Author: Anna Girolami

Farmers in Lincolnshire are being badly affected by broken supply chains. Brexit has led to a shortage of seasonal workers and lorry drivers.

Tory party receives £150k donation two days after Robert Jenrick decides in favour of a planning application for 625 new homes near Ledbury.

Boris Johnson promised to level up the Red Wall seats. Nearly two years after the election, let’s take a look at how he’s getting on.

Is there really going to be a battle for our booze? We love it, don’t we? Whether we’re out on the lash (hey kids, always drink responsibly) or hunkering down in front of Call The Midwife with a warming glass of Malbec, I don’t think anyone would try and deny that we love our booze. […]

One of a series of articles addressing the UK’s haulage and looming supply chain crisis. Central Bylines has already written about the UK’s shortage of HGV drivers. According to the Road Haulage Association, the profession is about 100,000 drivers short. In brief this is mainly because European drivers formerly based in the UK have returned […]

Supermarket shortages deepen as Britain’s supply chain is on the brink of collapse.

Falling numbers of HGV drivers while demand rises could lead to rolling shortages in UK shops.

Here at Central Bylines, we have been tapping our foot impatiently. Our East Midlands Tory MPs (on whom we generally rely for a regular supply of comedy pratfalls) have been suspiciously quiet of late. Luckily, the imminent arrival of silly season seems to have prodded them into life. All of which we have faithfully recorded […]

In May, Central Bylines reported on the trial of West Mercian police officers, Benjamin Monk and Mary Ellen Bettley-Smith for the murder, manslaughter and actual bodily harm of professional footballer Dalian Atkinson in 2016. Atkinson, 48 years old at the time of his death, had played for several clubs, most notably Aston Villa with whom […]

The National Audit Office’s second report on test and trace services in England does not make for reassuring reading.

In 2019 Serco was found to have “engaged in quite deliberate fraud against the Ministry of Justice.” It had already repaid £68.5 million to the government in overcharges and was subsequently fined £19.2 million for fraud and false accounting over its electronic tagging service. It also had to pay the Serious Fraud Office’s costs of £3.7 million. It still has the contract.

A Chesterfield-based charity supporting street children in Uganda has had its only international development grant withdrawn when the government cut foreign funding from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent gross national income (GNI). S.A.L.V.E. International S.A.L.V.E. International is a Chesterfield/Ugandan charity, aimed at supporting homeless and out-of-school children in Uganda. It was founded by a group […]

Back in November last year, Central Bylines posted a profile of Lee Anderson which concluded that Ashfield, his constituency, deserved better than the Labour-turned-Tory-turned-antiwoke-warrior as an MP. Seven months later, we thought we’d see how he’s getting on. Is Ashfield getting a better service from its MP these days? If what you want from your […]

SureScreen offered the tests to the government nearly a year ago but they were ignored. Addressing the government’s response to their approach, David Campbell, one of the directors, said, “We’ve done our best to engage with the government. There’s been tentative interest but unfortunately we haven’t had any good dialogue.”

The government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill has been in the pipeline since 2019 but the murder of Southend MP, Sir David Amess has put it back in the spotlight. Central Bylines takes a look at the bill in more detail. There are many in government who take the issue seriously. Tory MP and erstwhile Chair […]

Today sees the launch of step three of the government’s roadmap to get us out of lockdown. Today, I can go to a sauna (yeah..no), have a meal inside a pub (blessèd relief, it was snowing here last week) or stay overnight with my in-laws (I’m more likely to go for that sauna, to be honest). It all sounds wonderful. Our region has been in one sort of lockdown or another almost continually since November last year, bar a brief and lethal giddy spell over Christmas. It’s been hard but it’s worked – by the end of April, new cases, hospital numbers and deaths were all down, down, down.

Just days before a raft of Covid restrictions are due to be eased, a Derbyshire town has become England’s Covid hotspot.

Anaesthetists, on the whole, have a chip on their shoulder. We are the single largest hospital specialty in the NHS and, in our own view, we pretty much run the place. Try having surgery without an anaesthetist, or a baby or a critical illness or a chronic pain issue or an intravenous dialysis line or.. I could go on, but you get the point. In essence, we (yes we, I worked as an NHS anaesthetist for ten years) provide the physiological bedrock upon which all other specialties have to stand to perform their work.

Last year in Minneapolis, a black man was killed by a white US police officer. Two weeks ago, officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd in a landmark court case that was reported around the world and hailed by the US president himself as a “giant step forward” against systemic racism […]

Today is 4th May, we are deep into spring. This year’s county cricket season is three weeks’ old and Derbyshire is already languishing at the bottom of their group. Despite Covid-19, despite the Big Bash League, despite the razzamatazz of the Indian Premier League*, cricket remains the quintessential game of the English summer. The gentle […]

On Monday, Shirley Williams, the ‘undisputed godmother of the Liberal Democrats’, died at the age of ninety.