Cromford Moor Mine and the legend of the Black Rocks

Assailed by hay fever, flying insects and stinging nettles, Gareth Icke is our guide for a walk in the hills above the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire/

With that setting, disused lead mines, white spoil heaps and unlikely-sounding local folklore, this video ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

For more like it, subscribe to The Walk on YouTube.

Labour councillor defects to Tories after seeking to fight particular seat for Lib Dems, but there's something more interesting here

There's a story on MyLondon about a deselected Labour councillor in Brent who has joined the Tories after first demanding to be allowed to fight a particular seat for the Liberal Democrats.

I am reminded of the days when David Icke wanted to be the Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, but wasn't interested in any other seat.

The MyLondon report says:

A text message sent to the LDRS from a source at the Brent Liberal Democrat Group appears to show him expressing disappointment at the Party for not offering him the seat he demanded in Alperton. Instead, he was told "seats are not given away like sweets".

Brent Liberal Democrats Chair, Virginia Bonham-Carter, told the LDRS, whilst the party did have conversations with Cllr Rajan-Seelan about joining the party, they "decided quickly that he wasn’t acceptable to us, as he could not meet our expectations."

She added: "Labour’s decline in Brent has been clear for some time, and this latest episode involving a deselected Labour Councillor underlines how deep their problems run. Local people deserve councillors who focus on residents’ needs, not on party infighting and personal ambition."

A little research shows that Virginia Bonham Carter (no hyphen) is the daughter of Mark Bonham Carter and the granddaughter of Violet Bonham Carter.

Writing this reminded me that I knew a Tim Bonham-Carter when I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) back in the early Eighties. I saw sad to find that he died a few years ago.

To the best of my knowledge neither he nor Virginia is related to Lord Bonkers' old friend, the London gang boss Violent Bonham Carter.

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"Neil Oliver and his pals see themselves as radical, romantic revolutionaries, but they are really nothing more than a dismal combination of David Icke and Liz Truss. They have nothing useful to say. Please don’t indulge them." Chris Deerin on the online stars of the conspirasphere.

Andrew Rawnsley says Theresa May's memoirs leave no stone unturned, except when it comes to her own failings.

"Our national record on infrastructure and amenities since 2010 has been consistently awful. After getting back onto a growth path from 2011 onwards we could’ve taken advantage of rock bottom interest rates to borrow and invest in public sector infrastructure but we chose not to. Treasury officials would’ve known there was a window of opportunity, but decided to sit on their hands." It's not just our schools that are crumbling, reveals Matthew Pennell.

Sam Freedman offers lessons from the slow-motion collapse of our criminal justice system.

James B. Meigs argues that government underestimates the sense and resilience of the general public when faced with a disaster: "Disaster literature bulges with examples - from Hurricane Katrina, to the 2011 Japan tsunami, to the current coronavirus pandemic - in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace."

"For my money, the best thing about the movie is the women. They’re memorable, multifaceted, and utterly mesmerising." Shadows and Satin celebrates the Ealing Studios drama It Always Rains on Sunday.

Tory PCC hopeful is an expert on ghosts as well as aliens

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I regard myself as a Fortean - happy in general to accept that "there are more things in heaven and earth...", but distinctly sceptical in individual cases.

Recently I came across a podcast called The Unexplained, which is introduced by a smooth professional broadcaster called Howard Hughes who has an obvious interest in such matters.

Some of the episodes are really good. I recommend one on the death of Dr David Kelly with the journalist Miles Goslett and the most recent one, which looks at the D.B. Cooper plane hijacking in the US.

There are also interviews with David Icke - I have passed on those.

But what do we find if we skim through the other episodes?

Step forward Rupert Matthews, would be police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland and believer in UFOs and aliens.

In one episode Matthews talks to Hughes about the ghosts of Hampton Court and Surrey in general.

He comes over rather well and I like his theory that talk of a ghost can be a way of keeping a horrific crime alive in local memory.

But he does sound mighty sure that ghosts exist.

Gary Lineker "needs to decide if he's a political activist or BBC sports journalist - he can't be both"

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So said Alec Shelbrooke, a Tory MP who has hitherto flown beneath the radar of this blog, of Gary Lineker.

But he can be both. There are plenty of precedents.

The great John Arlott fought Epping for the Liberal Party at the 1955 and 1959 general elections.

Not only that: he was a regular panelist on Any Questions? which made him about the best known Liberal in the country before the party's revival under Jo Grimond.

A second member of the Test Match Special team, Alan Gibson, was a supporter of the Liberals. He fought Falmouth and Camborne in 1959.

And, as Andrew Hickey remined me on Twitter today, David Icke was one of the Green Party's principal spokespeople when he still worked for BBC Sport.

If Shelbrooke would prefer a right-wing example, he need look no further that Denis Compton.

While a member of the BBC's television commentary team for test matches he fronted the organisation Freedom in Sport, which sought to re-establish fixtures with Apartheid-era South Africa.

So Gary Lineker could certainly be a political activist and a BBC sports journalist if he chose. So far, of course, he has done no more than offer an opinion.

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Craig Brown writes on badgers, cows and evidence-based policy for the Association of Liberal Democrat Engineers and Scientists site: "The badger cull is rare in that it is one of the few policies for which real scientific field trials have been performed in order to establish its efficacy. Peer-reviewed journals detailing the results of these trials conclude that culling badgers is, for the most part, ineffective as a remedy for bTB."

"This British scientist, rejected by his short-sighted government, has written as good a handbook as one is likely to find." Jacob Silverman reviews David Nutt's "Drugs without the Hot Air" on Bookforum.

Green Economy says a UN report has found that cities will benefit greatly from more greenery as urban areas expand.

"At the very least, you have to admire a man who can get thousands of people to come to Wembley Arena to watch a twelve-hour PowerPoint presentation." James Ward listens to David Icke.

TalkYork introduces us to Nana Zheng, a Chinese postgraduate who has just completed a dissertation on “The history of the management of York city walls since the 19th century.”

"Dixon’s shooting is so shocking because it is unexpected. The Blue Lamp has a classical narrative shape that disrupts the order presented at the start of the film and reinstates it by the end." BFI Film Forever ponders Dirk Bogarde's shooting of Jack Warner.

House Points: David Davis should have stayed in the shadow cabinet

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

In the shadows

David Davis is everywhere. He was at the Convention on Modern Liberty last Saturday. He was at the celebration of 20 years of Charter 88 I reported a few weeks ago. The only place he is not to be found is the one where his presence would be most valuable. He is no longer in the Conservative shadow cabinet.

Some saw Davis’s resignation to fight a by-election last year as a magnificent gesture. But Labour and (more questionably) the Liberal Democrats declined to put up against him, so he found himself facing 25 assorted eccentrics – up to and including David Icke. And Davis looked less brave when the Green candidate, the nearest thing he had to a serious challenger, complained he would not debate with her.

That by-election was been swiftly forgotten. Call it a political suicide bombing. Blame it on frustrated ambition or the male menopause. But we are all living with the consequences of Davis’s folly. For we must now suffer a shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, who stands for everything Davis opposes.

Grayling made his inaugural speech to the Local Government Association, repeating it almost word for word in the Commons the next day:

“Police should have powers to go straight to a magistrate and get an order against that troublemaker confining them to their homes for up to a month – except for during school hours. And if they break that curfew order they should expect to find themselves in the cells.”

It was all summed up in the bizarre sound bite “fewer rights, more wrongs”.

The Tory faithful will lap this up. But David Cameron has based his strategy on appealing to the sort of liberal-minded people who have not voted Conservative since 1992. Quite how Grayling’s appointment will further this is not clear.

Yet in one way he is admirably suited to shadow Jacqui Smith. She was in the papers after they discovered she had named her sister’s spare bedroom as her main residence and was claiming a second home allowance on the house in her constituency where her husband and children live.

Similarly, despite being MP for a Surrey constituency, Grayling claims that allowance for a Westminster flat. Those same papers quoted neighbours who said they seldom see him there.

Small by-election, not many hurt

To no one's great surprise David Davis regained his seat at Haltemprice & Howden.

Liberal Democrats will be relieved that, though the Greens came second, they obviously did not pick up our habitual voters by the handful. And it was reassuring to see Jill Saward, who supported the Labour/Daily Mail anti-liberty line, do badly. The 110 votes David Icke won suggest he finds it easier to win votes in cyberspace than he does in prosperous parts of rural Yorkshire.

When it was first announced that the Liberal Democrats would not stand against David Davis, people queued up to praise Nick Clegg's sagacity. Most notable was James Hook, who wrote:

I’m so proud of Nick Clegg for his decision that Liberal Democrats will not contest David Davis’ by-election.

Jon Neal, our superb candidate last time, came so close that I am sure we could win the by-election; even after the human and financial burdens of Crewe and Henley.

Detention without trial is a threat to our national life and it is right for Nick to support David Davis’ courageous stance.

Since then enthusiasm for Nick's decision has cooled. In particular, it has been noticed that the Lib Dems won no concessions from Davis in return for not fighting him and made no effort to turn his campaign into a joint one. So much so that James Graham has written on Comment is Free today that: "The main loser of this episode seems to have been Nick Clegg."

I think the main losers are David Davis and the prospects of keeping the Tories signed up for the civil liberties agenda. Before he resigned Davis was shadow home secretary and had every chance of being home secretary after the next election. Today he is a backbencher.

Meanwhile the big debate on civil liberties have taken place, not in Haltemprice & Howden, but at Westminster. As Martin Kettle argues in the Guardian today, that debate took place in the House of Lords and Eliza Manningham-Buller's speech was the most important.

Dominic Grieve, who has taken Davis's job in the Tory shadow cabinet, has an honourable record of fighting for liberty in the Commons. Yet you sense he is a good lawyer who has done the best he can with the brief he has been given. If the balance of power in that shadow cabinet changes or David Cameron changes his mind about where advantage lies, Grieve will argue against liberty just as effectively.

And, of course, Davis's absence from the shadow cabinet makes it more likely that the balance of power will change and that the likes of Liam Fox and Michael Gove, who would feel happier attacking the government for not being Neo Con enough, will be the decisive influences on Cameron.

And the Liberal Democrats?

We have failed to gain any advantage from the by-election but seem not to have suffered any permanent damage in one of our target seats. In the absence of any explanation from out leader, it is hard to resist the suspicion that our main reason for not fighting the Haltemprice & Howden by-election is that we were broke and knackered after Henley and decided to let David Davis get on with trashing his career without us.

Strange days indeed

Photo by Sabine J Hutchinson
http://www.virtual-shropshire.co.uk/

Today is already comfortably the record day for visitors to Liberal England. The reason is not some sudden upsurge of interest in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats, but my occasional references to sightings of UFOs over Shropshire.

Elsewhere:

• Another mysterious big cat has been sighted in Shropshire - and this one has dropped 50p;
• The Wrekin turns out to be a sacred mountain;
• I am being assailed by David Icke supporters.

Is this what the end of the world feels like?

David Icke to stand in Haltemprice & Howden by-election

Last week I reported that Icke was thinking of standing in David Davis's by-election.

Now his website is saying that David Icke will definitely stand.

Time, perhaps, to remember Terry Wogan's finest hour...

David Icke to stand in Haltemprice & Howden?

Well he's thinking about it.

David Shayler: I am the Messiah

The Register reports:

Well-known former MI5 officer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist David Shayler has taken a further step along the path to fruitcakeville, suggesting to a TV news interviewer that he is the Messiah.

Describing an occasion on which he had been anointed by a mystic representing biblical figure Mary Magdalene, the confused ex-spook told More4 News:

"I felt a sense of peace, I suddenly realised why it had been how it had - why I seem to get such a strange deal from the universe, when I seem to be trying to tell the truth about everything."

David Icke is 55.

David Icke and the Liberal Party

The other day I suggested that at one time David Icke was being lined up as Liberal PPC for the Isle of Wight. Valerie Silbiger has e-mailed to tell me that the truth was rather different.

It's true that Icke was once keen on the idea of being a Liberal candidate and made it clear that the Isle of Wight was the only seat he was interested in fighting. There was some difficulty in verifying that he was a Liberal member, and when he was interviewed as a candidate by London Region (where he lived), the panel found that he had little or no knowledge of the party or its policies and could therefore not be approved.

In those days Icke was nothing more than a personable young sports reporter, so it is possible that someone higher up in the party thought it would be a good idea for him to stand. But Valerie recalls that the Isle of Wight party was not keen on the idea.

Stalking Norman Baker badly

Our attention has been drawn to Norman Baker Watch, a site which seems to have been set up to damage the exemplary Lib Dem MP for Lewes. Given that its chief complaint against him is that he is too active on his constituents' behalf, I cannot see it working.

Liberal Democrat Voice suggests that the site's obsession with Parliamentary questions means it is being run from the office of another MP. That may well be the case.

Whoever is writing it does not know much political history. The site tries to embarrass Norman by noting David Icke's support for his campaign for a proper investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly.

If you are going to use Icke to embarrass Liberals, why not mention that at one time he was being seriously lined up as our candidate for the Isle of Wight?