East Midlands Railway cancels 20 fast services a day because of problems with its new trains

East Midlands Railways has admitted that its problems with its new trains have not all been caused by the recent hot weather.

BBC News reports:

A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages.

Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary".

The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield.

EMR did not say how long the timetable changes would be in place for, but said in a statement they would remain in place while "EMR works with the manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, to resolve disruption for customers as soon as possible".

And the Guardian adds more detail:

EMR is cancelling about 20 fast trains a day between London, Sheffield and Nottingham, while others will also be short-formed and are likely to be crowded. Its new class 810 fleet, previously labelled Auroras when their launch was heralded less than a year ago, have suffered from what EMR has called “performance and reliability issues”.

The operator also criticised Hitachi’s maintenance of the existing fleet that the Auroras were due to replace, the class 222 trains, which it said had “significantly impacted upon EMR’s ability to run a consistent intercity service”.

Interestingly, BBC News ran a story only yesterday under the headline:

East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?

In it, my best friend from school, now secretary of the East Midlands branch of the passenger advocacy group Railfuture, said:

"a bit more transparency" around a recovery plan and the issues the operator was facing would be helpful for passengers.

We are not without influence.

The 810 trains are bi-modal – they're able to take power from overhead wires but also have their own diesel engines. They were ordered on Chris Grayling's watch after the Conservative government cancelled its plans to electrify the whole of the St Pancras main line. The wires run out at Wigston, a few miles south of Leicester.

But it's not all bad news. We're getting new taller ticket barriers at Market Harborough station to stop people without tickets boarding the trains that aren't running.

The Joy of Six 1497

"A child who grew up in the United Kingdom, attended British schools, made British friends, and considers this country their home will find, at the threshold of adulthood, that the system treats them as a temporary guest. That is a remarkable way to build community cohesion." Labour's plans on earned settlement are a social policy disaster in the making, argues Colin Yeo.

Alan Rusbridger asks if Britain has stopped believing the freedom to protest: "The police burst in, broke up the gathering and arrested everyone involved. They carted them off to the cells, confiscated their phones and, in at least one case, raided their home and took away all the family laptops and hard drives. The crime? Er, well, there may not have been one. Welcome to Britain in 2026 and the increasingly harsh way we handle not even protest, but the very thought of protest."

"Two centuries ago, [Thomas] Spence and his followers fought for universal cash payments because enclosure had made ordinary people too dependent on landowners for their livelihoods. They did not emphasise that money would be good for people, as proponents do now. They argued that money was owed to people." Will Glovinsky explores the historical roots of the idea of a universal basic income.

Kate Moore on the major hedgerow restoration programme at the National Trust’s Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire.

Municipal Dreams says Lincoln offers an interesting case study of the early drive to build affordable housing for working people: "Back then this was almost universally understood to be, of necessity, council housing, and the drive to build came – admittedly with political flavouring and different degrees of intensity – from all parties. There was also significant influence from local pressure groups, generally not radical in politics but sharing a common belief in the duty of the local state to house those in need."

"The character of Raffles looks forward to Bulldog Drummond, the Saint and, even more so, James Bond: the unflappable elegance, the insouciant brutality and the brand names (Raffles’s Sullivans, Bond’s Chesterfields and Morlands), the insistence on the best champagne and on the shaken-not-stirred martinis. The escapades of both heroes deploy the latest miracles of technology." Ferdinand Mount considers E.W. Hornung and his anti-hero Raffles.

The Joy of Six 1437

Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."

"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.

Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.

"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.

Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."

"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.

Poundland sold for less than £1

In what I think is a Liberal England first, the Financial Times wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The photograph shows a branch of the chain in Lincoln. The Lost Pubs Project says:

The Lion Hotel was situated at 169 High Street. This pub was present by 1826 and closed in 1988. It was also known as The White Lion.  It is now used as a branch of Poundland. At one time it contained a cattle pound for cattle that grazed Holmes Common.

GUEST POST The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today

Fresh from a canal holiday made difficult by unannounced closures, Peter Chambers looks at the many challenges facing the Canal & River Trust.

The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans. 

Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases. 

This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable it is to link more.

At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.

The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.

Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB. 

The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’. 

During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.

This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution. 

Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.

The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways. 

Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome). 

It is probably best to moor outside the Queen’s Head (closed on Mondays) and make your way into town. Alternatively you can cross the border near Chirk and press on to Llangollen, with its excellent hostelries. Ideally do both.

Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government. 

The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges. 

The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.

Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.

In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.

In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.

Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

It's time we had a talk about the birds and the bees

I saw a butterfly this morning. It was only a cabbage white but, as it's the first I've seen this year, still worthy of celebration.

Many people have noticed the lack of butterflies and bees this summer.

This video from Professor David Goulson tells us that one poor summer for insects after a long run of wet weather is nothing to worry about.  

Then he looks at the long term, and it's frightening. It's not just insects that are disappearing: the birds that depend on them for food are getting rarer too.

As I wrote a couple of years ago: 

I can't remember the last time I heard a cuckoo, yet when I was a child you expected to hear one on any spring or summer walk.

At least Lincoln Lib Dems are trying to do something about it.

Football Club Name of the Day: Southwell City FC

Bob Hardy, the late Bishop of Lincoln, once described his diocese as "two thousand square miles of bugger all". But it used to be even bigger. In 1837 it reached as far south as Hertfordshire.

In the same year, the Archdeaconry of Nottingham was transferred to Lincoln from York. In 1884 it became a diocese in its own right with Southwell Minster as its cathedral.

But Southwell has never been a city, even though the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica described it as one.

According to the Wikipedia article on city status in the United Kingdom it was not made one in 1884 because it was a village without a borough corporation and therefore could not petition the Queen.

That article is an entertaining rabbit hole, incidentally. You will learn that Rochester lost its city status in the 1990s because it failed to react nimbly enough to the endless local government reorganisations we ow go in for.

But the point of this article is to salute the chutzpah, or whatever its Nottinghamshire equivalent is, of the local football team, which has always played as Southwell City. 

The club's website (sort of) explains:

Southwell City was formed in 1893 and plays its football on the Memorial Ground in the shadow of the magnificent Norman Minister which became a Cathedral just prior to the club’s formation. Hence the name Southwell City, despite the fact that City status has never officially been conferred on the market town.

Good for it!

Is the question of city status closed? Southwell may not have been a borough in the 1880s, but it does have an active town council now. And if it were the smallest city in England, taking the title from Wells, that would surely attract visitors and boost its economy.

If this were an old British film, there would be a meeting of townsfolk about this continued slight and a spirited girl would get up and say "Come on! What are we waiting for?"

Sighcology: Davids Garnett, Lloyd George, Lawrence, Copperfield, Rook and Bronstein

Here's my column ('Sighcology') from the Summer issue of the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

The theme of the issue was 'David', and these are the thoughts I came up with.

Davids Garnett, Lloyd George, Lawrence, Copperfield, Rook and Bronstein

There’s a law that whenever you submit a piece of academic writing you immediately come across something you wish you had known about and been able to include. I recently published a chapter on Dickens and antisemitism that drew parallels between Oliver Twist and the local cults of unofficial boy saints, supposedly the victims of ritual killings by Jews, that flourished in the Middle Ages. Just after sending it off, I learnt that – shockingly – a textbook used in British schools until the 1980s stated that the blood libel was true in the case of the most famous of these ‘saints’, Little St Hugh of Lincoln.

Many years before, I completed a Masters dissertation on the romances of the 19th-century writer Richard Jefferies. One of these, Bevis: The Story of a Boy, was published in 1882 as a three-volume novel for adults but was gradually supplied with the apparatus that allowed it to be sold as a children’s classic. In the 1930s it acquired illustrations by E.H. Shepard:  the map on the endpapers had been drawn back in 1904 by an 11-year-old David Garnett.

I was reading Bevis as the adult novel it had once been, noting how Jefferies was aware that the freedom to play and wander it celebrated existed only because his young heroes were the sons of farmers rather than agricultural labourers. So I wish I had happened upon Lucy Masterman’s biography of her husband Charles Masterman. He was the minister who piloted David Lloyd George’s Health Insurance Act through the Commons in the teeth of opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession.

Lucy Masterman remembers a stay with Lloyd George and his family:

"If we kept the law about trespassing when we were children … we should have nowhere to play but a dusty strip of grass by the high road." I never remember during all our visit passing a 'trespassers will be prosecuted' notice without him remarking “I hate that sort of thing.”

Yes, children’s freedom is an intensely political subject. The best summation of the debate is in Victor Watson’s Reading Series Fiction, where he discusses the children’s ‘camping and tramping’ fiction Bevis helped to inspire:

The rural background to all those friendly and welcoming fictional farmers was, in reality, one of economic and social stagnation in which farmers had to supplement their incomes in any way they could. When farmers began to prosper and agriculture became intensive, an entire genre of children’s fiction was effectively wiped out by Common Market farming subsidies. And at about the same time the Beeching cuts closed down the branch lines that had taken so many fictional children by steam to their favourite holiday destinations.

******

Is D.H. Lawrence – that’s David Herbert Richards Lawrence – much read these days? Back in the Seventies, when we were taught by teachers who had been trained by people who had studied under F.R. Leavis, he was a fixture in the curriculum.

Not only did I study The Rainbow for A level, I kept a second-hand selection of his literary criticism by me as a charm or for inspiration. I don’t know if it included anything from Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, but there you will find his most famous critical principle:

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

And Lawrence is right. The idea that the artist’s intention inhabits a work like a thin ghost is mistaken, as is the belief that it is this intention that gives the work its meaning. But then the idea that any work of art has just one meaning is wrong too. That’s a belief you see reflected in everyday criticism of popular music, where if a song can be seen to be about drugs or about sex then that becomes its real meaning and all other mere disguise

The truth is that works of art that remain of interest to us are the ones that reveal new meanings as the world changes around them. If you have just one thing to say, you don’t write a poem or produce a sculpture, you write a memo or put it on a coffee mug.

*****

The adult David Copperfield can be a bit of a cold fish, so let’s quote George Orwell’s praise for Dickens’s depiction of him as a child:

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child.

******

The novelist and illustrator David Rook has disappeared from view. There is no Wikipedia entry for him and the website of a dealer who sometimes has his artwork suggests that Rook is still alive. In fact, he died in a car crash 1970 at the age of 35.

Rook’s eclipse is surprising, because he specialised in the sort of nature stories that find a loyal following. Not only that: one of his Exmoor novels was filmed as Run Wild, Run Free in 1967 and a second as The Belstone Fox after his death. And the Disney film The Hound and the Fox sounds as though it owes more to that second novel (The Ballad of the Belstone Fox) than to the one it was officially adapting.

Rook gets a mention here because Run Wild, Run Free, which was based on his novel The White Colt, is about a boy whom we would now probably place somewhere on the autism spectrum. And the film is a firm believer in the ‘iceberg mother’ theory of the condition’s genesis.

That’s the thing about the Sixities: if there was a child with difficulties, it was always Sylvia Syms’s fault.

*****

David Bronstein drew a match for the world chess championship in 1951, but under the rules the reigning champion, his fellow Soviet Mikhail Botvinnik, kept the title. Bronstein remained one of the greats of the game for another three decades.

The story is told that Bronstein once spent more than 30 minutes over his opening move in a tournament game. The audience thought: “This is wonderful. The maestro is working out a whole new opening scheme at the board.” But when one of his fellow grandmasters asked what he’d been thinking about all that time, he replied: “I was trying to remember where I’d left my hotel keys.”

The Ukranian-born Bronstein fell foul of the authorities when he declined to sign a round robin condemning the defection of the leading Soviet player Viktor Korchnoi. His own father had been sent to the Gulag because of an official belief, right or wrong, that he was related to Trotsky. There were also rumours that Bronstein had been put under pressure not to win his match against the model Soviet citizen Botvinnik.

But maybe he had already had his revenge. There is a story I have always believed, but am struggling to prove, that he named his son Lev. This made his full name Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

A book on medieval history used in schools until the 1980s treated the blood libel as fact

Here's something I wish I had discovered before I wrote my book chapter on Oliver Twist and anti-Semitism, with its discussion of the supposed killing of innocent Christian boys by Jews.

A history book by John Hooper Harvey, which was widely used in school sixth forms until the 1980s, maintained that there had been just such a killing in Lincoln in the 13th century.

A post by Dr J.A. Cameron on his blog Stained Glass Attitudes records:

One passage in his popular history book The Plantagenets (1948), praising Edward I’s statesmanship in removing the “exotic mass” of the Jewish community which in turn “united the national body”.

Additionally Harvey attempted convince his readers of the veracity of the most infamous case of Blood Libel: the accusation in 1255 of the Jewish community of Lincoln ritually crucifying a young boy called Hugh (later given a kind of informal local canonisation as Little St Hugh of Lincoln) upon the discovery of his body in a well. 

In his most disturbing show of unwavering positivism, Harvey claimed that because he’d read the original chancery rolls, the medieval court’s judgement on the case was “unassailable”. 

After repeated complaints from Jewish groups and even the Catholic Church in England, his publishers gave him a chance in 1984 to amend the text. He refused, and the book, which had been a mainstay of sixth-form history classes, went out of print.

It may be no surprise that Harvey was a member of a right-wing extremist faction in the 1930s:

He joined rabid anti-Semite Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League, which found Italian fascism a bit too airy-fairy and instead met with the Nazi party and adopted ideas of Aryan supremacy, removal of citizenship for Jews and put a full-blown  swastika on their logo. 

While the British Union of Fascists allegedly hit a high of 50,000 members, the Imperial Fascist League only ever mustered a few hundred.

Harvey was not in good company. This wasn’t just right-wing, it was full-on National Socialism with all of the biological racism that went with it.

Harvey was investigated by the authorities after the war broke out, but not interned. When you read this quotation from him, it's hard to see why:

"If Britain defeat Hitler it is a victory for Jews all over the world, if Britain is defeated by Hitler it is a defeat for the Jews and Britain would have a chance to put herself on the map again."

Do I hear a faint echoes of Brexit in the idea of Britain putting herself on the map again? 

Harvey's life and career - he was a leading historian of English medieval architecture - stand as a warning about the dark places into which romantic nationalism can lead you.

Lincoln man 'forced to take action' after overgrown bushes obstruct washing line

LincolnshireLive wins our coveted Headline of the Day Award.

Pay £96 to read my thoughts on Dickens and anti-Semitism

That's the hardback price. The paperback and Kindle editons are much cheaper.

I have written a chapter of Racism in Psychology: Challenging Theory, Practice and Institutions, which is edited by my old friend Craig Newnes and published by Routledge.

It will be published on 29 April, but some copies have already appeared on Amazon.

My chapter, which I will admit is a strange inclusion, looks at my own obsession with Oliver Twist and the way I have written about it in the part without touching on the novel's anti-Semitism.

I look at tellings of the story other than that by Dickens - notably David Lean's 1948 film and Will Eisner's graphic novel Fagin the Jew.

And I draw parallels between Oliver and local saints like Little St Hugh of Lincoln - Christian children supposedly murdered by Jews.

"Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more"

Embed from Getty Images

Fifty years ago, the Labour MP for my home town of Lincoln was Geoffrey de Freitas. In those days, Lincoln was a very safe Labour seat and Geoffrey de Freitas was a very wealthy man.

In common with many MPs of that era, de Freitas did not maintain a home in his constituency (a practice that at least had the merit of incurring no controversial expense claims). Indeed, he spent little time in his constituency at all. On the rare occasions he paid a visit, he and his wife would get in the Rolls Royce and drive north to Lincoln, his chauffeur following in a Morris Traveller. When the convoy reached the constituency boundary, it came to a halt. Mr and Mrs de Freitas would get out of the Rolls and into the Morris, and make a suitably modest entry into the city. The chauffeur followed at a discreet distance in the Rolls.

Simon Titley died almost six years ago, but I thought of that anecdote today because it opens an article he wrote for Liberal Democrat Voice in 2008 about politicians who claim to 'listen'.

As Simon went on to observe:

Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more. In the 1950s, most MPs – not just Geoffrey de Freitas – put in only token appearances in their constituencies, while local councillors were never seen from one election to the next. Yet electoral turnouts and party memberships were at an all-time high. 

Nowadays, most elected politicians conduct regular surgeries and carry unprecedented loads of casework; they are accessible online via e-mails, websites and blogs; they deliver leaflets and appear regularly in various local media; and they conduct frequent surveys and polls. Today, a politician with Geoffrey de Freitas’s hauteur would not even get selected, never mind elected. Yet people still moan that politicians are “out of touch”.

He goes on to argue that there is certainly a widespread sense of powerlessness and alienation among voters but that, given all the listening that is going on, it is doubtful that more of it is the solution.

Instead be recommends the report of the Joseph Rowntree Trust's Power inquiry, which had just been published and is still worth reading.

Simon was writing at a time when the whole party was being urged to listen, but his words still have resonance:

Politicians of all parties must stand for something, not blow with the wind. Their job is to lead, not follow; to persuade, not accept public opinion as a given. This does not mean being arrogant. Politicians should engage in debate and connect with people’s concerns. But they can do this effectively only if they have a clear sense of right and wrong, and they should not be afraid to communicate that moral clarity to the electorate. The people have the right to elect or reject them on that basis. But any politician who has no idea of what he stands for and instead can only ask “you tell me” is unfit for office.

You can find an archive of Simon Titley's writings on the Liberator website.

Ross Pepper to fight Louth and Horncastle for the Lib Dems

Ross Pepper has been chosen by Louth and Horncastle Liberal Democrats as their candidate at the next general election, reports Horncastle News.

He has previously fought two other Lincolnshire seats: Lincoln in 2015 and Sleaford and North Hykeham at a 2016 by-election and at the general election the following year.

A.G. Macdonell was twice Liberal candidate for Lincoln

High Bridge and the Glory Hole, Lincoln

A.G. Macdonell is remembered today, it at all, for his book England Their England and its description of a village cricket match.

An old post on Lion & Unicorn (retweeted today because Macdonell was born on 3 November 1895) shows that there was far more to him than that.

In particular, he was a Liberal and twice fought Lincoln for the party at general elections:

He was also involved in political campaigning at home, standing as the Liberal Party candidate in Lincoln in the general elections of 1923 and 1924. The seat had been Liberal until 1918, but winning it back it was a pretty hopeless prospect by this stage, and he was unsuccessful, coming third on both occasions. 

Championing the League of Nations was obviously a key plank in his platform. He described the League’s charter as "a treaty of mutual guarantee", and believed that the organization was the only way to transcend the rivalry that lay at the heart of international politics: "The whole world is in the shadow of the Franco-German quarrel."

His domestic concerns were evident in a 1924 speech, in which he said that "there was much talk of co-operation between Conservatives and Liberals, but he was absolutely against anything of the kind. There was a tendency to say too much about the Socialist menace and forget the Conservative menace."

Macdonell polled 23.8 per cent in 1923 and 17.6 per cent in 1924. At last year's general election the Liberal Democrat candidate polled 2.6 per cent.

Six of the Best 826

"Justice requires civility as well as rectitude. The bombastic and the wrong can be stopped, as Joe McCarthy was stopped." Cicero's Songs makes the case for civility in politics.

"The songs on Village Green Preservation Society aren’t really about village greens and steam trains, or saving ‘little shops, china cups and virginity’... the subject Ray Davies was writing about was nostalgia – or rather, the ways in which nostalgia can lead you astray, falsifying memories and leaving you yearning for something which may never have existed in the first place." Andy Miller says the Kinks' great album is more relevant than ever.

London Reconnections explains how a London Overground train coming to a sudden halt outside Peckham Rye station began a chain of events that led to over 80 passengers standing at trackside beside the live rail.

Blitz Detective on fatalities and bombings in Lincolnshire during the second world war.

"As big-budget musical epics go, Camelot, with its glorious Oscar-winning costumes and production design, is nothing short of a dream; the film’s vast scale emblematic of Arthur’s full-to-bursting idealism." Liz Smith makes the case for the film musical often dismissed as a flop.

Susanna Zaraysky introduces us to the Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish.

St Pancras to New Holland Pier in 1976

Footage from a rail tour in August 1976. On the way up we catches glimpses of Leicester station and a long-vanished signal box and of class 76 locomotives on the Woodhead route.

New Holland Pier was where the ferry to Hull left from the Lincolnshire shore of the Humber.

The service ended when the bridge opened in 1981 and New Holland Pier station (which I visited a couple of years after this video was shot) closed too. Here the paddle steamer Lincoln Castle takes you down the coast to Grimsby.

Coming back the train passes through the lost station of Lincoln St Marks.

The ghost trains from Sheffield to Cleethorpes

The Brigg Line Group, its website says, exists to promote services on the Sheffield - Worksop - Retford - Gainsborough - Lincoln line and on the branch line from Gainsborough via Brigg and Grimsby to Cleethorpes.

Northern Rail operates a daily serviceon the Sheffield - Lincoln route, but the Sheffield to Cleethorpes trains run on Saturdays only.

The Brigg Line Group argues that the Lincoln service needs to be improved and the Cleethorpes service should operate six days a week.

And I find that on Saturday I photographed a departure board showing one of these Cleethorpes ghost trains.

I travelled on this line a couple of times before it lost its daily service in 1993. If it were in the South East of England it would enjoy daily services and probably be electrified too.

Six of the Best 699

"Grenfell Tower should mark a point of no return. No return to the frenzied deregulation, cost-cutting and rampant inequality of the last four decades. These are not new evils. They have been lurking for many years. But it took the light of a burning building for the whole nation to see them." Jonathan Freedland says this disaster must be a turning point.

And Henry Porter says it has become a metaphor for Britain's year from hell.

Alwyn Turner looks at the appeal of revolutionary violence to the ageing Labour left: "When the Tories and their friends in Fleet Street attacked the current Labour leadership for past association with terrorists and enemies of the country, it wasn’t a smear campaign; it was an admittedly lurid but essentially truthful account. It may not have had the impact on the general election that was intended, but the facts remain."

Politics meets neuropsychology as Jerry Useem finds that leaders tend to lose mental capacities - most notably for reading other people - that were essential to their rise.

"The murky water of Dunwich conceals so much: not just porpoises but old merchant houses and graves and churches and even, perhaps most astonishingly of all, an ancient aqueduct." Tom Cox visits Britain's lost city.

Millie Thom on the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln Fair.

Six of the Best 692

Nick Barlow says those hoping for a British Macron have failed to grasp the fundamental differences between French and British politics.

The further away the problem, the easier it feels to resolve the ethics." Matthew Spencer discusses what the environment and development communities can learn from each other when it comes to achieving political impact,

Isabelle Fraser, daughter of the documentary maker Nick Fraser, on his stroke and accepting a special Bafta on his behalf.

David Butterfield offers 10 commandments for the public house. He is right about most things and "the handled glass and its quaint dimples" is an abomination.

"It was a surprise to find, when visiting Marion Park in Charlton where much of the film’s famous park sequences were shot, that Antonioni and his sound recordist, Robin Gregory, had merely emphasised something that was already there." Adam Scovell in the importance of sound in Blow-Up.

In the Middle Ages there was a superstition that the king of England must not enter Lincoln. Caitlin Green examines its origins. She mentions that Leicester had the same superstition. As Richard III discovered, it was well founded.

Nottingham to Lincoln by water

The British Waterways hotel boat Water Wanderer makes its way from Nottingham to Lincoln via the River Trent and the Roman canal the Fossdyke.

I would guess this dates from around 1970.