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Jonathan Simons fears that Labour have picked a new leader who communicates well, but whose instincts are wrong: "This easy, reflexive tilt back to the left being about class, and steel mills and coalfields and shipyards and dockyards, and Northern men in Northern towns, is politically weird in 2026."

"Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign." Carole Cadwalladr on the way the media allowed Nigel Farage to operate without scrutiny for so long and why things have suddenly changed.

"The phenomenon of ever-bigger cars has not come about accidentally. It has been sustained by an aggressive marketing campaign, as they are far more profitable for manufacturers than conventional-sized vehicles. They are sold on the basis that they are safer. Extra safety for your family is a key marketing strategy. But while Daddy drives Olivia and Rufus to school in perfect safety, other pupils are in greater peril. And that risk is growing as the cars get ever bigger." Christian Wolmar calls for a halt to carspreading.

Karina Colombo and Elisa Failache find that the rapid expansion of high-speed internet in Uruguay led to a reduction in children's test scores in communication, problem solving and social skills. But it wasn't because the children were spending too long online: it was because their parents were.

"Each retelling reflects contemporary concerns about technological risk, climate uncertainty, social inequality, disaster preparedness, media spectacle and the ethics of dark tourism while maintaining the same underlying core narrative." Jonathan Peter Skinner explains our undying interest in the sinking of the Titanic.

Lucy Janes says the River Clyde is central to modern Glasgow’s identity. "It flows through the core of the city and, as you look downstream, a moment's reflection can lead your mind’s eye out to sea and the wider world."

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.

The Poachers: The Coast

A good song for a summer Sunday.

The Poachers are a Glasgow band, and I don't know much about them beyond what we are told in this Instagram post.

The songwriting duo of Neil Donaldson and Seb Jonsen primarily started The Poachers as a studio based project, working with producer Marco Rea and releasing 3 EPs of bona fide country folk pop classics in 2020 and 2021. 

With no way of promoting these works in the traditional sense due to the lockdown, they took a hiatus for much of 2022 before emerging rejuvenated in 2023 with support from independent label Sunstone Records as well as the addition of Toby Virgo on bass and Dave Johnston on drums. 

Now a fully fledged live band, they released the singles 'Annabelle' and 'The Coast' with a sold out show at the Glad Cafe in May to much acclaim and radio plays including BBC Scotland and Amazing Radio.

Business forced to take down giant inflatable of Michael Myers after backlash

STV News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges comment:

"Big Duck Bathrooms of Dennistoun have let us down, they have let themselves down, but, worst of all, they have let Michael Myers down."

Big duck explodes on Glasgow street as locals left fuming at mess

Congratulations to the Daily Record, which waddles away with our Headline of the Day Award.

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"Kemi maintained her attack on the machine. Everything was their fault. The previous Conservative government was entirely blameless. Especially her. In her own mind she was the saviour of the post office operatives. Though judging by the laughs from the back of the room, they don’t see it in quite the same way." John Crace says Kemi Badenoch was seen at her brittle, narcissistic worst while giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

Alwyn Turner tells a story that has dropped out of remembrance of the first world war: "On 19 July 1919 - declared by the government to be Peace Day - parades were staged all over the country to mark the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and at many of those parades there were demonstrations and protests. A banner in Glasgow sarcastically announced: '400,000 unemployed ex-servicemen. A grateful country will never forget you'."

Patrick Howse asks if Labour will restore the BBC to the national broadcaster we need it to be or believe it can benefit from a subservient corporation afraid to hold power to account.

"Many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always - like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time." Jonathan Coe chooses five favourite recent political novels.

Hannah Long believes that Night of the Hunter is a Christmas film. Hear her: "This promise - that evil is powerful, but ultimately ridiculous and defeatable - carries us into the final hope of the last scene, set at Christmastime. It says, in the least sentimental way possible, that it’s possible to move beyond abuse."

"‘The Whiting’ is an absent-minded vicar so passionate about entomology that he forgets everything in pursuit of an elusive Wood White or a Purple Emperor. Then there’s old Smokoe Joe, a gruff charcoal-burner with a gargantuan nose who lives in the Chase; and the boys’ nemesis, the ponderous local bobby, Sergeant Bunting." Helena Drysdale celebrates Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

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Roz Savage explains why she has tabled her Climate and Nature Bill: "While I was out there, alone in the middle of the ocean, I witnessed the beauty and strength of the natural world first hand. I realised how utterly reliant we are on the health of our planet, and how vulnerable we are to the Earth’s changing climate." 

"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.

Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.

Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.

"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.

"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.

Stuart Henry broadcasting on Radio One in 1973

Here's a clip of the Radio One and Radio Luxemburg DJ Stuart Henry in action and talking about his approach to the job. I wrote about him when choosing Queen Bitch by David Bowie on Sunday.

A product of Stewart's Melville College and Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, Henry was an actor before he went into music radio. His career on the pirate stations was short-lived because he suffered terribly with seasickness, but he found safe harbour at the BBC until his health began to decline.

In his obituary of Henry, Chris Welch quoted Johnny Beerling, a former controller of Radio One:

"Stuart was a great guy. He used to do a spot called 'She's Leaving Home', which was all about missing youngsters. 

He showed a concern for social action broadcasting a long time before Radio 1 was ever involved with it. He'd say, 'I'm no asking you to go back, my friend, what I want you to do is let your parents know you're all right." He'd get people to ring in and make contact. (He used the old Beatles song as a theme tune.) 

He also campaigned about nuclear testing and had an environment spot on his Saturday morning show, before it was a popular issue."

Shelagh McDonald: Mirage

Shelagh McDonald wrote a piece in the Guardian under the title 'I disappeared for 30 years'.

It wasn't my intention to walk out of my own life and vanish, especially when things were going so well. I was an ambitious 24-year-old folk singer and had just started work on my third album. The second had been a critical success and had really started to get me noticed.

A bad trip was the catalyst for unexpected change. I took LSD at a party, expecting the effects to be short-term, but ended up losing three or four days. I remember wandering across London, experiencing terrifying hallucinations, then being helped on to a plane with no clue where I was going. 

Touching down, I recognised Glasgow and my parents' stern faces. They'd never approved of me becoming a singer; perhaps this is what they'd always expected.

The hallucinations continued for weeks. I remember lying in bed at my parents' house, hearing the phone ring, but if any of the calls were for me, they were never passed on. My address book hadn't made the journey with me, and I didn't have the money to travel. My friends were all down south and though I desperately wanted to see them, I became completely cut off. 

Over 18 months I began to recover, though when I tried to sing, all that emerged was a strangled croak.

But come back she did, after 30 years of a vagabond life.

This is a track from McDonald's first album, imaginatively entitled Album, which came out in 1970.

The obvious comparison to make is with Sandy Denny. And, sure enough, Wikipedia says:

On her first two albums, McDonald was backed up by many notables within the English folk-rock scene, including Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Danny Thompson, Keith Tippett, Keith Christmas, the Fotheringay rhythm section, as well as Ian Whitman, Roger Powell and Michael Evans, then members of Mighty Baby. 

Iona Zajac: Red Corn Poppies

The Skinny interviewed Iona Zajac last year when Red Corn Poppies was released as her second single:

Your new single Red Corn Poppies is beautiful. What’s it about?

Everything is dry and dead and unclean
And love spits for information’
(Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems)

I kept returning to Hannah Sullivan’s collection when I was living in Woodlands, Glasgow in November 2018. The streets were a mass of wet cardboard and browning curtains, getting anywhere felt like trudging through wet wool. 

One evening I went into a local fruit and veg shop after a very long day, to find everything inside had gone off, just filled with mouldy vegetables and wilting flowers. But for some reason I couldn’t leave without buying something – I think I salvaged a single plum. 

Red Corn Poppies is about the thing that wills you forward when all you want to do is sit down on the pavement, and let it all go.

Why everybody loves Pat Nevin

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I love Pat Nevin. I loved him as a player at Chelsea and I love him as a broadcaster now. I think everybody loves Pat Nevin.

The other night he was the summariser on a Chelsea game and named a change Graham Potter needed to make and why - bring on Aubameyang, even though he's not looked that interested lately, so Havertz could play a little deeper, which suits his game - just before Potter made it. And the change worked.

That is the sort of analysis listeners crave and so rarely get.

And then there was his hinterland. Here was a player who appeared on art quiz programmes hosted by George Melly.

So when I saw his memoir The Accidental Footballer in the library I grabbed it. And I'm not disappointed:

When Annabel wasn't around, if I wasn't eating at the Chelsea Kitchen you would find me at another cheap café called Vince's at Fulham Broadway with another friend, John Millar, the new young full back at Chelsea. I always tried to help and integrate the young players coming through, especially but not exclusively if they had come down from Scotland. 

In the café we started chatting about 'fitba' and 'Glesga' to a gruff, Rangers-supporting, six-foot-tall Glaswegian called Wullie who worked as a road sweeper. We started to see him regularly in the café and I suppose what follows tells you a lot about why I loved London so much, 

A few months after we'd met him Wullie asked, ''So wit ur ye daein the night, wee man?' 

'Actually I am going down to the South Bank.' I sheepishly said. 'There's a retrospective on about the Garman film director Werner Herzog and he is doing a talk afterwards that I want to hear...' I tailed off expecting a torrent of abuse from the road sweeper for being a culture snob. 

'Funny that,' says Wullie. 'So am I'. 

After months of talking 'fitba', spouting nonsense and judging each other as rough 'Glesga boys' it turned out that among other things he had a deep love of the arts, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Wagner's Ring Cycle and was also a friend of Sir Peter Hall! 

As to the question of whether Pat Nevin and Terry Butcher are cousins, it seems they are not blood relatives but are related by marriage.

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Basic Income Conversation and Compass have published new research modelling a fiscally neutral basic income that could reverse the poverty and inequality rises of the last 45 years.

Maxim Osipov describes the journey of those, like him, who chose exile rather than remaining as their country invaded Ukraine: "On the way to the airport, you drove through Moscow. Although this is where you were born, where you studied and lived, it has long been enemy territory. Parting with people is hard, nearly impossible; parting with Moscow is easy." 

"You might imagine that more conventional forms of modern therapy as delivered by a psychologist, counsellor or clinical social worker cannot be harmful because the treatments involve ‘just talking’. Regrettably, this is not the case." Yevgeny Botanovis, Alexander Williams and John Sakalukis on the drive to identify psychotherapeutic approaches that are not only ineffective but actively harmful.

The brainchild of Orkney-born musician Merlyn Driver, Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds is a multi-artist album inspired by the Eurasian curlew. Such celebrations inspire us to protect what we have, says Karen Lloyd.

Paul English reports on the search for the Glasgow Garden Festival: "A team of archaeologists is beginning an excavation in the only remaining part of the 120-acre site in search of touchstones evoking memories of the six-month festival that ran between spring and autumn in 1988." 

We all know  Margaret Rutherford's father murdered his own father (who was Tony Benn's great-grandfather) by banging him repeatedly on the head with a chamber-pot in Matlock. Matthew Sweet dives deep into the case.

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Richard Sears examines research suggesting that the overuse of psychiatric drugs is worsening public mental health in America.

"Each day on Twitter someone is held up for widespread public ridicule, and you want to make sure that it’s not you, because your job in life is never to do anything that might result in you getting made fun of by others." Freddie deBoer suggests we should not spend all day ridiculing others from afar on social media.

In the post-war era, Coventry was rebuilt as an optimistic, modernist city. But the selling off of the city centre since the 1980s has made this year's City of Culture feel more like a City for Developers, says Owen Hatherley.

"The gaze of the elf on the child’s real world (as opposed to play world) resonates with the purpose of the panopticon, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century design for a model prison (a central tower in a circular structure, surrounded by cells). Backlighting in the central tower made it impossible for prisoners to discern whether or not they were being watched." Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin uncover the sinister side of The Elf on the Shelf.

"Eardley’s short career is one of the most fascinating of her generation. She is a feverish, romantic successor to Goya and Soutine, and in these Glasgow pictures she is essentially a storyteller, capturing a community as it vanishes. The other pole of her painting life had nothing to do with urban Glasgow, but was situated among the seascapes and fields of Catterline, a village on the Kincardineshire coast that she began to visit in the early 1950s." Andrew O'Hagan celebrates the artist Joan Eardley.

Ed Simon on the rediscovery of the work of Thomas Traherne: "Circumstances surrounding the occasional rediscovery of the poetry of the 17th-century divine Thomas Traherne are as something out of one of his strange lyrics. Intimations of the allegorical, when in the winter of 1896—more than two centuries after he’d died—and some of his manuscript poetry was discovered in a London book stall among a heap that was 'about to be trashed.' ... How eerily appropriate that among that refuse was Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which included his observation that the “world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.” Not until he chances upon it in a London book stall."

Doves: Black and White Town

Doves, says Wikipedia, are an alt rock band from Manchester. Black and White Town was a 2005 single taken from their album Some Cities and reached number 6 in the UK singles chart.

It has also been widely used by BBC Sport - this video was directed by Lynne Ramsay and shot on the Summerston estate in Glasgow.

This all sounds authoritative, but I just heard it on Radio 6 Music and liked it. But then another Doves song has already been a Sunday music video.

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"Many Liberal Democrats don’t know that the late great Paddy Ashdown leaned heavily on the concept of a Basic Income as a fundamental component of his 'Citizens' Britain', arguing that 'every step we take towards a basic income liberates power in the hands of the citizen.'" Daniel Mermelstein believes universal basic income is a fundamentally liberal policy and a vote winner.

Shane Burke says the status quo in undercover policing threatens political rights.

"It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end." Lorna Finlayson explains why she walked out of school at 13.

Henry Grabar looks at what New York could do if it took a quarter of its roads away from cars.

"Upon arrival in Scotland, Heron was thrown in for his debut against Morton in a League Cup tie; the Jamaican adding Celtic’s second goal in a 2-0 win with a 20-yard first-half strike." Did you know Gil Scott-Heron's father played for Celtic? Craig Stephen will tell you all about him.

Stefan Sagrott looks at Edinburgh's Innocent Railway.

Secrets of the Glasgow Subway

This is the third oldest underground railway system in the world. Only London and Budapest got there before Glasgow.

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Mark Mills was never Kaiser Bill's batman, but he did learn a lot from being Vince Cable's intern.

Jeremy Corbyn will never be prime minister. Or so Louis Mian reckons.

Anoosh Chakelian reminds us that children's fiction can be political: "Although The Demon Headmaster: Total Control ... is not explicitly political, the effects of successive Tory government education reforms since the last book in 2002 weigh heavy on the plot and pupils."

"The 'tough guy' narrative is seductive. It suggests we have control over our fate, that we can will cancer away. These are lies we tell ourselves. And for some patients that’s helpful. It gets them through the day. For them, it’s a useful tool. But courageousness is a standard that no sick person should feel like they have to meet." Josh Friedman, a cancer survivor himself, thinks some of the reaction to John McCain's diagnosis has been unhelpful.

When Saturday Comes says Glasgow’s ghostly Cathkin Park, once the home of Third Lanark, stands as a warning to football’s wayward owners.

"The internet tells me that Jane's Country Year was Malcolm Saville's favourite of his own books." Front Free Endpaper reproduces Bernard Bowerman's illustrations (one of which you can see here).

Lord Bonkers and the Ukip gorilla lady

A Ukip candidate in Glasgow says she is sexually attracted to gorillas.

I don't know how this will go down with the voters, but I am reminded of a post on this blog by Lord Bonkers.

Explaing a viral video of a gorilla at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire apparently dancing, he wrote:

There is nothing the older residents of the Bonkers Estate enjoy more than the tea dances I host at the village hall. 

However, we have a problem. The toll taken by the local industries of Stilton mining and pork pie production mean that many more ladies than gentlemen survive to enjoy an active retirement. 

A couple of years ago the ladies prevailed upon me to provide them with more dancing partners. After no little thought, the solution sprang upon me: train the gorillas at Twycross Zoo. 

This initiative has proved a great success. When I proposed it some warned me of the danger of ravishment, but I am happy to report that to date no gorilla has complained of molestation.

Nine, Dalmuir West (1962)

Two years ago I fell in love with The Elephant Will Never Forget - John Krish's ridiculously moving account of the last day of London's trams in 1952.

Nine, Dalmuir West, made by Kevin Brownlow, shows the last day of Glasgow's trams 10 years later. (Click on the still above to view it on the British Film Institute website.)

Brownlow was obviously inspired by Krish: in fact he gets a mention in the opening titles.

The BFI site says:

Kevin Brownlow's portrait of the last days of Glasgow's tram system centres on the last tram to run in 1962, accentuating the mood of the final journey by contrasting shots of the event to the funky sounds of Joe Meek and The Tornados' Telstar, a symbol of the modern world to which the tram no longer belongs. 

As with his feature Winstanley, Brownlow tempers the elegiac qualities of the film with brutal reality. There is no nostalgia in this portrait. Regret at the passing of this form of transport is balanced by the description of the city it served: a harsh, poverty-stricken environment in which a tram was one of the more available pleasures.

Glasgow was the last British city to lose its trams - the Blackpool system continued as a tourist attraction. Trolleybuses lasted in Bradford until as late as 1972.

The following year saw massive increases in the price of oil. If these systems had survived only a few more years, they might never have closed.

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"This tells you everything you need to know about the desperate, empty campaign being run by a gang of politicians who’ve stepped beyond mere incompetence, and have ended up somewhere truly nasty, surrounded by supporters who love every bit of it." Rupert Myers is damning about the Brexiteers' assault on President Obama.

Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.

"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.

It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.

Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.

The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.