The Joy of Six 1431

"Nine of the groups are being run from Sri Lanka, three have admins in Nigeria, and the admins of six other groups appear to be located in Mexico, the US, Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Kosovo. The remaining eleven have hidden their locations, but conform to the same pattern of fake address – AI memes – gaming video creator, suggesting they are similarly moderated." Katherine Denkinson explains how foreign entrepreneurs are monetising the clicks of British racists.

Rebecca Hamer on the common thread that links abusers, from grooming gangs to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.

"His speech on Monday was a sprawling grievance tour, hitting every GB news talking point: immigrants, net-zero, lefty lawyers; all responsible for our economic woes and declining living standards." Zoe Gruenwald deconstructs Nigel Farage's big speech.

"In July 1616, nine women from the small South Leicestershire village of Husbands Bosworth were hanged after being found guilty at the Leicester Assizes of bewitching the teenage son of the Lord of the Manor." Margaret Brecknell says the case of the so-called Witches of Husband Bosworth shines a spotlight on the atmosphere of fear and superstition sweeping the entire country during the reign of King James I.

Rob Goulding reports on disagreements over the restoration of the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire. This marvel of Victorian engineering lifts boats from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal.

Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow show that Orson Welles notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of War of the Worlds did not cause hysteria across the US and ask why this legend persists.

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James Ball argues that the tech bros have outsourced social media moderation to British police forces – not surprisingly, they're terrible at it: "It shouldn’t become normal that the police get involved in social media disputes. They have better things to do, and it’s bad for freedom of expression – even if people aren’t actually being sent to the gulags, self-censorship based on fear is real and a problem. We should be trying to tackle this. And that means looking why it’s happening."

"I can understand why he took the job. I can understand why he left Meta after Donald Trump was elected. What I can’t understand is why he has written this book." Naomi Alderman reviews books by Nick Clegg and Tim Berners-Lee,

James Graham promises us a "defence of Liberalism".

Scarlet Cassock takes us behind the scenes of the scandal at Bangor Cathedral: "Many of us in the choir were, admittedly, recipients of their largesse and generosity, albeit with varying degrees of discomfort. They were always very clear that we relied upon their protection in order to maintain our position here, a claim made more tangible by the withholding of contracts of employment, agreed budgets and other types of paperwork."

"The concrete structures were built between 1900 and 1910, but Clee Hill was thriving with industrial activity long before then. Iron, coal, clay and limestone have all been mined here, but these crushers were built for the "Dhu Stone", a dolerite named after the Welsh word for Black. Demand for Dhu Stone dropped in the 1960s, and the quarry dwindled, but back in 1900 more than two thousand people were employed here." Shrewsbury From Where You Are Not takes us to the extraordinary post-industrial landscape of Titterstone Clee.

"Larkin’s prose is glorious, equally impressive in its portrayal of the nostalgic atmosphere of a bucolic English summer and its evocation of the bitterness of an unforgiving winter. Larkin is particularly strong when it comes to capturing life in an English town during wartime, an environment where people find themselves in rather diminished circumstances." JacquiWine reads A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin.

"Join the Lib Dems, stop moaning on Facebook and get involved": Leigh Frost did and now he's leader of Cornwall Council

"I was a big Remainer and still am. I believe that we had a lot of benefits from being members of the European Union. A vote to leave the European Union basically gave you less rights and I didn’t like the fact my children would grow up with less rights than I had.

"I became one of those ranty people on Facebook about why Brexit was a bad idea. Dan Rogerson [former Lib Dem MP for North Cornwall] sent me a message telling me I should join the Lib Dems, stop moaning on Facebook and get involved." Mr Rogerson, a newly elected councillor, is now a member of Cllr Frost’s Cabinet.

And now Leigh Frost is the Liberal Democrat leader of Cornwall, where we have formed a minority administration with the Independents. He talked to the Falmouth Packet ("in his treasured Bodmin") about his ambitions for the council:

"We need more affordable homes. The Government has set its target, which we all know is a bit of a fantasy in reality, but we’ve got to try and deliver the best we can. We need a mix of sizes. One of the biggest issues is we do not build enough one and two beds, so there’s nowhere for people to downsize to.

"There’s a whole range of housing stock that could be unlocked just by building more smaller properties. It’s not just about developing more, it’s about being smarter about how we produce the best from our existing stock."

He also pointed to the huge challenge that children's services are for all councils and his ambitions to use the council's powers to improve the dentistry service in the county.

The Joy of Six 1313

"With Meta’s recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations of people from the United States." Joseph Cox points to parallels between these changes and events in Myanmar in 2017, when Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate, and the military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture and rape against the Muslim minority population. 

Eliza Mackintosh has better news from Finland, which is winning the war on fake news - a war it sees as crucial to safeguarding its democracy.

The Ferret fears that farmers' protests are being hijacked by conspiracist groups: " One farmer has described being added to a campaign WhatsApp chat after an invite by [James] Melville. He claimed the group was 'toxic' with members 'fighting amongst each other' about Covid-19 vaccines and discussing 'uprisings' against the WEF."

"There are over a thousand beavers living in the Tayside region of Scotland, for instance, widely thought to descend from beavers deliberately, and illegally, released in the early 2000s. In England, the New Forest population of pine martens are similarly thought to originate from illegal releases in the early 1990s." George Holmes, Darragh Hare and Hanna Pettersson report that illegal attempts to reintroduce lost species are surprisingly common.

Joel Morris explains how its producers make The Traitors such compelling viewing: "The first edit is of the round table scene at the end of each show (the climactic confrontation between the contestants, where they level accusations at each other and attempt to root out the rats in the nest). The editors cut together this part first, even though it’s the end of the show. Once that sequence is 'locked', they go back and make the events of that round table scene seem inevitable, by editing the day’s footage to set up the dramatic payoff that you see at the end."

"Aside from being a deliciously dark and humorous noir-tinged thrilled with some wicked one-liners, especially from Walker, Strangers on a Train is rich in Surrealist symbolism. Bruno is a madman, and the Surrealists were fascinated by madness." Sabina Stent argues that  Hitchcock's film is a truly Surrealist piece of art. 

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Luke Clements says everyone should be talking about Tash Ashby. "Tash Ashby was 21 years old when she died. At the time of her death, she was street homeless, living in the undergrowth around Hereford bus station. Her lifeless body was found in her tent. Tash Ashby was taken away from her birth parents in 2011. Both her birth parents were at her inquest, along with her sister. Their pain was evident."

Chris Grey looks at the new year's Brexit news: "So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made."

Over the past three years, Garry Kasparov has repeatedly argued that any chance at Russia becoming a democratic country not only requires its total military defeat but a shedding of its imperialistic legacy — a stance not widely embraced by other Russian opposition figures. Read an interview with him by The Kyiv Independent.

"For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking." Facebook fact checks were never going to save us, argues Natasha Lennard, they just made liberals feel better.

Simon Taylor reflects on the ideas about public health and landscape design shared during a recent symposium.

"It’s one of the genre of midcentury English novels that feature little boys (usually travelling home from boarding school) who must bridge the gap between the pagan and the Christian in the haunted English landscape." I just wanted to share this comment by Katharine May on Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe.

Nick Clegg gets the push from Meta for being too sane

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The British media now have the story, but the American website Semafor claims this as a scoop:

Meta is revamping its global policy team, with President Nick Clegg stepping down and being replaced by Joel Kaplan, his deputy and the company’s most prominent Republican, people familiar with the matter said.

Kaplan, who was White House Deputy Chief of Staff under George W. Bush, has been one of the most forceful voices inside Meta against restrictions on political speech, arguing internally that such policies would disproportionately mute conservative voices. Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister and ex-leader of the country’s Liberal Democrats, joined Meta in 2018 to lead its policy and lobbying efforts and was named president in 2022.

The shift, three weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, comes as US companies are embracing the president-elect, courting his inner circle, and backing away from progressive stances many had embraced in recent years. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — whom Trump previously threatened to jail — dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and congratulated the president-elect on his win, one of many big tech executives to do so.

Poor Nick. He's now too sane to be a tech-bro.

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"What they got was a journalist with access to the upper reaches of the Government, with a determination to get on air and tell everyone the whispers that she had heard from ministers, advisors and officials – before Sky or ITN. What the BBC needed was someone who could take a step back, away from the scrum, and tell audiences when they were being lied to." Laura Kuenssberg has been a catastrophic failure as the BBC's political editor, argues Patrick Howse.

Jonn Elledge asks if the Tories are deliberately posting terrible social media: "It's worth noting, though, that the most damning comment I heard from anyone while reporting this piece came from a Tory strategist: 'The conspiracy theory I’ve always liked the most is the one that presumes that behind something inexplicably dumb there must be some grand plan or deep rooted super secret scheme designed in these smokey backrooms of government. It’s terrifically flattering,' they explained. 'My god, I wish it were true. I mean, have you met us? We really are just this shit.'"

Andrew Kersley meets the parents of truant children hit by the single justice procedure: "Imagine receiving a letter through the post, informing you that you’re about to be prosecuted for a crime you did not commit. Your defence and plea of not guilty won’t be considered. Instead, you will be found guilty in a private ruling, with only a single judge present in the room. There’s no prosecution, no defendant, no press, and no witnesses. And after all that, you will be left with a criminal record that could cost you your job."

"In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe." Peter West on the neglected British philosopher Susan Stebbing.

Jessica Kiang celebrates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was released 50 years ago.

"The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), an undergraduate at Christ Church in the mid 1920s, would bring visitors here to show them what he considered to be the embodiment of 'The Waste Land' described in TS Eliot's poem of the same name, of which he was a great admirer." Local History in South Oxford takes us to St Ebbe's Gasworks.

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"There’s not even the tiniest attempt to explain how globalists and socialists and Islamists can all be running Britain. The only coherence is the idea that whoever is running things, and whoever is responsible, it isn’t the Conservative Brexiters. And this idea is impervious to the observation that Conservative Brexiters have been running the country for years, since its proponents insist that those in charge were not 'true' Conservatives and Brexit was not ‘real’ Brexit." Chris Grey explains why nothing will ever be the Brexiters' fault.

Caitlin Doherty says attacks on social media are discouraging women from standing for parliament: "[Labour MP Julie] Elliott said that it is hard to prepare somebody for the onslaught they may face on social media when they step forward for election. 'You can explain until you’re blue in the face, but until you’ve encountered it and the really personal aggression, I don’t know how you prepare people to cope with that.'"

"The language (and the idea) of the mob paints a false picture of crowds, of crowd violence and of violence in society more generally. The gathering of people in protest does not indicate the imminent outbreak of violence and excess. It cannot, in and of itself, be taken as evidence of intimidation. It is not a threat to our democracy." Stephen Reicher argues that politicians' fear of 'mob violence' is misplaced.

Ben Zimmer examines the antisemitic roots of the term 'globalist'.

"Britpop was a reaction to grunge. What was the reaction to Britpop? Well, if Britpop was associated with easy, fun music then let’s make it as dark as possible. Everyone wanted to react against everything else going on around them." Jane Savidge talks about Pulp and their album This is Hardcore.

Martin Dawes on the strange story of a man who devoted his life to tending a memorial to the crew of a World War II US bomber that crashed in a Sheffield park. Only he didn't.

Guardian finds Surrey voters unrepentant for backing the Lib Dems

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Good news from Surrey. A focus group convened for the Guardian by UK More in Common suggests that:

Blue wall Conservative voters in Surrey are far from impressed with the government’s obsession with culture wars, and remain unrepentant for tactically backing the Liberal Democrats at last week’s local elections.

The prime minister still looks "out of his depth", uninspiring and unable to set out a straightforward vision six months in the job, according to a panel of Surrey residents who backed the Conservatives at the 2019 election. They believe "the country needs change now", and the Tories need some time in opposition to sort themselves out.

Though we should note the observation that the group

appeared to want to vote for the Conservatives again, but thought the party had "made fools of themselves despite having so many chances" to restart.

This morning Luke Tryl from More in Common tweeted a thread of findings from the group, including one that did not make the Guardian.

And they thought badly of the last coalition "When we had the coalition, oh what's his face? I can't remember his name now. Mr. Facebook, he was walking around puffed out chest and like, oh let's do this with these little tiny wins and was just, I found it just irritating"

— Luke Tryl (@LukeTryl) May 13, 2023

The Joy of Six 1116

"It is the year 2049, and residents of the UK city of Oxford are unable to leave their neighborhoods. If they do, a network of cameras - installed years earlier under the guise of easing traffic congestion — track their movements. If they stray too far from their registered addresses, a £100 fine is automatically removed from their bank accounts. The only cars now allowed on the streets belong to representatives of the world government, who relentlessly patrol the city for anyone breaking the rules." The 15-minute city freak-out is a case study in conspiracy paranoia, argue Feargus O'Sullivan and Daniel Zuidijk.

Elizabeth de Luna reports that Google, Facebook and online pharmacies can be required to turn data over to law enforcement in US states where abortion is illegal.

Peter Simons reads a new study that questions the existing assumptions of neuropsychology and provides new ways of understanding the complexity of the brain and mind that might help psychological science move forward.

"It’s easy to see why many proponents of Blue Labour earn a living bemoaning whatever woke liberalism they have dreamt up that day for a column in Unherd, Spiked, or if they’re lucky The Times when the person Michael Gove regards as 'one of the outstanding conservative thinkers of our times' is this short for ideas." Will Barber-Taylor is not impressed by Maurice Glasman's new book.

Matthew Carey on Harry Belafonte, who is still fighting for social justice at the age of 96.

Wetlands are being revived by beavers, says the Natural World Fund: "Beavers have been reintroduced in Canada and several US states over the past 50 years. After being nearly wiped out in the 19th century for their fur and meat, this was initially done to restore beaver populations. However, numerous species of frogs, fish, and invertebrates have returned as a result of the restoration of wetland ecosystems."

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"Since February, an isolated former RAF base near the village of Manston, in Kent, has been used by the Home Office to warehouse migrants reaching England’s southeastern shores on small boats. These are desperate people fleeing conflict, persecution, immiseration, environmental degradation and other crises. Most of them claim asylum. They all deserve better." Joseph Maggs argues that Manston refugee camp is a "politically manufactured crisis": the foreseeable result of government policy towards the vast majority of the global poor who are unable to access "safe and legal routes" to the UK.  

Stephen Glenn explains why he is not watching the Qatar World Cup.

George Cunningham on the challenges facing the Lib Dems' federal international relations committee. He lists getting the party leadership back on track concerning Europe among them.

Social media accounts from far beyond the city stoked tensions between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester at the time of this autumn's riots, says The Indian Express. 

"Many of the songs were suggested to the band by A.L. Lloyd, the self-taught folklorist who went on to become co-founder and artistic director of Topic Records and co-compile The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs with Vaughan Williams. Mike Waterson once called him "a guru to us"; Lloyd also directed the subject matter of their songs. "We sang one and he said, 'Mm, we shan’t use that one. It’s too subservient.'" Judge Rogers on The Watersons and the re-release of their album Frost and Fire.

Bobby Seal presents a list of his favourite psychogeography books of 2022.

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Stumbling & Mumbling looks into the supposed fiscal "black hole": "The Tories, aided by much of the media, are trying to pull a con trick. They want to present spending cuts as a technocratic necessity when they are in fact a political choice."

"Children living in bad housing are more likely to have respiratory problems like coughing and asthmatic wheezing, to be at risk of infections, and to have mental health problems. And by increasing the likelihood of missing regular school, these health problems, in turn, had a detrimental impact on their education." Taj Ali lays bare the lethal consequences of Britain’s slum housing.

"As usual, rape survivors are being treated as suspects rather than victims, when it’s the perpetrators’ lives who should be placed under the microscope." Lydia Spencer-Elliott on the revelation that rape victims' therapy notes from pre-trial counselling can be handed to police and the accused's legal teams during investigations.

Jonathan Haide says the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid and explains why.

"The architectural roots of the Victoria Centre are firmly embedded in the modern movement of the mid-1950s and its ambitions for the urban renewal of British cities. The development was however ultimately a product of opportunism and a misplaced belief in the capacity of a private developer to successfully achieve such renewal without a high degree of publicly-led planning and oversight." Municipal Dreams visits Nottingham as one major development reaches its 50th year.

Amanda Petrusich celebrates the boundless energy of the Spice Girls as their film Spiceworld enjoys a 25th-birthday reissue.

Nick Clegg, Roe v. Wade, Facebook, privacy... and Lord Bonkers

Remember when Nick Clegg told us he would defy the law and refuse to register for an identity card? (It was during a Lib Dem leadership election, if that helps narrow it down.)

I thought of him when I read this Guardian story:

When local Nebraska police came knocking in June – before Roe v Wade was officially overturned – Facebook handed the user data of a mother and daughter facing criminal charges for allegedly carrying out an illegal abortion. 

Private messages between the two discussing how to obtain abortion pills were given to police by Facebook, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. The 17-year-old, reports say, was more than 20 weeks pregnant. 

In Nebraska, abortions are banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The teenager is now being tried as an adult.

Court documents filed in June and made public on Tuesday show how tech companies including Facebook contribute to criminal prosecutions of abortion cases. 

I've never liked Facebook. I helped run an account at work, but only had a personal account for a few days before I deleted it. I once bought a book on Facebook, and that made me dislike it even more.

Facebook reminds me of the days when corporate social media was a new thing and training courses told you that your ideas about privacy were old fashioned. Young people didn't care about privacy at all: they put their whole lives online.

That bright-eyed approach didn't last long in the real world, but somehow it remains hard-wired into Facebook. Perhaps it's because of its origin in universities. There, making new friends and showing that you have made them, is all.

The Guardian quotes unnamed experts who say this shocking case shows the importance of encryption and minimising the amount of data Facebook stores on its users.

Those experts are right.

As to Nick Clegg and Facebook, I think Lord Bonkers got it right too:

Who should I bump into in London today but our own Nick Clegg? Curious to know what he is doing with himself these days, I treat him to lunch at one of my clubs.

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested."

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons - about things like the barrier between free speech and prohibited content, wellbeing of children, integrity of elections, AI and giving people control over their data."

Let us put churlish thoughts aside and hope that Clegg can do for Satan what he did for the Liberal Democrats.

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"We need to find a way that we can return responsibility to local people and get all the sectors on board – to show how to build an economy that can save the planet and save our lives at the same time, and how the moving parts might fit together." David Boyle calls for a new-style national plan.

Louise Whitfield has no time for Dominic Raab's plan to overhaul the Human Rights Act: "Watering down the HRA has long been one of Raab’s pet projects - he quite literally wrote a book on it – but to human rights lawyers like me who’ve spent the last 20 years seeing the Act change lives for the better, these plans make no sense."

Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the future of Facebook was a "delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade," says Jason Koebler.

Rachel Aviv on the frightening US shadow penal system for troubled youngsters run by a Christian organisation.

"They managed to open one wagon and free 17 of the prisoners. As the train continued slowly forward, other prisoners were able to free themselves. In all, 233 people got off the train; 89 were recaptured and 26 were killed, but 118 managed to remain free." Three young men from Brussels who set out in 1943 to rescue a train of deportees headed for Auschwitz are to be honoured, reports Alan Hope..

Sophie Atkinson explains why George Orwell hated Sheffield.

We reveal the cause of that Facebook outage

 

GUEST POST We need a new generation of Liberal Clubs

Matthew Pennell says the Lib Dems should put bricks and mortar before Facebook.

It was a day at school I’ll never forget: one of my Politics A Level classmates had a taboo revelation for us. 

It was Adam. You’d like Adam, he was nearly a foot taller than me but he was a gentle giant, soft round the edges in an otherwise waspish alpha male wannabe environment. Sharp intake of breath ... then he told us he’d joined the Young Conservatives. 

Mic drop - none of us were expecting that. Adam was a genuinely nice guy, it seemed absurd to my friends and I that he could do such a wicked thing. This was the 1980s. Thanks to the course we knew that not merely were there three million on the dole, but that there was a wider underclass of 10 million and that 90 years of income convergence up to 1980 had been wiped out by 10 years of Thatcherism.

In retrospect Adam’s choice to join the YCs makes a lot more sense. Dartford, our home town, was famous for being officially the most average town in Britain - hitting the mean in terms of socio-economic, age, race and religious demographics. 

It wasn’t average in terms of violence, though. All the towns along the Thames Estuary were very rough and ready during the 1980s. There was a police van parked in the middle of the town centre every Saturday night - a reassuring sight, but it was there for a reason.

Adam just wanted a quiet drink away from all the aggravation. Dartford’s Conservative Club is in the main drag, really straightforward to pop in and make an enquiry about signing up. 

There’s no Liberal Club. I was 17, I should have joined the newly formed Liberal Democrats at the same time, but I didn’t know how to. There was no simple pathway - I didn’t join until I was 41.

Social fabric - more than just a party

My politics teacher was at pains to stress that the Conservatives had a club in every constituency in mainland Britain. I guess this is a product of so much landed-gentry and corporate money being thrown at them for so long. As you can see from Figure 1, party membership used to be a huge part of British life.

Without regular face-to-face human contact, membership is precarious and volatile. Harvard Politics Professor Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone details how pressure groups have moved away from social experiences or a ‘chapter based’ membership model, to an impersonal experience. 

This led to millions joining Greenpeace in the US in the 1980s when the environment became a mainstream media issue, and millions leaving as quickly as they joined.

Unfortunately, with a similar membership model, not really by choice, the Lib Dems sees its numbers wax and wane - in 2019 we had 145,000 members and supporters. I’ve seen many announce they’ve quit the party since via online messages; in most cases they never actually met any other members because the had no local club to go to. 

Why now?

If you joined the Lib Dems after 2010 you won’t have had an easy time, we were on the back foot during the coalition years instead of celebrating our wins in government. 

I joined in 2015 because of a sudden sense that if I didn’t do something the party might disappear altogether. In 2021, however, I’m more confident about our long term future than I have been in over a decade - i.e. I can see a liberal party in some form surviving and thriving for decades to come. 

That being the case it’s no longer fanciful to have long term expansion plans that include boosting our physical presence because we’re not simply firefighting any more, we’re better than that. 

Where would the money come from? 

We spent a lot during the 2019 general election campaign, millions directed towards online ads. It’s clear that after a while we hit the law of marginal returns on this and ended up wasting a lot of our ad spend. This is money that could in the future be redirected towards bricks and mortar and away from Facebook (sorry, Nick Clegg).

This would not be a quick or easy process but it might be worth pursuing a specific fund to increase our club footprint, in the same way we have elections fighting funds. It would also be a way of elevating ourselves above the other small parties who are also reliant on pub and cafe meet-ups to get together.

You can read a longer version of this article on Matthew's blog returnoftheliberal and follow him on Twitter.

Six of the Best 949

"In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgements, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward. As one senior British government adviser put it to me, 'We’ve had our arse handed to us recently.'" Britain's performance on Covid-19 has been poor, but Tom McTague argues that we were failing long before the virus struck.

"The problem is that the Party’s democracy is performative, not real. We have elections, but accountability and scrutiny are poor. Finding out what the Committees do between elections is difficult – the various minutes are seldom published, very brief reports go to Federal Conference." Mark Valladares asks if the Liberal Democrats are governable.

Keith Melton is not a fan of the motion on the environment accepted for debate at next month's virtual Lib Dem Conference.

The way we talk on the internet is broken, but users are not the ones who broke it. It was the tech companies did that, says Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and they did it for profit.

Alison Campsie reveals that Scotland’s fishing towns and villages boomed from the sale of cheap salted herring to slave plantations.

"The film opens with a disembodied head warning a group of children about the dangers of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Steeped in religious language and projected against a starlit sky, the scene locates the film firmly in our collective imagination. This is neither the real world nor the world of books, it is somewhere in between," FilmJuice looks at Night of the Hunter.

Six of the Best 922

It's fair to say Nick Tyrone is not impressed by the Liberal Democrats who are fasting to show solidarity with Muslims: "In the Ramadan stunt, they have found something that will come across as pandering, virtue signalling and hucksterish to a large section of the electorate, and yet also manages to miss its intended target and potentially offend the people it was being used to suck up to."

Article 39 says the government is using the Covid-19 crisis as an excuse to remove protections for children in public care.

"Fatal overdoses have plummeted, from more than 350 a year in 2001 to about 50 a year now, one of the lowest rates in Europe. HIV infections resulting from injection drug use also have nearly vanished, dropping from 500 new cases in 2006 to 18 in 2017." Aubrey Whelan looks at the result of Portugal's decision to decriminalise the use of all drugs.

Aaron Sankin discovers that Facebook lets advertisers target users who are interested in pseudoscience.

David Gray and Mary Colwell discuss the plight of the curlew and conserving wildlife.

"The trips were fantastic. Mum packed the bare necessities and we jumped on the back of a lorry. At the age of five, venturing beyond the Blackwall Tunnel was an adventure. Rolling through the villages and countryside, waving to everyone we saw was too exciting for words." David Essex is one of many Londoners who share their memories of hop-picking in Kent with Colin Grainger.

A year of decision: Lord Bonkers in 2019

It is customary, or so he assures me, for Lord Bonkers to spend those lazy days between Christmas and the new year looking back on his adventures over the past year.

So here goes...


January

When you've had a hard day wandering around a library in a suit, you need refreshment. pic.twitter.com/Ayt7ro4ET5

— CFB Clips (@CFBClips) January 11, 2019

A reader alerted me to this Double Diamond television commercial from the 1960s, which was shot in the library of the National Liberal Club.

He suggested, surely correctly, that Lord Bonkers had arranged the filming to alleviate one of the club's regular financial crises.


February

His lordship paid tribute to Paddy Ashdown:

The obituaries will tell you how Sir Paddy Ashplant fused the community politics promoted by the Association of Liberal Councillors with his expertise in jungle warfare to win a string of by-elections and raise the Liberal Democrats from the ruins of Steel’s grand strategy. 

What they will not tell you is how my domestic staff loved his visits (Cook would frequently announced that he made her “come over all unnecessary”); how he stood his round in the Bonkers’ Arms and entertained the locals with his favourite joke; how he allowed the Well-Behaved Orphans to question him for hours about his time in the Special Boat Service (they were always particularly interested in the escape techniques he had been taught lest he be captured by the enemy).

He also met Nick Clegg:

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested." 

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons."

April

The old boy, who is far more trenchant than I would ever be, was not taken with our new recruit Chuka Umunna:

I curled up with a pamphlet he has just published. It soon transpired that he is one of these hearty public school types who want to send the nation’s youth off to camp. Sleeping under canvass; washing up in a bucket of cold water; doing PT with your shirt off… You know the type. 

By the time I had finished reading, it I was clear that the man is worse than that. He wants to haul in the country every teenager off to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness. Why in Gladstone’s name are our people delivering for him?

May

What is the reason for Lord Bonkers' longevity?

He always talks about his annual bathe the spring of eternal life that bursts from the hillside above the former HQ of the Association of Liberal Councillors and the cordial sold (at a steep price) by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

But a reader suggested another explanation.


June

Milkshaking was the talk of the summer. As so often, Lord Bonkers was there first:

A journalist rings to ask what I think of this modern tactic of pouring milkshakes over far-right politicians. I reply that the milkshake is an American import we could well do without and that if one is going to dispose of it then tipping it over a passing Fascist seems as good a way as any. 

Warming to my theme, I recall that I was once obliged to sit next to Oswald Mosley at dinner. Things were distinctly frosty between us from the get-go and when he made a disobliging remark about Herbert Samuel I tipped my knickerbocker glory over his head.

September

Lord Bonkers played a prominent part in our victory in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election:

What a splendid night! It was touch and go at the start of the count, but when the boxes from Ystradgynlais were opened it became clear we had triumphed. We toasted our victory in the finest Welsh champagne and sang our Liberal anthems: ‘The Land’, ‘Woad’ and ‘Cwm Off It’. 

One pleasure of this contest has been rediscovering the delightful countryside of Mid Wales. More than once by memory has been jogged by places I saw in the last campaign I fought here – I went through Three Cocks in the 1985 by-election.

He also contributed his customary foreword to the Liberator Songbook:

Welcome to all our new members! I hope you enjoy your first Glee Club and, a word of reassurance, please don’t worry: It’s Meant To Be Like This. 

I have already met many of you when you attended one of my basic training camps on the shores of Rutland Water. The party has signed up so many new recruits recently that I had to send out for extra tents. 

After a week of training in committee room theory and practice, Focus delivery and guerrilla warfare – all conducted under the beady eye of Sergeant Major Carmichael – new members need fear nothing they will encounter as a Liberal Democrat activist.

November

Defections to the Liberal Democrats were all the rage, so the old monster did his best to encourage them:

When Jo ‘Gloria’ Swanson tipped me the wink that we would be parading newly converted Conservative MPs to the Liberal Democrat Conference, I naturally decided to join the fun. I hired a van from Oakham’s leading Chinese laundry and bade a brace of gamekeepers join me; we motored up to Town and lay in wait outside the Carlton Club. 

In the middle of the afternoon a red-faced character sporting an Eton tie stumbled down the steps. I thumbed through Jane’s Conservative MPs and identified him as fair quarry. The gamekeepers moved in, and when he proved resistant to their orders a tap on the napper with an orchard doughty rendered him more pliable. He was bundled into the van and buckled inside the large wicker hamper with which it had come equipped.

Nick Clegg's Today interview is tweeted by Leave.EU

WATCH | Top Remainer Nick Clegg reveals that there’s no evidence of Russian interference in the EU referendum & the Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theory is totally false. A dark day for tinfoil nutters @carolecadwalla @BenPBradshaw and @DamianCollins 😂pic.twitter.com/aqtprgAqW7

— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) June 24, 2019

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?