The Mirror Crack'd

Barely six months into his new government and Sir Keir Starmer is losing ministers at a rate of knots to rival his Tory predecessors. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to lose one minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. And it is arguably carelessness - though possibly also naïvety - that lies at the heart of Starmer's travails with his former Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh. To add to his woes, Tulip Siddiq has just resigned as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, a role which included monitoring City curruption. Having referred herself to the PM's standards adviser and received rather less than fulsome support from that quarter, she was left with little choice. In fairness to him, Starmer had to fill a large number of senior government posts in very short order on gaining a landslide majority at the general election on 4 July. He did so knowing of Haigh's spent conviction for fraud, having accepted her assurance that her sentence was gi...

President Elect Donald Trump needs to watch his mouth if he wants a country to be president of after his inauguration. Alongside suggesting annexing the Panama Canal and buying Greenland, Trump posited Canada as the 51st state of the Union. This diplomatic outrage prompted an ironical response from veteran Canadian Green politician, Elizabeth May, who countered that instead California might wish to join Canada, before mentioning the concept of Cascadia. She was only partly joking. 'Cascadia', a vision of the contiguous US Pacific Coastal states of California, Oregon and Washington joining Canada in a liberal coalition has been around for many years - it even has a flag. Since 1992 these states have consistently voted Democrat in US Presidential elections. Pledging “safer streets, strict gun laws and free abortions" she suggested that were the United States to allow the secession of its West Coast it would “get rid of all these states that always vote democrat.” In an upbea...

Essex County Council has voted in favour of cancelling local elections in May in order to concentrate on a major shake-up of local government. The decision comes in response to the government announcing its wish to see fewer councils in England and for each region to have its own elected mayor. In the specific case of Essex, the number of local authorities could be trimmed down from fifteen to as few as two, with a new mayor for the county being voted into office in 2026. As a former London Borough councillor myself I have some misgivings about such centralising plans. In theory, the greatest level of subsidiarity is desirable to encourage grassroots local democracy, working from the parish council level upwards. The reality of that, however, can be cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive.  For example, in my home borough of Tower Hamlets I recall the introduction in 1986 by the incoming SDP/Liberal alliance council (later Lib Dems) of a new decentralising policy of neighbour...

Could 2025 seriously be the year we see a re-litigation of the mediæval Crusades? Perhaps a more accurate analogy than those notorious attempts to regain the Holy Land and Jerusalem for Chistendom would be the Reconquista of al-Andalus. This series of military and cultural campaigns, waged by Europe's Christian kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsular following its conquest by the Umayyad Caliphate, culminated in victory for the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in 1492, bringing to an end eight hundred years of Muslim rule. What prompts this line of thought is the posting of an image on Elon Musk's social media platform, X, that would seem to be urging, in graphic terms, the reconquest of the European part of Istanbul and its Turkish hinterland taken by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, put up a doctored photograph of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul with its iconic dome surmounted by a huge Greek flag and surrounded by Greek soldiers. Above the image is ...

It won't be, according to new research just published by Clarion, the UK’s largest housing association. Its findings suggest its future residents will be older, lonelier, in worse health and financially poorer. Why do I not find that hard to believe? As a pensioner having already lost his winter fuel payment of £200 I'm disinclined to be optimistic about the future. While the government seeks to reassure me that my pension will increase in April due to the triple lock I still have to navigate possibly one of the coldest winters in recent times with a 1.2% energy price cap rise in place for this quarter. Added to this, I have also recently been migrated from legacy benefits onto Universal Credit (UC) as one half of what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) defines as a 'mixed-age couple'. At the same time as I am deemed ineligible for Pension Credit due to slightly exceeding the income threshold I have lost my NHS Credit for new glasses prescriptions and dental tre...

A many gendered thing My Spanish husband is struggling with the concept of non-binary personal pronouns - or not so much the concept as their practical application in interpersonal relations. The problem arises out of Spanish being (as with most Romance languages, apart from Romanian apparently) so heavily gendered. Some neuters have crept into modern Spanish, such as chice instead of chico / chica  for boy/girl. But in standard Spanish even they/them are (is?) gendered:  ellos/ellas. C onjugating the verb 'to be' in the third person in a gender fluid era has become a veritable minefield, linguistically and socially. As I approach my seventy-second birthday I think I'll settle on the personal pronouns ho/hum! Betwixt and between I've never known how to refer to that dead patch between Christmas and New Year. Although strictly part of the Twelve Days of Christmas the nameless void from 28th to 30th December inclusive (ie after Boxing Day and before New Year's Eve) i...