The Joy of Six 1595

Ian Lucas argues that Andy Burnham has the opportunity to lead the fight against Russian interference: "The threatening alliances now emerging worldwide between the tech platforms, politicians not committed to democratic principles and donors committed to hard right views demand that those countries and individuals who are committed to democratic principles must act together now."

Hannah Jane Parkinson reports from Teesside, where maritime livelihoods are under threat and, as a new documentary reveals, crews are sure the local freeport is to blame. 

"What makes school or college debating, and political debates on TV, exciting is the theatre. As such, debate is not an entirely separate creature from professional wrestling, even if wrestlers have better costumes." Jonathan Beecher Field doubts the value of formal debating in education.

"The Social Network hardly portrayed the Facebook founder and his company in a hagiographical light (Zuckerberg later described the film as 'hurtful'), but there was at least an element of the plucky upstart to the rise of Zuckerberg as he takes Facebook to 500 million users and a valuation of $25bn ... The Social Reckoning picks up from there, with a clear perspective that both the founder and his company – as well as the industry they represent – are corporate villains now." Dan Mimo says tech execs have become the film villains of our age.

Snigdha Poonam takes us inside the lucrative world of literary scams: "This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?" 

"The ancient City of London is protected by dragons that guard the main roads into the city from perfidious invaders. They look ancient, yet the dragons around London are fairly new, albeit based on something that can trace its origins back to the Great Fire of London." Ian Mansfield on the dragons that guard London.

The Joy of Six 1594

"Trump’s early business ventures reveal ties to individuals with connections to Soviet intelligence. In 1976, Soviet immigrants Tamir Sapir and Sam Kislin sold televisions on credit for Trump’s Commodore Hotel. Tamir Sapir had previously studied at the Ministry of  Internal Affairs in the USSR, while Kislin's electronics business served as a cover for KGB operations, according to former KGB spy Yuri Shvets." Zarina Zabrisky reveals the long history of Donald Trump's connections to Moscow's intelligence operations.

Leilani Farha argues that the housing crisis shows democracies have ceded too much power to the financial sector.

Restraint can leave mental health patients traumatised, and Nutmeg Hallett and John Baker have researched what can help them recover: "A frightening experience cannot be undone. But being ignored or dismissed afterwards can deepen the harm, while compassionate support may help patients begin to rebuild their trust in the people caring for them."

"An area gentrifies and catches the eye of developers. Developers then build upmarket flats to attract upwardly mobile incomers, with their proximity to nearby vibrant hubs, pubs and clubs being a major selling point. Then, a few years down the line, some of those incomers decide they'd now like the vibrancy turned down to suit their increasingly conservative lifestyles." Mike Urban on the pressure on Brixton's night economy.

Harry Sword reads Arthur Machen: "The London Adventure is also a (perhaps, the) foundational work of early psychogeography, less working guidebook in the mode of, say, The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher (1962) or Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) and more akin to the playful, verbose, cog twisting world of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) (and on which Machen’s London Adventure was a firm influence).

Paula Hotti takes the first train from Finland to Sweden in 38 years.

Jago Hazzard on the planned West London Orbital rail service

Transport for London says:

We're making plans for a new rail service on existing, underused rail lines in west London - this would become part of the London Overground network. The West London Orbital rail service would run between Hendon in north London towards Hounslow in southwest London.

And Jago Hazzard shows us the lines that would be combined to provide this new service. One of the attractions of the scheme is that the track is already in place.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Local Liberal Democrats, says the Richmond & Twickenham Times, are pressing for the service to be extended from Hounslow to serve Whitton and Twickenham. It quotes Lib Dem London Assembly member Gareth Roberts speaking at a City Hall meeting on 15 October:

"I rarely use the word literally, but on this time I will. It literally does not go far enough. Just two more stops, and it could join to Twickenham."

And reports:

Later, Mr Roberts said extending the line to Twickenham would allow people from Teddington, Norbiton, Raynes Park, New Malden, Wimbledon and Hampton Wick to travel into north London with just one train change.

He said: "At the moment they've got to go into Central London, they've got to go to Clapham, they've got to mess around, they've got to do all sorts of things.

"This would be a single interchange which would open up north west London for hundreds of thousands of residents in the south west."

However, the TfL view appears to be that the line between Hounslow and Twickenham is too busy to accommodate more trains.

The Joy of Six 1592

Thom Hartmann says Trump is teaching America what every dictator knows: "When we think of strongman dictatorships we often imagine tanks in the streets, but those usually come in the later stages of repression (think Tienanmen Square) and often are never even needed (think today;s Russia). Instead, as every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away." 

Zack Polanski did not handle the Green conference motion on Zionism well. But, asks Sangita Myska, why did his own party put him in the hold where he now finds himself?

"Her IHT policy would give older people who wanted to avoid inheritance tax a massive incentive to overinvest in property as a tax shield – to upsize or upvalue as far as they could so their heirs could benefit. It would put the top end of the housing market into a deep freeze. Moreover, it would divert spare cash away from investment that could help the British economy grow, into unproductive housing assets." Jill Rutter argues that Kemi Badenoch’s inheritance tax proposals represent myth-based policy making at its worst.

Municipal Dreams looks at how the London Borough of Hackney came to embrace high-rise housing.

Mark Kermode talks to Nick Newman about the restoration of Ken Russell's 1971 film: The Devils: "I always knew that there was something wrong with it because the first time I ever spoke to Ken about it, he said to me, 'It’s damaged goods.' That was the phrase that he used. He said, because they just took this stuff out of it, that left it with a hole. Something is damaged about it, and then you put it back in and go, 'No, that is better. That is what it always should have looked like.'"

"What works so well here is the author’s ability to look at this world objectively through Fanny’s eyes while also satirising this eccentric, privileged milieu with humanity and wit – Mitford is acutely aware of the absurdities of the system she is dissecting here." JacquiWine celebrates Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford.

The abandoned platforms of South Kensington

Geoff Marshall is our guide to a tube station that has three (count 'em) abandoned platforms.

The exciting news is that one of them will soon to be brought back into use.

Peter Kellner: Zack Polanski should have won at a canter

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Peter Kellner sets last night's result in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election in its historical context:

Only three times in the party’s history has a Labour government been able to cheer a by-election night as a boost to its prospects of remaining in office.

The first was retaining Kingston-upon-Hull North in January 1966, ahead of its big national victory two months later. The second was four months ago, when Andy Burnham won Makerfield (though some ministers were happier than others).

Sagal Abdi-Wali has not just defeated the Greens in a local by-election. She has defied history. Four weeks ago, I argued that Holborn & St Pancras was a contest Zack Polanski should win. 

Going back more than half a century, Labour has a truly dreadful record defending its own seats when it is government and faces a by-election challenge from the left or centre-left. The average swing against Labour in such contests was 24 per cent.

On those figures, Polanski should have won at a canter.

And later he writes:

It was no mean achievement for Labour’s Abdi-Wali. Her share of the vote was down just 3.7 points on the general election. 

This was the tenth time that Labour has had to defend a seat when it has been in government and the main by-election challenge has come not from the right but from either the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Abdi-Wali has retained a higher share of the vote than any of her predecessors. 

Only Virendra Sharma, in 2007, came anywhere near, and he won Southall during Gordon Brown’s honeymoon as a new prime minister. 

A portrait of the last days of independent Penge

A film made by the Penge Rotary Club in 1964. It provides a useful corrective to the view, widespread on Bluesky, that we all lived in shoeboxes and ate gravel until about 20 years ago, while showing us why the Sixties had to happen.

The former canal mentioned is the Croydon Canal; note too the children playing cricket without being organised by adults and an unexpected appearance by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

As to the palace itself, my father remember being woken as a small boy in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1936 to see the glow on the northern horizon that was it burning down.

Then steel yourself for an appearance by the feared Penge Formation Dancers, before the demise of Penge's council is mourned.

As ever in such films, it is the street scenes that are the most interesting.

A ghost sign near Parliament Hill Fields

I've just got back from London after a walk and boozy meal with Liberator friends.

On the walk, I spotted this ghost sign near Parliament Hill Fields.

Exploring the history of old Tottenham with John Rogers

John Rogers takes us on a tour through the history of Tottenham in North London, partly in search of St Loy’s Well.

The walk's blurb on YouTube says:

Starting at Bruce Castle one of the two largest Tudor houses in Greater London making Tottenham an important centre of London history. Our Tottenham history walk then takes in All Hallows Church, Lordship Lane Rec and talk about Tottenham resident Luke Howard and his classification of clouds. We then visit Luke Howard's home in Bruce Grove. 

Walking down the ancient High Road Tottenham we talk about the various royal associations as we arrive at Tottenham High Cross which has stood on this site since at least the 12th century. From here we go to Page Green and discover where Seven Sisters gets its name.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Russia opens criminal case against Lib Dem councillor

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Russia's spy agency has opened a criminal case against a Liberal Democrat councillor, accusing her of being part of a terrorist organisation.

Ksenia Maximova, who was born in Russia, is a Lib Dem member of Ealing Borough Council. She is also the founder of the Russian Democratic Society, an organisation that works to counter authoritarianism and war by empowering democratic voices from Russia. It is designated "undesirable" under Russian law.

She told Sky News that being put on Russia's list of terrorists comes as no surprise:

"For years everyone was saying it's a bit random that I was still not on it. I guess I'm one of the last ones, I was a bit more careful."

Now the Russian authorities have opened a case against Ms Maximova under Part 2 of Article 205.5 of the Russian Criminal Code, which concerns participation in an organisation designated as terrorist under Russian law:

Ms Maximova could face prosecution if she returns to Russia, but says she already knew she could not go back:

"The problem comes if they stick you on Interpol," she added, saying that could see her held up at passport controls when she travels.

The Joy of Six 1582

"Watching him involved engaging a kind of cognitive dissonance: this desperate, thin man was the same person as a sweet 6-year-old saying he wanted to learn about the moon; a handsome 20-year-old studying Physics in Oxford flirting with the camera; a 48-year-old who had realised that the research he was still passionate about had hit a dead end." Jude Rogers on 70 Up.

Ferdinand Mount has no truck with the idea that Britain has always welcomed refugees: "The usual narrative of the Peasants' Revolt describes John Ball and Wat Tyler's march to London, Ball's sermon at Blackheath ('When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?') and the brave conduct of the young Richard II. We don’t often hear about the massacre of the Flemings in Cheapside on 14 June, though it was at the heart of the revolt and an episode of frenzied violence. According to a contemporary chronicle, the rebels 'beheaded without judgment or trial all the Flemings they found, so that mounds of corpses were to be seen in the streets'."

Norman Baker looks at why politicians deny climate change and champion fossil fuels.

"The more I encountered these stories where political and emotional commitments seemed irreconcilable, the more I began to ask: what was life like for those who found themselves inescapably drawn to someone they shouldn’t be?" Alison Garden leads a project building an archive of oral histories documenting mixed marriage in Ireland.

"If you believe he was an imposter, then you believe he was the son of a “boatman” from Tournai, forced to play the role of Richard, Duke of York. If you believe he was Richard, Duke of York, then he was actually the rightful heir to the English throne." Sophie Bacchus-Waterman is writing a biography of Perkin Warbeck.

Animation Obsessive takes us behind the scenes of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon 'What's Opera, Doc?': "At a cost of $35,510 (almost $430,000 today), it was spendier than most Warner cartoons. It took seven weeks compared to the standard five. To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards." 

The foxes who visited London Zoo with deadly intent

Remarkable stuff from Robert Hanks in the London Review of Books  for 21 October 2010:

On 18 March last year a fox, or foxes, found their way through a damaged fence into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and slaughtered 11 rockhopper and blackfooted penguins. News of the massacre only appeared this weekend, after the Independent got hold of a report on the zoo from inspectors at Westminster Council; since 2007, foxes have also killed a flamingo chick, a chicken and two mara (which the Independent described as ‘rodents resembling small kangaroos’; they’re more like guinea pigs on stilts).

The papers were shocked by the news, though they had some difficulty putting their fingers on the reason. For the Independent, it was a story both about the need for London Zoo to invest more in its facilities and about the imperative to close down zoos altogether. For the Daily Telegraph, ‘The revelations are certain to reignite the row over urban fox numbers which was sparked earlier this year by reports that two baby girls were attacked in their home by a fox’ – and hence, as many commenters on the paper’s website spotted, it was really a story about the consequences of New Labour’s ban on foxhunting. The Daily Mail did better, wailing about a ‘bloodbath’ and a ‘trail of destruction’ but refraining for once from drawing moral conclusions.

Infiltration by foxes and other local predators is part of zoo life. It’s because of the foxes, apparently, that the Regent’s Park penguins now inhabit a somewhat drab, shallow-banked pond rather than Berthold Lubetkin’s elegant Modernist Penguin Pool: the Lubetkin pool was always bad for penguins (too small, poor air circulation, unyielding concrete surfaces), but its Grade I listed status made alterations impossible; the last straw came when a fox started raiding and the zoo wasn’t even allowed to put up chicken wire. In April this year a fox walked over ice to get to the flamingos at Helsinki Zoo, leaving 16 of them dead.

Mother Damnable and the curse of Camden Town tube station

Jago Hazzard takes us to Camden Town station and its curse: the most complicated junction on the London Underground.

Blame the witch Mother Damnable or Mother Redcap. The station was almost named after a pub that bore her name.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

John Pardoe, Margaret Thatcher and antisemitism in Finchley

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The photograph above is captioned on Getty Images:

British Liberal Party politician John Pardoe with his wife Joyce, UK, 24th September 1964. Pardoe is standing against Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher as the Liberal candidate for Finchley.

And Pardoe did very well at Finchley in the 1964 general election, putting the Liberals into second place and recording a seven per cent swing against the sitting Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher.

A Jewish Chronicle article by Robert Philpot from 2017 gives an important reason for this achievement:

When Mrs Thatcher was selected as Finchley's Conservative candidate in July 1958, she inherited a seemingly impregnable majority of nearly 13,000. She soon discovered, however, that the Tories had a little local difficulty on their hands. At its centre were the constituency's Jewish voters who constituted a politically significant one-in-five of the electorate. 

It stemmed from that most quintessentially middle-class of pursuits: golf. The previous year, a number of Jews – including Shirley Porter, then a young Liberal activist – had applied to join the Finchley golf club. Each had had their membership refused; not an uncommon occurrence at golf clubs at this time.

The club leased its land from the Tory-dominated borough council, and its officers included a number of prominent local Conservatives. Scenting an opportunity, two Jewish Liberals fought and won seats in Finchley’s wealthiest and most Jewish wards. 

Upon her selection, a horrified Mrs Thatcher discovered that, while the club had swiftly caved in and agreed to admit Jewish members, more lasting damage had been done: in the next year's local elections, the Liberals made further advances. "The Jewish faith," she worriedly wrote to Central Office, "have allied themselves to Liberalism."

The golf-club scandal had come to symbolise a cloud of antisemitism which hung over the local Tory association. That was not altogether surprising given the attitude of Sir John Crowder, the retiring MP, who privately grumbled that the national party was trying to impose a choice between "a bloody Jew and a bloody woman" as his successor.

Mrs Thatcher was, she later recalled, upset that her new local association had been "tainted" by antisemitism and moved swiftly to repair the damage. She prioritised the recruitment of new Jewish members and invited Sir Keith Joseph, the Tories' rising Jewish star, to speak locally. Her efforts appeared to bear fruit: in October 1959, she increased the Tories' majority to over 16,000. 

However, the Liberal bandwagon continued to roll. In 1962, the party made sweeping gains and a year later it seized control of Finchley town hall. Six of its 19 councillors were Jewish, including the new leader of the council and mayor. Drawing a parallel with the Liberals' recent dramatic by-election victory, the press dubbed Finchley "the Orpington of North London."

Mrs Thatcher knew exactly the source of her problems. "It’s the golf club… that’s where it all started," she told one journalist. Her finely tuned political antenna were correct: she held Finchley in 1964, albeit with a sharply reduced majority. However, Jews in the seat voted Liberal in considerably higher proportions than non-Jews, with Mrs Thatcher and the Liberal candidate, John Pardoe, each taking roughly 40 percent of the Jewish vote.

John Pardoe went on to become MP for North Cornwall in 1966 and represented the seat until he was defeated in 1979. In the Seventies he became the party's economic spokesperson and, along with David Penhaligon, one of my early Liberal heroes.

Shirley Porter, who died earlier this year, followed a different political career path.

The Joy of Six 1573

Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute."

Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments.

Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But in 2026, it’s a far more humane vision, and better for it, than what her right-wing detractors have to offer."

"During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was 'not a Scotchman' and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan's racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military." Martin Spychal has researched the career of Peter McLagan, whom he calls "Scotland’s first Black MP".

"She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously 'do' Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while." Niela Orr celebrates the life and music of Dolly Parton.

The Secret Cricket Coach asks where the hell Rob Key is: "For years he was paid to tell us what was right and wrong with English cricket. Now he is responsible for much of it, but recently we haven’t heard much from him. England have had a difficult period, questions are being asked about behaviour, standards and leadership, and it is Joe Root who seems to be answering them. I find that quite strange."

John Rogers takes us on a fantastic stroll around South Kensington

John shows us Exhibition Road, the French district of Kensington and Benny Hill's blue plaque.

Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens on 19th-century poverty

Here's a book review that features my favourite writers on Victorian poverty – the two Charlies. That's Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens.

The book reviewed is Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 by Elizabeth Hurren, the reviewer is John Prebble, and it appears in the London Review of Books for 5 October 2012:

Like everyone who has written about Victorian poverty, she’s obstructed by the problem identified by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman in 1902. "We are very silent," the collective poor say in Masterman's From the Abyss; "so very silent that no one to this hour knows what we think ... or why we think it."

That remains true even now. From all the multitude of workhouse voices, not one has yet been recovered that says "this is how it was," "this is what we did," "this is how I felt." Victorian poverty is mute either because, in Masterman's words, it was "living for the most part with no articulate expression", or because it was too ashamed to speak. 

The Victorians who wrote about it were strangers in its midst: either middle-class missionaries, philanthropists and sociologists perceiving the London slums as "the undiscovered country of the poor" and "the dark continent ... within easy walking distance of the General Post Office", and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. 

And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto martyred surrogates in other hells – the workhouse, Yorkshire schools, Lancashire mills, slums like Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens confronting his own past is Oliver Twist confronting his. Having escaped into bourgeois security, Oliver revisits the town of his childhood, but he sees the workhouse only from outside, and his old acquaintances only as faces at the windows.

Robert Sherard, as we saw a few months ago, was the grandson of the fearsome Lord Harborough and Oscar Wilde's first biographer. 

Ian Christie asks if the cinema invented Swinging London

I've already posted the first two videos in this series of film lectures by Ian Christie. They were on Gothic London and on the British pioneer Robert Paul.

Here, in his final lecture, he talks about British cinema and Swinging London.

David Campanale seeks £788,740.75 compensation from Lib Dems

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David Campanale, the former prospective Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Sutton and Cheam who was deselected in 2023, and the national party are oceans apart when it comes to the compensation he deserves for suffering religious discrimination.

The Guardian reports:

Campanale's schedule of loss, seen by the Guardian, puts his claim at £788,740.75, including interest. It seeks compensation for injury to feelings, aggravated damages, past and future earnings, the loss of an MP's pension, counselling costs and the "loss of a chance", or "loss of political capital".

But in a counter-schedule filed on Friday, the Lib Dems described Campanale's claim as "grossly inflated and egregious". Their lawyers say £14,000 should be awarded for injury to feelings, and as a volunteer political party member, Campanale could have been expected to withstand “rigorous political debate and criticism”. They put aggravated damages, past and future loss of earnings, an MP’s pension and the loss of political capital at £0.

The Lib Dems have admitted to direct and indirect discrimination on grounds of religion or belief under the Equality Act in connection with the affair.

GUEST POST Why has the HS2 project been such a disaster?

Peter Chambers goes in search of enlightenment about the ironic low-speed train crash that is HS2.

Most people I meet have an opinion on HS2. Different opinions. It has been expensive. It goes to Euston. It was a plot by Labour or the Tories. It goes too fast. Or not fast enough. It was a sop to the North or a scheme to divert economic activity to London.

What are the most useful points? Was it anything but a muddle? Some acquaintances have advised me to use these new GPT-LLM-RAG machines to produce a summary (AI). However, I know too much about how they work, so will politely decline. Instead I might read a human-written review of a human-written book that has been deemed somewhat informed. 

So off to the Literary Review for some opinion. Transport expert David Leeder reviews Off the Rails: The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson. I was looking for something with lots of numbers, geography, requirements, political objectives, strategy, analysis, risk-management, expertise and national benefit. Who am I kidding? It was Oxbridge debating with itself and Natural England being paid off one change at a time.

Leeder tells us that at least 40 per cent of the population (of what ?) lives in a quadrangle formed by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Leeds. The distance between London and Birmingham is only around 160km while London and Manchester are around 260km apart. It is proposed to operate HS2 at 320 kph. Forty-nine  minutes. Barely time to scan the Guardian, and tell the buffet assistant twice that there is no milk in Americano. There never was. 

We can skip the bits about Blair and Adonis (who?) and the aspersions about Roy Jenkins and claret. You might as well take Avanti West Coast from Euston and find a good forward-facing seat in Coach C. They have USB and the Project Reach cellular upgrade should be working in 2028, even at Piccadilly and Euston. It would take most of 49 minutes to get Teams working and find that the AI sent you the wrong meeting minutes document. Was that £38bn or £80bn? At least the No.1 circular bus at Manchester Piccadilly is both free and powered by electricity.

Much of the rest of the review takes on a tour of the group-think of the rotating cast of London-based decision-makers. Leeder describes them as "Britain’s political class, which comprises a narrow pool of upper-middle-class types who share many of the same vague assumptions." 

This seems plausible as the stated requirements used vague language and rotated with administrations. The very basic cost-benefit analysis that would link national growth with having a high-speed railway at all seems missing. The two most dynamic nations do not encourage us: the US does not bother with high-speed rail, the PRC has long distances between major cities and poor legacy transport networks. We do not compare with either.

Perhaps the most concise criticism is that the low productivity of most of the UK outside London and the Home Counties may well be due to factors having nothing to do with transport. A high pound, managed decline, class struggle, City bias, disdain for STEM, and the privilege of the Oxford Union will be suggested by a quick-lazy search engine. 

HS2 functions as a 'shiny' and could be useful as a distraction from unpalatable political action. It is rather expensive for that though.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.