The Joy of Six 1275

'We cannot sit by as the left denigrate our history and pull down our monuments,' said Kemi Badenoch last week: she and her colleagues’ wilful neglect of museums shows that such talk is absurd." John Harris is angry about the assault on local museums since the election of David Cameron in 2010.

Erica Lamberg introduces to the concept of 'resenteeism', where lack of advancement opportunities, a toxic corporate culture, an excessive workload and feelings of burnout lead to people feeling trapped in jobs they do not want. Not surprisingly, this affects productivity.

More evidence that nothing works properly in Britain any more because it's underfunded: We Love Stornoway reports on the end of the tourism service on the Western Isles.

Simon Matthews looks at the 1949 film Now Barabbas Was a Robber, which was based on a play by William Douglas Home: "There are flashbacks to their lives before jail, the corrupting effect of the war is shown (a topic of much thought at the time, with talk of crime waves and a much readier resort to violence) and, indeed much of it, with its succession of interior scenes and wardens, plays like a POW film. The dialogue, and acting, are impressive."

Jon Hotten remembers Brian Close, the controversial Yorkshire and England captain: "The length of time that Richards and Botham spent talking about Brian Close spoke of his influence on the game and on their lives."

"Witchcraft, and the threat of such could be found from the collieries of East Shropshire through to the Clun and the distant agrarian places, whose names feel like an ode to Middle earth. Witchcraft was the hidden threat, the force that you could not control but also that which you turned to for comfort, or help." Amy Boucher on an important aspect of the county's social history and folklore.

Jago Hazzard on the failure of Ludgate Hill station

Ludgate Hill station? Wikipedia gives the basics and Jago's video gives you so much more:

Ludgate Hill was a railway station in the City of London that was opened on 1 June 1865 by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway as its City terminus. It was on Ludgate Viaduct (a railway viaduct) between Queen Victoria Street and Ludgate Hill, slightly north of St. Paul's station (now called Blackfriars station) on the site of the former Fleet Prison. 

North of Ludgate Hill station, Ludgate Viaduct continued to the Snow Hill tunnel to connect with the then recently opened Metropolitan Railway south of Farringdon station to enable main-line trains to run between north and south London.

Passenger services through the tunnel ended in 1916, after which services ran only the few hundred yards (metres) to Holborn Viaduct station which had opened in 1874. Ludgate Hill became little used because of its proximity to the Holborn Viaduct and St. Paul's stations, and on 3 March 1929 Ludgate Hill was closed. 

The platform buildings remained derelict until they were demolished in the 1960s but the island platform remained until 1974. Remains of the street-level buildings and traces of the platform and staircase lasted until the whole station area and viaduct were demolished in 1990.

It's remarkable how long the Snow Hill tunnels lay unused.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Sue Gray: Beware of beat-sweeteners and source-greasers

Duncan Robinson, the political editor of The Economist, was never convinced by all those articles praising Sue Gray:

Her flaws as a civil servant. such as a near-sociopathic desire for secrecy, are brushed over, and minor talents are hailed. "She's pretty ruthless at timekeeping," noted one portrait. Often the tone is of a primary-school teacher sending a report to a parent: "One Labour figure said Gray had been a good listener."

There's a term or two for this sort of journalism, as Timothy Noah wrote when it was the team around the newly elected President Obama who were being enthusiastically profiled:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

Armed with these concepts, judge for yourself the worth of an article that appeared on the Guardian website a couple of hours ago:

Who is in Keir Starmer’s top team at No 10 after Sue Gray resignation?

Half Man Half Biscuit: Westward Ho! Massive Letdown

Reaching it a few days after Ilfracombe, I too found Westward Ho! a let down. You expect more from a resort that was named after a novel and has an exclamation mark.

But what's going on in the song? It's clearly a dream - "Why is Frank Ifield jumping up and down on a windmill?" - but where does the dream begin and where does it end? Was his girl married to a plasterer from Bacup all along? Does he even have a girl?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I will share this from a Half Man Half Biscuit site:

I am presently employed by an Examinations Board. Immediately after perusing this thread during my lunch break I opened a package containing the GCSE Geography controlled assessment work of a candidate from the South West. The piece of work in question was entitled “Westward Ho!”

It further transpires that the candidate barely scraped a grade F. What a letdown.

GUEST POST No sign of an end to defections in local government

Thanks to Augustus Carp for his latest bulletin on local councillors changing parties, though I'll have him know that I lived in Hemel Hempstead between the ages of 3 and 13.

Well, it's been three months now since the General Election, and in Parliament we have seen several expulsions from the Labour Party together with a rather sudden resignation. In my innocence I had assumed that people would have left their political parties before the election, rather than in the immediate aftermath, but the evidence shows that resignations have continued apace amongst our local councillors.

Since July, there have been 17 defections from the Conservative Party, 13 from Labour, 17 from the Lib Dems and 6 from the Nationalists. The net beneficiaries have been the Greens (up 3) and Reform UK (up 12). The balancing figure is described, perhaps not accurately enough, as 'Independents', who have picked up the remaining 37.  

If I had more time and patience I would no doubt try to do a bit of analysis of the various independents. I am using the category to cover ratepayers, residents associations, localists, single-issue hobbyhorse jockeys and people who are incapable of working within any sort of group structure, and many more besides.  

Some councils have one or more competing groups who fall into the Independent category. Note that councillors sometimes become Independent as a sort of casualty clearing station, where they reside after resigning from A before seeing the light and joining Party B.  

Of the 103 defections, only five councillors have made a direct swap between parties - 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Tory to Green, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour and 1 from Labour to Lib Dem.  

One trend that seems prevalent at the moment is a disproportionately high number of defections in Wales. Since July, 14 councillors have changed their colours – 5 from Labour, 4 from the Conservatives, 3 Independents (who have transmogrified into a Reform group in Torfaen) and a Liberal Democrat.  The situation is similar in Scotland – 4 each from the Tories and the Nationalists, 3 from Labour and 1 Independent. 

The dramatic move for the Lib Dems was the mass defection of eight female councillors in Dacorum, over allegations of sexism and bullying. 

It's a matter of conjecture whether personal grievances or political ideologies are the main reason for councillor defections – there might be a doctoral thesis in it for someone with a high pain threshold.  

Incidentally, the reason the local authority is called Dacorum is to prevent the residents of Berkhamsted from having to say that they live in Hemel Hempstead.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Al Pinkerton: "The Chagossians have been dispossessed again"

Al Pinkerton, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Surrey Heath, posted a thread on Twitter last night that gave a perspective that had been missing from the day's heated debate on the Chagos Islands. It was that of the Islanders themselves.

Here is the full thread:

A few weeks ago, I became a member of the Chagos APPG, Vice Chair of the APPG on Gibraltar and the Secretary of the Falklands APPG. It would be fair to say I have more than a passing interest in U.K. Overseas Territories and a fair bit of accumulated knowledge.

A few key points:

1. The Chagos decision has no legal bearing whatsoever on the sovereignty of the Falklands, Gibraltar or the U.K. Sovereign Bases. The prominent conservative commentators who are opportunistically making that claim play into the hands of counter-claimants.

2. It was the Tories (Truss and Cleverly, in particular) who began the process of negotiating away the Chagos islands following the 2019 ICJ advisory + the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Cries of “weak, weak, weak” are deeply hypocritical.

3. While the U.K.-Mauritius agreement announced this week is consistent with international law, it is, in my opinion, a disgraceful abandonment of the Chagossian people, who have been serially failed by the U.K. since the 1960s.

4. Dispossessed and forcibly displaced from their islands by the U.K. in the 1960s-70s, Chagossians have now been dispossessed again through the bizarre spectacle of the ICJ giving force to a kind of ‘judicial colonialism’ by Mauritius.

5. The U.K.-Mauritius deal may be a “triumph of diplomacy” (as Biden has apparently claimed), but it’s also a distasteful reminder that, in 2024, the rights of a people to self-determine their future can be still be merrily set aside for the maintenance of western geo-strategy.

6. MPs should be given time to scrutinise and debate this decision next week. The right of Chagossians (who are UK citizens, or have the right to be) to determine their own future deserves to be heard in Westminster. Anything less risks legalised colonialism by the back door.

Owen Bowcott has detailed the Chagos Islanders long struggle for justice in an article for the Guardian.

As so often, it's the continuities between the Conservative and Labour approaches to this question that strike you, not the differences. 

Morecambe and Wise and Leonard Rossiter

Following on from my post earlier today about Leonard Rossiter, here he is on the 1978 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show.

Stage presence is a strange thing. With Eric and Ernie, it was always Eric you watched. But here, right from the start, you can't take your eyes off Rossiter.

Welcome to The Shropshire Witches Podcast

Good news for lovers of the Shropshire supernatural: the first edition of The Shropshire Witches Podcast has gone live. 

Its writers and presenters, Alix Chidley-Uttley and Amy Boucher, warn us to expect witches, folklore, hauntings and all things with a superstitious and murderous history.

The first episode features severed penises, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General and a misogynistic king.

"In a very real sense Leonard Rossiter is with us here today"

Embed from Getty Images

There's something about appearing in a successful situation comedy that makes an actor immortal. Leonard Rossiter is still a living presence to those who remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp, yet it's now 40 years since he died.

But he was far more than a sitcom actor, as the Guardian's superb survey of his career makes clear. He was a peerless stage actor and, because the best directors recognised his worth, he has a habit of turning up in films where you don't expect to see him.

I saw Rossiter in his final stage role as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, though I've forgotten how long before his death this was.

Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult, but I suspect that, as the Guardian article suggests, this was because he was a perfectionist about his own performance and expected no less from those around him.

When I talked to the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death, he said Rossiter had been a wonderful man. (Murray directed a Manchester production of Loot that created new interest in the play after it had bombed on its first appearance in the West End.)

I mentioned Rossiter's difficult reputation, saying something like: "He turned up for the first rehearsal word perfect and expected everyone else to be too." Murray, ever the director, bristled and asked: "What's wrong with that?"

Oh, and my title here is based on something the vicar said from the pulpit when Reggie Perrin was obliged to attend his own memorial service.

The Joy of Six 1274

Anthony Broxton looks back to Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference - and gives us a sense of the leadership the Conservatives now need but won't get: "In just one passage of speech, Kinnock flipped the trajectory of the party and, most importantly, the dynamics of party conference on its head. The left - for so long used to a monopoly on the righteous anger of leadership betrayal - was now being told to wear their own failures of the working class."

"A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbours." Anne Applebaum says Russia must be defeated.

"It is now indisputable that companies rigged safety tests with the complicity of the testing authorities, that politicians refused to act on safety concerns because to do so might have obstructed deregulation, that a social landlord which loathed its tenants ignored and concealed fire safety notices." James Butler reads the report of the Grenfell Inquiry.

Marlow Bushman reports that red squirrels are repopulating Aberdeen city centre.

"Few authors manage to publish bestsellers in one decade, let alone six. Agatha Christie managed to accomplish that feat, selling enormous quantities of her books throughout her career. Christie’s popularity kept growing throughout her life, but the settings of her novels changed with the times. When many people think of Christie’s books, they think of the interwar period, country estates, and quaint English villages; but during the 1960s Christie’s stories don’t fit these templates at all." Christie in the 1960s looks at her novels from that decade.

Books on the Line on the Crumlin Viaduct and the filming there of the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren film Arabesque.

The 'Silk Road' is a myth: Trade with the East went by sea and India was at its heart

In the course of his review of William Dalrymple's The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World in the London Review of Books last month, Ferdinand Mount quotes a passage from a book by Warwick Ball:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. 

Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. 

Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

That is from Ball's Rome in the East, which was published in 1999. William Dalrymple, according to Mount, takes a similar view:

He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story.

Dominika the roving Braybrooke skunk is found again - in Corby

Remember Dominika the Braybrooke skunk who, last month, escaped from her Braybrooke home and was recaptured around the corner from me?

I didn't tell you at the time, because it was too upsetting, but she escaped again shortly after she got home. 

But now there's good news again. Here's HFM News:

A pet skunk missing from Braybrooke has been found safe and well over 10 miles away in Corby after spending five weeks on the run.

Dominika escaped from owner Jayne McLaughlin’s home last month and had not been seen since a sighting in Market Harborough the following week.

The animal was spotted around a bin area in Hooke Close in Corby and after the sighting was shared on Facebook, Jayne was alerted and went straight to the area armed with some food.

There are lots of websites saying that skunks can make good pets, but none mentions wanderlust.

Anyway, this childhood favourite of mine sounds as though it might be a tribute to Dominika - sort of - so take it away, sisters.

Woodhead railway tunnels to Hadfield today

I first saw the Woodhead route - the lost railway from Sheffield to Manchester - in the summer of 1978. In those days Sheffield to Huddersfield trains used it to reach Penistone, running through the derelict Sheffield Victoria station on the way and also taking sweeping curves about the valley of the Don.

At Penistone you could watch a constant stream of goods trains taking coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield to a power station at Widnes or returning empty.

The class 76 locomotives were unique to this line and you could tell they had been designed in the 1930s, before the war put a temporary stop to electrification.

And I did manage to ride on the whole route shortly before it closed. In the winter of 1980/1 the Hope Valley line, the alternative way to Manchester that all Sheffield trains now use, closed for engineering works on Sundays and passenger services were diverted via Woodhead. I can still remember coasting past the reservoirs you see in the video on the way down to Manchester.

This is an excellent video from Trekking Exploration, showing the remains of the line between Woodhead and Hadfield today as well as some archive footage and photos of its last days.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The new political season has begun. What should Lib Dem strategy be in this brave new world? Is there a policy you would like to see us adopt? Any heretical thoughts you want to confess?

You're welcome to share your ideas in a guest post for Liberal England. 

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do get in touch first.

And, as you may have noticed, I'm happy to cover topics far beyond the Lib Dems and British politics.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• So far this year, 49 councillors have left the Tories and 42 have left Labour - Augustus Carp
• Singing the songs of the Cambrian Railway - Eric Loveland Heath
• Councillors changing party: general election update - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems achieved a wide and remarkably deep success - Alex Folkes
• The Lib Dems must meet the challenge of the Greens in the new political landscape - Anselm Anon
• This blog is not suitable for kids - Laurence Warner
• The future’s bright, the future’s orange - Stuart Whomsley
• An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough? - Stuart Whomsley
• The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club - Jo Colley
• An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart Whomsley

Fascinating Paddington London history walking tour

I've gone down with a cold, so I'll leave you in the excellent company of John Rogers:

A London walking tour exploring the ancient village of Paddington, famous for its railway station (and Paddington Bear of course). Originating as an Anglo-Saxon village, Paddington has a long and rich history. We cross the Grand Union Canal, Harrow Road and the Westway to visit Paddington Green and St. Mary's Church. 

From here we have a mooch in Church Street Market and wander down Edgware Road. In Praed Street we see the place where Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin  at Saint Mary's Hospital. We then look for the Tyburn Milestone and the burial ground where Laurence Sterne was laid to rest. 

Finally our walking tour takes us to Bayswater Road and the Smallest House in London, the Tyburn Convent and the site of the Tyburn Tree.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Michael Gove on why elected politicians have to fight against 'Treasury brain'

Rachel Reeves is starting to make Danny Alexander look like a maverick economic expansionist, but maybe the reason they succumbed to orthodoxy lies in the Treasury rather within them.

Michael Gove, stay with me, spoke to Jo Timan of the Manchester Evening News, and the interview is discussed in today's Northern Agenda email from Rob Parsons:

Describing an issue that's all-too-familiar to Northern leaders, he criticised so-called “Treasury brain” in government​ ahead of a Budget due on October 30.

On the way in which civil servants review investments, he said: “The way it works unfortunately means that the nominal return, say, on improving train times between Guildford and London is weighted disproportionately in such a way that it looks much better in terms of bang for your buck than improving rail links between, say, Sheffield and Manchester.”

Mr Gove said the phrase “Treasury brain … speaks to two things”, and claimed officials would have raised concerns with the 1944 D-Day landings on the basis they were “novel and contentious”.

He said: “The Treasury is where the brightest brains are in government but it’s also the case that the Treasury brain – and it’s quite a small-c conservative thing – looks at different propositions and it takes the view: ‘Hmm, you sir are saying that if we invest now, we’ll secure all sorts of benefits later.

“‘I’ve heard that a hundred times. All I know is you’re calling on me to invest now, that means spending money. These benefits, they may never come.’

“So there’s a classic sort of Tory scepticism of utopianism within the Treasury, but the parallel to that is there’s also a scepticism of anything which is anything which is in Treasury phrase ‘novel and contentious’.”

It's well worth subscribing to Northern Agenda, which bills itself as 

Read by policy-makers from the North's town halls to Whitehall, you'll get a bitesize guide to the stories that matter in our region from journalists outside the Westminster bubble.

Heavy flooding at Wellingborough last week

PurpleVision - follow him on YouTube for East Midland disused railway goodness - went to Wellingborough last week to look at the overflowing River Nene.

He explored the Embankment area of town on foot - you can see it, swans and all, in happier circumstances in a post on this blog - and then filmed the wider area with a drone.

The Joy of Six 1273

James Crouch argues that the greatest challenge the Conservative Party faces is a lack of unity among both its members and its remaining voters.

"In their speeches to this week’s Labour Party conference, Rachel Reeves mentioned it only briefly and in passing, and Keir Starmer not at all. It’s absurd, especially as the guiding theme of both speeches, as of the government’s entire incoming communications message, is that of the dire inheritance bequeathed by its Tory predecessors. Brexit can hardly be excluded from that reckoning." Chris Grey says there’s still little sign Britain has accommodated itself to Brexit or has any idea how to do so.

"It’s night. I’m trying to sleep. I’m so tired. But a voice says, 'What time is it?'. It’s half two, Mum, go to sleep. Half an hour later again, 'What time is it?'. Mum, it’s night, that’s why it’s dark. Please be quiet and let me sleep. 'Oh, okay.' Ten minutes later, 'Mick, put the light on for me'. My brother Mick hasn’t lived in this house for over 40 years! Again, I calm her down. But it only lasts for a bit, and finally at quarter to four I give up on this night, get out of bed and start the day." Anna Schurer talked to a carer and describes her life in her own words.

Andrew Anthony reviews a new book on Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter.

"It was a seminal moment in chess history, comparable to the 1945 USA v USSR radio match when the Americans, quadruple Olympiad gold winners in the 1930s, were crushed 15.5-4.5 to launch 45 years of Soviet supremacy, interrupted only by Bobby Fischer." Leonard Barden on India's dominant performance in the chess Olympiad.

Jon Hotten remembers Graham Thorpe: "His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that."

GUEST POST An essay in identifying Englishness

Stuart Whomsley attempts to do what the frontrunner for the Conservative leadership can't.

Robert Jenrick has recently stated that Englishness is under threat. However, he seemed unable to say what Englishness actually is. He knew the term had currency, but on enquiry he could offer no more. Like a patient trying to blag medication for an illness that they do not have because that medication can be sold on the streets. What are your symptoms? I have the symptoms of that illness. 

But what exactly are your symptoms? The illness symptoms. Jenrick, when asked, could not define Englishness; he looped around about a shared history and culture, but was unable to say what that was or to give any examples.

So I will try to help. How could I not try to help, with Jenrick being the Newark MP where I live? I could say my neighbour, but he does not seem to get here much, even before his leadership bid.

When you try to define Englishness there are problems. The territory of Englishness has been invaded by nationalists in recent years, people who have a fuzzy blur into racists and white supremacists. Therefore, this can make be a tricky topic to engage with; the brand has been sullied.

Another issue to consider is the question of Britishness compared to Englishness. Many of the features of what defines Englishness do cross over into what is Britishness. But there are differences. 

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are much smaller in terms of population, and though punching above their weight, have been the junior partners in the union, and some have felt a sense of subjugation by the English. Something the English themselves have never really felt. That is an English thing; no one will push the English around.

Englishness is about a language, that language, the English language, that has spread around the world and has been a bond between England and all the people around the globe who use it. People from England have also used the language well and we have a strong literary heritage in prose, poetry and song.

The people of England have been shaped by being an island nation, that there is bit of water around us kept us separate from the rest of the world. Maybe, this is one of the reasons why people arriving by small motes have hit a nerve with some people. The moat is being repeatedly breached. 

Being surrounded by water gave us oceans that we could utilise to take over, if briefly, large parts of the rest of the world. We are a nation of pirates, then colonialists. Not a heritage that we can be proud of without reservations. But after we went out and invaded the world some people have followed us back home, which has greatly enriched the nation, more than the Elgin marbles have.

We are a nation that has a proud history of democracy, even if sometimes we have been hypocritical about it, and even if it has been eroded in recent years, democracy is still a value that is dear to the English. 

I remember being on the march to stay part of the EU after the Referendum vote, a man who had been an accidental passer-by, stopped and went red in the face shouting at us that we needed to obey democracy, that a referendum had occurred, and we needed to abide by it.

The religious values of England are unsurprisingly, those of the Church of England. Which is basically Catholicism with the Pope and obedience to him removed - replaced for a while by the monarch, but then only the monarch nominally. It is also a religion without the guilt that seems to be bequeathed to every Catholic. In the Church of England there is nothing to be guilty about: you were born English, and so you are winning, chin up, chest out, sing a hymn.

England has been organised around the class system going back for centuries. It is very English to try and work out where someone else fits, because of how they talk, how they dress, and fitting them within the English sociological landscape. Not that I am a fan of this, but it is part of being English, with the monarch as the lid that keeps it all in place.

The monarch, even for Republicans, still has a central place in our national consciousness, that has long past for many previous monarch ruled countries. We divide our history up by them, we name our streets after them, we still sing about them being long to rule over us. This is very English.

England is a country with a super high density of historical places; you cannot drive very far from wherever you are without soon passing a marker of an historical figure or event. It might not be labelled, but when you stop and check it out, there will be historical treasure piled upon historical treasure. It is simply falling out of the hedgerows and ancient churches whichever way you turn at the next crossroads.

In terms of economics what could be more English than the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, which shaped the post war years? A very English pragmatic approach to economics that stands in the face of the more ideologically driven approaches of communism, monetarism or neoliberalism.

Englishness means being the inventor of rules for games. We might not have been the original inventors of the games themselves, but we were the ones who set to work drawing up rules of how the games are to be played, before teaching everyone else how to play them by our rules (very English), so that they can beat us at them. What can be more English than cricket?  A game that in its proper format, test cricket, is played over five days with meal breaks.

Pets, I have not mentioned pets. The English are a nation of animal lovers. This really got going under the Victorians. We went out into the wild and captured animals and turned them from being wild and free, to being our pets. So it is not all rosy, but we were at the front of animal welfare, and our love of pets, particularly our dogs, is a defining feature of Englishness. This is one of the British owned features too.

The people I know, directly or indirectly, whose parents were migrants seem to have picked up what it means to be English, no problem. It is some kind of osmosis achieved by growing up here, no matter where your family come from you are taking on Englishness, from the details of regional accents, to the bigger values stuff. They get it. They get what it means to be English. They too can fail at penalty shoot-outs. Did I mention the English sense of humour?

Ironically, and what could be more English than irony, the people who often make a big fuss about Englishness do not seem to be looking at England for their values base, but are instead looking at the USA and longing for us to be the 51st state, thus undermining Englishness.

So going forward, Englishness will continue to thrive, in part because of the people who migrated here in more recent times than the Angles, Saxons or Normans. They migrated here because they too wanted to be part of the English dream.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

Tommy Tucker: Hi-Heel Sneakers

Released in 1964, Hi-Heel Sneakers was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It reached 11 in the US singles chart and 23 in the UK.

I was led to it by a 2003 interview with Steve Winwood:

The Hammond organ was the invention of Lawrence Hammond, a clock maker and amateur home organist who wanted an instrument to replace the church organ. The Hammond was used by black churches in America, and it was there that jazz and R&B musicians first heard the possibilities that the instrument offered. 

Winwood grew up listening to that first generation of Hammond players, including Jimmy Smith, Booker T, Jack McDuff, Charles Earland and Richard "Groove" Holmes.

"A lot of the early R&B was organ-based," says Winwood. "I liked songs like the mod classic Hi-Heel Sneakers by Tommy Tucker, which had a particular sound that intrigued me."

For Michaelmas: St Michael and All Angels, Kettering

Today is Michaelmas - the Feast of St Michael and All the Angels. To mark it, here is my favourite tin tabernacle.

As I noted when I visited St Michael and All Angels, Kettering, Pevsner says it dates from 1907 and "has distinct charm". I also said that its garden gives it more appeal than many conventional urban churches of the period.

GUEST POST The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club

Jo Colley was there when teenage girls ripped off the Walker Brothers' shirts - and she still has a thread to prove it.

Among my CD collection are three late period Scott Walker albums, including And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And Who Shall Go To The Ball? which came out in 2007 with the excellent 4AD. Tucked into my vinyl stash is a Walker Brothers album that I found in a charity shop recently - all their hits, the soaring over orchestrated ballads that I loved at the time, although these days I am much more of an avant-garde minimalist. 

But in 1965 I did go to the ball. The Walker Brothers played the Frolickin' Kneecap in Market Harborough. It was insane, really. They must have booked the venue just before Make it Easy On Yourself hit the number 1 spot. The lads must have been stunned to find themselves in a less-than-one-horse town in the East Midlands, where I was mocked for wearing a beret and a maxi skirt. 

I don’t think I was a huge fan. At age 14, My favourite artists were The Who and Bob Dylan. I was alternately a mod and a New York intellectual. The venue I most frequented in the town was the Peacock Folk Club. But there was no denying these were handsome lads, although didn’t they look old? And so unfashionably well fed. 

I don’t honestly remember how any of it worked. Did we buy tickets or just turn up? It was also my first time in this venue although later I saw Family (a really excellent band). How wonderful to have a venue like this in the town! 

My main memory of the 'concert' is of utter chaos, screaming, and the poor Walker Brothers being nearly torn apart by frenzied teenage girls. They literally lost their shirts. We did not hear any of the music at all - which 

annoyed me even then, as it had earlier at the De Montfort Hall at the Stones concert. I went for the music - and the sex of course, but the music was where the real excitement was. And we did not hear a single note. 

I’m surprised nobody got hurt. I was too far back to do any ripping, and anyway that wasn’t my style. Also I was (still am) very short sighted and was not wearing my glasses. There was ear splitting screaming, a massive press of overheated girls. It was over very quickly and a friend of mine, clutching her hard won bit of fabric, passed me a thread, which is still somewhere in my attic. I have no idea which 'brother; was the wearer of the shirt. 

Jo Colley is a Writer, editor, blogger and maker of poetry films. You can follow her on Twitter.

Keir Starmer, Lord Alli and the good chap theory of government

Lord Hewart - see my review of Neil Hickman's book on him in the current Liberator - had little time for the argument that, because the Civil Service has such high standards, we shouldn't worry about civil servants being ungranted unexamined, quasi-judicial powers.

In a paper written for The Constitution Society in 2019, Andrew Blick and Peter Hennessy gave this attitude to government more generally a name:

In the UK, we have trusted politicians to behave themselves. We have long assumed that those who rise to high office will be 'good chaps', knowing what the unwritten rules are and wanting to adhere to them, even if doing so might frustrate the attainment of their policy objectives, party political goals, or personal ambitions – the argument being that 'good chaps' (of different sexes) know where the undrawn lines are and come nowhere near to crossing them: hence ‘the good chap theory of government.’

I thought of this theory when I saw the defences of Keir Starmer decision to put himself in Lord Alli's debt that Labour supporters mounted on Twitter this morning. They boiled down to the claim that we needn't worry about it because Alli is a good chap - all he wanted in return for his donations was the election of a Labour government.

This may well be true, but another maxim that developed out of the rulings of Lord Hewart is that justice must not only be done: it must be seen to be done. In this case I think that means that though we may accept that Starmer has done no favours for Lord Alli, he still should not have put himself in this position.

My chief feeling about this affair is one of surprise that Labour had not seen that it might damage them - Private Eye noticed some time ago that Starmer has a fondness for freebies. Similarly, though it has been inflated by the media, I don't know what else Labour thinks it has given them to talk about since coming power. They seem to have gone from obsessive media management under Blair and Alastair Campbell to giving up any attempt at it.

And, yes, the Tories were far worse, but I've already argued here that whataboutery won't get Labour out of trouble here. I suggest Labour examines the idea of putting a frugal limit on how much an individual can donate to a political party. Until last week at least, many of their supporters seemed keen on it.

Former Arsenal goalkeeper fined £113k after bizarre chainsaw incident

Our Headline of the Day is taken from Football London. Whirl those rattles guys!

The judges were anxious I should point out that, despite my illustration, the custodian of the net in question is Jens Lehmann, not Bob Wilson.

But this does give me time to make another award. Our Trivial Fact of the Day is that Barry Hines, the author of Kes, played in the same Loughborough Colleges side as Dario Gradi and Bob Wilson.