Tony Benn: Nigel Farage's John the Baptist?

#OTD 1975. Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn debate leaving the EEC on TV.

Jenkins argues that Britain will have no say over how trade rules are made.

Benn argues that the country would get the trade deal it wanted “because we are their very best customer”. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/lfhSYxYV5q

— Tides of History (@labour_history) June 2, 2024

This video was posted on Twitter earlier today, and it's uncanny how close Tony Benn's arguments against Britain remaining in what was then the European Economic Community are to those used by Leave in the 2016 referendum.

He comes over as Nigel Farage's John the Baptist, while the slightly amused reference to Italy wanting to sell its wine is pure Boris Johnson. 

You may say that Benn's wish to leave room for protectionism is a world away from the economic beliefs of Brexit's most powerful backers, but many Brexit voters thought they were voting for protectionism.

But then I have taken the odd potshot at the myth of St Tony over the years.

In 2009 I devoted a my Liberal Democrat News column House Points to the hobby, pointing out that the pirate radio ships of the Sixties had gone from being a threat to the British way of life to the subject of warm nostalgia:

You would not know it from Richard Curtis’s recent film, but the minister who sank the pirate ships was Tony Benn - or Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then called himself.

Getting into high gear, I continued:

Do the sweet young things who hang upon his words about global warming know that when a minister in the 1970s he forced through the construction of the coal-burning Drax power station?

Or take his party piece. There are five questions we should ask politicians: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?”

That is not what he said when he met Saddam Hussein in 2003: 

"I have 10 grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish, Indian, Muslim blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"

But it has to be admitted that Benn is good at getting his points across. Roy Jenkins does not say much in this clip, so it may be unfair to judge him on it, but there are two problems with what he does say.

The first is that accent. As Nye Bevan is supposed to have said when it was suggested to him that Jenkins was lazy:

"Lazy? Lazy? How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?"

The second is something that is endemic on the left: too much abstraction. I'm sure the average voter could quickly be brought to understand the concept of "pooled sovereignty", but I'm not convinced they will understand it without explanation. So maybe Jenkins needed to find simpler language in the first place.

I'm reminded of the time, at the height of the campaign for a second referendum, when someone decided that having Stephen Fry discoursing on "forced perspective" was the way to convert Leavers to our cause.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say in the European Union.

Boris Johnson tells lies with his hands on the Bible

I've just come across this video of the actor Ian Richardson on the BBC's Sunday AM programme in 2006, the year before he died.

In the excerpt I have chosen here, he reveals something I didn't know. And I speak with all the authority of a former parliamentary sketch writer for Liberal Democrat News.

The Liberal Democrat magazine AdLib is to cease publication

When I joined the Liberal Party it published a weekly newspaper - Liberal News. This became Liberal Democrat News when we merged with the SDP.

I applied unsuccessfully to work for it once and later became an (unpaid) columnist for many years. I even did the desktop publishing on a couple of issues.

Liberal Democrat News ceased publication shortly after the party went into coalition with the Conservatives.

Its replacement, we were assured, would be a revamped AdLib magazine.

This did manage to appear monthly for a while - I wrote for it in those early days, but found this (literally) a thankless task. Then it faded away.

Today I received an email from the party's "Director for People" telling me that AdLib is to cease publication. You can find it reproduced without comment on Lib Dem Voice.

This tells me, improbably in both cases, that AdLib is "much loved" and costs as much to produce as "the entire staffing budget for the Party's Membership Department!"

It's replacement will be an improved AdLib blog.

I did not know there was an AdLib blog, but it turns out that there is.

Maybe I am just an old fogey and the future for member communications does lie entirely online. But the fact that no one has thought to add the AdLib blog to the LibDemBlogs aggregator does not fill me with confidence.

Anyway, if you want to know what is going on in the Liberal Democrats you can always subscribe to Liberator.

Good Liberals were up in arms when the police raided Damian Green's Commons office in 2008

It seems tomorrow's Sunday Times is reporting that police found "extreme pornography" on Damian Green's computer when they raided his Commons office and impounded it in 2008.

When we have finished giggling, it might be a good idea to recall that at the time all good Liberals were up in arms over that raid.

Here is the House Points column I wrote for Liberal Democrat News that week...

MPs Collared

Michael Jabez Foster said just one constituent had raised the search of Damian Green’s office with him. It was "self-indulgence", he argued, for MPs to debate it.

But the people of Hastings and Rye should be more concerned with the health of parliamentary democracy. So this column is devoted to some of Monday’s more enlightened contributions.

Theresa May: "Constituents do not give information to their Member of Parliament on the basis that one day it might be pored over by police officers. Parliamentary privilege is not our privilege; it is the people’s privilege."

Elfyn Llwyd: "It seems rather strange that we should be discussing the whole idea of prejudicing the inquiry, given that the Government tried to force through the 42-day measure on the premise that we were all going to discuss issues to do with individuals."

Simon Hughes: "If the police knocked on the door of one of my constituents in Southwark or Bermondsey, everybody inside would know … they do not have to let the police in unless they have a warrant."

Dominic Grieve: "Since the passage of the Official Secrets Act 1989, the leaking of material not concerning national security has ceased to be a criminal offence. On what basis, therefore, is a civil servant arrested for that, and on what conceivable basis is my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford [Damian Green] arrested?"

Menzies Campbell: "Our responsibilities involve both the scrutiny of Government and the redress of grievance. If we cannot be confident that our communications with our constituents are confidential, there is necessarily an inhibition in our ability to fulfil those responsibilities."

Andrew Mackinlay: "Leaks are food and drink to me as a backbench Member of Parliament, and I do not want to stop them coming to me."

Kenneth Clarke: "I first met the Leader of the House [Harriet Harman] when she was the legal adviser to the National Council for Civil Liberties. She was a pretty feisty, radical lawyer in those days, and … she would not conceivably have made the speech then that she made an hour or two ago. She would have been leading demonstrations outside about the behaviour of the Government."

I am not sure what Simon’s claim tells us about South London, but it was a good debate.

Matthew Engel on the existential crisis of cricket (and me on the President of the MCC's buttocks)

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Matthew Engel has a magnificent polemic on the state of cricket in today's Guardian:

This is not the game that enraptured me when I was six years old. Nor the game I have written about happily for much of my adult life. 

I don’t care about the St Lucia Zouks. And I won’t care about whatever names the 12-year‑olds in marketing invent for the new made-up teams when the existing English Twenty20 is engulfed by yet another new competition in the years ahead. 

This wretched idea was sold to the county chairmen by bribery – an annual £1.3m sweetener per county – with a tacit undercurrent of threat.

My only interest – in common with many other cricket lovers – is the hope that the damnable thing is a total flop and that we can somehow save the game I once adored, and still love more than the people who have seized control of it.

Do read the whole thing.

You can argue that Twenty20 has led to batsmen being more aggressive and even inventing new shots. And leg spin has returned - if only because every bowler gets caned now.

But there have been greater losses. Few batsmen now seem equipped technically or mentally to play a substantial defensive innings. And I have heard Graeme Swann say that a spinner who has grown up keeping things tight in limited overs cricket has no idea how to take wickets if he is thrown the ball in the fourth innings of a first class match.

At the heart of cricket's crisis - and Peter Tinniswood's Brigadier did once accuse Engel of fomenting revolution in concert with Vic Marks - is money.

As I wrote in my Liberal Democrat News column as long ago as 2004:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

Engel asks:

When did you last see a group of children (public schools and Asian community partially excepted) playing cricket without an adult?

For me, I think it was in the summer of 2005 as England finally won back the Ashes and the authorities decided to sell the rights to screen future tests to Sky.

Politics and class in Kensington

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This is from a Liberal Democrat News column I wrote in November 1999, before most of my readers were born.

I had been down to Kensington and Chelsea to give me something to write about help in a by-election. The Conservative candidate was Michael Portillo.

Sent out canvassing, I found that few residents were in:

So instead I talked to a council workman who was sweeping up the leaves. He soon explained my difficulty: "They'll all be at their places in the country." He also pointed out a house that had just had a million pounds spent on it. It hadn't been bought for a million, you understand, just renovated. 

"Mind you," he went on, "this is a funny area. You've got judges living here, and junkies down the road." 

"Judges and junkies: I like that," I said, thinking I might steal the line for this column.

"Judges and junkies in juxtaposition," he replied, effortlessly topping it. 

And he was right; it is a funny area. Politics in Kensington and Chelsea remains polarised on class lines to an extent you rarely see nowadays. Not a single council ward has changed hands here since 1982.

Michael Howard is an alien

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How do we account for his desire to launch a war with Spain, that strange accent and his belief that prison works?

I have vague memories of writing a column for Liberal Democrat News back in 1997 about an alien spacecraft being sighted over Michael Howard's Kent home.

And it seems those memories are accurate.

A Guardian article from 2010 says:

But the opening of the latest batch of Britain's own "X-files" today reveals that the RAF in March 1997 did mount an inquiry into reports from six members of the public, including two firefighters, of a large, triangular "humming" object in the sky above his Folkestone home during his last months as home secretary. 

The Ministry of Defence file reports that witnesses said the UFO hovered for several minutes above a field before shooting off in a flash of light. Sophie Wadleigh, 25, from Hythe, told the Folkestone Herald: "It was so peculiar, it all felt really odd and I heard this humming noise. As I looked across the field I saw a large triangular shaped flying craft hovering about 300 feet off the ground." 

The MoD file includes a report from Chris Rolfe, of the East Kent UFO monitoring group, which says he believes it could have been looking for the former home secretary, as it was not interested in Wadleigh: "This … has left me wondering if its purpose had something to do with Mr Howard."

I think Mr Rolfe may have been on to something.

Colchester MP criticises the Guardian newspaper for ‘demeaning’ crossword clue

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the East Anglian Daily Times.

The spirit of Bob Russell lives on. He once wrote a letter of complaint to Liberal Democrat News when I invented some Essex** MP jokes in a House Points column.

* "Why do Essex MPs support VAT? Because they can spell it." That sort of thing.

** I am allowed to: my mother's mother's family all came from Tollesbury.

I was rude about Jacob Rees-Mogg before it was fashionable

Thanks to Kiron Reid for tweeting this extract from a House Points column that I wrote for Liberal Democrat News back in 2004.

As Rees-Mogg did not make it to Westminster until 2010, I am astonished at my own foresight.

Richmond House, G.K. Chesterton and the President of the MCC's buttocks

I have read and can recommend G.K.Chesterton's novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I have not read his The Flying Inn, but I can cut and paste from Wikipedia with the best of them:

The Flying Inn is a novel first published in 1914 by G. K. Chesterton. It is set in a future England where the Temperance movement has allowed a bizarre form of "Progressive" Islam to dominate the political and social life of the country. Because of this, alcohol sales to the poor are effectively prohibited, while the rich can get alcoholic drinks "under a medical certificate".

The plot centres on the adventures of Humphrey Pump and Captain Patrick Dalroy, who roam the country in their cart with a barrel of rum in an attempt to evade Prohibition, exploiting loopholes in the law to temporarily prevent the police taking action against them.

Far-fetched, you will say, but have you read this report in the Guardian?

MPs considered nationalising a Whitehall pub to avoid a drinking ban while they are relocated to the Department of Health’s offices for the duration of refurbishment works at the Palace of Westminster. 

Richmond House, which hosts the department, is one of three government buildings owned by Middle East financiers who have bought into an Islamic bond issued by the government. One of its stipulations is that no alcohol will be sold on the premises. 

To get around the restriction, some MPs proposed taking the Red Lion pub, located between parliament and Richmond house, into public ownership and banning entry to the general public.

Important buildings in Whitehall sold to foreign owners? That sale took place under the Coalition so, if it worries you, we Liberal Democrats cannot escape our share of the blame.

But let it serve as a reminder that, for all there willingness to wrap themselves in the flag, the Conservatives will do anything for money.

I am reminded of a House Points column I wrote back in 2005:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

Charles Kennedy speaking against the invasion of Iraq

The publication of the Chilcot report today has caused many people to remember Charles Kennedy's courage in opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The two videos above will show you the speech he made in the Commons on 18 March 2003.

Note the fury coming from the Conservative benches.

The Tories' had been driven mad by Tony Blair's unconditional embrace of the United States. They liked to see themselves as the great advocates of the Atlantic alliance. Suddenly they felt like like a young boy who had lost the friendship of a glamorous older boy.

I tried to convey something of Blair's approach to the US in a column I wrote for Liberal Democrat News the following year.

Future historians will probably have better things to do than discuss the internal politics of the Liberal Democrats, but the truth does matter.

I mean no disrespect to Charles Kennedy's memory when I recall that he was rather bounced into opposing the invasion of Iraq by his own party.

This post by James Graham tells you what went on before this debate and the famous march through London.

The first time I saw George Osborne

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In the days when I wrote a weekly column for Liberal Democrat News - in the days when there was a Liberal Democrat News - I had a Press Gallery pass at the Palace of Westminster.

Everyone said the place resembled nothing so much as a public school. Not having attended such an establishment myself, I was not really qualified to judge.

But the it certainly resembled what I imagined a public school to be like, albeit largely without the roasting over fires or flagellation.

One day in 2001 I saw an improbably  youthful figure on the opposition front bench. He really did look like a cheeky fourth-former sitting in the prefects' seats. I expected him to be booted out as soon as they turned up.

I asked a Press Gallery attendant (they know everyone by sight) who he was.

"That's George Osborne,"he explained.

The struggle to introduce National Insurance in the first place

So David Cameron is "open to the idea of workers funding their own unemployment or sickness benefits privately through financial products".

According to the Independent, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesperson told a briefing of journalists today that the Prime Minister agreed with a suggestion by Iain Duncan Smith about the role of private finance in the welfare state.

"We need to support the kind of products that allow people through their lives to dip in and out when they need the money for sickness or care or unemployment," Mr Duncan Smith told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend.

But then the Conservatives never liked National Insurance.

Back in 2002 I wrote a House Points column (in the much-mourned Liberal Democrat News) about the struggle Charles Masterman had putting Lloyd George's National Health Insurance Bill through the Commons.

Here is part of that column. It was written in the present tense because of some conceit involving a time machine:

The doctors are not keen. Sir James Barr, chairman of the BMA, believes it will "destroy individual effort and increase the spirit of dependence," and that "only loafers and wastrels will benefit". 

The British Medical Journal says that if you wanted to abolish the medical profession it would be "hardly possible to conceive a scheme better calculated to achieve that end that the present Bill". Letters to the Lancet call it "a bold and sinister attempt to degrade our calling" and "an attempt to capture and enslave our profession". 

Nor are the newspapers enthusiastic. The Daily Mail has declared its opposition to "the hateful task of collecting this unpopular tax thus thrust upon Mr Lloyd George's hapless victims". For, "it is not only 3d a week we shall lose, but our independence, self-respect and character" ... And a reader says: "If the Insurance Bill becomes law it will be advisable for us to leave England." 

Meanwhile the Evening News is warning that "we shall never boast of freedom again if we let this measure past," and writing feelingly of "these days of highly paid servants". 

The cost of employer insurance for domestic staff is uppermost in many minds. Five aristocrats have founded a League of Protest and called a public meeting. As we arrive, Lady Desart is reaching her peroration: 

"This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror." 

Later, when the government sends servants a circular about the new scheme, the headmaster of Eton will accuse it of "interfering with home life to an unprecedented degree". 

And if you listen carefully you can hear the Conservative leader pledging to repeal the act as soon as he comes into office.

Calder's four Laws of Politics

In my many years blogging and writing for the much-missed Liberal Democrat News, I have formulated four laws of politics.

They were:

1. If all parties are united in support of a measure, it will turn out to be a disaster.
2. The more power the state takes to itself, the more arbitrarily that power will be exercised.
3. When politicians do something which they think is very clever, it will eventually turn out to have been very stupid.
4. The more extreme a person's views, the more certain he or she will be that the majority of voters share them.

Today's performance by both frontbenches in the Commons are a good instantiation of Calder's Third Law of Politics.

Alvin Stardust and the sale of honours

I was sorry to hear of the death of Alvin Stardust. His first hit reminds me of my first months in Market Harborough. The song was played for what seemed like months by Radio Luxembourg before the BBC took it up and made it a hit.

Rather improbably, I find that he inspired one of my columns for Liberal Democrat News back in 2006.

So, by way of a tribute here it is again. The investigation into Lord Levy came to nothing, though all parties sell honours to some extent.

Identity crisis

Identity can be a complicated business. Take the case of young Bernard Jewry, who developed a love of rock music and hung out with a band called Johnny Theakston and the Tremeloes. In 1959 the band sent a tape to the BBC under the name Shane Fenton and the Beat Boys. Then tragedy struck: Johnny died.

When the BBC wrote back asking Shane Fenton and his band to play on a live radio programme Bernard Jewry became the new Shane Fenton - he even changed his name by deed poll - and a pop career was launched.

But musical fashions change, and after four hits Shane Fenton faded from view. Until in 1973 he was reborn as Alvin Stardust with the single "My Coo Ca Choo".

There are two reasons why the career of Bernard Jewry/Shane Fenton/Alvin Stardust is topical.

The first is that makes you wonder how the government's identity card scheme would cope with him. According to Joan Ryan at home office questions on Monday, everything is in on course. Cards will be phased in from 2008. "I repeat: 2008," she added, on the basis that if you say something often enough it must be true.

If you prefer to believe the officials working on the scheme, then the current plans are not remotely feasible. According to leaked e-mails, they fear a botched introduction that could delay ID cards for a generation.

Of course, for Liberal Democrats that would be very good news. But we must be wary of relying solely upon government incompetence to see ID cards off. We must continue to argue about the principle, showing people how these cards threaten a fundamental alteration in the relations between citizens and the state.

The second reason for being interested in Alvin Stardust is that his manager was a streetwise young accountant called Michael Levy. Today he is better known as Lord Levy.

What would people in 1973 have made of the idea that one day Alvin Stardust's manager would be arrested and there would be excited talk of the prime minister resigning?

Lord Levy once said that he and the prime minister were "like brothers". I doubt he would say that now. Tony Blair will have to find someone else to be his coo ca choo.

Take it away, Alvin...

An expanded edition of Breaking the Code by Gyles Brandreth

Exaro News promises us fresh revelations about Peter Morrison and the operations of the Conservative whips in a new, expanded edition of Gyles Brandreth's Breaking the Code.

Which gives me a chance to praise the first edition of that book. I once described it in Liberal Democrat News as:

a readable account of the last Conservative administration. Elected in 1992, Brandreth began as a government backbencher. He makes it clear what an awful job that is. It's not, as young idealists fear, that you may be forced to vote against your principles. It's more that you vote in the small hours when you have no idea what is at stake and would much rather be in bed.

The problem with John Bercow

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Back in March 2010, when John Bercow had been in the Speaker's chair for less than a year, I wrote in Liberal Democrat News:

With his gown and boyish smile, John Bercow resembles a progressive young master in an old-fashioned school. And like a lot of masters who want to be popular with their pupils, he has trouble keeping order. 

You can trace his problems back to the undistinguished reign of Michael Martin. Often Buggins’ turn will get you through, but when the expenses storm broke over Westminster Martin proved to have none of the qualities needed to restore its standing in the eyes of the public. 

Trouble was, there was no way of getting rid him other than public ridicule. And in that process the authority, the mystique, of the Speakership took a battering too. 

Then there was the way Bercow got the job. When the election of the new Speaker took place David Cameron was riding high in the polls and many Labour MPs assumed they would soon lose their seats. What better way of getting back at an incoming Conservative House, those Labour MPs reasoned, than landing it with someone it would detest? 

And Bercow, though he started out as secretary of the Monday Club's immigration and repatriation committee, had been long been courting Labour backbenchers with an eye to the Speakership. He did it so blatantly that he became widely disliked on his own side. 

So we again have a Speaker who is not respected by many MPs, which has done nothing to rebuild the standing of the role.

Michael Martin had been elected as Speaker when the bookies' favourite had been Sir George Young, largely because Labour backbenchers believed a House dominated by their party should have a Labour speaker.

As I pointed out in another Lib Dem News column:

There is, incidentally, another reason why Sir George Young lost, and it tells you a lot about Labour backbenchers. They could forgive Bercow for being the former secretary of the Monday club's immigration and repatriation committee, but they could not forgive Young for being an Old Etonian.

To return to the first column, I was right to say he reminds you of a schoolmaster. But what he really reminds me of is the sort of teacher you find immensely impressive when you are 17, but are disappointed by if you meet them in later life. (It was David Grace who made this observation about teachers to me.)

That is the real problem with John Bercow, though many liberals will support his attempts to modernise the Commons. He comes across as a permanent undergraduate.

George Monbiot, the environment and me

Back in 2008 I wrote a House Points column for a Liberal Democrat News special issue on the environment. Part of it ran:

Years ago environmentalists decided their only hope was to scare us half to death. Peak oil and global warming are just the latest in a list of dooms. The result has been to make many people terrified of the natural world. The environment is all around us (you cannot argue with that) and it is out to get us. 

This fear combines easily with parental concerns about traffic and strangers, so their children’s encounters with nature are increasingly limited. Yet the best of 20th-century education and children’s literature saw such experiences as central to a wholesome childhood.

Liberal Democrats should have a more generous view of the importance of the environment. There is abundant evidence that experiencing the natural world is good for everyone from behaviourally disturbed children to recovering surgery patients. 

And the claim that a vengeful Nature is going to sweep away our economic system is a cop out. We are going to have to use our intelligence to reform it if we want more people to live happy lives.

In fact I was banging on about the green movement making people scared of the natural world years before that column. I remember writing something on the same theme (and with some of the same lines) back in the 1990s.

And you can see that the House Points column shared some of the concern with children's freedom and children's books that I expressed on Comment is Free the other day.

My reason for return to these themes in this post is that George Monbiot's column in the Guardian today seems to be saying much the same as I said in 2008. He writes:

If threats promote extrinsic values and if (as the research strongly suggests) extrinsic values are linked to a lack of interest in the state of the living planet, I've been engaged in contradiction and futility. For about 30 years. The threats, of course, are of a different nature: climate breakdown, mass extinction, pollution and the rest. And they are real. But there's no obvious reason why the results should be different. Terrify the living daylights out of people, and they will protect themselves at the expense of others and of the living world. 

It's an issue taken up in a report by several green groups called Common Cause for Nature. "Provoking feelings of threat, fear or loss may successfully raise the profile of an issue," but "these feelings may leave people feeling helpless and increasingly demotivated, or even inclined to actively avoid the issue". People respond to feelings of insecurity "by attempting to exert control elsewhere, or retreating into materialistic comforts".

And later says:

None of this is to suggest that we should not discuss the threats or pretend that the crises faced by this magnificent planet are not happening. Or that we should cease to employ rigorous research and statistics. What it means is that we should embed both the awareness of these threats and their scientific description in a different framework: one that emphasises the joy and awe to be found in the marvels at risk; one that proposes a better world, rather than (if we work really hard for it), just a slightly-less-shitty-one-than-there-would-otherwise-have-been.

Or, to return to my 2008 column, as Richard Jefferies put it:

Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours have somehow become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients called divine can be found and felt there still.

In which I am mentioned in Hansard three times

This morning Charlotte Henry tweeted that she would "officially give up" if Gareth Epps gets into Hansard. We can only hope that, however Gareth fares, she does not do so.

But her tweet did remind me that I was mentioned in the House of Commons three times in June 2003.

The first mention was by Angela Browning on 5 June. She asked John Reid, as Leader of the House:

Can we have a debate next week on the middle classes? I am sure that the Leader of the House will have noted that in Liberal Democrat News of 30 May, Jonathan Calder, who is a member of the party's federal policy committee, wrote an article about the Conservative policy of scrapping tuition fees. He says that it "has a lot to be said for it", but goes on to say:

"If the Conservatives do not speak for the stupid middle classes, who do they speak for?"

We should like to debate that rather old-fashioned concept with them.

And then on 23 June it was Tim Boswell in a debate on student finance said:

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford said, Liberal Democrat News provided a ringing endorsement of our policies in the shape of Jonathan Calder's article, which explained that my hon. Friend's idea of 

"getting rid of tuition fees, and financing the move by scrapping plans to extend the number of students even further, has a lot to be said for it." 

I agree. It is useful to have allies on occasion.

The member for Ashford was Damian Green, who had already intervened on Phil Willis, then our shadow education secretary, to say:

I feel that I should draw his attention to Liberal Democrat News of 30 May 2003. It is a publication that I read sporadically. This edition is particularly interesting because it makes the following thoughtful point: 

"Damian Green's idea of getting rid of tuition fees, and financing the move by scrapping plans to extend the number of students even further, has a lot to be said for it." 

I always welcome support from Liberal Democrat News, and I hope to get it from the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesmen, as well.

Phil, characteristically, was unfazed by this.

How long ago it all seems! In those days the Labour government's policy was to have 50 per cent of young people going to university. That always seemed unrealistic to me, and I even heard someone at the last Lib Dem Conference applauded with reasonable enthusiasm for saying so.

Today, of course, we have less than half of young people going to university and tuition fees, but that is austerity for you.

I imagine that my column appeared in a briefing for Conservative MPs and that Angela Browning seized on the wrong phrase. I doubt the bright young things at Tory head office included it because of my joke about the stupid middle classes, but it obviously enraged her.

June 2003, towards the end of Iain Duncan Smith's leadership, was about the nadir of Conservative fortunes. The fact that three of their MPs thought they could help their party by quoting me, confirms that judgement.

In which Charles Kennedy does not visit a skateboard park in South Wigston

Celebrating this blog's 10th birthday the other day - and thank you for all the kind comments - I said I would look through its archive and see if any posts would bear republishing.

This is an example of House Points, the weekly column I wrote for the late, lamented Liberal Democrat News for many years. It appeared in the paper, and on this blog, in April 2004.

The writing’s on the wall

Charles Kennedy was missing on Monday. Not from the Commons – he was there to hear Tony Blair describe how well things are going in Iraq – but from Blaby Road Park, South Wigston.

He had been due to visit the Harborough constituency until events at Westminster got interesting and forced him to cancel. But we still had a television crew, Bill Newton Dunn and several local councillors.

They were there to mark the success of the district council (Liberal Democrat-run Oadby and Wigston) in reclaiming the park from underage drinkers. It is a thoroughly modern initiative involving anti-social behaviour policies, alcohol bans and community support officers.

In essence, councils are reinventing park-keepers. They were got rid of 20 years ago because the right wanted to cut taxes and the left believed they were crypto-fascists.

The South Wigston project also involved the building of a skateboard park. What a photo opportunity that would have been for Charles!

Skateboard parks mean bare concrete. And bare concrete means graffiti, which poses a dilemma for officialdom. These days it is too self-doubting to say graffiti is a bad thing but not relaxed enough to let events take their course.

The solution? Official graffiti. The council employed professionals to write on the concrete before anyone else got at it. You need a Masters in Graffiti Studies before you are allowed near a spray can these days. (“Who painted you this then? Bloody cowboys.”)

I had expected to have naughty libertarian doubts about the Blaby Road scheme. But it seemed a sensible idea and I liked the municipal flowerbeds.

After leaving the park I walked into Leicester down streets of council housing. You could tell they were council houses because of the tall metal columns topped with CCTV cameras. The scene was a cross between the old East Germany and a work of science fiction.

And at Westminster there is now a screen across the public gallery, supposedly to protect MPs from gas attack. You could call them cowards, but they seem to have had little to do with it. It was an initiative from the security services. Conspiracy theorists will believe they put it up to keep MPs in a state of fear.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Bin Laden laughing.