wagonman

I hope you're not trying to paint the Restore Trust mob as progressives? Regressives more like… right wing culture warriors who I, for one. am desperate to keep off the NT Council at the forthcoming elections.

When I was a High School Governor, about 15 years ago, our budgets were sufficient to be able to keep the structure in repair ('60s built so rather naff), employ almost enough Classroom Assistants, and even start a Breakfast Club. Heady days.

I think something similar applies to all Public Schools though to a lesser degree than at Eton. Even at my own school, suitably venerable though otherwise very much of the second or third rank, we were informed in all seriousness that we were in the top 7% educationally. If so then God help the rest. Floreat Etonas!

While agreeing that membership of political parties is very much a minority thing – even in the heyday the Tories and Labour only had membership in the low million mark, not a patch on the National Trust – it's worth pointing out that the Labour Party had over 500,000 members when it was led by ... Jeremy Corbyn!

Reason and sanity were banished from our political discourse in 2016. I fear it will be a long time before it returns.

Rivet press?

Campaign merchandise ready to roll...

I usually just refer to him as *unt. It is an indication of just how low this country has sunk when *unt is regarded as the only adult in the (cabinet) room and thus our saviour...

The 'M' obviously stood for 'Midland' as it always did. The numbers taken into BR stock were more than a handful – though obviously a fraction of those originally built some 20-30 years previously. I do not know how BR proposed to handle tarred roadstone traffic in the early '50s as it is well outside my period of research, but given the nature of the cargo it would need a dedicated fleet of wagons if carried by rail, which is why they were non-pool in the first place. I am not aware of any such wagons continuing in service in private ownership, but as I said outside my are of research. Ask David Larkin!

Not entirely true as the roadstone wagons were taken into BR stock in 1950-1 and numbered in the M36xxxx series.

Clearly Faith, Hope, and Charity were no longer options... PS: notice the use of an Oxford comma, just to annoy Coffey.

According to the 1912 Kelly's Directory the only coal merchant in Lavenham was Gayford & Kendall who, so far as I know, didn't't have any wagons. Likely suppliers, given the location, were J O Vinter of Cambridge or William Booth of Ipswich, plus of course Moy who had a base in Colchester as well as at Peterborough. Alas I don't think POWsides do either Vinter or Booth. Here is an A G Thomas sketch:

In some towns early closing was on Wednesday. In much of rural Germany, shops still close early on Saturdays – and all day Sundays. On the Norfolk coast most shops are open 7 days a week!

My friend George would definitely approve...

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Archer are going out of business... https://www.archertransfers.com

Class War is an enduring reality, like it or not, and at the moment the 'wrong' class is winning, and has been since 1979.

My error. Ms Grey is actually a recent appointment – to represent Scotland (I was under the impression she had been appointed during the Cameron regime...)

Len who? Sharon Graham is Gen Sec of Unite.

Clearly it no longer is the political wing of the TU movement – that ended with the abolition of the Block Vote, and the disaffiliation of most of the unions. I do worry about the concept of 'electable'. It usually means 'acceptable to the Establishment and unlikely to rock the boat' – Tory Party B Team. That unimpeachably Conservative commentator Peter Oborne has frequently defended Corbyn as a decent man vilely traduced by ... just about everybody. His 'electability' was demonstrated in 2017. The appointment of James Purnell, an exLabour MP, to the BBC Board was recently blocked by the non-execs fearful of the reaction of Johnson's so-called government. Grey has been there since before the present regime so is not strictly relevant.

Another name for the Mail is/was "The Forgers' Gazette" – harking back to Zinoviev and Red Robbo among others, though they left the Hitler Diaries to the Sunday Times.

It got screwed by First Past The Post, as did the rest of the so-called democratic process.

If you're looking for Commissars in the Labour Party you need look no further than Starmer and his Gauleiters Akehurst and Evans et al. They are trying to purge the party of every last trace of socialist thought. The latest victim seems to be Sam Tarry whose crime was to stand on a picket line with RMT members. Given that the Labour Party was founded with the express intention of securing parliamentary representation for the Trade Union movement, and is explicitly a Democrat Socialist organisation – it says so on the membership card – it's the present leadership that are out of step.

There is a lot of loose talk about the Hard Left as if it were a major force instead of merely a handful of sour faced tankies who call themselves TUSC. If you are, like the gutter press, trying to tar Corbyn and his ilk with that brush then you really do need to take a hard look at your preconceptions and prejudices. In reality they are mainstream Democratic Socialists of the kind that have been running most of Scandinavia for decades. But because the Overton Window has been pushed so far to the right they seem like ravening Bolsheviks to the uninformed. Yet many of Labour's policies in the 2017 Manifesto – such as the idea that essential utility services should be in public ownership – were and are popular across much of the political spectrum. 'Reasonable Tories' do still exist though I can't see any in the Parliamentary party since Johnson purged them all. What's left is the lunatic fringe of right wing libertarians and Ultras who seem to want to recreate the glory days of the British Empire c1890 when free-booting capitalists were free to exploit their workers, customers and the environment without let or hindrance. Part of that process is that they 'shrink the state' – but as we are seeing, a shrunken state is a barely functioning state. Everything from the Health Service to the Passport Office, Justice to Culture, is falling apart as a direct consequence of Tory government policy since 2010. There has in that time been a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. No government, whether of the Left, the Centre or the Right can hope to solve the country's problems without redressing that imbalance for starters. I've been voting since the '60s, from a time when the (pragmatic, One-Nation, mostly non-corrupt) Tory Party was the Opposition rather than the Enemy it now is. But, come the next election I will be voting LibDem as usual.

You're trying to create a false equivalent as the complaints from the Corbyn camp have been demonstrated to be justified.

As James seems to be skirting around the issue as gingerly as Maitlis did, I will name the 'guilty' party as Robbie Gibb, recently Director of Communications to Theresa May and brother of a Tory MP. I will also challenge him to identify a 'Corbynista' in a similar position of power within the BBC. Hint: there isn't one.