The Mirror Crack'd

BBC1 opened its autumn season (in August - go figure) with an historical drama about events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, featuring as much embroidery as the Bayeux Tapestry. It's always frustrated me, as a bit of a history buff, when such dramatisations depart radically from the truth - or as near the truth as one is ever likely to come with history, axiomatically, being written by the victors. With historical events as exciting and improbable as these, why gild the lily? Truth is usually stranger than fiction so if it isn't already dramatic enough for your tastes, make Game of Thrones instead. Admittedly,  King & Conqueror, the BBC television offering in question, has a lot of ground to cover and a lot of characters to work with - or gloss over, if not excise entirely. The storyline is also pretty convoluted so elision and omission is the order of the day if the plot is not to become bogged down in tedious explication. Some artistic licence must be granted the scr...

Putin and Trump - or Tart and Fart as I refer to this shameless pair of scoundrels - have had their summit or, as we say in Yorkshire, summat and nowt.   Former KGB agent meets former estate agent - who would you sooner trust? Yes, the respective Presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States of America have met - this time in Anchorage, Alaska, on a flying visit (two shits that pass in the night one might say) - and once again Putin has played Trump like a fiddle. Initially, Trump seemed to be of the opinion that Alaska was in Russia, when even a cursory glance at a map shows it to be a US state. (Given how keen he seems to claim Canada, Greenland, Panama etc you'd think he'd know the fifty he's already got.) True, Alaska was once Russian but that was before 1867, when it was bought from Tsar Alexander II by President Andrew Jackson. This was hardly an auspicious start. Imagine Trump's withering scorn had that rudimentary mistake (or misspeak) been made by ...

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, assures us she proscribed Palestine Action based on reliable intelligence that the organisation was planning acts of violence. I am not reassured. After Saturday's debacle in Parliament Square in Westminster, where the Metropolitan Police spent hours arresting 522 peaceful protesters, many of them pensioners sitting on the grass holding placards supporting Palestine Action, she needs to come clean. Precisely what advice did she receive? When trust in the government is at an all-time low she surely cannot expect us to believe this on her say-so alone. The cost of Saturday's policing, not just in the Square itself but of the march through London that accompanied it, must have been astronomical, with police reinforcements drafted in from as far away as Wales. Then there's the cost of processing all the arrestees, charging and trying them (if it comes to that) and then, if found guilty under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, imprisoning them fo...

I don't know where Yvette Cooper was today but she certainly wasn't in Parliament Square to witness the inevitable consequences of her proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. While her Cabinet colleague, David Lammy, enjoys his bromance with JD Vance at his grand 18th century country residence of Chevening House in Kent, Cooper will have to make her own summer arrangements. Wherever these may be I hope she can live with her conscience as she relaxes in her garden hammock. Actually, I hope she can't. Had she seen what I saw today as an observer in the Square, I wonder if she would have been as unrepentant as her recent statements suggest? Almost certainly. She claims to have received intelligence suggesting that Palestine Action is planning violent action. That may be correct and we await to hear precisely what that information is but until she makes it public we will have to take it on trust that her proscription was justified - and few of us, I suspec...

Fulfilling an election manifesto pledge, the Labour government has announced it will be bringing in voting for sixteen and seventeen year-olds in time for the next UK general election. Sixteen and seventeen year-olds in Scotland and Wales currently enjoy the right to vote for the Assembly and Sennedd, and in local elections, but this does not apply in Northern Ireland or England. According to the Electoral Commission, plans to lower the voting age are unlikely to be implemented in time for the next scheduled Northern Ireland Assembly election in 2027. The first time this cohort will be able to cast its vote, therefore, will be in the general election, which must be held before August 2029. This announcement has caused controversy in some quarters, which is odd considering it was a manifesto commitment by a party that went on to win a landslide majority. Those who find this a disturbing prospect are no doubt the very people arguing that sixteen and seventeen year-olds have an insufficie...

As hosepipe bans come into force across regions of England and Wales questions are being raised as to why no major new reservoirs have been built in over thirty years. I have skin in the game (forgive the Americanism) my father having worked on the construction of two in the late-fifties and early-sixties, the first in Somerset and the other in Yorkshire. Many of my childhood memories relate to being on-site with my dad, something that Health-and-Safety rules would presumably now prohibit. I have a photograph of myself in the driver's seat of a dumper truck on one site and vividly recall a vertiginous trip in a concrete hopper on a cable line over the emerging dam wall on the other, enough to have a site immediately shut down by the H&S Executive these days one imagines. With a rising population, increasing water demands and climate change creating more regular droughts, something clearly has to be done, urgently. With an estimated shortfall of 6.5 million houses in the UK, dwa...

In less than a fortnight British parliamentarians break up for their summer hols having tied up all the loose ends. Er, if only. Sure, their summer recess begins on 22 July and runs until 1 September, and MPs probably can't wait to get away. Unfortunately, though, while they're running for the hills, they're leaving behind them a mountain of problems from which they can run but can't hide. The problems will be waiting for solutions, with increased urgency, when they return to the green benches for the gruelling autumn term. Government MPs will need to brace themselves for the upcoming budget and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has just fired a broadside in the form of its Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report . The OBR produces this assessment of the state of the nation's finances once a year and it is generally met with a determined collective effort from our political leaders to ignore it as being too problematic. This year, that might not be possible....