The Joy of Six 1296

William Wallace opposes the abolition of district councils on the grounds of efficiency and cost-cutting: "But there is a countervailing cost in local democracy and representation which Liberal Democrats - I would argue - should fight against. Most people see political issues through local experience and daily life.  Now that so many decisions have been removed to Whitehall, with service delivery transferred to private providers or autonomous agencies regulated by central government, it’s not surprising that so many voters see politics as a distant game played in Westminster over which they have no influence at all."

"When Morgan McSweeney replaced Sue Gray as Starmer's Chief of Staff two months ago many expected the government’s communications would improve. They have not. For that to happen Starmer must abandon his vision of politics, at least for now. He needs to recognise that a government - especially today - will to be judged on its actions and its words." It's time for Keir Starmer to embrace populism, argues Steven Fielding.

Jonathan Foley says artificial carbon removal is largely a sideshow when it comes to climate change. At best, it may eventually grow into a minor solution. At worst, it's a distraction from reducing emissions - and plays right into the fossil fuel industry’s hands.

Jonathan Liew on the Global Super League Twenty20 in Guyana, where big oil, geopolitics and cricket collide.

"His book humanises the work’s exalted creators and demonstrates that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith but a troubled, often desperate quest for consolation. Despite those hectoring hallelujahs, what moves King is the oratorio’s prescription for overcoming personal misery." Peter Conrad reviews Charles King's Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah.

Welsh carols, Derbyshire ballads and Cajun drinking songs: Jude Rodgers selects the best folk music for Christmas and winter.

And, as it's getting near Christmas, here's a bonus...

The Joy of Six 1291

"With the 'Tractor Tax' protests filling the news for several days, yesterday delivered an email from Lib Dem HQ informing me that our MPs are demanding that the tax be axed. I was both surprised and disappointed to see our MPs siding with some very wealthy vested interests on this issue." Nick Baird says Lib Dem MPs are wrong to campaign against the government's changes to inheritance tax.

Alexandra Hall Hall on the changes the Democrats must make: "They voted for [Trump} ... not because they approve of his character, but because he successfully managed to come across as more in-touch with them and their concerns than any of the Democrat policy wonks crafting Kamala Harris' campaign messages and strategy, or the celebrities who endorsed her."

"The Armenian genocide of 1915-1917 ... is still denied by its perpetrators; indeed, politicians praise the men responsible and even make scornful jibes about the victims. The issue for Armenians is not so much about 'closure' as a fear that the same undercurrents of hatred are still brewing and will inspire further violence, a fear in part realised last year when Azerbaijan, Turkey’s ally, carried out what human rights groups called the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of over 100,000 Armenians." Britain's energy policy is making us allies of the Armenians' enemies, argues Ed West.

Ruairí Cullen explains new British Academy interactive maps that reveal cold spots in social sciences, humanities and arts in UK higher education, especially affecting disadvantaged students.

Lawrence Buell goes in search of the Great American Novel and returns with some recommendations.

"There doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason to create the crescent-shaped street. Perhaps it was a creative whim or perhaps it was an attempt to maximise space; whatever Stuckey was thinking, he created a crescent which can supposedly boast the smallest radius in Europe." Look Up London takes us to Keystone Crescent near King's Cross station.

That soup has missed the oil companies and splattered art lovers

"There is a price to teaching public venues to be suspicious of visitors and it is a price we all pay," wrote Stephen Daisley in response to Just Stop Oil's stunts at Stonehenge and the National Gallery. 

How right he was.

The London blogger Diamond Geezer has written about what a visit to the National Gallery now entails:

Walk-through metal detectors have been a fixture here for years, ditto a perfunctory bag check. This did tend to create queues but nothing ridiculous, and last time I visited back in May I was inside within five minutes. How much worse could it get with liquids banned?Spoilers - really very bad indeed.

And here are just some of the details:

Climbing the steps would normally have been a simple matter but in this case it took 20 minutes to get from the bottom to the top. The pre-booked queue alongside was moving faster but not significantly faster, which must've been frustrating. 

Only when you reached the top was there a sign pointing out what couldn't be taken inside - knives, aerosols and fireworks, obviously, but also now liquids, placards and cut flowers. Four bins had been provided for chucking away undesirable objects and for pouring away that nice drink you didn't realise you shouldn't have been carrying. 

By the time I was finally allowed into the building I had been waiting FIFTY-FIVE minutes, which was ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was that the queue then split into ← Bags and No bags →, each with its own detector arch, and because I didn't have a bag I didn't actually need to have waited all that time for a bag search anyway.

From my observations the pre-booked queue moved about twice as fast as the unbooked one but was also 50 per cent longer, i.e. anyone waiting in that queue would have taken about 40-45 minutes to enter the building. That's also a miserable amount of time to be waiting, especially for those who've done as asked and pre-booked a slot. 

The National Gallery essentially isn't walk-up any more, it's a queueing marathon, and all because visitors can't be trusted not to sneak soup in and chuck it over an Old Master.

Throwing soup - which is wanky and middle-class protest to begin with, like throwing milkshakes at Nigel Farage - has left the oil companies completely unscathed. Its victims have turned out to be art lovers and the reputation of environmental protestors more generally.

The towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station await demolition

James Graham (the television writer not the former Liberal Democrat blogger) has joined calls for the preservation of the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, which was Britain's last working coal-fired station before it shut down at the end of September.

BBC News quotes him as saying:

"Some might think they're ugly. I think they're majestic. Concrete cathedrals.

"I got to stand inside one, filming Sherwood series two. I've never stood anywhere like it on Earth.

"I'd love future generations to stand in them too. But they are inexplicably all going – all of them."

There are various online petitions calling for the preservation for one or more of the towers, but none seems to be arousing much enthusiasm.

No application for demolition has yet been submitted to the local council, says another BBC News report. But if demolition does take place, East Midlands Airport will have to be closed while it is underway.

The Joy of Six 1265

"The Labour government appears to think that improving the delivery of public services will be sufficient to resolve the embittered alienation of so many voters from British politics. Do we dare as liberals to argue that democracy requires a much more active engagement with our citizens, at national and at local levels?" William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats should be setting the agenda, not following it.

Christian Wolmar claims he has the ideal road plan for Britain: take the 16 major highway schemes worth £15bn and bin them.

"White privately-educated British male cricketers were 34 times more likely to play professionally than state-educated British South Asians." Taha Hashim on the work of the South Asian Cricket Academy.

Red Flag Walks looks back to the feminist protest against the 1970 Miss World contest: "Sarah Wilson was chosen to start the protest. 'When Bob Hope was going on and on with terrible, grotesque stuff, I got up and swung my football rattle. It seemed ages before anybody responded – people were lighting their cigarettes to ignite the smoke bombs – but then I saw stuff beginning to cascade down.'"

"He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the driving force behind Rising Damp." The late Eric Chappell, creator of the series, tells the story of Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp, the show he created and wrote 50 years ago.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the power station on what is now St Pancras Way: "The first phase of the power station faced the Regents Canal and the large area of railway coal depots, and this was one of the reasons why the power station was located here – the easy access to supplies of coal, whether delivered to the power station via train to the depot opposite, or along the canal from Regents Canal Dock (now Limehouse Dock), brought in from the north east of the country using colliers."

Lydd on Sea and Dungeness station - with a note on the origins of the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School

Atmospheric photographs and atmospheric music. The blurb on YouTube explains what we are looking at:

Although the trackbed from Romney Junction towards New Romney is easily traceable, nothing remains of Lydd-on-Sea Halt today except for a gated concrete approach road from Kerton Road. 

Promoted  by holiday camp development in the area, the Southern Railway decided in 1937 to realign its branch line to New Romney (which had been opened in 1884) closer to the sea and to open two intermediate stations - Lydd-on-Sea and Greatstone-on-Sea. 

The opening of Lydd-on-Sea on 4 July 1937 coincided with the closure of Dungeness station to passengers; it was intended that Lydd-on-Sea, ½-mile from Dungeness, would serve both locations and its running in board read "Lydd-on-Sea (for Dungeness)".

To handle the expected flow of holiday traffic, the station was equipped with a long curved island platform with a passing loop on which was perched a small wooden shed. The traffic never materialised and the station was downgraded to an unstaffed halt on 20 September 1954 when its passing loop was also lifted. 

As passenger traffic dwindled and freight became insignificant, the New Romney branch fell into decline and was listed for closure in the Beeching Report. In 1966 the Minister of Transport Barbara Castle announced her intention of closing the Appledore to New Romney Branch and passenger services ceased on 6 March 1967.

Trains still run from Appledore to Dungeness to collect nuclear waste for reprocessing at Sellafield. There's more about that and the history of the line on Kent Rail, and Derek Hayward has photographs of the old Dungeness station and its site today.

Dungeness still has a station on the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, and Jon and David get off a train there in The Elusive Grasshopper, the sixth of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories:

When they got out at the station the wind was so strong that for a moment they held on to each other. It howled and roared over the flat wastes and round the lighthouse towering above them. It whipped the smoke and steam from the engine's little smoke-stack into nothing and flattened the sea poppies growing in the shingle at the side of the track, and as they stumbled up the old full-gauge railway lines towards the school it whistled and sang strange songs among the telegraph wires.

It was not very pleasant exploring the school because the wind played odd tricks in those empty rooms and corridors and the house was full of mysterious groans and whisperings and thuds. But there was nobody there and no sign that anybody had been there since they had found Wilson stunned on the floor. Jon showed David the loose floorboard with a sketch of the grasshopper and they even searched for cigarette ends or pipe ash, without success.

I assume there really was a ruined school beside the old standard-gauge branch at Dungeness when Saville knew it. And it's also the inspiration for the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, which Lord Bonkers mentions from time to time.

The last days of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station

Jillian Ambrose for the Guardian about the plans to close Britain's last coal-fired power station, Ratrcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire:

When Ratcliffe was opened in 1968 by the Central Electricity Generating Board, the very first series of Dad’s Army was about to be broadcast, the Beatles were topping the charts and coal power was in its heyday.

Coal-fired stations mushroomed through Britain’s mining heartlands in the late 1960s and 1970s to provide baseload power for Britain’s electricity network. The 2,000-mega­watt Ratcliffe broke up the skyline for drivers on the new M1 motorway, and provided power to heat and light 2m homes.

It was built in an area rich in coal, where collieries employing tens of thousands of miners dotted the landscape. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe was burning 65% of south Nottinghamshire’s coal output.

The new power stations were built at speed. At the time, their scale and engineering complexity were unprecedented, and their impact on the climate unforeseen.

When Ratcliffe generates its last megawatts this year, it will represent the final dismantling of Britain’s coal heritage and end almost 150 years of coal-powered economic growth.

“It’s the end of the first Industrial Revolution, really,” says engineering manager Nigel Bates. He first stepped on to the Ratcliffe site more than 40 years ago, as a 16-year-old mechanical apprentice with a handful of O-levels. “Coal started it all, and soon we’re going to end it,” he says.

I'll miss the giant cooling towers that became an important part of the landscape of postwar Britain. They were at their most dominant in the Trent Valley.

My photo shows the towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar from the place where the Erewash Canal joins the River Trent.

By-election as Conservative MP Chris Skidmore resigns from party and Westminster over Sunak's energy policy

Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP for Kingswood, has resigned the party whip in protest against Sunak's decision to maximise the extraction of North Sea oil and gas.

He explains his decision in a long statement on Twitter, saying "I can no longer stand by."

Skidmore has also announced his intention to leave Westminster "as soon as possible," which must mean another parliamentary by-election.

Kingwood is in South Gloucestershire and Skidmore had a majority over Labour of over 11,000 at the last election. Labour held the seat between 1992 and 2010.

Lib Dems call on Welsh government to save the Centre for Alternative Technology

Embed from Getty Images

Jane Dodds, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, has called on the Welsh Government to help save the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, which celebrated its 50th birthday earlier this year.

She told the County Times:

"I was saddened to hear of the news that the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth has been closed to visitors due to a lack of funds, placing 14 jobs at risk.

"For many people, the centre was an entry point that opened their eyes to what was possible and practical when it comes to sustainable energy.

"At a time when we urgently need to transition to net zero, centres like CAT which inspire the next generation to think sustainability are vital in the fight against climate change.

It Is vital that the Welsh government step in and extend a helping hand to the centre during this difficult time to prevent further job losses and potentially reopen the centre."

The paper says the centre hopes to reopen if it is successful in securing Levelling Up funding for an 'overhaul'.

Councillors accused of 'unreasonable behaviour' blocking solar farm on farmland in shadow of Belvoir Castle

Our Headline of the Day comes from the Leicester Mercury.

The judges observed that it's probably not a good idea to build a solar farm in the shade.

Exploring the Aldeburgh to Saxmundham Branch with Em and Stu

The branch from Leiston to Saxmundham opened in 1859 and was extended the four miles to Aldeburgh the following year.

Passenger services survived until 1966, so (pace Em and Stu) you can include it among the Beeching cuts to the network. The 'I'm Backing Britten' campaign of 1968 came too late to save it.

And there is a village at Thorpeness - a select early 20th-century holiday village - but it is some way from the halt that was opened to serve it.

Watch the video and you will see that the line from Leiston to Saxmundham remains open for occasional workings to and from the nuclear power station at Sizewell. I believe they take spent fuel rods to Sellafield for reprocessing.

And you will see at the start that the terminus at Aldeburgh, where festivalgoers must once have alighted, has vanished. You can find some photographs of it on the Disused Stations site.

Conservative-controlled East Yorkshire votes for Lib Dem motion against fracking

The is evidence today that the Conservative leadership's enthusiasm for fracking does not extend even to their own councillors. Tory-controlled East Yorkshire council has voted overwhelmingly against fracking within its boundaries.

Drill or Drop? reports:

A Liberal Democrat motion committed the council to write to Liz Truss, her business secretary and the climate minister reinforcing the county’s opposition to fracking in the county.

A full meeting of the council in Beverley this afternoon voted by 49 votes in favour, with none against and six abstentions.

There were no speeches against the motion and it was supported by the council leader, Jonathan Owen.

The Joy of Six 1076

Sarah O'Connor, in a Twitter thread, fact-checks five key assertions from Britannia Unchained (which was co-authored by our new PM and chancellor) and finds them all untrue.

Putin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between left and right, argues Quillette, but offer an example of the two poles making common cause against the centre.

Jeff Sparrow argues that the stronger resistance to fossil fuels grows, the more laws spring up to contain activists: "In Australia, where fossil fuel lobbyists exert tremendous influence over the major political parties, the trend has probably gone further than anywhere else."

"Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of her reign, did everything he could to escape from 'the gruesomeness' of public ceremonies. The result was that the few ceremonial occasions under Victoria often involved embarrassment: marching columns that concertinaed, coffins carried the wrong way, words that were misread and ceremonies that were botched." Adrian Wooldridge examines how the British crown learnt to do pageantry in the 20th century.

"So profound was the PM's passion of the moving picture, her first words on being introduced to Lord Attenborough were 'Why didn't you come years ago?' 'Because I wasn't asked, darling,' Dickie replied." Richard Luck on Margaret Thatcher's ambitions to revive the British film industry.

Simon Matthews reviews a new biography of Aleister Crowley: "Along the way we meet W.B. Yeats, who scorned Crowley as a writer, Clifford Bax, Dennis Wheatley, Gerald Yorke (personal representative of the Dalai Lama), Tom Driberg, Anthony Powell, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Clifford Bax."

Lib Dems pick issues they will use to attack Liz Truss

Jane Merrick has a new leaflet she says the Lib Dems will use to attack Liz Truss when she becomes prime minister - albeit rather a cropped copy.

In her report she explains the thinking behind it:

Lib Dem strategists claim voters in Tory heartlands in southern England have voiced concerns on the doorstep about Ms Truss’ failure to offer more help with energy bills, her comments about “lazy” British workers and her commitment to British farming.

Voters in Blue Wall target seats have also expressed concern about reports Ms Truss presided over budget cuts at the Environment Agency when she was the minister responsible, leading to a doubling of discharges of raw sewage, the Lib Dems say.

People in rural communities have complained about Ms Truss pursuing trade deals with Australia and New Zealand when she was International Trade Secretary that have undermined British farming, the party claimed.

Britain's pubs and chip shops are under threat: Where are the culture warriors?

It's not just individuals and families who will be hit by the horrific rise in fuel prices: businesses will be two.

And among them are two types of business we like to think of as quintessentially British.

The Independent reports today:

Pubs and brewers across the UK are at risk of closure within months amid price hikes upwards of 300%, industry bosses have warned.

Bosses of six of the UK’s biggest pub and brewing companies have signed an open letter to the government urging it to act in order to avoid “real and serious irreversible” damage to the sector.

Greene King, JW Lees, Carlsberg Marston’s, Admiral Taverns, Drake & Morgan and St Austell Brewery all sounded the alarm on Tuesday.

You can find the full letter on the British Beer and Pub Association site:

Dear Prime Minister

As Chief Executives of breweries and pub companies who are experiencing first-hand the hugely damaging impacts of the energy crisis, we feel compelled to write to you to calling for urgent support.

Across our businesses we are witnessing price rises which are causing irreversible damage. Hikes can now be upwards of 300% on pre-pandemic energy bills, with the current average increase around 150% across the beer and pub sector, putting jobs and businesses at risk. As more fixed price contracts come up for renewal this is only worsening. The time to act is now.

A recent report from one licensee of a small community pub was of a £33,000 increase on their previous year’s energy costs. This is one of countless examples of stark energy quotes. These figures when compared to a venues profitability simply do not add up. Without swift and substantial  intervention from Government there is no doubt we will witness a huge number of pubs close their doors for good, leaving individuals without jobs during a cost-of-living crisis and communities without its social heartbeat. Breweries that supply them are equally facing eye-watering increases in energy costs.

Rising energy costs is an issue impacting the entirety of the industry’s supply chain, with major CO2 producer CF Industries announcing it will be ceasing production of what is a critical component in beer production and dispense in pubs, citing market conditions as a key decision driver. 

Additionally, energy price increases have come at a time when the pub and brewing sectors had just begun to piece together their recovery from the pandemic, with many venues still carrying debt accrued from this time. Without Government support, all of the positive work done to support the sector during the pandemic could be wasted, as unprecedented costs tip many pubs and brewers over the edge.

We urgently need the Government and the leadership contenders to outline a targeted support package for the sector. For example, along with a pause on levies, the introduction of an energy price cap for small businesses will go a long way to stop rocketing prices crippling pubs and breweries, and additional grant support will aid pubs before we lose them forever in communities across the country.

And the is was on BBC News last week:

Fish and chip shops are facing "extinction" amid rising costs, an industry body has warned. 

Some shops in the West of England say the soaring price of cod, sunflower oil and energy has left them struggling. 

The National Federation of Fish Friers is urging the government to cut VAT and help shops with energy bills.

What I want to know is this: why aren't the culture warriors all over this? Fighting off a threat to our chip shops and pubs should be what gets them out of bed in the morning.

But we have heard nothing from them on social media or in real life.

And, yes, I'm talking about you, Nigel Farage.

As Delia Smith once put it:

"Where are you? Where are you? Let's be 'avin you! Come on!"

Incidentally, I am well aware of the history of fish and chips in Britain. Anyone who tells me about it, here or on Twitter, will set off a loud QI-style klaxon.

The Joy of Six 1071

"I want to know how the government is going to help Britain through the winter. If it doesn’t, whoever wins the Conservative leadership will find themselves in the cold in 2024." Sam Ashworth-Hayes says Britain is not prepared for winter blackouts.

Nadeine Asbali warns that today’s boys are easy targets for Andrew Tate: "When the state fails to provide support, when adults are so absorbed in trying to live hand to mouth, when opportunities for social mobility are shattered, Tate offers a dangerous hand for them to cling on to. It’s time for schools, community leaders and families to step in and get there before he does." 

It's 10 years to the day since archaeologists from the University of Leicester found what proved to the the skeleton of Richard III under that Leicester car park. BBC News asks the people involved what has happened since.

Sara Papic offers a concise introduction to the work of the most infuential 20th-century philosopher: "Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential and multi-faceted thinkers of the 20th century. The Viennese philosopher went through several career-changes, fought in the First World War, and radically changed his own philosophical perspective mid-way through his life."

"There’ll be a public 'light well' at Sheffield station later this year so passengers can look down into the River Sheaf from platform five, and sections of the Porter are already being opened up on pathways near Decathlon and Matilda Street."  David Bocking on how Sheffield reclaimed its rivers.

Mark Bridge argues that Star Wars is bleak critique of democracy and US policy.

Liz Truss pledges to beat the Lib Dems in Cheltenham, but doesn't know which county it's in

Yesterday's Conservative leadership hustings took place in the plum Liberal Democrat target seat of Cheltenham.

During it, Liz Truss pledged she would ensure the Lib Dems did not take the constituency back. (We held it from 1992 to 2010.)

She may have trouble keeping her promise, because she appears to think the town is in Derbyshire. Just watch the video.

Incidentally, she could have saved herself time and embarrassment by dropping that prefabricated answer.

Because it became clear that her honest reponse to any question about what she would do to give immediate help to people hit with colossal fuel bills is "Nothing."

Lib Dems get tough with privatised utilities

There are two news stories about the Liberal Democrats and the privatised utilities today.

BBC News reports that we have:

called for October's expected energy price cap rise to be scrapped, with the cost covered by a windfall tax on energy company profits.

Experts expect the energy price cap - the maximum amount suppliers can charge their customers in England, Scotland and Wales - to hit £3,615.

The average bill was £1,400 a year in October 2021.

And the Guardian says:

Water company bosses should be banned from giving themselves bonuses until they fix their leaky pipes, the Liberal Democrats have demanded.

New figures uncovered by the party found that England’s water and sewage company bosses have awarded themselves about £27m in bonuses over the past two years.

Analysis of Companies House records by the party found that executives at England’s water and sewage companies were paid £48m in 2020 and 2021, including £27.6m in bonuses, benefits and incentives.

This is despite reports that they allow 2.4bn litres of water to be leaked in England every day.

I'm pleased to see both these proposals. OFGEM has been ridiculously accommodating to the power companies - any idea that the point of privatisation was that those companies should bear the risks has long been forgotten.

And Ofwat has been no tougher with the water industry. If we hit directors where it hurts - in their pockets - then we may at last see some action on leaks.

We also need to get tough on the pollution of rivers. I suggest we threaten those same directors with prison sentences if they don't clean up their act.

How I became anti-nuclear: Windscale Fallout by Ian Breach

Ever since Michael Gove said "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts" the left hasn't been able to get enough of them.

Yet if you are on the left then at some point you will have decided that Important People are wrong.

For me it was the debate over nuclear power. At the start of 1978, when I was still 17, Lord Justice Parker recommended in his inquiry report that a thermal oxide reprocessing plant be built at Windscale and the government went ahead with the idea.

I decided Parker had got it wrong. I remember asking a visiting speaker at school, who was there to promote nuclear, why we didn't develop renewables instead.

And I had a 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks' T-shirt and bought a Penguin Special on the subject: Windscale Fallout by Ian Breach. 

Though they sound like something out of the 1940s, Penguin Special were very much a thing in those days. They felt serious and grown up and I liked them in the way I liked the New Statesman because it had its leading article on the front cover.

I've found a review of Windscale Fallout from Australian Left Review:

The scene that Breach describes is familiar: A company which has been doing a profitable business in reprocessing nuclear fuel wants to expand its operations. It already has a very lucrative contract with Japan. The workers are in general in favour of this expansion. And so is the Labour Government. The expansion goes along with future plans for a commercial fast breeder reactor program. But because the company has been secretive about the safety of its operations, because local people are concerned, the Government is induced to hold a public inquiry.

The wide terms of reference of the inquiry encourage those who have objections, mostly environmentalists, to throw a great deal of time, effort and money into presenting their case. They raise the issues of safety, civil liberties, nuclear proliferation, the need for public participation in setting safety standards and making energy policy. In the end, the Commissioners write the report which the company and the Government expected and wanted.

Not much has changed in more than 40 years.

Breach was an interesting figure who became one of the BBC's first environmental correspondents before, his Guardian obituary records, being sacked by John Birt for demanding the corporation devote more airtime to the environment.

Bull's attempt to scratch 'itchy bum' cuts off power to 800 homes in three Scottish villages

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Evening Standard.