As I awoke yesterday, I could not but remember that it would have been the date of my 59th wedding anniversary and I thought that day might be a little  difficult to bear emotionally. But I was due to be on a U3A trip to Shrewsbury gaol for all of the day so that this will help to divert my thoughts. As it was, I had set the alarm so as not to oversleep but got up and turned off the alarm 15  minutes before it was due and got going with my normal morning routines. Getting up to speed with the political news of the day, I read this morning that the normally rock-solid Republican state of Texas might be wavering in its support of Donald Trump. One factor uniting both right and left in the state is the emergence of huge data centres which are enormous consumers of both water and power and are springing up everywhere but appear to be universally unpopular. The other Texas factor is the price of beef as Trump has done a deal with the import of beef from Brazil and Argentine do the detriment of American producers. Ironically, the EU has rejected the import of beef from these two countries despite the surplus because those countries  do not meet the safety standards on the use of antibiotics. The anniversary of 9/11 is fast approaching as are the many celebrations of this macabre anniversary as will be 25 years after the event. But Donald Trump has recently  caused a great deal of offence amongst 9/11 survivors as at a recent memorial gathering he released a host of several  memories of the event that were obviously a tissue of lies.  He claimed to see the second plane strike the  twin towers from Trump Tower but the sight lines are such that this would have been impossible. In fact, he was on TV bragging about the fact that with the twin towers collapsed, Trump Tower would now be the tallest building in New York. He also claimed to send a 100 of his construction workers to help out with the disaster and to have contributed $10,000 dollars but there is no evidence that either of these claims are true. In fact, so pronounced his Trump’s narcissism and false memory that he is actually claiming that he himself was pulled out of the rubble by two emergency workers whereas he was in fact in a TV studio miles away. So these very evident lies are now causing a great deal of offence amongst the families of those who died in the disaster and is even more evidence, if more was needed, of his deteriorating state of mind. But such is Trump’s hold upon setting the agenda of the Main Street Media that none of these evident falsehoods are being given the  denial that they deserve. The anniversary of 9/11 is now two days away and we will be subject to a barrage of recollections about the events of that terrible day. Meanwhile, our British institutions seem to be disappearing day by day as there is news this morning that Monty Don is to step down as the presenter of Gardener’s World after 23 years of presenting the programme each week on the BBC. In fact, many viewers will recall not only Monty Don but his faithful dog which often featured in the programme. Monty Don’s most famous faithful companion is his golden retriever Nigel, who became a beloved fixture on BBC Gardeners’ World before passing away in 2020 and must have been one of the most well-known dogs to grace our TV screens.

As my family are away in Swanage, I walked down the hill to collect my newspaper and then stopped off to have a coffee before completing my journey  on foot to pick up the coach for the outing to Shrewsbury today. I arrived at the pick-up point some 17 minutes before the planned departure time of 9.00am but the coach was already three quarters full.  I sat alone for my journey because everyone else was already in a dyad or triad of friendship groups but a travelling companion would have been nice. Such the scale of the roadworks ere in Bromsgrove that it took the coach practically half an hour to reach the outskirts of the town where we picked the motorway system to covey us northwards along the M5/6.Once we got there about an hour and a half later, most of us made our way to the tearoom so that we could refresh ourselves before the tour that we knew was going to be an hour long in duration. The prison was firstlaid out in the 18th C but was subsequently rebuilt by the Victorians with the principal architect being Thomas Telford no less, probably because of the vast amount of iron work deployed in its construction.  Early public executions began in 1795 and continued until 1863 and they appeared to be exceeding popular attracting huge crowds of onlookers. The gaol was only closed in 2013 having been in use for some 220 years as a county gaol. Our guide was an ex-prison officer who had worked there and could therefore add a lot of first-hand accounts and local ‘colour’ to his account, of which more later. After the tour was open at about 12.00pm we were all issued with a map of Shrewsbury and told to entertain ourselves for the next four hours until the pickup time of 4.00pm. Many of our number (but not myself) had done a lot of research about the town but we were left to navigate an extremely hilly town by ourselves. This is one part of these U3A excursions which I do not enjoy when a map is thrust into our hands and we are told to fend for ourselves and whilst many of the more intrepid of the party enjoy these particular challenges, I for one would not be averse to a little shepherding. So the prison was on the edge of the town and so a walk was in prospect before we could enjoy the sights and sounds of the town. I teamed up with a couple of the group who had joined us from the Redditch branch of U3A and we fond a little bit of local park where we could consume some of the things we had brought with us. Fortunately, they had prepared some sandwiches for themselves and I had myself taken along a flask of coffee and some jaffa cakes which I had bought but not taken with me on my trip to Yorkshire.  Then we had a communal fish about as my two companions wanted to have a walk near the river .Eventually, we managed to locate this but found ourselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the river where we really needed to locate the riverside walk and the only thing to do was to retrace our steps towards the prison ad then to renavigate from there. This we did and hunted around for  a ‘staircase’ of some 60 stone steps that we were assured would take us down to the river but even the local shopkeepers seemed unsure about this to give us some more precise directions. At this point having walked down and up through the slopes of the town my left knee was hurting so I let my two new found companions go on their own way whilst I sat on a wall and contemplated how I was going to fill my time. After a rest on the wall, I found the  steps that led to the river and enjoyed a riverside walk but could find nowhere to sit down for a break so I occupied the rest off the day with a fiendish Sudoku until it was time to. catch the coach home.

Before I went to bed the evening before last, I viewed on YouTube some of the liberal political commentators on the domestic scene, namely James O’Brien and Nick Ferrari. What concerned these two commentators were three dramatic events that occurred over the weekend. The first two were so called ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations by far-right activists when groups of fighting age men dressed identically in black and with masks and face coverings descended upon the streets of first Dover and then Portsmouth. In the case of Dover, the entire port was brought to a standstill as roads were blocked for several hours. The Portsmouth case seemed even more sinister as the police were caught completely off guard and when they did respond, their response was low key and with only the lightest of touches. The degree of organisation behind all of this was evident in view of the ‘uniformity’ of the black clothing worn by the protestors as well as attempts to shield their own identity. Of the assembled crowds a proportion had travelled by train rather giving the lie to the fact that these were purely local expressions of concern, but the nearby social housing estates were undoubtedly a ready source of the requisite foot soldiers. The point made by the political commentators was that  ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests had been dealt with immediately and swiftly by police so there was a massive asymmetry in the way in which the far right protestors were dealt with when compared with other protest groups. Even the (Conservative) Crime and Police Commissioner appeared to condone the activities of the far right  when she argued that such protests were quite understandable and the government needed to protect the whole of the south coast of England. So the organisers of the far-right movement can feel highly satisfied with themselves that they can mobilise so quickly a quasi-army of masked supporters and the authorities seem powerless and unwilling to intervene. The police have the power to order the removal of face masks if they feel there is an imminent threat of violence but they did not do so on this occasion. To these two incidents can be added a third which is the treatment meted out to a heckler who interrupted a speech by Nigel Farage who was giving the leader’s speech at the Reform national conference in Birmingham. All political parties have to cope with heckling – after all the tradition goes back centuries and the heckler is swiftly bundled out of the conference hall by security staff. But what happened in this case was terrible to behold. The heckler had her hair pulled out in clumps, her face grabbed and was hit by a crutch in what can only described as a mob with hatred etched over their faces. The heckler was accused of being a far-left activist, probably with a sociology degree (!) and had paid for an entrance fee to attend the conference. Nigel Farage laughed his head off whist the attack on the heckler was taking place. Afterwards, when asked about the attacks on Sky News, Jenrick, Reform’s economic spokesman, said: “Oh boohoo […] get a life. You take your chances if you go to a party conference and try to mess it up. ‘We are now in a country where somebody, whatever she is, a far-left protester, goes into a party conference, tries to wreck the leader’s speech and cries foul if a pensioner knocks her over the head with a Zimmer frame. Come on, get a life.’ So the liberal commentators are trying to take stock of these two demonstrations by the far-right over the weekend  and the attack on the heckler by the Reform mob and are asking themselves what is happening  in contemporary Britain. Some are seeing the influence of MAGA and massive amounts  of American money spreading beyond the shores of the USA and now finding expression in British politics putting the whole of our democratic politics and institutions at risk.

This morning was the morning when my domestic help calls around. As she is a very good but also adventurous cook, she is always on the lookout for nutritious and healthy recipes and follows several of her good sources on social media. She has forwarded one or two of these recipes to me which I certainly try. The difficulty is that I will have to study the ingredients list with some care as I am not convinced that Aldi, my normal first choice supermarket, has the ingredients that I need so I may have to change my supermarket to Lidl which has a wider choice but it correspondingly more difficult to find ones way around. I have in my study a book I must have bought in a charity shop illustrated with at least 100 recipes for soup. I also do have a soup-maker but I only tend to deploy this during the winter months but as autumn is advancing and the evenings are growing colder, then now might the appropriate time to bring it into use once again. I have the feeling that when I get into full stride, I am going to be kept busy most Saturday afternoons preparing soups for consumption in the week ahead. Apart from my U3A trip to visit Shrewsbury gaol on Wednesday, I have a curry evening locally in the area for the day afterwards. At the weekend, there is going to be the last in the series of ‘free’ coffee-and-cake concerts in the local large Anglican church which overlooks the town and acts as a concert venue and this will round off the season of summer concerts. Although I had been to my usual Pilates class in the middle of the day, I had a delayed lunch of a mackerel salad and then, after a rest, set to and got the grass cut on the back lawn which had grown tremendously thick as a result of the rain in the last week or so. Tonight is going to be the promised film night where I am going to watch ‘Testament of Youth’, the Vera Brittain biography which was shown late last night and which is going to be my treat for the evening but I need to have a fairly early night because I need to walk to the point were the coach picks us up for our day out tomorrow. My son and daughter-in-law who would normally give me a lift are on holiday in Swanage and taxis are so unreliable at 8.00am in the morning so I am going  to make the coach trip in two halves. Firstly, I will walk down the hill  and then pick up muy newspaper in Waitrose where I can have one of their ‘free’ coffees and a rest. Then I can walk the second half of the journey which will be at the far end of our High Street.

As I awoke to the start of a new week, we are witnessing yet another demonstration taking place against migrants arriving via the small (or not so small these days) boats. After the ‘spontaneous’ demonstration of people dressed in black and with identities concealed by balaclavas who descended on Dover over the weekend, last night was the scene of clashes between hundreds of protesters who greeted the small boat arrival at Portsmouth. The role of social media is not to be underestimated because protests appear to be well organised and the far right are using social media to maximum effect (and minimal cost) Hundreds of far-right activists have descended on Portsmouth, where a small boat with 140 asylum seekers on board was intercepted heading towards the Portsmouth coast. The vessel’s arrival sparked a major response with a helicopter, an aeroplane and lifeboats sent to the scene. It is thought to be the first time such a large boat containing asylum seekers has been brought to Portsmouth and the first time a large group of anti-migrant protesters have tried to block newly arrived asylum seekers from being processed. The protesters blocked roads for hours and had vowed to stay all night to prevent the new arrivals from being taken to a processing centre. The demonstration ended about 3am, when police obtained a dispersal order and threatened arrests. It is the second major anti-migrant protest of the weekend. Many of those at Portsmouth were dressed in all black and wore face masks, similar to those who attended a rally that blocked roads in Dover on Saturday. One witness who was not involved in the protest said on Sunday night: ‘The atmosphere here is still very tense. The coaches carrying asylum seekers have still not left. About 25-30% of the far-right protesters are wearing balaclavas and many are wearing black. Two police cars had their windscreens smashed by protesters. At one point they broke through the police cordon.’ To continue with the theme of the popularity of the resurgence of the far right, it has emerged that the far right party in Germany (AfD) has emerged as the victor in one of the eastern states of Germany (a federal state) AfD secured 44% of the vote and although they may not have secured an outright majority, they have ousted the existing CSU. Preliminary results show it has fallen short of an outright majority needed to govern alone, with 43.8% of the vote to the conservative CDU’s 17.2%, and tricky negotiations on who will run the state lie ahead. Today, as I awake, I contemplate some of the tasks that are on the ‘need to be done’ list and mowing the lawns is getting to the top of the list but I may attempt to pay a visit to a small cafe, away from our High Street, that my domestic help was enthusing over the other day. But the week as a whole promises to be quite a busy one. I am also keeping an eye on the weather as low pressure systems will continue to bring wet and windy conditions, especially to the north of the UK at the beginning of the week, before things settle down on Wednesday and Thursday. After breakfast, I was amused by turning to the James O’Brien LBC podcast broadcast on YouTube and he had assembled together at least four of the six journalists who had been refused accreditation to report on the Reform party conference. Their ‘transgression’ was they had reported truthful facts about Reform which the party managers did not want their public to hear so James O’Brien gave them a full hearing on his own show which had a certain degree of piquancy.

After a trip down to town to collect my newspaper and a beef-and-potato pie saved from the other day, I set to work getting the greened area in front of the house cut for the first time in a few months. During the hot weather and in the absence of rain, the grass did not grow at all but strangely one or two weeds grew to well over a foot. Having got this cut, the back lawn will get a similar treatment tomorrow but it only takes half of the time. As a ‘reward’ to myself, I am going on catch-up ‘Burch Cassidy and the Sun Dance kid’ which  I have seen several times before but has some great one-liners in the script. Tonight, there is  going to be a showing the biography of Vera Brittain (the mother of Shirley Williams) who lost her fiancé, two closest male friends and a brother in the first World War and ‘Testament of Youth’ is a cry of outrage over the consequences of the first World war. Towards the end of the film, when Vera returns to Oxford to resume her studies, a character appears who announces herself as Winifred Holtby, the author of South Riding. My mother claimed to know Winifred but how well I do not know but it is possible that they met via an amateur dramatic society in Hull in the 1930’s. There is more sad economic news to depress us further. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) who have a huge manufacturing base in Solihull are scheduled to lose 4.000 jobs over the next two years. But to put this into context, all European car manufacturing is in a fairly dire state giving the Chinese dominance in electric vehicles manufacture. JLR had had to content both with Brexit and also with a huge internet attack in the last year and was already in a weakened position but the future of vehicle manufacture in the UK is looking bleak. The new Chancellor, John Healey, in her first major speech was seeking to reassure the bond markets and other international investors but a well known dictum is that when the UK wishes to borrow money we are at the mercy of ‘the kindness of strangers’ and recent political history does not make the UK economy seem a good place  which to invest. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attack upon the World Trade Centre, our TV screens are full of programmes reminding us of those terrible events and a Panorama programmes to be broadcast tonight implicating the role of Saudi individuals who may have been part of the planning of the overall attack. It seems strange to relate but Saudi Arabia is deemed to be an ally of the West and not an enemy such as Iran or Iraq. Bin Laden of course was a Saudi national before he sought refuge in Afghanistan and Pakistan before he was eventually tracked down and was despatched by the Americans in a summary execution.

The night before last, I had a rather ‘up-and-down’ night which was ended prematurely by my alarm going off to get me an hour earlier  than is normal so that I can be ready for church. It is certainly noticeably darker in the morning these days as the year advances and what we are witnessing is what the poet Keats describes as the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ Last night I had a brief and very early walk in the park with my American friend. Part of the park’s car park is cut off whilst it is being extended, a process that will take a couple of months. In the meantime, my friend and I were astonished to discover that there were practically no spaces left at 5.00pm on a Saturday afternoon as no doubt the dog-waking fraternity was out in numbers. The Sky News channel are putting forward a revamped politics show each Sunday morning which I will miss as it collides with my church attendance/car washing routines in the morning but I will see if I can watch this later in the day although catching repeat of Sky News programmes is very much a hit-and-miss affair. No doubt, when I catch up on some of the Sunday morning comment programmes later in the day, I will hear again what Nigel Farage has to say by way of an excuse when he was caught as part of a Channel 4 News sting operation which showed him in his Clacton constituency enjoying a breakfast of oysters and champagne and discussing how Reform might receive a large donation by being channelled through a supposedly American billionaire ‘father’ to his UK resident ‘son’. Nigel Farage has said he ‘frankly was not listening’ during a conversation with his former chief of staff and an undercover reporter discussing what appears to have been a scheme to funnel foreign money to Reform UK. His former chief of staff Dan Jukes and ex-head of policy James Orr have both been removed from their jobs after an investigation recorded them talking about how to get money to the party from an American donor and asking a fake company to pay for polling. Jukes has denied doing anything wrong. Orr has told Sky News he will co-operate fully with Reform’s internal investigation. In an interview with the BBC, the Reform leader said he was not listening to the discussion. Now this must be the weakest excuse offered by any politician to any revelation of damning evidence and must rank with the mythical schoolboy’s ‘Sir, the cat ate my homework’ It rather put me in mind of the excuse offered by James Maxwell during the Levison enquiries into nefarious practices by the British process to obtain details of celebrity comings-and-goings via telephone taps. When faced with incriminating emails into which he had been copied, James Maxwell indicated ‘that he had not bothered to read that far’. Having said that, although the excuse was not believable I do not recall Maxwell being sanctioned as a result. Although I have no social engagements scheduled for today the week ahead is going to be quite a busy one as I have a trip out to Shrewsbury gaol on Wednesday, a Curry Club outing on Thursday and I anticipate a meal out with friends next Saturday. Meanwhile, after a summer of enforced absence from lawn mowing, these now require some attention so I need to refresh my petrol supplies and get busy after the grass (and weeds) have regenerated themselves somewhat after the much needed rainfall. After I had attended the church service this morning, I was delighted to see that the parish hall was reopening again after its redecoration during the month of August. This meant that  could I avail myself of the coffee  and biscuits which is on offer immediately after the service and this opens up the opportunity to have a chat with acquaintances, one of whom is probably  to going on the U3A trip to Shrewsbury next Wednesday. Afterwards I made a trip to the garage where I pick up a copy of the Sunday newspaper, filled the car and my mower container with petrol and give the car its weekly wash. After I returned home, I watched a catch-up version of the Laura Kuenssberg Politics programme which included an interview with Nigel Farage in which I shared the opinion of a subsequent reviewer that Kuenssberg had failed to press on some ridiculous statements made by Farage, principally the comment that Farage made that he was ‘not actually listening’ when a supposed prominent American millionaire was suggesting a mechanism by which he could channel a substantial (illegal) donation in the direction of the Reform party.

After I had lunched on pork ribs, I was watching YouTube in which an amazing programme was broadcast which was the way in which we kept ourselves and our houses warm in the huge snow of 1962-63. I was only aged 17 at the time and made a journey to the National Lending Library for Science and Technology by scooter but I remember slithering off practically every day. A scooter was on some respects safer than a motorbike because the scooter went in one direction and you went on the other as you were not sitting astride the bodywork. This program then gave way automatically to another in which  I was actually enthralled. It was entitled ’25 Brilliant Things British Homes Had in the 1960s That We Stupidly Got Rid Of’ and I am going now to do a rather eccentric thing and to list them all in case any of them evoke any memories in readers of this blog. So here goes: -Teak sideboards -fireplace -Kitchen dresser -Radio Gram – Belfast (i.e, deep porcelain) sink -Eiderdown – Dansette record player – Pressure cooker – Victorian floor tiles -radiators (heavy, cast iron) -front doors with coloured glass inserts -Mangle -String bag -Candlewick bedspread -Paraffin heater – Formica  drop-leaved kitchen table -‘Constellatoon’ floating vacuum clear -Canteen of cutlery -Kenwood chef -Cast iron enamelled bath -solid wooden shutters -a ‘Spong ‘(mechanical) mincer -Donkey Stone (for keeping one’s front step in good condition) – Display cabinet (in the front parlour). The whole and evidently nostalgic commentary pointed out that all of these items were ripped and out and thrown away but they command prices of hundreds of pounds when people try to buy them back to create a retro look. It was pointed that may items e.g. the Kenwood Chef were solid metal appliances and could be in use in use for 25 years or more whereas their modern replacements were plastic based and tended to wear out and have to be replaced much more regularly (which practice is known as ‘planned obsolescence’) Advancing this argument, then modern appliances might appear to be cheaper but probably turn out to be expensive when their purchase price is spread out over the years of actual usage. But in the 60’s there was a great seeking after the ‘modern’ and up-to-date and the artefacts of the late 50’s and early 60’s were seen as large, ugly and old fashioned.

As I watched some more analysis of the Reform scandal last night, I was interested to learn of the views of some experts on electoral law. A close reading of the legislation appears to indicate that the Reform party has a case to answer. Apparently, it is the case that planning or arranging to accept illegal donations is a serious criminal offence. Under UK electoral law—specifically Section 61 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA)—it is a crime for any person to knowingly participate in or further an arrangement to evade controls on political donations. As all of this was caught on video and handed to the police, it appears to be an ‘open and shut’ case of guilty. The Reform party will attempt to argue that no monies actually  changed hands, that the talk caught on video was just loose ‘pub talk’  and that in any case, the whole video collection was the result of  huge deception or hoax. I doubt that any of this will wash as lawyers should be able to convincingly argue that such operations are always clandestine and kept away from prying eyes an therefore it was in the public interest that a clandestine operation in the manner of a ‘sting’ is nearly always necessary to gather evidence. The police themselves will know this and must use similar techniques, on occasion, to gather relevant compromising evidence. In the meantime. we still a Parliamentary enquiry which will gather its own evidence on the donations received by Farage and this will report in the fulness of time. It must be said that this whole episode demonstrates how easy it is to hijack British democracy and although rules have been put in place to try to prevent foreign money influencing British political elections, there has been a reluctance to deploy the full force of the law. One wonders, for example, how many police officers employed by the Met are experts in electoral law or what resources the police themselves have to deploy such expert evidence. If you look at the Electoral Commission website, then the following explanation of their functions and powers is given. The purpose of an investigation is to establish whether or not the suspected offence has taken place, and if it has, who committed it. During an investigation, we gather evidence about potential offences from those we believe hold relevant information about what happened. When doing this, we actively look for evidence to prove or disprove our reasonable suspicion that an offence has occurred. Evidence-gathering can take many forms, from asking people to provide information voluntarily, through to interviewing witnesses or suspects or requiring evidence to be provided to us. For example, we have the power to issue a legal notice to any person or organisation that we believe to hold relevant documents or information. That notice sets out what the recipient must supply us with and the deadline for doing so. Failure to comply with the notice is a criminal offence, and so is knowingly or recklessly providing false information to us during an investigation. Also, if someone does not comply with our notice, we can apply for a disclosure order from a court to gain the relevant information. One must say, though, that on past form the Electoral Commission have been amazing supine in its approach but perhaps this case is a wake-up call for it to do the job for which it was instituted.

Whilst on the subject  of electoral matters, I came across the following which astonished me. In the EU referendum, only those on the electoral registers of the United Kingdom and Gibraltar were entitled to vote, and not all of these, as citizens of other European Union member states (except Ireland, Malta and Cyprus) are barred from voting in referendums. Many British citizens entitled to be registered were not registered, typically young people on the move. British citizens resident in crown dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man) or in overseas territories (Bermuda and Anguilla, for example) weren’t entitled to register, nor were British citizens long resident in other parts of the European Union. The number of British residents and British citizens barred from voting in the referendum was at a conservative estimate close to four million. Now the actual referendum was won by a majority of about 1.27 million i.e. one third of those whose registration was deemed to be ineligible. When this was challenged in the High Court, the judgement was that those who had lived abroad for more than 15 years had ‘insufficiently close ties’ with the UK to be included on the electoral register. Until 2024 the eligibility to register as an overseas elector depended on how long ago someone left the UK. From 2000 to 2024, this was limited to 15 years.  The Elections Act 2022 removed this 15-year limit. Since January 2024, any British citizen living overseas can register as an overseas elector as long as they meet one of the two conditions outlined in the section above. There are no official figures on the number of British citizens living overseas. The UN estimates that there were 4.8 million British citizens living overseas in 2024. When the Elections Bill was introduced in 2021, the accompanying impact assessment estimated that once the 15-year rule was abolished there could be around 3.2 to 3.4 million British citizens eligible to register as overseas voters. The implications of all of this that the result of the Referendum would have been to ‘Remain’ if only one half of those excluded had been allowed to register.  Even when exit from the EU was finally achieved, it is quite probable that many of those elderly who had voted ‘Leave’ would have died and hence not be included in the electoral registers. David Cameron, of course, if he had the political foresight should have specified a trigger level of 60%. We are not very experienced in the running of referendums in the UK but if we had followed the example of the rest of the world, then a 60% trigger level should have been imposed. Many referendums use a 60% supermajority trigger level—often called a three-fifths requirement—specifically when they deal with major constitutional changes or tax increases. While a simple majority (50% + 1) is the global standard for standard elections, a 60% threshold is frequently used to ensure that a major, irreversible shift has stable, long-term consensus rather than winning on a temporary political whim. When the history books come to be written, the results of the EU referendum will almost certainly rank as one of the greatest mistakes in British social and political history. We are now living in a  world, where the importance of global alliances cannot be over-emphasised particularly with Putin’s Russia bent on recreating Greater Russia and probing Europe for weaknesses at every point.

The night before last after I had gone to bed, I had one of those strange and nightmarish type dreams from which one is glad to eventually be awake. A companion and I were wandering around a fairground in some continental city trying desperately to find the bus that had transported us there. But either of us could remember the colour of the bus, the name of the city we were in, the name of the hotel in which we were staying or even the country in which we were located. We started looking for a taxi, assuming that the bus that had transported us there had left without us, but realised that without the name of the hotel then even this would not be our salvation. At that stage, I woke up and saw with some dismay that it was only 1.00am in the morning so there was a night’s sleep to be had. I watched TV for a little and then went back to bed and slept quite soundly but the dream was not a pleasant experience. After I returned from walk around the park the evening before, I switched on Channel 4 news and found myself near the start of a Channel 4 News investigation into the funding of the Reform party.  Reform UK has denied breaking party funding rules over an allegation that top officials arranged for a US company to fund three polls. It comes after Channel 4 News broadcast a programme which featured undercover footage of Nigel Farage appearing to say that the polls commissioned by the party described as were amazing and bang for buck. According to its report, James Orr, the party’s head of policy, and Dan Jukes, a close aide to Farage, arranged for an American company to fund the polls. The three polls allegedly cost £32,500. The undercover reporter was posing as the British-based son of a rich American businessman. When discussing the subject of a bigger donation to Reform, which would ultimately be funded by the US-based father’s firm, Farage appears to reply: ‘Thank you.’ He also appears to say that the donation would be ‘all above board’. Foreign companies are not a permissible source of funding for parties, including for payments for studies and research, under electoral law. A particularly revealing aside broadcast in the programme was the absolute contempt with which the Electoral Commission was regarded. The Electoral Commission is the body charged with ensuring that UK political parties comply with the law, particularly with reference to finance and the disdain of the Reform Party may well not be without foundation. The Reform party is arguing that it has been the subject of a massive hoax and recordings indicating that they would readily accept a source of overseas funding was not proof that they had done so and so no Electoral law had been broken. However, there is a narrow area in which the Reform party could be held to account and that is three opinion polls, one given prominence by ‘The Times’ and the another by the ‘Daily Telegraph’, were secretly financed by the Reform party and may have broken some electoral rules. The Reform party are meeting for their annual conference in  Birmingham and corporate donors are present in abundance so these revelations may give them some of them pause for thought whether Reform has robust systems in place to avoid illegality. For their part, an Electoral Commission spokesperson said: ‘The law requires political parties to report all permissible donations they accept with a value over £11,180 and all impermissible donations over £500. Information about any potential attempt to evade the controls on donations is for the police to consider.’ But, at the end of the day, this is an intended breach of electoral law but no actual money, although promised and suitably ‘laundered’ has been paid so the police will probably say ‘Nothing to see here. Move on’ In the morning, my son and daughter-in-law called around and I was very pleased to see them. not least because they were going to few days away on the South Coast so we would be out of contact for several days.  We discuss the ‘Reform’ exposures on Channel 4 last night in some detail and my son was of the view that Reform could be charged under the rubric of conspiracy to commit a crime. But conspiracy is very hard to prove in law as no document trail exists and jurors would have to rely upon circumstantial evidence. This morning Reform is claiming that it has been the subject  of an massive hoax and no illegalities has occurred. But it has made two of its key officials shown in the videotape to step aside whilst they wonder what to do. Reform UK has banned at least three journalists from its annual conference who have reported critically on the party and Nigel Farage. The Guardian’s City editor, Anna Isaac, the investigative reporter Peter Geoghegan and the broadcaster and biographer Michael Crick were told this week that their credentials to cover the event, which begins on Thursday, had been declined. The party has billed its conference, which will take place at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, as ‘the most talked about event of 2026”’ Reform figures are hoping to use it as a reset after a difficult summer consumed by questions about an undeclared £5m gift Farage received shortly before he was elected in 2024. When questioned by interviewers, delegates to the conference responded to the fact that Reform was subject to a witch-hunt from the other major political parties and implied that all political parties would have done the same. It is very instructive that the Tory party has not joined calls for the Reform finances to be investigated and one wonders whether similar ‘dodgy’ donations have been made to the Tories in the recent past.

Meanwhile, on the international scene. Doald Trump has indicated that he would not support the UK in any future conflict with Argentina over the Falkland islands (Malvinas to the Spanish speaking world) This has given the Argentinians a green light to make bellicose statements and they undoubtedly have eyes firmly fixed on the oil deposits discovered near the Falkland Islands but lying some 400 miles off their coast line. Now that Margatet Thatcher is dead and the armed forces have been so hollowed out, it remains an interesting question whether the UK would be in a position to defend the Falkland Islands in a subsequent invasion. Even on the last occasion, the USA took a lot of persuading to support the UK position as it had more than a hint of rampant colonialism and the Trump regime would not offer any support to the UK in a future conflict. Trump himself argues that the UK did not come to the assistance  of the Americans in the conflict against Iran although the UK did allow Americans refuellng and some logistical support even if not direct miliary assistance.

The evening before last, I ensured that I had my evening repast strictly at 6.00pm so that I could eat it whilst watching the news and could then go for a little walk in the park at 7.00pm. This took quite a lot of will power because all I wanted to do to stay snug at home and it was rather a muggy day outside anyway. Nonetheless, I made myself do it because there were two TV programmes that I had promised myself to watch as a treat. The first of these was a history of Rome by Sebag Montefiore and it detailed both the rise (and the fall) of the Vatican whose history is intertwined with that of Rome. Two little facts stuck with me as a result of this viewing. In the first place, after the excesses, as they appeared, of the voluptuous paintings of which the highlight was MichaelAngelo’s depiction of the Last Judgement, I had not realised that in the Counter-Reformation, a sense of prudishness had swept across the Vatican. This resulted in any of the genitals displayed by figures created by MichaelAngelo to be overpainted with fig leaves. Following decrees from the Council of Trent in 1563 condemning nudity in sacred art, the artist Daniele da Volterra was hired to paint drapery and loincloths over the exposed areas (where. they remained to this day). The second  fact that I learned from the film was that the status of Vatican City as an independent state, the smallest on earth was only fully settled in the Concordat signed by Mussolini after some sixty years of conflict between Vatican and Roman militia. So all of this was very enlightening but then I made myself watch the harrowing account in a documentary entitled ‘Stolen Babies’ of the ways in which the British state was complicit in the forced adoptions of babies born to unmarried mothers in the 1950’s. This was not confined to the UK or even to just unmarried mothers but was part of a wider phenomenon in many countries, including Spain. The phenomenon of stolen babies and forced adoptions up until the 1980s represents a dark chapter in modern history, spanning several countries under various regimes. These systems primarily targeted vulnerable women—such as political dissidents, unmarried mothers, or indigenous families—and separated newborns from their biological parents through coercion, deception, or state-sanctioned theft. The programme shown recently focused on the accounts of the then unmarried mothers and the fact that they were often forced to give birth with no pain relief, given no anaesthetic in any stitching that was required as a ‘punishment’ and then their babies were often removed within minutes of birth. As the film explained, this was a system in which largely working class women gave birth to children who were then handed over to predominantly white, middle class families. The passing of the Abortion Act and more easily available contraception meant that this practice died out as the ‘supply’ of babies radically diminished  but the women whose children  had been forcibly removed from them carried the feelings of guilt and shame for decades. The devolved administrations on Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland issues public apologies but in the case of England, it was left to Keir Starmer to make a formal announcement of the state’s guilt and complicity as late as July of this year – 2026.

I attended my Tai Chi class for the first time for a fortnight and was pleased that everything seemed quite unenergetic on this particular occasion. The Methodist Centre in which the classes are held will not re-open its coffee bar area until next week so after the class, I strolled along to the ‘Gifts of Love’ charity shop that I frequent once a week and can always have a chat with the volunteers who are manning it (as well as supplying me with a cup of coffee) Then I returned home and made a sort of fricassee with some frozen ham ends added to some fried onions and then supplemented by one of those instant veg in a microwavable bag which I use on occasions. After my lunch, there was nothing much on the TV schedules which caught my attention, so I turned to Channel 4 in the catch-up mode and watched a programme on the rise of the far right in the UK. This turned out to be a compelling watch because a journalist from the ‘Hope, Not Hate’ anti-fascist campaigning organisation had infiltrated one of their journalist members into some right wing groups in an attempt to discover the wealthy but anonymous donor who was funding all of these groups. This turned out to be quite an exciting watch as the  journalist gained the trust of some of the right wing groups and then posed as a potential donor who wanted to supply funds but had to ensure that his money was not ‘wasted’ The journalist succeeded in his aim of discovering the millionaire  donor who denied all of the allegations put to him but nonetheless pulled out all of is funding as the source of funds was no longer clandestine. Then in the late afternoon, my chiropodist called around for my monthly foot treatment and we discussed my holiday trip in some detail. I am trying to maintain my daily walk around the park after a light supper but I am aiming for an hour earlier today to give me a fairly uninterrupted evening. I have spent a certain amount of time making sure that I have all of my U3A (University of the Third Age) commitments appropriately calendared. This week has been quiet but I have two engagements next week and two the week after that and I find that this is just about my limit because were I to engage in even more group activities, this might start to appear a little burdensome to me.  After a summer in which  I have been spared the weekly ritual of grass mowing, I also think the time is rapidly approaching when I need to refill the petrol can and start on a regular mowing regime again although the grass appears patchy and the only thing that seems to have thrived after the intense hot weather followed by copious rainfall are the weeds. The autumn is a generally a good time when one starts to think of a certain degree of pruning and cutting back but there is quite a lot of that to do in  my garden at the moment. As with many of these things, I suspect I need to devote a regular 30 minutes a day to these gardening activities, provided the weather holds up of course. We may well be having another spell of good weather with which to round off our strange summer but the heat cannot be as intense as it was in July.

The night before last, I treated myself to a delayed viewing of the romantic  comedy of ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ which is always worth a repeat viewing. After I had viewed this, I went to bed but thought I would watch one of the many documentaries that are being broadcast to commemorate (if that is the right word) the destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York some 25 years ago now, the Americans referring to the disaster as 9/11 (11th September). The documentary was mainly a compilation of video shots taken from people’s mobile phones and stitched into a commentary-less account more or less echoing the events as a type of real-time event. What I think was most dramatic was that the collapse of the second tower which was not a slow crumbling  but a huge instantaneous collapse after fire had gutted the upper stories. This was followed by a huge cloud of dust and debris with the intensity of a tsunami and although many people were running for their lives, they still caught up in the speed of the huge dust and debris cloud speeding towards them. I wondered how many people would have their lungs affected for the rest of their lives by the catastrophe in which they were engulfed. We have never seen huge buildings being deliberately destroyed by aircraft being flown into their upper stories and no wonder the effects were unpredictable. Even Bin Laden was reported as saying in subsequent years that he had only expected the destruction of the upper stories and had not imagined the progressive collapse of the lower storeys which we all now know is what happened. This film did not make for easy viewing but after I had watched over an hour of it, I thought I had had enough and decided to go to sleep. The following day, I awoke to a night where we had evidently had rain during the night which is always welcome. On the domestic front, although we are expecting a budget from the new Chancellor within the month, the omens are not all all good and we may be heading for another financial crisis if the AI bubble of speculative stocks comes to burst. The most immediate cause for concern is how much extra we are having to pay to service the debt on the monies that the government has borrowed. In the UK, the yield on 10-year gilts stretched to 5.22% from 5.15% on Friday, while the 30-year hit 5.85%, up from 5.79% on Friday. The 10-year gilt had traded earlier on Tuesday as high as 5.25%, an 18-year high, and the 30-year at 5.89%, a level last seen in 1998. As the Sky News analyst Ed Conway explained in the article, bond yields are effectively the interest rate in the markets: ‘the ultimate interest rate’, if you like. ‘We are used in the UK to talking a little bit about bond yields – we all remember the mini budget. This time round it is an international story, but the problem in Britain s because we start this with really high bond yields; we are more in the firing line than most other countries around the world.’ It does not really reassure us to know that the UK shares this problem with several other advanced economies, including the USA, but the effects for a variety of technical reasons is so much more severe. But there is huge political pressure to increase the volume of defence expenditure, the enormous costs associated with the funding of social care still has to be fixed and the costs of the welfare expenditures seems to rise inexorably. In the latter case, cuts will do tremendous damage to the social fabric and thus we have the familiar situation in which the poor and disabled are being asked to bear the brunt of economic problems, even though the causes lay beyond their control. Whilst on the subject of shortage of money, the last day has seen the transfer deadline for the large football clubs to buy and sell players from each other. Premier League clubs have broken their all-time summer transfer record with spending reaching £3.49bn. English top flight clubs had already pushed well beyond the £3bn barrier when Iliman Ndiaye’s move from Everton to Manchester City on deadline day for an initial £60m took the amount spent past the previous mark of £3.14bn from 12 months ago.  A total of £506.5m was spent on deadline day itself, up from £391m last year. The total amount spent during the window considerably dwarfs the £1.13bn spent by clubs just five years ago and underlines the power top English clubs have to attract talent, according to figures provided to BBC Sport by Paul Macdonald, founder of FootballTransfers.com. These sums are subject to VAT which is reclaimed anyway so to my mind, here is the opportunity to tax some of these really sums with a special ‘Football Transfer Tax’  Bankers’ bonuses are subject to special taxes on occasions and given that houses are taxed when  they are bought and sold with ‘Stamp Duty’ why could the principal not to be extended to these obscene amounts of money. Just out of interest, £3.5 billions matches the exact estimated cost required to clear the highest-risk safety-critical maintenance backlog across crumbling NHS hospital buildings. Historically, a £3.5 billion real-terms boost was earmarked to transform out-of-hospital care, funding 24/7 rapid response teams of doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists to prevent hospital admissions. In terms of Social Care and Workforce Reform then this amount of money aligns with cost models for broad social care reforms, such as implementing financial caps on personal care costs or raising social care worker pay to NHS band standards. So if I were in government, I would subject football transfers to a large transfer tax (of the order of 20%) since they can evidently afford it.

In the middle of the day, I did my normal weekly shopping and was relieved to have a fairly light week as I was spending more than usual on my days away in Yorkshire. Upon my return, I cooked myself a simple lunch of quiche accompanied by some mange-tout peas (which always to keep especially well, even if beyond their sell-by date).I thought I would engage in a little experiment to make the meal a little more exciting and a bit less bland, so after microwaving the mange-touts, I gave them a quick toss in olive oil to which  added a teaspoon full of mint sauce (after all, one adds sprigs of mint to garden peas) and this worked out OK as an experiment as well as a thin sliver of sweet chilli on the quiche sauce although I am sure this is not good for you unless consumed in the most sparing of quantities. 

I must say that it feels rather good to be in the month of September when something similar to ‘normal’ life reappears after summer vacations and the disruptions to a more normal routine. I have always throughout my life started either new jobs or new ventures such as attending university in late September/October so I always associate this time of year with new beginnings or a fresh start. Now that the summer vacations are over, I am hopeful that the cafe area in the Methodist Centre in town which is one of my regular haunts will re-open after its summer refurbishment and the same applies to the parish hall which is adjunct of my local church. To complete the sense of ‘new beginnings’ Parliament is to reassemble and Andy Burnham is due to meet MPs, both supporters and opponents in the new session with a host of urgent problems on the agenda, not least in the prisons crisis. I am always reminded when one political figure was asked about his ‘enemies’ in Parliament, he reflected upon the fractious nature of politics when he opined that ‘it is my opponents who are in front of me, my enemies are behind me’ (i.e. in the same party but perhaps in a different wing of it) It is interesting to observe the domestic political scene at the moment because one does get the impression that with their long history as the governing party, the Conservatives naturally much more take to being in power than they do to the role of opposition. This feeling has its obverse in the Labour Party who one feels are very good at Opposition but much less sure-footed when it comes to the business of actually being the governing party, despite their huge majority. In their attempt to solve the short term problem of the absence of enough prison cells in the system, the government are resorting to the expedient of throwing a certain amount of money at the prison estate and asking prison governors if they can identify some spaces such as laundry rooms or storage cupboards into cells. I happen to think that this is quite a good idea even though temporary solutions have the habit of becoming more permanent ones as happened with income tax. There must always be some prisoners in any particular prison who are  old or infirm but can be regarded as trusty and would never think of anything such as an escape. For such individuals, the amount of security could be appropriately light and perhaps their ‘trusty’ status could be rewarded by their own cell converted out of a store cupboard or odd space somewhere. I am always reminded of the days when I used to teach the BASIC programming language and when one was concerned with sorting an array of data,  one always had to have one spare unit of storage space (analogous to a prison cell) whilst numbers were being swapped in the sort process. My niece in one of our recent coffees together was telling me about a book which I think I must both buy and read. I am pretty sure it was called ‘Counterfeit Gods’ and according to the publisher’s blurb it details the following:’ Success, true love, and the life you’ve always wanted. Many of us placed our faith in these things, believing they held the key to happiness, but with a sneaking suspicion they might not deliver.’

Our domestic help called around this morning and we always seem to have a lot of things to discuss with each. She had discovered a very friendly and heart-warming little cafe in a district away from our High Street so this might be worth a look, particularly as they do a good line in bacon butties. There is also a good nearby charity shop run by AgeUK where they seem to always have an extraordinary range of goods so this, too, is worth a visit after an absence of several months. Half way through the morning I got a telephone call from my Italian friend who lives down the Kidderminster Road and I have accepted her invitation to have a nice cup of coffee in the morning. In the past, I have taken my Italian friend to join in the chatty table in the Methodist Centre. When I was out on the road collecting my newspaper I called around to remind myself via a note on their door when normal service is to be resumed and was delighted to learn that it is going to be next week after a summer refurbishment so I am pleased to able to share this good news with my friend. n the middle of the day, I attended our normal weekly Pilates class but our number was diminished to just three of us today. After I returned home, I made myself a mackerel salad and then settled down to watch the statements to be made in the House of Commons by both Andy Burnham and also Kemi Badenoch who are squaring to each other for the first time. meanwhile, an intriguing London by-election may be in the offing. Sir Keir Starmer has indicated that he will step down as an MP for the London seat of Holborn and St. Pancras. Now this is a seat in which the Greens made a strong showing in the last election and Zak Polanski who has lived in London for decades evidently has ambitions to become elected to give the Green party a seat I Parliament for their elected leader. Now it is too early to say whether Polanski will rise to the challenge but in politics, you have to seize the opportunities whilst you can. Polanski is a very erudite and accomplished speaker who can think quite quickly on his feel but has made a couple of gaffes recently upon his opponents have seized. Under the leadership of Zack Polanski, the Green Party of England and Wales experienced a historic and rapid surge in membership and polling support following his election in September 2025. Membership climbed from around 68,000–70,000 in September 2025 to over 200,000 by March 2026. The massive influx allowed the Greens to overtake both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party, establishing themselves as the third-largest political party in the UK by membership numbers. If the Burnham government tries to embrace a form of electoral reform (which is unlikely but not impossible) then I imagine the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens could form a coalition, either loosely or in more formal terms, that would keep the right out of power in the UK for a generation.

Most of the packing got completed satisfactorily and then I watched one of the repeated ‘Pilgrimage’ programmes normally broadcast on a Sunday morning. In sharp contrast to the evening before, when I went down to the bar/lounge area, I find it practically deserted so perhaps most people are having a meal and then going straight to bed. I anticipated meeting up again with the American actor with whom I had socialised so much throughout the late morning, but he was not in evidence – or anyone else for that matter. I have to complete my packing first thing in the morning and so I had to content myself with an early night hoping that the Bank Holiday trains run true to timetable for my return journey. It now looks as though the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has bowed to the public outcry by ordering changes in the ‘Early release of Prisoners’ scheme. Two of the men in prison for the killing of PC Andrew Harper are set to stay behind bars after the prime minister this morning revealed changes to the planned early-release scheme. Andy Burnham said people convicted of unlawful killing, including manslaughter, would now be excluded. Eligible prisoners are due to start being released from October in an effort to ease chronic overcrowding. However, the prospect of Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole being freed caused an outcry, and they are now no longer set to be released at the halfway point of the 13-year-sentences they received in 2020. The excuse for not having done this early was the possibility of appeal under the ‘Human Rights’ rubric and it is hard to see how a challenge that could have been made yesterday is so suddenly nullified today, I awoke yesterday after not a particularly good night’s sleep, perhaps a little concerned about the journey ahead of me back home but it promises to be a bright day. My niece is giving me a lift to the station which will be quite a boost as the journey from the hotel to the station is up quite a steep hill so this is welcome. The political news is dominated by personalities this morning. Priti Patel has lost her position in the Shadow Cabinet and her services dispensed with by Kemi Badenoch so there is no sisterly love shared between  these two female, black right-leaning politicians. But the bigger news is that James Cleverly, a Londoner, is to resign from the Shadow cabinet in order to run in the next election for London mayor. He is the biggest hitting candidate on the Tory side since Boris Johnson and although the capital city inclines towards the left, I would rate his chances as fairly high because I am not sure who the Labour party would put up against him. Sadiq Khan took office as mayor on 9 May 2016, and was re-elected in 2021 and 2024 so has already run two terms of office The position had been held by Ken Livingstone from the creation of the role on 4 May 2000 until he was defeated after two terms in May 2008 by Boris Johnson, who also served two terms before Khan was elected. Cleverly immediately becomes the front-runner for the nomination. He is, as one admiring senior Tory in London puts it, ‘Well liked, experienced, good on the media and can connect with London Conservatives.’ He previously served as a member of the Greater London Assembly in 2008 and 2016, in which capacity he drove through a difficult reorganisation of the capital’s fire services. Among some Conservative colleagues, there was a feeling at times that Cleverly was not across the detail in various briefs he held. Yet he can plausibly claim to be more experienced and tested than any of the three mayors who have held the post since its creation in 2000 and so I would rate his chances as fairly good.

My niece phoned up a good half an hour before she was due to pick me up from the hotel so we popped into a nearby coffee bar for some quick refreshment before she dropped me at the station (which was very welcome) the train that transported me to Leeds was a LNER Kings Cross bound train and seemed much superior to the Cross Country trains offering. The very helpful travelling ticket inspector on board the train found the platform to which I was heading in Leeds which was useful as I only had about thirteen minutes to effect the transfer. In the event, I made this with a few minutes to spare on board the Plymouth bound train which became hideously crowded in the journey through the Midlands from Derby onwards. At one stage there were about eight or none people standing in the carriage  in which fortunately I had a booked seat although I had to ask for it to be vacated when I boarded the train. The train was rerouted through Lichfield and Sutton Coldfield but arrived in Birmingham only about 5 minutes late and so I had plenty of time to get to the Bromsgrove train which, Hereford bound, turned out to be faster than the normal service. So the overall journey like  the proverbial ‘curate’s egg’ was good in parts. I was delighted to see my son who gave me a lift home having only got back from his own travels earlier in the day. Then during the course of the afternoon, I was unpacking, restoring things to their rightful resting places and getting the washing underway. I have a few set things that I like to take away with me which make hotel life a little more liveable of which the most important is an extension cable for the laptop I take away with me and a spare cable and batteries as well some items when I breakfast in my room. Tonight, I shall probably indulge in Paddington 2, being transmitted, no doubt, as today is a Bank Holiday and the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ is always  worth another look but as the transmission time is late, I will save that for ‘catch-up’ the next day. I am contemplating my larder to see what meal I can prepare from my tinned stock as I tried to run down supplies before I went away (five days ago) less they go off. Now that this mini-Yorkshire vacation is over, I feel I probably need to re-establish an exercise routine for myself (some daily walks, for example) but I have a Pilates session tomorrow which might be a good start. Some people swear by a walk after a light evening supper and my local park always has a fair sprinkling of dog walkers as well as other more purposeful walkers at about 7.00pm.