The major parties should boycott Farage's dodgy by-election

Liberal Democrat HQ doesn't need much encouragement to ignore unpromising parliamentary by-elections these days - it's worryingly reminiscent of the Nick Clegg years.

But in the case of the Clacton by-election Nigel Farage has just engineered, we would be right to ignore it. We should not field a candidate.

And the other major parties shouldn't field one either.

In a move straight from the Trump playbook, Farage wants to turn his by-election into a people versus the Establishment election. He says the voters of his constituency should be the judge of his actions.

The people of Clacton can vote how they choose, but they have no power to overturn the rules the House of Commons has put in place to regulate the conduct of its members.

So if this is an attempt by Farage to dodge an inquiry into his exotic finances, it will fail.

Let him be opposed by boring Count Binface and a cast of assorted nutters. The major parties should have nothing to do with his by-election.

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"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein’s victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier’s sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and  but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell.

Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."

Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.

"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.

"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.

Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.

Essex village locals baffled by £7k duck crossing sign because they have 'no ducks'

"Unlike the England cricket team," remarked one of the judges. Together with her fellows, she gave our Headline of the Day Award to Essex Live.

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Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, says AI nudification is the latest weapon of violence against women and girls: "Using AI to strip a woman of her clothes is the modern equivalent of locking her in stocks in the town square and throwing rotten fruit at her. It is a weapon of shame, designed to humiliate. Like other pillories, it is meant to send a message to everyone else: do not do what this woman has done."

"The shortage of legal children’s homes across the UK is fast becoming a national crisis. Last week, a Public Accounts Committee report revealed that nearly 800 children were sent to live in illegal accommodation in 2024, staying an average of around six months each." Gareth Davies and Tom Wall report on a national scandal.

Chris Grey on Donald Trump, Greenland and Mark Carney: "Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism."

Emma McClarkin argues that Britain's tax regime is forcing pubs to raise the price of a pint.

"After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern." Julie Phillips on Ursula Le Guin the political activist.

"As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat." Natalie Guest visits Ilford pet cemetery.

Guerilla guardianship on the River Roding

 Here's the YouTube blurb for this film:

The Roding is London’s largest forgotten river. Out on the eastern fringe of the city, it endures every modern indignity: scythed by motorways and concrete bridges; choked with sewage and rubbish; canalised, fly-tipped, retail-parked, thickened with the polluted slime of London clay. It is a forbidding place to call home. 

Yet in 2017 that is what the environmental barrister, Paul Powlesland, set out to do. Embarking on a hair-raising journey up the Thames on a tiny narrowboat (his propeller nearly fell off on route) he made it to the mouth of the Roding, chugging upstream to anchor among the reeds. His mission: to protect the river and speak for its rights. The River Roding Trust was born. 

Seven years later Right to Roam visited the Roding to team up with Paul and the Trust to highlight this incredible story of guerrilla guardianship. Alongside the local community we planted trees, created hibernacula for reptiles and amphibians and tackled the endless crust of rubbish washed in by the tide.

We believe that access to land and water is about more than just recreation. Instead it can be the start of a new relationship with nature, where we connect in order to protect. A concept we call Wild Service.

Yet currently only 8 per cent of land in England has a "right to roam" and only 3 per cent of rivers enjoy an uncontested right of access – a major obstacle to community guardianship. We’re campaigning for that to change.

If you're interested in these issues, you may enjoy The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes.

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"I’m more interested in what the stratospheric rise of a person like Charlie Kirk says about the state of political discourse. He was in many ways representative of a type that has come to dominate the internet’s ‘infotainment’ ecosystem in recent years. His purported renown among a section of the youth probably explains the urge among certain mainstream newscasters to conjure away the nasty bits. They too desperately want to be down with the kids." James Bloodworth on the meaning of Charlie Kirk.

European Powell claims that Labour’s "reckless data-centre dash" will gut the planet, fleece the public –and leave only noise, heat and hollow promises.

"As so often in higher education policy, it seems as though the context and focus of these comments is the industrial value of the sciences (engineering departments are mentioned). Yet the wider implication is worrying: much of what is published in humanities departments is 'unfunded' research in the sense that there is no designated external grant money attached to it." Jeremy Noel-Tod is concerned by the president of Universities UK's condemnation of "hobbyist research that's unfunded".

Sandra Laville reports on the disappearance of bus services in Shropshire: "The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon."

Yasmin van der Poel introduces us to the Red Vicar of Thaxted: "Conrad Noel, a Christian Socialist, was appointed vicar of Thaxted in 1910. He fused Anglo-Catholic ritual with radical politics, transforming his parish into a sanctuary of spirit-inspired rebellion. His sermons, described in a question in Parliament as ‘sedition’, championed Irish independence, workers’ rights, and land reform."

"I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service – comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers – at their best. Something I’ll never forget." Richard Williams experiences a sudden health crisis and thinks about the NHS and rhythm.

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“The government is about to publish a White Paper on Election Regulation, in preparation for the Elections Bill it will bring forward in the next parliamentary session.  Both have major implications for British democracy; both take us away from a Liberal approach." William Wallace on Liberal localism and Labour centralism.”

Phoebe Weston reports from the biodiversity desert that is Dartmoor today: “We have become so used to these landscapes,” says author and campaigner Guy Shrubsole, who advocates for Right to Roam on Dartmoor. “Good geology hides a lot of problems. We’re admiring rocks and not what should be a living ecosystem.”

“Nigel Farage spent a decade thundering about the virtues of British parliamentary democracy – the sanctity of ‘taking back control’, of laws made by “our” elected representatives in ‘our’ sovereign chamber. But now that he’s finally secured a seat in the House of Commons, he’s treating it with contempt.” Sam Bright says Farage’s disappearing act is a portent of things to come.

“Levellers had been briefly consulted on a new constitution, but the discussions were quietly forgotten once the business of deposing and killing the king was done. Their last significant challenge to the new regime was a sadly quixotic mutiny, defeated by the army leadership at Burford, making the honey-coloured Cotswold town an unlikely site of pilgrimage for later radicals.” Jonathan Healey reviews two books on England under the Commonwealth.

Off the Records listens to Hot Chocolate's UFO-themed hit No Doubt About It, which made number 2 in the UK singles chart in 1980, and explains why its subject matter was so topical.

A London Inheritance takes us to Highgate Archway, where a collapsed tunnel was replaced by a bridge.

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The government needs to look beyond the 'bonfire of red tape' narrative if it's to solve the housing crisis, argues Labour MP Chris Hinchcliff.

Erica Jackson lives in a country where her neighbours can be dragged off by masked men: "From the start, the administration set their sights on targeting marginalised and minority groups. They propagated false narratives to incite prejudices, violence, and convince their supporters to justify the unjustifiable. The biggest scapegoats and, in MAGA’s mind, tools for pushing more tyrannical edicts and actions are America’s vast immigrant population."

Hannah Cloke says that England's water crisis calls for more than just a few new reservoirs: "We need a complete overhaul of the way we use water. We need to plug leaks, cut down on waste and use water more than once in our homes and buildings before sloshing it down the drain. We need to catch more water wherever it falls – not just in the river basins that are linked to big reservoirs."

Secret cameras are marketed as harmless gadgets but are used by stalkers and abusers, reports Anna Moore.

Richard Blair - George Orwell's adopted son - remembers his childhood: "At the beginning of June, following his wishes, I left Jura and was placed in the care of Lilian Wolfe, who ran a ‘colony’ at Whiteway, near Stroud. Whiteway had been an anarchists’ colony during the First World War and was a strange place to accommodate me but as far as I can recall I was perfectly happy there and even attended a local kindergarten for a few weeks."

Newly published by Little Toller, Brightening From the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory by Ken Warpole tells stories of arcadian dreams among the plotlands of Eastern England.

Council feared backlash if Jodie Marsh kept lemurs

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The case continues.

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.

Why do so many British supermarkets have clock towers?

It's down to the problems Asda experienced getting the design approved for its store in the centre of the Essex new town of South Woodham Ferrers, says Chris Spargo in this video.

He argues that the inspiration for the style, known in the trade as 'Essex barn', came from nearby Coggeshall.

Green children, lethal crinolines and the bandicoot bandwagon

The current Fortean Times has an article by John Clark on the famous case of the Green Children of Woolpit. It begins:

They were green. There were other strange things about the two children, a boy and a girl, found by harvesters in the fields of the Suffolk village of Woolpit on a summer's day in the 12th century. But it was their green skin that people first noticed. There was much more to the story, but that's how it began.

He suggests that the children were Jewish and were either fleeing persecution elsewhere in East Anglia or had been separated from a group of travellers from abroad. This would explain several puzzling aspects of the case, including the children's green colouring.

This issue also revisits the subject of death by fire in women wearing crinolines, finding an example from as recently as 1938. The unfortunate woman was Phyllis Newcombe, who was engulfed in flames at a dance at Chelmsford. Her case is often seized upon as an example of spontaneous human combustion by believers in the phenomenon.

But I was most taken by the Great Bandicoot Panic of 1996. This was a initially a marketing stunt designed to get these small Australian marsupials into public consciousness before the launch of a new Playstation game called Crash Bandicoot.

Bandicoots, the campaign said, were invading Britain and were a serious pest to farmers and gardeners. And, sure enough, members of the public soon report sighting the beasts. The fact that what are called "bandicoots" are in reality several different species meant that anything from a mouse to a badger could be mistaken for the new menace.

So bandicoots were seen in the East and West Midlands, while the South Wales Daily Post reported three separate sightings in two days. And:

During a rumination on the existence of the Rutland Tiger - a local Alien Big Cat - the Rutland Times appeared to accept the presence of the "Australian bandicoot" as a fact.

Then the game was launched, the Christmas silly season passed and, all at once, the bandicoots disappeared.

Incidentally, the Rutland Tiger may well have been left over from the sudden and botched closure of the safari park at Bonkers Hall. This followed an unfortunate incident involving a coachload of nuns. 

These were not, I must emphasise, the Sisters from Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes, who are more than a match for any tiger.

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'Graham', a victim of John Smyth, explains why the attitude of the Church of England means that he cannot move on: "victims have no closure. We do not yet have the truth. We do not yet have personal apology. We do not yet have justice. We do not feel that anything has changed."

"Cottesmore Hunt were about to be forensically challenged - and in real time.  Along with Chris and Megan was Fabian who, armed with a live broadcast camera, captured all the action as it happened and shared it via a live social media stream. The only veil of secrecy the Cottesmore could call upon was the thick mist which shrouded the killing fields."  Northants Hunt Saboteurs are joined for a day by Chris Packham and Chris Packham and the zoologist Megan McCubbin.

Will Tavlin on the strange economics of streaming services: "For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theatre seats."

J.J. Jackson explores East Anglia's hidden man-made and explosive dangers.

A tour of some of the grandest interwar public houses of East and South London in the company of Modernism in Metroland.

"Coming away from a light-hearted festive flick often feels like being sloshed on a cocktail of capitalism and corporate greed. Can’t connect with your children? Just buy their affection with an expensive toy, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way. Want a turkey but there’s hardly any left in stock? Fight with a rival shopper, as per Jamie Lee Curtis in Christmas with the Kranks." Sam Quarton suggests a Christmas horror flick for the anti-festive film lover: The Legend of Hell House.

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"The lesson of the 1974 reorganisation is not that it put in place a robust system of local government which would survive for 50 or 70 years like the previous arrangements, but that it heralded a near-permanent revolution of structures and types of leadership." Tony Travers on the perils of reorganising local government.

Freethinking Economist asks why Labour expects to improve Britain's record on economic growth when its policies are so similar to those that have been tried in the past.

"In the years AD ('after Dennett'), the story continues and - in large part because of Dennett - philosophy of mind divested itself of its obsession with our ordinary thought and talk about the mind, and instead took its inspiration from science - in particular, neuroscience." Tim Bayne examines Daniel Dennett's contribution to philosophy.

"When the Prince of Orange marched in triumph into London, in December 1688, he did so after ordering all the remaining English troops in the capital to withdraw a minimum of 20 miles from the city. The bulk of the Dutch army was brought into, or placed around, London; Dutch Blue Guards took up all the posts around Whitehall and Hyde Park; and London remained under Dutch military occupation for 18 months." An old article by Jonathan Israel challenges the Whig account of the Glorious Revolution.

Olivia Petter explains why digital cameras are back.

Jonathan Nunn argues that the East End's pie and mash shops were responsible for their own demise: "Outside the East London hipster stereotype, there is still a working-class in Cockney heartlands – in Bow, in Whitechapel, in Dagenham, in Romford – they just happen to not all be white. Pie and mash shops could and should have adapted to bring this demographic in. They could have ensured their survival by instilling a new generation with some sense of ownership over it. Instead, they have chose"n to become ossified.

Ric Holden calls a Westminster hall debate on pie-and-mash shops

In his parliamentary sketch for The Critic, Robert Hutton catches up with Ric Holden, whom he finds displaying a new-found enthusiasm for pie-and-mash shops:

A few months ago, Holden was the chairman of the greatest election-winning machine in history, the British Conservative Party. Now he is just a humble opposition backbencher. Some might say his demotion was deserved. He did after all oversee a campaign that set a number of records, including lowest Conservative share ever and most seats lost by a government ever. But those people miss a very important point: although Holden waved goodbye to 250 colleagues in July, he did succeed in saving his own skin. 

When his Durham seat was abolished, he realised that he had always, at heart, been an Essex man, and fled south to the ultra-safe constituency of Basildon and Billericay. Not that it stayed ultra-safe for long. Under his stewardship, the Conservative majority fell from 20,000 to just 20. You could see why he’d felt that a seat with a majority of, say, 19,000 wouldn’t have been enough. 

This all explains why on Tuesday afternoon, Holden was in a room off Westminster Hall where MPs are allowed to raise matters that are likely to be of limited interest. Officially, he was there to ask the government to save a Cockney delicacy by giving it official protected status. Really, he was there to beg the government to save Ric Holden.

Walking the Mardyke Way in Essex with John Rogers

John Rogers's blurb on YouTube:

A Walk following the Mardyke Way from Purfleet, Essex through the countryside on the edge of Greater London to the village of Bulphan. The Mardyke is an ancient river that has been following its course for over 30 million years. 

The route I took from Purfleet was around 11-miles followed by around another 3 miles to West Horndon Station. This is great walk through fields, meadows and fens.

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

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The media must start holding Reform and Nigel Farage to account, says Hardeep Matharu. The normalisation of racism and dog-whistles will only get worse if the press continues to treat Farage as an entertaining figure representing the 'real views' of the British people.

Imran Mulla and Peter Oborne examine Rishi Sunak's worrying links with India's far right.

"Compared to similar size towns in the UK, Clacton has a limited heritage and cultural offer. It has a wonderful but very small museum space run by active volunteers in the public library. There’s room for about five visitors at a time, and it’s open just twice a week. Sadly, other venues where Clacton’s hidden heritage was celebrated have shut, such as museum dedicated to Pirate Radio which closed in 2016." Tony D. Sampson and Andrew Branch argue that Nigel Farage’s populism distracts from what people in Clacton are really proud about.

"Across the world there must have been so many of us who experienced a similarly uncanny sense of déjà vu upon reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time. That is because for those of us who come from “wounded democracies” or autocracies-in-the-making or downright dictatorships, Oceania was never some far-fetched dystopian land set in an unforeseeable future, but something closer, much more visceral. And frightening too. It was not even a prescient warning about where things might lead if politics went unexpectedly wrong. For us, Nineteen Eighty-Four was already here. It was already happening." Elif Shafak on the undiminished power of George Orwell's novel remains as powerful as when it w

Richard Williams pays a visit to Robert Wyatt in Louth.

The King's Cross district of London got its name from a memorial to George IV that everybody hated and which lasted only 15 years, explains Matt Brown: "The octagonal base survived two further years after the statue was removed. It served variously as a police station, beer shop and advertising space. When it was pulled down in 1845, few people mourned. Newspaper accounts of the removal were scarce and short."

GUEST POST Councillors changing party: general election update

Rather to his surprise, Augustus Carp finds himself offering an update on the latest trends in councillors changing party.

I am not particularly good at political forecasting.  I had expected a quiet summer, with just a slight peak in the number of local council defections in the run-up to the local elections in May. 

Well, it’s only been eight weeks since then, and a grand total of 115 councillors have changed their political allegiance one way or another.  Some have had it changed for them, by way of expulsion or suspension. 

In any event, that’s a net figure of 85 defections once movements in different directions are taken into account; those changes are bound to have an impact on the leafletting, canvassing and telling operations of the parliamentary candidates in those areas.

Clearly, the general election has caused a number of people up and down the land to reassess the way they want their political ideals to be made manifest. Five councillors have resigned in order to stand as Independent General Election candidates – three Conservative, one Labour and one Lib Dem. 

A Tory in Sussex has gone Independent having publicly supported a Labour parliamentary candidate, and in a famous case discussed in this forum, an East Anglian Lib Dem has been expelled for supporting tactical voting with a little too much enthusiasm.  

A net 29 Conservatives have left the party that saw them elected, but that number is exceeded by the 43 who have left Labour. The Lib Dems have lost eight, the Nationalists four and the Greens one. Six Conservatives have joined Reform, including four who have formed a group in Tendring, which covers the Clacton constituency. 

Most defectors seem to join a new party after a few months as a notional Independent (broadly defined) but there have been six instances of councillors immediately changing Party labels – two from Labour to Lib Dem, one from Tory to Lib Dem, one Tory to Green and one each way Labour to Tory or vice versa. 

The Conservatives and Lib Dems have both (on paper) lost control of councils as a result of defections, but it’s the Labour Party who seem to be nurturing nascent opposition groups within their bosom – new Independent groups have formed out of the Labour Party in Flintshire, Hackney, Kirklees and Worthing.  

Anyway, here’s a forecast – depending on what happens after 4 July, the number of councillor defections is either going to decline slightly or accelerate out of all proportion, depending on the Conservative Party’s relationship with Reform. Who knows, I might have to start counting MP defections as well.

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

Labour orders its candidate against Nigel Farage to leave Clacton

Embed from Getty Images

An extraordinary story from the Guardian:

Labour has been accused of "not putting up a fight" against Nigel Farage in Clacton after the party’s candidate was instructed to leave the constituency after "distracting" from Keir Starmer’s campaign.

Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, 27, who works for Labour’s equalities team, was installed by the party last month to contest the seat, weeks before Farage changed his mind and decided to stand in the Essex constituency.

Owusu-Nepaul has since been "seconded" to the West Midlands, while the local campaign in Clacton said that it had been banned from printing leaflets, blocked from using campaigning software and had access to the campaign’s social media overriden, with posts deleted on X.

If I lived in Clacton, I think I would hold my nose and vote for the Conservative candidate Giles Watling in an attempt to keep Farage out of parliament.

I have noticed Owusu-Nepaul getting attention on Twitter, though, if only for his dashing dress sense.

It seems that getting attention was his crime. According to the Guardian report:

A campaign source said Labour headquarters had been angry with the traction Owusu-Nepaul was getting. “At one point [Jovan] was getting more retweets than Keir Starmer. The officials were furious with him and said he was distracting [from] Starmer’s campaign,” they said.

No doubt Freddie and Fiona would thoroughly approve of this action, but I don't.

Giles Watling vs Nigel Farage in 1964

Before he entered parliament, Giles Watling, the Conservative MP for Clacton, was an actor. His most prominent role was Oswald, the vicar in Bread.

And before he was an adult actor, he was a child actor. At the age of 11 or so, he played Malcolm Gideon, son of John Gregson's Commander Gideon of Scotland Yard, in the television series Gideon Way. The series is now a staple of Talking Pictures TV.

One of the best episodes of Gideon's Way was The 'V' Men, which dealt with a right-wing demagogue and the problems he and his supporters caused for the police.

In that episode, young Malcolm Gideon is fighting a school election and watches the demagogue for tips.

I have posted this clip before, but it seems newly relevant. I hope his childhood experiences will help Giles Watling in the weeks to come.