Is The UK heading for divorce? An interview with James Hawes

I referred to James Hawes's The Shortest History of Ireland the other day, and I've just sent Liberator a review of the book by fast orphan. Here Hawes raises wider issues about the future of the United Kingdom, and he's well worth a listen.,

Among his insights are that "England", to the Conservative Party, ultimately means the South East of England and the elite institutions to which it is home. And that the Reform vote is not working class, but a vote for a more hard-line Tory party. I suspect, though, that a good chunk of it is the sort of protest vote that we Liberals used to benefit from.

A word too for Adrian Goldberg, who was one of the most welcome voices in the early day of BBC Radio 5.

"The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate"

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James Hawse's The Shortest History of Ireland reveals that the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, with its notorious verse

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

was written by Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, in Donegal at the height of the Irish famine.

At one of my first meetings as a councillor, Harborough was asked to make its response to the Thatcher government's proposed Community Charge, which was to be universally called the Poll Tax.

It's forgotten now, but the government's original proposal was that the Poll Tax should be phased in over 10 years. If they had kept to that, they might have got away with it. But Harborough was one of many Conservative-run authorities that was so enamoured of the new tax that they wanted it brought in at once.

I remember the debate: you could see the pound signs in some Tory councillors' eyes as they calculated how much the Poll Tax would save them and their neighbours.

In my own contribution, I used some of the approved clichés of the day, calling the proposal "a Robin Hood tax in reverse" and complaining that "the rich man in his castle will pay the same as the poor man at his gate".

One of the later speakers in the debate was Tim Brooks, a Tory and the owner of Wistow Hall. Rather painedly, he pointed out that owning a great house brought with it great expenses.

Anyway, the Conservatives made the mistake of listening to their rank-and file and brought in the Poll Tax at once. Among the consequences of this decision was the fall of Margaret Thatcher. 

The myth that Labour's tax policies lost them the 1992 election

Why did John Major win the 1992 election when most pundits expected Neil Kinnock's Labour Party to be the victors?

Immediately after the contest, a consensus developed that the reason was the effectiveness of the Conservatives' campaign against Labour's economic policies. This view was certainly advanced by the Tories themselves, as its acceptance would make Labour more timid about challenging Thatcherite economics in future. 

And it was advanced by the head of the Tory campaign, Chris Patten, perhaps as a way of burnishing his reputation and consoling himself after he lost his own seat of Bath to the Liberal Democrats.

But I have always doubted this explanation. I remember thinking that it did not chime with what I had heard during the campaign from voters or from colleagues at work.

I recently came across an article that suggests I was right to be sceptical. In May 1994 the Independent published an article by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice on the findings of their study of the 1992 election.

They go through the various explanations that had been offered for Labour's defeat and find them all wanting – notably the claim that "It's The Sun Wot Won It" made by, you guessed it, The Sun itself.

Here are Heath et al. on the suggestion that it was Labour's tax policies that had been decisive:

Labour's proposals for taxation and national insurance contributions – outlined in John Smith's 'alternative Budget' – were relentlessly attacked by the Conservatives. Faced with the prospect of a cut in their disposable income, the argument runs, voters had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting Labour in.

But our surveys find little evidence to back this argument. It arose because the polls showed a small Labour lead throughout a campaign in which taxation was one of the dominant issues and yet the Tories won. Our research, however, confirms that the pollsters had it wrong all along: they consistently underestimated the Tory vote. The Conservatives were ahead throughout the campaign. 

There was a late swing, but far too small to account for Labour's defeat. And the people who deserted Labour were not particularly averse to high taxation; rather, they seemed to have relatively little faith in Labour's ability to improve services such as health and education.

In fact, the authors find nothing in the 1992 election campaign had much of an effect on the final outcome.

I did receive intimations that there had been a late swing to the Tories. During the campaign, I'd heard stories of Liberal Democrat workers putting money on Nick Harvey gaining North Devon with a large majority, when ultimately he gained it with a small one. 

And I was told to put money on the Lib Dems in Falmouth and Camborne, because Sebastian Coe was going down very badly there. Luckily I didn't, because Coe held the seat for the Tories. He lost to Labour in 1997 and the Lib Dems finally took it in 2005.

My own theory was that voters had chosen John Major over Neil Kinnock. After Margaret Thatcher's late Sturm und Drang years, Major was a breath of fresh air. Those who only know of him as a figure of fun may be surprised at this, but if they study his statesmanlike conduct since losing power they may see why people found him attractive in 1992.

Neil Kinnock, by contrast, had been leader of the opposition for nine years. Some of the attacks on him as a "Welsh windbag" bordered on the racist, but, boy, he did talk a lot. And, burdened by cares of leadership, he had lost the wit and sparkle that had made his name as a backbench MP – notably on Jimmy Young's Radio 2 programme.

So that's why I didn't believe in 1992 that the Tories' attacks on Labour's tax policies had won them the election. And, going by Heath et al.'s study, I was right not to believe what became the received wisdom on that contest.

This question is not just of historical interest. Rachel Reeves's pledge not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT, which has backed her into such a corner, was made because of a more or less conscious memory of 1992.

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher by Mark Garnett

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

It’s not a novelty for British prime ministers to leave No. 10 without having lost an election: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Wilson all did so. What is new, says Mark Garnett, is for them to be bundled out of power when they are still in good health.

He dates this trend to the fall of Thatcher in 1990, and it’s tempting to put its acceleration in the years since then down to Brexit. As Garnett says:

The 2016 referendum, and its consequences, accounted directly for Cameron and May; and while Johnson and Truss found means of self-sabotage, arguably neither would have earned the chance to showcase their ineptitude for leadership without Brexit.

But he sees other forces at work. The social upheavals of the Sixties led to a decline in class consciousness and in strong identification with a particular party among voters. In this new world, the popularity and perceived strengths of party leaders became increasingly important, as seen from the fact that Margaret Thatcher is the last party leader to have won an election while being less popular than her main opponent. 

This trend has encouraged a presidential style among prime ministers – a style that the public and press seem to have come to expect. When John Major tried to undo some of the changes of Thatcher’s Boadicea years and restore the importance of the cabinet, it was widely seen as a sign of weakness.

It’s no wonder, then, that politicians, journalists and voters alike now look to a change in prime minister to improve things when a government is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer had better watch out.

Garnett writes with wit and an eye for a good anecdote. David Cameron’s courtship of the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 election "made Casanova sound like a tongue-tied ingénue". At her post-election party conference, Theresa May received "the kind of sympathetic audience response that, in bygone days, had greeted the arrival of the condemned at Tyburn Tree". The claim that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy was inaccurate, "but it was certainly not from want of trying".

Downing Street Downfalls is an agreeable companion to contemporary political history and, when it turns to the last ten years, a reminder that there’s nothing quite as strange as the recent past.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

One of the problems with our political system is that it produces such inexperienced leaders

In recent days I've come across three instances of people arguing that one of the problems with our political system today is that it produces such inexperienced leaders.

You can hear Robert Saunders making this argument in the latest episode of Nick Cohen's podcast The Lowdown. (Click play on the video and you'll get the relevant extract.)

Mark Garnett also touches on it in his new book Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain's Prime Ministers Since Thatcher, which I review in the next Liberator.

In the book he writes:

Even before Brexit there had been signs that individuals with slender qualifications were beginning to regard themselves as viable candidates. In January 2015 Adam Afriyie, a right-wing backbencher little known to parliamentary colleagues let alone the public, was mooted as a serious challenger to David Cameron's position. Unlike Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, before the rumours fizzled out Afriyie showed every sign of wanting to run purely on his own behalf.

And you can see the same concern in the Chris Dillow article I blogged about the other day:

Labour party members in 2020 were so keen to see Corbynism without Corbyn that they overlooked questions about Starmer's suitability: is a man who became an MP only in 2015 sufficiently experienced in Westminster politics? Does being head of a large hierarchical organization equip a man to lead a more egalitarian one facing fierce competition? Does he have any good record in developing and selling policy?

Closer to home, how much did Liberal Democrat members know about Nick Clegg when they elected him as their leader.

I know I'm getting old, but I think there is something in the argument that our leaders are too inexperienced.

Chris Dillow explains our incompetent political culture

When the centenary of Margaret Thatcher's birth was marked last month, the consensus view on Bluesky was that she had made everything in Britain worse. Not only that: it was all down to her personal wickedness.

Whatever happened to the left having a knowledge of the tides of history that is denied to the rest of us?

One writer who offers a more sophisticated analysis is Rutland's own Chris Dillow. In his latest post he looks at the travails of the government and the BBC asks why so much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

Here's the crux of his argument:

Good politics recognises that public opinion is not a fixed entity but is malleable, not necessarily by rational debate alone. Labour likes to present itself as businesslike. But decent businesses advertise their products, respect their customers, and don’t shout about the merits of their rivals. ...

Good politics also requires something else - a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out. Which is what we don’t have. Instead, we have a system which often selects for rather than against charlatans and incompetents. And, worse still, neither politicians nor the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it.

You can read the whole article on Chris's Substack. 

John Gray on the strange death of Tory England

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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.

Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

When Thatcher led international debate on the environment

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A word of uninvited advice for the Conservatives: listen to Margaret Thatcher on the climate crisis, not Kemi Badenoch.

Here, thanks to a 2013 Guardian article by the late John Vidal, are some of the Iron Lady's words of wisdom on the environment.

Here is an extract from a speech she made to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988:

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

And here is one from her speech to the United Nations general assembly in November 1989:

What we are now doing to the world … is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all. 

The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.

As Vidal says, her enthusiasm soon waned. But he also quotes the words of Jonathon Porritt:

Thatcher … did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda. From 1987-88 when [she] started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree-hugging weirdos thought, "ooh, it's Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious". She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people.

Mrs Thatcher was many things: one of them was a scientist.

Later. It's not in John Vidal's article, but here is another Thatcher quote from this era - her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1988:

It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth—we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come. [Clapping]. 

The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy - with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full. [Clapping].

I wonder if today's Tories would clap those points?

The Joy of Six 1325

Amanda Litman argues that it's time for the ageing leadership of the US Democrats to stand down: "While their wisdom and experience have value, and while some can certainly still hold their own, the septuagenarian and octogenarian class of Democratic leaders - predominantly older white men—are by and large ill-equipped for this crisis we have found ourselves in."

How do radical ideas go mainstream? Alice Evans studies the women's magazines of the 1970s to help her understand the rise of feminism.

How well did Queen Elizabeth II get along with her prime ministers? Rebecca Cope has the answers: "It would be easy to think that as a Labour Party leader from a northern middle-class background, Harold Wilson would not have gotten on well with the Queen, but quite the opposite was true. A regular at Balmoral, he was frequently asked on picnics with the wider family, and reportedly enjoyed the informality of the occasion, mucking in to help clear up after the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous barbeques."

Ellie Robson on the philosopher Mary Midgley: "In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men."

Writing in Country Life of all places, Lewis Winks demolishes the case against allowing wild camping on Dartmoor.

Michael Wood goes to the movies and thinks about Brady Corbet’s films: "How brutal or damaging does your childhood have to be to make you a great dictator or a memorable pop star? Are the connecting words ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’? Or is there no causality here at all, just a sort of baffling coexistence? Are the films in love with an ugly idea of chance? This possibility seems especially relevant to The Brutalist."

It's still a month to polling day, but the Conservative Party's civil war has already kicked off

From the Guardian this evening:

Jeremy Hunt has warned the Conservatives that elections are won from the centre ground, amid fears that the party could lurch to the right in response to Nigel Farage’s return to frontline politics.

In an interview with the Guardian, the chancellor suggested the party must remain a “broad church” despite concerns that Reform UK could cost the Tories as many as 60 seats at the general election.

It's several years too late, but at least Hunt has said something about his party's rapid journey to a strange planet many light years away. 

But Margaret Thatcher called moderate Tories "wets" for a reason. 

In his Guardian interview, says the paper, Hunt:

hinted that the party could promise to try to “reform” the ECHR instead, rather than withdraw entirely.

“We need to be able to have control of our borders. That has to be decided by elected politicians, accountable to voters through parliament, not by foreign courts,” he said. 

“You’ll need to wait on [the manifesto] but I think what we would all like to see is reform of the ECHR.”

This concedes three-quarters of the Reform case before any debate has begun. He's going to have to fight harder than that if he wants to save a recognisable Conservative Party.

The Exorcism: The scariest thing I have ever seen on television

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

What’s the most frightening thing you’ve seen on television? I can remember an episode of Sexton Blake, shown during children’s hour on ITV, in which Tinker, the great detective’s resourceful young assistant was measured for his coffin by a sinister undertaker while he was still alive.

A bit of research tells me that the Sexton Blake story involving Mr Tapp the undertaker was screened in two parts when I was seven years old. 

Don’t listen to the Haunted Generation mob and their claims for the Seventies: we Boomers had a harder time of it in the Sixties.

If I’m allowed to mention films I saw on television, then the scene in the Bob Hope picture The Cat and the Canary where a hand reaches through the wall behind a bedhead and searches the bed while the occupant sleeps hit me pretty hard. 

Until then I’d assumed that if my back was to the wall then at least I was safe from attack by bogeyman from that direction.

Finding The Exorcism

But if I have to name just one frightening programme then it has to be a television play that I saw when I was 12. For decades, as I waited impatiently for the internet to be invented, I didn’t know even what it had been called.

But then I bought a collection of television criticism by the influential Welsh academic Raymond Williams. I began reading his review of a play by Don Taylor called The Exorcism, and it became clear that this was what had scared me all those years ago.

The Exorcism was broadcast by the BBC on Bonfire Night 1972, as part of a series of seven plays called Dead of Night. Originally there were meant to be eight, but the now-famous The Stone Tape came in at 90 minutes and so did not fit the series format. Only three of the seven survive today and the good news is that The Exorcism, which was the first in the series, is one of them.

You can buy those three plays on a DVD from the British Film Institute. The website there describes The Exorcism well:

The best known and perhaps the most terrifying of the episodes – four wealthy, middle-class friends (Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) gather for a Christmas dinner in a country cottage only to find that the past will not rest while they feast.

But as I don’t want to have to worry about spoilers here, and as I’m sure you are busy, I suggest you watch The Exorcism on YouTube now while I add some spoiler space. 

You may want to have a stiff drink by you.

Are you OK? I did warn you.

When I discovered The Exorcism was on YouTube it took me a while to pluck up the courage to watch it. When I did, it wasn’t as frightening as the first time and not because I was no longer 12 years old. It was more that I knew what was coming. I found I had remembered for 40 years the wine that turned to blood, the total blackness outside the windows and the news bulletin at the end about a bizarre Christmas tragedy.

My motivation for writing this post was to alert readers to this extraordinary piece of television drama. I don’t want to go on saying “Wasn’t it scary when…?”, but if you want to hear a discussion of the play you’ve just watched, then I recommend an episode of A Very British Horror. One of the participants says The Exorcism is the only thing he has watched in the making of the podcast that has given him a nightmare.

What I shall do is offer some thoughts on the individual television play as an art form, some notes on the cast of The Exorcism and, finally, a look at its fortunes after this first broadcast.

The television play

Watching The Exorcism today, it speaks of the year 1972 in three ways. First, it is an essay in folk horror, in that the rational outsiders encounter something dark and rural and come off second best – it is the cottage that has exorcised its new inhabitants, not they who have exorcised the echoes of past horrors.

Second, it is a piece of popular entertainment that wears its politics on its sleeve: there is a discussion of whether it’s possible to be a rich socialist, and the play gives a very definite answer in the negative. Just ask the police officers who had to turn out on Christmas morning.

There would be questions in the House today, but such overt political content was unremarkable in 1972. The BBC broadcast a series call Play for Today between 1970 and 1984 that, by the end, encompassed more than 300 individual plays, and many shared The Exorcism’s politics. It’s been said that if you watched nothing but Play for Today, you would have forecast a Communist revolution in 1979 rather than Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.

And there is a third way in which The Exorcism speaks of 1972: it is a television play that does not aspire to be a movie. Though television drama’s critical standing today is perhaps higher than it has ever been, it does give the impression that it hankers after the sheen of Hollywood. But when The Exorcism was broadcast, the television play was seen as a discrete art form and it, at least, looked to the theatre at least as much as it looked to the cinema.

Don Taylor himself, in his memoir Days of Vision, described the television studio as:

…an empty space. A prepared canvas ready to paint on; the vacuum of an open mind waiting to be filled. It can offer the landscape of the imagination, ready to be entered, a world inside the head as vivid, often more vivid than the world outside the eyes that the film camera photographs so faithfully. It can offer nothingness, waiting to become something, a world waiting to be created out of the chaos of four characterless walls, a shiny floor, and a grid of lights. It is something waiting to happen, a statement ready to be made. One object or person placed within it makes a quite specific and individual point. Two, and the play begins.

You can hear about Taylor’s approach to television drama from his son, the actor Jon Dryden Taylor, in an edition of the podcast The Box of Delights. It’s worth mentioning that part of what makes The Exorcism such a claustrophobic experience is his use of close ups, and another part is that the play takes place in real time - it follows the verities.

I grasped this difference in approach, when compared to today’s television, through watching the 1961 Granada Television production of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. When I say it was clear that the aesthetic behind it was that of the theatre rather than the cinema, I don’t mean that Granada had just filmed a stage performance or that the acting was too broad. The cast - Patrick McGoohan, John Thaw, Freda Jackson, Stratford Johns - was far too good for that.

What I mean is that the viewer is aware the performance is taking place in a television studio, and even expects to see the cameras at any moment. You don’t, but you are left wondering if it would matter if you did. Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?

The cast

Of the four actors in The Exorcism, only Edward Petherbridge is still alive. Like the rest of the cast, he appeared on television far more than on film – it is harder to trace people’s stage careers, but all four were considerable theatre actors too.

Petherbridge is best known for playing Lord Peter Wimsey in BBC adaptations of the Dorothy L. Sayers novels. He also appeared in The Ash Tree – one of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. 

Anna Cropper, who is so impressive here, made her career principally in television plays. She was married for a time to William Roache, who has played Ken Barlow in Coronation for 64 years now, making him the world’s longest-serving actor in a continuous role. Their son Linus Roache had a huge reputation as a Shakespearian actor when he was a young man, but his star seemed to fade. He was very impressive in Stephen Poliakoff’s television series Summer of Rockets in 2019. Anna Cropper died in 2007.

Sheila Kay also worked more in television than films, often appearing in situation comedies, and she later trained and practised as a psychotherapist. She died in 2019.

Clive Swift was a mainstay of British television and is the most recognisable face in the cast because of his years opposite Patricia Routledge as Mr Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. He appeared in the first two Ghost Stories for Christmas: The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious. The way he carries off those Seventies threads in The Exorcism is greatly to be admired. He too died in 2019.

The afterlife of The Exorcism

The Exorcism was put on as a stage play in London in 1975. Don Taylor, as his son explains in The Box of Delights podcast, was unhappy with changes that had been made to the script and wanted his name taken off the production. His agent, the famous and fearsome Peggy Ramsay, threatened to disown him if this was how he reacted to his first West End opening, so he relented.

Rachel, the part played by Anna Cropper in the original television production, was played on stage by Mary Ure. She had been married to the playwright John Osborne and been in the cast of his groundbreaking Look Back in Anger. But by the early Seventies, her career and health were in decline, but the opening night of The Exorcism was seen as a triumph.

Ure had drunk her share of champagne and then took her prescription medication on top of it. The mix was enough to kill her. Anna Cropper stepped in to play the role, but the press made great fun of the idea that The Exorcism was a cursed play.

Nevertheless, its small cast and gripping story have made it a favourite with amateur theatre companies. But would I want to watch it again?

Keir Starmer was right: How Margaret Thatcher bankrolled a generation of left-wing entrepreneurs and artists

I don't subscribe to the Telegraph, so I may not have read everything Keir Starmer had to say about Margaret Thatcher earlier this week. But what I did see was wholly unobjectionable.

Starmer was quoted as saying Thatcher had "set loose our natural entrepreneurialism".

Well, that was what she dreamed of doing. Most Conservative measures to help small businesses turn out to help large businesses rather more, but in one area at least Thatcher's policies did have a positive effect. And it often involved young entrepreneurs with very unThatcherite views.

A Guardian article from this summer remembered the summer of 1983:

That same month, a new government initiative was rolled out nationwide. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was the brainchild of a Treasury civil servant called Peter Kemp and had been trialled over the previous two years. 

Despite its bland name, it was a daring concept. If citizens wanted to set up a small business, the government would guarantee an income of £40 a week for up to 12 months, and an escape from dole checkups. 

If your business plan and a savings test passed muster – and for three-quarters of applicants it did – you were good. For the decade or so that it ran, more than half a million people ended up using it. Many were under 25.

And the article continued:

There was one unlikely side-effect, almost certainly unplanned by Treasury mandarins – the birth of an entire generation of British creatives. Successful EAS alumni included Alan McGee of Creation Records, Laurence Bell of Domino, and Julian Dunkerton, who founded Superdry; musicians such as Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder; artists including Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller and Edmund de Waal.

Forty years after the scheme was rolled out, it’s a faintly astonishing thought: would Britpop and the YBAs have happened without a hardline Conservative government? Was Thatcherism, widely detested by the arts establishment, actually good for culture? When I put these questions to the artist Rachel Whiteread, she chuckles. “Yeah, it’s a little bit strange, the whole thing. I don’t think they had a clue what would happen.”

Well that's the good thing about markets: they can overturn the existing order. It's why we Liberals support them.

Labour was at pains to associate itself with the arts in the run up to its victory in 1997, but mutual the love affair didn't last. 

This report appeared in the Herald in March 1998:

Tony Blair has lost his cool. According to a band of leading figures in the music world, the Prime Minister has betrayed the principles on which he was elected and should no longer be regarded as an honorary member of the ''Cool Britannia'' movement.

The ''band'' is fronted by two Glaswegians, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, and the head of Creation Records, Alan McGee, who gave £50,000 to Labour's General Election fund.

And McGee's complaint?

Alan McGee said the Government was making it harder for musicians. Mr McGee serves on Government task-force committees - but refused to go to a meeting with Employment Minister Andrew Smith a fortnight ago in protest at Labour's Welfare to Work policy.

He said he wanted the Government to introduce a scheme to allow young artists to by-pass requirements to take the first job on offer so they could develop their musical skills.

The NME went so far as to produce the front page and report you see above. An account of Tony Blair's response to it says of the paper's original report:

Singled out for heaviest objection were Government policies on curfews for young people, the abolition of supplementary allowances for those without work, imposition of thousand-pound tuition fees for university students and a total rejection of any debate on repealing Britain’s outdated drugs laws.

This just suggests that someone at the paper had got round to reading Labour's 1997 manifesto.

My memories of Labour's polices on youth unemployment from this era are summed up by this BBC News story:

A pilot scheme in Coventry to remove unwanted tattoos from the unemployed has received a £2m government grant.

Many jobless people believe their colourful designs put off employers, but tattoo removal costs between £500 and £1,000.

The employment service in Coventry is considering removing tattoos for nothing as part of a broader programme to help jobseekers become more employable.

A generous policy in its way, but it was all about fitting people into existing employment opportunities. It was never going to give rise to new artistic movements or musical styles.

Under the Conservatives (and under the Lib Dems during the Coalition years) unemployment problem has been about using poverty to force people off benefits one way or another. And there are few signs that Labour will be much different after the next election.

There are many among the young employed who would benefit from a revival of Thatcherism.

Night of the Lepus and Any Questions? in the Seventies

These days I can't stand such programmes, but when I first became interested in politics as a young teenager I listened avidly to Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4.

So a few random memories of some of the more regular panellists in those days.

Richard Marsh had been a trade union official and a youthful member of Harold Wilson's cabinet in the Sixties, but by the time I heard him he was gratingly pro-business - full of talk of "UK Ltd" and the like. It was no surprise when he endorsed Margaret Thatcher in 1978 and received a peerage in return,

Ann Mallalieu was a young Labour-supporting barrister with a lovely deep voice. She received a peerage in 1991 and returned to prominence in the media as a supporter of fox hunting when Blair's government set about banning it.

Russell Braddon was an Australian writer who had made his name with The Naked Island, an account of the war in the Pacific and his years as a prisoner of the Japanese. I remember him as purveying right-wing views in an overly emotional voice.

Arianna Stassinopoulos - billed as a former president of the Cambridge Union - was never off the programme, though some wags claimed she was so dull that you fell asleep halfway through her name.

Michael Clayton, "editor of Horse and Hound", was another permanent fixture. He was on the panel when they broadcast the programme from my school and he later moved to the area. It turns out that, until the early Seventies, Clayton had been a BBC foreign correspondent and had also reported on the Fischer vs Spassky match in Reykjavik.

Fast forward a few years (which seemed like a couple of lifetimes while I had to live through them) and I'm a student at York. In fact, I'm at the Derwent Horrors - a long evening of horror films put on from time to time by Derwent College.

On the bill that night was Rabid, an early David Cronenberg film. But I remember another offering from the evening because it was so bad. In Night of the Lepus, an American family is menaced by giant killer rabbits that have escaped from a secure facility after an experiment gone wrong.

Because the film's premise was so ludicrous, and because the family had a particularly annoying child, we took to cheering the rabbits whenever they appeared.

And what ties all these memories together? It's that Night of the Lepus was based on a novel called The Year of the Angry Rabbit, which had been written by Any Questions? stalwart Russell Braddon.

The Joy of Six 1163

"Liz Truss almost wrecked the British economy in her 49 days as prime minister, and is now working on a book, Ten Years to Save the West, to be published in April next year. Margaret Thatcher was initially reluctant to join the international speaker circuit following her 10 revolutionary years in power. But the shortest-serving politician in British history recently pocketed some £90,000 for a five-day trip to Taiwan during which she delivered a speech about the importance of standing up to Chinese aggression." Adrian Wooldridge says we are living in an age of political shamelessness.

Ruth Bright argues that the NHS "must address misogyny and listen to women. In the obstetric context, at minimum women’s dignity, continence and future birth chances are at stake. At most their very lives and even the lives of their babies are on the line."

"Good Ofsted scores are not fairly spread but are far more likely for suburban, girls-only, selective schools with no long-term poor pupils, for example. Perhaps 70 per cent of the variation in Ofsted grades can be explained by these factors." Stephen Gorard is sceptical about the value of these grades.

Roy Eidelson is interviewed by Democracy Now! about the American Psychological Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programmes and the struggle to reform the psychology. 

"Videotaped drama is a form of television that (soaps apart) we don’t see anymore. Once, of course, it was the dominant way of programme-making and remained so for decades." Archive Television Musings on what technical change meant for actors and viewers.

Now! Then! A Yorkshire Almanac for 2023 looks at the invention of the legend of John Bartendale, the York man who survived hanging.

The Joy of Six 1159

"We rarely recognise how deeply the car is cherished in British political culture. We mock the American attachment to giant vehicles and vast multi-lane freeways, and their non-existent public transport systems - but we are far closer to them than we would like to admit. Far from there being a 'war on the motorist', much of British economic and transport policy is oriented in their direction." The war on motorists is a myth, says Lewis Goodall.

Chris Dillow argues that the Conservatives have given up on Margaret Thatcher's belief in freedom and much else that she stood for: "Thatcher was smart enough to know that if you wanted people to support capitalism you had to give them at least a chance of owning property. Today's Tories have forgotten this."

An open letter from health professionals asserts that the government has a moral duty to help people harmed by prescribed dependence-forming drugs.

Judy Woodruff talked to PBS News Hour about the connections between decline of local news and growing political division.

"Austin enjoyed only thirty years of adult life – perhaps half of what he might have reasonably expected - and he had little opportunity to revise or develop his ideas. But in those thirty years he had two careers of outstanding international importance in largely unrelated fields. Very few can equal this achievement." Thomas Nagel reviews a biography of the influential post-war philosopher J.L. Austin, who was also the officer in charge of gathering intelligence for the D-Day landings.

Graham McCann tells the sad story of the hugely popular radio comedian Jimmy Clitheroe's unsuccessful attempts to conquer television.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Tories are suffering from 'long Boris'

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in today's Guardian:

For a century and a half the Tories had a plausible claim to be “the natural party of government”. Today, they barely look capable of governing at all. Forty years ago Thatcher brimmed with ideas, some of them right and some of them demonstrably wrong, but the Tories now have no idea at all. They have run out of time, run out of excuses - and maybe run out of purpose.

Well, that's encouraging.

Wheatcroft locates the reason for this malaise in the party's recent history:

If the fall of Thatcher, or the way it was done, poisoned the party for years, the recent poison was inflicted by the cynicism behind the rise of Johnson. As Dominic Lawson, an intelligent Brexiter, has said, "Boris Johnson was never in favour of Brexit, until he found it necessary to further his ambition to become Conservative leader."

Since the Tories knew that, their relationship with him was always transactional. He was useful for a time, but he was dumped as soon as he became more liability than asset. And yet the Tories are suffering from 'long Boris', a grievous affliction that could still prove terminal.

More good news. And as he goes on to say, the continuing civil wars in their party have left the Tories with one of the most unimpressive cabinets in history.

I am less convinced by another chapter of his history:

In 2002 Theresa May told the party conference they were in danger of becoming “the nasty party”, but this was a misunderstanding. They have always been that, and as Lee “fuck off back to France” Anderson shows, they still are. 

But nobody ever voted for the Tories because they were "nice". Their success was founded not on amiability but on competence, and that’s what has been destroyed by the farcical recent turbulence, with five prime ministers in the past seven years.

But a lot of people who vote Conservative like to see themselves as nice. Thatcher's nastiness was accompanied by a promise of national renewal, but today's Tory nastiness is nastiness for its own sake. It's now as much part of their identity as self-pity or a belief in conspiracy theories.

That's putting off habitual Tory voters - the sort we might call Amersham Woman following canvassers' reports from the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

We can though rejoice when Wheatcroft writes:

After a torrent of scandals and a string of byelection defeats, this August finds polls in which the Tories are looking at a wipeout in next year’s election. Eighteen years ago I published a book called The Strange Death of Tory England, and was later mocked in the rightwing press when the Tories staged a revival. But maybe that title was only premature.

Poverty isn't a lack of character: it's a lack of cash

Rutger Bregman begins his TED talk like this:

I'd like to start with a simple question: Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it's a harsh question, but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully. Why? 

Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. And she called poverty "a personality defect." 

[Laughter] 

A lack of character, basically.

I'm suspicious of quotations that are so convenient for the speakers' argument, but Thatch really did say this. It was in a 1978 interview with the Catholic Herald.

But then large parts of the Labour Party are more interested in reforming the working class than liberating it too.

As I said of Blair's new government in a letter to the Guardian in 1997 (which I later found quoted in a book I had bought):

Labour is effectively recasting unemployment as a form of individual delinquency.

And Labour is still at it. Today Darren Rodwell, who is apparently a rising star of the party, was threatening to evict families from council accommodation if their children don't inform on people who commit knife crime.

So it's important that Liberals continue to discuss utopian ideas like basic income and a reduced working week. Most will probably prove to be unworkable, but where there is no vision the people perish.

The Joy of Six 1133

"Thatcher, like her contemporaries in all parties, thought the job of politicians was not so much to sheepishly follow public opinion as to shape it. In her 1975 speech opposing the EU referendum, she approvingly cited a letter to the Evening Standard pointing out that if it had been left to the will of the people, 'we would have no Race Relations Act, immigration would have been stopped, abortions would still be illegal and hanging still be in force'." Chris Dillow on politicians who appeal to 'the will of the people'.

Michael Rosen counters Nick Gibb, the Conservative education minister, and his claim to have "won the phonics war and got England reading".

"For reasons that are a little bit unclear - declining religiosity, the rise of social media, maybe - for a long time now, Americans have been reporting more time spent alone, smaller social networks, and fewer people they can confide in. Isolation is not a trivial thing, but a serious threat to survival, coming with increased stress, insomnia, suicide risk, and hypertension." Angie Schmitt asks what urban planning can do to counter an epidemic of loneliness.

Cal Newport wonders if a four-day week is a radical enough solution to the problem of burn-out in office workers.

Neil Drysdale celebrates the 40th birthday of Bill Forsyth's film Local Hero.

"On a peaceful hillside thousands of Sheffield’s citizens lie at rest, some with graves marked by grand memorials, others unseen beneath the trees and undergrowth. After a period of post-war neglect and uncertainty, the Sheffield General Cemetery is now a celebrated part of the city’s heritage." Caroline from Flickering Lamps shows us around.