PurpleVision - follow him on YouTube for East Midland disused railway goodness - went to Wellingborough last week to look at the overflowing River Nene.
He explored the Embankment area of town on foot - you can see it, swans and all, in happier circumstances in a post on this blog - and then filmed the wider area with a drone.
"In their speeches to this week’s Labour Party conference, Rachel Reeves mentioned it only briefly and in passing, and Keir Starmer not at all. It’s absurd, especially as the guiding theme of both speeches, as of the government’s entire incoming communications message, is that of the dire inheritance bequeathed by its Tory predecessors. Brexit can hardly be excluded from that reckoning." Chris Grey says there’s still little sign Britain has accommodated itself to Brexit or has any idea how to do so.
"It’s night. I’m trying to sleep. I’m so tired. But a voice says, 'What time is it?'. It’s half two, Mum, go to sleep. Half an hour later again, 'What time is it?'. Mum, it’s night, that’s why it’s dark. Please be quiet and let me sleep. 'Oh, okay.' Ten minutes later, 'Mick, put the light on for me'. My brother Mick hasn’t lived in this house for over 40 years! Again, I calm her down. But it only lasts for a bit, and finally at quarter to four I give up on this night, get out of bed and start the day." Anna Schurer talked to a carer and describes her life in her own words.
Andrew Anthony reviews a new book on Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter.
"It was a seminal moment in chess history, comparable to the 1945 USA v USSR radio match when the Americans, quadruple Olympiad gold winners in the 1930s, were crushed 15.5-4.5 to launch 45 years of Soviet supremacy, interrupted only by Bobby Fischer." Leonard Barden on India's dominant performance in the chess Olympiad.
Jon Hotten remembers Graham Thorpe: "His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that."
Robert Jenrick has recently stated that Englishness is under threat. However, he seemed unable to say what Englishness actually is. He knew the term had currency, but on enquiry he could offer no more. Like a patient trying to blag medication for an illness that they do not have because that medication can be sold on the streets. What are your symptoms? I have the symptoms of that illness.
But what exactly are your symptoms? The illness symptoms. Jenrick, when asked, could not define Englishness; he looped around about a shared history and culture, but was unable to say what that was or to give any examples.
So I will try to help. How could I not try to help, with Jenrick being the Newark MP where I live? I could say my neighbour, but he does not seem to get here much, even before his leadership bid.
When you try to define Englishness there are problems. The territory of Englishness has been invaded by nationalists in recent years, people who have a fuzzy blur into racists and white supremacists. Therefore, this can make be a tricky topic to engage with; the brand has been sullied.
Another issue to consider is the question of Britishness compared to Englishness. Many of the features of what defines Englishness do cross over into what is Britishness. But there are differences.
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are much smaller in terms of population, and though punching above their weight, have been the junior partners in the union, and some have felt a sense of subjugation by the English. Something the English themselves have never really felt. That is an English thing; no one will push the English around.
Englishness is about a language, that language, the English language, that has spread around the world and has been a bond between England and all the people around the globe who use it. People from England have also used the language well and we have a strong literary heritage in prose, poetry and song.
The people of England have been shaped by being an island nation, that there is bit of water around us kept us separate from the rest of the world. Maybe, this is one of the reasons why people arriving by small motes have hit a nerve with some people. The moat is being repeatedly breached.
Being surrounded by water gave us oceans that we could utilise to take over, if briefly, large parts of the rest of the world. We are a nation of pirates, then colonialists. Not a heritage that we can be proud of without reservations. But after we went out and invaded the world some people have followed us back home, which has greatly enriched the nation, more than the Elgin marbles have.
We are a nation that has a proud history of democracy, even if sometimes we have been hypocritical about it, and even if it has been eroded in recent years, democracy is still a value that is dear to the English.
I remember being on the march to stay part of the EU after the Referendum vote, a man who had been an accidental passer-by, stopped and went red in the face shouting at us that we needed to obey democracy, that a referendum had occurred, and we needed to abide by it.
The religious values of England are unsurprisingly, those of the Church of England. Which is basically Catholicism with the Pope and obedience to him removed - replaced for a while by the monarch, but then only the monarch nominally. It is also a religion without the guilt that seems to be bequeathed to every Catholic. In the Church of England there is nothing to be guilty about: you were born English, and so you are winning, chin up, chest out, sing a hymn.
England has been organised around the class system going back for centuries. It is very English to try and work out where someone else fits, because of how they talk, how they dress, and fitting them within the English sociological landscape. Not that I am a fan of this, but it is part of being English, with the monarch as the lid that keeps it all in place.
The monarch, even for Republicans, still has a central place in our national consciousness, that has long past for many previous monarch ruled countries. We divide our history up by them, we name our streets after them, we still sing about them being long to rule over us. This is very English.
England is a country with a super high density of historical places; you cannot drive very far from wherever you are without soon passing a marker of an historical figure or event. It might not be labelled, but when you stop and check it out, there will be historical treasure piled upon historical treasure. It is simply falling out of the hedgerows and ancient churches whichever way you turn at the next crossroads.
In terms of economics what could be more English than the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, which shaped the post war years? A very English pragmatic approach to economics that stands in the face of the more ideologically driven approaches of communism, monetarism or neoliberalism.
Englishness means being the inventor of rules for games. We might not have been the original inventors of the games themselves, but we were the ones who set to work drawing up rules of how the games are to be played, before teaching everyone else how to play them by our rules (very English), so that they can beat us at them. What can be more English than cricket? A game that in its proper format, test cricket, is played over five days with meal breaks.
Pets, I have not mentioned pets. The English are a nation of animal lovers. This really got going under the Victorians. We went out into the wild and captured animals and turned them from being wild and free, to being our pets. So it is not all rosy, but we were at the front of animal welfare, and our love of pets, particularly our dogs, is a defining feature of Englishness. This is one of the British owned features too.
The people I know, directly or indirectly, whose parents were migrants seem to have picked up what it means to be English, no problem. It is some kind of osmosis achieved by growing up here, no matter where your family come from you are taking on Englishness, from the details of regional accents, to the bigger values stuff. They get it. They get what it means to be English. They too can fail at penalty shoot-outs. Did I mention the English sense of humour?
Ironically, and what could be more English than irony, the people who often make a big fuss about Englishness do not seem to be looking at England for their values base, but are instead looking at the USA and longing for us to be the 51st state, thus undermining Englishness.
So going forward, Englishness will continue to thrive, in part because of the people who migrated here in more recent times than the Angles, Saxons or Normans. They migrated here because they too wanted to be part of the English dream.
You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.
Released in 1964, Hi-Heel Sneakers was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It reached 11 in the US singles chart and 23 in the UK.
I was led to it by a 2003 interview with Steve Winwood:
The Hammond organ was the invention of Lawrence Hammond, a clock maker and amateur home organist who wanted an instrument to replace the church organ. The Hammond was used by black churches in America, and it was there that jazz and R&B musicians first heard the possibilities that the instrument offered.
Winwood grew up listening to that first generation of Hammond players, including Jimmy Smith, Booker T, Jack McDuff, Charles Earland and Richard "Groove" Holmes.
"A lot of the early R&B was organ-based," says Winwood. "I liked songs like the mod classic Hi-Heel Sneakers by Tommy Tucker, which had a particular sound that intrigued me."
Today is Michaelmas - the Feast of St Michael and All the Angels. To mark it, here is my favourite tin tabernacle.
As I noted when I visited St Michael and All Angels, Kettering, Pevsner says it dates from 1907 and "has distinct charm". I also said that its garden gives it more appeal than many conventional urban churches of the period.
Among my CD collection are three late period Scott Walker albums, including And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And Who Shall Go To The Ball? which came out in 2007 with the excellent 4AD. Tucked into my vinyl stash is a Walker Brothers album that I found in a charity shop recently - all their hits, the soaring over orchestrated ballads that I loved at the time, although these days I am much more of an avant-garde minimalist.
But in 1965 I did go to the ball. The Walker Brothers played the Frolickin' Kneecap in Market Harborough. It was insane, really. They must have booked the venue just before Make it Easy On Yourself hit the number 1 spot. The lads must have been stunned to find themselves in a less-than-one-horse town in the East Midlands, where I was mocked for wearing a beret and a maxi skirt.
I don’t think I was a huge fan. At age 14, My favourite artists were The Who and Bob Dylan. I was alternately a mod and a New York intellectual. The venue I most frequented in the town was the Peacock Folk Club. But there was no denying these were handsome lads, although didn’t they look old? And so unfashionably well fed.
I don’t honestly remember how any of it worked. Did we buy tickets or just turn up? It was also my first time in this venue although later I saw Family (a really excellent band). How wonderful to have a venue like this in the town!
My main memory of the 'concert' is of utter chaos, screaming, and the poor Walker Brothers being nearly torn apart by frenzied teenage girls. They literally lost their shirts. We did not hear any of the music at all - which
annoyed me even then, as it had earlier at the De Montfort Hall at the Stones concert. I went for the music - and the sex of course, but the music was where the real excitement was. And we did not hear a single note.
I’m surprised nobody got hurt. I was too far back to do any ripping, and anyway that wasn’t my style. Also I was (still am) very short sighted and was not wearing my glasses. There was ear splitting screaming, a massive press of overheated girls. It was over very quickly and a friend of mine, clutching her hard won bit of fabric, passed me a thread, which is still somewhere in my attic. I have no idea which 'brother; was the wearer of the shirt.
In a paper written for The Constitution Society in 2019, Andrew Blick and Peter Hennessy gave this attitude to government more generally a name:
In the UK, we have trusted politicians to behave themselves. We have long assumed that those who rise to high office will be 'good chaps', knowing what the unwritten rules are and wanting to adhere to them, even if doing so might frustrate the attainment of their policy objectives, party political goals, or personal ambitions – the argument being that 'good chaps' (of different sexes) know where the undrawn lines are and come nowhere near to crossing them: hence ‘the good chap theory of government.’
I thought of this theory when I saw the defences of Keir Starmer decision to put himself in Lord Alli's debt that Labour supporters mounted on Twitter this morning. They boiled down to the claim that we needn't worry about it because Alli is a good chap - all he wanted in return for his donations was the election of a Labour government.
This may well be true, but another maxim that developed out of the rulings of Lord Hewart is that justice must not only be done: it must be seen to be done. In this case I think that means that though we may accept that Starmer has done no favours for Lord Alli, he still should not have put himself in this position.
My chief feeling about this affair is one of surprise that Labour had not seen that it might damage them - Private Eye noticed some time ago that Starmer has a fondness for freebies. Similarly, though it has been inflated by the media, I don't know what else Labour thinks it has given them to talk about since coming power. They seem to have gone from obsessive media management under Blair and Alastair Campbell to giving up any attempt at it.
And, yes, the Tories were far worse, but I've already argued here that whataboutery won't get Labour out of trouble here. I suggest Labour examines the idea of putting a frugal limit on how much an individual can donate to a political party. Until last week at least, many of their supporters seemed keen on it.
The judges were anxious I should point out that, despite my illustration, the custodian of the net in question is Jens Lehmann, not Bob Wilson.
But this does give me time to make another award. Our Trivial Fact of the Day is that Barry Hines, the author of Kes, played in the same Loughborough Colleges side as Dario Gradi and Bob Wilson.
But the Walker Brothers weren't the only big names to play Harborough in those days. I've blogged before about Jethro Tull, and now I can add some more names to the list.
Because a reader kindly pointed me towards an old post about the town on the Soul Source site:
The club was called the Frollockin' Kneecap and had been there since 1968, I saw Brenton Wood, Blossom Toes, Ferris Wheel, Keef Hartley, Dantallian's Chariot (Zoot Money), Brenton Wood and the best of all the Family 3 times, once with Fairport Convention jamming; about 700 in for that one!
It goes on to say that the club called itself The Lantern for "allnighters", which suggests there was such a thing as East Midland Soul.
I can't give you Family and Fairport jamming, but here's Dantalian's Chariot (Andy Summers, later of the Police, is on guitar) with their most famous track.
If you were lucky enough not to have come across this, er, unique Guardian article 'The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons', do not click this link.
It was suggested to me by on Twitter that the author must be the son of someone on the paper to have got it published.
The new Private Eye shows that was almost right: he's the long-term partner of someone there.
When the editor saw this article, the Eye goes on, she gave orders for it to be buried in the depths of the Guardian's website. But I recruited a team of professional cave divers to help me this afternoon, and we found it.
Richard Kemp promised to put the cause of carer leavers at the heart of his work as Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He writes about an event held yesterday that will help him honour this pledge.
"Dr Newman debunked the popular idea of 'Blue Zones' as regions of exceptional longevity and healthy lifestyles. Many, if not most of the centenarians in the ‘Blue Zone’ have turned out to be alive in the government records but deceased in reality." The press people at University College London on work by Saul Justin Newman that revealed fundamental flaws in research on extreme old age.
Pam Fisher has researched Loughborough's first workhouse.
Amy Boucher is intrigued by Shropshire's female ghosts: "Some of our female spirits have strong historical basis, one only has to peel back the layers to uncover a real woman. Other tales are harder to track down historically, but instead can come to symbolise the suffering and experiences of a collective womanhood. Some of their experiences may even be familiar to you, though your stories are separated by the centuries."
"Perhaps 'cooked' is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish." Alwyn Turner offers an anthology of sausages in literature."
Sayeeda Warsi was once a living symbol of the changes David Cameron claimed to have made to the Conservative Party. Today she resigned her membership.
It is with a heavy heart that I have today informed my whip and decided for now to no longer take the @Conservatives whip.
— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) September 26, 2024
This is a sad day for me.
I am a Conservative and remain so but sadly the current Party are far removed from the Party I joined and served in Cabinet.
My…
I'm surprised she has lasted as long as she has.
Back in 2011 I blogged about the way the Tory right tried to turn an invited lecture she gave at the University of Leicester into some kind of scandal.
From Hemel Today:
Eight female councillors in Dacorum have left the Liberal Democrat group after accusing the council leader of “failing to deal with allegations of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment”.
It means the Liberal Democrats have lost their majority on the borough council, which has now moved into no overall control.
The councillors, who included two cabinet members and will now sit as independents, announced they were leaving the group during a full council meeting yesterday (Wednesday, 25 September). They remain members of the Liberal Democrat party.
The report goes on to quote a statement from the eight women and give some of the background to the affair.
Dacorum Council is based in Hemel Hempstead. The borough also includes the towns of Berkhamsted and Tring and surrounding villages.
My hazy recollection was that the hero was taken to be a rich man and so was never asked to pay for anything. Showered with gifts, soon he really was rich.
A contemporary review from the Manchester Guardian fleshes out the plot:
The story begins in 1953 with the return of Mr Peter Blagden from New York, and for a page or two the irony seems to be held in reserve; we have time to think that Mr Belloc could, if he would, give us a very interesting "ordinary" novel. But Mr Blagden loses his memory completely, and from no particular cause; chances combine to identify him with Mr Petre, the great American millionaire.
So he becomes involved in enormous transactions, and on the strength of an occasional "Exactly" or "I quite understand" his reputation as the most astute man of his time becomes assured. He puts up at the Splendide (or, as the proof-reader leaves it on one occasion the Savoy), and so courted is he that he must bolt to the country sometimes for breathing space.
If he buys everybody follows, and his chance expression of opinion breaks up a luncheon party, everybody rushing for the telephone. Perhaps the loss of memory is a little arbitrary in its working, but it is a good device for the display of Mr Belloc's scornful irony.
For, of course, everything that Mr Petre says and does is idiotic. A man reputed to have fifty million pounds must be a master-mind, and financiers feel that they must crawl before him or be ruined.
Belloc was Liberal MP for Salford South between 1906 and 1910. Though he was a raving antisemite, his book of political theory The Servile State is worth seeking out. I think of it when I read that the government is to give itself powers to investigate the bank accounts of people receiving welfare benefits.
Another feature of Mr Petre is that, according to that review, it was illustrated by Belloc's great friend G.K. Chesterton.
These days we think of illustrations as suitable for children's books but not fiction written for adults. Yet some of the greatest 19th-century novels were illustrated.
And in Vanity Fair, where the text says one thing and Thackeray's own drawings suggest something more sinister is taking place, we instinctively trust the picture over the words.
A very Leicestershire video filmed in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Steve and friends from LeiceExplore look at what remains of the closed stretch of the Nottingham Canal from Great Northern Basin at Langley Mill in Derbyshire to the city of Nottingham.
They end their ride at Meadow Lane Lock, where the navigable stretch of the canal joins the Trent.
The Eastern Daily Press wins our Headline of the Day.
Most of the story is behind the paper's paywall, but what we can see is worth quoting:
A window cleaner who threatened to kill people in a town centre told the court “I’ve got as many convictions as Donald Trump”.
Andy Cowper on the Darzi review of the NHS: "It’s interesting how much the Darzi review emphasises Lansley’s NHS reforms. It’s also politically smart, because they were a total failure. Choice, competition, and clinical commissioning achieved nothing in the English NHS over the past 12 years. The Darzi review’s main, unstated purpose is about the allocation of political blame. It does that quite effectively."
"The first government minister who kept a cat with him when on government business was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. It was said he travelled with a number of cats, took them to Mass and that they sat in at meetings with him. The statue of Cardinal Wolsey in Ipswich shows a cat peeping around his robes." Nicola Cornick sets out the long history of political cats.
"Despite the grave fate that awaits Mary, for the most part Yield to the Night is a quiet film that relies on the emotional dexterity of its star for a narrative engine. At every juncture, Dors was not just convincing, but compelling. It was a mammoth, and yet searingly intimate, performance." Chloe Walker celebrates Diana Dors' wonderful performance in the anti-death-penalty film Yield to the Night (1956).
Matt McManus wants the left to read the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Shroppie Mon will tell you all about a Shrewsbury dragon.
Peter Jay is one of those people of whom, if I had any younger readers, my younger readers would not have heard.
His Guardian obituary by Stephen Bates is a comic gem. That's not how most of us would wish to be remembered, but there you go:
If ever a man was damned by being described as “the cleverest young man in England” it was the economic journalist Peter Jay. When Time magazine decided on the epithet and chose him as one of its 150 world leaders of the future in 1974, Jay was already 37, so rather old to be a young hopeful.
However, he needed next to no encouragement to believe it, having already garnered a reputation at the Times, where he was then economics editor, for arrogance. It was scarcely the magazine’s fault that his highest elected office ended up being mayor of the Oxfordshire town of Woodstock, but as his career went into a slow decline following his brief period as British ambassador to Washington in the late 1970s – having been appointed to the post by his father-in-law the Labour prime minister James Callaghan – each mishap was accompanied by the sound of chortling schadenfreude in the British press.
Rachel Reeves was heckled during her conference speech today. Naturally, the man responsible was grabbed by security and bundled out of the hall.
Our politicians used to be more robust. Before the decline of the public meeting, they were expected to deal with hecklers using their own wits and wit. The heckler would stomp off defeated, not in the grasp of a gorilla in a suit.
The most able of politicians, such as Harold Wilson, positively welcomed heckling because it gave them the chance to appear in a good light. All Reeves had was a line copied from Keir Starmer, delivered after her heckler had been disappeared.
And this post is a chance to pay tribute to Wilson for not getting Britain involved in Vietnam.
A story on Professional Builder suggests things are not so simple:
The inaugural Planning Portal Market Index has found that more than a million homes granted planning permission since 2015 have not yet been built.
This equates to around a third of the total given the green light over the period. The figures cast doubt on the near-exclusive focus of the major parties on boosting housebuilding numbers by tweaking the planning system.
The Index suggests the causes of this lack of building include high interest rates, skills shortages in the construction industry and materials shortages.
Me? I remember what the late Ian Jack wrote in the London Review of Books five years ago:
A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’
The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price".
For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.
That I should live to see such times!
This video was produced by Harborough District Council - and very good Harborough looks in it too.
Desborough's Millennium Green Trust holds the Green in perpetuity for the people of Desborough. Designed by local people, it has ten dedicated benches, a scented raised bed and a butterfly corner.
The hedges were planted as wildlife corridors and the trees were selected as mainly native species (arrived between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago), together with three species introduced more recently by the Romans.
The most striking feature near the entrance was the apple trees left over from the land's former use as a market garden.
Windfalls covered the ground there, and I suddenly thought "September ... decaying fruit ... wasps. Is this a good idea?" Then I looked more carefully and found there was not a single wasp there.
I posted a video here a couple of months ago that said insects doing badly in one wet summer is nothing to worry about, but the long-term decline in their numbers certainly is.
Today I've found an article on the decline in wasp numbers by the Guardian environment reporter Helena Hornet, which...
Sorry, that should be Helena Horton. She writes:
Professor Seirian Sumner is an entomologist at University College London who has spent her career studying wasps. She said she was “thrilled” that people were worrying about low wasp numbers because “usually they only get airtime when they start annoying people”.
And Professor Sumner says:
“The science tells us that cold, wet springs mean that foundresses – the big queen wasps that start appearing in spring – struggle to successfully grow a nest. This is because they are solitary at this time in the colony cycle and so need to do all the nest building, egg laying, prey hunting all by themselves.
“Rain and cold make this difficult; and of course their prey will have been affected by the poor weather too, compounding the challenge. So with fewer successfully founded nests in spring there will be fewer mature nests now. And predictably, fewer wasps bothering people.
“This is bad news. Wasps perform many important roles in the environment, as natural pest controllers, as pollinators and also in the case of the yellowjacket they are important decomposers – that’s why they happily scavenge the carrion at your BBQ,” said Sumner.
In the long term, wasp numbers were thought to be declining overall because of human activity, she said. “They will be affected in the same way as other insects by chemicals like pesticides – after all, these chemicals are designed to screw up insect physiology and neurology.”
So, yes, we should worry.
Other experts quoted in the article share her respect for wasps. I am reminded of the summer when my mother and here second husband were away on one of their long canal holidays and I found a wasps nest at their house.
The man who came to deal with it was also respectful. "If they start a nest and it's not exactly right, they'll abandon it and start a new one." He could have been a minor character in a good British comedy.
I'll leave you with a memory of how things used to be.
Discussing at the weekend the concept of the "waspy bin". School playground bins so stuffed with rotting lolly wrappers and crumpled tins of Fanta that they were orbited by a permanent cloud of angry wasps. Does the waspy bin still exist?
— Bob Fischer (@Bob_Fischer) September 9, 2024
A single from the Stone Roses' first LP,* Waterfall reached no. 27 in the UK singles chart in 1991.
I love that very Nineties chiming guitar sound, but what is the song about?
A comment on Song Meanings says:
Ian Brown said in an interview that this is about a girl whose fed up with everything, drops an acid and goes to Dover. What would Vera Lynn make of that?
But then writers don't necessarily fully understand their own songs.
* I suppose using 'LP' rather than 'album' is hopelessly old fashioned, but I still tend to write it first before I correct myself.
David C. Anderson and Nigel P. Scott
Waterside Press, £22.50
The possibility of false conviction is routinely deployed as an argument against the death penalty, but otherwise does not concern us as much as it should. Anderson and Scott look at three high-profile cases, those of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito (Italy), Stefan Kiszko (UK) and Darlie Routier (USA), and trace the factors they have in common.
The authors emphasise the roles of psychopathology, confirmation bias, false confessions, the media and the internet as causes of unjust accusations. Putting a lack of empathy among police officers, prosecutors and others to the fore, it considers a wide range of other psychopathological aspects of miscarriages of justice.
They write: “The law is too important to be left to lawyers, judges, Prosecutors and police if we are not ultimately to sink to the levels described by Franz Kafka in the trial there the victim Joseph K discovers at first hand just what can happen when lawyers decide that their role is to earn a living at the expense of the accused and where things cannot be questioned.”
Darlie Routier is still on Death Row in Texas despite overwhelming evidence that her conviction for killing her own child is false, whilst Knox, Sollecito and Kiszko have been vindicated by the highest judicial authorities and telling evidence. The authors show how and why unfounded rumours still persist in the case of Knox and Sollecito and advances the theory that the Routier killings were the work of a notorious serial killer.
Jonathan Calder
To keep his government on track, Keir Starmer needs to restore the clout of the cabinet secretary and stamp out Downing Street factionalism, says Alex Thomas.
Adam Kucharski offers a guide to the bad-faith arguments people use on social media and how to defeat them.
"I go down there to get away from everything. And it’s a place you can time travel. You get this sense of the past that’s been locked away in the mud, sometimes for thousands of years." Harriet Sherwood on the growth in popularity of mudlarking on the Thames foreshore.
Rose Staveley-Wadham tells the story of all 34 British medallists from the 1924 Paris Olympics using local press cuttings: "Remaining in the sphere of athletics, there was another gold medal winner for Britain at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the shape of Douglas Lowe. His win, on the same day as Harold Abrahams’s, garnered less attention. For example, a small paragraph in the Halifax Evening Courier on 11 July 1924 noted how ‘the winner of the Olympic Games 800 metres race, Douglas Gordon Arthur Lowe, is an old Manchester Grammar School boy, who left the school when his family removed to London in 1917."
The scariest sound in film? Adam Scovell looks back on Jerzy Skolimowski's "visionary British horror oddity" The Shout.
I saw this film at the Renoir, an arthouse cinema near Russell Square in London, in 2001. I remember being attracted by a quote in the window, which I suspect was this one from Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review:
This is a British film with pertinent things to say about contemporary Britain, urgently and powerfully expressed in a cinematic language far from the callow, Lottery-nurtured idiom of Tepid Britannia comedy thrillers.
He might have added – as it was the year 2001 – that most of those tepid thrillers were directed by mockneys with expensive private educations.
And Bradshaw was right: Last Resort was a very good film. It offered a tender love story, political criticism and a portrait of contemporary Britain that made it seem at once familiar and strange.
Tanya (played by Dina Korzun), is a romantic Russian artist with two failed marriages behind her. She arrives at Heathrow with her 10-year-old son Artyom (Artyom Strelnikov) in tow, expecting to be met by her English fiancé. When she sees no sign of him at the airport, she panics and claims political asylum.
The authorities send Tanya and her son to a bleak seaside resort while her claim is considered - a process. she is told, that can will take “between 12 and 16 months”. Forbidden to leave the town, they are housed in a decaying tower block – the town is thick with barbed-wire fences and surveillance cameras. When Tanya finally manages to make contact with her fiancé from a phone box, he ends the relationship.
Artyom falls in with a gang of local children who smoke, drink and steal, while his mother tries to earn money from an online pornographer. When she tells the authorities she wants to withdraw her claim of asylum and go back to Russia, she is told that even this could take six months to process.
The two – first Artyom and then Tanya – are befriended by Alfie (Paddy Considine), a former prisoner who manages an amusement arcade in the town. He helps redecorate and refurnish their flat and takes them out for a day on the seafront. He and Tanya develop a romantic relationship, but she decides she has to stop dreaming and get back to Russia. (The more streetwise and cynical Artyom thinks they would be better off sticking with Alfie.)
So the three hide in a beached boat to defeat surveillance, and when the incoming tide lifts it they sail along the coast until they are well clear. Alfie arranges a lift to London for them and they part, with Tanya giving him the painting she had brought with her from Russia.
Dina Korzun and Artyom Strelnikov are both perfect for their roles, but the actor who stood out for me was Paddy Considine. I was so impressed that I will still watch a film just because he’s in it. I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.
A word too for Lindsay Honey, who plays the pornographer who offers Tanya work and makes him a human, even likeable, character. Honey, under the name Ben Dover, was a star of pornographic films, and is the father of Tyger Drew-Honey from Outnumbered.
If Considine has a rival as the standout star of Last Resort, then it is Margate, the town where it was filmed. Since then, the Turner Gallery has been opened there, in the hope that it would spark an economic revival in what had once been a prosperous resort. The Dreamland pleasure park, seen lying near-derelict in Last Resort, has been revived too.
A year later, the star-packed cast of Last Orders were to arrive in Margate to shoot the final scenes of that film. One of them, David Hemmings, has been persuaded by his parents to enter a singing contest there and won it, which was the first spark of a career that saw him as a boy opera star and then a film actor and director.
Perhaps most remarkable of all is the way the film was shot by its director Pawel Pawlikowski:
When he first landed in Margate with his skeleton crew, Pawlikowski had little more than a loose semi-autobiographical story to go on. (He came to Britain from Poland with his family when he was 12).
"Initially Alfie [played by Paddy Considine, a former boxer who made a startling screen debut in Shane Meadows's A Room for Romeo Brass] was to be a much more ambiguous, slightly threatened character, but the chemistry with Dina was magical. Paddy is a real phenomenon.
We all lived together during the shoot, that is part of my method, so we were able to improvise scenes and come up with new ideas in the evening and over dinner. I am an insomniac, too, so I just kept writing all night sometimes. That is the way I like to work."
In other hands, you suspect, such an approach would result in a mess of a film, but Pawlikowski and his cast produced something magical.
In the 24 years since Last Resort was made, nothing has improved in the way Britain deals with asylum seekers. The last Conservative government effectively ceased processing applications at all in an attempt to stoke a sense of crisis that they hoped would benefit them at the polls.
This is what Pawlikowski found when he discovered the perfect location for his film:
"When I first when down to Margate, my first contact was with the Roma, the Gypsies, who were the only refugees really who interacted with the locals. Even with them, what struck me was how little their world extended beyond what they called Margatta. They would make epic journeys to a strange place at the far end of their known world called Greyvas End.
"You don't have to be there long to realise that most of the asylum-seekers are clueless peasants. They are Kurds and Afghans mostly. Some have not even lived in cities before. They are all stunned, many don't move because they don't know what to do.
"When the local Margate kids go round spitting at them, you can see their shock because they come from cultures were people have manners, where strangers receive hospitality. To me, they looked like they were living inside a Kafka story."
I will leave you with this clip of him talking about the remarkable film he made there.
Fifteen of the boys from Highgate School who sang on the first recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem have held a reunion, reports BBC News:
The recording, made in 1963, sold 200,000 copies in just five months (almost unheard of for a classical work) and won Britten two Grammy Awards - but the choristers, from London's exclusive Highgate School, were never listed in the credits.
Last year, Decca Records launched a search for the surviving members, with a notice in London's Ham & High newspaper.
Fifteen of them were able to reunite in Soho on Thursday, to hear a cleaned-up version of the Requiem and relive the "gruelling" experience of recording Britten's masterpiece.
"It was like going through some great storm, a great orchestral storm," recalled Tim Healey, who was 13 at the time of the original recording.
"By the time it was over, I was quite glad it was over - but then you look back and think, 'That was pretty amazing'."
As I blogged last year, one of the boys on this famous recording was John Rutter, now a celebrated composer.
Another, Nigel Law, told BBC News:
"I still remember the first day, which was a washout, thanks to [Russian soprano] Galina Vishnevskaya throwing a completely and utter wobbly.
"It was quite disturbing, hearing this woman scream."
You can find an amusing clip of Britten, who conducted the performance, rehearsing the boys at the top of this post.
This review appears in the Conference issue of Liberator (Liberator 425), which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website.
Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied
Neil Hickman
£24.95 from Amazon UK
Gordan Hewart is a figure from those Dark Ages of the Liberal Party between the end of the First World War and the revival under Jo Grimond. Born in Bury in 1870, Hewart came to prominence as a radical journalist in the North West before becoming a barrister. He was elected for the two-member seat of Leicester in a 1913 by-election and, with the help of the Coupon from the Lloyd George coalition, won the new single-member Leicester East seat in 1918. He had served as Solicitor General from 1916 and became Attorney General in 1919.
Hewart left the Commons 1922 on being appointed Lord Chief Justice, having already turned down the chance of becoming Home Secretary. No doubt this offer was a tribute to his talents, but it may also have been a sign of the limited number of people who were loyal to Lloyd George even at that early in his premiership.
Neil Hickman’s book is concerned to defend Hewart’s performance as Lord Chief Justice – he has gone down in history with a poor reputation – and to press the relevance of his thought today. His most important writing is to be found in The New Despotism from 1929, and the route by which he fears despotism arising has much in common with the practice or ambitions of recent Conservative governments: pass only skeleton legislation, fill in the details with orders parliament cannot vote on and bar legal challenges to the new laws. Hickman argues that the danger to democracy from such processes is graver than it was when Hewart was writing.
Hewart may be best remembered today for his maxim that “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done” – though he never arrived at such a concise formulation of it himself. This belief was of a piece with his distrust with the ‘Good Chap’ theory of government; this holds that officials need not be bound with burdensome rules if we can trust them to do the right thing because they are the right sort of people.
Those with a passing knowledge of the law may recognise two cases that crop up in Hewart’s career. One is the libel case brought against a newspaper publisher by one Artemus Jones – Hewart came to prominence as a barrister by winning it for him. The second is his decision in the Court of Appeal to support the quashing of a guilty verdict against the Liverpool insurance collector William Wallace for the murder of his wife because it was unreasonable given the evidence the jury had before it. This case has become a favourite with true crime enthusiasts, and the consensus among them seems to be that Wallace did it. I am sure Hewart was not swayed by the fact that Wallace had once been the Liberal agent in Harrogate.
All in all, this is a welcome introduction to the life of a forgotten Liberal. Though written with his legal career most in mind, it says much that is relevant to the politics of Hewart’s era and of the present day.
Jonathan Calder
I spent my last day in Shropshire at Snailbeach and Stiperstones village. Here is the Stiperstones Inn with the hills behind it.
The pub, I can report, now has inside toilets and more dining space, including a pleasant outside area. And, unlike some remote establishments I could mention, is still friendly and welcoming, serving food all day, every day.
It doesn't do bed and breakfast any more, but owns some self-catering accommodation nearby. This seems a general pattern in the area: everyone wants week-long bookings, and the sort of places I stayed at for one night in my walking days seem to have disappeared.
I should add that, despite the carving over the door where you used to go up to the accommodation at the Stiperstones Inn, I was never sacrificed to their local pagan deities.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. Congratulations to them, to Annie Allen and to the alpacas.
Ms Allen said:
"I’ve travelled quite a bit and seen so many things, but I’ve never met alpacas before - they’re wonderful."
A largely positive article about the Liberal Democrats by Jonathan Edwards for Nation Cymru points up an irony. We Lib Dems have become very good at first-past-the-post elections but rarely do so well in elections under more proportional systems:
However, in a Welsh context the strategy employed by the Liberal Democrats at UK level doesn’t work. Quite simply there are not enough Tory/Lib Dem marginals. In July it only yielded one seat in Wales where David Chadwick captured the new seat of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe. With the Senedd election in mind, Jane Dodds and her team are going to have to be more creative.
The D’Hondt electoral system isn’t the easiest to decipher; however the Lib Dems are going to have to improve their poll ratings if they are to achieve the minimum threshold required for a seat in the new Senedd constituencies. Their success in England last July was based on clever targeting of constituencies, and their strategists need to employ similar informed decision making for 2026 as opposed to a blanket approach.
A complicating factor is that the 2026 Senedd elections will be fought on new constituency boundaries. If the Boundary Commission proposals are accepted, one seat will stretch from Corndon Hill, which is almost entirely surrounded by Shropshire, to the tip of the Lleyn peninsula. Meanwhile, what is essentially the old Brecon and Radnor seat has somehow acquired a coastline.
Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."
Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."
Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.
Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.
"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.
And don't forget to download the Conference issue of Liberator.
Sunday
On my way home from Divine Service at St Asquith’s, I called at the beavers’ lodge. I casually broached the subject of my family’s long feud with the Dukes of Rutland, emphasising what rotters they have been over the centuries. “Sounds like we’d all be better off without ‘em,” remarked the elected spokesbeaver.
At this point I dropped the King of the Badgers’ theory about Belvoir Castle originally being Beaver Castle into the conversation. Just as I had hoped, this gets him properly riled. “I’m calling a meeting and shall recommend immediate direct action,” he said, the light catching his sharp front teeth. He must have got the required two-thirds majority, because later in the afternoon I saw the entire colony marching north, armed and looking Terribly Fierce.
So I write these words in their jacuzzi as the deer graze beyond my ha-ha. I don’t know whether the beavers will succeed in retaking Belvoir Castle and drive out the Dukes of Rutland – though I did pass on to them a map showing secret ways into the cellars of the old pile that the King of the Badgers found in his library – but they will be out of my hair for a while.
As for the lake… Well, it is rather pretty and I have never been that fond of croquet.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary
The Great Western Railway service was cancelled at Redhill after the animals got on the train at Gomshall.
Staff attempted to remove the animals but the squirrels "refused to leave" and the service later returned to Reading.
A spokesperson for GWR said: "We can confirm that the 0854 Reading to Gatwick was terminated at Redhill after a couple of squirrels boarded the train at Gomshall without tickets, breaching railway byeclaws.
"We attempted to remove them at Redhill, but one refused to leave and was returned to Reading to bring an end to this nutty tail."
In other rodent news, Cinammon, the escaped Telford capybara, has been located but not recaptured.
When I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) in the early 1980s, Piccadilly Line trains would stop at Turnham Green on Sundays, or at least for a part of them. There was a note to this effect on the London Transport Tube map.
So if I was coming back from a weekend in Market Harborough, I would change at Turnham Green, which added a little excitement to the journey. Would the train really stop?
You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
The King of the Badgers is a character in the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, but the king who appears in the Bonkersverse - debating weighty matters underground - owes most to the badger in White's The Book of Merlyn. Let's hope Labour will reward his statesmanship by ending the badger cull.
Saturday
Feeling in need of a chinwag, I make my way to the royal chamber of the King of the Badgers, deep beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election.
I find him in low spirits. His strategy of fighting the cull of his people through the courts while reining in the hotheads among the younger badgers has come to nothing. He is now inclined to let the young idea, as it were, shoot.
Soon we are talking of the beavers, and the King suggests their guild-like organisation comes from reading Hegel, whom we agree is fundamentally unsound and responsible for making T.H. Green’s writing Such Hard Work.
The King then tells me of a legend among the badgers that the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle is so pronounced because it was originally built by beavers, who were later driven from their home by usurping aristocrats. I shall make good use of this story next time I find myself talking to my new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails: it has The Ring Of Truth.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary
