United Kingdom

While the mayor doesn't have any authority in the matter (considering he's in charge in a different county) he's at least got some attention and likely isn't the only person feeling this way.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/00MAo

Andy Street has called for the Crooked House pub to be “rebuilt brick by brick” after it was demolished following a huge fire over the weekend.

The building, known as the Britain’s “wonkiest pub” and dating back to 1765, was gutted by a fire on Saturday night just two weeks after it was sold to a private buyer.

On Monday the remains of the building in Himley, near Dudley in the Black Country, were demolished, hours after Staffordshire police said they were gathering evidence as part of an investigation into the cause of the fire.

It is not yet clear who demolished the pub.

Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, said he had written to the leader of South Staffordshire council, Roger Lees, asking him to ensure the building was rebuilt, and any application to change its use was blocked.

“This pub may be just over the border in your county of Staffordshire, but it clearly holds real cultural and historical significance to the West Midlands. We therefore found it deeply upsetting to see the iconic location gutted in this way,” the letter read.

“We therefore ask you to consider ensuring the property is rebuilt brick by brick (using as much original material as possible) before any further discussion about the future of the site take place.”

He added: “We would strongly ask you to consider not allowing any alternative use and instead keeping this iconic location as a pub. It is in all our interests that we do not allow the Crooked House pub to be consigned to history.”

On Monday, Staffordshire police said they were “reviewing all of the available evidence alongside fire investigators to determine the cause of the incident”.

Firefighters said they struggled to access the building when it was ablaze on Saturday as large mounds of dirt were blocking the road leading up to it.

The station commander, Liam Hilton, from Staffordshire fire service said they were “a good 800 metres to approximately 1,000 metres distance” from the building meaning they had to get water from a “high volume pump”.

In another letter to the chief constable of Staffordshire police and the chief fire officer, Street said “there are major questions to be answered given how swiftly this fire happened following the sale of the pub to an unknown private developer”.

“We are also intrigued by the fact your officers faced blocked access when trying to get to the scene,” he said.

Staffordshire police and Staffordshire fire and rescue service have been approached for comment.

cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/66332

[ sourced from TechCrunch ]

Archived version: https://archive.ph/rXLlw

A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after a stabbing near the British Museum in central London, Scotland Yard has said.

Officers said a man was being treated for a stab wound to his arm and his condition was being assessed after the incident at the junction of Great Russell Street and Museum Street at about 10am on Tuesday.

“This was an isolated incident and there is no outstanding risk to the public,” the Metropolitan police said. “It is not being treated as terror-related.”

An area was cordoned off while officers investigated and police said they expected it to remain in place for much of Tuesday. A police tent was erected on the pavement on the museum side of Great Russell Street, just metres from the entrance.

The London ambulance service said its medics treated the man at the scene for his injury “before taking him to a major trauma centre as a priority”.

A 27-year-old woman from New York said she was about to enter the queue at the museum when police told her to leave because someone had been stabbed.

She told PA Media: “I was standing across the street at the Starbucks walking out to get into the line. We decided it was a good time to go, then we walked out and a cop directly in front of us told us we needed to leave and that the crime scene was large.

“I heard that someone was stabbed and the ambulance was parked inside near the grass area and then rushed down the street, right by me, with police following behind. A cop told me the museum is completely closed until tomorrow.”

The museum is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, receiving about 2 million visitors between April 2021 and March 2022.

Senior Tories share fury, as 20 migrants granted last-minute reprieve following legal challenges

Retailers are ramping up promotions on goods in a bid to entice shoppers after July's wet weather hit business.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news/t/316149

Metropolitan police approved their use at Notting Hill carnival and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020

Not sure how wide spread some of these issues are. Has anyone here experienced anything like what the author describes?

Archived version: https://archive.ph/zDSbp

An enormous amount has been made lately about Barbie and (to a lesser extent) Oppenheimer reversing the terminal decline of the theatrical cinema experience. The films have enmeshed themselves in the cultural conversation in ways that movies simply don’t do any more and, as a result, scores of people who don’t habitually go to the cinema are being dragged out to see them. This is a good thing. Anything that prolongs the life of cinema deserves to be celebrated.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect outcome, because all these newcomers have clearly forgotten how cinemas are supposed to work. The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.

In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that social media – TikTok especially – has made it easier for people to record and publish fights in cinemas, to the extent that the Maidstone melee seems to have been posted by multiple accounts from multiple angles, like a sort of mega Zapruder. Perhaps, for all we know, cinemas have always been a tinderbox of mouthy idiots itching for a scrap, but it’s only since the advent of shareable video that anyone has actually noticed.

But then again, the fact that all these fights were recorded on phones – in an environment that repeatedly and explicitly discourages the use of phones – speaks to a deterioration of etiquette in itself. Plus, as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months.

I went to see Barbie on opening day and, although it was nice to see a full auditorium for once, it was slightly confusing to see how many people had brought their children along. Not their older, age-appropriate 12A children, either – their tiny, young toddlers who in all honesty were unlikely to appreciate the intricacies of a film that largely exists to deconstruct feminist iconography. The film was preceded by a trailer for Joy Ride, in which all the characters start singing the line from WAP about all the whores in the house. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen several dozen mums simultaneously panic in the dark, but I’d recommend it.

So what’s causing this spate of awfulness? My guess is our old friend Covid. The lockdowns of 2020, coupled with the film studios’ sudden mania for slinging all their new releases on the nearest streaming platform, stopped people from going to the cinema altogether. Nobody wants to spend several hours sitting shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of strangers in an enclosed space when there’s a fatal virus going around, after all. And it isn’t like people went to the cinema all that much before then either, given the enormous cost of tickets and snacks and drinks and babysitters.

The fact that Barbie is so successful means that, for a huge percentage of its audience, this will be their first cinema visit since 2019. And four years is easily long enough to forget some of the rules. They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt. It’s like stumbling across an unexploded bomb, or being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off.

The good news is that the wild success of Barbieheimer might have reminded people how much fun it is to go and see a new film in the cinema. Things are rough now, etiquette-wise, but if this has shaken people out of their slumber enough for them to return to cinemas regularly, then it will only be a matter of time before they start obeying the rules once again. The bad news is that Barbieheimers don’t come along every day. Unless The Meg 2 inexplicably ends up becoming a Star Wars-level hit, it might be a while before these people return to the big screen again.

It looks like we weren't the only ones thinking this was a bit suspicious...

Archived version: https://archive.ph/O7x45

Full article:

Police have said they are “reviewing all of the available evidence” on the cause of a fire that destroyed the famous Crooked House pub in the West Midlands just two weeks after it was sold to a private buyer.

The pub in Himley, near Dudley, was completely gutted on Saturday night by a blaze that took 30 firefighters to extinguish, days after being sold by the brewer Marston’s.

On Monday, Staffordshire police said an investigation into the cause of the fire at the 18th-century pub was open and that a cordon around the site remained in place.

DI Richard Dancey said: “This incident has caused a great deal of speculation locally and we understand the significance of the building within the local community.

“We would like to remind the public that our investigation is ongoing and we are reviewing all of the available evidence alongside fire investigators to determine the cause of the incident.”

Dancey said people were being asked to avoid the area due to damage to the structure of the building. The force confirmed that no one had been inside the building at the time and no one was injured as a result of the fire.

The pub was famous for its wonky appearance, caused by the building sinking due to mining subsidence, which created optical illusions such as coins appearing to roll uphill.

It had been put up for sale by Marston’s in January this year, a company spokesperson said.

Six fire crews from Staffordshire fire and rescue service (SFRS) and the West Midlands fire service used a high-volume pump and several jets to extinguish the flames after emergency services were called at 9.58pm on Saturday.

Station manager Liam Hickey from SFRS said: “Crews have worked diligently to safely extinguish the fire and make sure damage was minimised as much as possible.

“We know the significance that the building has within the local community and we are working alongside our colleagues in the police to investigate what happened.”

The Black Country Living Museum, which is based nearby, responded to suggestions it could have stepped in to save the building, which dates back to 1765.

“The fire at The Crooked House, Himley, is devastating news, after the recent sale seemed to offer a future for the building, albeit with a new use,” a spokesperson said.

“Unfortunately, the museum was not in a position to save, let alone relocate, the building. Our hope remains, despite the fire, that the Crooked House can, and will, be restored, and once again have sustainable use at Himley.”

Staffordshire police urged anyone with information that may help the investigation to contact the force quoting incident 761 of 5 August.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB

For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.

Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.

Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.

For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”

Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.

Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”

Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.

In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”

Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.

It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.

By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.

“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”

Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.

And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.

By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”

Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.

Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”

Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news/t/314510

Eris desends from Omicron and is now the second most prevalent Covid variant in the UK

Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZfHr3

I am back on the job hunt. My recent role working with young people who are at risk of becoming involved with county-lines activities has come to an end.

I’m used to it. I’ve always worked short contracts. What I’m not used to is how hard it is to get a proper contract now with a decent number of hours. No one knows what the future holds so employers have become tentative. Any contracts that are given out are small – 18 hours a week, for instance.

I have enjoyed this latest job. What it’s really made me realise is that county lines and exploitation can be traced back to poverty and destitution. Young people are being exploited because their mums work on low-income wages and they don’t have any money. These mums can’t afford to buy them £100 Nikes or whatever it is they’ve seen on Instagram. One young person – a nice kid – I was working with was a phone thief. I asked them why they did it. Their answer: “I can earn £200 to £300 per phone. I’m at home with my mum, my dad’s in prison and there are mouths to feed.”

Rishi Sunak is on a different planet. He’s not seeing the poverty, the destitution, the high cost of living that normal people are experiencing. The cost of living is still affecting me and everybody else but there is also clearly greedflation. There are things I simply refuse to buy now. I saw Bisto gravy granules in Asda for £4. Are you mad? They used to be £2.50. The company that owns Bisto has just announced a 21% rise in sales. The Nescafé cappuccino sachets I used to like for £2.50 are now £3 in Sainsbury’s. Domestos bleach was always £1. Now it’s £1.50. I refuse. I just buy the rubbish stuff instead. I feel like I’m being mugged off. The only power you have is to say no.

We are being squeezed. To me there is something really evil about doing this to consumers; money is being made off our backs. I might be working but I feel like I’m not reaping the whole benefits of my salary.

I don’t even know who I am going to vote for. Keir Starmer has said he is not going to change the policy on the two-child benefit cap. What is the point of voting for a progressive party if they are not going to make change? That policy is what has driven so many children into poverty. Then there’s the way Rishi Sunak has spoken about immigration. He has used the term migrants when we should be talking about helping refugees. He talks about them like they are some new species that is overtaking us.

I went to the theatre the other day with my niece. It was a folk play. I’m part of a literary group so I get free tickets. Our seats were in the corner. There was a couple seated there before us. I said: “Excuse me, these are our seats.” She kept staring at me, not watching the play. In the second half she swapped seats with her partner. When the show finished, I said to her: “I’m sorry that my black skin made you uncomfortable.” What else could it have been?

Racism has been tolerated by the government, especially with the way they talk about refugees like there’s an invasion. I’m going to start calling it out. I’m tired of being judged as soon as people see the colour of my skin.

On a positive note, I’ve got a role in a play called Bread and Roses, part of the Untold Stories series in Enfield. It covers suffragettes and going to war, but also deals with homelessness, eviction and the cost of living. I rehearse every Sunday. I feel like I’m getting to do what I want. Even though I’m not acting full-time, I’m still engaged in it, still performing.

Sharron Spice is in her 30s and lives in London

Archived version: https://archive.ph/rgfak

Once again, the spectre of the “motorist” is haunting Westminster. The Conservatives’ narrow win in last month’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection has been pinned – perhaps somewhat speciously – on widespread alarm about the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone, and from that, all else follows. A move against 20mph speed limits and low-traffic neighbourhoods is now reportedly in the government’s sights. A huge chunk of the media, meanwhile, loudly speaks for parts of the population who are supposedly addicted to asphalt, petrol and zooming from A to B with as little obstruction as possible.

Amid all the resulting noise, a huge story about transport goes almost unnoticed: the ongoing decline of buses, and how poorly prepared for the future it leaves us. After nearly 40 years of deregulation and outsourcing, and nearly 15 years of the cuts and shortfalls imposed by Whitehall on local authorities, the mode of travel that still accounts for 69% of journeys by public transport is in an ever-worsening mess. The relevant statistics are stark, and sad: in 2002, for example, there were just over 18,000 numbered bus routes in England, but that number has since fallen to just under 11,000, with more cuts seemingly arriving every month. There are few symbols of the literal privatisation of everyday life more potent than unloved bus shelters adorned with emptying timetables, now such a fixed part of the average British streetscape that their fading away is taken pretty much for granted.

The relevant news stories are everywhere. The people in charge of the South Yorkshire mayoral combined authority – which includes Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham – are warning of “horrible” cuts, which will mean increases to fares for children and young people. In Kent, where the county council says its bus system is “broken”, there will soon be cuts to services in such places as Maidstone, Folkestone and Ashford. Last month, 20 routes in County Durham and Darlington were scrapped, amid claims that the bus company Arriva was holding local councils “to ransom”.

There are similar stories in Stoke-on-Trent, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Essex and more. Dig into many of them, and you alight on a truth that all the talk about passionate “motorists” rather ignores: the fact that many car owners are not avid petrolheads, but people forced to drive by the paucity of public transport. Near where I live, for example, the villages and towns in and around the old Somerset coalfield have recently suffered drastic bus cuts. Back in February, a local news report included the views of a woman who lives in the village of Farmborough, only eight miles from Bath and 10 miles from Bristol. “I would rather use the bus to travel but the service has been cut back so many times it became impossible to rely on it,” she said. “If you live in the surrounding villages there is no option but to use a car – if you have access to one.”

Two years ago, the usual quiet about these local tragedies was broken by a new national bus strategy for England, titled “bus back better”. Driven by that alleged bus lover Boris Johnson, its creation was a belated consequence of the Brexit referendum highlighting the predicament of so-called “left-behind” places. It also spoke to unavoidable aspects of the present and future: our ageing population, the spurning of the car by younger people and the demands of net zero. Johnson presented it with his customary hype, including a promise of services that “run so often that you don’t need a timetable”.

But the £3bn that was pledged turned out to be closer to £1bn. Areas were forced to bid for money from Whitehall; less than half of the 79 local transport authorities that asked for money were successful, and – as the tireless pressure group Campaign for Better Transport soon revealed – even the winners received only 24% of the money they jointly required. In everyday terms, that meant that a crisis made much worse by the pandemic was allowed to grind on, following a grimly familiar pattern. Once timetables are hacked down and departure and arrival times defy logic, dwindling passenger numbers fall into a kind of feedback loop. And in that context, even the government’s most welcome move – the £2 cap on most local bus fares in England outside London, introduced in January this year and set to rise to £2.50 in November – only scratches the surface of the problem.

In some places, there are signs of hope. Thanks to dogged work by the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, the autumn will see the first phase in the creation of that region’s Bee Network – the London-style system of integrated local transport focused on yellow buses brought back under public control – which ought to offer an example for plenty of other areas to follow. In Oxfordshire, the first of 159 new electric buses will arrive next month, providing at least a flash of what the near-future ought to look like. Last year, Cornwall introduced a fare-cutting pilot backed by a £23.5m grant from the Department for Transport aimed at prising people out of their cars, which includes reductions in travel costs of up to 40% and £20 tickets that extend across a whole week.

These moves reflect some of the same sense of possibility expressed by Labour’s spirited shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, who is promising the biggest reform to the bus sector in 40 years. If Labour gets in next year, she says, franchising – in other words, restoring the control of routes and timetables to councils – will be concertedly extended beyond regions that have mayors to all local transport authorities. Councils will also be able to establish municipal bus companies. Such, she insists, will be the death knell of an absurd and inadequate system, crystallised in one inescapable fact – that, as she puts it: “We’re the only country in the developed world which hands operators power over routes, fares and services with no say for communities.”

There is only one problem: Labour’s current rigid insistence on fiscal restraint. A reliable and modern bus system needs money: not to be casually sprayed around, but carefully invested in better services, cheaper fares, green vehicles and dedicated staff. The alternative is what we currently have: decaying public transport, amid glaring symbols of the gap between a lucky few who can glide to wherever they fancy and the impossibilities that regularly hit the rest of us. The prime minister, for example, not only fixates on the “motorist”, but delights in travelling by helicopter and private jet. Millions of people, by contrast, have daily difficulties simply getting to work: a perfect illustration not just of a fraying society, but why buses ought to be right at the heart of our politics.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/sQLTT

Britain’s “wonkiest pub”, which dates back to 1765, has been gutted by fire just days after being sold to a private buyer for alternative use.

Firefighters were called on Saturday night to The Crooked House pub, in Himley near Dudley in the West Midlands, which gained its name after it started sinking into the ground due to mining subsidence in the area.

Roads around the area were closed as smoke and flames could be seen pouring from the Grade II-listed building.

A spokesperson for Staffordshire fire and rescue service said several crews attended a severe fire at the pub and tried to extinguish the blaze. An investigation into the cause of the fire was already under way, they said.

The building was originally a farmhouse, and became a public house in about 1830, originally named The Siden House, with “siden” meaning “crooked” in the local Black Country dialect.

It was deemed unsafe in the 1940s and was scheduled for demolition, before it was bought by Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries which used buttresses and girders to make the structure safe while maintaining its lopsided appearance.

It had been a tourist attraction ever since, thanks to its distinctive appearance and optical illusions created by the wonky structure, such as coins and marbles appearing to roll uphill along the bar.

It’s former owner, the British pub and hotel operator Marston’s, put the pub up for sale this year with a guide price of £675,000.

An update post on the pub’s Facebook page on 27 July said: “The Crooked House has been sold. Unlikely to open its doors again. Marston’s have sold the site to private buyer for alternative use, that is all we know. This is just to update the page so nobody makes any wasted journeys to the site.”

A petition to save the pub from redevelopment, launched on 29 July, had attracted more than 3,500 signatures.