeated by 32 votes to 20 - an alternative replacement model (a leader and a cabinet) was rejected by a larger majority.

This week, as sure as night follows day, comes news that three Labour councillors are to be disciplined for voting against the mayoral system.

The Leicester Mercury reports:

Three Leicester councillors have been suspended by the Labour Party for rebelling against the city mayor’s office at a meeting last week. The meeting was held so elected members of all parties represented on the council could vote on whether to scrap the post, currently held by Labour’s Sir Peter Soulsby.

Patrick Kitterick, who represents Castle ward, Rita Patel and Ross Willmott, both Rushey Mead, have all had the whip withdrawn.

Kitterick has talked to the Mercury:

"For 20 years, I’ve abided by the group whip, but that’s always been on the basis we’ve had a democratic discussion within the group and we’ve come to a collective decision. There was no such discussion on this occasion.

"There wasn’t any meeting of the Labour group over this. There was no internal discussion and there was no democratic debate.

"There was just an order that went out, and that’s not the basis on which we take decisions within the Labour group. I’m not taking orders from people who haven’t consulted any of my colleagues."

So has Soulsby, but he didn't have much to say beyond "Nothing to do with me, guv":

He refused to offer an opinion, saying: "That’s very much a matter for the Labour Group whip, and the party more generally, rather than me. They take the decision on those things and whether they feel someone has stepped beyond what is acceptable."

Leicester Labour's internal politics are pretty impenetrable, so I don't know if Soulsby's truth train is stopping at every station here. But even if he does not ultimately wield the party whip, he has significant powers of patronage - notably his power to make councillors assistant and deputy mayors.

If you're a Labour councillor who wants a flourishing career in the city, you have to stay on the right side of him.

I'm not a fan of elected mayors, but if you are going to have one then you must have a body of robustly independent councillors to scrutinise their decisions.

And where you have a council that is dominated by the same party that the mayor comes from, as is the case in Leicester, you are unlikely to get one. Liverpool's experience has been the same.

The conclusion is that if you want an elected mayor, then the council that oversees them must be elected by proportional representation.

Meanwhile, the size of the vote for change last week suggests the feeling that Sir Peter Soulsby is in danger of outstaying his welcome is growing in the Labour Party as well as the city.

Later. The Leicester Mercury is now reporting that a fourth Labour councillor, Jacky Nangreave, has been deprived of the whip and that none of the four will be able to stand for the party in May's city council elections.

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Neal Lawson believes there’s no point Labour winning the next election unless it acts to dismantle our toxic electoral system.

"Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected." Robert Saunders shows that the forces that gave it Liz Truss still dominate the Conservative Party.

Sebastian Stroud says that botany degrees are disappearing from British universities just when the world needs botanists most.

John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which adapted for the BBC in 1979, is a perfect snapshot of a declining Britain managing its post-imperial malaise in a changing world, argues Eliot Wilson.

"Kay’s great-grandfather, Captain Harker, in whose house Kay lives, lost some treasure - 'church ornaments, images, lamps, candlesticks, reliquaries, chalices and crosses of gold, silver and precious stones' - entrusted to his care by the archbishop of a South American port during the revolutions and uprisings of 1811. The loss haunted the captain until his death, a haunting that also ruined the happiness of his wife and son. Now others more avaricious than Kay are on the treasure's trail. Can he find it before they do? It is only at the end that you realize the book is about the restoration of more than one kind of treasure." Mathew Lyons on The Midnight Folk, John Masefield's prequel to The Box of Delights

Eleanor Parker finds that genteel Buckinghamshire is really wild border country.

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Jane Dodds argues that Wales can thrive with a basic income: "A basic income has five core characteristics: It’s paid in cash, so it’s money you can spend on whatever you want. It’s paid regularly, so you know the next payment is coming. It’s for individuals, with each person getting their own basic income, paid to the individual not the household. It’s unconditional, so you don’t have to work or make any promises to get it. It’s universal, so everyone gets it."

The single transferable vote breaks open one-party fiefdoms. Don't take my word for it: listen to Scottish Conservative councillor Dave Dempsey.

Becca Massey-Chase says making local public transport free at the point of use isn't a fantasy, it's a popular way to help communities and the climate – and it's already a reality in cities around the world.

"If the decline of the UK regional press since 2008 instead had happened to schools, police, fire stations or hospitals there would rightly be national outrage bordering on revolt." Dominic Ponsford on an overlooked tragedy.

"Martin was on a mission to bring down the unjust from their perches to the level of the populace." Max Adam looks at the art of the 19th-century painter John Martin and how in his epic landscapes of apocalyptic scale reflected his revolutionary leanings.

Dan Thompson visits Arlington House, the futuristic tower block that marked the start of 1960s redevelopment in Margate.