Europe’s coffin-makers warn Chinese imports could be death knell for industry

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Thanks to a sharp-eyed Liberal England reader, Politico wins our Headline of the Day Award.

GUEST POST Is Isaac Asimov's psychohistory fiction or reality?

Peter Chambers mixes science fiction with computer games, the numerical simulation of history, computer games and a take on political warfare.

The term 'psychohistory' originated in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. He started writing this in the 1940s, and after a long gap following the first three books continued to the end of his life. They sold very well. 

Psychohistory is the concept that the future of societies can be predicted – in outline – given a lot of data and a lot of computer power. At the time in which Book 1 was set, a Galactic Empire existed and its bureaucrats recorded more or less everything. Asimov was quite clear that he borrowed heavily from the Roman Empire. There were no Jedi nor Sith.

Book 1 was simply called Foundation. It was a collection of short stories that had been published in magazines. The Galactic Empire was falling and a bunch of academics wanted to preserve a kernel of knowledge. They established a sort of college on an obscure planet and had it chartered as a foundation. 

They used psychohistory to map out the future and selectively interfere using forms of political warfare. Their planet mutated into a sort of mayoral republic: first a city state, then a nation state. Rome again. The mayors were portrayed a bit like New York City mayors. They used the predictions of the academics to operate a strategic plan. Sometimes they used propaganda, false religion, economic warfare or covert operations. It is reminiscent of the Cold War.

Book 2 was called Foundation and Empire. The principal tale concerns the last gasp of the old Empire and its best general, who might look like Scipo Africanus in certain lights. The Foundation deal with the Empire by essentially doing nothing. They manoeuver on the periphery and let the Empire become snarled in its internal politics in the centre. It  reminds me of Imperial China around 1890. 

The mercantilists become rich, and are a rising power. The imperialists become divided, and are a falling power. The second tale concerns a unique individual who could not be predicted by the old-school politicians. His name is not Donald, but nothing he does lasts and he does a lot of damage.

Book three is called Second Foundation. The old academics knew that psychohistory was only approximate, and there would be a residual error. There might also be random errors, such as Not-Donald. They founded an invisible college to deal with this, with the best computer – the Prime Radiant (data science!) – and new intuitive powers. Also whole food, fresh air and exercise. They fixed a few glitches. Manifest Destiny was back on. Also suburban life and atomic powered cars. Quite the Sixties.

Book 4 is called Foundation’s Edge, but it could be called Third Foundation. Asimov seemed to reconsider his vaunted Trilogy and find it wanting. He invented a third power, which was aware of Empire, First Foundation, and Second Foundation. And it could meddle. But it wanted independent verification. Affirmation. 

It viewed the Empire as now dead, the First Foundation as clunky as the Soviets were – coal, oil, steel, and ships – and the Second Foundation as some sort of computer-bound outfit with too many PhDs and too little wisdom. The book tours around and then ends. More books follow, but do not really matter: the characters were rubbish and the settings only sketched. They all sold well.

Almost everybody who read Foundation wondered if psychohistory could be real. Could Immanuel Kant be right that "we could reason together"? Could rational modern planning smooth out the economy and herald "an end to boom and bust"? Could we have five-year plans?

Obviously the whole concept was incredible. Impossible. Philosophically a category error of misunderstandings. Besides, the compute that would be required would be unheard of and the Data far too big. Where could it all be stored? It was pie-in-the-sky. OK, so a cloud. Most people with a STEM degree would have looked out the window, scoped it out and shaken their heads.

Until Peter Turchin. Around 2005. Peter discovered that there was data from early modern England, the Han and Tang China, and the Roman Empire that related population, state stability, growth, food production and the state of social elites. He called subsequent studies cliodynamics – the dynamics of power. These seemed to be related in dynamical oscillations across decades. The behaviour predicted can be quite interesting, such as "elite overproduction".

Figure 1: Population-Instability cycle in England, from Turchin, P. (2005) Dynamical Feedbacks
between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States 

Dynamical means that the model predicts output from previous data using update rules (e.g. parents have children, surplus leads to more surplus). I first learned about dynamical models from the game Yellow RiverKingdom that came with the original BBC Micro. This was a port of the 1968 mainframe classic Hamurabi . 

These games have the player as the manager of an agrarian society next to a river. You must manage population pressure, food production, famine, flooding, bandits, and social unrest. At first it is difficult to avoid instability: over-population, famine, flood deaths and so on. 

So I looked at the BASIC source and wrote out the dynamical equations. Drew a few graphs. Used the game as a simulator. Soon I had stabilised society – with some effort – by raising the counter-bandit activity. The deaths of soldiers on counter-bandit patrols stabilised the runaway population explosion. Having done that, I found it easier to modify the BASIC code to make this easier to automate – Psychohistory in action! 

The more alert reader might notice a similarity between counter-bandit patrols and having foreign wars of choice. As a tool of policy. You can – if you want – export instability. Second sons and all that. It might be more responsible to change your 'War Department' to a 'Ministry of Defence', and put more effort into foreign aid and exporting stability. This avoids what it called blowback.

Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

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This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

The Joy of Six 1475

Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.

The long history of Chinese food in Britain

The view that the British subsisted on overcooked vegetables until the Eighties is a tenet of faith for many, but the reality is more nuanced and interesting.

Here's an extract from an article on the Newham Chinese Association website:

The history of Chinese food in Britain is best understood in relation to the history of Chinese immigrants. Historically, the first Chinese eating houses in Britain catered not for local customers, but for Chinese sailors who had settled around the docks in London’s Limehouse and wanted a taste of home. Until the 1940s, the majority of customers in the restaurants were not English but Chinese immigrants.

In the aftermath of World War II Chinese food began to grow in popularity. British servicemen returned from various parts of the Empire and the Far East with a willingness to try different foods and cuisine and a new enthusiasm for Chinese food and restaurants. This in turn saw the rise of the restaurant trade in Soho. Chinese people entered the catering trade because of the downturn in shipping and the closing of laundries, traditional areas of employment.  

In the 1950s and early 1960s there was an influx of Chinese from Hong Kong who provided the necessary workforce. The restaurants served Cantonese food because of Britain’s old colonial links to Hong Kong where most of the chefs came from. The lack of certain authentic ingredients meant having to improvise and also adjust a few dishes to suit the liking of British customers, for example Chop Suey, an old style Chinese cuisine consisting of meat and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean-sprouts and a starch-thickened sauce.

With the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China, staff at the Chinese Embassy in London were recalled but the majority chose to stay in the UK and many of them then went on to open Chinese restaurants. Kenneth Lo, a former Chinese diplomat, became a popular and well known author of several Chinese cookery books explaining the intricacies of Chinese cooking to the British public throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He went on to become a legendary figure on the capital’s restaurant scene and also the foremost expert in Britain on Chinese food, and played a huge part in popularizing and improving its consumption.

What I find particularly interesting here is the insight that servicemen returned from war in the Pacific with a taste for Asian food. That's a useful corrective to the consensus view that the Fifties took place entirely in black and white.

But being an imperial power had affected our tastes well before then. Tea became the quintessential British drink, and we take it with milk because we learnt to drink it in India.

My only question about the article is whether it takes too London-centric a view. Chinese restaurants soon spread far beyond Soho – the advertisement above dates from 1962, and the headline below relates to an incident at The Painted Fan in Market Harborough in 1966.

Chinese spying case: Why did the Crown Prosecution Service throw in the towel?

Alan Robertshaw looks at the Crown Prosecution's decision not to pursue the case against two men who were charged with spying on behalf of China. 

Reading between the lines, he is puzzled by it.

He gives links to the three witness statements the government supplied on YouTube, and he has also posted an earlier video on the case there.

Alan's YouTube account is well worth following for topical discussion of legal matters.

Reform candidate for Higham Ferrers has moved to China

Reform UK nominated four candidates for a postponed election in the Higham Ferrers ward of North Northamptonshire Council. Which was good going, seeing as it's only a two-member ward.

One of them withdrew in time, but there will still be three Reform candidates on the ballot paper come 12 June.

And one of those three has since moved to China, which means that if he's elected he'll have to resign and cause a by-election.

A Reform councillor told the Northamptonshire Telegraph:

“He has just had a change of circumstances. He has got a Chinese wife and something has happened and he has got to go over there to China.

"If he gets elected we will have to have a by-election.”

On consulting my files, I find I have taken no photographs in China but have plenty from Higham Ferrers.

h/t Mark Pack

The Joy of Six 1347

Wera Hobhouse demands to know why she was deported from Hong Kong.

"As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death." Ed Conway tries to get to the bottom of what is happening at Scunthorpe.

"Could we see protests akin to the Luddite attacks - this time targeting server farms instead of knitting frames?" John Cassidy discusses how we might survive the AI revolution.

Michael Mechanic and Nina Berman report allegations of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida: "The scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched."

"The four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. 'You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.'" J. Hoberman reconsiders Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film.

John Lacey traces a pre-historic trading route across Leicestershire.

GUEST POST How Dune anticipated Deep Seek

Peter Chambers turns to Frank Herbert's classic science fiction for help in understanding the Artificial Intelligence world of today.

Recently a small company in the People's Republic of China released a GPT-LLM model set called Deep Seek. This seems to have surprised some in the US tech oligarchy to the tune of about a trillion dollars.

This is presented by some commentators as ‘little China’ being nimbler than ‘big America’. But this is not strictly true, and Frank Herbert anticipated the point in Appendix I of his novel Dune.

Big America is in reality a bandwagon started by OpenAI and Nvidia around a specific architecture epitomised by Chat-GPT. 

This demo caught the common imagination and was backed by Elon Harkonnen, Eric Corrino, Mark Richese, Sam Atreides and others. They organised investment in the $100 Bn range. Eric even said at a closed meeting at Stanford that the technology would do what his “15,000 programmers would not do”.

Little China was one company within the PRC headed by one Liang Wenfeng, which claims to have spent about $6m on electricity for their demo, using older export-grade chips from the USA.

How many firms and universities in the PRC failed to produce anything? We do not know. We will never know. Deep Seek found a sweet spot in the landscape of possibilities. We do not know what combination of skill, money, inspiration, technology, and luck led them to this. But they got there.

What did Frank Herbert say about finding success? In Appendix 1 of Dune he wrote:

Kynes knew that highly organised research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. He set up small-unit experiments with regular interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect.

Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist and a pioneer in the science of ecology. There is a lot of stuff on him online. He organised committees. One term - 'ecosystem' - associated with him was actually from a colleague. He was an inspiration, but not perhaps a Great Man.

Small teams with a lot of lateral information sharing versus a highly organised structure run from the centre. I shall not labour the point more.

Trillion-dollar pivots can come about by quite humble people noting that an Emperor is actually naked. Maybe 9999 people at that time miss that point. It might take only one though. 

There are a lot of possible configurations in the space of GPT-LLM. Multiple ones may be valuable. Herbert used the example of ecology in his Appendix to appear profound. Ignoring this might cost someone a trillion dollars.

Peter Chambers is a Lib Dem Member in Hampshire.

Glossary

GPT – generative pre-trained transformer, something that generates an output by transforming an input using pre-trained (fixed) weights, mathematically. The inputs and outputs are digital data.

Chat-GPT – a demonstration GPT made by the firm OpenAI. It obtained viral PR fame.

FRS – Fellow of the Royal Society

LLM – large language model, a model that uses a language of digital data tokens, which are strings of bits. Make it a large one. The meaning and significance of the tokens exists in the senses and minds of humans, natural intelligences that evolved on the Third Planet.

PRC – the People’s Republic of China ("the Mainland one").

No one expects Josh Reynolds' inquisition

Before Christmas it was Amazon, yesterday it was the fashion e-commerce platform Shein that was interrogated by the Liberal Democrat MP Joshua Reynolds at a hearing by the Commons business and trade select committee.

Josh later wrote on Bluesky:

With their poor record on modern-day slavery, I was hoping that they could reassure us they were taking the issue seriously...

The Joy of Six 1302

Clare Coffey watches It's a Wonderful Life: "It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral."

"A target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation." Philip Murphy believes the British establishment offers a "target-rich environment" to spies.

Timothy Garton Ash asks what will happen if Russia wins in Ukraine: "Ukraine would be defeated, divided, demoralised and depopulated. The money would not come in to reconstruct the country; instead, another wave of people would leave it ... Europe as a whole would see an escalation of the hybrid war that Russia is already waging against it, still largely unnoticed by most blithely Christmas-shopping west Europeans."

Chris Dillow on the rise of managerialism and fall of British business management: "Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities."

The inter-war council estates that George Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier are visited by Municipal Dreams.

"Thirkell makes quite a few stealth jokes about sexuality that have a camp insouciance, in strong contrast to her otherwise default tone of extreme social conservatism." Kate Macdonald considers the contrasting treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism in the novels of Angela Thirkell.

The 'Silk Road' is a myth: Trade with the East went by sea and India was at its heart

In the course of his review of William Dalrymple's The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World in the London Review of Books last month, Ferdinand Mount quotes a passage from a book by Warwick Ball:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. 

Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. 

Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

That is from Ball's Rome in the East, which was published in 1999. William Dalrymple, according to Mount, takes a similar view:

He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story.

Invasion of the buddleias: When did it take place?

Since writing this, I have done what I should have done first and had a search in the British Newspaper Archive. It turns out there are plenty of wartime references to buddleias on bombsites. A second blog post will follow.

When did the buddleia invade England? I'm complicit in the invasion myself: I planted one because I like butterflies, but there are depressingly few of those to be seen now.

Buddleias, however, are everywhere, including places they shouldn't be - you often see them growing out of the masonry of neglected buildings. And they are everywhere on old railway land because the ballast resembles the riverside gravel where they grow in China.

But you never see buddleias mentioned in accounts of world war II bombsites. Here is a Guardian country diary from August 1946:

Many people in certain busy parts of London have recently looked about them in surprise at what at first appeared to be snowflakes drifting down before the breeze. 

But when the “snowflakes” settled on sleeves or hats they were found to be the small parachute-like seed-carriers of the rosebay willow herb, which grows so profusely on any waste ground and particularly favours the bomb-scarred areas of the City of London. 

A few days ago these dreary spaces were for a brief time magnificently clothed in rosy purple and here and there in gold where the Oxford rag-wort blooms. But now the beauty is fading and millions of seeds are being scattered far and wide by the wind.

No buddleias there, nor in this account of the exotic spaces the bombsites became from an essay on Rose Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

So the invasion of the buddleias appears to be a post-war phenomenon, but when exactly did it take place?

Commons intelligence committee questions Danny Alexander's role with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

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From this morning's Guardian:

David Cameron’s appointment as vice-chair of the £1bn China-UK investment fund and Sir Danny Alexander’s appointment as vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB] were in part engineered by the Chinese state, parliament’s intelligence and security committee found.

Their appointment was to lend credibility to Chinese investment as well as the broader Chinese brand, according to confidential evidence given to the intelligence watchdog.

The report goes on to quote the evidence to the committee of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong:

"I think they [China] probably think we are not entirely reliable useful idiots … I think they regard us as an economic opportunity and as an opportunity to, through elite capture, through the cultivation of useful idiots, through playing on things like the ‘golden age’ of British-China relations, getting us by and large corralled into doing the sort of things they would like us to do."

And it reminds us that, despite opposition from Washington, the UK played a big part in the creation of the AIIB. Good relations with China were seen as a particular enthusiasm of George Osborne.

Danny Alexander was appointed to a role with it after losing his seat at the 2015 general election. 

At the time this was attributed to the influence of Osborne, whose number two Alexander had been at the Treasury under the Coalition. I was reminded of a younger son being sent out to the Empire to make his fortune.

The Guardian also mentions the dramatic resignation last month of the AIIB's global communications chief Bob Pickard. He said on Twitter at the time.

The bank is dominated by Communist party members and also has one of the most toxic cultures imaginable. I don’t believe that my country’s interests are served by its AIIB membership.

Happy to be gone from that cesspool. The Communist party hacks hold the cards at the bank. They deal with some board members as useful idiots. I believe that my government should not be a member of this PRC [Chinese] instrument. The reality of power in the bank is that it’s CCP from start to finish.

Danny Alexander was quoted by Reuters as saying Pickard's allegations that the Chinese Communist Party has undue influence on the bank "are without any foundation whatsoever".

You can read the intelligence and security committee press release about its new China report online, but the full report does not seem to be on its website yet.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: 3/6 a bottle from Boot’s in Uppingham

Not only was there really a Wise Woman of Wing, but legend persists that it was indeed possible to buy her pills and potions in Boot's of Uppingham well into the 20th century.

Friday

Despite the Wise Woman of Wing’s excellent embrocation (3/6 a bottle from Boot’s in Uppingham), I will admit to being a little on the stiff side these days to have made Gareth Southgate’s final 26. So it was little hardship for me to announce my personal sporting boycott of Qatar, but cricket is another matter. 

For some years now my own eleven has opened its season with a chilly April fixture against a team selected by the President of China. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs leaves me with no choice but to abandon the fixture. 

Today, therefore, I have written to the Chinese Ambassador withdrawing my invitation. There will no Lord Bonkers’ XI v. President Xi’s XI next spring.

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

Earlier this week...

• No camel could have sacrificed his penis in a finer cause
• "A mulligatawny is pleasantly warming at this time of year"
• "What about the Young People?"
• The Marxist Groupuscules XI

Six of the Best 988

Bruno Maçães says the attempted coup in Washington this week is further proof that we live in an age that is collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality.

"Any story which depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossibly dangerous. No British journalists would dare to handle it, let alone publish it." Writing before the unexpected verdict, Peter Oborne and Millie Cooke considered what the extradition of Julian Assange would have meant for journalism.

William Yang asks if the mass arrest of pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong signals the beginning of the end for the territory's civil liberties.

Gillian Darley mourns Coventry's failure to cherish its modernist architecture.

"The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name." Ian Jack on the history of trainspotting.

"In St Mary’s Church, in the village of Frensham, Surrey, the strangest object can be found. Propped up on a tripod, near the pews, beneath the arched windows, in among all the other fittings you’d expect in an English country church, stands what appears to be a witch’s cauldron." David Castleton tells a strange story.

The recent career of Ryan Coetzee

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You remember Ryan Coetzee. He was Nick Clegg's special adviser and then director of strategy for the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election campaign.

That was the campaign that saw the party reduced from 57 MPs to eight.

Nothing daunted, he then served as director of strategy for Stronger In, the official pro-remain campaign in the EU referendum.

After that, he went a bit quiet.

But today's Guardian brings us up to date with his career:

Hong Kong has turned to the former director of strategy of the UK remain campaign in the Brexit referendum to revive its reputation, amid further scrutiny of the role played by London-based political operatives that advise overseas governments.

The Hong Kong government awarded a £5m public relations contract to the Mayfair-headquartered Consulum as part of its Relaunch Hong Kong campaign, shortly before Beijing introduced a new security law designed to crush pro-democracy protests in the territory.

The Guardian understands the Hong Kong account is being led by Ryan Coetzee, who was employed on the unsuccessful 2016 remain campaign.

The paper also tells us:

Following his unsuccessful role trying to convince Britons to remain in the European Union, Coetzee joined Consulum where he continues to be heavily involved in projects to rehabilitate the overseas reputation of Saudi Arabia. These efforts were derailed in the international media by the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The current Lib Dem leadership is much concerned with whether we should defend or disown our years in coalition with the Conservatives.

This is odd, because I doubt that voters in 2025 will be much interested in a Lib Dem defence of what we did ten or 15 years before.

But Coetzee's later career, like Nick Clegg's journey from pledging to go to jail rather than carry an identity card to becoming the front man for the data harvesters of Seattle, does not make one warm to those who were in positions of power in the party during the coalition years.

Six of the Best 933

"The media would have us believe that Rishi Sunak is having a good crisis. But this is because it focuses far too much upon presentation and not enough upon policy. The standards for Tory politicians have fallen so low that being able to read a speech fluently suffices to make one a future PM." Chris Dillow considers the origins of the Conservatives' policy disaster on Covid-19 and the economy.

Natalie Bennett on the privatisation of care homes for older people has been a disaster.

"In Russia, it is a deceitful, neurotic, and bullying approach to history. In China, it is the same story but over geography." Ed Lucas argues the regimes in both countries are expending huge amounts of political capital on unnecessary fights.

Margaret Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before it even existed, as Jay McGregor reveals.

"Ravilious ... was a strong opponent of fascism, as one might expect from his light and playful sensibility. He raised money for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and apparently had to be dissuaded by friends from enlisting in the British Army as a private soldier when war broke out." Niall Gooch says Eric Ravilious depicted 'Deep England' but unsullied by any kind of dubious politics.

Mary Reid recalls the pains and pleasures of living near a zoo.

Six of the Best 812

"And it was certainly a dramatic landslide – with diners in the National Liberal Club dancing on the tables as victory after victory was reported." Mark Pack on the 1906 Liberal landslide.

ConservativeHome is a hotbed of Conservative Islamophobia, says Simon Childs.

Adam Segal looks at the prospect of China becoming a cyber super-power: "If this happens, the Internet will be less global and less open. A major part of it will run Chinese applications over Chinese-made hardware. And Beijing will reap the economic, diplomatic, national security, and intelligence benefits that once flowed to Washington."

What went wrong with the Ben Stokes trial? The Secret Barrister explains.

JohnBoy pays tribute to the publisher John Calder: "John, who has died at the age of 91, was in his late twenties in the late 1950s when let in the light on dreary post-war Britain with his publication of a flood of progressive foreign writers and became the scourge of its conservative literary establishment in the process."

You can watch Elvis Costello and his band Flip City playing in 1974 on Open Culture.

When New Labour took on the Teletubbies

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China has banned Peppa Pig, reports the Guardian:

The wildly popular children’s character was recently scrubbed from Douyin, a video sharing platform in China, which deleted more than 30,000 clips. The hashtag #PeppaPig was also banned, according to the Global Times, a state-run tabloid newspaper. 

The seemingly innocuous cartoon’s downfall appears to be no fault of its creators. Instead the problem is Peppa’s association with counterculture memes and “society people” – a slang term for lowlifes and gangsters. 

People who upload videos of Peppa Pig tattoos and merchandise and make Peppa-related jokes "run counter to the mainstream value and are usually poorly educated with no stable job". "They are unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the young generation the [Communist] party tries to cultivate."

Ridiculous. Nothing like that could happen in Britain.

You say that, but I am reminded of what happened when Labour came to power in 1997.

An article by Anne M. White on Televzion Online tells the story of how it became caught in crossfire between trendies and traditionalists in education:

This becomes clear in an article about Stephen Byers, the then Minister of State for School Standards, who is described as "fighting back" against the "dumbing down" of British culture exemplified by the "Teletubbies". 

Significantly in this context, the journalist notes: "Mr. Byers said he had asked for a recording of the "Teletubbies", but had not yet had an opportunity to view it," highlighting the fact that it was what the programme symbolised that was really the issue.

Mr Byers and the Teletubbies were the subject of one of my first columns for Liberal Democrat News. I had written to him some time after the story broke, but the civil servant who replied said that he had still not found the time to watch it.

In the event the Teletubbies were to last rather longer than Mr Byers

So there are surprising parallels between the Chinese dictators and New Labour.

This affair also reminds us how well things were going for the country when the latter came to power and how hard they had to try to find things to be outraged about.

Again! Again!