“They’ve got under my skin”, says Lyme Regis artist Christine Allison, as she stands in the museum’s quirky rotunda, surrounded by the metre-square ‘portraits’ of six highly individual trees. “And I realise that I am approaching painting them as I would a portrait of a human or an animal.” Gnarled and twisted or smooth and […]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest report this week. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, described it as an “atlas of human suffering”. Alice Bell, co-director at the climate change charity Possible, wrote in the Guardian: “The key findings are bleak, if familiar. Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly; many of the […]
I’ve learned through teaching and writing for children and young adults that we ‘grown-ups’ underestimate the young at our peril. Many of them are more clued up, more engaged and more inclined to mobilise than many an adult. Anya Haywood is a great example. She’s eight and fighting to save a stretch of countryside that […]
“When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber,” Winston Churchill once said of blathering back-bench MPs. An eagle silenced by death in Dorset had erstwhile pork-pie plotter, Chris Loder, now shamefully returned to the back-bench Borstal of Boris-backers, jabbering on social media recently. It is not known how the rare young eagle came […]
Perhaps the journalist for Bournemouth Echo had guessed that Jacob Rees-Mogg was about to be handed the ‘exciting’ challenge of proving the advantages of Brexit. None seem to be immediately discernible. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released a report on 9 February, which revealed that “the only detectable impact so far is increased costs, paperwork […]
Dear Mr Burns, Hoping this finds you well. I move around a lot in social circles as an ‘after-hours musician’, and whenever I engage in conversation, which is a lot, this particular question goes around like a wildfire all the time: “How long can Boris Johnson cling on to his job?” For us normal people, […]
Are you worried about the state of our democracy? Our electoral system? Pollution? The climate crisis? The threats to the NHS? Housing? Social justice? We know that most of our readers care deeply about the issues we cover in our articles. We also know that whilst people want to know the truth, the seeming tsunami […]
Last week I wrote to my local MP Robert Syms. I explained the great sadness and upset I felt had been caused by the revelations of casual disregard of the Covid rules by those responsible for imposing them. While my family had been prevented from seeing dying relatives and attending funerals, they partied on. Back […]
Dear Mr Parish, As long as laws are made in Parliament, then British people must have a legal right to protest them in Parliament Square. Democracy is not an ‘inconvenience’. Public opposition and dissent are among the hard-won rights that make our democratic system function. Seeking to limit noise levels so people cannot be heard, […]
At West Country Voices we like to tell the stories that others in the media don’t. Often, these stories concern issues that the powerful and well-connected are keen to suppress; they involve holding policymakers to account or exposing abuse of office. Recent stories have focused on the threats to our democratic rights and freedoms. They […]
In 2021 the average price of houses in Taunton increased by 21 per cent: the highest rate of increase in the country. It is a sign of how utterly dysfunctional our housing market has become that this was announced as good news. According to the Daily Mail, for example, “while it was good news for […]
Housing. It’s in crisis across the UK but nowhere is that crisis more acute than in the south-west, battered by the perfect storm of beauty, inequality and wealth. It’s not as if we don’t know what damage second, holiday and empty homes do to a community. There’s enough research out there, let alone the daily […]
At the heart of Bournemouth and Poole lies Talbot Heath Nature Reserve – an extraordinary 37-hectare fragment of the once ‘Great Heath’ that stretched uninterrupted from the Purbeck hills to the New Forest. Since 1800, 80 per cent of heathland has been lost worldwide, and today the UK is the custodian of 20 per cent […]
Ah, the review of the year! An opportunity to look back and see how far we have come, only in the UK’s case there is more than a whiff of Groundhog Day and zero evidence of any great moment of enlightened self-awareness or contrition from this government. Take our first highlight from January from Cornwall […]
During the medieval period, the grand estate known as Kingston Lacy was part of a royal estate within the manor of Wimborne in Dorset. The manor house stood to the north of the present palazzo, close to a deer park. Supporters of the Crown were allowed to let the estate. After it was sold at […]
Dear West Country Voices, I would imagine you are inundated with responses to that editorial. If not, you should have been! Whilst I have never been a member of the Conservative Party I have voted Conservative in parliamentary elections since getting the vote at 21 in 1968. (With one exception. I refused to vote for the […]
The cumulative effect of a sucession of scandals, incidents of rule-breaking, double standards, lies and evasions is that, for many, this government’s behaviour has become intolerable. At WCB, we’ve often praised Simon Hoare for his more sensible and moderate stance on many hot topics. We have come to expect sycophancy and slavish obedience from many […]
Did you think all that ever comes out of Dorset is fossils? Or that most political Brexiters are crusty, scrofulaic old men with questionable hygiene, an onanistic fetish for the past (the more forgettable the better) and misty-eyed nostalgia for things like the Norfolk Island penal colony, public beheadings of entire families, and the good […]
A train trip back in time “Going anywhere nice today?” Taking the drink from the young woman at the station kiosk, I replied: “We’re off to Newbury, to Greenham Common. It’s the 40-year anniversary of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. My mum was one of the Greenham Women. We’re going to see the events […]
Social care may well prove to be Alexander Boris de Pfeffel’s Johnson’s Waterloo, and deservedly so. Out of the blue, less than a week before parliament was to vote on the matter, Number 10 tabled a new proposal (New Clause 49 to the Health and Care Bill) on the social care cap. It significantly watered […]
Dear Tobias I am now retired, but I worked in the NHS (as a nurse, then a health visitor) for 28 years, then for a further 20 years in an NHS-funded post in a university, in teaching and research. I have, therefore, seen and worked through very many changes and reorganisations in the NHS: often […]
November 5: Parliament Week. As the fallout from the Owen Paterson affair began to crescendo in Westminster, and Boris Johnson considered making a speedy escape north, one MP made his own trip down to his home constituency. The MP for Bournemouth East, Tobias Ellwood, visited the local grammar school on Friday afternoon to meet its […]
Dear Editor Imagine a job where all the responsibility for difficult decisions has been delegated to your organisation. You just need to turn up and vote the way you are told and, should any of your fellow workers or members of the public question ‘your’ decisions, the organisation will craft a standard reply to send […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
The government’s proposed amendment comes to parliament 8 November and was sneaked out late on Friday night in an attempt to bypass scrutiny. It would allow water companies to claim compliance with the law if they reduced outfall by 1/1,000 a year. Not good enough. As Feargal Sharkey said of the amendment “it will […]
If the rain, the dark evenings and the (even darker) news are getting you down, you need an art fix – an encounter with creative energy and a feast of colour, art you can gaze at until you forget everything but the image in front of you. Distraction. Absorbtion. Escape. Well-known Lyme Regis artist Christine […]
“Lords’ Amendment 45 to the Environment Bill would have placed a legal duty on water companies in England and Wales “to make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.” “Despite the horrendous environmental impact of the disgusting practice, shortly before the vote, the Conservative Environment Secretary George Eustice recommended to his […]
Hot on the heels of West Dorset MP Chris Loder’s scarily ill-informed and ill-advised comments on the parlous state of the UK’s supply chains comes this gem, which we are reproducing from the original blog post by Luke at Town Towels. It would be pure fun if it were not for the nasty undercurrent that […]
The pandemic The ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ (TEFL) sector has for decades played a vibrant cultural and economic role across the UK, not just in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) area. The spring and, especially, the summer seasons, used to see large numbers of foreign students arrive to study English, make new […]