Paul Cotterill

Ah, fair enough. I clicked through and read it fine.

This one is free to read.

Tbf, Chris, this scoop is a bit bigger than that scoop I tried to give you a few years ago. Congrats.

Went away to walk for a couple of days, and discovered that the use of television is to fill that period between coming off the fells (winter time) and it being a respectable time to go to the pub when there's no comfy place for reading.

I watched 'Small Prophets' on BBC I-Player. Report incoming.

Yes.

Yes indeed. I yearn for the days of the union convalescent home.

Yes, I think we're broadly agreed.

It might well not be.

All I'm saying is that they'll have stats of some kind of their own, which may or may not be leading to bias about their chances, depending on who's reporting in on them and with what motives.

It's not polling data they'll be using. It's sampling from their own canvass records. Labour have been doing this in closer contests for 20 years.

Serious point about this, and Hoggart's analysis in his seminal book, is that the working class people, however defined, pretty well always aspire to being middle class, however defined, and are constrained by material circumstance, not by some weird invented solidarity of aesthetic or culture.

Serious point about this, and Hoggart's analysis in his seminal book, is that the working class people, however defined, pretty well always aspire to being middle class, however defined, and are constrained by material circumstance, not by some weird invented solidarity of aesthetic or culture.

The authoritative guide to what makes for an authentically working class living room is Hoggart R (1957), The Uses of Literacy, p.35

p.36 is also useful e.g. on the need to have a male child "drying himself on the family towel near the fire" tho this is now optional. Happy to screenshot if needed.

Blackpool FC now on an utterly amazing two match unbeaten run.

Toying with idea of having a shower but leaving the water dispensed from it to fill up in a plugged large bowl arrangement and the using the same water later to become clean again, rather than having another shower.

I’m not v fussed about Owen Jones’s mild indiscretion but any regular canvasser knows that you never walk on people’s grass to the front door, and always close a gate if there is one and it was closed when you arrived. It’s a signal of courtesy.

Of course 999 is the best option if it's immediate, I hasten to add.

If you're a councillor getting death threats of any kind, best option from experience is 101 online form submission to police. It gives you time to order your words and make them factual, and you get a more considered response. Bottom line is that yoy shouldn't just let it go as 'part of the job'.

All recognized as good and even established policy in the new Pride in Place programme, but unfortunately only covers bits of a few towns and puts an extra tier of decision making into local governance that simply isn't needed.

Yes, it's still basically 7th century Oswald vs Penda.

I see there's a lot of 'cope' going on from people who generally accuse people of 'cope' but can't bring themselves to confront the idea that theoretical tactical voting like this assumes parties will not over-egg their chances, unless there is an actual alliance-forming mechanism against that.

My soundings are that what I set out here might actuallu understate the meltdown for Labour in these areas, and that in some areas there might be pretty well nobody to put their name to a Labour candidacy.

I rather like the Namibia national anthem. Got a Karl Jenkins feel to it.

Blackpool have won a game of footbal.

No, the other way round, B of A.

I think A may be a subset of B. C is entirely legit.

What really gets at me especially is that in the early 1990s I ran vaccination clinics (inter alia) in the urban slums of Bangladesh. Mothers would queue from before dawn to save their kids. (Bangladesh now has the 2nd highest vaccination rate in the world after China.)

I’m a London parent who hasn’t vaccinated my kids against measles, let me explain A new outbreak of measles is spreading across north London, and it’s a wake-up call to all mums like me who didn’t give the MMR vaccines to our children, says Charlotte Cripps

Maybe indicative that this article about choosing to endanger the lives of her children and those of many others is in the lifestyle section of the website, according to the URL www.independent.co.uk/life-style/h...

One of the great thrills of my mother's later life, which was one dominated by grief, was when I took her to see Jesse Jackson at Edge Hill University in 2013, just a few months before she died.

She really wasn't well enough to go, but she was determined to witness greatness.

This may create, by mistake and despite what regional organisers try to do to fill gaps, quite a few seats which become straight Green vs Tory/Reform mash ups (though Tories may also struggle to fill), and a weird natural experiment in what designed electoral coalition of sort I advocate can do. 2/2

There won't of course be much sympathy for all the Labour cllrs in the 30 areas who've been told to plan for one more year of it all and now been told to plan for not one more year of it all, but I suspect lots of them will just not bother to be candidates in May, with vacancies v hard to fill. 1/2