Liberal England

A tube train at Leicester

2012-01-27T19:59:00.000Z

I came home from work early one afternoon this week. Just south of Leicester station I saw a London Underground train. Presumably it was on its way to or from the Litchurch Lane Works in Derby.

This train had a pair of class 20 locomotives (a rare sight themselves these days) and a buffer wagon at either end, but there was still something moving about seeing a tube train in such circumstances.

It reminded me of a pit pony allowed up from the depths for a short while to frolic in a sunlit meadow.

Two grandsons of the 10th US President are still alive

2012-01-27T19:07:00.000Z

Thanks to the New York Magazine for confirming a story that has been going the rounds for a few days and thus providing us with our Trivial Fact of the Day.

John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States of America, was born in 1790 and in office from 1841 to 1845. Remarkably, two of his grandsons are still alive.

One of them, Harrison Tyler, explains how this has come about in an interview with the magazine:

"Both my grandfather - the president - and my father, were married twice. And they had children by their first wives. And their first wives died, and they married again and had more children. And my father was 75 when I was born, his father was 63 when he was born."

Six of the Best 219

2012-01-26T21:26:00.001Z

It has been a day for Liberal Democrat bloggers to think the unthinkable on education. On Lib Dem Voice Tom Smith circles nervously around the issue of grammar schools.

Too lib·er·al [adj.] has no such inhibitions: "Pupils, from low-income families, should have the ability to apply for a government certificate to meet the tuition costs of a private school. The poorest in society should not be excluded from the best private facilities in the country; we cannot achieve greater levels of social mobility if we restrict the poorest to the state sector."

Basing police officers in schools was the sort of policy that made New Labour purr. But an article by Lizzie Schiffman on Huffington Post suggests that it has the effect of criminalising more youngsters. Recent research in Chicago "found that 20 percent of all juvenile arrests in 2010 took place on school grounds. Nearly one-third of those arrests were for simple battery charges - offences that in previous years would have been written off as schoolyard skirmishes and punished with suspensions or other penalties doled out by the school."

Rob's Blog is appalled by Conservative-run Cornwall Council's ban on tweeting from meetings.

With the current debate over Scottish culture and independence near to the surface, Out in the Shires looks at Ronald Neame's 1960 film Tunes of Glory.

Brain Pickings tells the story of a disastrous 1897 expedition to the North Pole by balloon.

How will Nick Clegg's call for more tax cuts be received by his fellow Liberal Demcrats?

2012-01-26T21:03:00.000Z

At the last election my party promised to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 for ordinary taxpayers. And I am extremely proud that the Coalition is on track to do so over the course of this Parliament. We’ll make sure that anyone earning £10,000 or less will pay no income tax at all and for those on middle incomes, the first £10,000 they earn will be tax free.

For millions of basic rate taxpayers – ordinary, hardworking people – that means paying £700 less in income tax each year, around £60 a month.

In the 2010 Budget we increased the tax allowance from £6,475 to £7,475. This year we have already announced a planned rise of an additional £630 - meaning that a total of 1.1 million more people will no longer pay income tax at all.

But today I want to make clear that I want the Coalition to go further and faster in delivering the full £10,000. Because, bluntly, the pressure on family finances is reaching boiling point.

Nick Clegg's speech to the Resolution Foundation today has been well received by the press and Liberal Democrat bloggers.

"Nick Clegg's call for tax cuts may save the Lib Dems from annihilation" suggests Daniel Knowles on the Daily Telegraph site (a trifle melodramatically, but then - judging by his photograph - he is only 14). While Prateek Buch for the Social Liberal Forum is enthusiastic, seeing the proposed changes as part of the Liberal Democrats' fairness agenda.

For what it is worth, I am enthusiastic too. One of the problems Labour regularly runs into is that, despite its rhetoric, it is difficult to make the rich pay more. Of course, there are things you can do, such as taxing property rather than income, but the result is that increased public spending tends to increase the burden on lower earners until they become unwilling to bear it.

Certainly, I found this argument easy to make during one of my rare television appearances.

But not all my Liberal Democrats will agree with me. Because this is very much the debate we had at our Bournemouth autumn conference in 2008. There the party agreed to fight the following general election promising tax cuts, but as a Daily Telegraph report from the time shows, there was a significant minority in the party that did not agree with this strategy:

Opposition to the programme was led by Evan Harris, the party's science spokesman, and fellow MP Paul Holmes, who argued that those in most of need of help were too poor to receive any benefit from tax cuts.

Their amendment sought to bind the party to tax cuts only after other priorities had been met, including tackling child poverty and climate change.

Telling delegates about the plight of hard-up families in his constituencies, Mr Harris added: "Most are so poor that they will never pay taxes."

The vote in Bournemouth was clear enough - conference voted three to one to approve the new policy - but no debate can settle such a question for all time.

And it is notable that those in the party who have been less enthusiastic about the Coalition have emphasised their opposition to cuts in public spending.

If money has been found to cut tax, won't they (whether they have called themselves "Progressives", "Social Liberals" or use some other slightly vaguely defined category) now be calling for a reduction in those cuts?

Or will they keep their heads down because Nick Clegg's speech has gone down well and it is good to see the party pursuing a clear strategy at last?

Pun of the Day

2012-01-26T18:53:00.001Z

Congratulations to Andy Wilson for slipping this into a Guardian cricket report this morning:

Swann, who grew up in Towcester, then popped up at Nottinghamshire.

Headline of the Day

2012-01-26T08:30:00.000Z

A victory today for the Daily Telegraph:

Swingers sprayed stranger in face with bear repellent

The case of William Mayne revisited

2012-01-25T21:23:00.002Z

William Mayne was one of Britain's very best children's writers from the 1950s until his death a couple of years ago. And in 2004 for he was gaoled for two-and-a-half years for offences against children.

Now a post on Freaky Trigger by someone who calls himself pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør (as is his right in a free country) returns to this troubling case:

It seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility.

We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life.

Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

pˆnk s lord, if I may call him that, makes great claims for Mayne's writing:

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books.

But I am convinced that these claims are entirely justified. William Mayne is an extraordinary writer.

Pˆnk s lord plans to read or re-read all the Mayne books he can find and (I think) to blog about them.

In the mean time, you may be interested in my own post The death of William Mayne. It has acquired 70 comments and gives us a clearer picture of the man and his activities.

Harborough man spends five days on top of a pole

2012-01-25T20:34:00.000Z

Thanks to top Harborough tweeter @solarpilchard for alerting us to this film from 1959 on the Media Archive for Central England website:

Jenny Martin begins the report with a piece to camera explaining that Jack Watling is squatting up a pole in Market Harborough to publicise a film. She then calls upon the services of fireman Tom Alcock to carry her up a ladder to Mr Watling's hut at the top of the scaffolding structure. She then interviews Watling about his experiences of spending five days and nights in his hut.

Which film was he publicising? The Harborough Mail has gone to its archives and promises to tell us next week.

Michael Crick meets Rupert Matthews

2012-01-24T21:28:00.001Z

Michael Crick had a report on Channel 4 News this evening about the continuing saga of Roger Helmer's resignation (or not) as one of the MEPs for the East Midlands and whether Rupert Matthews will replace him.

In his accompanying blog post he writes:

When I went to see Rupert Matthews at his home in Surrey today he refused to speak on camera. He doesn't want to upset his chances.

Off-camera, he denied several times to my face that he was a teacher for the IMU, and had merely designed the course. Yet in the IMU's online video Matthews talks to camera of being "your tutor for the course". Matthews denies being a professor for the university, though they were calling him such up to the end of last week.

And he denied that IMU gives out degrees, though their website quite clearly offer masters degrees. All very odd.

I agree with Crick's conclusion:

Conservative HQ says it will do what it can to help Matthews take over Helmer's seat. But they still want to question him. And I can't help feeling that question process will lead to Matthews being rejected, or persuaded to abandon his claim.That would be a pity in a way, for Rupert Matthews would be a lot more colourful than most MEPs.

And from a purely selfish point of view, if he does not become and MEP I shall be robbed of a stream of blog posts that write themselves.

If you want more background to this affair, read my earlier posts on Rupert Matthews.

Claire Tyler is the new chair of Cafcass

2012-01-24T18:22:00.000Z

Children & Young People Now reports that the Lib Dem peer Baroness Claire Tyler has been appointed chair of Cafcass - the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service:

Education Secretary Michael Gove, who appointed Baroness Tyler, said her appointment would "help ensure that children’s interests are always at the heart of care and family court proceedings".

She joins after a tough four years for the court service, which has battled to cope with a dramatic increase in caseloads since the Baby Peter case, as well as fend off criticism from MPs and unions.

Latest figures indicate Cafcass is winning its battle to reduce the number of unallocated cases. By the end of March last year there were just three unallocated cases, compared with 986 by the end of August 2009.

Six of the Best 218

2012-01-24T14:47:00.000Z

Welcome to The Libertine, "the blogging platform for young Lib Dems".

"All his life, Havel lived by the belief that if you wanted something to happen, you had to do something to make it happen, and damn the consequences, including arrest and prison, and possibly even death. Speaking about the early days of the post-Stalin thaw, he once said: “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” It is a fine summary of his attitude, and, in a sense, his legacy." Paul Wilson writes about the legacy of Václav Havel in the New York Review of Books.

Jock Coats argues, against George Monbiot, that libertarianism is naturally green.

The solution to hospital bed crises is not necessarily more beds, argues Slugger O'Toole, looking at the experience in Northern Ireland.

Nicholas Whyte looks at Scotch on the Rocks, a strangely prescient thriller written in the 1960s by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond.

"Few places I've visited have such a powerful and unique identity as Dungeness and I could see instantly why Ravilious had felt at home. The lighthouses and miniature railway and power stations and eccentric little houses were part of it, but what appealed to me most was the evidence of passing time." James Russell follows in the footsteps on Eric Ravilious and Derek Jarman.

Headline of the Day features a moose

2012-01-24T08:15:00.000Z

We have a new winner in the shape of the Huffington Post:

Dorothea Murphy, Alaska Woman, Fights Moose With Shovel

Konrad Smigielski and the destruction of old Leicester

2012-01-23T21:31:00.000Z

This is a video from the University of Leicester that offers a re-evaluation of the career of Konrad Smigielski, the city's planning officer from 1962.

It argues that, though Smigielski is often blamed for the worst aspect of Leicester's redevelopment (the ring road, the loss of ancient buildings in the city centre), he deserves credit for many features of the city that are admired today, such as the preservation of New Walk and the improvement of some of its Victorian suburbs.

There is more about Konrad Smigielski and Leicester in a post by Jones the Planner. For better or worse, we never did get the monorail he proposed.

Stroking the black dog: A carnival of mental health

2012-01-23T20:10:00.001Z

Ellen Arnison at In a Bun Dance is hosting a carnival of posts about mental health.

British R&B bands of the 1960s

2012-01-23T19:57:00.001Z

Andrew Hickey is serialising his new ebook on The Kinks. In the first part he writes of British rhythm and blues bands of the 1960s:

Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material.

When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!”

The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound.

Andrew seems spot on to me here, and not just because he compliments to two of my very favourite bands.

Does the location of the polling station affect how you vote?

2012-01-22T21:47:00.001Z

A post by Jon Henley on the Guardian's Shortcuts blog suggests that it may:

A new US study has found "significantly more conservative social and political attitudes" among people near churches than those near municipal buildings like schools. Since both serve as polling stations, voting location could affect a close-run election.

The research is reinforced by a 2008 study by Stanford business school, which found that in Arizona's 2000 elections, people voting in schools were – regardless of other factors – more likely to support higher education spending. In a control experiment, people shown images of churches proved less likely to back stem cell funding. "Environmental cues", they concluded, may in some cases influence voting outcomes even more than political views.

Leonard Cohen: Famous Blue Raincoat

2012-01-22T12:36:00.000Z

Leonard Cohen has been in the newspapers this week because of the release of his album Old Ideas. His later style may not be to everyone's taste: "Catch Leonard Cohen's UK tour before his voice drops outside the range of human hearing," as someone said when he released The Future in 1992.

Come to that, Cohen's earlier wasn't to everyone's taste either, but I find this wonderfully bleak.

More about Leonard Cohen on his official website.

Chelsea, Peter Osgood and Swinging London

2012-01-21T22:44:00.000Z

As an armchair Chelsea fan (though I was there when we drew the FA Cup final in 1970) the advent of Gullit and Vialli and "sexy football" seemed like a restoration of the natural order of things. Chelsea should be a glamour club that wins a cup now and then. The subsequent Premierships under St Jose were something quite outside the expectations or experience of the club's fans.

I once wrote. To which I can add today: under AVB, Chelsea are pretty much back where they belong.

Just how much of glamour club Chelsea was in the sixties was made clear in a Jewish Chronicle article by Greg Tesser a few weeks ago:

Chelsea were London's glamour club at the time, attracting a host of celebrity supporters. People like the actor David Hemmings, the photographer Terry O'Neill and, on occasion, Hollywood stars like Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, would regularly lunch at Alvaro's on the King's Road before making their way to Chelsea's ground, Stamford Bridge, to cheer on Osgood and company.

I was an occasional guest at Alvaro's, and had struck up a friendship with O'Neill, who, along with David Bailey, was the most fashionable photographer in London and the former husband of the actress Faye Dunaway.

It was not long before the national press cottoned on to the idea of footballers as celebrities and Osgood, playing for a club with so many glamorous supporters, soon became a glamour figure. When the Hollywood actress Raquel Welch was interviewed in The Times and (thanks to a little bit of Terry O'Neill persuasion) informed the world that she really admired Osgood, interest in him and Chelsea mushroomed.

Tesser goes on to describe a successful attempt to persuade Welch to attend a game - the straitlaced Chelsea manager Dave Sexton was against the idea, but Jimmy Hill smoothed things over and she was seen at Stamford Bridge.

Welch did not attend what he calls the post-match "tea room" at Stamford Bridge, Tesser says, but she was about the only celebrity of the day who did not:

Welch never attended the post-match "tea-room" at Stamford Bridge but she was about the only A-list celeb who didn't. Regular visitors convening for refreshment after matches included Michael Caine, John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Tom Courtney, Michael Crawford, Leonard Rossiter, Dennis Waterman and even United States Secretary of State and Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger. They were all, as Osgood used to say, "Blues nuts".

Another fan was the Jewish comic actor Marty Feldman. Marty lived above me in Wellesley Court in Maida Vale and I introduced him to Osgood. I do not know which of them was more starstruck. Feldman at the time was one of the most sought-after comic performers in the country, but even so I remember him saying wistfully to me: "I wish I had Osgood's talent".

Those really were the days.

Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference

2012-01-21T21:12:00.001Z

I spent this afternoon at Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference.

It was an excellent event and could well provide a model for other local parties. Liberal Democrats can be so concerned with campaigning that they seldom make the time to discuss policy or the party's wider philosophy. Meanwhile, our national party conferences can be prohibitively expensive, are increasingly managed and require you to give your passport number, inside leg measurement and an DNA sample.

So there is certainly a role for more local events that enable party members to learn about and debate policy questions

There were three speakers: William Davidson from ALTER (the Lib Dem group Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform); Dr Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante, a consultant in public health medicine, and Bill Newton Dunn MEP.

William Davidson gave a good summary of the case for taxing land values. This is an idea that has been around in the party since the 19th century - indeed, suggested that Henry George's classic work on the subject from 1879, Progress and Poverty, outsold Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the English-speaking world.

The basic idea behind land value taxation is that the state should tax the profits that private landowners make because of public investment - say a new railway station increasing the price of nearby houses - should be taxed so that the public gets the advantage instead. At the same time, the state would have less need to tax income, profit or economic activity in general.

Land value taxation was implemented to an extent by Liberal governments early in the 20th century, but abandoned in the 1920s. There has been a recent revival of interest in the idea and it is now Liberal Democrat policy to use a form of the tax as a replacement for business rates.

My concern, which I tried to frame in a question, is that the idea of land value taxation was developed in a era when the great villains, in Liberal eyes, were landlords who refused to allow the fullest economic development of their estates. Nowadays, Lib Dem campaigning is often predicated on the idea that it would be a good thing if land were not developed to its fullest extent, and I wonder how this fits with taxing land values. Anyway, there is plenty more about the idea on the ALTER website.

Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante made an impassioned case against Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. You can read her view for yourself in a Guardian article published last week.

I was convinced that we should campaign to retain the duty of the Secretary of State for Health to provide services. This is particularly necessary if you are a good Liberal who wants to see more diversity and local management in the system, as there then needs to be someone at the centre who will act to fill any gaps that emerge. David Cameron's recent intervention on the quality of nursing care is a good example of what can sometimes be necessary.

Beyond that, I always find it hard to disentangle concern for the patient, the defence of professional interests and the resistance to change we all feel in our jobs in such contributions. For instance, Corinne was concerned that local government is to take more responsibility for public health, but that seems to me a thoroughly good thing.

The idea that we should just leave it to the doctors won't really do: as someone pointed out from the floor, the British Medical Association opposed the setting up of the National Health Service ("...and Lloyd George's Health Insurance Act," I helpfully added).

Finally, there was Bill Newton Dunn - eloquent, patient, polite, as he always is. He gave us a master class on European politics and the current economic crisis.

Somehow MEPs sounds less like politicians than Westminster MPs. In part this is because so many of us know too little about European politics, so such talks always have an element of education about them. But it is also because there is something of a democratic deficit about the whole European project - see this week's election for a new President of the European Parliament for an example, though Bill told us that there are moves to make this process more open and to involve the public more in future.

He also, surely rightly, argued that David Cameron's problems with Europe have their roots in his decision to seek support in the last Conservative leadership by promising to take the party out of the European People's Party where is natural allies are to be found. More encouragingly, Bill suggested that Cameron has now realised the dangers of isolation and is trying to do something about it.

Oh, and this being a Lib Dem event, there was someone who wanted to solve the problems of interpretation at the European Parliament by forcing everyone to learn Esperanto.

Overall, it was a really good event and, as I began by saying, its format could well be copied by other local parties. It ran from noon until four o'clock, meaning that Nottingham people did not have to give up a whole Saturday and those of us who came from further way could travel at a civilised hour.

The venue was the comfortable surroundings of the city' masonic headquarters. There was a Wi-Fi network there, so I had thoughts of tweeting from the event, but I did not have the password (or perhaps the handshake) to allow me to use it.

Lord Mayor of Leicester could be suspended

2012-01-21T09:22:00.001Z

From the Leicester Mercury:

The Lord Mayor of Leicester could be suspended after an investigation concluded he had brought the office of councillor into disrepute.

Veteran politician Rob Wann was referred to the city's standards board over claims he had five parking tickets cancelled by senior council officers and received a free parking permit to which he was not entitled.

Independent investigator Jon Wigmore issued a report to the city council's standards board on his findings this week.

The law states such reports should not normally be handed to the media.

However, a copy has been leaked to the Mercury and we have decided to publish its findings as we believe it is in the public interest to do so.

Publishing such a report can currently lead to a prison sentence under Section 63 of the Local Government Act 2000, but that section of the law is about to abolished.

Robert Wann (not to be confused with the city's elected mayor Sir Peter Soulsby) maintains his innocence and says he has done nothing wrong.

I'm just wild about Hari

2012-01-20T22:30:00.000Z

Well, not wild exactly, but I do think that Johann Hari's resignation from the Independent was the right outcome.

As I said in July of last year when the scandal broke:

He has always seemed to me more of an academic essayist than a journalist. A good example are his slightly irritating appearances on The Review Show, where new film or novel has to be compared with three others to make sense of it.

So it was no great surprise to me that he should turn out to be more at home copying passages out of his interviewees' books than taking notes of what they say.

The sanest summing up of the affair I have read was posted by Splintered Sunrise in the same month - I included it in a Six of the Best at the time - who emphasised that Simon Kelner, the newspaper's former editor, must take a share of the blame.

It is worth reading the whole post, but this is the key passage:

Again and again, we come back to Kelner. He hired a raw young star about whom doubts had already been expressed at the New Statesman, and relentlessly promoted and protected him.

Hari didn’t get the firm editorial hand a young journalist needs; his columns don’t seem to have been subjected to fact-checking or serious editing (comparing Hari’s columns on the Indy site with his own site, one sees that Indy editorial broke up his long paragraphs and corrected a few obvious howlers, but little else); he clearly was never given the training or mentoring he needed (and if Hari thought he didn’t need training, Kelner should have insisted)

Hari was given plenty of resources – one hears stories of Indy interns doing mountains of photocopying that would then be couriered over to the great man (couriered, I ask you, as if he was Peter fucking Mandelson) – but didn’t give him what he really needed, a guiding hand.

Headline of the Day

2012-01-20T07:55:00.000Z

Today's award goes to the Daily Mirror for:

Man arrested in Saddam Hussein statue buttock investigation

A tribute to Kodak

2012-01-19T22:38:00.002Z

From BBC News:

Eastman Kodak, the company that invented the hand-held camera, has filed for bankruptcy protection.

The move gives the company time to reorganise itself without facing its creditors, and Kodak said that it would mean business as normal for customers.

The company has recently moved away from cameras to focus on making printers, to try to stem its losses.

MEP resignations show what's wrong with the list system

2012-01-19T21:09:00.000Z

European Voice reports that the Liberal Democrat MEP Diana Wallis is to resign as MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber. Apparently she wants to "take a break from politics" and believes it is time "for someone with fresh eyes to take over".

All of which makes it a little odd that Diana stood as president of the European Parliament earlier this week.

But there is a deeper issue here. Because Diana's resignation appears to form part of an increasing trend for MEPs to stand down between elections.

I suppose the thinking is that it will help resigning MEP's party in the next election if its list boasts more people with experience in Brussels.

But there is a danger that these resignations give the impression is in the gift of the resigning member or that member's party rather than the voters.

The fact that Diana is likely to be succeeded by her husband Stewart Arnold strengthens the impression that Euro seats are the member's personal property to give away, but the Roger Helmer and Rupert Matthews saga (Gollygate? UFOgate?) has made it clear - see the comments on this post - that the seat is in the gift of the retiring member's party.

One thing is for sure: the voters are not consulted.

All of which should remind us how bad the list system is. As someone said in a tweet to me today, we must make sure it is not used for elections to a reformed House of Lords.

With thanks to Lib Dem Voice.

Six of the Best 217

2012-01-19T20:39:00.001Z

Richard Clare on Liberal Democrat Voice wants your help in stopping the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer.

Is lack of funding really the only possible explanation for a school's weakness? asks Eaten by Missionaries. "Even the late Labour government's worst enemies would concede that it spent a lot of money on schools in the days when boom and bust had still been abolished. There hasn't been time for the effects of austerity (whether one considers it painful but necessary or ideologically driven) to filter through. So if comprehensive schools have been failing because of lack of funding, then there really is no hope."

Cicero's Songs reminds us that "the deepest instincts of the Labour Party remain collectivist and tribal.".

Writing for Youngzine, Anita Ramachandran notes that 2012 is the International Year of Cooperatives.

"It’s a wonder Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigour. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read." In the New York Times Review, Verlyn Klinkeborg hears the whirling sound of planet Dickens.

IanVisits peeks behind the hoardings at Blackfriars Station.

Headline of the Day

2012-01-19T19:23:00.001Z

Well done to the Leicester Mercury for:

Drink-driver was caught in a nappy and a bonnet

Write a guest post for Liberal England

2012-01-18T20:40:00.000Z

A reminder that Liberal England is now accepting guest posts. So far 24 (count 'em) have appeared:

In praise of slow government - Simon Beard
Children and the surveillance state: Will the Coalition keep its word? - Terri Dowty
Standards matter in higher education, not just participation rates - Anonymous
A Woking class hero is something to be - Lisa Harding
The campaign for a Robin Hood Tax - Ian Sullivan
The limits of the Big Society - Martin Veart
Can hyperlocal news sites be the future of journalism? - Niall Sullivan
How Edward Stourton misunderstood The Orange Book - Simon Titley
Why I caged my son: The Love Outdoor Play campaign - Daniel Raven-Ellison
Against the Comment is Free view of politics - Jonathan King
A beginner's guide to anarchism - Ruth Kinna
The other side of suicide - Elinor O'Neill
AV, politicians and the wasted vote - Chris Slowe
Creative Perambulations: Marking the boundaries of Sherwood Forest - Dave Wood
Towards a Liberal Democrat ideology - Simon Beard
The community shops movement - Mike Perry
Why the Liberal Democrats should support co-operatives - Peter Arnold
Grandparents or adoption: Who would you choose? - Peter Hulme
Arts Fresco, Market Harborough, 9-11 September 2011 - Hazel Cook
Richard Jefferies and Coate: A centenary celebration - Rebecca Welshman
"A modest county": Pevsner in Leicestershire - Susie Harries
Anthony Burgess in Leicester - Phil Beesley
Why you should visit The Bog - Paul Davis
Blogging for happiness - Ellen Arnison

If you would like to write one yourself, please send me an email so we can discuss your idea.

I am chiefly interested in political posts, but if you are a regular reader you will know that this blog is noted for its eclectic range of interests...

The long history of Boris Island

2012-01-18T20:07:00.000Z

The proposal for a Boris Island airport in the Thames estuary have put me in mind of the debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s over whether London needed a third airport and, if so, where it should be sited.

Writing on a Guardian blog, Andy Beckett reminds us that Edward Heath's government fully intended to build a similar scheme at Foulness (or Maplin as it more euphoniously came to be called) in Essex:

t would have multiple runways and new transport links to London, to relieve the already-notorious noise and congestion at Heathrow and help regenerate the poorer eastern side of the capital. Heath was very keen, and the plan quickly acquired faintly sci-fi features: "a brand-new jet city" to be built nearby, "tracked hovercraft" to whisk airport users to London. Speculators bought up whole streets around the planned London terminus near King's Cross.

In 1973, construction started on the grey-brown Essex mudflats. A gravel "trial bank" 300 metres long was erected, to see if an airport could withstand the North Sea storms and deep estuary quicksands.

Riding the rising tide of early 70s environmentalism and political militancy, local opponents of the project organised themselves flamboyantly as the Defenders of Essex, and seduced visiting reporters with picturesque arguments such as the damage likely to be done by the airport to Southend's cockle pickers. Meanwhile, in Westminster, an unholy alliance of Labour MPs and austere Thatcherites-in-the-making such as Norman Tebbit questioned the rising cost of the scheme to taxpayers.

In those days the easiest way to get a round of applause on Any Questions? (the panel usually seemed to consist of Richard Marsh, Arianna Stassinopoulos, Michael Clayton - "editor of Horse & Hound" - and Russell Braddon) was to call for prestige projects like this airport, Concorde and the Channel tunnel to be abandoned. And eventually the airport and the tunnel were abandoned.

It turns out, if you read an excellent paper published by the House of Commons Library - Aviation: proposals for an airport in the Thames estuary, 1945-2011 - that Maplin and Boris Island are just two of many schemes for an airport on the Kent or Essex mudflats.

You may enjoy the Pathetic Motorways entry for the unbuilt M13 too.

Jonathan Meades on France starts tonight

2012-01-18T14:16:00.000Z

A new series by him is a television event, but the BBC has allowed Jonathan Meades on France little publicity.

So let me tell you that you can see the first part, Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia, on BBC Four tonight at 9 p.m. The BBC Four website tells us:

Jonathan Meades travels through Lorraine and explains why, although close to its eastern border, it has become the symbolic, or even mystical, heart of France and a stronghold of a romantic nationalism that is also expressed by such diverse means as typography, music, engineering, exquisite urbanism and, above all, a sensitivity to Germany's proximity.

The second film, to be shown next week, is A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries and third remains a mystery for now.

You can read an interview with Meades about the series on The Dabbler and there is plenty more from the great man at the MeadesShrine on Youtube.

Otters filmed in the River Welland at Market Harborough

2012-01-17T20:10:00.001Z

Hurry over to the Harborough Mail website for the footage:

One of them plays with a beer bottle in the video, shot near the Northampton Road bridge in Harborough at about 5.30pm on Tuesday night (January 17).

The Guardian catches up with Liberator's editorial on police commissioner elections

2012-01-17T20:04:00.001Z

There will be an article in tomorrow's Guardian by the paper's home affairs editor Alan Travis that quotes the editorial of the January issue of Liberator. That editorial is highly critical of the Liberal Democrats' decision not to contest the new police commissioner elections in November - as was this blog.

Travis writes:

The January edition of Liberator, the long-established voice of the party's radical activists, has attacked the decision in virulent terms, calling it "an act of political lunacy".

Its editorial accuses the party leadership of political cowardice and goes on to ask: "Is this really the party that was prepared to stand up for civil liberty throughout the New Labour years, but which now has nothing to say on how voters are policed or how the police behave?"

The only slightly odd thing about this is that the January issue of Liberator was with subscribers before Christmas. You can read the editorial Travis refers to - it is the second item of Commentary and titled "Running Scared - on the Liberator website.

Local News Story of the Day

2012-01-17T18:51:00.002Z

From the Cambridge News:

Theft victim who caught up with crook 'concerned about youth fitness'

A long-distance runner has donated cash to promote youth fitness after catching a thief who snatched his laptop.

Peter Stevens was in his car outside his home in Beche Road, Abbey, Cambridge, when the hooded thief opened the rear door and grabbed the computer.

The 34-year-old runner and IT expert chased him and was surprised when he caught up with the thief after just 225 metres.

Realising the game was up, the puffed-out criminal dropped the laptop, allowing Mr Stevens to pick it up.

Mr Stevens said: “I was appalled by how unfit this guy was. I thought it would take a lot longer to catch up with him."

Leicester rail crash 1949

2012-01-17T08:15:00.000Z

"It's become a Leicester legend: the night a railway engine and tender derailed and fell into Tommy Wadsworth's backyard in Northgate street. It's still talked about to this day."

The Sutton Trust, private schools and social mobility

2012-01-16T21:49:00.002Z

Stephen Tall writes in slightly wary support of the proposal from the Sutton Trust that the government should fund places for poor students at the best private schools:

But those who think Sir Peter is wrong-headed should reflect seriously on what their alternative to the status quo is.

Sure, everyone on the liberal-left champions the comprehensive ideal that all local state schools should be great schools — but decades later we’re still waiting. And in the meantime thousands of pupils are losing out each and every year, while the intelligentsia which wrings its hands at the thought of selection by merit happily games the system to ensure their own kids don’t suffer.

Like Stephen, I am attracted to this idea but feel a little guilty about it. But the size of the problem with the current system was brought home by the recent two-part BBC4 documentary on the history of grammar schools. It quoted figures showing how the percentage of state schools pupils at Oxbridge has declined since the 1960s.

A Spectator Coffee House article by Peter Hoskin quoted much the same figures in a passage from A Class Act by Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard:

Modern mythology has it that the number of privately educated children at Oxbridge is on a steadily declining path. And indeed it was - in the heyday of the state grammar schools in the 1960s. By 1969 only 38 per cent of places at Oxford were awarded to private educated children - a sharp reduction for the private schools even on their 1965 proportion. And yet in the 1990s, thanks to the destruction of the grammar schools and the consequent decamping to the private sector of many of the most able children, the figure now hovers around the 50 per cent mark.

Nick Clegg's speech on responsible capitalism and the John Lewis economy

2012-01-16T20:59:00.000Z

The Liberal Democrat website has the full text of the speech on responsible capitalism that Nick Clegg gave at the Mansion House today. It is worth reading the whole thing:

Our problem is what Jesse Norman has called crony capitalism. It’s easy to throw rhetorical rocks at directors, bankers and businesses. But, if we are honest, this is as much a failure of politicians and regulators, the authorities too often cowed by corporate power. Whether that is political parties of all stripes in hock to vested interests or regulators struggling to stop supermarkets from putting the squeeze on small suppliers, whether it’s politicians kow-towing to media barons, the problem is endemic.

There’s nothing new about it. Kings have always bestowed privileges on their favourite merchants. Corporations will naturally seek a dominant market position. It’s one of the reasons liberals from John Bright to the present day have been such fierce advocates of free trade. The agricultural landlords of the 19th century and early 20th century were happy for working people to pay more for their food because of protective tariffs. What Lloyd George in 1906 memorably called ‘stomach taxes’. So long as their own profits were protected.

This has always been capitalism’s greatest danger: a tendency for the rule makers and the money makers to get too close. And we saw the consequences of that closeness play out in the most dramatic fashion right here, in the City, just three years ago. It was a political failure; a regulatory failure; and a market failure too.

As I discussed with his kinswoman Deirdre Razzall earlier today, another Liberal pioneer in this field he could have mentioned is Theodore Cook Taylor.

Chris Huhne hails 50p tax rate decision as a Lib Dem victory

2012-01-15T20:53:00.000Z

John Bingham in the Daily Telegraph reports Chris Huhne's interview on BBC Radio 5's Pienaar's Politics:

Mr Huhne indicated that the 50p rate was set to stay, remarking: “I think we've won that argument.”

He said that this was “partly, I think, because people simply realise that this is not an appropriate moment to send out a signal that we're going to tax well off people less”.

While insisting it had been a collective decision, he nevertheless suggested that pressure from the Liberal Demoracts had forced Mr Osborne’s hand.

“The Conservatives don't have an overall majority, so they need, if they want to get a finance bill through, if they want to get anything else through, they need to have Liberal Democrat support in the House of Commons and that's absolutely crucial,” he said,

Six of the Best 216

2012-01-15T20:06:00.001Z

"The current Cabinet of the United Kingdom consists of twenty three members, each department also has several junior ministers. In post-devolution Britain, majority of social policies (health, education,et al) are devolved to regional bodies – the power of Westminster is reduced. And this proposes an intriguing question: Can the Prime Minister justify a large Cabinet?" Too lib·er·al [adj.] makes the case for smaller government.

iRadar gives five reasons why he will not be voting for Ed Miliband.

David Hunt, Conservative peer and the new head of the Press Complaints Commission, recently made the extraordinary claim that bloggers pose a greater challenge than the tabloid press. Richard Wilson has since been in correspondence with him and is far from reassured.

"Croydon once had civic leaders with the vision to commercialise the town centre in the 1960s, replete with subsidised arts and national quality concerts at Fairfield. The recent barbaric destruction of arts provision must have played some role in making Croydon less attractive as a national HQ for Nestlé – playing down to Croydon’s image as a cultural desert." Inside Croydon looks at the decline of the borough under recent Conservative administrations.

Landscape Architecture Blog considers the shared space crossing outside Sloane Square tube station.

"Painting the Forth Bridge" will no longer do as a metaphor for a task without end. Now The Victorianist looks at its construction in the 19th century - and provides this post with its illustration.

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound: Kites

2012-01-15T12:20:00.001Z

Inspired by Christmas on Earth Continued, it is time for me to show you the first single I ever bought, because I must have done so a few days after that happening happened. I still have the disc, though I don't own a turntable to play it on at the moment.

Kites was released in October 1967 and reached no. 9 in the chart the following week. So I suspect that I bought it with a Christmas record token - I have the amount of 7/6 in mind, but it was all a long time ago.

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound consisted largely of the three Shulman brothers, almost recruited Elton John as their keyboard player and later metamorphosed into the progressive rock band Gentle Giant.

All of which was pretty cool for a seven-year-old, I hope you will agree. Perhaps they put something in the school milk in those days?

My first LP was less cool: Band on the Run by Wings. I thought the title track and Jet were great singles when I was 13 - that is the age when you spin the dial after hearing a favourite track, hoping to find another station that is playing it so you can hear it again right away.

But it all sounded pretty tame by the time I sent it to a charity shop.

Robert Maxwell (Labour) loses his seat at Buckingham

2012-01-14T21:52:00.000Z

A segment of the the BBC's October 1974 election coverage - there is much more of it on Youtube.Robert Maxwell appears right at the start.

Michael Brown has a dog named Charlie...

2012-01-14T20:10:00.001Z

...after the former Liberal Democrat leader.

Or so the Daily Telegraph claims.

Christmas on Earth Continued: 1967 The Winter of Love

2012-01-13T20:11:00.002Z

I came across a priceless (for me) clip of Traffic playing live in 1967 the other day. It turns out to come from an event called Christmas on Earth continued held at Earls Court on 22 December of that year.

Marmalade Skies (from which I have borrowed the illustration here) says of it:

The last major underground event of the year is “Christmas On Earth Continued”, billed as an “All-Night Christmas Dream Party” and held in the vast London Olympia on the 22nd. Pre-publicity is hopelessly inadequate and this, plus a particularly severe winter freeze, results in a sparse attendance and financial disaster for the organisers, despite a fabulous line-up of acts—Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon, Pink Floyd, The Move, Soft Machine, Tomorrow, Graham Bond Organisation, Sam Gopal and Paper Blitz Tissue. The Who fail to turn up!

And someone writing on the Pink Floyd fan site A Fleeting Glimpse disproves what they say about the sixties by painting a vivid picture of it:

Olympia was a much more cavernous venue than the Ally Pally, and the focus was on two stages, facing each other across the vast hall. Bands were playing alternately, causing the majority of the 10,000 crowd to turn, first left for fourty minutes, then right and so forth, like a colony of paisley penguins!

The light shows, if anything, surpassed the amazing Ally Pally event the previous July, with the wall to wall coverage and dreamscapes. ( Mark Boyle's Sensory Laboratory was specifically billed as support for Soft Machine, and the Floyd had announced the first appearance of their fabulous new '3D lightshow'.) We were absolutely wired for a good time and the bands didn't disappoint us.

Soft Machine, with Kevin Ayers resplendent in pre-punk black string vest, climaxed with the ultimate Dada version of 'We did it again' as Robert Wyatt leapt into a full bath of water, that just happened to be on-stage with them! At least, we assumed it was water.

Tomorrow powered through their unique mix of heavily Beatles influenced psychedelia. During 'Strawberry Fields Forever' Twink(drums) and Junior (bass) performed a mimed fight whilst being subjected to the most powerful strobe light effects I've ever witnessed. Steve Howe was a revelation, moving from raga to classical to Barrett - style anarchy with an almost arrogant ease.

Traffic, still with Dave Mason, even performed 'Hole in my shoe'. Steve Winwood was into his white cheesecloth period, and their music was so unlike anything else around that they occupied a totally original space. The song, 'Here we go round the Mulberry Bush' was very typical of their trippy, watery sound at that time.

Hendrix - voom! All light shows were killed for his performance. Noel Redding was constantly niggling Jimi, playing bass behind his head as Jimi performed his tricks with his guitar. It was the first time I saw Hendrix with his Gibson Flying Arrow, and the tension on-stage produced some electrifying music.

Christmas on Earth Continued is also remembered for a sad reason. As Alison's Wonderland says:

Sadly, the Christmas on Earth festival also marked Syd Barrett's last major show with Pink Floyd. By the time of the concert, Barrett had suffered a significant mental breakdown due to stress and excessive drug use, allegedly exacerbating symptoms of schizophrenia, though Barrett's sister denies this diagnosis. At the concert, Barrett was observed to just stand on stage with his guitar, his arms hanging limp at his side, while Roger Waters played the same bass line over and over again.

Anyway, here is that clip of Traffic. They play Dear Mr Fantasy (which Steve Winwood still plays today) and Giving to You:

And here are various clips of Jimi Hendrix playing at the same event:

Some posts on The Corridor (a cricket blog)

2012-01-12T19:46:00.002Z

Finding myself in possession of the password for what seems to be an otherwise abandoned cricket blog, I have added some posts this week:

Later. And now my password no longer works.

In which I have a story published in the Shropshire Star

2012-01-12T18:43:00.002Z

A story in my favourite newspaper begins:

One in four office workers complains of “chronic boredom”, turning to coffee and chocolate to lighten up their day.

People are also more likely to have an alcoholic drink at the end of a boring day at work, a study of office-based employees showed.

Four out of five of those surveyed by occupational psychologist Sandi Mann said boredom caused them to lose concentration, and half believed it led to mistakes.

Which is rather pleasing, because that story originates from a press released I sent out in the course of my day job.

All media professionals will agree. It doesn't get much better than getting a story into the Shropshire Star.

Richard Reeves discusses John Stuart Mill's On Liberty

2012-01-11T22:12:00.003Z

This is an issue of the excellent Philosophy Bites podcast devoted to an interview with Richard Reeves, author of John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

The interview concentrates on Mill's On Liberty. Note in particular Reeves' important point that the widely quoted 'harm principle' is not the core of Mill's argument in the book.

If you enjoy this interview you may want to watch a video of a lecture Reeves gave on Mill at the University of Richmond, Virginia, in 2009. You could even read an old Liberator article of mine, Why John Stuart Mill is the greatest liberal, that owes a lot to Reeves' arguments.

Charles Kennedy set to lead pro-Union campaign in referendum

2012-01-11T21:27:00.001Z

A report in tomorrow's Guardian claims:

Alistair Darling, Charles Kennedy and the former Tory leader in Scotland, Annabel Goldie, are being lined up as the main faces of the pro-union campaign in the referendum on Scottish independence, sources in the three parties confirmed Wenesday [sic] night.

The report also says that Labour and Liberal Democrats have expressed the hope that David Cameron will adopt a lower profile in future.

Will Charles and co. be enough to save the Union? Certainly, the rise of the SNP has been greatly eased by the way that almost all the considerable figures in the other parties have chosen to make their careers at Westminster rather than Holyrood. He may now face more formidable opposition.

But, having been told when young that the future lay in great conglomerates, I grew up into a world more notable for the break up of multinational states - Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union. It is hard to resist the feeling that the tides are at present in favour of the SNP.

Another question is how hard the Conservatives will try to save the Union. It used to lie at the heart of their identity, but in this way - as in so many others - the modern Conservative Party has little connection with traditional British Conservatism.

I doubt that David Cameron will want to be the prime minister on whose watch the United Kingdom broke up. But it is hard for him to resist the calculation that it would be much easier for the Conservatives to win a majority at Westminster if there were no Scottish members there.

And, as we were reminded in King's Lynn, to the average Tory member the Scots are just a bunch of ingrates who take more than their share of public spending.

The SNP, equally, is convinced that an independent Scotland would be much more prosperous. They cannot both be right.

My own suspicion is that the end of the Union would make surprisingly little difference to Scotland or England, which is why I find that I am not dismayed at the prospect.

Six of the Best 215

2012-01-10T21:27:00.000Z

"I know that some people who agree with me that Thatcher was a divisive and damaging Prime Minister are boycotting the film. My advice to them is swallow your pride and go and see it." The Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Williams, our man in the front row of the stalls with a bucket of popcorn, has been to see The Iron Lady.

If you take Stephen's advice then you will probably want to read a three-part survey of the development of Margaret Thatcher's voice and oratory by Max Atkinson.

The Slog casts a scathing eye on the career of shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy.

"The underground remains of Northampton Castle could be brought to the surface under new proposals to regenerate a historic area of the town," reports the Northampton Chronicle & Echo. The picture here shows the only portion of it currently to be seen above ground, and that has been moved from its original position.

Spitalfields Life pays tribute to Ronald Searle by reprinting some drawings he made there in 1953.

"There are places that touch the soul so deeply it hurts." Diary of a Desperate Exmoor Woman on the home of the children's writer Alan Garner.

The restored Hallaton Helmet is coming to the Harborough Museum

2012-01-10T20:08:00.000Z

The ceremonial Roman helmet found at Hallaton in Leicestershire in 2000 has been restored and was revealed to the press today.

BBC News quotes Dr Jeremy Hill from the British Museum explaining its significance:

"You can't underestimate the shock and surprise this had when it was first found - Hallaton really transforms our understanding of the Roman conquest of Britain."

He added: "Even if it went into the ground in 43, 44, 45AD, that is changing what we normally think is happening in the Roman conquest.

"We normally think of the Roman conquest of Britain as Romans versus us. Here you probably have a situation where local Britons are fighting on the Roman side."

The Hallaton Helmet will be displayed permanently at the Harborough Museum from 28 January alongside the other finds from the site.

Guardian wins Weak Diary Story of the Day

2012-01-10T18:51:00.000Z

The Guardian Diary used to be one of the best things about the newspaper, breaking and pursuing substantial stories of its own.

Those days are a couple of decades past. Even so, an item Hugh Muir gave us today stands out for its vacuity.

Here it is in full:

Historians, meanwhile, continue to be fascinated by our ruling coalition. And they wonder, what other examples are there of questionable figures going out of their way to propel Tories to power? My man in the archives discovers that in 1899, the aspiring Conservative politician Winston Churchill stood as the Conservative candidate in the Oldham byelection. Posters sprung up around town urging electors to vote for Churchill, who was "top of the card" – and would surely be "top of the poll". And who printed and published those posters? One "WE Clegg". Send for the genealogist.

David Dimbleby and the demise of Nationwide

2012-01-09T21:03:00.001Z

As I am not a great admirer of David Dimbleby - his career surely owes more to family connections and bladder control than talent - I was intrigued to come across this account of the demise of the popular BBC1 programme Nationwide under the editorship of Roger Bolton.

It was written by Ian Jones in 2002 and a revised version now appears on Off the Telly:

The climax of this, however, and the twist which in hindsight sealed Nationwide’s fate, was the enlistment of David Dimbleby as a new host in January 1982. This was solely Bolton’s doing. Dimbleby had been wooed by former Nationwide producers before, but turned them down; now he made the move, impressed with the expressed intention of Bolton to jettison the frippery and promote hard-nosed investigative journalism.

“I think it displays rather a narrow vision for a programme like Nationwide not to cover events in, say, Israel or Poland,” Dimbleby sniffed. Regardless of the merits of this perception, what was arguably of far greater importance was whether Nationwide itself, with its very particular character, history and legacy, was and ever could have been the vehicle for such a stern-lipped agenda.

Viewers certainly didn’t think so. “Nationwide is the only programme that covers matters of interest about Britain which do not necessarily warrant coverage by the national news or even national press. Hands off Nationwide, Mr Dimbleby,” an angry correspondent wrote to Radio Times. “Face the facts,” declared another, “it is all a dreadful mistake. Return the chubby chap to ‘Miserama’ and give us back Frank and Sue and the rest with their everyday stories of real people.”

There was indeed a perversity in filling up a programme structured to “present the facts, the people, and the background of the country we live in” with a stream of foreign news stories. Dimbleby himself displayed a singular lack of charm and viewer rapport that was a trademark of the programme. He was even billed, controversially, above Frank Bough in Radio Times.

If that wasn’t enough, his arrival was marked by yet another makeover with a further “new” theme – an acutely irritating synthesiser-heavy concoction with little trace of a tune – plus a title sequence that bizarrely harked back to that first ever “here’s-your-region” effort of 1969. Ratings slipped still further; and though Dimbleby’s “temporary” departure in April ‘82 became a permanent one, the damage was done. Management decreed the programme unsalvageable.

Later. And, thanks to TV Ark, you can even hear the theme and see a little of Dimbleby in Nationwide action. Scroll down to Nationwide 1982.

The Black Beast of Harborough

2012-01-09T20:21:00.000Z

This is the lead story on the front page of the current Harborough Mail:

A large black panther-like creature was spotted running across a field at Foxton in the latest sighting of the infamous ‘black beast’.

Schoolgirl Sarah Burdett had a shock when she saw the beast from her bedroom as it moved from the cover of a hedge off North Lane in the village.

She rushed to the field with her dad’s partner Lora Cannon, but the large cat was no longer anywhere to be seen.

However the pair found what they believed were its prints and droppings, which they photographed as evidence.

The incident is the latest in a series of sightings of ‘black beasts’ stalking the Harborough countryside which go back as far as the 1990s.

The Hounds of Baskerville and Saucers Over the Moor

2012-01-09T19:56:00.000Z

Last night's Sherlock gave us a secret research station on Dartmoor.

A novel idea?

Not quite. Here are trainee journalist Dan Sturt and his mother talking in Malcolm Saville's 1955 children's book Saucers Over the Moor:

Mrs Sturt put down her cup.

"You know as well as I do, Dan, that there's some secret place atop of the Moor. Folk round here all know it but they don't talk about it."

"That's true enough. It's something to do with atomic stuff, I b'lieve. I asked one of the warders from the Prison in the train once but couldn't get much out of him. Said it was built in the war but that people were still working there . . . Then I asked a chap in the office and he said we'd never be allowed to mention it. I thought I'd told you about it before."

"You did son. I'm just trying to help you. Seems to me that if a lot of crazy scientists are shut up in that place then there's something interesting going on. Do you know where it is?"

"Somewhere high above the source of the Swincombe Brook."

You can read a little of the background to Saucers Over the Moor in an earlier post on this blog.

Now Eleanor Burnham is on reality television too

2012-01-08T18:44:00.000Z

What is it with Welsh Liberal Democrats and reality television?

The other day it was Lembit Opik (again). But Eleanor Burnham, AM for the North Wales regional constituency until May 2011, was also on S4C over Christmas.

She appeared on Dudley: Pryd o Sêr. Cheat by clicking on the English button and you learn:

Over four nights between 27 and 30 December, Dudley: Pryd o Sêr sets a culinary challenge for a group of celebrities that would make the most experienced chef tremble.

Eleanor is quoted as saying:

I am quietly competitive and although the tasks were hard it was nowhere near as hard as working in politics!

U2 and Johnny Cash: The Wanderer

2012-01-08T15:52:00.000Z

I have long been resistant to the bombast of U2, but I love Johnny Cash and this, the final track from the band's 1993 LP Zooropa, still sounds good.

It reminds me of bombing around the Stiperstones in an open-topped car. The spoil heaps at Snailbeach had been landscaped by then, but the words still fitted the area's strange post-industrial landscape.

And there was cricket on the radio. A youngster called Ben Hollioake was hitting the Australians all round Lord's on his one-day international debut which means I can date this experience precisely to 25 May 1997.

John Arlott: Cricket's Radical Voice

2012-01-07T22:11:00.000Z

Earlier this evening I listened to this superb documentary on BBC Radio 4.

John Arlott is remembered as a cricket commentator - except that it is more than 30 years since he retired as a commentator and 20 years since his death, so I fear that many followers of the game today have hardly heard of him. Suffice to say, he was the greatest cricket commentator there has ever been.

But there was far more to him than that. He was twice a Liberal candidate and, in the days when the party was at its lowest ebb, he was probably the best known Liberal in the country, thanks to his appearances on Any Questions? He was also one of the foremost British campaigners against Apartheid in South Africa

You can hear John Arlott: Cricket's Radical Voice on BBC iPlayer for the next week. By the time it has finished, the programme has gone a long way to substantiate its claim that he was "one of the great radical liberals of the 20th century".

Tim Farron to benefit from cross-party deal on Cumbrian boundaries

2012-01-06T19:51:00.001Z

Last year, in the process of paying Tim Farron some backhanded compliments, I commented that he had:

turned Westmorland and Lonsdale into what looked very like a safe Liberal Democrat seat until the Boundary Commission got hold of it.

When I wrote that, it looked as though Tim would have to stand in a very much altered constituency against the Conservatives' Rory Stewart (aka Lawrence of Belgravia).

Tonight, courtesy of Michael Crick on his blog for Channel 4 News, comes news that the major parties appear to have agreed upon alternative proposals that would overturn the Commission's proposals:

The cross-party deal would overturn the boundary commission’s controversial plans to create a new seat which would have joined Windermere with Whitehaven. Most Cumbrians thought the plans were crazy, since the new seat would have been a geographical nightmare in terms of transport links, straddling England’s highest mountain range.

Under the alternative cross-party plan, two of Cumbria’s five seats would be centred around its biggest urban areas – Carlisle and Barrow. Another would take in the industrial towns of West Cumbria – Whitehaven, Workington and Maryport. A fourth, likely to be Stewart’s seat, would include Penrith, Keswick and Cockermouth. And Tim Farron, the president of the Liberal Democrats (and possible next leader) would be left with a Westmoreland seat around Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside and the southern Lake District.

Crick goes on to note that the Commission is not obliged to accept this alternative plan, but a decision to reject the views of the three main parties, as well as important local groups, would face a strong risk of being overturned in a judicial review.

So it looks as though Tim Farron's faces less of a battle to keep his Westminster seat.

Michael Brown arrested in the Caribbean

2012-01-06T19:33:00.000Z

From the Guardian website this evening:

The Liberal Democrats' biggest donor, who has been on the run for three years after being convicted of a multimillion pound theft, has been arrested by police in the Dominican Republic, the Guardian can disclose.

Michael Brown, who bankrolled the party with £2.4m of stolen money, was detained near the resort of Punta Cana on the easternmost tip of the Caribbean island this week. Interpol has been informed.

The report suggests that this development could lead to renewed legal efforts by his victims to seek compensation from the Lib Dems and Brown through the British courts.

The Simpsons: The Monorail Song

2012-01-05T21:32:00.002Z

Roger Helmer and Rupert Matthews latest

2012-01-05T21:19:00.001Z

This affair seems to have come down to a Mexican stand off.

Roger Helmer won't resign from the European Parliament until it is confirmed that Rupert Matthews will replace him. And the Conservative Party says it will not consider the selection until he has resigned.

Richard Gadsden, commenting on my most recent post on the subject, suggests that the most highly placed unelected candidate from the same political party as the retiring MEP does not automatically take the seat. It is up to the party.

This provides yet another argument against the list system. But then, when faced with the inevitability of a proportional system, Jack Straw chose the list system precisely because it is was the worst one on offer. He did not want PR to become popular and threaten Labour's power bases.

And Roger Helmer has some trenchant words on the subject:

at a personal level I should be very angry indeed if a loyal, long-term Conservative Party Member and activist, who has worked his socks off for the Party, not least in the 2009 euro-elections, and who has already missed out on a seat in Brussels because of the Party’s positive discrimination policy, should now miss out again because CCHQ can’t quite get its head around the regional list PR system, and seems inclined to set aside a legitimate democratic decision in favour of some modish prejudices. I should be very angry, and so, I suspect, would a great number of East Midlands Conservatives.

Stiperstones School to remain open

2012-01-05T20:41:00.001Z

Early last year this blog was much concerned with the fate of Stiperstones primary school in my very favourite part of Shropshire.

Now the BBC News pages for the county confirm that the school is to remain open after agreeing to enter a federation with another primary school.

And a big Liberal England hello to Councillor Cecilia Motley, now the cabinet member responsible for schools in Shropshire. She is not quite Aggie Caesar-Homden, but she does confirm that you need a faintly exotic name to land this role at Shropshire Council.

The IRA bombed Leicester station in 1939

2012-01-03T20:56:00.000Z

Take out your copy of Leicestershire's Stations: An Historical Perspective by Andrew Moore and turn to page 46.

What's that?

Really, if you are not prepared to do the reading there is no point in your coming to these seminars.

Let me try a different tack. I bought Moore's book some years ago and was intrigued by what I found on page 46:

From the [booking] hall, passengers pass the site of the ticket barrier, in use until the station became 'open' on 1 October 1984. At this point a large IRA bomb exploded in July 1939, causing much damage, especially to the show-cases (advertising Leicester's diverse trades) which were once a permanent feature on the adjacent, enclosed bridge that spans the lines.

I tried to research this terrorist attack on the net, but could find nothing about it. The Wikipedia entry on the S-Plan (the IRA campaign of which the Leicester explosion formed a part), for instance, quite wrongly says the attack of 3 July took place in Birmingham.

But I have now found that a full account of the events of that day was published in the Leicester Mercury in 2010.

After detailing the earlier bombings in the campaign, the report says:

Then, early in the morning of Sunday, July 3, the IRA strike here.

A suitcase had been left in the ticket collector's cabin by a man from Birmingham at 7pm the previous evening, the Mercury reported.

No-one, despite the IRA's activities, seemed to think too much of it. Until it started smoking.

A second before the bomb went off, ticket collector Charles Venn was standing nearby, talking to a Mr C Thompson, of Willow Street, said the Mercury account.

Mr Thompson was awaiting the arrival of an excursion from Brighton.

He looked down and felt a lurch of shock as he saw his shoe being seared by flames. Puzzlement gave way to panic. This was no stray flicked fag end. It was a fuse sizzling into the suitcase.

"Neither man had time to do anything but fly for his life," said the Mercury. "As they ducked out of the door, speeding in opposite directions, the cabin became engulfed in smoke and flames.

"Almost simultaneously, there was the deafening explosion that echoed and re-echoed through the building while fragments of woodwork, slot machines and windows hurtled through the air.

"Holes gaped in the high ceiling of the hall and whole sections of boarding were torn from the train times and departures board.

"Windows high in the walls and in the roof in all parts of the booking hall, blown out by the concussion, crashed in fragments on the floor.

"Of the collector's cabin, where a moment before the two men had stood talking, nothing was left but a pile of debris barely visible through the suffocating clouds of dust and smoke."

A taxi driver on the rank outside heard the hissing of the bomb and went to investigate.

"He got no further than the entrance when everything was blotted out by the explosion and glass crashed down from a window above him.

"Two companions were just behind him and for a second all three stood rooted to the spot, unable to move."Literally deafened by the terrific noise, which still buzzed in their eardrums, they conquered their panic and ran for help.

"Not knowing whether the whole building was about to collapse or not, someone set about moving the motors out of the yard while one taxi driver drove with all haste to the City Police headquarters."

An IRA bomb in Coventry the following month were to kill five people and wound 50, but casualties in Leicester that day were few:

The blast gouged huge chunks out of the station and its fittings, sending glass, wood and metal flying towards staff and passengers.

Lucky ticket collector Mr Venn escaped with a severe gash across his back, a cut across the bridge of his noise, and a couple of bad bruises.

"My cap has gone and I haven't seen it since, so I suppose that must have been blown to shreds," he told the Mercury after being released from hospital.

Everyone else was walking wounded.

It could have been worse, much worse, had it not been for a stroke of good fortune.

The station should have been packed with holidaymakers climbing off the Brighton train. It was 45 minutes late."Lives saved because it was not on time", said the Mercury.

Children returning from a trip to Southend had just left the building.

IRA bombs were not to return to Leicester until February 1990. Then, for reasons best known to himself Keith Vaz, still one of the city's Labour MPs today, suggested the bomb may have been planted by the Army at its own recruiting office.

My illustration shows the old bookstall from Leicester station, which would have been in place in 1939. Ticket barriers were restored to their old position some years ago.

Stilton wars

2012-01-03T19:47:00.002Z

"A row over the ownership of the name of Stilton cheese could end in court," reports BBC News.

As the website goes on to explain, Stilton is made in a handful of dairies in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. And since 1996 the cheese has enjoyed Protected Designation of Origin from the European Union, so it cannot be made anywhere else.

Which is odd, because the village of Stilton is in none of those counties. It was originally in Huntingdonshire and is now in Cambridgeshire as the smaller county has been abolished.

The conventional wisdom is that the cheese became famous and gained its name in the 18th century because it was sold at the inn in Stilton, which was on the Great North Road (now the A1).

But, says the BBC report, campaigners in Stilton say there is a long history of cheese making in the village, so they should be entitled to use the name too.

You can find more about this on page 8 of the October 2009 Stilton Community Association Newsletter.

It is interesting that they have turned up a reference to the 'famous' Stilton cheese being made in the village. But in those days cheese was being made in every village in England. Whether what was produced in Stilton in the 18th century had much to do with what we know as Stilton today must be doubtful.

And if Stilton did used to come from Stilton, how did the name come to be attached to cheese made 30 miles away?

Headline of the Day

2012-01-03T07:50:00.000Z

Well done to the Independent for:

Mystery over dead herring

We liberals have our myths too

2012-01-02T20:36:00.000Z

For years, right-wingers have kept their indignation levels bubbling away at an enjoyable level by inventing myths. Labour councils want to ban Christmas and nursery rhymes; the European Union wants to ban everything else - unless they plan to make them compulsory.

These stories are usually false and liberals often take great pleasure in demonstrating this. But we have our myths too.

I expect you are outraged at the way the Sun ran a countdown to Charlotte Church's 16th birthday - the point being that it would then be legal to have sex with her.

Except that, as a post on Heresy Corner shows, the Sun never did any such thing. Do read the comments too. They will leave you thinking less of the BBC and the Guardian rather than worrying about the Sun.

And then there was the paediatrician who was forced out of her home by a mob that thought she was a paedophile.

Except that, as I discussed back in 2006, no such incident has ever taken place.

Is Euro realism breaking out in the Liberal Democrats?

2012-01-02T20:00:00.002Z

An article in tomorrow's Guardian will claim that talks are planned between Tory Eurosceptic MPs and centrist Liberal Democrats to see if a common agenda can be formed on Europe.

The newspaper says:

The talks, involving mainstream Eurosceptics opposed to an EU membership referendum, had been planned ahead of David Cameron's decision to wield a UK veto at the EU summit in December, leading to a public split between the two coalition parties. But the Tory sceptics are determined to revive the plan insisting a section of the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party are desperate to avoid the label of Europhiles.

Without saying they have been involved, the report goes on to name Alistair Carmichael, Jeremy Browne, David Laws and Nick Harvey as having "warned their own party must not be seen as starry-eyed uncritical supporters of the EU".

And they are right. Support for co-operation at a European level need not decay into uncritical support for the current structures and policies of the European Union. Liberal Democrats should be known for demanding reform in Europe - as we do everywhere else.

It is also worth pointing out that, as Nick Clegg himself has always been something of a Euro realist, they may be pushing at an open door. I also share the suspicion of Eaten by Missionaries that such views are more widely held in the party than is often supposed.

The report also suggests that the Eurosceptic Tories are also hopeful of working with Ed Davey. As an employment minister, he has been pursuing a deregulation agenda in Europe.

Six of the Best 214

2012-01-02T17:11:00.000Z

David Maclean, political correspondent of the Leicester Mercury, explains why the Freedom of Information Act is vital to his work.

Max Atkinson presents 12 video clips that he used last year to illustrate points about the art of making a political speech.

Why are carrots orange? Slugger O'Toole explains.

On ZD Net, Violet Blue looks at the relationship information technology has with depression, suicide and Asperger's syndrome: "My hope is that in reflecting on the losses so many of us have suffered this year, we can take a close look at what makes tech and the startup world a prime environment for incubating and overlooking these issues."

If you have been watching the reruns of Top of the Pops from 1976 with mingled horror and derision, you will be interested in a guest post on Yes It's Number One. There Former Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley offers a limited defence of the year's music - or at least argues that 1975 was worse.

Cinebeats looks at Live It Up! and Be My Guest - the mod musicals of Lance Comfort: "Live It Up! provides viewers with a brief but unforgettable glimpse of a more innocent time just moments before pirate radio, drugs, shorter skirts, Beatlemania and the merseybeat sound would transform the capital city into 'Swinging London.'."

Irrefutable Prediction of the Day

2012-01-01T21:49:00.000Z

Well done to Jackie Ashley, writing in tomorrow's Guardian:

I don't expect the coalition to fall this year, though we should rule nothing out.

Aloe Blacc: I Need a Dollar

2012-01-01T13:56:00.001Z

I heard this on Jools Holland's Hootenanny last night and it sounded good. Though, to be honest, another reason for choosing it is that Aloe Blacc's real name turns out to be Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Benjamin Britten's A New Year Carol, with the Corpus Christi Carol as a bonus.

So farewell then Leicester's New Walk Centre

2011-12-31T17:38:00.000Z

Earlier this week Sir Peter Soulsby told BBC Radio Leicester that the New Walk Centre, which houses the City Council's offices, is to be demolished.

Today's Leicester Mercury quotes a demolition expert as saying that the roads surrounding the New Walk Centre could be partially shut for up to five months while the two towers are demolished.

The New Walk Centre was a speculative office development of the early 1970s - I have seen footage of the National Front marching through the city in those days, and in the background you can see the hoardings around what was then a construction site.

Is it unfair to suggest that the developers must have seen the council coming? Or at least, should we be shocked that such a building becomes unsafe in less than 40 years?

The good news is that Leicester's Town Hall, built a whole century before the New Walk Centre, is still doing fine.

Congratulations to David Bill MBE

2011-12-31T14:20:00.000Z

From the Leicester Mercury:

County and borough councillor David Bill, 67, is to receive an MBE for services to local government.

The founding member of Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council has been a councillor since the authority was established in 1973. He has also held a seat on Leicestershire County Council and Leicestershire Police Authority for more than 25 years.

"It is all I know really," Coun Bill said.

"And while I can't remember why I got into it, I stick with it because I enjoy inspiring and encouraging people to be involved in the community where they live."

Thanks in large part to David's work, Hinckley and Bosworth is a Lib Dem council and the party is also in a healthy second place in the parliamentary constituency.

If you travel to Sheringham and visit the cafe at the North Norfolk Railway's station in the town, you will find a plaque recording that it was David who opened it. When I saw this I assumed he was asked as some sort of recognition that the line was used by many holidaymakers from the East Midlands, but it turns out that he originally comes from Sheringham.

Headline of the Day

2011-12-31T14:02:00.003Z

Well done to the The Press from York:

X-Factor CD among items flushed down toilet

Roger Helmer may not resign after all

2011-12-31T13:14:00.000Z

This blog has taken an interest in Rupert Matthews ever since Roger Helmer announced that he would be resigning from the European Parliament today, 31 December 2011. That is because Matthews was the highest ranked Tory candidate for the East Midlands not to be elected in the last Euro elections.

However, it has emerged that Conservative high command has concerns about Matthews and might prefer to see someone else as the new MEP for the East Midlands. Already the Derby Telegraph has reported that Helmer will be delaying his resignation until around 15 January because of the uncertainty over his successor.

Now Guido Fawkes (with the help of italics and red ink that I do not reproduce here) is suggesting that he will not resign at all:

Helmer’s resignation was supposed to be effective of today, but as party chairman Sayeeda Warsi is apparently insisting on someone other than Matthews, apparently “a less-geeky woman”, takes over, Helmer has decided to dig his boots in.

A European c0-conspiritor (sic.) told Guido last night “Roger won’t be going anywhere unless Rupert is guaranteed.” CCHQ sources insist that they won’t be budging on this one, so it looks like Helmer will be staying. Once again, the Tory high-command’s gender-agenda has created an almighty mess…

The Conservatives' regional chairman yesterday told the Derby Telegraph that no investigation has taken place, but I am not convinced that he would have been told about it.

All of which does raise a serious point... Is it automatic that the first unelected candidate on a regional list fills a vacancy created by someone from his or her party resigning? Or does a party have the power to nominate someone else?

Later. The BBC quotes Roger Helmer as confirming that he is postponing his resignation:

"There do seem to have been one or two administrative queries arising with central office over the succession to the seat.

"Naturally, I want to get those sorted out before I formalise my resignation."

End of Year Lolcat

2011-12-31T12:19:00.001Z

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Walkers bookshop, Market Harborough, closing down

2011-12-30T21:04:00.000Z

Man flu has kept me largely indoors since Christmas, but on one of my rare excursions I was sorry to see that the Walkers bookshop in the town has a closing down sale.

It is a small shop that sells new books and also has a Thornton's chocolate franchise. In short, it has been a godsend for the present-buyer in a hurry.

The Harborough Mail explains that rent negotiations with the new owners of St Mary's Place have fallen through. There are still other Walkers bookshops in the East Midlands.

Rupert Matthews: The East Midlands holds its breath

2011-12-29T21:36:00.001Z

BBC News confirms that the Conservative Party has Doubts about Rupert Matthews and that those doubts are centred on the book that he published for the UKIP member Bill Etheridge - complete with golliwog on the cover.

Elsewhere, I rather like the way New Europe puts it:

Matthews was discovered to be a sceptic over the EU, but on precious little else.

That blog also quotes a source as saying that Helmer is threatening not to retire as planned and "foaming at the mouth" with anger.

How can they...? You can see where this is going.

Later. The Derby Telegraph says that Helmer will be delaying his resignation until around 15 January because of the uncertainty over his successor.

Six of the Best 213

2011-12-29T21:02:00.000Z

SomeBeans refuses to be outraged at the proposal to allow NHS hospitals to obtain up to 49 per cent of their income from private patients.

David Cameron's proposal for a minimum price for alcohol is defended by Labour blogger Representing the Mambo.

"Miliband cannot see that he is taking a profoundly ideological position here - the idea that centralised leadership can find solutions even though it hasn‘t done so in the past." The assumptions behind Ed Miliband's new year message are unpacked by Stumbling and Mumbling.

Somewhere I have an old London Underground map showing an extension of the Bakerloo to Camberwell under construction. It was never built, but now it may be. More details from James Barber.

"I've stumbled on a wonderful documentary film made in the 1960s that in an odd way does help give some kind of perspective on today. It's about two brothers called Billy and George Walker. Billy was a boxer and George was a gangster who became Billy's manager. The film is a beautiful record of the way two brilliant chancers were manipulating British society and the media at a moment in 1964." A fascinating post from Adam Curtis.

Katyboo1's Weblog gives us the 10 best books she has read this year.

Jonathan Meades and Henry Porter

2011-12-28T22:29:00.000Z

I was watching old Jonathan Meades programmes on YouTube, like you do, when I came across Brick and Mortars, his discussion of military architecture, from 1990.

And who should turn up at 5:16 but a young Henry Porter?

Much more from Jonathan Meades at the MeadesShrine. And Henry Porter has his own website.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Fracking hell

2011-12-27T19:58:00.000Z

The end of another week with Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.

Sunday

There has been a lot of nonsense written in recent weeks about ‘fracking’ – that is, drilling into hard shale rocks and then setting off small explosions to crack them and release the gas inside – which I have been practising here in Rutland. One local newspaper (not my own High Leicestershire Radical, I hasten to add) printed its report under the headline “IT’S FRACKING HELL SAY VILLAGERS”; I thought that was in particularly poor taste. Let me make it clear: Rutland has always been subject to earthquakes, as anyone who has studied its history will know. To connect them with my fracking is simply...

I am sorry, Meadowcroft came in just then, complaining that he had narrowly missed being hit on the head by a stone that had fallen from the battlements as he was digging in the kitchen garden. I pointed out that there is bound to be some settlement in old houses like mine and suggested that he got on with his work. He left mumbling something about Trotsky.

There has been, as I was pointing out, a lot of nonsense talked in recent weeks. In particular, the Revd Hughes’s refusal to mount the pulpit of St Asquith’s until he had been given a hard hat seemed to be particularly unfortunate. And did he have to take as his text Zechariah, xi, 2 “Howl, fir tree, for the mighty cedar is fallen”? It set a bad example to the choirboys...

I say, could anyone dig a chap out of all this rubble?

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Danny Alexander is more influential than Simon Cowell

2011-12-27T19:52:00.000Z

That is the moral that the John O'Groat Journal and Caithness Courier draws from GQ magazine's list of the 100 most influential men in Britain:

The 39-year-old chief secretary to the Treasury is universally underestimated according to the upmarket men’s magazine, which sells more than 76,000 copies a month.

GQ writes he is derided in Westminster circles by his political detractors for coming to power despite only being a former press officer for the Cairngorm National Park, but is in a strong position supporting the chancellor.

"As chief secretary, he is in direct control of the Government’s deficit-reduction, and as George Osborne’s de facto deputy, his voice carries serious weight in cabinet," the magazine writes.

GQ also highlights Mr Alexander’s role as the Lib Dems’ chief strategist and says he is charged with finding a way to ward off an "electoral massacre" at the local government elections next year and the general election in 2015 because of the party’s widely criticised role in the coalition administration.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Thriller in Vanilla

2011-12-26T20:48:00.001Z

Saturday

As an enthusiast for the Noble Art, I was naturally distraught at the death of Smokin’ Joe Frazier. How well I remember his trilogy of battles with the great Muhammad Ali! The greatest of these, of course, was the ‘Thriller in Manila’, and it was about then that I turned my mind to the revival of heavyweight boxing here in Rutland.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps my ideas smacked too much of the circus, but audiences had dwindled to an alarming extent. So it was that I first staged the Heavyweight Championship of Rutland in a large brown envelope, promoting it as the ‘Thriller in Manila’. This was followed by a return bout in an enormous ice cream bowl – the ‘Thriller in Vanilla’.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Six of the Best 212

2011-12-26T18:51:00.001Z

Though he greatly admires her, Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph, is against the idea of giving Margaret Thatcher a state funeral: "The problem is that talk of a state funeral for Lady Thatcher reflects a troubling failure to understand what such events are about. They are so very rarely awarded because they have been designed for a category of great men and women who have come to represent the nation as a whole, rather than a particular sect or faction."

Voters in the unrecognised state of Transdniestria (a sliver of eastern Moldova) have kicked out not only the strongman who has run the place since the end of the 1992 conflict with Moldova, but also the Kremlin's chosen candidate to replace him, reports From the Heart of Europe.

The American Wright Thompson defends five-day test cricket on ESPN: "The Indians are staring at an English score of 474. The grind is slow. In Test cricket, only bad things happen quickly. Anything good takes time."

"Until 1980 the only way to show a chess game was for a master to stand in front of a demo board and move the magnetic pieces by hand. Then the BBC TV station pioneered a radical new technology: using a glass chess table and chess pieces with symbols stuck to their bases they brought us animated games, commented semi-live by the players." ChessBase News looks back 30 years to the BBC's highly successful Master Game series and provides links to some of the games on Youtube.

IanVisits has some photographs of an empty London on Christmas Day.

The Cat's Meat Shop visits the St Pancras Renaissance - the old Midland Grand Hotel. His photographs look like stills from an alternative London version of Scorsese's Hugo.

Lembit Opik as the Fairy Godmother

2011-12-26T13:18:00.001Z

In July I blogged about Lembit Opik's appearance in the reality show cariad@iaith, where celebrities (I use the term in its widest sense) spent a week learning Welsh in an eco-friendly chic campsite in Pembrokeshire.

The, er, good news is that cariad@iaith returned on Christmas Eve for a "one-off festive special" in which the challenges turkey plucking, cooking mince pies and a Christmas pantomime performance.

And who played the Fairy Godmother in that pantomime? Lembit, of course!

To see the whole performance, go to the cariad@iath website and then click on the cast photograph. Those who wish to read the page in English should click on the button at the top right of the screen.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Bob Willis on Portland Bill

2011-12-25T20:55:00.000Z

Christmas Day wouldn't be Christmas Day without a word from me, what? - Bonkers

Friday

I was sad see to those Pakistani fellows jailed for bowling no balls. If such strictures had been applied in the 1970s, then our own Bob Willis would be breaking rocks on Portland Bill to this day. I was myself attached to the Special Investigations Branch of the MCC for a number of years, and it was heartbreaking work. More than one county scorer cut his throat on a dark winter’s afternoon, as the pilot flame in his Ascot water heater guttered, over discrepancies in the leg byes account.

Later, you may recall, I chaired the committee of inquiry into allegations over irregularities in the betting on local authority by-elections in the 1950 and 1960s. Few think of it today, but it was the most tremendous scandal in its day and many of the aspects of local elections we now take for granted - the ban on having the polling station in the home of one of the candidates, the discouragement of firearms at the verification of papers, the oath of celibacy for agents - have their roots in The Bonkers Report.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Rogered by a past winner of the 2,000 Guineas
Sending a Jeremy Browne to China
Meet Eva Vestoff
Remembering John Maynard Keynes

A Christmas Day treat: A full edition of Top of the Pops from 1970

2011-12-25T10:30:00.000Z

I looked for a Blodwyn Pig track to share with you and found a whole edition of Top of the Pops. It comes from 29 January 1970 (when your humble blogger was nine years old) and was orginally broadcast in colour even thought all the videos below are in black in white.

And a very good edition it is too - complete with Jimmy Savile, as it happens. The sixties were over, but there were some really interesting bands in the singles chart and Glamrock had not yet been conceived.

Incidentally, as Digital Spy explains, few editons of TOTP this old survive.

Anyway, here goes.

Blodwyn Pig, formed by Jethro Tull founder Mick Abrahams, are first up...

Next it's Arrival with Friends...

Next is Sympathy by Rare Bird, a track so good that is has already featured here as a Sunday video...

Next up were Pan's People dancing to I'm a Man by Chicago - regular readers will not need to be told that this was written and first recorded by the Spencer Davis Group. The version of this on Youtube showing Pan's People has a very different soundtrack to it, but here are Chicago doing the song at around the same time:

After that it was Mick Abraham's old sparring partner Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull, with a bit of a classic:

Next it is Mary Hopkin's long-forgotten track Temma Harbour:

After that sources differ, but this video suggests that next come the Dutch Band Shocking Blue with Venus, followed by Bad Finger with Come and Get it from the film The Magic Christian:

Now Jonathan King with Let It All Hang Out. Awkward.

And now we have Brotherhood of Man, long before Eurovision, with United We Stand. I have written before about the way that the counterculture leached into mainstream pop in this era:

In penultimate track spot we have Canned Heat with Let's Work Together. Groovy:

And we end with Britain's number one. After such a good edition it is a little disappointing to find it is Edison Lighthouse with Love Grows as my Rosemary Goes:

A Merry Christmas to all our readers

2011-12-24T15:00:00.000Z

Santa's little helpers revolt over unpaid wages

2011-12-24T14:12:00.000Z

From The Press - York's daily newspaper:

It's the last thing Santa needs two days before Christmas – police being called to investigate a row with unhappy elves.

Officers were called to York’s Winter Wonderland in Exhibition Square, as tempers flared between managers and staff.

Two workers say they have only been paid a fraction of their wages after working there for weeks, and police were called to the grotto this week as angry staff demanded payment.

The paper goes on to quote one of the unhappy elves:

“I had always been promised I would be paid at the end of the week, but we never got paid at all. They owe me about £1,000 in wages. They are still using my photograph for advertising too.”

Perhaps Alexei Sayle was right after all?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Remembering John Maynard Keynes

2011-12-24T10:21:00.000Z

Thursday

You do hear a great deal about my old friend John Maynard Keynes these days, don’t you? This warms my heart, because he was the soundest of men: an Apostle, President of Cambridge University Liberal Club, adviser to Lloyd George in the Great War and founder of the Arts Council.

I never could quite get my mind around his economic ideas, but when you hear people say that we should borrow lots of money and, if we have trouble paying it back, borrow even more, while citing the great man in support of their views, I cannot help feeling there was More To It than that.

Keynes, incidentally, was author of the pamphlet “Can Lloyd George Do It?” The consensus amongst reviewers was that he could – and did so frequently.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Six of the Best 211

2011-12-23T19:42:00.000Z

Rolling Stone examines the influence of the Plastic People of the Universe on Vaclav Havel: "Until meeting the band, Havel was not exactly a cultural avant-gardist. "There's a letter from prison where he's asking his wife to buy the latest Bee Gees album," says Wilson, who has translated many of Havel's writings. Once acquainted with the Plastic People and their circle, however, Havel became their unofficial patron. The band played many shows in the barn at the country house where he died on Sunday."

You can read all about the January 2012 issue of Liberator on Liberal Democrat Voice.

A View from Ham Common finds Louise Mensch at the bottom of a deep hole, digging furiously.

Edward Lucas writes on Diplomaatia about the prospects for Estonia: "Every one of the EU-10 – the new(ish) members of the union – has falling unemployment, growing economy and a manageable deficit. That is not the case in the supposedly more solid 15 countries of the old EU. But Estonia is in a class of its own."

The sign of the Three Swans, Market Harborough, is one of the favourites of English Buildings.

Go Litel Blog, Go... experiences the inexplicable splendour of City of London Churches at Christmas.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Meet Eva Vestoff

2011-12-23T10:37:00.001Z

Wednesday

Who should I meet in Westminster but my old friend Mike Hancock? I ask him to pass on my congratulations to the delightful Katia Zatuliveter for her victory at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. I have never had much time for our Intelligence people: every one of them I knew in the 1930s turned out to be working for the Russians, and I don’t suppose things have changed very much since.

Besides, as I remarked to my personal secretary and masseuse Eva Vestoff only this morning, if every attractive young woman with an interest in British politics were sent home, then the business of government would soon grind to a halt. They are known, I believe, as ‘interns’.

Eva, incidentally, used to live in Italy, joined its (at least until recently) governing Bunga Bunga Party and served briefly in the Cabinet there.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

The Box of Delights: An interview with Patrick Troughton

2011-12-22T22:18:00.002Z

"And now, Master Harker, now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you could do something to stop their Bite

As the years go past the 1984 television adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights becomes more and more central to our idea of Christmas.

Here is Blue Peter publicising the show as it was about to be screened. Patrick Troughton comes on at 6:58...

Malcolm Saville provides a good reason for writing

2011-12-22T22:02:00.000Z

From chapter 6 of Rye Royal (1969):

But when they reached the castle they saw that it was now surrounded by a high wire fence bearing a notice "Entrance to the Public prohibited" and Dickie said he would like to write a protest article about this sort of happening.

"Anyway," he added. "Things and places are hardly ever what they were. I suppose that's another important thing about being a writer. You can help people to remember.

There is more about my favourite writer as a child on the Malcolm Saville Society website. The castle mentioned here is Camber Castle.

Will Rupert Matthews ever be an MEP?

2011-12-22T20:51:00.000Z

Suddenly a stream of blog posts that would write themselves is under threat.

Because it seems the Conservatives are threatening to take the fish from my barrel by declining to nominate Rupert Matthews as the new MEP for the East Midlands when Roger Helmer stands down on the last day of 2011.

Or so Mr Matthews reckons. He told the Leicester Mercury:

"I sent off the relevant paperwork to the party about three weeks ago.

"I should have received confirmation 10 days later but I've had no response.

"Phone calls are not being returned, and my e-mails have not been responded to.

"I don't know what's going on at the party end."

The Mercury quotes Tory high command as making a strangely non-committal response:

Party spokesman said there was no vacancy as Mr Helmer remained in his post. He declined to comment.

While Roger Helmer says:

"It's supposed to be a formality – the party must do the usual background checks and then issue a certificate ...

"Unless he turns out to be an axe murderer or a child molester or has defected from the Conservatives to the Communist Party in the meantime, then he should get the seat.

"But now central office is saying it's not as straightforward as that and that they could bring someone else in.

"Rupert was selected as a Tory candidate at the last election by 3,500 party members, and 370,000 people voted Conservative in the East Midlands.

"He has a democratic mandate. If the party proposes to give the seat to someone else, I would have to think very carefully about whether to resign."

I have reason to believe that it is not Mr Matthews' view that "The evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling" that worries his party. Nor will they be concerned at his belief that European Union Panzers may invade Britain, as that now seems within the mainstream of Conservative thinking.

No, if the Tories are worried about Mr Matthews it will be because of his association with UKIP's Bill Etheridge.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Sending a Jeremy Browne to China

2011-12-22T20:27:00.001Z

Tuesday

To Avonmouth Docks to wave off the Jeremy Browne. What with the current economic problems on the mainland of Europe, it has become clear that our relations with China will become increasingly important. To that end, I have arranged for a Jeremy Browne to be presented to Peking Zoo so that the Chinese may enjoy viewing this delightful denizen of our English countryside.

Later I call in at a village hostelry and fall into conversation with a fellow whose family has been farming Jeremy Brownes on the Mendips for generations. He is not sanguine about my plans, informing me that Jeremy Brownes are very choosy about their diet and usually unwilling to mate in public.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Rogered by a past winner of the 2,000 Guineas

Headline of the Day

2011-12-22T20:09:00.001Z

The Shropshire Star wins for its:

Telford tyre-burst driver in pothole cash wait

This headline makes good use of the Unit Headline Language identified by Michael Frayn in his novel The Tin Men. (it is worth reading the late Christopher Hitchens on this too.)

The judges also liked the same newspaper's

Call to turn Wem signal box into tearoom

for its evocation of Shropshire life.

The tile museum at Jackfield in Shropshire

2011-12-21T22:17:00.000Z

Back in August I got all enthusiastic about the tile museum at Jackfield near Ironbridge in Shropshire. Now, thanks to this video, you can share the experience.

Note the frieze taken from the Singer Building, High Street, Leicester, at 2:50. The museum card explains that no one knows who sculpted the frieze, but the building was designed by Arthur Wakerley and completed in 1904.

I had dinner with Wakerley's great granddaughter earlier this evening. She said that the Singer Building is still standing (minus its decoration) but no one knows what to do with it.

The knockers of Stamford

2011-12-21T21:57:00.001Z

During the summer, in the comments to my post about the legend that Stamford was a university town, I mentioned that students from Brasenose College, Oxford, had stolen an ancient door knocker (or knockers) from Stamford's Brazenose Street in 1890. They obviously believed the legend, though sadly it is not true.

Anyway, a reader tells me of an incident from the early 1970s.

In those days Stamford High School for Girls, I am reliably informed, was a horribly repressive environment, run by narrow-minded spinsters.

Some masters at the parallel boys' grammar school - chief among them Graham Johnstone, the school's director of music - invited these mistresses to an elaborate ceremony at which they were formally presented with a pair of knockers, replicas of the ones taken by Brasenose.

These were "received with gracious thanks and complete credulity".

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Rogered by a past winner of the 2,000 Guineas

2011-12-21T21:43:00.000Z

The new issue of Liberator is with subscribers, so it is time to pass another week at Bonkers Hall.

Monday

What a splendid fellow Prince William is! Tall, upstanding and brave, he has a delightful wife and his wife’s sister has a bottom like a Cox’s Orange Pippin. He even rescued some Russian sailors in his helicopter the other day. The only drawback is that it has to be admitted that he does look remarkably like a horse – I am told that, when the winch failed in that rescue, he let down his silky tail and lifted the last man to safety himself.

So much does he resemble a horse that I have no alternative but to conclude that the story – widely circulated in my young day – that Queen Mary was rogered by a past winner of the 2,000 Guineas after a particularly jolly party at Newmarket is true after all.

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

Underestimating Danny Alexander

2011-12-21T08:25:00.000Z

From Michael Deacon's sketch in this morning's Daily Telegraph:

Mr Alexander may have surprised some people with his statement. The surprise lay not so much in its content as in its delivery. Because of his looks (startled guinea pig) and voice (small boy playing third shepherd in the school Nativity), it’s easy to run away with the idea that Mr Alexander is a gentle, sweet-natured sort of creature. Not a bit of it. He is, in his own quiet way, as mischievously snide as the Chancellor.

He began by praising “Lord Hutton’s magisterial report” on pension reform, and added that the Government had followed the recommendations of “the former Labour Work and Pensions Secretary”. Those are, in both cases, Mr Alexander’s italics, slathered in irony as thick as treacle.

The last week of Sheffield trams 1960: Part 2

2011-12-21T08:05:00.000Z

We have already posted Part 1.

Six of the Best 210

2011-12-20T22:14:00.000Z

North Korea is a nation of racist dwarfs, the late Christopher Hitchens explains in an article published by Slate last year.

"If Europe lets the Euro fail it won’t stop there and just because we are outside the Euro, (it) doesn’t mean we won’t suffer the full impact of (the) unintended consequences." The Rambles of Neil Monnery shares the wisdom of a passing banker.

UK Polling Report explains why the Lib Dems always do best in ICM polls and worst in YouGov ones.

"I wonder if he now needs to move outside his sitcom comfort zone of deliberately un-PC fake fly-on-the-wall documentaries as he essentially now just repeating himself for rapidly diminishing returns." Mark Thompson's Blog is not impressed by Ricky Gervais's latest series Life's Too Short.

"John Piper's topographical paintings and prints offer an unparallelled record of mid twentieth-century Britain," says Adventures in the Print Trade.

Creative Review looks forward to the Painting by Numbers exhibition that opens at the London Transport Museum next month: "Painting by Numbers - Making Sense of Statistics will feature 20 London Underground posters, many dating back to the 1930s or earlier. The posters were designed not only to promote the benefits of travelling by London Transport but also in order to wow the travelling public with details of the remarkable service they were (hopefully) enjoying every day."