DEMOCRACY'S DAY OFF IN MANCHESTER

In the damp annals of British political theatre, where provincial potentates once promised to devolve power like so many municipal Santa Clauses, we now witness the sequel that no one particularly queued for. Greater Manchester, that throbbing conurbation of rain-lashed ambition and intermittent footballing despair, has just staged a mayoral by-election with a turnout of around 25%. One can picture the ghosts of civic reformers past—those earnest chaps who dreamed of regional barons wielding budgets over housing, transport, and policing—gazing down in mild bewilderment. Twenty-five per cent. It is not so much a democratic exercise as a polite suggestion that the electorate has better things to do, perhaps involving a kettle and a strong view on whether the biscuits have gone soft.

This, of course, is the natural progression from the raving loonies coming second to actual madness in Gorton and Denton only months earlier. There, the native Briton’s heroic indifference allowed organised blocs and earnest environmentalists to carve up the spoils while the sofa class exercised its inalienable right to remain horizontal. Now, in the realm of the Metro Mayor—Andy Burnham’s former fiefdom, no less—the apathy has achieved something close to perfection. A city-region billed as vital, dynamic, and bristling with devolved importance has mustered the enthusiasm of a wet Wednesday afternoon in Stockport. Staggering, one might say, if one were the sort to stagger. Horrific, declares our man on X, and for once the hyperbole feels almost measured. Manchester, important? Undoubtedly. Important enough for three-quarters of its eligible voters to interrupt their torpor? Evidently not.

One must admire the Metro Mayor experiment for its exquisite pointlessness, a masterclass in administrative theatre. Created with all the fanfare of a new public convenience, these regional overlords were to bridge the gap between Whitehall’s lofty abstractions and the gritty realities of the provinces. Yet here we are, post-Burnham’s ascension to the Commons (MPs and mayors being, it seems, incompatible in the way that certain chemicals react badly in the stomach), watching a by-election that cost millions and engaged fewer citizens than a moderately successful pub quiz. The candidates from Labour, Reform, the Greens, and sundry others vied for the honour of chairing a cabinet of borough leaders, setting priorities that might, on a good day with a following wind, influence the frequency of trams or the sternness of parking enforcement. Power, in other words, of the sort that makes one wonder why anyone bothered leaving the house—except, of course, they mostly didn’t.

Andy Burnham himself has lately been musing about Australian-style compulsory voting. One can almost hear the collective sigh of a nation that invented both habeas corpus and the tactical abstention. Australia, that sun-baked land of rules, cricket, and democracy sausages, drags its citizens to the polls with the gentle threat of a modest fine, achieving turnouts that hover in the high nineties. The result, we are told, is a more representative electorate, less prone to capture by the motivated fringes. Burnham, fresh from his mayoral perch, now eyes this mechanism as a cure for the democratic narcolepsy he helped preside over. It is the sort of proposal that makes one reach for the gin: not entirely mad on paper, yet freighted with the delicious possibility of biting its proponent squarely in the posterior.

For if compulsory voting were introduced, the great unwashed—those indifferent masses who treated the Greater Manchester contest as optional background noise—would be compelled to render a verdict on the very devolved structures that failed to stir them. Metro Mayors, suddenly answerable to a fuller cross-section of the populace rather than the diligent few who can be arsed, might find their grandeur somewhat deflated. No longer could one rely on low turnout to mask the gap between rhetoric and delivery; the sofa warriors, roused from their slumbers by the faint threat of bureaucracy, might spoil their ballots with artistic genitalia or, worse, vote for the candidate promising to abolish the whole pointless apparatus. The irony would be exquisite: Burnham, architect of the mayoral model in practice if not in name, inadvertently engineering a system that exposes its hollowness. One secretly hopes it does bite him, if only for the poetic justice. Few spectacles delight quite like a reformer hoist with his own petard, preferably while wearing the ceremonial chain of office.

Of course, the British recoil is instinctive. Compulsion sits ill with a people who regard rules as personal insults and authority as something to be endured with a raised eyebrow and a quiet pint. Force us to vote and the polling stations would become carnivals of passive resistance: donkey votes for the first name on the list, essays on the futility of the enterprise, or perhaps a surge in support for the Monster Raving Loonies, whose porcine candidates at least possess the virtue of honesty about their absurdity. Australia manages it with barbecues and conformity; we would manage it with complaints, exemptions, and a thriving black market in plausible excuses involving errant dogs and urgent plumbing emergencies. The bureaucracy would bloom like Japanese knotweed, the fines would mutate into poll taxes by stealth, and the noble experiment in civic duty would end, as so many do, in a quinoa kebab of moral superiority tasting faintly of damp resentment.

Yet the alternative is the status quo: democracy as optional spectator sport, where importance is proclaimed from the podium while the electorate votes with its feet—usually in the direction of the television remote. In Greater Manchester, a mere 25% bothered to show up for a role that Burnham once occupied with characteristic vigour. The message is clear enough: Metro Mayors, for all their devolved pomp, have yet to convince the public they are worth missing a lie-in. If compulsory voting arrives as the reluctant remedy, it may finally force the conversation these experiments were meant to provoke. Whether that conversation ends with the abolition of the Metro Mayor model or merely its reform is anyone’s guess. One thing is certain: the apathy was staggering. The remedy, if applied, promises to be even more so.

Despair, as ever, remains the rational response. But at least under compulsion, we should have earned the right to complain with a full ballot paper in hand—preferably one marked with the quiet dignity of a crossed-out list and a doodle of a pig in a mayoral robe. In Britain, that might count as progress.

THE TELESCOPE THAT FELL TO EARTH

In the grand theatre of national decline, few props are quite so poignant as a radio telescope. There it stands—or rather, stood—in the damp Cheshire countryside, the Lovell instrument at Jodrell Bank, a great ear cocked toward the cosmos since the days when Britain still pretended it had a place at the high table of technological civilisation. Now, with the quiet bureaucratic sigh that characterises our age, the funding tap is to be turned off. 

By April 2028, unless some philanthropic miracle intervenes, the observations will cease, the jobs will evaporate, and the site will join that melancholy roster of British institutions that once meant something and now serve chiefly as cautionary tales for visiting schoolchildren. One pictures the civil servant responsible, a decent enough fellow no doubt, ticking boxes in some windowless office while the universe continues its indifferent expansion. The annual sum involved? A mere £2.8 million. Peanuts, one might say, if one were feeling generous toward peanuts. In the broader scheme of government expenditure it is the sort of figure that might otherwise have been allocated to a modestly ambitious diversity consultancy or perhaps the redesign of bottle tops—those vital instruments of public safety without which we might all, heaven forfend, experience the horror of an unscrewed cap.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Americans are catching reusable rockets like so many celestial cricket balls. The Chinese are methodically planting flags and ambitions on the Moon. Even the Indians, with a fraction of our historical GDP per capita, have managed to park hardware on lunar soil without first convening seventeen working groups on the carbon footprint of propulsion. Britain? We excel at regulation. We have become world leaders in the bureaucratic arts: the precise placement of chargers, the approved dimensions of plastic lids, the correct pronouns for astrophysicists. These are the hills upon which we have chosen to die, or at least to experience a slow, dignified administrative euthanasia.

Jodrell Bank was never some frivolous academic bauble. In 1957 it was the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, listening for signals from objects so distant they make our domestic political dramas look even more parochial than they already are. It tracked early Soviet satellites when the Space Race was young and Sputnik was beeping its way into Western nightmares. It helped NASA during Apollo. It has contributed to our understanding of quasars, pulsars, gravitational lenses—the sort of phenomena that remind one that the universe is under no obligation to flatter human self-importance. UNESCO, in a rare moment of lucidity, granted it World Heritage status. One wonders whether they knew the site would eventually become a heritage monument to lost ambition rather than a living instrument of discovery.

The defenders of the cut will, of course, speak of 'prioritisation' and 'sustainability' and other such soothing euphemisms. UK Research and Innovation has a budget, we are told, and tough choices must be made. Indeed they must. One could almost admire the clarity of it if the choices weren’t so consistently revealing. Protect the core discovery research, they say, while defunding the infrastructure that makes discovery possible. It is rather like deciding to keep the orchestra but sell the instruments and the concert hall, then wondering why the music has grown so thin. Other projects fall alongside Jodrell: support for telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, upgrades here and there. The cumulative effect is less a strategic retreat than a comprehensive surrender of the field.

There is something peculiarly British about this species of managed diminishment. We do not rage against the dying of the light; we commission a report on the environmental impact of raging, consult stakeholders, and conclude that a tasteful dimming is more inclusive. Our politicians import what they no longer build. Our universities train ever more sophisticated graduates to service ever more sophisticated foreign projects. We retain the language, the manners, the residual prestige—enough to host the occasional international conference where delegates can admire our charmingly obsolete facilities before flying home to nations that still believe the future is something one reaches for rather than regulates into submission.

One should not, I suppose, grow maudlin. Jodrell Bank may yet find private saviours or European partners or some improbable benefactor moved by the romance of it all. The Square Kilometre Array headquarters remains on site, a consolation prize that speaks volumes: we shall coordinate the world’s greatest radio astronomy effort from a place whose own telescopes are falling silent. It has the melancholy poetry of a retired general selling maps of old battlefields while the new recruits drill elsewhere.

The deeper sadness lies in what this episode reveals about our collective imagination. Space, for previous generations, represented the ultimate frontier—a place where engineering boldness met philosophical wonder. Today it is simply another domain in which we have decided not to compete seriously. Instead we tinker with the trivial, comforted by the thought that at least our bottle tops are recyclable and our charger standards harmonised. The stars, one feels, will manage without us. They always have.

And yet, on clear nights, the Lovell Telescope still points upward like an accusatory finger. Or perhaps it is merely waving goodbye. In either case, it does so with a dignity that its political masters might do well to emulate. Britain once listened to the universe. Now the universe will have to manage without our reply. The silence, when it comes, will be deafening.

BILL ODDIE (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Bill Oddie, the last twitcher of the apocalypse, has finally gained his own wings at the age of 85, leaving behind a trail of rubber chickens, protest placards, and an alarming number of binoculars pointed at the wrong end of the garden. He went, one suspects, with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had spent half a century trying to convince the British public that staring at a small brown bird in a hedge constituted a meaningful life. 

Born in Rochdale in 1941 and raised in Birmingham by a father who balanced the books at the Midlands Electricity Board while young Bill balanced his obsessions with jazz, satire, and oology, Oddie arrived at Cambridge like a northern missile aimed at the Footlights. He emerged as one third of The Goodies, that peculiar 1970s institution which proved that slapstick, eco-sermons, and songs about funky gibbons could coexist in the same half-hour slot without the BBC’s head of comedy reaching for the smelling salts. Where Graeme Garden supplied the mad science and Tim Brooke-Taylor the bewildered decency, Oddie brought the anarchic growl and the hairy cynicism. He wrote the hits, thumped the drums, and generally behaved as if the entire medium of television had been invented solely to annoy him. 

The Goodies made him famous; fame, in turn, allowed him to spend the second half of his life telling people off for disturbing the nesting habits of the lesser-spotted whatever. It was a smooth transition. One minute he was falling off buildings in a giant custard tart; the next he was falling into raptures over a warbler in a bush. The public barely noticed the difference. As a conservationist he was tireless, which is to say he never tired of pointing out that the rest of us were busy murdering the planet while pretending to like David Attenborough. He presented Springwatch and Autumnwatch with the air of a man who had accepted that his audience consisted largely of retired majors who wanted to see badgers but would settle for a lecture on biodiversity. 

Oddie collected honours the way other men collect parking tickets: an OBE for services to wildlife and mild irritation, honorary fellowships, and the quiet respect of people who secretly preferred their comedians bearded and bolshie. He suffered the usual late-life indignities—depression, the sense that the world was getting louder and stupider—but met them with the same sardonic shrug he once gave a collapsing set on live television.

In the end, Bill Oddie did what few comedians manage: he turned a childhood hobby into a second act that outlasted the first. He leaves a wife, children, several thousand grateful birds, and one lingering question: if the planet really is doomed, who will be left to watch the spring? Probably not us. But somewhere, a lesser redpoll is raising a silent wing in tribute.