The sewage in our rivers and on our beaches is a direct consequence of Brexit

Here's Andrew Adonis writing in October of last year:

Brexit is causing the treatment of sewage to regress from its already poor level. The Environment Agency, which lays down the rules on sewage treatment, has just issued emergency guidance exempting water companies and other undertakings from requirements to treat waste water where they can’t procure the necessary chemicals. 

Its new regulations on "water and sewerage company effluent discharges: supply side failures" begin: "You may not be able to comply with your permit if you cannot get the chemicals you use to treat the effluent you discharge because of the UK’s new relationship with the EU." 

So the "supply chain crisis" isn't only closing petrol stations and emptying supermarket shelves. It is now leading to raw sewage being pumped into rivers and coastal waters where that didn't happen before. 

This was widely reported at the time time Adonis was writing, so it's not clear why it has taken everyone by surprise this week.

Still, it's a good campaign and has the potential to hurt the Conservatives, so let's keep the pressure up.

The Joy of Six 1050

"Those that claim to be the party of clever economics and fiscal responsibility would do well to remember this simple truth: the square root of fuck all is always going to be absolutely fuck all, no matter how creatively you’re told to to dice it." Jack Monroe asks why elected representatives and salaried journalists and presenters are trying to undermine the ten-year career and credibility of a food blogger.

Andrew Adonis reviews Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper: "In place of Kuper’s plan, I would instead introduce a different 'levelling-up' reform challenge for Oxford. It needs to radically broaden the social intake of its state school recruitment, which today is too largely drawn from grammar schools, sixth-form colleges and academies in London and the southeast".

Helena Horton on ambitious plans to rewild London.

Neal Ascherson is always worth reading: here he discusses the history of the extraordinary Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

"Tragically, he was discovered, captured, and deported during a raid in Toulouse in 1944 - first to Drancy, then to Auschwitz, and finally Kaunas-Reval in Lithuania. Of hundreds of people captured in Toulouse that day, only a handful survived. They perished without a trace." Janet Horvath says we should not forget the cellist and composer Pál Hermann.

"It was a big car park, but it was in bad shape. So in 2010, the Trinity Square high rise car park, an iconic brutalist building that dominated Gateshead’s skyline in the 1970s, was demolished, and a part of British film history was gone. Though not before the canny council sold tinned lumps of rubble to film fans for £5.00 a go." Tim Pelan watches Mike Hodges' 1971 film Get Carter.

The Joy of Six 1016

Nigel Scott on the Liberal Democrats, queer theory and transsexual rights: "The Liberal Democrats’ have adopted a queer theory centred approach to trans rights. This means that the party implicitly opposes women’s sex-based rights, because women no longer exist as a fixed sex class. Accordingly, any man can adopt the status of a woman on demand and because 'transwomen are women' in the words of the party's mantra, there is no longer a rationale for single sex spaces."

"Having been for centuries essentially a comprehensive for the aristocracy, Eton changed into an oligarchical grammar school. With the incomes of the super-rich racing ahead, especially after Thatcher;s tax cuts for the wealthy and ;big bang; deregulation of the City, the sky was the limit for both fees and resources." To understand Boris Johnson you must understand Eton, arguesAndrew Adonis.

Heather Burns says the new Online Safety Bill gives government enormous to redefine, constrain and censor the boundaries of free and legal speech. 

"Today there is no former rust-bucket city, no sometime edgeland, no crumbling dock, no monument to asbestos that has escaped rebranding as a 'creative quarter'." Jonathan Meades pours cold water on fantasies of regeneration.

Jane Nightshade celebrates Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now.

"In the collection’s final poem ‘Who’ Causley writes of seeing the ghostly figure of himself as a child haunting the places around Launceston he has known his whole life. He sees his younger self wandering beside the River Kensey in old fashioned clothes and has a vision of the fields where he once played, now covered by houses." The Cornish Bird surveys the life and work of the Cornish poet Charles Causley.

Andrew Adonis on the case for reversing Beeching

Andrew Adonis - Remain ultra turned Corbyn loyalist - has done his best to upset all sides recently, but he knows his stuff when it comes to railways.

Yesterday he gave a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 'Reversing Beeching'.

The first half dealt with HS2 - a project I find hard to love and one that may not long survive the arrival of a new Conservative prime minister.

Reading the recent Independent article  by Jon Stone, however, I suspect it is one I should try to love. Certainly, Stone makes a better case for HS2 than any politician has done.

It is the second half of Adonis's speech, where he turns to reversing Beeching, that appeals to me:

The case for a systematic – not piecemeal – policy of reversing the worst mistakes of Beeching is now overwhelmingly strong. 

Look at the last decade. London Overground, reinventing and extending the North London Line which was a designated Beeching closure which didn’t happen although the service became virtually non-existent, is one of the most successful public transport upgrades in history. 

The Welsh Government’s reopening of the Valley line from Ebbw Vale to Cardiff and the Scottish Government’s reopening of the Waverley line from Edinburgh to Galashiels and Tweedbank, have also been great successes. 

The problem on all three of these routes hasn’t been viability but overcrowding, with traffic greatly exceeding projections.

And who could resist this proposal?:

The Burton-on-Trent to Leicester line, goods-only since passenger services were withdrawn in the 1960s, would serve the towns of Coalville, Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Swadlincote among others. 

This line comes into Leicester through heavily built up districts where there could also be stations. With new and reopened stations in the towns and Leicester, this would serve a rail neglected population of about 150,000 on this line alone.

Adonis has thought of how this programme can be paid for too:

The M4 Relief Road has just been cancelled, saving £1.4bn. The ludicrious tunnel proposed for the A303 under Stonehenge, which I cancelled a decade ago but has resurfaced for political reasons at a projected cost of £2.3bn, should also be cancelled. 

Add in a few other politically motivated but unjustified road schemes and you have an initial £5bn Reverse Beeching fund. More if you can secure local contributions and other regeneration funding. 

That’s enough to make a bold start on the first set of Reverse Beeching projects, which should be agreed through a competitive evaluation next year.

He goes on to point out that there would be more money still for these schemes if Brexit were cancelled.

Pointless offers a warning to Change UK

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Change UK - or the Tiggers, as I still think of them - announced their Euro candidates today.

There are some names I recognise, notably the former Conservative cabinet minister Stephen Dorrell.

I note, however, that he is standing in the West Midlands rather than the East Midlands, where he was an MP for 36 years.

With Dorrell and a few other people we politicos have heard of - Rachel Johnson, Gavin Esler - the Tiggers must be feeling pleased with themselves.

But they should not feel too pleased.

Last year I pointed out how little most people know about politics:

Pointless is almost a mirror image of Family Fortunes, which rewarded contestants for being average not for being clever. 

Yet there are two subjects where Pointless contestants generally know little and find the thought they might know something to be so unreasonable as to be amusing. 

One is British politics and the other is geography.

After I had posted that, "the admirable Alwyn Turner" sent me the link to a post he had written in 2013.

It was about a round in Pointless that year where 100 people had been asked to name as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010:

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. 

Then came: Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100 

Ed Balls -13 out of 100 

David Miliband - 12 out of 100 

Jack Straw - 7 out of 100 

Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100 

Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100 

David Blunkett - 4 out of 100 

Clare Short - 2 out of 100 

Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100 

Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

So, as I say, the Tiggers should not feel to pleased with themselves tonight.

Incidentally, this second post was quoted without attribution on the Today programme by a Leading Political Commentator, who unfollowed me on Twitter when I pointed this out.

But I'm not bitter.

Sophie Scott, laughter and the folly of Have I Got News for You

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Professor Sophie Scott is a psychologist and stand up comedian who will be speaking in Leicester next month - more about that at the end of this post.

She has written an article for BBC News today about laughter, explaining that there are:

many reasons people laugh - and most of them are not because somebody is being particularly funny.

One theme she takes up is the way humour can be used to disarm criticism:

Other public figures appear to carefully cultivate a "funny" image, where they often appear the butt of the joke. 

For example, MP Boris Johnson was arguably first perceived as funny on satirical TV quiz show Have I Got News For You. 

Mr Johnson kept up this light-hearted, funny persona over the following couple of decades, helping him to bat away critical comments with jokes and bluster. 

Whether it was getting stuck on a zip wire, or joking about never becoming prime minister, difficult questions could be disarmed, and his personal charm seemed enhanced, by the sounds of laughter.

Having inflicted Johnson on us, the people behind Have I Got News For You are determined to do the same with Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It's Twitter account - I imagine it staffed by dozens of new graduates who are chained to their desks each day until they have reached their personal target for satirical tweets - never misses a chance to play up Rees-Mogg's chosen image as a fogey.

Yet his exaggerated courtesy, his old-fashioned language and his children with their quaint names and quaint clothes are all chosen to disguise the fact that he is a very 21st-century financier.

Andrew Adonis really should stop calling him "the member for the 18th century". It's just what he wants.

Anyway, if you want to hear Sophie Scott talk about laughter, you can hear at the Secular Hall, Humberstone Gate, Leicester, on the evening of Sunday 10 February.

Lord Adonis to speak for a People's Vote in Leicester on 4 October

The European Movement is organising a meeting in Leicester in support of a 'People's Vote'.

Andrew Adonis will be the speaker and the meeting will take place at the Secular Hall on Thursday 4 October from 6pm.

Book your place on eventbrite.

The Secular Hall is part of the history of Leicester radicalism and, back in the 1970s, Leicester Chess Club met there.

In those days the Market Harborough team included a vicar, and I suspect he was rather disconcerted by its busts of great atheists.

Lord Adonis to debate Brexit in Kettering

Lord Adonis is to take part in a debate on whether there should be a referendum on the final Brexit deal.

The debate will take place at St Peter and St Paul Church in Market Place, Kettering, on Friday 22 June from 7.30 pm.

His opponent will be Philip Hollobone, the town's Conservative MP.

This is a free event, but if you want to attend you must book your place via Eventbrite.

Six of the Best 279

Our text today is taken from Keynesian Liberal: "I was brought up under the influence of the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer, so each Sunday morning  and evening, as a choirboy, I was exhorted to confess my "manifold sins and wickedness" and not to "dissemble nor cloke them."  It's a pity this has gone out of fashion, because there seems to be a good deal of dissembling and cloking going on in modern society, among all sorts and conditions of men and women, and not just in the Liberal Democrats."

Lib Dems should vote against the Secret Courts Bill on Tuesday, says Clare Algar on Liberal Democrat Voice. She's right.

On the Fabian Society website, Olly Parker reports on a Lib Dem Conference session the Fabians organised with Centre Forum on the subject of pluralism. The panel comprised Andrew Adonis, Ming Campbell, Jon Cruddas and Jo Swinson.

Rutland Ospreys writes: "Last week when I put out an appeal on the website and e-mailed some contacts in Morocco, it was more in hope than expectation that someone in Morocco may be able to go and find out what had happened to 09(98) on the edge of the Sahara. We were receiving transmissions from a remote ridge of the northern edge of the desert, well away from main roads and in some of the most inhospitable terrain Africa – or perhaps, more accurately, the world has to offer. Surely, 09′s fate would remain a mystery?" Read the remarkable story of what happened next.

The connections between Marie Lloyd, Dr Crippen and the Bedford Music Hall in Camden are traced by Another Nickel in the Machine.

Intermezzo brings you Dogs of the Great Composers.