Man vows to "never travel to Lincolnshire again" after Humber Bridge fines

The judges were aghast. What, never again see Lincoln Cathedral or the stone buildings of Stamford?

Nevertheless, they gave Hull Live our Headline of the Day Award for its tale of a pissed off hedgehog rescuer.

My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal

This article appears in the new Liberator – you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about.

You can find The New Deal online.

Lib Dem Narrative – The Search Goes On

The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals’ brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is a feeling of deflation among many Lib Dems. May’s local elections, whose outcome was in some ways very good for the party, were followed by a series of posts on Lib Dem Voice expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s direction or at least arguing that its current approach had been exhausted and a new one was needed.

This dissatisfaction arises from a sense of disappointment. If we have so many MPs, why aren’t we more central to the political debate? You can blame the media all you like, and they certainly do us no favours, but maybe the problem lies deeper than that. If we were allowed to write out own newspaper headlines, do we know what they would be? The approach with which we fought the last election – three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can’t win here – and its continuation after that election have left us with a limited number of headline policies.

Massive failures

Where we do have them, they aren’t necessarily as strong as we try to make them sound. We won support at the last election by campaigning on the massive failures of the water companies, but what would we do about them? The answer is that we would appoint a new, tougher regulator. The trouble with this is that the model promised at privatisation – businesses that displayed market-driven efficiency and went in fear of powerful regulators – has never looked like working. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that the water industry is a natural monopoly. The second is regulatory capture, the process by which public institutions that are set up to keep an industry in check are subverted so they come to act in its interests. Nothing about the Lib Dems’ proposals for the water industry suggests they have found the answer to either of these problems.

Then there is the party’s performance in opinion polls and local elections. When it comes to the polls, despite the collapse of the Labour vote, we are happy if we see one where we match the 12 per cent of the vote we achieved at the last general election. We may remember Zack Polanski as an ambitious Liberal Democrat who was keener on austerity than most of us, but as James Butler wrote in the London Review of Books: 

Polanski’s political journey … is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.

We need to have more to offer such voters than we do at present.

Our vote is now heavily concentrated in the parliamentary constituencies that we won in 2024. We gained dozens upon dozens of councillors there in May, but I saw debate as to whether we had gained or lost councillors across all the other constituencies. What is certain is that our vote in seats where we have not been active in recent years is as low as one or two per cent, as is demonstrated weekly in local by-elections. And while we are being worried, the party’s membership is generally estimated to be 60,000, which is barely half what it was in 2022.

Many of the areas we now represent are prosperous, which means we must beware of simply representing their interests. Our opposition to inheritance tax on land, for instance, is hard to defend. As far as farmers have a grievance, it’s that the price of land has lost its relationship with the income that can be derived from farming it. But if you allow land to be used as a tax shelter, that problem will not be solved, it will get worse.

In the end, the Liberal Democrat hold on the seats they gained in 2024 may be out of their hands. In order for disillusioned Conservatives to come over to the Lib Dems, it is necessary for them not to be too scared by the possibility of a Labour government. If Andy Burnham turns out to be more Socialist than anyone expects, or at least if the press succeeds in getting the public to see him that way, then there is a danger that those voters will flock back to the Tories, however sensible or moderate we have been.

Against the background of this complicated political landscape comes The New Deal: How the Liberal Democrats Should Go into the 2029 General Election. It’s billed as “a pre-manifesto strategy document from the Yorkist group of Liberal Democrat activists” and, in his foreword, William Wallace explains its purpose:

This paper aims to start a conversation within the party on the narrative we need to construct. We have at most three years until the next election. Too many voters have come to despair of any political party’s ability to overcome the country’s economic stagnation and social divides. Liberal Democrats must find a way to offer them hope that national renewal – economic, social and political – is possible and attainable.”

To that end, The New Deal offers an analysis of the electoral position of the Liberal Democrats, a narrative they should develop before the next election and the policies it says flow from that narrative.

When The New Deal was published in May, it seemed that both the Greens and Reform UK were in line to make sweeping gains at the next election and that the Liberal Democrats would have to change their strategy to take account of this. Since then, both parties have faltered. The Greens appear to have hit their ceiling in the opinion polls and the media have at last started to ask hard questions about how Reform and its leader are funded. This position may change again, of course, but at the moment it seems the 2029 election may be more like the 2024 election than we expected.

Usefully, The New Deal considers the parties along two axes. There is the conventional one of Progressive/Centre Left vs Authoritarian/Orthodox, which sees the Liberal Democrats lined up with Labour, the Nationalists and the Greens against the Conservatives and Reform. From their history, their members and their voters, the Liberal Democrats are inescapably an anti-Conservative party, though that doesn’t mean that, deep down, we are the same as Labour or that ‘Progressive’ is a meaningful political identity rather than just a more impressive way of saying you are against the Tories.

The second axis is System vs Anti System, which sees the Lib Dems (and we still just about deserve this) placed in the Anti-System camp along with the Greens, the Nationalists and Reform, while Labour and the Tories share the System end. 

Anti-system

This ‘anti-system’ concept is a useful one and helps explain why, to the bafflement of the simplicities of social media, there are many voters who choose between Reform and the Liberal Democrats. It’s an identity that I suspect has something to do with being a long way from the centres of power, as voters are in Cornwall or Lincolnshire, and perhaps with the area being a historical stronghold of religious Nonconformity. As academics always say, more research is needed.

The New Deal emphasises the importance of developing a narrative, identifying Keir Starmer’s failure to do this as a key reason for his premiership foundering, but I’m not sure that what they’ve come up with quite fits the bill:

We are a better country than this! We are a kind, welcoming people, proud of our traditions, keen not to be taken for fools, but happy to be a modern, compassionate civic nation. We believe in a helping-hand role for a benign state, but one that doesn’t encroach any more into private lives than is strictly necessary. We believe in giving power back to the people, and in making all votes of equal value. 

This is a collection of four sentences, two of which are immediately qualified with a “but…”, that fails to tell a story. Stories involve movement through time or space, but these words just sit there. And they are statements about the Liberal Democrats when what is needed is a story about Britain today that will make voters nod in assent.

So an effective Liberal Democrat narrative might look more like:

In recent years politicians have looked to party interest rather than what’s good for Britain, the gap between rich and poor has grown too wide, and young people are finding it too hard to get a start in life. We need to rebuild our democracy, make it easier for people from all homes to make the most of their talents, and revive social housing.

That’s what’s on the back of my envelope, anyway.

When it comes to the paper’s policy offer, the cover leads you to expect great things because it has a mock-up of FDR wearing a Lib Dem rosette. In fact, it’s not always clear how different this New Deal would be. There are places where it talks about “success and progress being about more than GDP, including measures of social wellbeing and the environment” and “markets working for society rather than society being there to support markets”, but it’s not clear what these encouraging sentiments would mean in practice. Nor is it clear what the “unashamedly Keynesian” policy it wants to see at the next election would be. It seems to envisage more government intervention in the economy, which is welcome, but Keynes’s great theoretical innovation was the idea of demand management to avoid the cycle of economic booms and slumps. I’m not sure that’s on offer here.

But there are some very good ideas in The New Deal, and not only rejoining the European Union either. There’s a welcome emphasis on localism, and the inevitable support for electoral reform is strengthened by a call for it to be “linked to some form of bottom-up democracy to allow citizens to generate legislation, and to take more control over their local affairs”. There’s a call for the provision of rented accommodation (though it doesn’t say in which sector) and for an emphasis on “doing up the housing at the bottom of the ladder which is a health hazard for many of those living in it”. Education is there too, with a thoroughly Liberal emphasis on the importance of teaching critical thinking.

Above all, it’s great to see Liberal Democrat members publishing their ideas in a long form. Since the demise of Lib Dem News and then political blogging, communication within the party has tended to be very short (hello social media) or very top down. I hope The New Deal will be the first of many such publications.

Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

Embed from Getty Images

Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

Geography: She does well to find her way home – E

Stamford, Lincolnshire: Nowhere near Newcastle upon Tyne

Watch a few TV quiz shows and you will realise there are that two subjects the British public knows nothing about. More than that, they think it's funny if they are expected to know anything about them. Those subjects are British politics and British geography.

Kemi Badenoch is bound to know more than most of us about politics – she's heard of Kemi Badenoch, for a start – but she's no better than the rest on geography. Over to John Crace and his Guardian sketch on her series of short interviews today with regional journalists:

Anna reminded Kemi she had been a minister at a time when health and education outcomes in the north were considerably worse than in the south. Why were buses so much more expensive and infrequent in Newcastle? 

Kemi started talking about buses in Lincolnshire. "But Lincolnshire is nowhere near the north-east," Foster said, sounding completely bewildered. She had clearly expected someone with a working knowledge of UK geography.

"It is near the north-east," said Kemi. After all, Lincolnshire was quite a way from London so it might as well be near the north-east. In any case, it was all in the wilderness called "outside the M25". A nether world where people barely existed. 

Anna had another go. How could she put this nicely? Lincolnshire was two and a half hours from Newcastle. Next time, could she speak to someone who wasn’t a halfwit? Thank you and good night.

It's worth adding that this ignorance on part of the south-eastern establishment is often an affectation – a way of signalling that they are of this class through and through. 

Start talking knowledgably about the Midlands or the North and you will find people asking searching questions about what your parents do or which school you went to.

An Edward VIII postbox on Ryhall Road, Stamford

Today I bagged another Edward VII postbox. Having stalked and photographed the three examples in Leicestershire (on the Saffron Lane Estate and in Earl Shilton and Hugglescote) a couple of years ago, I was looking for more worlds to conquer. Then I read online that there was a box in Stamford.

And here it is. You'll find it on Ryhall Road, not far from Greyfriars Gatehouse.

Mysterious blue glow traced to Flying Banana

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award with this tale of mysterious Lincolnshire:

Is it a UFO? Is it the Northern Lights? No, it's the "Flying Banana".

A blue glow that has lit up Lincolnshire's night sky in recent weeks has been traced to an unlikely source: a bright yellow train.

Network Rail said the mysterious light comes from its new measurement train – nicknamed the Flying Banana – which looks for faults on the line for engineers to repair.

The company said on hazy nights, equipment from the yellow train can create a blue glow "that looks like something from the X-Files" as it tests overhead lines.

My photo shows the Flying Banana at Leicester station some years ago.

The Joy of Six 1449

"They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them?" Helen Pidd looks at how Reform UK are coping with running the council in Lancashire.

Michael Savage dissects Liz Truss's attempt to win herself a share of MAGA gold: "The alternative media ecosystem has no shortage of comeback stories. It is always possible to rebrand yourself when you give in to a rabid political fanbase."

"Systematic synthetic phonics is taught using 'decodable' books that often have very limited content. But using real books is a way to motivate children through the imaginative ways that stories, poems and information are portrayed in these books." Dominic Wyse says England’s synthetic phonics approach is not working for children who struggle to read.

"In a story ... a boy runs into Jesus. He curses the child, who instantly drops down dead – though Jesus brings him back to life after a brief reprimand from Joseph." Mary Dzon on medieval Christians' enjoyment of tales about the young Jesus being a holy rascal.

Bob Trubshaw has studied the numerous east-west routes in north-east Leicestershire that continue into Lincolnshire and on to the Norfolk coast. They once transported wool in great quantities and were used by countless pilgrims heading for Walsingham.

JacquiWine reads Dark Tales, a collection of Shirley Jackson's later short stories.

Man sought over trousering of hedgehog statue

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award. 

The judges were also impressed by the photograph provided by Lincolnshire Police.

We're building walls to separate social and private housing again

The segregation of the classes is back, and it's not done only by price. Here's a report by Jessica Murray and Michael Goodier from the Guardian:

The homes of people in Nunsthorpe, a postwar former council housing estate known locally as “The Nunny”, sit only a few metres away from their more affluent neighbours in Scartho with their conservatories and driveways.

Walking between the two is almost impossible because of a 1.8-metre-high (6ft) barricade between them, which blocks off roads and walkways that link the two areas in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Journeys that should only take a few seconds become a 25-minute walk down to the open field on the edge of the estate, or through the grounds of a hospital, to bypass the wall.

When I read that, I remembered that such walls had been put up in the 1930s. And then I saw that Municipal Dreams had posted a couple of examples from his blog on Bluesky.

The first was in Oxford, where in the city council built its Cutteslowe Estate. A couple of its roads joined up with roads on a private estate recently built by private developers, the Urban Housing Company:

The Company alleged council tenants were responsible for vandalism on the private estate. It also claimed that the rehousing of former slum-dwellers on the estate breached an undertaking given by the Council that it wouldn’t be used for this purpose. 

Whatever the (not so) niceties, it’s not hard to see the naked class prejudice and commercial interest that lay behind the Company’s supposed grievances. It erected two-metre high, spiked walls – separating the council homes from their private equivalents – across the connecting streets in December 1934. They forced a 600-metre detour for council estate residents trying to reach the main road.

And the second was in Lewisham, where this was the reaction to the opening of the council's Downham Estate: 

In 1926, a seven-foot high wall capped with broken glass was built across the street to the adjacent private estate, intended to prevent Downham’s residents using the street as a short-cut to Bromley town centre. The wall remained till 1950.

It was worse than that in Oxford where the Cotteslowe Walls lasted until 1959.

But they did come down. Today's society is putting walls up again.

Former nun Emma Smith's 101 days buried alive in Skegness

There's a sad and fascinating story in today's Guardian about Mick Meaney, and Irish labourer who in 1968 was buried alive in a coffin under a Kilburn builder's yard. 

He hoped the stunt would bring him riches and fame, but he was swindled by his manager and returned to Ireland with nothing to show for it:

No Guinness Book of Records representative recorded Meaney’s feat and a rival burial artist named Tim Hayes, who spent less time underground in a regular-sized coffin, disputed his champion credentials. Later in 1968, a former nun named Emma Smith had herself buried beneath a fairground in Skegness for 101 days.

I just had to look up Emma Smith in the British Newspaper Archive, and found this front-page photograph from the Daily Mirror (18 September 1968). You can read more about her on the Skegness Magazine blog. She came to no harm, unlike Harold Davidson, the Rector of Stiffkey, who was mauled to death in the town by a lion called Freddie.

Emma Smith's record lasted until 1981, when it was broken by an American who lasted 141 days in his coffin. In 1999 a man stayed buried under the garden of the Railway Inn, Mansfield, for 147 days to win the record back for Britain. He was Emma's son Geoff.

The 17th-century Stamford Canal

The Stamford Canal was an artificial cut that paralleled the River Welland between Stamford and Market Deeping. It was nine and a half miles long and had 12 locks.

It was opened in 1670, and so predates the canals of the Industrial Revolution. I believe it was constructed by the Dutch engineers who were responsible for the draining of the Fens.

This video from Jay Naylor Films – like and subscribe – shows the Stamford end of the canal.

Charles Dickens describes flooding in the Welland Valley

My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place has been extremely dreary. 

The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. 

Bleak House has a strong claim to be Charles Dickens' greatest novel, and Rockingham Castle, near Market Harborough, played an important part in its genesis:

Charles Dickens was a regular visitor to the castle and a great friend of the then owners, Richard and Lavinia Watson. In November 1849, he spent several days here and delighted his hosts by acting out scenes from Nicholas Nickleby and School for Scandal alongside Mrs. Watson's cousin, Miss Boyle. 

The house and grounds certainly wove their magic upon the author's fevered imagination. As "the first shadows of a new story" began "hovering in a ghostly way" around him, he made several visits to Rockingham Castle to commit to memory in preparation for its becoming "Chesney Wold" in his novel Bleak House.

Rockingham Castle is in Northamptonshire and looks out across the Welland Valley to Leicestershire and Rutland. Stamford, where Lincolnshire begins, is some 15 miles away.

All of which means that in the passage above Dickens is describing flooding in the Welland Valley below Market Harborough.

This is not the only connection between the great novelist and this part of the world – see my post I could have voted in Dickens's Eatanswill by-election.

The Joy of Six 1422

"The British physicist has dedicated herself to increasing diversity and accessibility within the STEM community, with a special emphasis on women of all backgrounds. Among her many advocacy initiatives are, of course, her Wikipedia biographies, which she began writing in her 20s. In less than a decade, she has created more than 2000 articles for the online encyclopedia, focusing on women and underrepresented scientists who have been overlooked or forgotten by history." Eva Baron on Jessica Wade's work to further the recognition of women scientists.

Clive Simpson says the Lincolnshire Fens desperately need new flood defences: "Most of the area’s pumping stations and sluices were commissioned in the 1960s and recent Environment Agency studies show what would happen if those pumps stopped: vast swathes of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire would be under 1.5m of water. Combine this with rising sea and tide levels, and it’s clear why the issue is urgent."

The Riyadh comedy festival was an ultimately doomed attempt by the Saudi government to buy the kind of authentic grassroots culture it is unwilling to countenance, argues Jonathan Liew.

"For centuries, such creatures were cast as messengers of fate, straddling the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Yet today, the omens these animals bring are no longer warnings of ghosts or witchcraft, but of something far more tangible: their own survival." Jessica Lloyd May and Matthew Jones find the medieval folklore of Britain’s endangered wildlife – from hedgehogs to nightjars – is developing a new meaning.

Nicola Skinner finds pet-sitting provides the ideal single-parent holiday.

Ben Finlay chooses ten autumnal British albums – I strongly approve of his number 1.

The Towers of Trebizond was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness

I'm an admirer of Rose Macaulay's writing, and wouldn't share the critical judgement in this old London Review of Books article by Claire Harman. Still it does contain an irresistible trivial fact and a good joke at her expense:

Perhaps The Towers of Trebizond is the only one of Macaulay’s 23 novels in which a satisfactory balance between style and content is achieved. A charming detail is that this cosmopolitan story was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness, where she had taken Gerald O’Donovan’s granddaughters for a holiday. 

Macaulay was not a snob, though she was taken up by snobs all her life, and relished a very active social life. Macaulay’s greatest claim to fame was the most perishable: she was a ‘golden talker’, valued by literary hostesses from her first appearance in print onward, and described by Naomi Royde-Smith in terms equally applicable to a patent corkscrew, ‘welcome at any dinner table, invaluable at weekends’.

So irresistible that it's our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: We feed them sausages and plum bread

I'm pleased that Sister Sid is doing so well, but I worry about those Lincolnshire refugees. 

I don't know how long they are put up at the Bonkers Arms, but I do know that the Stilton mines are always looking for new recruits.

Friday

Sister Sid drops in from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes to lobby me about American tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands, where he has relatives. Cook provides us with an excellent fish lunch and is quite unperturbed by Sid’s requesting his be served raw. “It’s just like that Japanese stooshie you hear so much about,” she observes. 

Later we take a turn by the shore of Rutland Water and watch the small boats come in – ever since Reform took over Lincolnshire, refugees from that county have been landing here. Once ashore, they report themselves to Constable McNally in the village and ask for political asylum, whereupon we put them up at the Bonkers Arms and feed them sausages and plum bread.

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

Earlier this week...

• From the pubs of Oswestry to the crumbling walls of Ludlow
• Matron told me at the party last night
• Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's
• Rescuing fallen women or scourging himself

John Gray on the strange death of Tory England

Embed from Getty Images

While I was writing my article in the current Liberator, I searched for the quotation below - the last paragraph in particular.

I didn't find it, because I was convinced it came from The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, which was published in 2005. 

It doesn't. It comes from Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought by John Gray. Impressively, this was published as early as 1997. Perhaps there's something in the idea that Gray's a bit of a seer after all.

Because I couldn't find the last paragraph, I had to write instead:

Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.

I felt a little unhappy with this, because I knew that not everyone in Grantham saw Alderman Roberts as the pillar of civic virtue that his daughter did.

But enough from me. Here's the quote from John Gray:

The self-destruction of British conservatism by New Right ideology and policies is best interpreted as an exemplification of a central neo-liberal theme - the importance of unintended consequences in social, economic and political life. 

The radical free market policies implemented in Britain since 1979 have had as one of their principal effects an unravelling of the coalitions of economic interests and the social hierarchies on which pre-Thatcher conservatism depended. In sweeping away the postwar settlement which all major parties endorsed for a generation, Thatcherism demolished the social and economic base on which conservatism in Britain stood, and created several of the necessary conditions for a prolonged period of Labour hegemony. 

The medium-term effect of neo-liberal Conservative policy in has been to destroy ethos in institutions such as the Civil Service and the National Health Service by remodelling them on contractualist and managerialist lines. In addition to squandering a large part of Britain's patrimony of civilized institutions, this neo-liberal project of refashioning social life on a primitive model of market exchange has speeded the delegitimation of established institutions of such as the monarchy and the Church. 

Further, by stripping democratic local government in Britain of most of its powers and building up the unaccountable institutions of the Quango Sate - the apparatus of committees appointed by central government to oversee the operation of the newly marketized public services, which is now larger in manpower and in the resources it allocates than democratic local government in Britain - the Conservatives have marginalized their own local party organizations and thereby contributed to the steep and swift decline of the Conservative Party itself ... 

As for Tory England - that rich network of interlocking interests, social deferences and inherited institutions that Tory statecraft has successfully protected and reproduced for over a century by its skilful adaptation to democratic institutions in Britain - it is now as good as dead.

From Liberator: Such people write about Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries

The new Liberator - issue 429 - is out and can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary and a book review of mine, it includes this article. I wrote it in response to the local election results of 1 May.

In Search of Their Motives

Why did Reform UK do so well in the local elections? How should parties respond to their rise? Who exactly is voting for them?

Some would tell you to wait for the academics to crunch the numbers, but if you go to the research on how and why Leave won the 2016 European Union referendum then you find, as so often the case in academia, not a body of agreed conclusions but a loose bundle of continuing debates. So rather than wait for a consensus that may never emerge, I’m going to do what I can here to clear what seem to me widespread misconceptions about Reform and their voters.

To begin with, the success of Reform should not shock or even surprise us. Ukip polled more than any other party in the 2014 elections to the European parliament, receiving 26.6 per cent of the vote and electing 24 of the UK’s 73 MEPs. Five years later, the Brexit Party did even better, electing 29 MEPs and receiving 30.5 per cent of the vote, slightly more than Reform UK won in this year’s local elections.

These three successes were achieved by Nigel Farage under three different party names, which reminds us that the far right has always been prepared to form parties, break them up and form new ones until they hit upon an arrangement that attracts voters. It also reminds us that Farage has been key to their successes, but we should have grasped years ago that there is no reason to expect us to be immune to the rise of the far right that has taken place across Western Europe in recent years. Despite leaving the EU, Britain now finds itself with a thoroughly European party system that includes a substantial party that stands to the right of the Conservative Party. This may well be the new normal.

After the EU referendum, Leave’s victory was widely attributed to a desire for revenge by left-behind areas. This narrative had its appeal to some on the left, because you could argue that it made the disastrous outcome of that vote all George Osborne’s fault, but I was never convinced. It seemed rooted in a dated, even nostalgic, view of the working class as white, male and engaged until recently in heavy industry. Yes, big changes have taken place in working class employment, but they took place some decades ago. The Full Monty and Brassed Off came out in the mid-1990s, and both were looking back on a transformation that had already taken place.

Yet a disaffected working-class was the first explanation many reached for to account for Reform’s successes on 1 May. Liberal Democrat Voice, for instance, immediately ran an article that argued Reform is “hoovering up votes across the country by doing one simple thing: articulating the grievances of the working classes”. It was good to see an article on that blog which talked about inequality and social class, but I don’t buy its thesis that Reform’s vote came solely from an aggrieved working class. Even in Durham, where Reform swept away a previously solid Labour majority, the figures show that it won a large slice of the votes that previously went to Conservatives and Independents as well as taking votes from Labour.

What I found most striking about the local elections was the collapse of Tory Midland England. Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire all fell to Reform, while Leicestershire now has a minority Reform administration. Even amid the Liberal Democrat triumph in Shropshire, Reform won enough seats to become the largest opposition group on the new council. While all these shires contain areas of widespread poverty and areas of Labour strength, it was the Conservative Party that took a hammering.

It seems to me that the Reform vote is best regarded as a protest vote – a concept we Liberals should be very much at home with, because we depended upon such a vote for survival and occasional upturns for decades. The late, great David Penhaligon was given to suggesting that a “Stuff Em All Party” would do well at the polls, and that is how Reform is seen by many voters, which is perhaps something we miss in our anxiety to condemn Nigel Farage’s views on race or the latest member found to have once espoused Fascist views on social media.

Whether you blame the economic situation it inherited or its lack of ambition, this Labour government is proving a sore disappointment to many who voted for it, while the thoughts of habitual Conservative voters can only be imagined. They now find themselves faced with a leader who is older than Tony Blair or David Cameron was when they came to power, yet comes over as a spiteful child. The majority of her MPs, meanwhile, hesitate to remove her for fear of who the party’s membership might land them with next. 

So you can see why there’s now a ready market for the Stuff Em All Party. Meanwhile, we Lib Dems can choose between being disappointed that our concentration in the affluent South means we are no longer viewed in that light, and taking this as a sign we are beginning to have a more coherent policy profile with voters.

Having managed to fake authenticity, Nigel Farage has made himself a better media performer than either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch. It’s not so much that he comes over as being more fun to go for a drink with: it’s more that you can’t imagine the other two going for a drink at all. Added to that, now and then Farage does show political nous – he resisted the temptation to court Elon Musk and his money by embracing Tommy Robinson, sensing that one of his weaknesses is that he is already seen as too close to Trump and Putin.

In a thoughtful piece for Compass, Olly Glover, the Lib Dem MP for Didcot & Wantage, wrote of it becoming “increasingly common to encounter voters who are open about their intention to vote Reform. A surprising number of these were choosing between Reform and Lib Dem.”

He continued:

Voters’ reasons for considering Reform are more varied than might be assumed, with scepticism about net zero and climate change commitments now as common as concerns about immigration. 

Uniting them all is widespread cynicism and loss of confidence in the entire political system and the British state. This aspect is shared with many non-Reform voters too, but Reform have captured the bulk of the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment.

And Dr Nathan Ley, a Lib Dem councillor from Abingdon, has written on his [now vanished] Substack that Reform is now:

The repository for some voters who are angry, dispossessed, downtrodden, as well as lots of people who are actually quite comfortable with their life, but feeling just a bit bored.

Labour is pinning its hopes on recovering these disaffected votes simply by governing better and producing visible improvements by the next election. This ambition does not seem to extend much beyond the NHS: elsewhere the government is continuing the austerity its members devoted fourteen years of their lives to condemning.

I wish Labour well in this endeavour, but they are going to have to find better communicators to put their case across. If Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves gave a fireside chat, you fear the fire would go out.

It’s hard to know what to advise the Conservatives to do. The most significant voting pattern of the 2016 referendum has always seemed to me the way that great swathes of prosperous Southern England voted Leave. You can blame David Cameron – if a prime minister puts a choice to voters in a referendum, they are entitled to assume that both paths are reasonable ones for the country to take – and I wouldn’t discount Dr Ley’s observation that voters were a bit bored. But what happened to all those Southern Tories with a fat stake in the status quo and a determination to keep things pretty much as they are?

I would look to the disappearance of responsible clerical and middle-management positions to technology and cost-cutting, and to the difficulty most people now experience in getting on the property ladder. David Boyle wrote a book about these trends, Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, back in 2014. [The link is to a radio programme based on the book.]

Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.

And for Liberal Democrats? We should be wary of habits that it is too easy to learn online. One reason I distrust the argument that Reform is winning on working-class votes alone is that it plays into a snobbish view of the working class held by some people who imagine themselves to be left wing. The working class, they believe, is, like anyone who disagrees with them, stupid.

Such people write about, say, Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries, complete with a party of native bearers carrying their aspidistra and upright piano, but instead of cleft sticks to send messages, they use smartphones. They paint the county as impoverished, sexist, racist and any other ist you care to mention. This view is backed up by some small-town boys who praise themselves for having escaped it.

Yet Lincolnshire voted in line with the rest of the country in the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the European Economic Community – two-to-one in favour. And, years after that, Liberal candidates piled up huge votes in coming second in constituencies like Gainsborough & Horncastle and East Lindsey. In the latter, which is largely the Boston & Skegness constituency now represented by Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, the Liberal Alliance polled over 20,000 votes at the 1987 general election. 

Politics is rarely as simple as online debate makes it appear.

The loss of the Lagik at Sutton Bridge on the River Nene

Photo: Maritime and Coastguard Agency

As the first one has proved surprisingly popular, here's a second post about a cargo vessel being grounded in the River Nene.

Back in 2000, reports Lincolnshire Live, a ship named the Lagik, carrying a cargo of 2250 tonnes of steel products, attempted to berth at Sutton Bridge, a few miles downstream of Wisbech, with severe consequences:

The 92 metre-long German-owned cargo ship entered the swinging basin at the port to be swung before it could berth, but within seconds it began to ground following "inappropriate manoeuvring."

It's bow ... grounded at a distance from the opposite bank equal to the ship's length and once a tide caught the ship's stern ... it was effectively 'wedged' in position.

Later that same day (December 13, 2000), a combination of the weight of its cargo and the falling tide caused the ship to break its back and settle further into the river with each tide.

The Lagik blocked the River Nene ... and this led to closure of Wisbech port in Cambridgeshire for 44 days.

The Lagik could not be recovered whole, and was cut in three pieces where she lay by salvage experts. The only good news is that they managed to prevent serious pollution of the river.

A swinging basin appears to be a harbour's equivalent of a winding hole on the canals and allows a ship to be turned in little more than its own length.

I captured the mouth of this swinging basin on my visit to Sutton Bridge in 2009 - you can see it in the photograph below.

If you think the Nene is a narrow river to have inland ports like Sutton Bridge and Wisbech, you may be surprised to know that ships used to dock even further upstream.

The Victoria County History for Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely says:

As recently as 1938 a sea-going vessel, the Constance H, sailed as far as Peterborough, clearing Guyhirn Bridge by 1 inch. In 1951 some sea-going barges, laden with corn, sailed from the Thames to Peterborough. 

GUEST POST The state of our canals - and canalside pubs - today

Fresh from a canal holiday made difficult by unannounced closures, Peter Chambers looks at the many challenges facing the Canal & River Trust.

The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans. 

Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases. 

This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable it is to link more.

At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.

The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.

Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB. 

The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’. 

During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.

This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution. 

Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.

The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways. 

Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome). 

It is probably best to moor outside the Queen’s Head (closed on Mondays) and make your way into town. Alternatively you can cross the border near Chirk and press on to Llangollen, with its excellent hostelries. Ideally do both.

Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government. 

The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges. 

The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.

Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.

In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.

In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.

Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

Reform council leader thinks circumcision causes transgenderism

The new Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council has suggested there's a link between circumcision and transgenderism in children, reports the Jewish Chronicle.

In a now-deleted post on social media, Sean Matthews, who earlier this month became leader of Lincolnshire County council, said: “It's no surprise that children want to remove their penises and become girls.

"Most of their parents started the process shortly after birth, by chopping their foreskin off in the name of (insert deity).”

I'm not going to blog about every fruitcake, loony and closet racist that got elected as a Reform councillor on 1 May, but this guy is a council leader.

Incidentally, in the Britain of the 1930s, 35 per cent of boys were circumcised, with the practice being particularly favoured by upper class parents.

But I bet Mr Matthews will tell you there were no transexuals in the good old days.