The five original members of the group had all played with local bands during the years of the beat boom of the early Sixties. Despite the successes of other provincial groups in the early Sixties, Birmingham's bands seemed to lag behind in the race to become national stars.And Television Heaven had more on The Five O'clock Club.
According to Roy Wood, the reason was that Birmingham audiences - at the time, considerably wealthier than their cousins in Liverpool or Newcastle - were mainly to be found on the supper-club circuit where they expected to hear note-for-note copies of the chart hits of the day rather than original new material or versions of old or obscure rock'n'roll or R&B numbers.
By 1965, only the Rockin' Berries, the Spencer Davis Group and the Moody Blues had broken out of the Midlands into the national circuit - groups like the Redcaps, Carl Wayne and the Vikings and Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders remained in the shadows.
Despite appearing regularly on a children's TV show called 'Five O'Clock Club', by late 1965 singer Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders' guitarist, Roy Wood, both felt that the group was in a rut. Sheridan left to go solo on the cabaret circuit, while Roy Wood joined forces with a number of musicians from other small-time Birmingham groups in a general reshuffle which earned the newly-emerging ensemble their name - the Move.
Carl Wayne brought Chris ('Ace') Kefford with him from Carl Wayne and the Vikings. Kefford - known as 'the singing skull' because of his gaunt looks - played bass. The pedigree of drummer Bev Bevan included a stint with Denny Laine and the Diplomats (Laine's gig prior to joining the Moody Blues) and guitarist Trevor Burton came over from Danny King's Mayfair Set.
It creates the controversial legal concept of ‘third party harassment’, under which workers will be able to sue over jokes and banter they find offensive – even if the comments are aimed at someone else and they weren’t there at the time the comments were made.While an article by Tim Black for Spiked argued that the Act does not simply consolidate existing legislation but introduces a number of new offences in the field:
They can sue if they feel the comments ‘violate their dignity’ or create an ‘intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’.
A one-off incident is enough to sue – there is no need for the ‘victim’ to have warned the perpetrator that their comments are unwelcome.
The most notable of these is the concept of ‘third-party harrassment’. So while it was already an offence for an employer to pick on an employee on the basis of race or gender, an employer will now be liable for any employee ‘harrassment’, too. This means that if someone at work feels that someone else’s comments ‘violate their dignity’ or create an ‘intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’, they can sue their employer.As I said, these two sources will not satisfy everyone - for the record I have written twice for Spiked but never for the Daily Mail - so here is a less controversial one.
Harassment will have the same definition across all strands of discrimination.I take this to mean that because many Scottish people have red hair Harman's remarks should be seen as racist, even if she had no intention to offend or harass the Scots.
The focus will be on preventing "unwanted conduct which has the purpose or effect of violating a person's dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment".
A one-off incident may amount to harassment, and so the victim need not have made the perpetrator aware that the conduct was unwanted.
The definition covers conduct which is "related to" a protected characteristic - a protected characteristic being sex, race, religious belief etc.
This means that there is no need for the particular employee's characteristics to be the reason for the unwanted conduct in order to trigger liability.
In 1795 the "chapel house" was licensed for nonconformist worship. A joint church of Independents and Baptists was formed in 1803 which continued until 1833 when they separated, with the Independents building this chapel and the Baptists building the chapel at Lordshill ...I shall have to go back to Lordshill chapel and photograph it one day. In the mean time you can see it in the 1950 Powell & Pressburger film Gone to Earth.
The chapel in Minsterley was built of brick which is now rendered. An upper floor was inserted in the late 19th century to be used as a schoolroom. The chapel was still in use by the Congregational church in 2003.
Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. And we will continue to crack down on those who try to cheat the benefit system.An extract from a speech by a tough-minded Coalition minister? No, that paragraph is taken from A Future Fair for All, the manifesto on which Labour fought the last election. You will find it on page 20.
The cause was a heart attack several hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree.
a rare date for a church in the country, and the church is indeed both interesting and attractive in its naive handling of the new semi-classical, semi Baroque motifs.A Birmingham Post article gives more of the history of the church and also discusses the maidens garlands that you will find inside:
Our ancestors had a different way of marking the death of an unmarried woman. In England they made her a maiden’s garland, carried before her funeral procession or borne on her coffin. The garland was a crown made of thin hoops of wood, wrapped in white lace.
And to the crown they tied ribbons and gloves and little paper flowers of blue or red. To that they then added real flowers. When the coffin was lowered into the ground, the garland remained in the church, to yellow with age and gather dust.
If the Alternative Vote had been in use at the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats would have won 32 more seats, and a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition would also have had a Commons majority, find the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog.The work of James Tanner ... is replete with thought-provoking observations. His time as a pupil at Marlborough college appears, later, to have afforded him access to the records of the medical officer and the natural science master dating from 1873. Using these as a baseline, Tanner showed how the average height of the boys when aged sixteen and a half had risen by half an inch a decade over an 80-year period.
In Foetus Into Man (1978), he suggested that this "secular trend" was in part a consequence of improved nutrition, but also attributable to genetic factors. The latter included the increased incidence of procreation outside the village community, a key factor in which was the introduction of the bicycle.
This year’s Liberal Democrat presidential election was unexpected. The incumbent (Ros Scott) was widely assumed to be running for a second term. It seemed unlikely that Ros, a popular and successful president, would face a contest.Read the answers on the magazine's website.
Then in early September, after nominations had opened, Ros suddenly announced she would not be re-standing. There was much speculation at party conference about why she had taken this decision – and why so late (see RB, page 4). There was also speculation about who would stand, given the difficulty for anyone of getting a campaign off the ground at such short notice.
Two potential candidates (Jennie Rigg and Jason Zadrozny) soon dropped out, leaving us with a choice between one MP and one ex-MP (the latter rumoured to be about to become a peer). And this is hardly surprising. With the exception of the Lib Dems’ first president (Ian Wrigglesworth), every successful candidate has been a sitting MP or peer.
The electorate is the whole party membership, voting in a postal ballot. The turnout last time (2008) was 47.8%, the previous time (2004) 47.3%. Assuming 65,000 members, a similar turnout this year would produce about 31,000 votes. Given that activists comprise – at most – about 15,000 members, ‘armchair’ members would predominate even on this low turnout.
Ballot papers have already been sent out. The deadline for returning them is 10 November and the count will take place on 13 November. In the meantime, Liberator has asked both candidates a series of questions and here are their answers.
New global rules on how much capital banks must hold are insufficient to prevent another crisis, and reforms to the financial sector need to be much more radical, according to the governor of the Bank of England.You can final a PDF will the full text of Mervyn King's speech on the Bank of England website.
In a speech in New York, Mervyn King listed problems with the main existing reforms to the financial system, such as the higher capital requirements demanded by the Basel III proposals, the British government’s levy on banks, and efforts to identify systemically important institutions and design better ways of letting them fail.
Reforms might need to go farther and could include demanding capital levels many times higher than the levels set out in Basel III, splitting up banks or requiring the use of debt instruments such as contingent capital that left creditors more exposed when things went wrong, Mr King said.
His comments provide a forewarning of the position the Bank is likely to take as it extends its control over financial regulation.
Simon's full title is Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons. (Navnit Dholakia is the party's "other deputy leader" representing Lib Dem peers in the Lords.) He is not, therefore, deputy leader of the party, though that is how he is styled in the media.He does not say this to denigrate Simon, but to emphasise that his recent and well-founded concern about the Coalition's housing and social security proposals should be seen in a proper light.
The pupil premium is designed to have two beneficial effects. First, because the extra money follows the child, it will ensure that deprivation funding is far better targeted than it is now. Second, the premium will deliver extra money to the schools with the highest level of challenge – giving them an opportunity to combat disadvantage. Too few schools facing real challenges currently have the money to make a difference, for example with more one-to-one tuition, a longer school day, holiday classes, or paying more to attract the best teachers.Laws also argues that the premium does represent extra money for schools.
There are certain key pieces of archival film that stay in our collective consciousness and remain remembered by everyone. Film archivists know them so well because they are requested again and again.He concludes:
There is Chamberlain waving his piece of paper promising ‘peace in our time’; there is the couple dancing the Charleston on the roof of a car as it drives down Kingsway; there is the procession of impractical and helplessly clumsy early aircraft crashing in succession into the ground; there is that hapless lady dignitary trying to launch a ship with a champagne bottle that will not smash; there is the suffragette throwing herself under a horse at the 1913 Derby; there are the troops going over the top in the Battle of the Somme; and there is the sand dance of Wilson, Keppel and Betty.
I worked at the National Film and Television Archive for a number of years, and I think it is probably true to say that this one piece of film was requested by the public more times than any other.
They inspired many imitators, but none came close to the mixture of anarchy, suggestiveness, humour, grace and knobbly knees that made Wilson, Keppel and Betty a unique phenomenon.And there is more footage of them on the British Pathe site. Click on the picture to go there.
Mr Cameron reportedly intends to award 29 peerages to Tory donors and other political allies, with 15 for Mr Clegg's Liberal Democrats. By contrast, Ed Miliband will get just ten new Labour peers.Who will those 15 new Liberal Democrat peers be? Walters speculates:
It is the biggest influx from a governing party since Tony Blair handed out a record 47 peerages when Labour won power in 1997, giving his party a majority in the Lords for the first time.
Lords insiders say Liberal Democrat candidates include Brian Paddick, the former Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner, who stood as the party's London mayoral candidate in 2008, and qualified doctor and anti-abortion campaigner Evan Harris, who lost his seat as Lib Dem MP for Oxford at the Election.
Three Liberal Democrat donors who each paid up to £250 a month into Mr Clegg's private bank account before he became party leader are also said to be under consideration.
They are Ian Wright, a senior executive at drinks firm Diageo; Neil Sherlock, head of public affairs at accountants KPMG; and Michael Young, a former gold-mining executive.
"The cuts aren't about economics any longer – they're about ideology. And the ideology is that a big state is bad and state interference is bad."Jefferies invites him to agree with the proposition: "So the US Tea Party agenda has been smuggled into British politics?"
"Absolutely, and nobody so far is fighting against it. Take quangos. The ones they're keeping are the ones that benefit business, while cutting the arty-farty ones that cost very little and arguably earn money."I wouldn't go to the wall to defend every decision the Coalition made in its bonfire of the quangos, but there are a number of points to be made here.
You divide the world into two groups: there are sensible people like you and your readers, and there are people who hold ludicrous views. There can be no middle position.Here the proposition Jefferies and Iannucci are advancing is that there are people who agree with every last penny of spending by the last Labour government and there are people who support the Tea Party agenda. There can be no middle position.
Mark Steel has based a whole stand up and journalistic career on this trick. His every column or routine runs in essence: "So the Tories say X do they? I expect they say Y and Z too!" And everyone laughs.
They laugh because this technique is a form of political group grooming. It reminds you how generous and sensible you and your allies are, and how cruel and stupid your opponents are.
He has another idea for the series. "We have to cast someone who is utterly thrilled to be in power, amazed to find themselves in government, but who has death in their eyes when it comes to enforcing the cuts." This sounds as though he's – please God, make it so – poised to make Nick Clegg the butt of his next satirical series.Again we see that, interesting though Iannucci is, Jeffries thinks that it his own opinions that Guardian readers will most want to hear.
British politics is a lot like the class system. You're supposed to know your place, and if you are a Liberal Democrat that place isn't meant to be breakfasting with the prime minister at Chequers. He's the first liberal leader for generations to mistake democracy for an invitation to help run the country. He's broken the code. He's slept with the wrong sort. He's even married them. And now he's being hated for it.He later added:
This mindset does not judge the coalition for its actions but condemns the fact that it exists. The fury – far beyond the scale of anything the Lib Dems expected – is rooted in a hostility to pluralism that regards Conservatism as something approaching an evil, and any Lib Dem association with it an unnatural compromise. Presumably, the only acceptable outcome would be ceaseless Labour rule.Exactly so. And it is this hostility to pluralism that leads intelligent people like Jeffries to take refuge in such absurd simplicities. You are either with him and vote Labour or you are against him and support the Tea Party.
It comprised first a block of four houses, which he put up "in Southgate Street, near the Water-house pump ... on the spot where he was born"; and behind, partly screened by this block, the Consanguinitarium. This was a charitable foundation for the benefit of his relatives. It was a battlemented stone building, with Gothic windows, containing five small houses.Life at the Consanguinitarium does not sound a barrel of laughs. As Simmons goes on to record, the inhabitants were hedged around with a remarkable list of regulations.
In 1878 a new Consanguinitarium, designed by his great-great-nephew Robert Johnson Goodacre (1826-1904) was built in Earl Howe Street; this building was sold some years ago, but the charity is still extant.This removal and rebuilding is recorded by a plaque at Earl Howe Street.
"I believe it is ideally suited for a regional airport.However, Lord Bonkers' current-day successor is not keen. Alan Duncan, MP for Rutland and Melton, says:
"It has all the ancillary services needed and can handle aircraft as large as a Boeing 757 and a Galaxy transporter.
"It is close to the A1, would service a local need, and could boost tourism. It has great links to London."
"It is a totally inappropriate site for a regional airport.
"The road links are inadequate."
"We are going to spend 5% more of national income on the state at the end of this process that Tony Blair and Gordon [Brown] were in 1997. We are going to employ 200,000 more people in the public sector at the end of this process. I think it is a cavalier misrepresentation to claim somehow it is a scorched earth policy."This latter point is an important one and a measure of how public spending ran out of control in the last few years of Labour government.
An East Sussex vicar who is believed to have abused a former altar boy was allowed to serve at a church despite being convicted of possessing a gun.
Strange meeting with David Cameron during the Tory conference this week. I was at the Spectator party with Steve Bell, who, as you cannot have failed to notice, always draws the prime minister with a condom over his head. They have discussed this before, at a chance meeting during the election campaign, when Steve explained that it was because his skin appeared remarkably smooth and even taut, so it looked as if his head was encased in tight rubber.In a Liberal Democrat News House Points column from October 2005 I said of Cameron:
His complexion is so unblemished that, like Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings films, he appears to have had his face covered with a thin layer of plastic film.You read it here first.
AJ sounding a bit like Frankie Howerd - "Deficit? Oo-err missus" etc - but, amazingly, it's working!I am not convinced it did work, and it certainly won't do in the long run. Johnson is endearing, but he is no one's finance director. He is the boozy regional sales manager who is not always too careful with the paperwork.
The Liberal Democrat History Group has published a revised edition of its Liberal Leaders: Leaders of the Liberal Party from 1828 to 1899. Mark Pack presents his revised biography of Viscount Melbourne.one of Leftwich's colleagues, electronics lecturer Ken Todd, monitored the maths performance of first-year electronics students between 1989 and 2004, and found that an A-grade achiever in 2004 would have been down towards the bottom of the class 15 years earlier.
No wonder that York, like many other UK universities, now runs remedial classes in basic skills for students who know their stuff on their specialist subject, but don't make the basic grade for numeracy and literacy.
"One thing you notice about essays these days is that many students simply haven't got the fundamental writing skills that almost all had in your day," says Leftwich.Every year when record A level results are announced, Liberal Democrat bloggers ridicule anyone who suggests this may be because examinations have got easier rather. But in the face of such evidence that looks the most convincing explanation. Particularly as York remains one of the most sought after universities.
the ad is a spirited homage to Wilson, Keppel and Betty, an inter-war variety act featuring Jack Wilson and Joe Keppel, along with nearly a dozen different "Bettys" – who were criticised by Goebbels, who thought their bare legs "bad for the morals of the Nazi youth". They retired from the stage as late as 1963. All of which confirms my long-held belief that, even now in the hi-tech 21st century, most of the roots of British entertainment curl up from the old-style variety hall.So the next time the English Defence League turns up in Market Harborough we should face them like this...
"Everybody in politics wants to be in the front line ... Everybody wants to have their hands on the levers. I don't think I'm exceptional in that regard politically. Everybody wants to be in the front line."That quotation comes from an interview with John Pienaar to be broadcast at 7 p.m. this evening on BBC 5 Live.
Nick Clegg has wrung from the Treasury "additional" funds to pay for his idea of a fairness premium that would see extra support allocated to poorer pupils. The scheme will cost £7bn during the course of this parliament.
At a speech today in Chesterfield, the deputy prime minister was coy about the money, saying this could be shown only next Wednesday in the comprehensive spending review. But officials say Clegg decided late yesterday to go early with an announcement, a decision which had the support of David Cameron and George Osborne but surprised senior and middle ranking Treasury officials.
Today Clegg repeatedly described the funds for his fairness premium as "additional" – making clear he wants the money to come mostly from outside the education department rather than merely outside the schools budget by cutting "non-essential" education projects such as youth clubs and after-school activities, as had been suggested.
A senior No 10 aide said: "The money for this will come from outside the education budget. We're not just rearranging furniture – this is real new money from elsewhere in Whitehall."This is very good news and I wish the Liberal Democrat blogosphere had been as exercised about it as it has been about the question of fees for students.
The legislation would:But I was more struck by the comments of the Conservative MP for Finchley & Golders Green, Mike Freer:
- Require people issued with penalty charge notices - for example over littering or parking - to provide their name and address to council officers
- Allow councils to recover the cost of street cleaning from polluting traders
- Require fast food sellers to display their hygiene rating and allow councils to crack down on unlicensed car dealers.
"Many of us in this house would like to turn back the clock to a gentler age, but sadly we do live in an irresponsible society where many individuals cause problems for residents.
"Many of us would prefer a reduction in regulation and a lessening of the intrusive nature of government - both national and local.
"However, we do have a responsibility to address the real issues facing Londoners."Well, if you want "a lessening of the intrusive nature of government" then why not vote for it and oppose this bill?
The depressing manner in which Uni as a gateway to mega-bucks jobs and economic stability has been accepted without question is perhaps the more vital question. When did education for the good of the mind become unfashionable? It is this question which has been forgotten by almost everyone involved in the debate.I suspect that a few universities will close in the coming years and I will not mourn them. But it is clear that most will stay open and that the current numbers of students will more or less be maintained.
Isn't it bonkers to wrap up the cost of university research with the job of teaching 19-year-olds? Shouldn't the funding be divided? Most students know a good researcher isn't necessarily a good teacher. The top-notch universities have to be pushed to focus on other ways of paying for research – including business links, sponsorship and alumni funds.All of which suggests that there is more to Greg Mulholland's call for a wider review of higher education than a wish to dodge the fees question.
