So, farewell to Amazing Radio, a station we enjoyed more in theory than in practice. It was great to hear something different from the commercial mush, but there's a damn good reason most of the acts weren't signed. After this long, we'd expect sponsors Amazing Tunes to have found at least one big act, but no. Amazing are recommending 6 Records as a replacement station, showing to Digital One that karma's a bitch that comes back with a slap.

Popjustice remembers how it was twenty years ago yesterday that the KLF split up. We hadn't twigged that the KLF were The Timelords until someone pointed it out, at which point we got the joke.

Robert Sharp writes on press ethics and pseudonomity. The print journalist's desperation for a scoop outweighed concerns about the value of the writing that was being produced by the blogger. A writer-on-writer attack.

Declan Ganley sets out the reasons to vote against the Fiscal Compact at the end of the month. We think he's conflating two matters that should be kept apart. It's true that the banks (particularly German banks) need to take a haircut for the greater good, and really shouldn't be foisting their losses on the public, still less the public of other countries. It's also true that the Euro-stability fund will be above the law, and that's bad for democracy. But Mr. Ganley doesn't make the killer point: that the Fiscal Compact takes the present economic fashion, and puts it into law, so that it binds future generations just as surely as the debts of the banks.

Should C4 axe Hollyoaks? We've never been fond of Phil Redmond's third show: it oozed like runny jam across teatime from one evening a week to all five, casting out quality imported drama like Party of Five (to E4) and Dawson's Creek (Channel 5), ending coverage of the Tour de France for a couple of years, and making it more difficult for Channel 4 to experiment with other shows. The omnibus edition was quietly shunted across to E4 back on 11 March, and no-one seems to have noticed or cared. More than anything, that shows how weak Hollyoaks is.

The Irish Times has changed its commenting system.

You'll see that users now need a social media account - Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn - to authenticate their login to comment. This reflects The Irish Times's view that social media now forms a central part of our engagement with our audience. In effect, we're aiming to move on from the rather antiquated concept of linear comments on articles towards facilitating a more dynamic set of real-time conversations around the many subjects covered every day on our website.

Two things wrong here.

1) The Irish Times is quite right to insist that contributors abide by its house rules, which are unexceptional. But it does not attempt to explain why it insists on contributors accept the house rules of third-party companies. If we wanted to make a point on the Irish Times, there is absolutely no reason why we need the permission of anyone other than the Irish Times. The attempted justification, "social media now forms a central part of our engagement with our audience", is completely irrelevant to the policy.

2) What in kilbeggery is that last sentence blithering on about? If the Irish Times wishes to deprecate per-article comments for per-theme ones, then they can do that. It's a barking thing to try, we don't think it'll last more than five weeks... But would someone please strip out the marketing hogwash and translate that sentence into English, Irish English, or as Gaelige.

(Actually, four things wrong: the phrase "Please enable JavaScript to view the Comments" need never appear, because if something only works with javascript, it is hopelessly broken; and the phrase "Comments on this article are now closed." appears immediately below it, which is just completely, mind-bogglingly contradictary.)

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This blog's new councillor has released a public statement. Strip away the puffery, bloviation, hot air, and cliché, and we're left with:

Last Thursday was cold, wet, and rainy.

Not even an invocation to wrap up.

The Economist fails the Turing test, reports Crooked Timber.

Even today, I imagine that someone with middling coding skills could patch together a passable Economist-editorial generator with a few days work. Mix in names of countries and people scraped from the political stories sections of the news, with frequent exhortations for "reform," "toughminded reform," "market-led reform," "painful reform," "change," "serious change," "rupture," and 12-15 sentences worth of automagically generated word-salad content, and you’d be there.

All of this led the Crooked Timber residents to let their imaginations run away with them, creating such monsterpieces as Pride and Prejudice and Free-Market Zombies:

"The Bennet household is in desperate need of far-reaching reform, as it faces up to the consequences of nearly two decades of profligacy and maybe-an-heir-will-turn-up short-termism. Its structural over-production of daughters and unrealistic estimations of future prospects, however, driven by a fixation on landed property and a pervasive anti-business and anti-trade snobbery, and the lackadaisical attitude and resistance to change of its leader, suggest that it will continue to be out-performed in the marriage market by more forward-looking neighbours willing to accept conversational austerity as the price of financial security and the condescension of Lady Catherine de Burgh..."

The art and activism of Jimmy Somerville. Everything the world's best Ian Hislop lookalike ever recorded.

1996: Obscure Illinois politician favours equal marriage. No-one notices. 2012: Same politician repeats his earlier pledge, world cheers, and Ben Summerskill looks a fool.

Will the Crass Spectacle become a dystopian sports event? What do they think will happen if they shoot down a plane over a city? That plane is going to come down, quickly, in the middle of the city. Is that really your best plan? See also: Diamond Geezer's risk register for the event.

Modern storyteller James Masterton on working shifts.

Nadia Rogers pens a piece about Florence Welch, full of warm 'n' fuzzies.

Quite the most bizarre tale, of the theatre critic and the photographer and Bianca Jagger.

Rated and recommended: a graphics designer reviews election posters for the referendum vote in Ireland.

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This blog's - slightly cheeky - contention is that the Labour party as we know it came into being in 1931, after Ramsay MacDonald left it. Martin Pugh begs to differ, following the thread of self-identification back through the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party to the 1870s. Then, the Liberals noted that if all men (not just toffs) were to be granted the vote, then all men (not just toffs) should be represented in parliament. The Labour Representation Committee was the organising force behind these workingmen (as Pugh consistently and irritatingly calls them), and the book chronicles the struggles to get working-class people into parliament.

We'll get the style gripes out first. We found Speak for Britain a difficult book to read. Pugh has clearly done his research, digging in the archives of prominent individuals, and of some metropolitan parties - principally in London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. His work is long on anecdote, often colourful, and carefully plotted so that (for instance) there's only one section in each chapter covering the role of women. The chapters are arranged chronologically, dividing the party's history up into chunks of about fifteen years. His writing style tends to plod along like a donkey on a rutted road: it'll get there, but it'll be a slow journey, and we'll be bumped around now and again. Acronyms are used widely, sometimes at the expense of clarity - the section around 1900 was a mess of three-letter initials. We might miss out the best bits - in 1906, the narrative goes straight from the Labour Representation Committee to the Labour Party, as though it was just a change of name.

Pugh presents a convincing argument about Labour's need to appeal to the working-class Tories, populists who were in favour of cakes and ale and song and dance and saluting the flag before singing "Knees up Mother Brown". In modern times, it's the strain of populism that brought Boris Johnson his success. From this viewpoint, Pugh is moderately sympathetic to Oswald Mosley, and is able to understand and explain - if not justify - Mosley's drift to populist socialism. The author does not draw modern comparisons.

Throughout the Labour party's history, it has had a relationship with the trade unions. Pugh constantly notes that trade unions don't represent all working people, but only those in relatively skilled manual trades, or those who are employed directly or indirectly by the state. Trade unions are portrayed as assuming their members are homogenous crowds, able to be herded like sheep. Pugh never hesitates to call out the social conservatism of union leaders, the way they jealously guard the levers of power for their preferred successors; he implies that union heads are often hopelessly out of touch with the people they claim to represent.

Pugh often refers to socialism, but we don't think he ever defines what he means by that term. We suspect that the intended definition is something close to common ownership of the means of production, the phrase used in Clause Four of the 1918 constitution. It was put there by Sidney Webb and his Fabian thinkers, who found themselves up against the muscular revolutionaries of Russia. We think there could have been more explanation of what the Fabian approach actually meant, centralised planning and reliance on the state, and why this was adopted in the 1920s. Little time is spent on the revolution-or-evolution debate, more on Labour not frightening the establishment by doing something to really upset them. Pugh explains why Labour was broadly against the 1926 general strike, and why there's never been any push towards republicanism.

The author has clearly worked out his heroes and villains: Herbert Morrison is never referred to in anything less than glowing terms, there's praise for MacDonald and Harold Wilson, slights against Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee, and James Callaghan gets it from both barrels. The rise and inevitable fall of Michael Foot is the subject of a masterful deconstruction, and Neil Kinnock is given credit for rebuilding the local base rather than build up the central office. Pugh asserts that Hugh Gaitskell was inept, but we don't see much evidence to support his claim.

He dismisses the leadership of John Smith in slightly less than one page, claiming that it was a return to more conservative values after Kinnock; our view from Election 92 was that Smith represented the acceptable face of Labour, and he was crucial to making the party appear more electable. Little details are wrong - Pugh asserts that John Smith's first heart attack was in June 1993 (it was actually in 1988; Michael Heseltine had treatment in 1993), and many mid-1980s characters were apparently campaigning against the poll tax even before it had emerged from Conservative Central Office. Such details are specks in the ointment, but they raise questions against the more detailed work Pugh presents.

The final chapter is a vitriolic attack on Tony Blair - by now, we know it's not unusual for children of Conservative families to rise within Labour, as Stafford Cripps and Clem Attlee did. Pugh charges in like a Gatling gun, arguing that Labour had lost its political compass when it failed to defend Keynesian economics in the mid-1970s, Blair was himself a Conservative who found success in someone else's party, and simply tried to out-Tory the Tories. While the Conservatives were divided, it worked, but at the expense of the local parties reinvigorated by Kinnock. When the charming Blair was replaced by the waspish Brown, and the Tories had the bright young leader, disaster loomed. The death of the local party is a thread running from the second world war, perhaps to damn Blair further.

Pugh wrote the bulk of his book in 2009, and briefly addresses the 2010 election in a preface to the paperback edition. Throughout, he argues a cogent case, that Labour's bouts of radicalism have been rare and have never been rewarded by the electorate, so it has compromised in the hope of gaining power.

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The best Scottish albums of recent years, retconning the Scottish Album Prize for the past twenty years. We particularly approve of the praise for 1998's The Space Between Us. And we hope that the SAP won't be as smotheringly inescapable as 6 Music makes the 6 Music Album Prize.

If the final is between two Ayrshire clubs, move it to Ayrshire. Common-sense from the administrators of Scottish chess, in a witty article from Dave Hewitt. He raises the prospect of raucous chess fans careening up the A74, dressed up in the team's colours, wearing oversized plastic knight's heads, and chanting You're not en passant any more!

From Dublin, we see unorthodox approaches to bicycle parking.

It's mercifully rare that we completely disagree with Martin Belam, but here's one instance. He wrote,

It always dismays me the number of people who are happy to come onto the Guardian site, where we rely on commercial components to pay for the journalism, and then use our free commenting platform to recommend that people use AdBlock, or disable the analytics scripts that are the only way we can measure usage of the site to prove the worth of it to advertisers. It basically says 'I'll have your news for free thanks, and I don't even want you to be able to generate the money it has cost you in bandwidth and storage to serve the page - let alone pay for the reporting.

That's a straw man argument, and Mr. Belam is better than that. The Observer has chosen an intrusive and inefficient way to ask its readers to pay. Rather than asking for a direct transfer of cash from reader to newspaper, the paper chooses to employ middlemen. Our considered view is that these middlemen are disreputable creatures, they are parasites on society, consuming attention and diverting money to prop up myths of their own adequacy. Worse, advertising brokers are lying toads, who deliberately mislead and deceive the public and their customers. After carefully considering the evidence, we believe that the social cost of advertising is greater than the social benefit, and we believe that the cost to us of advertising is greater than our personal benefit. We resent being cast as cheap, when the failure is of The Observer's corporate imagination.

Twenty years ago, comic artist Lew Stringer pitched for the gig drawing Sonic the Hedgehog. He didn't get it. Now, he publishes artwork for Sonic.

From the same source, Desperate Dan's long road to cover stardom.

Dave Farquhar explains why he's not using G****e's cloud storage thing. He's actually read the proposed term of use, and notes that the advertising behemoth claims the right to exploit anything uploaded for their own benefit, which includes publishing it. Mr. Farquhar is a journalist, and wishes to honestly claim that nothing has been published.

Koan: something to think about, something to reveal a greater philosophical truth. We keep the box at the top of each page short and punchy. Liberal Youth's Emma Revell explores why silence is fantastic. And rare.

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We pick up from last night with the London results. First the Assembly election:

(More: Those London results in full)

Time to reconsider our scene-setting post (we refuse to call it a prediction post, because that attracts the attention of Mystic Mug).

Labour - 700 gains without breaking sweat, we said. That's pretty much what they've got, and in a large swathe of the country, they've only regained ground lost in these seats since 2000. They did manage to finish considerably ahead on the London Assembly.

Conservatives - we were saying that 200 net losses would be good; they come out with double that, but can point to London and a whole host of local successes. Already, there are calls for the Tories to show their judgemental side.

Lib Dems are losing the anti-government vote to Labour, for obvious reasons. As the Ashdown-Kennedy strategy unwinds, we reckon there'll be calls to demonstrate clear liberal values, opposing the Conservatives on ideological points of difference.

Greens continue their very slow climb up the ladder: they're now clearly on a par with the Lib Dems in London, and have more wins than losses elsewhere. TheScottish Greens also made advances.

A fair night for the SNP, the single largest party, though not quite reaching the lofty goals they'd set themselves. Not a good night for Plaid, losing seats and their one council. The UKIP still shout loudly, but seem to be the receptacle for right-wing anti-government votes.

Perhaps the biggest losers from out of this are the broadcast media. The BBC tried its occasional election night trick, of deciding on the lead story (C+LD getting hammered, Labour roaring back), and marshalling the facts and expertly steering conversation to its talking points. It wasn't as bad as in 2003, when the narrative of Conservative stumble caused them to ignore a Labour collapse, but it wasn't as good as it should have been.

A greater question is whether the timid broadcasting regulations need to be loosened a little. All broadcasters pointed to OFCOM (effectively, government) regulations preventing them giving more than token coverage to Siobhan Benita, yet she got twice as many votes as candidates invited to broadcast debates. We would have thought there was room for at least one round-table discussion with all seven candidates, yet the regulations - or the broadcaster's interpretation of the regulations - prevented this.

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The great thing about setting down our expectations for the elections (outside London) is that we can compare results to expectations, and react accordingly. Remember, we're writing this before the London elections are declared, and these will probably change our calculus of wins and losses.

On that basis, Labour has done well, but perhaps not as well as all that. They've made 765 gains in England and Wales. Sounds impressive, but 400 of those gains are recovering ground lost in the 24% calamity of 2008. Labour's performance has been patchy: they've done well in their traditional heartlands, holding Glasgow from the SNP, regaining councils across Wales and the likes of Derby and Reading. But these are councils that should never have stopped being Labour. They've only gained one council they didn't hold in 1997 - that's Sefton, an entirely artificial amalgam of Conservative / Liberal Southport and the Labour stronghold of Bootle.

The Conservatives have performed less well than we expected, down by 389 seats, and reversing most of their gains in '08 and '04. Their share of the vote is estimated at 31%, roughly the core vote they relied upon in the early part of the last decade. Similarly, the Liberal Democrats have taken less flack than they did last year; their core vote remains at 16%, and they're down 256 councillors.

Results in Scotland are not comparable with those in England and Wales, and show a similar picture to last year's parliamentary election. The Lib Dems are heavily down, the Tories continue to bump along the bottom. The anti-government vote now goes to Labour, with the SNP gaining from better nomination strategy and a bonus from their successes in national government. SNP have the most councillors, Labour edges the greatest gainers by 58 to 57.

Things are more complex than the dry mathematics of wins and losses. Where the council administration is Conservative or Lib Dem (or a mixture of the two), and Labour is the leading opposition, Labour has done well. It's won back seats it lost in 2008, it's won seats it lost in 2004, in some cases it's won seats not held since the glory days of 1996. Where Labour is already the administration - overall majority or largest party - it's won seats, roughly enough to retrench losses since 2004. Councils where Labour has little or no presence remain a Labour-free zone. It's done a good job of regaining its core vote, they've done particularly well on Merseyside - Sefton and the Wirral are good gains - but this isn't spreading the message.

There are other stories. Where the Lib Dems are in power, they've done well. In Hull, net Lib Dem gains. In Stockport, a minority Lib Dem administration loses just one seat. In Portsmouth and Eastleigh, the governing party holds its position. Where the Conservatives are up against the Lib Dems, the Tories have done well - by a quirk of circumstance, this only netted Winchester council for the blues.

And where there's a credible fourth party, they've done well - Residents' Association in Hart and the Health Concern party in Kidderminster have both eliminated Conservative majorities; independents in Castle Point have almost done the same. RESPECT gained five seats on Bradford council, and the Greens held all their seats on Norwich council in the face of a strong Labour challenge; they also gained in Oxford; the Scottish Greens also made gains.

UKIP had a curious election: they had a net gain of one councillor, but secured about 13% of the vote where they stood, and decapitated the Conservative leader in Tunbridge Wells. Goodbye and (frankly) good riddance to eight British National Party and Encyclopaedia Dramatica councillors. The Liberal party lost seats, but can point to a small victory, beating the Conservatives in the Liverpool mayor election - this achievement is also claimed by the far-left Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, Greens, Lib Dems, and the independent Liam Fogerty. More standard procedure in Salford, where Labour beat the Conservatives in the second round.

We're not expecting many more mayoral elections - voters in nine cities voted to retain the current system of elected and removable councillors, but those in Doncaster decided to keep the mayorality when the present term expires next year. Of those asked, only Bristol decided to take the mayoral plunge.

The final story of the elections is the London mayor and assembly vote. A Conservative outright win requires Boris to retain the mayorship and the Conservatives to win nine seats on the assembly; with that, the assembly can't block Boris's budget. On the provisional figures, we reckon 11 assembly seats for Labour, 9 for the Conservatives, and two each for the Greens and Lib Dems. It's not clear if UKIP Fresh Choice for London will clear the 5% threshold and claim a seat; if they don't, it's also unclear whether the seat will go to the Conservatives or Labour.

(More: The gains and losses so far)

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The main event of the last two months in cricket was the 20/20 world cup qualifiers. Ireland lost their opening match to Namibia, but won all their other games, including the semi-final against Namibia, and the grand final versus Afghanistan. The two finalists progress to the 20/20 world cup later in the year. The UAE and Scotland warmed up with some one-dayers in Sharjah, the home side won both. Afghanistan and the Netherlands played afterwards, the Afghans winning in Test and ODI forms. Namibia had the edge when they hosted Canada.

Elsewhere, Sri Lanka defeated Australia in their ODI series, but lost in the group phase of the Asia Cup - Bangladesh beat Pakistan in this competiton for sides in the Indian subcontinent. South Africa had an enjoyable tour of New Zealand, winning the Test series 2-0. The Aussies went to the West Indies, where the ODI and 20/20 matches were split, but the visitors had the better of the Tests.

(More: The full tables)

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Matters of note, and we're going to begin with what men want to say about sex and masculinity. It takes the fresh thinking of Laurie Penny to actually ask men some very personal questions, it takes the charm of Laurie Penny to get some very personal answers. We reckon there's a lot more than an 800-word piece in this. Such as, an exploration of why the only socially-normal form of sexual deviance is submissive women. It all serves to reinforce the narrative of sex and gender and power.

The sidebar contains a very valid point: why is it that women are not permitted to be creative without having to speak for the entire condition of womankind? [..] Is it because we don't believe that a woman can truly create fiction or write meaningfully without drawing entirely on her own experience? Is it because mainstream culture still lacks a language to talk about women's issues and women's lives that is not at once confessional and riddled with lazy stereotypes? [..] Is it because we don't believe women can actually be artists? Guilty. Must do better.

Still on matters of gender politics, we note a puff piece in The Observer about cakes that hide the sex of a baby and only reveal their secret when cut. It's as if the most important thing about the forthcoming sprog was precisely what's between its legs. It's as if modern parents believe that boy-children and girl-children are of different species, requiring completely different outfits and completely different toys and completely different parenting. And thus the stereotypes perpetuate: men are men, women are women, and woe betide if new-child dares step outside those simple boxes. Must do better.

Grand schemes and plots: a blue-sky thought on the rise of the Pirate Party in Germany. Michael Bawens suggests an alliance between the Pirates, Greens, die Linke, and the SPD. To be frank, we think Herr Bawens is being very over-optimistic: it's not obvious that RR will be represented in the Bundestag after the elections in autumn next year, and it's not obvious that the standard SPD + G coalition wouldn't command a majority. The presence of Pirates in government would be a game-changer, which is why the establishment will do everything it can to prevent it.

Andrew Taylor attempts to explain why no voting system is perfect using non-transitive dice. We're not convinced it's the best model, but then maybe we're confused by the diagram at the foot of page one.

Over in Canada, Stéphane Dion proposes party-STV open-list PR. Voters would rank parties, and cast a ballot for one person, who would be their choice if the party wins a seat. This system was tried in Canberra's citywide elections, and proved to be easily gamed, and produce perverse results. To dive into the analogy of talent shows, it's possible for Jedward to come top of the personal poll, but the Bizarre Haircut party wouldn't attract enough preferences to be elected. We still think that the Lib Dems missed a trick by not forcing through a properly proportional system for the European Parliament elections, and party STV would be a good start.

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