Six of the Best 454

"Tories, of course, are ALWAYS evil, but Lib Dems and Greens can be acceptable; IF and ONLY if we are doing whatever Labour want us to do. As soon as we show any sign of not-supporting Labour in any way they scream that we are BETRAYING them. Because obviously, the fact that we all joined another party doesn't mean we don't support Labour REALLY, it just means we like other coloured shirts or something. And as soon as we become BETRAYERS we are automatically WORSE than the Tories. Tories can't HELP being evil, you see, but we made a CHOICE to be evil by not supporting Labour." Jennie Rigg on the ousting of Tim Swift and his minority Labour administration in Calderdale. How long it seems since he was the leader of the Liberal Alliance group on Leicestershire County Council and an employee of the Association of Liberal Councillors!

Iain Brodie Browne looks at Tim Farron's Beveridge Memorial Lecture, given at the Social Liberal Forum Conference a couple of weeks ago.

"Nationalism has many potential outcomes, but they are all predicated on defining and separating, with concern for ‘our people’ not ‘the people’. Real progressive politics does the opposite. People at home or in the places that will shortly be abroad if there is a yes vote in September would do well to remember that". On Left Foot Forward, Stephen Low reminds us that, up close, Scottish nationalism looks a lot like other nationalisms.

Scientific American explains how the decline in wildlife populations has exacerbated child slavery in Ghana, Somali piracy and the illegal ivory trade.

With a little help from the late Neil Postman, fatpita.net compares and contrasts George Orwell and Aldous Huxley in comic-book format.

A Sense of Place takes us back to Liverpool in 1948.

It seems the Harborough Mail is now an authority on the Middle East

Haaretz bills itself as "the world's leading English-language website for real-time news and analysis of Israel and the Middle East".

Today, as a reader has kindly pointed out to me on Twitter, it quoted David Cameron as calling for an "unconditional, immediate humanitarian cease-fire" in Gaza, and warning that future prospects of a two-state solution were quickly dwindling.

Its source for this important intervention?

"A British daily called the Harborough Mail."

I know what happened: the Harborough Mail has recently taken to running agency copy on national and international news stories on its website, and one of those must have popped up in one of Haaretz's searches.

Still, it doesn't give you enormous confidence in that Haaretz's understanding of British sources. The Harborough Mail, of course, is not a daily but a very local weekly.

Coming soon: The Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser on how to deal with ISIS in Syria.

Plane forced to land at Gatwick after passenger 'throws prosthetic leg at cabin crew'

Headline of the Day goes to the Evening Standard.

But why the scare quotes? Either he threw it or he didn't.

Paddy Ashdown on Gaza

Gaza: there is wrong on both sides here. But Israel's response is clearly disproportionate. And that too is a war crime.
— Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) July 31, 2014

You can follow Paddy Ashdown on Twitter.

Ukip candidate resigns claiming party has been infiltrated by the occult

From the Western Daily Press:

One of the highest-profile Ukip candidates at the next General Election sensationally resigned tonight – along with his local party chairman – amid bizarre claims that the party had been ‘infiltrated by the Glastonbury occult’. 

Jake Baynes was due to stand in next May’s election for Ukip in the Wells constituency, but resigned – claiming there was civil war within the party in Somerset and a vendetta against him, and he ‘wanted nothing more to do with politics’. 

The Wells Ukip branch chairman Graham Livings also quit his post, claiming that the Somerset party had been ‘infiltrated’ by ‘devotees of the occult’ based around the alternative community in Glastonbury. 

But two leading members of Ukip in Somerset, who run a healing centre which claims divine intervention from the Archangel Michael, dismissed the ‘occult’ claims as ‘ridiculous’.

Meanwhile in London, reports the Evening Standard, "A former brothel madam who served time in prison has re-emerged as a Ukip fundraiser and supporter."

A Ukip spokesman helpfully told the paper: "We’ve got nothing to say on this."

The death of the Scarborough to Whitby line

Thanks to Youtube for recommending this. It knows what I like.

Confused Cats Against Feminism

Confused Cats Against Feminism has received a lot of media coverage in recent days. The Women's Blog om the Guardian site is one example.

Me? I just like the pictures of cats.

Liberal Democrats try to win back the green vote

The Liberal Democrats are promising to place Britain's forests in a protected trust to stop them ever being sold off, as was proposed in the early months of the Coalition.

According to the Guardian, this measure will be contained in a nature bill that is being drawn up by the party to bring in greater protections for the environment. It will be put to the party's autumn conference for possible inclusion in the its manifesto for the next general election. Dan Rogerson appears to be the moving spirit behind it.

Its reports says:

Under the plans, the Lib Dems are suggesting a target of more than 700,000 trees per year, or 3.5m over the course of a parliament, which is threefold the number due to be planted under the coalition's Big Tree Plant scheme that covers built-up areas. It would mean a new tree for every child born over the next five years. 

The bill would include targets for clean air and water, a plan to stop natural resources such as peat and wood being harvested at an unsustainable level and put British forests into a trust to stop them being privatised. 

It would also increase the penalties for enforcement and punishment of environmental crime such as deliberate water pollution and wildlife crime and use the proceeds for these increased penalties to fund the National Wildlife Crime Unit and the sector of the Environment Agency that tackles pollution-related crime.

Though I could never get too outraged at the prospect of conifer plantations grown for cropping being privately owned, I am pleased to hear of this planned bill, because there are many in the party who seem content to see our green voters go.

I am one of many who grew up on the slogan "Think global, act local," but showing a concern for your local environment today can make you a "nimby". Neither the infrastructure fanatics nor the severe economic liberals have much time for your local woodland if someone wants to build on it.

Meanwhile, those who do care for the environment tend to be more interested in staving off climate change than local campaigns.

So all power to Dan Rogerson and his 700,000 trees a year.

Timothy Garton Ash on global free speech standards

This is one of a number of Free Speech Bites available on the Index of Censorship website.

House of Lords committee says right to be forgotten is unworkable

From this morning's Guardian:

A "right to be forgotten" – enforcing the removal of online material – is wrong in principle and unworkable in practice, a parliamentary committee has said. 

The House of Lords home affairs, health and education EU sub-committee has condemned regulations being drawn up by the European commission and a recent landmark judgment by the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. 

The study supports the coalition government's opposition to the EU proposals on the grounds that search engines should not be made responsible for the content of the internet.

David Hemmings in Venice for the premiere of The Turn of the Screw, 1954

#78986519 / gettyimages.com

When I looked for some photos from the set of Blow-Up on GettyImages, I did not find any I could embed here. But the video of the film's locations then and now has proved popular.

What I did find were some embeddable pictures taken of David Hemmings when he was 12 and in Venice to sing the role of Miles in the premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw. Yes, before he was an actor he was a singer.

Though there are questions to be asked about Britten's relationships with boys, Hemmings always maintained that nothing untoward happened.

Interviewed for Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Britten, David Hemmings said:

"Did I feel that he was desperately fond of me? I suppose I did, but I must say I thought far more in a sort of fatherly fashion; and I had a a very bad father-son relationship ... There is no man in my entire life that has been more influential on my attitudes than Ben."

Oh, and nice choice of sandals, Mrs Hemmings.

Kenneth Clarke on Paddy Ashdown on Tony Blair

Kenneth Clarke - surely the real-life Peter Mannion? - was interviewed by Andy McSmith in Sunday Independent:

He fears that the long shadow of the Iraq war is diminishing the UK as an actor on the world stage. He suspects that part of the reason David Cameron was defeated in the Commons when he proposed to punish the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons was a “sense of guilt” over Iraq. 

Clarke opposed the war at the time – unlike David Cameron and the majority of Tories – but acquits Tony Blair of the charge that he deliberately lied over Iraq’s weaponry. He remembers Blair addressing the Commons long after the invasion, still arguing his case with total conviction like “the last man living who still really believes they are going to find weapons of mass destruction… 

"One of the funniest things ever said to me about Tony Blair – it was by Paddy Ashdown – was: ‘The trouble with Tony is that he always believes everything he says when he is saying it’."

It is enjoying a summer break at the moment, but this is a chance to say how good McSmith's diary in the Independent is.

In an era when other such columns subsist on yesterday's leavings from social media, he still finds original stories.

Nursery worker faces sack after starring as a Tunnock's tea cake on TV at Games opening ceremony while on sick leave

The Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award.

But really, it could happen to anybody. I once worked with someone who was pictured on the front page of The Times greeting Michael Jackson at Heathrow when she was off sick.

Leicestershire Conservative county councillor faces trial for assaulting a woman

From the Leicester Mercury:

A county councillor is to face trial after being charged with assaulting a woman. 

Tony Kershaw appeared before Loughborough magistrates yesterday for the case to be heard, but it was adjourned to a later date, to ensure police and medical witnesses were available. 

The 77-year-old has been suspended from County Hall's Conservative group pending the outcome of the case. 

He has denied assaulting a woman in Anstey on May 2.

Mr Kershaw was suspended from the Conservative group "without prejudice" when he was charged in May.

At the time he was chair of the county council's environment and transport scrutiny committee, and he has been a member of its cabinet.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

This is a reminder that I welcome guest posts on Liberal England.

And as you can see from the list of the 10 most recent guest posts below, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects.

If you would like to write a guest post for Liberal England yourself, please send me an email so we can discuss your idea.

Bullying on Leicester City Council - Ross Grant

Pubs must help themselves if they are to survive - Matt Wright

One woman’s view of being a senior citizen - Eileen Ward-Birch

The perfect Christmas gift for a carer - Jon Pollard

Politic360: Mending online political discussion - Jason Brown

A new hole in the safety net - Anonymous

Memories of Snailbeach in the 1950s - Christina Samson

We are all the poorer for soundbite politics - Tony Robertson

A few thoughts on walking - Phil Smith

The mad, mad world of Maghull Town Council - Tony Robertson

The demolition of the cooling towers at Didcot power station

These towers, which have stood for more than 40 years, were felled at 5am on Sunday.

Quote of the Day visits Hinckley and Bosworth

The winner is Liberal Democrat campaigner Michael Mullaney.

Over to Twitter:

It would be nice if Bosworth's MP David Tredinnick could campaign for things that were on this planet, let alone Hinckley and Bosworth!
— Michael Mullaney (@miketmullaney) July 28, 2014

This BBC News story explains all.

The scandal of Sir Peter Morrison

#3140217 / gettyimages.com

Margaret Thatcher’s personal bodyguard Barry Strevens has told of how he warned the Prime Minister of allegations that one of her top aides was involved in sex parties with under-age boys.

Perhaps you don't believe this report in the Independent? I don't believe all the stories that have emerged about the abuse of children by politicians in recent weeks.

But in the case of Sir Peter Morrison you just have to take the word of his parliamentary colleagues.

Gyles Brandreth wrote in his published diary Breaking the Code - a surprisingly good book, incidentally - that he and his wife Michele had "been told several times on the doorstep – in no uncertain terms – that the MP is ‘a disgusting pervert".

In her diary, Edwina Currie - Ian Pace had reproduced the page - wrote:

One appointment in the recent reshuffle has attracted a lot of gossip and could be very dangerous: Peter Morrison has become the PM’s PPS. Now he’s what they call ‘a noted pederast’, with a liking for young boys; he admitted as much to Norman Tebbit when he became deputy chairman of the party, but added, ‘However, I’m very discreet’ – and he must be!

And Norman Tebbit has confirmed this story, as the Mirror reported the other day:

Norman Tebbit yesterday admitted he had been told Sir Peter Morrison was a paedophile more than a decade before the truth about the notorious Tory was exposed. The ex-party chairman said “rumours had got to my ears” that Morrison had sex with underage boys before he became Margaret Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1990.

But then we all heard rumours about Morrison in those days.

I can remember being told that Cheshire Police were tired of picking him up for pestering young men in public lavatories and had told him that the next time this happened charges would be brought. The parties, my informant added, were busy selecting candidates for the inevitable by-election.

A different version of this story surfaced in the Guardian column of the late Simon Hoggart in November 2012:

Grahame Nicholls, who ran the Chester Trades Council when Morrison was the local MP, wrote describing how he'd often met Morrison, who was by the 1980s pretty well constantly drunk. 

"After the 1987 general election, around 1990, I attended a meeting of Chester Labour party where we were informed by the agent, Christine Russell, that Peter Morrison would not be standing in 1992. He had been caught in the toilets at Crewe station with a 15-year-old boy. 

A deal was struck between Labour, the local Tories, the local press and the police that if he stood down at the next election the matter would go no further. Chester finished up with Gyles Brandreth and Morrison walked away scot-free. I thought you might be interested."

The version I heard made no mention of under-age boys, but then the age of consent for gay sex in those days was 21. It was the state, as much as the Paedophile Information Exchange, that served to blur the distinction between man and boy.

Still, Edwina Currie was in little doubt: she called Morrison a pederast, which suggests she believed the boys were younger than 16.

And the former Conservative minister Rod Richards told the Daily Mail in 2012:

"What I do know is that Morrison was a paedophile. And the reason I know that is because of the North Wales child abuse scandal."

He went on to explain:

"It fell to me to decide initially whether to hold a public inquiry. So I saw all the documentation and the files. Morrison was linked. His name stood out on the notes to me because he had been an MP. He and [the other man] were named as visitors to the homes."

All of which suggests that the Morrison saga should be put down as an unlovely example of the way that churches and political parties will protect their own rather than expose wrongdoing.

The Yardbirds: Stroll On

As yesterday's video showing the locations from Blow-Up then and now has proved popular, here is a clip from the film featuring the Yardbirds.

It is an unusual line up for the band, as it includes both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Beck, who had replaced Eric Clapton as lead guitarist was shortly to be ousted by the other members. (You can see all three playing together in the 1983 benefit concert for Ronnie Lane and his ARMS charity.)

The real Ricky Tick Club was in Windsor, but the interiors here were filmed on a recreation of it at Elstree Studios and yesterday's video showed us where the exteriors were filmed.

But remember kids: Not even beating everyone to Beck's smashed guitar neck may not be enough to ward off ennui if you are an achingly fashionable photographer.

Six of the Best 453

What You Can Get Away With completes its series of posts inspired by Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism.

On British Politics and Policy, Mareike Kleine provides three suggestions on how Lord Hill can be a good European commissioner and still serve the British interest.

China is setting up fake social media accounts to give a false impression of life in Tibet, reports Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times.

Ben Goldacre, in an editorial for the British Medical Journal, says true informed choice will require wholesale changes to the way we gather and communicate evidence: "When we offer a preventive drug to such large numbers of healthy people, we are a long way from the doctor treating a sick patient. In some respects, we are less like doctors and more like a life insurance sales team: offering occasional, possibly life changing, benefits, many years from now, in exchange for small ongoing inconvenience and cost."

"Audiences in 1949 didn’t see the film as fanciful. Vienna may have been badly bombed, but so had Coventry, London and Liverpool. Crime was a UK problem, too. Shortages and rationing meant plenty of people knew a man who could get a hold of extra petrol, sugar or meat. Fellas like Lime had their stories in the papers and their pictures on post-office walls." Gerald Heyes celebrates the 65th anniversary of Carol Reed's The Third Man for Spiked.

London Reconnections explores the Connaught Tunnel and Silvertown Station.

The locations from Blow-Up today

After the still from the set of Performance the other day, I had hoped to show you from the set of another key sixties film, Blow-Up. And there are some on Getty Images, but none of them can can be embedded on blogs.

So instead here is a short filming showing Blow-Up's locations in the original film in 2011.

Blow-Up ostensibly shows London in the swinging sixties, but today Antonioni's take on the city and the era seems cool, continental and very much his own.

It is all a long time ago - Blow-Up was released in 1966 - but Terence Stamp still mentions his annoyance that he was dropped from the film in favour of David Hemmings in every interview he gives.

Whatever happened to the idea that Ed Miliband speaks human?

In view of Ed Miliband's speech yesterday in which he half apologised for the way he looks and the way he speaks, it is worth remiembering how he was sold to the Labour Party as a possible leader.

Here is Mehdi Hasan, who was soon to become his biographer, writing about Ed Miliband and the party's leadership contest in August 2010:

I remember the first time I realised Ed Miliband could be the next Labour leader. Standing in a packed room at the TUC's Congress House headquarters in January, at Ken Livingstone's Progressive London conference, I watched as the younger Miliband brother, clad in a fleece and jeans, inspired a captive audience of party members, Trots, anarchists, Greens and, yes, Liberal Democrats. 

Speaking without notes, the then climate change secretary passionately made the case for tackling global warming, despite the depressing deadlock at Copenhagen a month earlier. "He's awesome, isn't he?" whispered the young woman next to me, her eyes alight with excitement. 

Of all the Oxbridge candidates running for Labour leader, it is Ed Miliband who displays the common touch - or, in the words of Neil Kinnock, the "X-factor". "He has a special ability to lift spirits and motivate people - the capacity to inspire," says the former Labour leader. 

The younger Miliband's strategists and supporters have known from the start that this is their man's strongest selling point: his ability to reach out, in our new, plural era of coalition politics. Throughout this protracted contest, throngs of energised Ed Miliband supporters have descended on the various hustings holding placards proclaiming "Ed Speaks Human". 

Let us be clear: Ed M is not JFK. Nor is he the British equivalent of Barack Obama. But he does have the all-important ability to connect with ordinary people, especially the young, and to motivate and inspire them.

How strangely that passage reads now!

Shelagh Delaney's Salford (1960)

After I posted a clip from A Taste of Honey as a tribute to Dora Bryan, a reader kindly tweeted me the link to this short film.

Shelagh Delaney's Salford was made by Ken Russell and broadcast on 25 September 1960, when I was precisely six months old. She comes over as a striking and attractive figure.

The story of A Taste of Honey is worth retelling. Michael Billngton did so after Delaney died in 2011:

Shelagh Delaney ... was almost as important for what she symbolised as for what she wrote. She was, as Jeanette Winterson wrote in the Guardian last year, "the first working-class woman playwright". And even if nothing she later wrote achieved the success of her first play, A Taste of Honey, Delaney proved that an 18-year-old Salford girl could breach the walls of what, even in 1958, was still a mainly middle-class, male-dominated British theatre. ...

Delaney had been taken to see Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme at Manchester's Opera House and came away convinced she could do better. So, in little more than a fortnight, she banged out a play about a feisty Salford girl, Jo, who is left alone by her flighty mum one Christmas, goes to bed with a transient Nigerian sailor, gets pregnant and is lovingly tended by an effeminate art student. Having written the piece, Delaney had the nous to send it to Joan Littlewood, who had turned the Theatre Royal, Stratford East into a vibrant home of new drama. 

In her autobiography, Littlewood made no bones about the fact that a lot of work was needed to knock Delaney's play into shape. She liked the sparky dialogue but felt many of the scenes were undeveloped and the plot anecdotal. So she got Avis Bunnage, as Jo's mum, to use her talent for direct address and brought in a jazz quartet, consisting of trumpet, drums, guitar and sax, to set the mood. Delaney's slightly artless script quickly became a critical success.

Her career never reached these heights again. In some ways she was a female version of Leicester's Colin Wilson, who was taken up by the critics for his first book The Outsider and butchered by them for his second.

And I do like the comment in the original theatre programme for A Taste of Honey, as quoted by Rachel Cooke:

She is the antithesis of London's 'angry young men'. She knows what she is angry about.

Liberal Democrats apologise to Chris Rennard for mishandling investigation

From the Guardian website - and tomorrow's newspaper:

The Liberal Democrats have apologised to Lord Rennard for mishandling part of his disciplinary process and dropped their investigation into whether he brought the party into disrepute by refusing to say sorry to female activists who accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour. 

The peer and former chief executive is now under investigation only over the issue of whether his "criticisms of party processes" on social media and in the press have harmed the reputation of the Lib Dems, which means he continues to be suspended from the party in the House of Lords.

Satellite full of sexually experimental geckos adrift in space, Russia lose control of mission

The Independent wins Headline of the Day.

The late Lou Reed adds:

Lord Bonkers on Philip Hammond

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England:

"Hammond must be our least memorable Foreign Secretary since... What was that fellow's name?"

The CIA operated a secret torture centre in Poland after 9/11

From the Open Society Foundations website:

The European Court of Human Rights has finally officially confirmed the facts of a story that the U.S. and European governments have sought to deny for more than a decade: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operated a secret torture center on Polish soil in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. 

In a historic ruling, the court concluded beyond reasonable doubt that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri—represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative—and Abu Zubaydah were held in secret and tortured by the CIA at a military base called Stare Kiejkuty in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Land Giant in Action (1951)

It is not so long since the countryside around Kettering and Corby was a landscape of vast quarries, mineral railways and aerial ropeways.

This 1951 British Pathe film gives you an idea of the scale of the undertaking.

The Market Harborough to Northampton road crosses the line of a couple of old ironstone railways. I used to know where they had been and look for the bridge parapets in the hedgerow as the bus sped past, but I have now forgotten those locations.

When David Cameron called Gaza "a prison camp"

Four years ago BBC News reported:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has condemned the blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing the territory as a "prison camp". 

He also criticised Israel for launching an attack on a convoy transporting Turkish activists and aid to Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens died in the raid. 

He was speaking to an audience of businessmen during a visit to Ankara. ...

"Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp," Mr Cameron said. 

"People in Gaza are living under constant attacks and pressure in an open-air prison," he said.

David Ward, Gaza and tweetcrime

If I lived in Gaza I would...

If I lived in Gaza I would what? If I lived in Gaza I wouldn't be me. I certainly wouldn't be a middle-aged British Liberal Democrat.

So there was something silly about David Ward pondering what he would do if he lived in Gaza. Whatever that conflict there is about, it isn't about you, David.

Still, David has not been half as silly as some of his critics. Last night Conservatives took to Twitter to demand his instant expulsion from the party:"

One bladder-on-a-stick called Nadhim Zahawi has even written to the Metropolitan Police calling for David to be prosecuted.

If anything,  it is Zahawi who should be prosecuted - for wasting police time.

And David, in his cack-handed way, was making an important point: anti-terrorist and police operations can be counterproductive. We have examples of that - internment without trial in Northern Ireland; police us of stop-and-search powers - much closer to home.

You may not agree with these arguments when they are used, but it must surely be possible for someone to advance them without being expelled or prosecuted.

One amusing thing this affair is done is show us that the right is just as politically correct as the left. Force them to encounter an argument they don't like and don't normally here and they will nor argue back: they will try to silence you.

You can tell something odd is going on when Spiked emerges as the voice of reason. Under the headline "Let Lib Dems commit 'tweetcrimes'" it says:

David Ward, Lib Dem MP for Bradford East, is not sharpest of political tools, but his tweeting over the past 24 hours has been an expression of his political views. ‘The big question is - if I lived in #Gaza would I fire a rocket? - probably yes’, he wrote on Tuesday. And then in a follow-up tweet, he tried on Kennedy cliché for size: ‘Ich bin ein #palestinian - the West must make up its mind - which side is it on?’ 

It’s not big, and it’s definitely not clever, but it is a genuine expression of Ward’s political views: he thinks Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israeli state (or ‘the Jews’, as he referred to it last year), and he thinks the West needs to come down hard on Israel. So far, so right on. 

But what has been astonishing is the response of the Tories. Not only have they, like Labour, sought to make a big deal of Ward’s flight of imaginative sympathy after which he concludes that he, too, would be firing rockets at Israel if he was David Ward born in Gaza, now battling Israel, rather than David Ward born in Lincoln, and now boring in Bradford. No, the Tories have gone one depoliticising step further and suggested that Ward’s mal mots are not only a bit simple; they’re possibly illegal.

Interviewing Ed Davey at the Social Liberal Forum conference

If, as Paul Walter suggested the other day, Ed Davey is the Liberal Democrats' climate change bulldog, then he is a very polite bulldog: a bulldog who is all over his brief as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

After interviewing Tim Farron, I met Ed Davey, along with Paul Walter, Caron Lindsay and Mathew Hulbert. We met in a cool room somewhere upstairs in Amnesty International's new headquarters during the Social Liberal Forum conference on Saturday.

If not a bulldog, then Ed was certainly bullish. He is clearly delighted with Liberal Democrats achievements under him, and Chris Huhne before him, at Energy.

He set these out - notably the increase in electricity generation from renewable sources - in a recent article for Liberal Democrat Voice.

One of the things we talked about was how we make the sure the party gets the credit it deserves for these achievements and take the campaign forward at the next election.

Ed believes we need a few clear points to emphasise and suggested, a little gnomically, that the energy policy our last conference passed gives the basis for this. I suggest you read it again carefully.

Paul Walter has given a full summary of what we talked about. You will see that I asked about nuclear power - as a Liberal of a certain age, I still find it hard to come to terms with our change of policy here, even if it a change that many prominent environmentalists have made too.

Others have not made it. When I told someone from Leicester Friends of the Earth about this interview, he suggested I ask Ed why we need a Civil Nuclear Constabulary but not a Civil Wind Farm Constabulary or Civil Solar Power Constabulary.

Ed reminded me that Chris Huhne had promised there would be no subsidy for nuclear power, as I suggested, but no special favours. The price nuclear generators are guaranteed may look high, but he believes it will look less so when the new capacity comes on stream.

Behind my faulty recall of Chris's promise lay a puzzlement that energy has to be subsidised at all. Aren't heat and power among the most basic of human needs with a guaranteed permanent demand?

That may explain why I shall never be Energy Secretary. Ed is - and a mightily impressive one too.

Perhaps his talents lie more in persuasion in small meetings than in platform oratory, but he is now an important figure in the party.

Russia: Cameron gets tough

Farewell to Dora Bryan

Dora Bryan has died at the age of 91. She had a long life, made difficult later on by illness. As the BBC tribute suggests, she specialised in scene-stealing cameos rather than great roles.

We have already seen her as Rose, the tart with the heart of gold, in The Fallen Idol. So here she is as the mother at the start of A Taste of Honey. She also took part in cinema's greatest train chase in Great St Trinian's Train Robbery.

Trivia fans may be pleased to learn that one of the children singing the song is Hazel Blears' brother.

James Fox, Mick Jagger and Cecil Beaton on the set of Performance

#144826578 / gettyimages.com

Read more about Performance elsewhere on this blog.

Understanding the Putin regime in Russia

Two of my favourite bloggers have been looking at the nature of the Putin regime.

Craig Murray writes:

The immediate cause of the MH17 disaster was a missile shot by pro-Russian forces who mistook it for one of the military aircraft they had been regularly shooting down. It is a terrible tragedy – and tragically not unique. There have been several such events in my lifetime, including the USS Vincennes incident and the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner. 

The problem is that Vladimir Putin has revived the Soviet cult of perfectionism – the idea that the state simply cannot make a mistake. That Putin-backed forces could commit an error is therefore unthinkable, as that would imply that Putin made an error in backing and supplying them. 

Putin cannot make errors. We have therefore seen a stream of desperate propaganda stories emanating from the Russian media, such as the allegation that it was the government in Kiev attempting to shoot down Putin himself. These narratives are aimed at the domestic Russian nationalist audience, but are accepted by the small band of ardent Putin supporters in the West.

And Cicero's Songs writes:

The scale of the human rights breakdown under Putin is now so complete, it is legitimate to ask, in the twenty-first century, "if Russia has such a warped structure that it simply can not be a free society, should the country even continue to exist?" 

For there is little doubt, that even without the 14 other Soviet Republics, Post Soviet Russia remains an Empire both in fact and in spirit. For example, there are over 185 different national groups, speaking over 100 native languages in the Russian Federation, of which 27 have some official status, although only Russian is designated as the state language. Although Russification, official and unofficial, has continued, the percentage of the population that is ethnically Russian is in steady decline- Russia is growing more diverse and not less. 

That goes for the economy too. Many people, used to the glitz and obvious wealth of Moscow and St. Petersburg can be totally shocked by the contrast, not merely with the seedy and run down state of most other cities, but the dire poverty that exists even in the rural areas close to the capital. Russia has one of the largest wealth gaps ever seen in human history, with brutal poverty literally within sight of the richest individuals on the planet. 

But such astonishing inequality is the result, not of entrepreneurial graft, but of the capture of the natural resources of the country by a self-selected criminal class. Rent seeking and exploitation are the watch words of this mafia, and it has crushed the vast bulk of the population. The creative and intelligent class are driven to the margin or seek better lives outside the stultifying control of the Kremlin propaganda machine.

Frank Furedi: Paranoid Parenting 13 years on

Frank Furedi published his Paranoid Parenting in 2001.

In today's Independent he looks at what has happened over the ensuing 13 years. He does not paint an encouraging picture:

In 2001, when I published my book Paranoid Parenting, I was genuinely surprised to discover that virtually all experiences associated with childhood came with a health warning. 

At the time, Paranoid Parenting documented the growing tendency to extend adult supervision into every aspect of children's lives. It was apparent that the outdoors had become a no-go area for many youngsters and that the majority of parents did not even allow their offspring to walk to school on their own. 

The idea that children were too vulnerable to be allowed to take risks had already become entrenched. That was bad enough. But since the turn of the century, the regime of child protection has become steadily more pervasive and intrusive. The relentless erosion of children's freedom has been paralleled by the constant tendency to politicise parenting. 

During the past decade or so, the banning of a variety of activities associated with children's life has acquired a relentless dynamic. I still remember, when in February 2007 after a group of children were suspended from school for throwing snowballs, an angry mother writing to me to ask: "What will they think of next?" 

Regrettably, the obsessive impulse to regulate children's life ensures that the next target of child protection is already on the horizon.

London's termini in the fifties, sixties and early seventies

London's Termini in the 50s, 60s & Early 70s from Lewisham Bill on Vimeo.

I have a book on Romney Marsh, published in the early 1960s, that has a photograph of the new nuclear power station at Dungeness.

While the power station itself still looks modern, even futuristic, the cars parked outside seem quaint and comically bulbous. In short the power station and the cars look as though they come from quite different eras and it feels strange to see them together.

I get the same feeling from this video of trains at London termini with a contemporary soundtrack. The pop songs sound much more modern than the trains look.

Anyway, here is 44 minutes of sheer pleasure. And if anyone read my mention of Broad Street the other day and thought I had dreamt it, you can see the station at 32:42 and then enjoy a short trip along its viaduct north out of the City.