The 1931 floods and the history of Winchelsea Beach

This is an interesting little video. Winchelsea Beach, where we had a family caravan holiday when I was seven, is a small resort that has developed on land that was reclaimed as the sea retreated.

Winchelsea, which was once a major port, now finds itself a couple of miles inland, but the sea used to lap at the foot of the cliffs on which it stands. It is Winchelsea Beach that stands by the sea and is at risk from its moods.

I suspect these floods in 1931 inspired the plot of Malcolm Saville's third Lone Pine story, The Gay Dolphin Adventure, which was published in 1945.

You will see at least one old railway carriage in the video, which makes me think that Winchelsea Beach may have begun less as a holiday resort than as plotlands of the sort which Jonathan Meades led me to at Bewdley.

A post on English Buildings suggests I was right.

Remember Calder Womble, Remember Calder Womble

I have learnt from my addiction to the livestream of the proceedings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry that there is a transatlantic law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson.

Indeed, two of its partners are due to give evidence to the inquiry in June - I believe the firm was retained by the Post Office for a time. (No doubt someone will be on hand to whisper "Remember you're a Womble" in their ear before they take the stand.)

Naturally, I was curious about a lawyer called Womble, and the Womble Bond Dickinson site does give some of the family history in a 2016 obituary for William F. Womble, Sr. - or Bill Womble, Sr. if you knew him well.

Bill's father, and the first of the lawyer Wombles, was B.S. Womble. That's Bunyan Snipes Womble.

And Bunyan Womble had a brother, also a lawyer, called Calder.

I shall not forget Calder Womble.

Incidentally, if you follow the Womble family back through American genealogy sites, and it's surprisingly easy to do so, it seems their name was originally Wombwell.

Hooked on the livestream from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Imagine a cross between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the interview episode of The Apprentice. That's what you get from the hearings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

The inquiry's website carries a livestream during the day and also has a complete archive of recordings of all the hearings to date. It's well worth exploring. I won't pick out any names, but I doubt you'll come away impressed with the quality of Post Office personnel at any grade.

To whet your appetite, I've chosen part of this afternoon's evidence from Angela van den Bogerd, former People Services Director at Post Office Ltd and Programme Director for the Branch Support Programme.

Asking the questions is the impressive Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry,

Disgraced MPs should resign from the Commons not their party

Embed from Getty Images

Mark Menzies has resigned from the Conservative Party but is to remain as a member of the House of Commons until the general election.

This is what generally happens when an MP gets into hot water, but it has long seemed to me that it gets things the wrong way round.

It's being a member of the Commons that requires a degree of probity, not belonging to a political party. I suppose if your behaviour while a party member is bad enough you will be slung out in disgust or from fear you will become a liability, but all parties have members they would not dream of putting up as Westminster candidates.

Menzies has denied the allegations against him, but he still strikes you as an unhappy bunny. I suspect he's going to need his friends in the coming weeks, whatever action the authorities decide to take.

And if he's anything like most politicos, many of his friendships and much of his social life will have been found through his party. Now he has resigned from the Conservative Party, he is much less likely to meet those friends.

I suppose I'm saying political parties have a duty of care towards candidates who get elected, and that duty becomes more important when those successful candidates run into personal trouble.

Mason Crane, England's forgotten man, on how to encourage spin bowling in the County Championship

It's a podcast with young men, so there's lots of top bantz, but in between Mason Crane - England, Hampshire, Sussex and now Glamorgan - has some interesting things to say about how we can encourage spin bowling in the County Championship.

GUEST POST In old age a shared past is rich and comforting

The Secret Support Worker discusses what older people in care homes need to thrive - and what they are given.

Well, gentle reader, I did it. I walked away from the most amazing and most magical (and most badly paid) of jobs.

I don’t really know how it happened, but for the last few months I have been in a different world, working in a care home remembering the Britain of the 1940s to the 1970s with a group of my most elderly fellow citizens. 

It was a bit like being Dominic Sandbrook but without the podcast and the Daily Mail rants. We walked back to happiness, we had never had it so good, we were so cheerful it kept us going and, most of all, we laughed in the face of dementia and we cocked a snook at the grim reaper.

The home is kind and warm, but with me gone it loses its last member of staff with any British heritage of any kind. It loses the Beatles, the rationing, the 1966 World Cup and the nostalgia which is a vital anchor for those with dementia.

If you have Alzheimer’s the short term is hard, but a shared past becomes ever more rich and comforting.

The retro noticeboard featuring the Grand National, D-Day, homemade lavender bags and silly snaps has been replaced with corporate photographic prints and a cheesy hotel lounge vibe. 

On the wall behind some of the frailest residents, the new slogan reads: It's a Good Day to be Happy.

Homes Under the Hammer flickers on to the omnipresent telly as I leave. What are they are all going to do all day now? 

The Secret Support Worker, a Liberal Democrat member, was paid £11 an hour and had a budget per activity session per resident of 3p. The home has an annual turnover of a million pounds and the proprietor a flash car with personalised number plates.

Boy, 9, from Derbyshire, wins European gull screeching championship

Congratulations to Chesterfield's Cooper Wallace and also to the Guardian, which wins my Headline of the Day Award.

Thanks to both for giving me an excuse to post a photo of one of the large and healthy gulls I met in Hastings last week. Clearly, scavenging is the way to go.

Another hold up with the Lib Dem selection in Sutton and Cheam

There's news of a further hold up in the attempt to find a Liberal Democrat candidate for the eminently winnable seat of Sutton and Cheam.

Early yesterday Michael Crick tweeted:

🟠 SUTTON & CHEAM: one source says the hustings have been postponed because two comp
laints were received, and the source suggests John Sweeney and Trish Fivey may now have been added to the shortlist. Can anyone confirm or deny any or all of this? https://t.co/CVJdQbVwZK

— @Tomorrow'sMPs (@tomorrowsmps) April 21, 2024

According to Inside Croydon, the original shortlist for the meeting had only two names on it: former London mayoral candidate Luisa Porritt and Sutton councillor Luke Taylor.

Radical Bulletin in the latest Liberator (issue 422) reported after the original call for applicants was issued:

This presumably means that Sutton & Cheam’s former prospective parliamentary candidate David Campanale has finally been ousted from that role after an interminable series of appeals that began last summer when the constituency first sought to remove him.

Although Campanale was originally a Liberal Democrat he left to join the highly socially conservative Christian People’s Alliance and rose to be its leader and author of its 2010 general election manifesto. Some of this was unexceptionable but it also said: “A new hierarchy of rights has put the needs of sexual minorities above religious freedom” and inveighed against “sex in view of families enjoying parks and open spaces” (Liberator 416).

He stood as a Lib Dem candidate in Spelthorne in 2019 - though few outside the area appear to have noticed - but Sutton & Cheam is a rather more serious proposition as the party held it from 1997 to 2015.

Some Sutton members felt they should have been better acquainted with Campanale's past by the party before the original selection meeting and were unimpressed to be told they should have looked on Google.

The current Conservative member for Sutton and Cheam, Paul Scully will not stand at the coming general election. In 2019 he had a majority of 8351.

As Liberator says, the seat was held for the Lib Dems, in the person of Paul Burstow, between 1997 and 2015.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I enjoy publishing guest posts on Liberal England. So drop me a line if you've got an idea for something you could write for this blog.

As you can see from the list below, I accept posts on subjects far beyond the Liberal Democrats and British politics.

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 please get in touch first.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• Councillor defections: emergency update - Augustus Carp
• Look out for lobbying in the Listed Election - Augustus Carp
• Councillor defections: The scores on the doors at the end of 2023 - Augustus Carp
• Snailbeach and the music of abandonment - Eric Loveland Heath
• Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair - Alex Grant
• Jon Pertwee's Doctor tackled many of the problems we face today - Peter Chambers
• Martyn’s Law and its unintended ecclesiastical consequences - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems approach the general election in a far weaker position than in 1997 - Anselm Anon
• A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit - Peter Chambers
• No smoke without political economy - Anselm Anon

The last days of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station

Jillian Ambrose for the Guardian about the plans to close Britain's last coal-fired power station, Ratrcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire:

When Ratcliffe was opened in 1968 by the Central Electricity Generating Board, the very first series of Dad’s Army was about to be broadcast, the Beatles were topping the charts and coal power was in its heyday.

Coal-fired stations mushroomed through Britain’s mining heartlands in the late 1960s and 1970s to provide baseload power for Britain’s electricity network. The 2,000-mega­watt Ratcliffe broke up the skyline for drivers on the new M1 motorway, and provided power to heat and light 2m homes.

It was built in an area rich in coal, where collieries employing tens of thousands of miners dotted the landscape. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe was burning 65% of south Nottinghamshire’s coal output.

The new power stations were built at speed. At the time, their scale and engineering complexity were unprecedented, and their impact on the climate unforeseen.

When Ratcliffe generates its last megawatts this year, it will represent the final dismantling of Britain’s coal heritage and end almost 150 years of coal-powered economic growth.

“It’s the end of the first Industrial Revolution, really,” says engineering manager Nigel Bates. He first stepped on to the Ratcliffe site more than 40 years ago, as a 16-year-old mechanical apprentice with a handful of O-levels. “Coal started it all, and soon we’re going to end it,” he says.

I'll miss the giant cooling towers that became an important part of the landscape of postwar Britain. They were at their most dominant in the Trent Valley.

My photo shows the towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar from the place where the Erewash Canal joins the River Trent.

Rhydian's grandfather saved the life of the Glamorgan cricketer Roger Davis

Embed from Getty Images

You'll love this Trivial Fact of the Day, particularly if you remember county cricket from more than 50 years ago and TV talent shows from the early years of this century.

Here's Cricinfo:

Roger Davis was the fielder who nearly caught Garry Sobers during Glamorgan`s Championship match with Nottinghmashire at Swansea in 1968 when the great West Indian all-rounder became the first man in cricket history to hit six sixes in an over in first-class cricket. Davis was fielding on the long-off boundary and off the fifth ball of Malcolm Nash`s historic over, Davis caught one of Sobers` mighty blows, but in so doing, he fell over the boundary and the umpires signalled six.

Three years later, another blow almost ended Davis` life, as for a few awful moments during Glamorgan`s Championship match with Warwickshire at Cardiff in 1971, it looked as if Davis would not recover from being hit on the side of his head whilst fielding at short-leg. After being struck, Davis collapsed, went into convulsions and had to be given the kiss of life by a doctor who ran onto the ground from the member`s enclosure. Thankfully, this helped to save Davis` life and after a brief spell in hospital, he fully recovered, and by the following season, Davis had regained his place in the Glamorgan side.

And who was the doctor who saved Roger Davis's life?

An article on Wales Online reveals that it was a Dr Colin Lewis: "the grandfather of Welsh opera star Rhydian Roberts."

That's right: Rhydian off of X Factor!

I suspect my blog has peaked with this, but if you enjoyed the post then you will probably also like:

• Patrick Cargill was Robin Jackman's uncle.

h/t @allanholloway on Twitter.

The Joy of Six 1223

"In their very different ways, these stories centre on the same key ideas: a rejection of any idea of natural places and spaces being off limits, and the joyous democracy of gathering together to experience something more nourishing than concrete and tarmac." John Harris senses the spread of a new, radical British politics rooted in nature.

Brian Klaas argues that we need objectivity, not 'balance', from the media: "If someone says the sky is green and another person says it’s blue, you shouldn’t have a blue/green panel on the Sunday shows. But when it comes to election denialism, the media is accused of 'left-wing bias' if it doesn’t give equal platforms to authoritarian election deniers who live in a fantasy world and parrot Trumpian lies. That’s ridiculous."

In one of his last interviews, the philosopher Daniel Dennett talked to Nigel Warburton about some of the books that had influenced him most.

Eleanor Janega finds that we are more prudish than medieval people were.

Georgy Jamieson celebrates the career of a much loved performer: "Leslie Phillips was much more than his screen image. He was a household name thanks to the Carry On and Doctor films, but also a producer, director and in later years a fine character actor doing some very heavy-weight and interesting work."

"There’s no more Pinteresque character in Pinter than Harold Pinter on the cricket pitch. His dreams have not come true - his hero: Len Hutton; his highest score: 39 - but he dreams them nonetheless, while honing a curt line in dialogue for his fellow close fielders." Richard Beard on the playwright and cricket.

Two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors

I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.

It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.

Since you ask, here are the books I studied:

O level

• The Merchant of Venice
• An anthology of 20th-century British poets
• Lord of the Flies

You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.

A level

• Hamlet
  
• The Tempest
• Dr Faustus
• Wordsworth's Prelude (Book 1)
• John Donne
• T.S. Eliot (Selected Poems)
• The Rainbow
• The Grapes of Wrath

I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.

When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.

And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.

So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.

You can download the full report from the campaign's website.

Capitalism vs the free market

William Davies reviewed The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet by Brett Christophers in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.

The opening of his review is worth reading in its own right:

The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. 

Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other.

In Braudel’s analogy, long phases of economic history are layered one on top of another like the storeys of a house. At the bottom is ‘material life’, an opaque world of basic consumption, production and reproduction. 

Above this sits ‘economic life’, the world of markets, in which people encounter one another as equals in relations of exchange, but also as potential competitors. Markets are characterised by transparency: prices are public, and all relevant activity is visible to everyone. And because of competition, profits are minimal, little more than a ‘wage’ for the seller. 

Sitting on top of ‘economic life’ is ‘capitalism’. This, as Braudel sees it, is the zone of the ‘antimarket’: a world of opacity, monopoly, concentration of power and wealth, and the kinds of exceptional profit that can be achieved only by escaping the norms of ‘economic life’. 

Market traders engage with one another at a designated time and place, abiding by shared rules (think of a town square on market day); capitalists exploit their unrivalled control over time and space in order to impose their rules on everyone else (think of Wall Street). 

Buyers and sellers on eBay are participating in a market; eBay Inc. is participating in capitalism. Capitalism, in Braudel’s words, is ‘where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates’.

The Raincoats: Fairytale in the Supermarket

Maddy Costa wrote about the Raincoats in the Guardian back in 2009:

When Gina Birch and Ana da Silva decided to start a band in the late 1970s, they were art students who "knew nothing" about music. "Ana knew a couple of chords," says Birch, "and I could sing along with a few hymns and rock'n'roll tunes." 

But this was the do-it-yourself punk era, and the pair felt so inspired by their nights out at notorious London clubs like the Roxy (and by another female-fronted band, the anarchic Slits) that they forged ahead as the Raincoats. Only later did they realise that most punk musicians were more proficient than they let on.

But the Raincoats had their admirers. In 1992, Kurt Cobain went into the Rough Trade Shop in Talbot Road, London in search of a new copy of their first LP. He was sent round the corner to see da Silva at her cousin's antique shop. 

Cobain wrote about this meeting in the liner notes of Nirvana's Incesticide album. In late 1993, Rough Trade and DGC Records reissued the Raincoats' three studio albums, with liner notes by Cobain and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon.

Others were less complimentary. Danny Baker wrote of an early Raincoats appearance in the NME that they were so bad that "every time a waiter drops a tray, we'd all get up and dance".

Me? I love the home-made, anyone-can-do-it aesthetic of punk. You found it earlier in skiffle and later in the glory days of blogging. But just as they have music, the big corporations have taken over the internet, and the world has grown grey from their breath.

The Malcolm Saville Society plaque at the Hope Anchor Hotel, Rye

"The Gay Dolphin is almost as old as Rye itself. I am not sure how old it is, but there is no doubt that it was much used by smugglers and I am now fairly confident that it contains some secret which I have never discovered."

It's little wonder that readers of Malcolm Saville's The Gay Dolphin Adventure* think the Mermaid in Rye was the model for the Gay Dolphin.

And the Mermaid surely was the model for its building. But if you read the book carefully you will find the Gay Dolphin occupied a different position in Rye - one with a view across the river to Winchelsea and Romney Marsh.

That position, in real life, is occupied by the Hope Anchor Hotel, which is why you will find this Malcolm Saville Society plaque there.

* No sniggering please. Enid Blyton once published a book called Mr Pink-Whistle Interferes.

Tories refuse to drop council candidate who called Volodymyr Zelenskyy an "enemy of the people"

New on the Mirror website:

A Tory election candidate branded Volodymyr Zelensky an "enemy of the people" as he suggested we should stop supporting Ukraine.

Ian Glass, who is standing to represent the party on Hartlepool Borough Council, dismissed the war hero as a “puppet”. ...

Mr Glass, a personal trainer, posted his criticism of Mr Zelensky when the Ukrainian President visited the UK in February last year. After Mr Sunak tweeted a photo of the two leaders together, he wrote: "The puppet installed president (after coup) meeting an unelected PM, both enemies of the people."

In another post in January this year, he suggested that Vladimir Putin's regime isn't as bad as it's presented and hit out at the sums the Government has pledged to help Ukraine defend itself. He wrote: "It's over with Sunak and Crew, people will not vote for Cons, they sick of the boats, money going to Ukraine and this BS that Russia wants to rule the world."

The Mirror says the Conservatives have not responded to requests for a comment on Mr Glass and his opinions, but the local party has continued to promote him as a candidate.

I'm blogging about this because I suspect Mr Glass is not so untypical of today's Tory activist. As I said after a fake Tory campaign on speed limits in Wales was exposed earlier this year:

It does confirm my impression that the average Tory activist is now less likely to be a pillar of the local business community than a keyboard warrior or social media troll.

If these new-look Tories like fascism so much, they should go and live in Moscow and see how much they like it then.

Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex

I came back from Hastings via Ashford and the HS2 line to St Pancras. I noticed Doleham because it was the only station between Hastings and Ashford that we didn't call at, so I decided it was time to post this video again.

Until 2005 Doleham enjoyed an hourly service in each direction. But then, until 1959 there was an even more remote station north of Doleham called Snailham Halt.

And things could be worse. I first used the Ashford to Hastings line on the way to a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967, and I clearly remember that there were people collecting signatures against the closure of the whole line.

Lionel King's Biographical Directory of Parliamentary Candidates

Simon McGrath writes on Liberal Democrat Voice:

Following a reference in the Journal of Lib Dem History I recently came across the most extraordinary labour of love, a biographical directory  of   people who have been  Liberal, SDP and Lib Dem parliamentary candidates from 1945-2019.

This is a 20 year piece  of work by Lionel King who I find from the directory is 87, fought Kidderminster in 1964, Sutton Coldfield in 1970, and Walsall South 1987, is  former chair of Birmingham University Liberal Society, worked as a teacher and then TV/Media lecturer in FE and held many roles in the Birmingham and West Midlands Party.

The directory is divided into 14 parts, by region  and gives a fascinating insight into the range of people attracted to become our parliamentary candidates over the years.

I came across Lionel King's directory for the West Midlands myself a few years ago and blogged about it here.

The whole directory is now online. Lionel would love to hear from people who can help him fill out the entries.

GUEST POST: No smoke without political economy

Anselm Anon argues that the Liberal Democrats are wrong to treat the tobacco debate as one simply about consumer choice.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill would "make it an offence to sell tobacco products to anyone born after 1 January 2009". It passed its first reading on 16 April, supported by the five Liberal Democrat MPs who voted, including Ed Davey. 

Yet Lib Dems online have not been unanimous. They have presented some nuanced liberal responses, taking into account concerns for personal liberty, public health, differential laws for different age cohorts and the dangers of the black market in tobacco products. 

Sensible Lib Dems have taken different positions. Some, such as Linda Chambers and Ed Davey, support the bill. Others, including Caron Lindsay and Liberal England’s own Jonathan Calder, have expressed reservations. 

This discussion within the party has centred on consumer choice: 'Should people have the freedom to smoke?' But I wonder if this is a sufficient way for liberals frame the question of tobacco policy. 

This isn’t just a case of regulating consumption, but also of regulating production and distribution. In other words, ‘Should people have the freedom to produce and distribute tobacco?’ or even 'Should people be free from manipulation by the tobacco industry?' 

The latter question has in part been answered by controls on tobacco advertising, in the UK and worldwide. But the chemical effects of addiction remain, and some social cachet too. And the tobacco industry spends a great deal on political lobbying. 

In these terms, the question is less one of consumer choice, and more one of how much freedom we should allow wealthy companies to pursue a socially harmful activity. Tobacco is big business, and the tobacco industry has a poor record, not only on public health, but also on tax avoidance and the environment. The profits of tobacco are in part reinvested in lobbying legislators, in the UK and internationally.

I suggest that Lib Dem discussions of this topic are too focused on consumers, and not enough on considering the political economy of tobacco in the round. 

It is welcome that the Bill undermines the tobacco industry. This is in sympathy with current party policy, which seeks "a new levy on tobacco companies to contribute to the costs of healthcare and smoking cessation services". 

But I’d like to see the Lib Dems address the issue more systematically. It is hard to see a justification for tobacco companies to exist in their current forms. If tobacco is to be produced and distributed, then this should be done by entities which are not devoted to maximising returns for shareholders and payments to directors. 

Rather, they should be in some sense state or social enterprises, driven not by financial imperatives, but by the need to wind down tobacco usage over the years. Within the UK this, of course, means wholesale distribution, rather than production.

The exact form that this would take isn’t something I’ll go into now, but the Lib Dems ideas for water companies are interesting in this context. In short, a more thoroughly liberal approach to tobacco would include the political economy of tobacco, beyond consumer choice.

Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.

Malcolm Saville and Asa Briggs were neighbours in Winchelsea

I've just got back from three days in Hastings. While I was there I made the pilgrimage to Winchelsea and Malcolm Saville's house there.

I went to look for the blue ceramic plaque that the Malcolm Saville Society installed there. I think I was at the ceremony back in the Nineties, but it still took me a while to find the right house.

And the house next door now has a plaque too. It's in honour of the historian Asa Briggs, who lived there.

Were Saville and Briggs neighbours for a time? It seems they were.

This was where Malcolm Saville lived for some years before his death in 1982 - his office was on the second floor.

And the particulars for Brigg's house on an estate agent's site say that he lived there until 1981. 

The Joy of Six 1222

"What they got was a journalist with access to the upper reaches of the Government, with a determination to get on air and tell everyone the whispers that she had heard from ministers, advisors and officials – before Sky or ITN. What the BBC needed was someone who could take a step back, away from the scrum, and tell audiences when they were being lied to." Laura Kuenssberg has been a catastrophic failure as the BBC's political editor, argues Patrick Howse.

Jonn Elledge asks if the Tories are deliberately posting terrible social media: "It's worth noting, though, that the most damning comment I heard from anyone while reporting this piece came from a Tory strategist: 'The conspiracy theory I’ve always liked the most is the one that presumes that behind something inexplicably dumb there must be some grand plan or deep rooted super secret scheme designed in these smokey backrooms of government. It’s terrifically flattering,' they explained. 'My god, I wish it were true. I mean, have you met us? We really are just this shit.'"

Andrew Kersley meets the parents of truant children hit by the single justice procedure: "Imagine receiving a letter through the post, informing you that you’re about to be prosecuted for a crime you did not commit. Your defence and plea of not guilty won’t be considered. Instead, you will be found guilty in a private ruling, with only a single judge present in the room. There’s no prosecution, no defendant, no press, and no witnesses. And after all that, you will be left with a criminal record that could cost you your job."

"In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe." Peter West on the neglected British philosopher Susan Stebbing.

Jessica Kiang celebrates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was released 50 years ago.

"The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), an undergraduate at Christ Church in the mid 1920s, would bring visitors here to show them what he considered to be the embodiment of 'The Waste Land' described in TS Eliot's poem of the same name, of which he was a great admirer." Local History in South Oxford takes us to St Ebbe's Gasworks.

Oxford to Market Harborough by water in 1950

Another transport video that I've posted before and is overdue a repeat.

This colour film shows a journey from Oxford to the National Festival and Rally of Boats held at Market Harborough held at 1950. 

Enjoy footage of the old railway swing bridge over the canal at Oxford and then the canal through city, with the campanile of St Barnabas easily recognisable. 

Then it is on to some some broad locks that must be on the Grand Union somewhere near Braunston. This part of the film is then repeated, but no one will mind, I am sure.

After that it is on to Watford locks, Foxton locks and the canal basin here in Market Harborough.

Forget abandoned railways: this is an abandoned Sheffield road

Another outing with Trekking Exploration - find out how to support this channel.

Dominic Guard on The Go-Between

Another video that is worth another posting.

The Go-Between was filmed in 1971 by Joseph Losey. In this video, Dominic Guard, who played Leo, talks about the experience of making the film.

It's required listening for anyone who admires the film or the novel. And, as Guard grew up to be a child psychotherapist, it has things to say about the issues they raise.

The last days of Melton Mowbray North

I posted this video on Liberal England a decade ago: it's so good I should repost it every six months.

Melton Mowbray North was the town's station on the Great Northern and London and North Western Joint line. From it you could catch a direct train to Market Harborough and on to Northampton. 

The Joint line carried lots of freight, notably iron ore destined for the steel plants of South Wales.

Regular passenger services were withdrawn 1953 - I once quoted John Baldock MP mourning them in the Commons - though summer specials from Leicester Belgrave Road to the East Coast resorts survived until 1962.

This film, YouTube says, features Mr Lilley, the last signalman, and his grandson Nigel. It was shot by Nigel's father, and he must have done so shortly before goods facilities were withdrawn in 1964.

There's a wonderful picture on Flickr of the decaying station taken in 1966.

The Joy of Six 1221

Matthew Pennell still says no to ID cards (and so do I): "I’ve always noticed that those who advocate for ID cards are exclusively white British males living in Britain who in pretty much every respect are in the cultural mainstream, nothing would mark them out as being part of any social group on the fringe of society. Such people would not feel threatened being approached by a police officer or would never have to talk to other arms of the state, such as a housing officer, to avail themselves of certain public services." 

Many of us have the mistaken idea that previous experience of poverty makes it easier for someone to take further hard knocks, argues Nathan Cheek.

Remember Amazon's 'just walk out' grocery stores? As James Bridle explains, they were not what they seemed: "An employee who worked on the technology said that actual humans - albeit distant and invisible ones, based in India - reviewed about 70 per cent of sales made in the 'cashier-less' shops as of mid-2022."

Charlie Clinton on the campaign to defend small music venues.

Anne Billson presents six films from the 1980s that should be better known: "Mike Hodges’s offbeat gothic thriller isn’t so much a film that has fallen into obscurity as a a film that never got a decent shot in the first place." 

"The Trip stands in Brewhouse Yard which was part of Nottingham Castle until the 17th century when the present building and caves were created. The earliest reference to its use as a pub, called the Pilgrim, comes from 1751. By 1799 the name had been changed to the Trip. The earliest mention of the Trip as the oldest pub in England comes from around 1910 when the landlord drummed up trade with new signage." James Wright goes in search on the oldest pub in England - it's clearly not the one shown here.

Ruby Turner, Steve Winwood and the Jools Holland Big Band: Something's Wrong With My Baby

This is from a hootenanny long ago.

The Ronnie Scott's site tells us about Ruby Turner:

Ruby Turner began a successful run as a solo artist in the late 1980s, landing a chart-topping hit with "It's Gonna Be Alright," and releasing numerous respected albums and singles over the coming years that traversed soul, gospel, and pop. She became a frequent collaborator with Jools Holland and performed with an array of high-profile stars from Mick Jagger to Steve Winwood.

Her debut album, Woman Hold Up Half the Sky (1986), was a critical and commercial success, and she went on to release another 13 albums over the course of the next three decades, including 1989's Paradise, which peaked at number 39 on the Billboard R&B chart. She also charted eight singles throughout the '80s and '90s, the most successful of which was "I'd Rather Go Blind," which made it to number 27 in England in 1987.

On 4 June 2012 Ruby performed 'You Are So Beautiful' with Jools Holland at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace in London. In autumn 2012 Ruby was a guest judge on BBC 'The Choir: Sing While You Work with choirmaster Gareth Malone' and in 2013 Ruby was a guest judge on BBC 'Songs of praise gospel choirs competition.  In June 2016 Ruby was awarded an MBE.

Ruby Turner was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and in 1967, at the age of nine, moved with her family to Handsworth in Birmingham. She has also enjoyed a substantial acting career.

Steve Winwood may be familiar to regular readers of this blog.

A day at the cricket: Leicestershire vs Sussex

On Friday I went to see the first day of Leicestershire vs Sussexc in Division 2 of cricket's County Championship.

I had planned it as a sort of existential protest against starting the cricket Championship so early to make room for The Hundred in midsummer. I expected to be wrapped in woollens and sipping a thermos of Bovril. As it turned out, the forecast was for a dry and sunny day.

The weather didn't quite live up to that - the morning was lovely, but it clouded over after lunch and eventually the floodlights came on - yet I've been much colder at cricket matches later in the year than this.

And I met my old council colleague Mark Cox on the gate. It turned out that, just as it was when I was 13, it you're not a member you have to walk down a dismal alley and pay at the other end of the ground.

I don't begrudge county members their privileges: they may be the only people who resist the England and Wales Cricket Board's plans to get rid of half the first-class counties, Leicestershire and Sussex included.

Leicestershire won the toss and batted, with their opener Rishi Patel making a stylish 87. After he was caught behind for 87 early in the afternoon, they found scoring much harder. Sussex did well to keep up their intensity, because the pitch didn't appear to be doing very much. The ended with the game evenly poised: Leicestershire were 326/8, with the stubborn Liam Trevaskis not out on 82.

I went to the cricket here twice in 1973. I saw the a day each of Leicestershire vs Derbyshire and Leicestershire vs Middlesex.

To be honest I don't remember the Derbyshire game at all, beyond speculating with the friend I went with about whether Fred Trueman, who had turned out in the Sunday league for Derbyshire, might be playing, He wasn't.

I must have seen the second day of the Middlesex game because I remember seeing Mike Smith - M.J. Smith- score a century before lunch. It was also one of John Emburey's first games for the county. Despite Smith's feat, Leicestershire went on to win the match comfortably. 

In 1973 Leicestershire were as strong as any county, and their attack was dominated by spin. In the Derbyshire game they fielded two England off spinners - Ray Illingworth and Jack Birkenshaw - and two left-arm spinners - John Steele and Chris Balderstone.

Sussex used only one spinner: Jack Carson from County Armagh.

Robb Heady: History's unluckiest hijacker

Embed from Getty Images

When it comes to American mysteries, second only to 'who shot JFK?'* comes "Did D.B. Cooper get away with it?"

In November 1971, during the 'golden age of hijacking', D.B. Cooper** hijacked an internal US flight and demanded $300,000 and two parachutes. He got them, leapt from the plane at altitude and was never seen again.

Nine years later, some of the money he had been given was found buried in the banks of the Columbia River in Washington State.  This may suggest that the rest of the money and Cooper's body lie somewhere nearby, but there are good reasons why the mystery refuses to die.

The first is the Cooper demeanour throughout the hijack. He remained perfectly cool and in command, suggesting to many that he had a background in special forces. For them, even the knowledge that it was possible to jump from the rear steps of a Boeing 727 in flight suggests he had been involved in operations in Vietnam.

The second is that Cooper inspired a dozen copycat hijackings, and the perpetrator of everyone survived the parachute jump.

One of the copycats was Robb Heady:

On June 2, 1972, Robb Heady, a 22-year-old former Army paratrooper and Vietnam War veteran, hijacked United Airlines Flight 239 from Reno to San Francisco. Carrying his own parachute and using a .357 revolver, he demanded $200,000 in ransom money. Because the hijacking occurred at night while banks were closed, FBI agents were forced to secure the ransom money from two local casinos in Reno. 

Once he had received the ransom, Heady directed the pilots on a very specific flight path. However, the pilot intentionally altered the flight path by half a degree, causing Heady to miss his drop zone. Heady was captured the next morning. 

The money bag containing Heady's ransom was jerked from his grasp when he pulled the ripcord and was recovered by FBI agents two days later. In September 1972 Heady pled guilty to aircraft piracy and was sentenced to serve 30 years in federal prison

What that Wikipedia account omits is how Heady was recaptured. The FBI worked out from the flight path he had demanded where he had intended to land and searched the area. There they found a car parked in a remote area that was of particular interest to them, so they kept it under observation.

Sure enough, a man eventually arrived at the car, retrieved the keys from beneath a nearby rock and let himself in. The man was Robb Heady.

And what had drawn the interest of the FBI to the car? A 'Member of the U.S. Parachute Association' bumper sticker.

Which makes him history's unluckiest - or most careless - hijacker.

* If, like me, you wonder why more has not been made of Lee Harvey's time in the USSR and visit to Cuba, read the guest post by Jack White.

** The hijacker actually gave his name as Dan Cooper, but for some reason this faulty newspaper transcription stuck.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Fish and chips by Walmgate Bar

More biting satire: I find it hard to see Ed Davey holding on to the leadership after this. It's a good thing this entry marks the end of this visit to Bonkers Hall.

How strange it is that Lord Bonkers should have discovered my student haunts in York! When I went back some years ago, I found that Jimmy's Fish Bar had become Jenny's Fish & Chips. I don't know if the business is in the same family, but in my day Jimmy was a small Italian and Mrs Jimmy was a large Yorkshirewoman. We speculated that she had captured him at Anzio.

Also new was the security on the pubs' doors. When I knew them, they all had fierce landladies who everyone was a little scared of and there was no trouble.

Sunday

What a pleasure it was to be in York for our Spring Conference! Though I devoured the debates and speeches, I will admit that I made the time to visit the pubs of Fossgate and enjoy some fish and chips by Walmgate Bar. 

And a good thing I did. While I was sampling said delicacy among the daffodils, Freddie and Fiona turned up with an orange bulldozer and then set about painting a stretch of the city’s celebrated walls bright blue. 

“What are you two up to now?” I called across. “It’s a stunt for after Ed’s speech. Liberal Democrats knocking down the Blue Wall. The media will love it.” “Well the Lord Mayor and the good people of York won’t. Wash that paint off at once and then take the bulldozer back to where you hired it.” 

I cannot resist adding: “Perhaps Ed should have thought about this first?”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors
• “Ed doesn’t approve of thinking"
• The Cricklewood Crinkles and the Wolverhampton Wotsits
• The noted woman crime novelist Dame Agatha Mousetrap
• Mountains of unsold Stilton
• There were extra buns for tea

Flooded farms in England refused compensation as ‘too far’ from river

By some distance, the Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Well done everybody in showbiz North London.

The Joy of Six 1220

"People who are gender non-conforming experience stigmatisation, marginalisation, and harassment in every society. They are vulnerable, particularly during childhood and adolescence. The best way to support them, however, is not with advocacy and activism based on substandard evidence. The Cass review is an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence informed care at the heart of gender medicine." Kamran Abbasi has written a British Medical Journal editorial on the Cass review.

Charlotte Tobitt reports that newspaper editors have come together in a bid to improve Labour MP Wayne David's Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation Bill, which has reached its committee stage.

"There’s no doubt that many academics are feeling very pressured, highly anxious, and deeply insecure about their profession and its prospects. For some, suffering perhaps worse than others, a feeling of desperation, of being cornered, is setting in. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it?" Glen O'Hara on the crisis of morale among academic staff in our universities.

Jennifer Gerlach advises us not to try to resolve a conflict by texting.

Taylor Dorrell argues that it was his encounters with Britain’s labour movement that inspired Paul Robeson's socialist and anti-imperialist politics: "The American, who was treated as a second-class citizen by many of his countrymen back home, came to be summoned for a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace and was befriended by Members of Parliament. It was also in London that Robeson befriended anti-colonial leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Jawaharlal Nehru of India."

"The collected letters also hold human qualities that field notes and published books do not. They reveal humor and uncertainty and, notably, a willingness to discuss ideas with people of many walks of life." Faye Saulsbury hails the transcription and publication of more than 15,000 items of Charles Darwin's personal correspondence.

Harold Wilson's estate owes Roy Wood a fortune

It was the first record to be played on Radio One and reached number 2 in the UK singles charts, but the Move's single Flowers in the Rain didn't earn its writer Roy Wood a penny.

Because, in one of the stunts for which he was famous, the band's manager Tony Secunda issued a postcard promoting the song that showed a naked Harold Wilson, the prime minister of the day, in bed with his political secretary Marcia Williams.

Wilson sued, won his case and the High Court ordered that all royalties from the song be donated to a charity of Wilson's choice. They are still being donated today to a range of good causes chosen by the Harold Wilson Charitable Trust.

While yesterday's revelation of Wilson's affair involved another lady and took place some years after the Flowers in the Rain affair - stay with me - it still paints his character in a different light to that which must have been deployed in the High Court.

I'm not calling for the good causes to repay the money, but shouldn't the meagre royalties on Wilson's books be made over to Roy Wood until he has received his due from Flowers in the Rain?

With thanks to Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

Reform UK sorry for not knowing York candidate had died

Of course BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award, but the judges drew this paragraph in the report to my attention:

The spokesperson said: "The simple fact is that we have removed upwards of 50 candidates for complete inactivity and I know those who had been removed for disciplinary measures."

This suggests that Reform UK are not going to able to fight much of a ground war come the general election.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: There were extra buns for tea

Our prime minister always seems to come off second best when encountering children and games. His visit to the Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans was no exception.

I suspect the little inmates' facility at cards owes something to Beachcomber's Narkover.

Saturday

Did you see that picture of the prime minister shaking hands on a bet with the detestable Piers Morgan? Hardly statesmanlike behaviour, was it? You’d never have caught Mr Gladstone having a Yankee on the Berlin Conference on Africa, the Anglo Egyptian War, the Naval Estimates and the Panjdeh incident, would you? 

In truth, though, I have long been aware of a certain innocence in Sunak when it comes to gambling. When he was a newly elected MP, I invited him to visit my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans, and then made the mistake of leaving him alone with the young inmates. By the time I rescued him he had lost all his spare change at three-card brag and was about to surrender his shirt. Of course, I had to pretend to be furious, but there were extra buns for tea.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors
• “Ed doesn’t approve of thinking"
• The Cricklewood Crinkles and the Wolverhampton Wotsits
• The noted woman crime novelist Dame Agatha Mousetrap
• Mountains of unsold Stilton

Hear Asquith promote the People's Budget of 1909

I don't think I've heard Asquith's voice before. This is him speaking on the People's Budget of 1909: presumably this recording was intended for distribution as a gramophone record.

It is remarkably clear, and we even catch what sounds like a "Will this do?" at the end.

Football fan accused of role in post-match brawl at station was 'visiting Santa's Grotto'

Embed from Getty Images

The Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.

At the insistence of the judges, allow me to point out that the case continues.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Mountains of unsold Stilton

There are those who claim that Lord Bonkers has built up large stocks of Stilton to enable him to withstand a strike by the miners, but I'm sure that's not true. Lord B. does indeed like his Stilton gamey, but that is a taste that export markets have yet to acquire.

Friday

You may have noticed – if you’ve had the window wound down you can hardly have failed to – the mountains of unsold Stilton beside the Great North Road in the Far East of Rutland. 

They have accumulated because Liz Truss failed to negotiate a trade deal with Canada that would allow exports to continue after Brexit; their size is a testament to how much the brave Mounties and lusty lumberjacks once enjoyed their Stilton sandwiches. We have tried promoting them as a venue for winter sports with, if I am honest, limited success. 

I can say now that I had my doubts about La Truss from the start. It took me hours to convince her that, however hard she wished and however sparkly her wand, she would never be a real princess. The very next day, in a fit of pique, she strode to the Conference rostrum to demand the instant abolition of the Royal Family.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors
• “Ed doesn’t approve of thinking"
• The Cricklewood Crinkles and the Wolverhampton Wotsits
• The noted woman crime novelist Dame Agatha Mousetrap

Raymond Williams: The Country and the City

Because I wanted to read again what he had to say about Richard Jefferies, I ordered a secondhand copy of Raymond Williams's book The Country and the City.

It arrived the other day with no index and an introduction by Tristram Hunt. We live in barbarous times.

Williams's treatment of Jefferies is as good as I remembered and still the best I have come across. I have also rediscovered his exposure of the way that "traditional country values" recede further into the past the more you try to pin them down. His excoriation of great English country house is a pleasure yet to come.

A recent article on Williams in Dissent describes the book well:

The Country and the City, which appeared in 1973, brings Williams’s critical acuity to the idea and reality of farm and village life, holding in a single vision the literary traditions of pastoral and counter-pastoral, the political inheritance of country radicalism, the material history of grinding exploitation, and the inhabited feelings of love, grief, hope, and defeat of the often invisible rural poor who were his people. 

His critical eye spares nothing, yet the book is animated by charitable, patient attention. A landscape, he showed, was “not a kind of nature but a kind of man,” a way of living on and seeing a region and terrain. He invited his readers to see the great country houses, in so many minds the defining features of rural England (just think of Downton Abbey), as monuments to the labour that was stolen to build them—not gracious ornaments on the land, but “barbarous” in their “disproportion of scale” to the lives that surrounded them. 

Living on land, in place, fulfilled a deep human appetite, but the ordinary condition of that appetite was to be denied satisfaction—dispossessed by enclosure, uprooted by new technology and new markets. Adding insult to injury, there were always rural squires willing to appoint themselves the voices of country virtues, praising the candor and integrity of the village against London cheats. Their conceits, however, rested on “the brief and aching lives of the permanently cheated,” who worked their lands and never saw London unless they’d come as refugees.

Williams declined to see the tradition of rural radicalism as a true alternative. Too often it was just sentimental longing for an intact world that might never have existed, and in any case had no future. In writing of the sweet and good countryside that had been stolen, “a human instinct was separate from the society . . . turning protest into retrospect, until we die of time.” 

The more properly political radicalism of land reformers, critics of enclosure, and opponents of industrialization struck him as poignant and sincere (unlike the landlords’ moralizing) but trapped in its own paradoxes. People who had managed to live decent lives within a temporary order for a generation or two tried desperately to make it permanent, usually by picking and choosing bits of feudal order and bits of liberal freedom. 

Most rural radicalism was “an idealization, based on a temporary situation and a deep desire for stability,” and “served to cover and evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time.” By refusing to look clearly at their past or their present, nostalgic populists kept themselves from working toward a viable future.

The video above is of a programme based on the book that Williams made in 1979, six years after its publication. And this is his own recording of it off air, which is somehow wonderful.

GUEST POST A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit

Peter Chambers argues that Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford provides a model that explains why Leave was able to win the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George Box, statistician 

Brexitland describes political processes leading up to the Brexit referendum of 2016 and since. Unlike most Brexit books, it is not a journalistic narrative. It is based on data from social surveys and  analysis done by the authors, so is rigorous. 

They propose a compact model of the changes in our society that led to Brexit, and explain why our political class missed what was going on. 

The authors are clear what they omit. Economics, class, right/left and authoritarian/liberal are all held to be secondary to the factors that drove the shock. 

The two proposed drivers are: 

• the rise of mass higher education;
• mass immigration, leading to significant minority populations 

To many of us who are politically involved today, it is difficult to imagine Britain in 1945. Then  Britain was approximately 0 per cent minority, rather Christian and 3 per cent degree education. Most people  left school at 15 and started work right away. Degrees were for clerics, professions and the upper classes. 

The most recent census shows 20 per cent minorities (and rising), while the official Higher Education  Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) is around 50 per cent. It was 35 per cent in 2010 and 15 per cent in the 1980s. 

The compact model in Brexitland is there are three broad viewpoints. Necessity identity liberals are the minorities who believe that majority should not discriminate against them (so 20 per cent of  voters). 

Conviction identity liberals are graduates and believe that discrimination is always wrong. They are modelled as the HEIPR fraction of the 80 per cent white voters. Other work has shown  that higher education is the best predictor of voting Remain. 

The third group is the identity conservatives, who are mostly non-graduates, older and non-metropolitan. They are ethnocentric - this is a belief that there is an in-group (us) and an out-group (them) - though this is not always about ethnic origin. 

Member of this group tend to disengage from mainstream politics. Their drive is to protect the in-group from perceived threats from the out-group. When scarcity looms, the in-group has first call on resources, with the out-group being served later. Inequality is seen as legitimate. 

The identity conservatives have been targeted by right-wing populists in the UK, as the AfD has done in Germany. There is value in persistent engagement with many ordinary  people, as our community politics work showed back when we used to practise that. It may be  worth reinvesting in participatory democracy. 

As time passes, the fraction of graduates in society tends to the 50 per cent that Tony Blair wanted and a service-based economy needs. This means that a modelled end-state is 20 per cent necessity identity  liberals, 40 per cent conviction identity liberals and 40 per cent identity conservatives. 

The tipping point between a majority of identity conservatives and identity liberals was reached in the 2010s. During that decade voting patterns were indeed a "50-50 deal": someone feels under siege. 

The linkage between ethnocentrism and the EU is partly an artefact of culture around the Conservative Party, and partly of the failure of attempts to reduce headline immigration rates because of Freedom of Movement. Indeed, unrestricted immigration from the "Accession 8" states  during the New Labour era caused the issue to become salient for a time. This was unintended. 

Once all this was in place, there was a narrow window when identity conservatives could be activated for a one-time campaign against Freedom of Movement and the European Union. 

Peter Chambers is a Lib Dem member from Hampshire.