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"Since February, an isolated former RAF base near the village of Manston, in Kent, has been used by the Home Office to warehouse migrants reaching England’s southeastern shores on small boats. These are desperate people fleeing conflict, persecution, immiseration, environmental degradation and other crises. Most of them claim asylum. They all deserve better." Joseph Maggs argues that Manston refugee camp is a "politically manufactured crisis": the foreseeable result of government policy towards the vast majority of the global poor who are unable to access "safe and legal routes" to the UK.  

Stephen Glenn explains why he is not watching the Qatar World Cup.

George Cunningham on the challenges facing the Lib Dems' federal international relations committee. He lists getting the party leadership back on track concerning Europe among them.

Social media accounts from far beyond the city stoked tensions between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester at the time of this autumn's riots, says The Indian Express. 

"Many of the songs were suggested to the band by A.L. Lloyd, the self-taught folklorist who went on to become co-founder and artistic director of Topic Records and co-compile The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs with Vaughan Williams. Mike Waterson once called him "a guru to us"; Lloyd also directed the subject matter of their songs. "We sang one and he said, 'Mm, we shan’t use that one. It’s too subservient.'" Judge Rogers on The Watersons and the re-release of their album Frost and Fire.

Bobby Seal presents a list of his favourite psychogeography books of 2022.

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"This country has transformed children in care into commodities in a misery market. Then they discard them when they’re too old – usually at 16 to semi-independent accommodation, or as a 2019 report conducted by the all-party parliamentary group for runaway and missing children and adults put it, into a 'frightening, twilight world of unregulated semi-independent homes'." Daniel Lavelle says it shouldn’t be down to John Lewis’s Christmas commercial to stand up for children in care.

More and more ministers are handed top jobs for their loyalty rather than their competence. Alexandra Hall Hall considers what we can do about this democratic deficit.

Kamran Abassi says the General Medical Council, which is responsible for regulating doctors in the United Kingdom, must reform itself or die.

Opera is not elitist, argues Alexandra Wilson: "Calling opera elitist doesn’t make it more accessible to anybody. It’s a terrible sales pitch: how many people would be tempted to explore an art form they had been constantly told was elitist? Describing classical music in these terms plays straight into the hands of anyone looking for an excuse to cut school music lessons, reduce the amount of opera on TV or, yes, remove subsidies from arts organisations that bring joy to people’s lives and do a lot of social good."

Tim Walker remembers interviewing the British actor Harry Andrews. Until I read this piece I had no idea that Andrews was gay.

Chris Dalla Riva finds that key changes are employed much less frequently in number one hits from after 1990 and identifies the cause.

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If satire were going to bring the Conservatives down, it would have done so a decade ago. Still, it keeps our spirits up and Euan McColm is in good form here: "Plaudits, too, for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who hit the airwaves a day later. The secretary of state for business has created a character for the ages, part Christopher Robin, part 1950s hangman. Beneath a plummy and polite exterior lurks the terrifying stench of menace."

Harry Shukman reports from the Ukip conference: "Today, fifty members of Ukip fit into the function room of a country pub outside Skegness, and there are plenty of empty chairs. The guest list barely stretches onto a second sheet of A4. There is talk of policies and history and electoral success but the room gives off the impression of a village cricket AGM instead of a party that recently took four million votes in a general election. Without Farage and without Brexit, Ukip is bereft."

Lucy Scholes praises The Glass Pearls, a forgotten novel by Emeric Pressburger about a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight in the streets of Pimlico.

Robert Hugill enjoys an evening of queered 18th-century music.

"My father took the following photo of Baldwin’s Gardens in 1949. The view is looking down towards Gray's Inn Road. In the early years of the war, the area suffered from the impact of several high explosive bombs and the effects of these can be seen to the right of the street." Baldwin's Gardens runs from Gray's Inn Road to Leather Lane and is a street I remember from Liberator paste ups long ago. This is a typically interesting post from A London Inheritance.

London's first UFO was spotted over St James's Park and Bloomsbury by a well-known physician called Cromwell Mortimer in 1746. Ertan Karpazli has the story.

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Sally Dawson pays tribute to Maureen Colquhoun, Britain’s first openly lesbian MP, who died earlier this month. She sat for Northampton North between February 1974 and 1979.

The coming Holyrood elections should be about the life draining from Scotland's hills and glens and the need for rewilding, argues Adam Ramsay.

"Politically speaking, Popper had lived through much. He had seen the dissolution of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He was part of the subsequent intellectual revolution that, among other things, produced the Vienna Circle, of which he was a peripheral part. He witnessed first-hand the rise of the Nazis and, with equal dismay, the rise of Communism." David Cohen remembers Karl Popper.

Caitlin Green looks at the evidence that there were people named Muhammad in medieval England.

Adam Chapman studies an apparently innocent landscape by Ronald Lampitt and finds a wealth of information about the changes to British agriculture after the second world war.

"If Leeds was somewhere to escape from then the Yorkshire Dales were somewhere to escape to. Jake Thackray’s Swaledale was similar to James Joyce’s Dublin: a quasi-magical place rooted in a real geography containing the world’s multitudes." Will Ainsley celebrates the genius of Jake Thackray.

There’s Drama in the Queer Penguin Community

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal Democrat insider, the American publication The Cut wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Photo by Plume at Morguefile.com

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"People can privately believe what they like but we have to be very careful who we publicly associate ourselves with - especially when gifts and donations are concerned." Andrew Page says Liberal Democrats should have no connection with those who advocate conversion therapy for LGBT+ people.

Amy Clarke on the need to challenge those who blame Leicester's Covid-19 lockdown on minority communities.

James Harper believes that "The government’s recent proposal to suspend jury trials is a potential threat to the Rule of Law – i.e. a legal system that treats everyone equally and which you can access, no matter who you are."

If we can rewild river catchments and floodplains we can ease some of the severity of flooding, argues Rewilding Britain.

Isle of Dogs - Past Life, Past Lives has some wonderful photographs from the 1960s.

"Drake sold so few records in his lifetime he was scarcely a professional threat, but his blank immunity to approval and his unshowy refusal to compromise presented a form of unspoken challenge to Martyn, who affected not to care about such things but probably in the end cared too much." Graeme Thomson has written a book about the friendship between Nick Drake and John Martyn.

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"The dumbing down of democracy has been gradual, but a Pandora’s Box of idiocracy was fully opened with the election of Trump in the US and the EU Referendum in Britain. Both were seismic events that shook the foundations of politics through the blatant manipulation of basic truths." James Melville believes we are losing the art of seriousness, clout, gravitas and diligence in our political discourse.

Peter McColl looks at government's view of the public in the second world war and Covid-19: "In the 1940s the population were thought to prefer safety. In the 2020s the population were thought to prefer work. The patricians of the 1940s were wrong. The behavioural economists of the 2020s are wrong."

Attempting to change someone's sexual orientation is unethical, exploitative and potentially harmful, says Megan Manson as she argues that British charity law is charity law propping up conversion therapy.

Where did the plot against George Soros come from? Hannes Grassegger explains.

Jonathan Fryer celebrates Ronald Searle and St Trinian's.

"The peculiar journey of a world renown piece of Pre-Raphaelite art – that will take us from Clapham Common to Puerto Rico, carefully avoiding Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lefty granny. And remarkably, this painting, Flaming June is back in this country, in the London house where she was painted." The Long Victorian on the strange career of Frederic Leighton's Flaming June.

The real Billy Elliot?

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With the fact that today has been World Ballet Day, I thought of this photograph.

Does it show the real Billy Elliot?

It is captioned:

June 1958: 12 year old John Ryder and his friend Trevor Briscoe play in a back garden in the coal mining area of Amthorpe, near Doncaster. Surprisingly, miner's son John wants to be a ballet dancer and shows guts as well as ballet talent, fighting any local boys who call him 'sissy'. He has also joined the school boxing team to prove it. 

Before you laugh or protest too loudly at the attitudes of the 1950, have a look at what I once wrote about the film Billy Elliot.

I complained of its "ludicrous sexual politics" and complained:

In order to show he is not gay Billy has to have a best friend who is not only gay but looks and dresses like a girl.

Golliwog MEP Bill Etheridge resigns from Ukip because it is racist

I used to have fun with Bill Etheridge, He and his wife left the Conservative Party after they were disciplined for posing with golliwogs and putting the photos on their Facebook page.

They joined Ukip and Etheridge published a book:

In this fearless and controversial booklet, Bill Etheridge argues that the political and social elite have cravenly surrendered to the diktat of the Politically Correct dogma that has crushed free speech, smashed enterprise and reduced Britain to a mere shadow of its former self. Using personal insights and real life examples he shows how our political leaders can no longer be trusted and issues a powerful rallying cry for all lovers of freedom to stand up against the totalitarian bigots who have forced Political Correctness upon us.

He was later elected to the European Parliament and even stood for the Ukip leadership.

Today comes news that Etheridge has resigned from the party. In a letter to its leader Gerard Batten he says:

"The changes you have made have changed the party beyond recognition. 

"The party is now seen by large swathes of the British public as a vehicle of hate towards Muslims and the gay community... 

"For my part I wish UKIP well and leave with great sadness that the party I loved has left me and taken a different direction."

I think we can take Etheridge's resignation as final proof that Batten has taken Ukip to the far right.

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The death of local democracy is the national calamity we don’t hear about, says John Harris.

Jurgen Habermas, the eminent German sociologist and philosopher, discusses the future of Europe: "Today, national populations are overwhelmed by the politically uncontrollable functional imperatives of a global capitalism that is being driven by unregulated financial markets. The frightened retreat behind national borders cannot be the correct response to that challenge."

"My first London Pride, meant to be an inclusive event, was being hijacked by people telling me I shouldn’t be there. I chair one of the main LGBT charities, and I was being made unwelcome, as were other trans people, by a handful of people who were apparently getting special treatment from the organisers." Helen Belcher on last Saturday's event.

"Most of the one million visitors who visit Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain every year believe they are looking at untouched 4,000-year-old remains. But virtually every stone was re-erected, straightened or embedded in concrete between 1901 and 1964, says a British doctoral student." Emma Young reports on a controversy in archaeology.

Chris Schurke goes on a hunt for a graveyard of military aircraft.

Clerk of Oxford has a tale of St Thomas Beckett and a lost village.

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Mark Pack looks in more depth at the Lib Dems' local election performance last week: "the story is partly one of making progress against the government but finding it harder going against the main opposition party. That’s a familiar pattern from Liberal Democrat history."

Who needs Jordan Peterson when we have Ferdinand Mount? Ian Sansom celebrates an attractive Conservative thinker.

"Cosmetics and clothing played a key role in allowing queer men to identify each other in a society where same-sex relations were illegal." Carianne Whitworth on gay life and police persecution in 1930s London.

Owen Hatherley says developers' architecture too often forgets the value of public space.

"The film presents a collision between an ancient, rural way of life and the modern world, but manages to honour the people of both, repeatedly staging encounters where those on each side recognise a connection with the other and find something to respect." Eleanor Parker watches A Canterbury Tale.

Benton follows the footsteps of Richard Jefferies through Tolworth and provides a striking quote from the great man: "'Before a dandelion has shown in the meadow,' he remarks, 'the banks of the railway are yellow with coltsfoot.'"

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Gay conversion camps

Look, I don't write this stuff. I just edit it for him. OK?

Friday

Plans for this summer’s gay conversion camps here at the Hall are in hand. I know these are a controversial idea, but it would take a heart of stone not to help the parents who come to me. “We’ve tried everything,” they sob, “bought him Doris Day records, but he is just not interested.” This summer I have decided the students will camp, and I use the word advisedly, by the lake.

Then there is the fixture list for my XI this summer. Among our regular matches against the MCC, Mebyon Kernow and the Elves of Rockingham Forest, I am pleased to see a number of new names. Notable among them, all the way from China, is Mr Xi’s XI.

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

Earlier this week

• The Beast from the East
• Stilton Man
• Jo Swinson gives Humphrys one up the snoot
• "Dance, Frog Man, dance"

Two points on Tim Farron and Christianity

I made two points on Twitter about Tim Farron's recantation of his view on gay sex that seem worth repeating here.

The first is in that interview, as he often does, Tim told his interviewers "what Christians believe".

But there are, says Wikipedia, more than two billion Christians around the world. They vary from the Russian Orthodox church to the Wee Frees of the Western Isles.

It is simply wrong to suggest that they all share the conclusions of Tim's slightly home-made Evangelical faith. 

Christians believe all sorts of things and, in Britain at least, many of them are more relaxed about gay sex than Tim appears to be.

The second point is that Tim said in the interview that Christianity is always "radical and counter-cultural".

Not in England it isn't. 

We have an established church and bishops sit in the House of Lords - and you can't get less counter-cultural than that.

Again, Tim is talking about his particular variety of the faith, not Christianity as a whole.

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The six-week delay in paying new Universal Credit claims will lead to evictions by private landlords, says Giles Peaker.

"Demonizing homosexuality is, most obviously, a way for Putin to assert Russia’s superiority over the West. The West’s acceptance of homosexuality is given as proof of its moral and social collapse." Robert Cottrell reviews a study of how totalitarianism has reclaimed Russia.

Joshua Smeltzer reviews Michael Ignatieff's new book The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World,

Jonathan Meades remembers Anthony Burgess: "In person he was very genial, generous, and, among other things which you wouldn’t expect from him, a very good listener. But in private, that’s to say on the page (and one commits to the page things one would never say), he was rancorous and grudge-bearing and full of antipathies."

"I’m pleased to report that it’s been an entirely positive experience rediscovering the series." Tim Holyoake has been watching the DVD release of Shoestring, the TV private detective series from 1979 and 1980 that starred a young Trevor Eve.

Dakota Boo goes for an urban wander around Brentford.

Andrew Bridgen, Edward Heath and Wiltshire police

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North West Leicestershire's Andrew Bridgen is the ultimate rent-a-quote backbench Conservative MP, ready with an ill-informed right-wing opinion on any topic at the drop of a hat.

Only last week he was in the Daily Mail complaining about a National Trust exhibition at Kingston Lacy:

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen said of the Kingston Lacy exhibition: "This is totally inappropriate. It’s not what people visit the National Trust for. If I want moral guidance I go to church – not the National Trust."

Perhaps Bridgen should have spent more time in church, because today his excruciating performance at a family court hearing has been all over the papers.

My readers are, of course, much too sophisticated to be interested in such matters - I recommend Fleet Street Fox in the Mirror for the best account.

Even before that story broke, however, I was considering a post about Bridgen because of the extraordinary context in which his name cropped up on Sunday.

A Sunday Times report headed "Fresh doubt over Heath sex inquiry" contained this passage:

The Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who has seen an early draft of Wiltshire police’s report on Heath, described its findings as "credible and disturbing". 

The MP for North West Leicestershire said: "I have never known any other police investigation that has got as much media attention and where such efforts have been made to discredit it before publication. 

"I have the utmost confidence in his [Veale’s] integrity and the professionalism of his team, and I would urge people to reserve judgment until they have read the report."

It is right that accusations against of sexual abuse Edward Heath should be investigated. But if it is true that this investigation has failed to contact Sir Timothy Kitson, who knew Heath for 35 years and was his parliamentary private secretary during his time at No 10 from 1970-74, it is hard not to be sceptical about it.

Above all, you wonder who decided to give Andrew Bridgen a copy of the the report, particularly as it seems that this report will remain confidential.

I hope the journalists reporting the publication of a redacted version of the report on 5 October will ask that question.

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Matthew Green offers a sober assessment of Liberal Democrat prospects under our new leader.

"The progressive alliance can only work when everyone is genuinely willing to work together. If they are all fighting over the same voters then it was always a fallacy." Neil Monnery draws a lesson from this year's general election campaign.

"Looking back at the time of the 1967 Act even those supporting decriminalisation called homosexuality ‘a disability’ and ‘a great weight of shame’. Bisexuals didn’t even occur to them. Goodness knows what they’d think of all the diversity of sexuality we share today! It shows us how far we’ve come, how hard that fight has been, and how much further we still have to go." Jennie Rigg marks an important anniversary.

Melanie Phillips is rightly critical of the way some exploited the plight of Charlie Gard and his parents.

Social workers and other professionals need to do more to help looked-after children achieve their potential, and to diminish the ‘stigma’ of being in care, research has found. Alex Turner on the findings of a new survey.

James Fitzgerald introduces us to the inhabitants of Eel Pie Island.

David Steel bigs up Tim Farron

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On the New Statesman website, the former Liberal Party leaders praises the current Liberal Democrat leader as "the most under-rated politician in the UK today".

Sir David writes:

I have known and highly regarded him since I first met him as leader of the student Liberals at Newcastle University. 

In 2005 he defeated a right-wing Tory MP by just 250 votes. At the next election in 2010 he jumped to a 12,000 majority, much of which he retained in the debacle in 2015. 

Twice he has persuaded me to address his annual constituency fundraising dinner saying “it is just over the border” – actually more than a 200 mile round trip over Hadrian’s Wall. I was deeply impressed by his hold on the good people of Cumbria. 

Indeed his election as party leader against Norman Lamb, who had been an excellent minister, was partly because party members wanted someone less identified with the post-Coalition disaster. 

He is a committed Christian, which I regard as a plus, and I do not understand the fuss about his alleged views on homosexuality or abortion since we have always accepted that these are matters of conscience for individual MP’s not for party diktat. 

His track record as MP showed him willing to oppose some of the errors of the party, especially the student fees fiasco. He is vehemently anti-Brexit.

I prefer the slightly mischievous David Steel of today to the David Steel who led the Liberal Party when I joined it.

Two Conservative MPs forced to stand down

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I have blogged several times about David Mackintosh the embattled Conservative MP for Northampton South.

The reasons his position has been under threat are given in this post, though I should emphasise that Mr Mackintosh has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

And recently his constituency party has turned against him.

Last night came the news that Mackintosh has decided to stand down and so will not be fighting the seat on 8 June.

So well done to Northampton South Conservatives for forcing his hand.

Then today we heard that Andrew Turner, the Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight, will not be standing then either.

As the Isle of Wight County Press tells it:

Andrew Turner has stepped down as Isle of Wight MP after an outcry over alleged comments about the LGBTQ community to a group of Christ the King College students earlier today (Friday). 

Mr Turner had been due to be re-selected this afternoon until a decision by the Tories to delay the process to avoid confusion with next week's local elections. 

But he faced mounting pressure to go, after students spoke out about alleged comments made by Mr Turner during an A Level politics class, in which they said he called homosexuality 'dangerous to society' and 'wrong.'

So it looks as though the hounding of Tim Farron over his views on the sinfulness of being gay and of gay sex has netted a victim in the shape of a Tory MP.

I hope the backwoods Tory councillor from round here who took to Twitter to display a hitherto unsuspected interest in the subject of gay sex is happy with this outcome.

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"The Liberal Democrats led a battle in the Lords to get the Government to change the law to pardon all those gay men convicted under the dreadful Labouchère amendment and similar Acts." John Sharkey on the success of a Lib Dem campaign.

Alex Massie says people who protest against Donald Trump are not the problem: they are right. And in The Spectator of all places.

"Reading it in January 2016 seemed strangely appropriate, as we grapple with new authoritarianism and protest. The scenery may change but the stories remain similar." Nicholas Whyte encounters V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore,

Stephen Pentz blogs an essay on beauty.

Backwatersman now has a second blog. On it he walks from Luton Airport Parkway to Harpenden.

"Playing 'one of the stately homos of England' and 'the greatest god of all' within the span of a year had a huge impact on a generation of young teenagers, of which I was one at the time. Frank Collins pays tribute to John Hurt.

Row over fantabulosa servicette at Cambridge theological college

The news today is that Westcott House in Cambridge, a leading Church of England theological college, has apologised for its students attempts to 'queer' evensong.

As the Guardian tells it:

Student priests at Westcott House in Cambridge organised the evensong service on Tuesday in the college chapel. Advertised as a "Polari evening prayer in anticipation of LGBT+ history month”, it was described as a “liturgical experiment" ...

A prayer referred to the "Fantabulosa fairy" and ended: "Praise ye the Duchess. The Duchess’s name be praised." Psalm 19 was reworded to refer to "O Duchess, my butchness".

Speaking as an atheist, I find this rather endearing.

But then Polari reminds me of childhood Sunday lunchtimes and Round the Horne, In that wonderful radio comedy Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, as Julian and Sandy, introduced the wider world to this gay argot.

I have read that the downside of this was it lost its usefulness to gay men - Polari is not a good way of hiding your meaning if your maiden aunt can understand it because she listens to the radio.

The story also reminds me of my reactions the first time I attended evensong in a cathedral - it was York Minster.

My reaction was first that Christianity feels very Eastern and it is remarkable that it established itself so thorough in these green, Western islands.

And second it was that the service was not just theatrical, but camp - men in frocks, pretty boys and so on - which made it more appealing.

So I think the students at Westcott House may have been on to something, and one day we shall find out who was right.

As Paul wrote of heaven to the Corinthians,

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then eek to eek.