Whether it was Nigel Farage’s reliance on Welsh Dave at the Caerphilly by-election or the fact that the last leader of Reform in Wales Nathan Gill has been jailed for taking Russian bribes, according to a new YouGov poll Reform support in Wales has slumped by 6 points with support for Plaid Cymru surging.
There are 96 seats to be elected in the Senedd elections in May and the seat projection gives Plaid 45, Reform 23, the Greens 11, Labour 8 and the Tories 6.
Of course polls are just that although YouGov which nowadays is a large commercial polling organisation does tend to be at the more accurate end. Dodgy political polls are bad for business
We’re half-way through Dry January, which once again I’m not participating in.
In fact the publicity around it seems a little less noisy but it’s against a backdrop of both media coverage and actual sales of alcohol.
The CEO of Heineken Dolf van den Brink has stepped down (no need for a collection) citing likely sales in 2026 worse than 2025. Sales of low and no alcohol products have increased as sales of Heineken’s flagship brands have decreased.
Wetherspoons January Sale had a range of low and no alcohol drinks in it (ends 15th January) which one senses was no accident.
Of course there are established low alcohol brands like Lucky Saint and Big Drop, and Big Beer has long been in the territory, Diaego with Guinness for example.
Craft or to use the 2026 term Indy Beer has been less in the market but not absent. The low alcohol version of Track’s Sonoma is an example.
In general though the same issues seem to arise that I recall when Beavertown tried to produce low alcohol beers before Heineken took over. I write from direct experience as I was a regular at the Tottenham tap room. The beer looked great (i.e murky) it tasted good but it was thin, lacking body.
I was intrigued then when Verdant, arguably the UK’s premier brewers of murky beer, at least for the moment, produced an 0.5% beer for Dry January, Peripheral Visions. It appears to have required a considerable number of iterations to get a what Verdant felt was a decent beer.
I ordered a few cans and tried one.
Of course the taste, mouth feel, was good but initially I still had the feeling that it lacked body. However as I drank a glass that was less of the case. In fact if it didn’t say 0.5% on the can I would have thought I was drinking a 4%+ session IPA.
It underlines that there is plenty of room for development in brewing techniques in 2026 and its good news for those who are doing Dry January, or can’t drink for a range of reasons but still like the taste of a decent indy beer.
Btw Peripheral Visions is sold out on the Verdant site but you’ll find some in your local bottle shop and what better time to visit than January?
During one of the brief-ish non-lockdown periods in 2020 I looked through some issues of the weekly socialist paper The Clarion published in the early 1900s. The paper has been fully digitised and is available on-line, although paywalled except in academic locations such as the British Library where access is free.
The Clarion promoted socialist fellowship and culture perhaps notably with cycling. It straddled an audience that used pubs and those who didn’t and carried some reports of temperance hotels and pubs. These were attempts to emulate the social atmosphere of the pub but with (at least nominally)non-alcoholic drinks such as ginger beer, dandelion and burdock and Vimto. The view was, even from those who were well disposed to temperance, that these were that these were austere and unfriendly places.
Brian Harrison in Drink and the Victorians notes that temperance hotels were often commercial ventures not connected to local temperance societies. They had to compete commercially with pubs and some had a reputation for gambling and indeed use as brothels.
Meanwhile temperance drinks were mostly fermented which meant that they were to an extent alcoholic, perhaps around 2.5%. Well below an average strength of much Victorian beer but close to a modern day Table Beer.
This poll appeared in the Sunday Times on 11th January 2025.
Of course polls are fallible, not least because we can be sure who was voting. The majority however is so decisive that there seems little doubt that Grok is bad for Musk;s business. Of course Musk may have ideological motives.
The graphic appears on the social media of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, but its reasonable to expect it won’t be featuring on GB News or in the Express.
Nigel Farage and indeed his erstwhile political acquaintance Donald Trump have been promoting falsehoods about crime in London and claiming that if you’re out and about in the Capital you might end up murdered. You might of course but the chances are very low and unless you are involved in things like street level drug traffic, even lower than that.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t crime in London or that the Met Police are particularly good at dealing with it (the record is patchy and the Met continues to have its well known obsessions, not least with racism and corruption). What Farage and Co are concerned about is that London a city of at least 9 million people stands for a tolerant and diverse Britain which is precisely the reverse of the one they want
Beard Liberation Front confirms lifetime ban for Nadhim Zahawi
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has confirmed that the lifetime ban from association with the BLF remains in place.
Zahawi defected to Reform on 12th January but the BLF says that he was banned sometime ago from the BLF for bringing the hirsute into disrepute.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Nadhim Zahawi does not present a positive public image of the hirsute and hence falls foul one of the BLF’s core principles
With an Ashes defeat behind them those members of the England and Wales cricket team who play short form white ball cricket are off for T20 games against Sri Lanka and then the T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka.
The management team of Rob Key and Brendan McCullum remain in place not least because there is no time to change them. McCullum has been criticised for a laidback coaching style leading to a drinking culture (some might think that this is one of the great traditions of English cricket) and a lack of preparation combined with a one-dimensional strategic approach.
However (and I owe to the point to a throw away remark in the Observer- ‘now is the time of monsters’ which is the alternative translation from the Italian for ‘morbid symptoms’) to the real issue is that other teams have worked out the Bazball approach and how to defeat it. However England currently have no replacement strategy..
While there are references to Gramsci and football there is absolutely no evidence that he was interested in or knew anything about cricket. His words which sum up a crisis in capitalism are however also apt for the crisis in English cricket.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear., Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Lord Mandelson recently sacked as UK Ambassador in Washington because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein has given an interview to Laura Kuenssberg (11th Jan). It has something of the flavour of Emily Maitlis’s interview with Andrew Mountbatten.
Mandelson admitted the error of his links with Epstein, particularly after he was convicted of offences, but failed to apologise for being involved in the late financiers trafficking of young girls, noting that he knew nothing about this.
While it might be accepted that Mandelson was attracted to Epstein because of his wealth and contacts, the argument that he didn’t know what was going on seems implausible.
Tony Benn first encountered Mandelson at meetings of the Labour NEC and Shadow Cabinet after the 1987 Election. Benn wrote in his Diary:
Monday 16th February 1987. Today we had a meeting of the NEC and the Shadow Cabinet, the first since Neil Kinnock became leader..Kinnock introduced the meeting and spoke for about twenty minutes.. We went on to Peter Mandelson who said a few words. I find Mandelson a threatening figure for the future of the Party…
Benn proved a shrewder judge of political character than Tony Blair and Keir Starmer
