Gentrification and the rise of the pro-bedtime left in the Nineties

The term "the anti-bedtime left" is in vogue as a way of disparaging people in the Labour Party who still have ambitions to set the people free rather than police them more closely.

But I am old enough to remember the days when there was a pro-bedtime left. And this press cutting from The Scotsman (18 November 1996) is a relic of it:

Bedtime Stories 

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise, says New Labour. The shadow home secretary Jack Straw has called for firmer discipline at home, including set bedtimes to stop today’s children becoming tomorrow's juvenile delinquents.

That framing is very New Labour. Today we would be worrying about children's wellbeing or mental health, but back in the Nineties it was all about preventing crime. If they were in bed and drugged with Ovaltine, they wouldn't be out causing trouble.

Even Labour's education agenda then, with its support for homework even in primary schools, seemed us much about keeping children off the streets as about their learning.

Why was New Labour so authoritarian? One reason is gentrification. Imagine If you had moved into an up-and coming but still edgy part of London in the mid Nineties and wanted to entertain a senior member of your chambers and their partner to dinner in your garden on a summer evening to show off that amazingly good value Bulgarian red you had found. 

You would be looking forward to scheming with them to remove some left-wing Labour council candidates. And if the opportunity arose, you might broach the subject of your being selected for a safe Labour seat in the North of England. You wouldn't want kids kicking their football against your back fence, would you?

The British Establishment is a House of Straw

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The witness before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry these past two days has been has been Alice Perkins, who was chair of the Post Office board between 2011 and 2015.

She also became a director of the BBC in 2014, which made her position ticklish when Panorama began investigating the Horizon scandal.

As John Sweeney, journalist and now Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton Coldfield, wrote in Byline Times in January, this mean that in May, June and July 2015, Perkins had:

lived with the mother of all conflicts of interest. I have trawled through the relevant BBC minutes for that period and I can find no declaration of it.

But I'm not alleging any wrongdoing here. Having listened to Perkins before the inquiry, I am sure that she will have simply forgotten that she was a director of the BBC.

Yes, she followed the pattern for appearing before the inquiry that was established by Post Office leaders. In a really tight corner, blame you underlings, and otherwise claim you don't remember.

If the Post Office is at all typical of the standard of British management, then this inquiry has laid bare a major reason for our poor economic performance.

Alice Perkins is married to Jack Straw, and is the mother of Will Straw CBE, mastermind of the useless Office Remain campaign in the EU referendum.

Lydd on Sea and Dungeness station - with a note on the origins of the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School

Atmospheric photographs and atmospheric music. The blurb on YouTube explains what we are looking at:

Although the trackbed from Romney Junction towards New Romney is easily traceable, nothing remains of Lydd-on-Sea Halt today except for a gated concrete approach road from Kerton Road. 

Promoted  by holiday camp development in the area, the Southern Railway decided in 1937 to realign its branch line to New Romney (which had been opened in 1884) closer to the sea and to open two intermediate stations - Lydd-on-Sea and Greatstone-on-Sea. 

The opening of Lydd-on-Sea on 4 July 1937 coincided with the closure of Dungeness station to passengers; it was intended that Lydd-on-Sea, ½-mile from Dungeness, would serve both locations and its running in board read "Lydd-on-Sea (for Dungeness)".

To handle the expected flow of holiday traffic, the station was equipped with a long curved island platform with a passing loop on which was perched a small wooden shed. The traffic never materialised and the station was downgraded to an unstaffed halt on 20 September 1954 when its passing loop was also lifted. 

As passenger traffic dwindled and freight became insignificant, the New Romney branch fell into decline and was listed for closure in the Beeching Report. In 1966 the Minister of Transport Barbara Castle announced her intention of closing the Appledore to New Romney Branch and passenger services ceased on 6 March 1967.

Trains still run from Appledore to Dungeness to collect nuclear waste for reprocessing at Sellafield. There's more about that and the history of the line on Kent Rail, and Derek Hayward has photographs of the old Dungeness station and its site today.

Dungeness still has a station on the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, and Jon and David get off a train there in The Elusive Grasshopper, the sixth of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories:

When they got out at the station the wind was so strong that for a moment they held on to each other. It howled and roared over the flat wastes and round the lighthouse towering above them. It whipped the smoke and steam from the engine's little smoke-stack into nothing and flattened the sea poppies growing in the shingle at the side of the track, and as they stumbled up the old full-gauge railway lines towards the school it whistled and sang strange songs among the telegraph wires.

It was not very pleasant exploring the school because the wind played odd tricks in those empty rooms and corridors and the house was full of mysterious groans and whisperings and thuds. But there was nobody there and no sign that anybody had been there since they had found Wilson stunned on the floor. Jon showed David the loose floorboard with a sketch of the grasshopper and they even searched for cigarette ends or pipe ash, without success.

I assume there really was a ruined school beside the old standard-gauge branch at Dungeness when Saville knew it. And it's also the inspiration for the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, which Lord Bonkers mentions from time to time.

Pointless offers a warning to Change UK

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

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

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

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

But they should not feel too pleased.

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

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

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

One is British politics and the other is geography.

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

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

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

Then came: Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100 

Ed Balls -13 out of 100 

David Miliband - 12 out of 100 

Jack Straw - 7 out of 100 

Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100 

Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100 

David Blunkett - 4 out of 100 

Clare Short - 2 out of 100 

Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100 

Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

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

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

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

But I'm not bitter.

Why there should be a single Remain list for the Euro elections - and why it won't happen

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When Labour was obliged to introduce proportional representation for elections to the European parliament, Jack Straw chose the most unattractive system he could find. He did not want the idea catching on and fuelling demands for PR in Westminster elections.

He chose the D’Hondt method because it denies voters the ability to choose between different candidates from the same party and, crucially for the argument of this post, does not allow votes to be transferred between parties.

A tweet from Nick Reeves explains the implications of this for the Liberal Democrats:

D'Hondt is roughly proportional, but in a 6 seat constituency if a party gets 20% it should get an MEP elected, if its gets 10% it almost certainly won't. Now imagine three Remain parties all getting around 8-12%

— Nick Reeves #FinalSayForAll #FBPE (@nickreeves9876) April 13, 2019

I am a Tigger sceptic, but if we want to maximise the number of pro-EU MEPs elected then we need to have a joint list with the Independent G and to bring in the Greens in too.

Parties can’t deliver their voters en bloc – and I can imagine some Greens declining to vote for a list that features Tiggers who used to be Conservatives – but I expect such a list would largely unite Remain voters.

But it’s not going to happen.

There Euro elections represent the Tiggers one chance of establishing themselves as a national force and being treated as such by the media.

In their ideal world, remember, they would not form a pact with the Liberal Democrats but replace us.

I don’t expect the Tiggers to do particualarly well in the Euro elections, but they certainly have to give them a go.

Sadly, I do expect them to do well enough to make it harder for Lib Dem and Green candidates to get elected.

Ian Jack on The Causes of Brexit

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England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. 

Charles Dickens skewered a certain school of political journalism in Bleak House, but that school is pre-eminent today.

It's all about who's up and who' down among a small cast of players. Hot takes are filed on the hour. And, though I have always had a weakness for gossip myself, it's almost all instantly forgettable.

At my more thoughtful I prefer commentators like Neal Ascherson and Ian Jack who can bring a historical perspective to bear on contemporary events.

In today's Guardian Ian Jack sets out The Causes of Brexit (as he had to The Causes of the First World War as a schoolboy) and identifies eight of them:

• Deindustrialisation
• Immigration
• Cultural dementia
• The Dam Busters
• English exceptionalism
• The playing fields of Eton
• The newspapers
• Complacency

He writes under this last head:

During the Scottish referendum campaign in the summer of 2014 I met a painter and decorator on the island of Bute who said he was voting for Scottish independence. “You have to.” Why? He knew people in Sunderland, “and every one of them wants to leave Europe”. Sunderland, with its big car factory that exported cars to the continent? Surely not. “Yes, they want to leave.” He laughed at the daftness of it. I didn’t believe him.

And there was a lot of complacency about.

David Cameron and George Osborne had convinced themselves they were political geniuses. So what if the right wanted to limit who could vote in the referendum to skew the electorate in favour of Leave? They were bound to win it anyway.

Who was put in charge of the Remain campaign? Jack Straw's son, whose life had hardly been one of political struggle, and the mastermind of the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election campaign.

And if half the passion that has been put into Remain since the referendum had been evident during the actual campaign the result might have been different. That said, much of that passion has been devoted to laughing at or demonising the people who voted Leave, which is hardly likely to win them over.

Anyway, read Ian Jack's piece for yourself and read him in the Guardian every Saturday - there is an archive of his columns on the paper's website.

Chapter and verse from Pointless on how little interest most people take in politics

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A couple of days ago I wrote that the television quiz Pointless reminds us how little most people know about politics.

After I had done so, the admirable Alwyn Turner sent me the link to a post he wrote back in 2013 making the same point:

An edition of the TV game show Pointless this week had a round based on 100 people naming as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010 ...

It's not a scientifically selected sample, but even so the results suggest just how completely uninterested in politics the public are.

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

Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100
Ed Balls - 13 out of 100
David Miliband - 12 out of 100
Jack Straw - 7 out of 100
Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100
Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100
David Blunkett - 4 out of 100
Clare Short - 2 out of 100
Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100
Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

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

Alwyn rounded off his post by quoting from Pamela Hansford Johnson's 1962 novel An Error of Judgement:

"Could it really be that I am the only person in the world bored stiff, bored pallid, by politics?" a character asks, and is immediately put straight by another: "'No, we all are, those of us who aren't politicians. That's why we're the prey of the silly men, the posturing men. They don't get bored, not ever. We are the victims of their professional excitement."

Is this the best the pro-European forces in Britain can do?

Jim Pickard and Sarah Gordon report in the Financial Times that three "senior figures" from the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats" are angling, with the help of some Sainsbury money, to lead the pro-EU campaign in the forthcoming referendum.

Who are these titans?

Will Straw, an associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, is expected to lead the group as executive director. Mr Straw stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate in the Rossendale and Darwen constituency in May’s general election. 

He has joined forces with Ryan Coetzee, a South African who was strategy director for the Lib Dems ahead of the election 

The third political member is Lord Cooper, a former director of strategy in Downing Street under David Cameron. Lord Cooper joined the House of Lords last September and is co-founder of Populus, an opinion polling firm.

The journalists are tactful in not mentioning that Will Straw is best know for being Jack Straw's son, and that Ryan Coetzee's strategy led to the loss of 49 of the Liberal Democrats' 57 MPs.

You have to ask if this trio is the best the pro-European forces in Britain can come up with.

Treating Jack Straw differently

From BBC News:

A UKIP parliamentary candidate is to be questioned over allegations he tried to influence voters by giving away sausage rolls at a party event featuring snooker star Jimmy White. 

Kim Rose, standing in Southampton Itchen, said he had been told to report to police over allegations of treating. 

Electoral Commission rules state food and entertainment cannot be provided by candidates to "corruptly influence" votes.

Craig Murray (whose headline I have nicked) reckons that such matters are handled differently when a cabinet minister is involved. Writing yesterday, he quoted a blog post of his from the 2005 general election:

On 24 April 2005, in an election rally in Jack Straw’s Blackburn Constituency, over one hundred Blackburn electors were given a full free meal by the Labour party, with Jack Straw present, having just made an election speech to the lucky partakers of this generosity. ... 

There was no shortage of witnesses – protestors were ringing the hall. The police were actually providing protection for this criminal event, and showed no interest in the fact that the proceeding was illegal. Jack Straw runs Blackburn as a personal fiefdom. 

I therefore went to a police station and made a formal complaint. This obliged the police to investigate, and to do them justice, the detectives of Lancashire Police did a very good job, establishing the facts of the incident. They then sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service. 

The Crown Prosecution Service returned the file to Lancashire Police, saying that the offence was “Trivial” and there would be no prosecution. As this was one of the worst examples of large scale electoral treating since it was made a criminal offence in 1832, presumably this means the CPS has decided that the law on treating has fallen into desuetude, and candidates may now provide food and drink to electors. 

Or only New Labour ministers?

It seems Craig was right.

Malcolm Rifkind is not fit to chair the intelligence and security committee

A couple of days ago everyone hated the Telegraph. Now its sting operation on Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind, at least, is being celebrated.

And rightly so. Not so much because it shows these two in their true colours as because it reveals how British politics works.

Just as Chris Morris and Brass Eye revealed how celebrities and backbenchers endorse causes they know nothing about, so the Telegraph shows what often lies behind windy talk of "public service". Greedy men looking to fill their boots,

But when we have finished being outraged or laughing at these two boobies, there is a serious point that must be addressed at once.

Malcolm Rifkind is chair of the Commons and Lords' joint intelligence and security committee, yet he is happy to accept money from a Chinese company without having the most basic checks carried out on it.

This is an act of such monumental folly that he must be removed from that role at once.

Pompous, not half as clever as he thinks, a lowland Scot... Fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will recognise Malcolm Rifkind at once.

He is not George Smiley. He is Percy Alleline.

Simon Hughes on the Tory and Labour arms race on prisons

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Speaking to a CentreForum and Prison Reform Trust event today Simon Hughes said:

The sad reality is that the political consensus needed for real reform remains the victim of an arms race between the two largest parties on who can sound toughest on law and order. 

Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that ‘prison works’, contrary to all the evidence in so many cases of course, became an ideology which was then enthusiastically embraced by Labour Home and Justice Secretaries including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and John Reid. 

That misguided consensus has been directly responsible for a near doubling of the prison population: from about 44,000 in the early 1990s to the 84,656 people in prison at the end of last week.

You can read the whole speech on Simon's own website.

Remember when Tony Blair was a Womble

From a Calder's Comfort Farm, the column I used to write for the New Statesman website, published on 24 June 2008.

A couple of summers ago the excitement over Cash for Honours was at its height. There was even speculation that Lord Levy’s troubles might see the end of Tony Blair.

What would we have made in 1973, I wonder, of the thought that the arrest of Alvin Stardust’s manager might one day bring down the government?

But in those days the link between politics and pop music was closer than most voters realised. One of the most popular bands of the era was The Wombles, who always appeared on stage in large furry costumes.

The advantage of this was that anyone could be a Womble, and a shifting cast of session musicians used to share the gigs between them. But, thanks to the good offices of Michael Levy, on occasion a Womble costume would be worn by a hungry young Labour politico.

Levy’s recent memoirs are disappointingly sketchy on the subject, but it is known that Jack Straw, Patricia Hewitt and Dr John Reid all appeared as Wombles at one time or another.

Fascinatingly, a young lawyer named Anthony Blair would also pull on a costume when the briefs were slow coming in.

Alastair Campbell has ruthlessly expunged this episode from the Blair CV -- I feel a little nervous telling you about it even now -- but was he right to do so?

The Roman Emperors used to keep a slave to whisper “remember thou art mortal” when they got above themselves. Tony Blair would have done well to have an aide close at hand to say “remember you’re a Womble” now and then.

And if he was being particularly messianic, that aide could have added: “Re-member-member-member what a Womble Womble Womble you are.”

Six of the Best 78

Nick Clegg stood in at prime minister's questions today. Nick Thornsby's Blog was impressed: "I thought Nick Clegg handled himself extremely well, looking reasonable, intelligent and fluent. Jack Straw proved a difficult opponent, though not because he scored some big hits against Clegg. Frankly, Straw’s line of questioning was just plain weird. He went on for far too long on some technical points that, if we’re honest, nobody really knows or cares much about."

Jonathan Wallace was not impressed by Her Majesty's Opposition: "Labour ... are completely obsessed with having a go at the Lib Dems, to the exclusion of the issues that matter to most people. It makes them feel good to be beastly to the Lib Dems but its not the sort of behaviour that will give them victory at the general election in 2015."

"The future of Phil Woolas as Saddleworth’s MP will be decided by an election court in less than two months’ time. It was revealed today that two High Court judges will travel to Oldham for five days of hearings, beginning on Monday 13 September." Read all about it at Saddleworth News.

The blog Save Bray Studios has been set up to prevent the destruction of the former home of Hammer Films.

Random Blowe brings news that tomorrow the Director of Public Prosecutions will announce whether any police officer will face criminal charges over the death of Ian Tomlinson. And also news of a demonstration in support of Tomlinson's family.

The current Leicestershire Festival of Archaeology is covered by Culture 24.

Lord Lester: My GOAT hell

Lib Dem peer Anthony Lester has an article in tomorrow's Guardian about his unhappy period as an adviser to Jack Straw:

Apart from being unpaid and independent, none of my conditions of appointment was met. I and my gifted team worked with a junior minister, Michael Wills, and a team of able and loyal civil servants. I saw Straw rarely to discuss policy. I was not given some key papers in sufficient time to have an input.

I was never invited to attend a meeting across government departments, still less to attend a cabinet committee. My advice was received politely, but it was unacceptable to a conservative justice secretary preoccupied with the crisis in our prisons and tinkering with Lords reform.

Yet more Tory logo fun

The original Tory logo generator no longer works, but Blackburn Labour Party have set up one of their own.

They also have printed their top 10 Tory logos. The one above (which would be more grammatical if one were allowed more characters) does not feature in it.

Lord Lester resigns as adviser to Jack Straw

The Daily Telegraph reports:

A brief statement issued by the Lib Dem whips office in the Lords, said he was standing down because he did not agree with "the Government's current proposals for a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, and with some aspects of its proposals for constitutional reform."

Lord Lester, a noted human rights lawyer, was appointed by Gordon Brown last year shortly after he became Prime Minister to advise on constitutional affairs. It was part of the GOAT plan - a government of all the talents.

House Points: Is Jack Straw the new Sarah Palin?

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

A moose in the lobby

Chris Huhne told us in his speech at the Bournemouth Conference that this government has introduced 3,600 new criminal offences since it came to power in 1997. "Labour’s new legislation takes the same amount of shelf space as 200 copies of War and Peace," he said. "And it is twice as heavy as John Prescott."

So it’s no surprise that a few of those offences have slipped through without anyone noticing. At Home Office questions on Monday the Labour MP David Drew raised the case of a friend and constituent who had been arrested at Kingsnorth climate camp for "aggressively picking up litter". Is it any wonder the Wombles are threatening to move to New York?

The work of reducing our liberties is now so great that Gordon Brown has been forced to split it between two cabinet ministers. While Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was busy at the Commons dispatch box, Jack Straw, as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, was making a speech down the road at the Royal Society of Arts.

There he invented something called the ‘criminal justice lobby’ and announced that it has been running Britain’s prisons for the past decade. This of nonsense, of course, and not just because it is ministers who runs our prisons. Anyone who works with public sector professionals will know how quickly they come to endorse every new twist of government thinking. They know which side their bread is buttered.

But try telling that to Straw. According to him, the members of this lobby are obsessed with the needs of offenders when they should be worrying about the victims of crime - though he was notably short of practical proposals for helping those victims. More punishment was his recipe. Worse than that, they insist on using long words like "criminogenic".

Believing in left-wing conspiracies, vengeful, anti-intellectual. Does Jack Straw remind you of anyone?

It’s Sarah Palin, of course. If you gave Straw a beehive hairdo and he started wearing his glasses again, it would be impossible to tell them apart. You betcha!

"Now on 'Autumn Watch’ we are going over to Simon King who is with some moose in Blackburn" "Thank you, Bill, and the news here is that the moose are looking distinctly nervous."

George Galloway: Poplar not Blackburn

The BBC reports that George Galloway is to stand against the transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick in Poplar and Limehouse at the next general election.

Earlier speculation suggested he might stand against Jack Straw in Blackburn.

George Galloway to stand in Blackburn?

The Lancashire Evening Telegraph reports:

Renegade anti-war MP George Galloway is considering standing against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency at the next general election.

After uprooting Labour's Oona King in London's Bethnal Green seat at the last election in 2005 Galloway promised to only serve one term.

Kevin Ovenden, spokesman for Galloway, said that he was now considering whether to stand again as an MP and if so where.

Thanks to Harry's Place.

Politicians and clothing

I think we are beginning to see a pattern develop:

• Jack Straw asks Muslim women to take their veils off;
• Mark Foley asks teenage boys to take their shorts off.