The Joy of Six 1445

"Whether it is the private contractors paid enormous sums of public money to bring prisoners to court failing to bring prisoners to court, or technology procured at vast public expense simply not working, or entire court buildings being shut down because the roof is falling in, the Crown Courts every single day endure absurd, entirely-fixable inefficiencies which contribute significantly to the backlog of work." The Secret Barrister explains that abolishing most jury trials will not touch the main causes of delay in the legal system.

Paul Bernal argues that banning children from social media is a very bad idea: "For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more."

"You only have to take a look recent exam papers to see the problem. For example, when my colleague Catherine Gower and I surveyed 219 GCSE, AS and A-level history papers issued in the summer of 2023, we found only 6 per cent of 991 exam questions directed students to discuss women (37 per cent directed students to discuss men)." Natasha R, Hodgson shows that women are largely absent from the questions, sources, and mark schemes that shape how history is taught and assessed in schools in England.

Municipal Dreams reviews Ned Hewitt's Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing: "Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma."

National Museums Scotland tells the fascinating story of the Isle of Lewis chessmen and their discovery.

"Living in the Past was a song in five/four time, with jazz flute solos, and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn’t for Anderson, who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use, and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance." Andrew Hickey on the eccentric single that became Jethro Tull's biggest hit.

Elvis Costello and The Attractions: Watch Your Step

This is immaculate. And doesn't he know it?

It's a live performance on American TV in 1981, introduced by someone who's been specially flown in from 1961.

Folk horror, Saxons and the workhouse: Brixworth on a sunny winter's afternoon

I went to Brixworth yesterday afternoon. It's a large village between Market Harborough and Northampton famous for its Saxon church. (The spire is a 14th-century addition.)

A low winter sun and bare tree branches always make for shadows that look like they are out of a folk horror film.

There is a horrible irony about the village. It's workhouse was notorious:

Soon after the Workhouse had opened the Secretary of State had to send a Bow Street Runner to Brixworth to investigate the strict policy being adopted by the Guardians regarding the payment of "out relief" to the poor and needy of the parish. Brixworth became known as the "dark portion of rural England" due to its almost complete withdrawal of "out relief".

Conditions inside the building were often criticised too as being prison like and spartan and Mrs Briddon, one of the cooks, described the food as meagre and tasteless. It was an institution feared by the old and needy, a place where families were split up and accommodated in single sex dormitories.

The surviving central block of the workhouse – it used to be considerably larger – now houses a cafe. I always feel guilty when I order my avocado toast and latte there.

Man sought over trousering of hedgehog statue

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. 

The judges were also impressed by the photograph provided by Lincolnshire Police.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The nights are drawing in. There’s nothing to watch on any of the 94 TV channels. Doom scrolling is all you have left for fun.

Don’t despair! You could cheer your evenings by writing a guest post for Liberal England.

It could be on the Liberal Democrats, politics more generally or… anything really. Why not something on a local campaign or quirky piece of history?

Please drop me an email if you want to discuss your idea first: I’d hate you to spend time on a piece I wouldn’t want to publish.

Here are the 10 most recent guest posts published here:

• Shut it! Two words of advice from Jack Regan – Peter Chambers
• Councillor defections: The trickle becomes a stream – Augustus Carp
• Let next week's online summer school rekindle your Radical Liberal fire – William Lane
• What is the technical debt of Thames Water? – Peter Chambers
• The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle – Anselm Anon
• Defections Update: Lib Dem Conference Special – Augustus Carp
• Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle – Matthew Pennell
• Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them – Augustus Carp
• In the cause of duty: Walter Stolworthy is remembered at Wymondham station – Neil Hickman
• Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem – William Lane

Walking Charles Dickens' London with John Rogers

Here's a seasonal treat: a tour of the areas of London associated with Charles Dickens – or at least some of them -– in the company of John Rogers.

John's YouTube blurb for this walk explains:

This Charles Dickens London Walking tour starts in Southwark where Dickens lived as a child while his father was held in Marshalsea Prison on Borough High Street. This influenced much of his writing, most notably Little Dorrit. There are also multiple references to character in The Pickwick Papers around Borough. 

After stopping by The George Tavern where Dickens used to drink we cross London Bridge which is mentioned in multiple Dickens novels - most strikingly in Oliver  Twist, we walk through the City of London, The Magic Lantern, visiting various locations mentioned in the works of Charles Dickens including St Peter's Cornhill, The Guildhall, The Bank of England, Mansion House. We also look for the site of the first address the Dickens family stayed at on Wood Street when they arrived from Chatham. 

From here we go via St Bartholomew's Hospital, site of the Fortune of War pub (A Tale of Two Cities) before going to Bleeding Heart Yard (Little Dorrit), Saffron Hill (Oliver Twist) and finishing at The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street.

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

National Trust seeks to buy land around the Cerne Abbas Giant

The National Trust has launched a £300,000 appeall to buy the land surrounding the Cerne Abbas Giant, reports BBC News. The site it hopes to acquire amounts to 341 acres, but size isn't everything.

The Guardian says it has already exchanged contracts on the site and will use funds, grants and bequests to cover £2.2m of the asking price. Presumably the £300,000 is needed on top of that.

Its report also says:

The planned purchase is expected to clear the way for more archaeological investigations around Britain’s largest chalk hill figure, which looms over the rolling Dorset landscape.

It would also mean more work can be done to protect the flora and fauna on the hillside, including the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly. And the conservation charity hopes the purchase will lead to better access for people to the figure, with more chances for exploration and play.

The National Trust clearly regards this as a major project, because it is using the graphic above on social media to promote it.

You can donate to the Trust's Cerne Abbas Nature Appeal online.

The Joy of Six 1444

"The mansion tax will impact less than the top 0.7 per cent of households. At a time when Britain’s public services are stretched to breaking point and taxes will inevitably have to increase, it is only right that we asked the wealthiest property owners to contribute more. Asking the wealthiest to pay more to lift children out of poverty or to invest more in the NHS and social care is the fair thing to do. In fact, it is the Liberal Democrat thing to do, or at least it was up until a few days ago." Paul Hindley says Ed Davey should support the government's new mansion tax.

Robert Reich on Trump, billionaires and the media: "Why are the ultra-rich buying up so much of the media? Vanity may play a part, but there’s a more pragmatic – some might say sinister – reason."

Save Ukraine shows how Russia teaches children to hate the West.

"Restoring ponds – old and new, rural and urban – is one of the simplest, most effective steps we can take. Every pond counts, from a farm hollow to a garden bowl. Together, they form networks that wildlife needs to survive and make our landscapes more resilient to climate change." Lucy Clarke explains why restoring Britain's ponds is vital for wildlife and climate resilience.

"Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno. One philosopher in Stoppard’s radio play Darkside is never sure if he is spelling Nietzsche correctly." Fergus Edwards examines the importance of philosophy to Tom Stoppard's work.

Graham McCann uncovers one of comedy's great feuds: Tommy Trinder vs Bruce Forsyth.

Boarding on Insanity documentary to be shown at Westminster

There will be a special screening of the film documentary Boarding on Insanity at Westminster on 19 January. The evening will be hosted by Simon Opher MP and feature a panel of speakers including Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and  Alex Renton.

A page about the event emphasises that the prevalence of boarding education is not a niche or historical issue, but a "public interest issue affecting safeguarding, social mobility, governance, mental and physical health across generations". You can see Piers Cross making that case in the video above.

Attendance is by invitation only. MPs and members of the media can apply for a place via the email address on the page. There is also a draft letter there that you can send to encourage your MP to attend.

I review Charles Spencer's book A Very Private School in the current Liberator.

After three years online, Leicester Gazette launches a print edition

Leicester Gazette is one of a new generation of local news outlets born out of the collapse of local newspapers and the right-wing bias of most national ones.

It began almost three years ago as a website – Reece Stafferton wrote a guest post for this blog outlining the Gazette's plans a few months before it launched.

Now comes news that the Gazette is to launch a print edition.

An article on the Gazette site says it will have 32 pages and be a unique "half Berliner" size – slightly larger than a magazine but with the feel and look of a traditional newspaper:

Creating a print edition is a new thing for us. Our core team is made up of trained journalists, but we have limited experience in print. If you notice any mistakes, please let us know – and please be gentle with us!

For our inaugural issue, we’ve included a mix of old and new. You'll find striking features from our regulars like Margaret Brecknell and Joseph Herbert, as well as reports from the local democracy reporting service. Our hope is that it gives new readers a taste of what we're all about.

Our first print run is 5,000 copies, with plans to publish quarterly and increase circulation with each issue.

I wish this exciting development well.

The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle has reopened

Good news from the BBC News Shropshire pages:

A historic Shropshire pub has reopened under new ownership, five months after it shut and was branded by locals as an "embarrassment".

The Three Tuns Inn in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, closed on 11 July due to "unforeseen circumstances", former owner Heineken Star Pubs said at the time.

Now its doors are open again under the management of The Shed, a Shropshire-based events and hospitality business.

I visited Bishop's Castle this summer and found the Three Tuns closed and the town, partly as a result, rather depressed.

As Darren Dixon, one of the new landlords, told BBC News, "It's a great pub that should never really have closed."

He said there is investment planned with the neighbouring, Three Tuns Brewery that will "reshape the image" of the pub. Its appearance has been criticised in the town, as it has fallen into a state of disrepair.

A chance to see Frankie Howerd's Bottom

Put your titters away, because I'm talking about Shakespeare. In 1957 Frankie Howerd was invited to appear as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic.

And very good he was to, at least according to Francis Wyndham in The Queen (7 January 1958):

Some members of the audience may have feared that his gift for gagging might interfere with the sacred text; others, that his comic genius might be constrained within the limitations of a classic. 

On the first night he struck a happy medium, under-acting in the rehearsal and Titania scenes but bursting out with hilarious bravado when performing Pyramus before the Duke. This play scene can have seldom been made so funny.

You can see Howerd's Bottom ("Shut your face.") in the video above.

Far down the cast as First Fairy ("And that's an achievement with this lot, I can tell you.") was a young Judi Dench. You can see and hear her below.

We're building walls to separate social and private housing again

The segregation of the classes is back, and it's not done only by price. Here's a report by Jessica Murray and Michael Goodier from the Guardian:

The homes of people in Nunsthorpe, a postwar former council housing estate known locally as “The Nunny”, sit only a few metres away from their more affluent neighbours in Scartho with their conservatories and driveways.

Walking between the two is almost impossible because of a 1.8-metre-high (6ft) barricade between them, which blocks off roads and walkways that link the two areas in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Journeys that should only take a few seconds become a 25-minute walk down to the open field on the edge of the estate, or through the grounds of a hospital, to bypass the wall.

When I read that, I remembered that such walls had been put up in the 1930s. And then I saw that Municipal Dreams had posted a couple of examples from his blog on Bluesky.

The first was in Oxford, where in the city council built its Cutteslowe Estate. A couple of its roads joined up with roads on a private estate recently built by private developers, the Urban Housing Company:

The Company alleged council tenants were responsible for vandalism on the private estate. It also claimed that the rehousing of former slum-dwellers on the estate breached an undertaking given by the Council that it wouldn’t be used for this purpose. 

Whatever the (not so) niceties, it’s not hard to see the naked class prejudice and commercial interest that lay behind the Company’s supposed grievances. It erected two-metre high, spiked walls – separating the council homes from their private equivalents – across the connecting streets in December 1934. They forced a 600-metre detour for council estate residents trying to reach the main road.

And the second was in Lewisham, where this was the reaction to the opening of the council's Downham Estate: 

In 1926, a seven-foot high wall capped with broken glass was built across the street to the adjacent private estate, intended to prevent Downham’s residents using the street as a short-cut to Bromley town centre. The wall remained till 1950.

It was worse than that in Oxford where the Cotteslowe Walls lasted until 1959.

But they did come down. Today's society is putting walls up again.

The Joy of Six 1443

"Companies that have collaborated with immigration enforcement agencies in various ways to aid Trump’s mass deportation initiative – whether through allowing ICE to raid their parking lots, taking on contracts with DHS, or a variety of other actions – are starting to feel the rumblings of a consumer revolt." Adrian Carrasquillo says a backlash Is brewing against companies that help Trumps's ICE.

Rowena Mason maps the depressing journey of Motability cuts from right-wing social media to Rachel Reeves' budget.

Matt Simon finds that urban farms and gardens ease food insecurity, boost mental health and create communities.

"Getting Franklin’s story right is crucial, because she has become a role model for women going into science. She was up against not just the routine sexism of the day, but also more subtle forms embedded in science – some of which are still present today." Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort argue that the role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of DNA is still misunderstood.

"By the early 1940s, Watson had also become increasingly uncomfortable about the methods used in dairy and egg production, and so began to exclude all animal-based foodstuffs from his diet." Margaret Brecknell introduces us to Leicester's Donald Watson, the founder of the modern vegan movement.

Frank Collins reviews the 1947 film It Always Rains on Sunday. He says its director, Robert Hamer "seems to have regularly fought a corner for women working in film at Ealing, a studio often criticised for its very male view point of the world, and [Googie] Withers is a strong presence in many of his films.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Dame Agatha Mousetrap

And so another week at Bonkers Hall draws to a close. It looks like Keir Starmer is in the clear for a while, but I still wouldn't accept any invitations to stay on mysterious islands off the Devon coast if I were in his shoes.

Sunday

These days every television celebrity thinks he’s Dame Agatha Mousetrap, but there’s more to the whodunnit-writing game than meets the eye. I once had a shot at it myself; all went well until I sat down to pen the final chapter, only to find I had not included a butler among the cast of characters and thus had no murderer to reveal. 

My reason for mentioning this is that if the prime minister has been knifed by this own party by the time you read this, it will be like Murder on the Orient Express. They’ll all have had a go at him.

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

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown
• A strange episode
• He should ask an eagle to do it