The Joy of Six 1375

"As I stood outside the barricaded burial site and watched through a peephole, I felt a sense of joy. The grounds are now full of cabins, small diggers and fencing. There are workers in hard hats, forensic archaeologists and a multitude of others who will keep us up to date on what they find. Hopefully it will be the full number - 796 little bodies waiting for a dignified burial." Catherine Corless refused to give up until she learnt what became of the children who died at the mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.

Ben Ansell dissects the increasing extremism in British commentary about race: "For a large number of writers - from Matt Goodwin to David Goodhart, Lord Frost to the MP Neil O’Brien - the distinctions among British citizens are apparently important and worthy of what can at best be described as suspicion and at worst denigration."

Olivia Bridgen asks if trail hunting is an important tradition or just a cover for illegal hunting.

"Racism, especially Islamophobia, is impossible to avoid in Farage-adjacent TikTok. Some of it is imbued with nationalist melancholia, the screen dotted with Union Jacks, clips of wartime heroics interspersed with laments for what the country has become. Some of it is didactic, explaining to the viewer where Islam originated, and the dangers it supposedly presents." William Davies ventures into Faragist TikTok.

Josh Jones looks at research that confirms what philosophers and writers have always known: walking fosters creativity.

"The six town centres are now littered with empty and derelict historic buildings, many of which are in the hands of absentee owners. Meanwhile, those that are put to use are often terribly managed by what can only be described as rogue landlords." Dave Proudlove weighs the prospects for postindustrial Stoke-on-Trent.

My MP Neil O'Brien is a poster boy for the decline of the Tory mind

My Conservative MP Neil O'Brien's X account is a bin fire. You would never know from it that in a general election less than a year ago his party lost half their vote and two-thirds of their MPs. And his only tweets on the local election have been about an 18-year-old Labour candidate in Burnley.

And there's lots about race, much of it designed to encourage the idea that it's white people who are discriminated against. No wonder he gets lots of like and retweets and follows from blue-tick accounts with even more right-wing views.

Are these even from real people? I smell Russian bot farms. And if they are real people, you can bet they live in the US and not Oadby or Market Harborough.

He wasn't always like this. Back in 2018, I praised a speech he gave to a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference and quoted a generous chunk from a Guardian report of it:

Neil O’Brien, who became MP for Harborough last year, noted that in the 2017 election there was a massive deficit between the Tories and Labour in terms of younger voters, and those from minority ethnic backgrounds. 

At the 2015 election, O’Brien said, the Tories lagged two percentage points behind Labour for voters in their 20s, and by four percentage points for those aged 18-24. Just two years later these deficits had shot up to 26 and 40 points behind. 

The party was also doing increasingly less well among other groups whose numbers were rising, such as those with degrees, people who were unmarried, and those who rented their homes or live in cities, said O’Brien, a former director of the Policy Exchange thinktank. 

"All these different social bases of Conservatism are being eroded," he said. “Either we have to do much better amongst these groups of people, or we’re going to go out of business as a political party.” 

Such structural changes would have an impact, he added: "It’s a bit like a beam that is rotting away, and eventually it snaps."

He was right. But now Neil O'Brien has become the sort of person he used to warn the Conservative Party against.

Two Labour members thrown out for backing a tactical Lib Dem vote in Lewes

In what Mark Perryman on Labour Hub calls "a sorry tale of hypocrisy and snitching", two members of Labour's constituency party in Lewes have been expelled for advocating a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats there in last year's general election. 

The Lewes seat, which was held by Norman Baker between 1997 and 2015, was recaptured from the Tories last year by James MacCleary.

Perryman calls it hypocrisy because:

Labour publicly identified Lewes as a ‘non battleground’ seat .... The candidate and his team were instructed to minimise campaigning; instead they were sent to seats where Labour could win. Which party precisely did they think this would benefit?

And the snitching?

The 2024 tactical voting campaign in Lewes was organised by the local Lewes Compass Group. Compass nationally, despite, its very public support for tactical voting, is not a Labour Party-proscribed organisation. 

It is cross-party, yet at its core are a whole host of Labour members, including councillors. At least three Cabinet members I can think of have spoken on Compass platforms.

The local campaign went beyond what is permitted under Labour rules. I have never displayed a poster advocating a vote for any party other than Labour ....

But not everyone is as tuned in to navigating the Labour rule book as me.  Our ‘snitch’ didn’t  have the good sense to give a friendly piece of advice to his or her fellow members that they were breaking Party rules. Instead they were busy compiling their evidence to secure expulsions.

Nobody has ever owned up to this cowardly behaviour, so in our local Labour Party we have a snitch entirely unwilling to justify their actions politically. 

Labour List also has the story - apparently Clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour Party Rule Book is the one you have to watch out for.

I voted Labour in Harborough, Oadby and Wigston last year. That was partly from a slim hope that they might defeat our very online and increasingly radicalised Conservative MP.

But it was more from a feeling that it was hypocritical of me to be so keen that Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats in places like Lewes if I wasn't prepared to reciprocate myself.

Tory MP Neil O'Brien praises J.D. Vance's speech

I thought Vance's spech was good - a provocative but thought-provoking prod for us in Europe - 'what are you trying to defend'? https://t.co/fGAXgDR3DE

— Neil O'Brien (@NeilDotObrien) February 15, 2025

Neil O'Brien is my MP - the Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston. On Saturday he shared his thoughts on J.D. Vance's speech in Munich.

I could construct an argument that he has to talk like this to hang on to his shadow ministerial (not shadow cabinet) post. He was at one time close to Kemi Badenoch, but backed Robert Jenrick in last years's Tory leadership contest, and she does not strike me as one to forget a slight in a hurry.

But I'm more inclined to conclude that he now believes this stuff. How the Conservative Party has fallen.

It's quite hard to find the full text of the speech, but RealClear Politics has it.

Max Wilkinson and Roz Savage come second and third in ballot for private members' bills

Congratulations to the Liberal Democrat MPs Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) and Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) who finished second and third in this session's ballot for private members' bills. With such high placings, they do have a realistic chance to getting a bill through parliament.

Further down the list, you will also find Danny Chambers (Winchester) in 17th place and Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) in 19th.

The 20 places in the ballot were filled by 15 Labour MPs, these 4 Liberal Democrats and 1 Traditional Unionist Voice. Remarkably, no Conservatives were drawn out of the hat.

My Tory MP, who once put up a creditable fight against the anti-Covid-vaccination nutters, seems to have taken this badly.

I may well be about to embarass myself here - so please do put me right - but if we assumed all 121 Conservative MPs put in, and exclude Sinn Fein and government ministers, then isn't the probability of no Conservatives in the top 20 for the PMB ballot less than 1% ? https://t.co/jLo47WhHBJ

— Neil O'Brien (@NeilDotObrien) September 5, 2024

Harborough Tories phone a Lib Dem councillor to ask him to help put up their posters

Red faces at Neil O'Brien's campaign headquarters this week...

Someone from Neil O’Brien’s office called me up the other day to ask if I’d be willing to help them put posters up. Even she saw the funny side of it when I told her I was a Harborough Lib Dem Councillor! https://t.co/hmBxe3ubuP

— Cllr Buddy Anderson (@buddyandersonuk) June 16, 2024

It sounds as though the Conservatives' local campaign is going every bit as well as their national one.

Right-wing Tories want to see fewer British students too

Conservatives who want to see fewer foreign students won't be put off by telling them this could put some universities out of business, because they want to see fewer British students too.

Robert Jenrick has been making the running on the Tory right's agitation against foreign students, and his new sidekick is my own MP, Neil O'Brien.

So let's turn to an article O'Brien wrote for Conservative Home in 2020:

The most recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis found that, viewed from the point of view of the student, their degree isn’t worth it for around 10 per cent of women, and a quarter of men. This is extraordinary, given they are receiving big taxpayer subsidies. 

Viewed from the point of view of the taxpayer, the taxpayer makes “a loss on the degrees of around 40 per cent of men and half of women.” Summing together the effect for society as a whole (the gains to students and taxpayers) “total returns will be negative for around 30 per cent of both men and women.”  In other words, nearly a third of students degrees are not worth it economically. 

The variation by degree and institution is even more dramatic. The taxpayer makes huge losses subsidising creative arts courses – only four and a half percent represent a positive investment. 

Only 30 per cent of English students earn enough to justify taxpayers’ investment. The taxpayer makes a loss on the majority of students in sociology, psychology, communications, and languages. Many would be better off doing something else.

And there's more:

For a country like Britain, deep in debt, lofty thoughts are not enough to justify such huge numbers of students doing things that don’t help them economically, given that’s what many themselves want. 

O'Brien goes on to call for more money for technical education. Tories have been doing this for as long as I can remember - it's an excellent idea for other people's children.

So bear this in mind when you hear right-wing Tories shrugging off the threat their ideas pose to British universities: it's an added attraction for them.

The British right is increasingly attracted to the idea of forced labour

Isabel Oakeshott published an article in the Telegraph this morning under the headline:

Get benefits claimants back to work - cleaning our filthy streets

That article is behind the paper's paywall, but Vox Political has a few quotes. If they give a fair representation of the piece, it is designed to evoke disgust, not just of dirty streets, but of the people who live in them.

But Oakeshott's partner Richard Tice was in no doubt of its quality, retweeting it with the words:

Let’s make Welfare work…..

Let’s get Benefits claimant’s cleaning Britain….

Let’s ignore the howls of woke lefties….

And his deputy as leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, chimed in:

Absolutely right Richard. 

The human condition requires work to be settled. It is good for the people and good for the country.

I like clean streets too, but I like them to be cleaned by people who are paid a good wage for doing the work and who belong to trade unions.

But this hankering after an army of unpaid workers is creeping in on the right of British politics.

When I saw tweets about Oakeshott's article, I was reminded of a an article by my own MP.

Blogging is what Neil O'Brien seems to do most of the time these days, which pleases me as a fellow exponent of a dying art. But this was not on his own Substack but Conservative Home.

And there he wrote:

In the 1990s, the visionary New York police chief, Bill Bratton, put Broken Windows policing into effect, and crushed crime. It has two elements: creating orderly places, and making sure lower level crimes get swift and certain punishment.

To create orderly places, community payback offenders shouldn’t simply beput (sic) into charity shops. Instead, they should be helping deliver a massive national drive to reduce graffiti and tidy town centres.

So there's another reserve army that can clean up Britain while undercutting council workers: prisoners.

What will be suggested next? Making this free labour available to private companies? That's what already happens in the vast US prison system - see this article from the American Civil Liberties Union.

And you could read Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie, which long ago alerted me to look for this trend. It's one we should all fear.

Lib Dem South Cambridgeshire sticks to its guns on four-day working week trial

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Congratulations to Bridget Smith, the Liberal Democrat leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, for standing up to the government over the authority's trial of a four-day working week.

BBC News reports that last week the local government minister Lee Rowley

wrote to the district council calling for the trial to stop and expressed concern about its impact on local taxpayers.

He said the council's approach could breach its legal duties under the Local Government Act, and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities would "shortly be issuing clear guidance".

But the council is not stopping the trial but extending it. In September he crews of its refuse vehicles will be able to join the trial.

Bridget Smith told BBC News:

"This is a trial, but we have already seen strong independently assessed evidence which showed that performance was maintained, and in some cases improved, in the first three months.

"As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that recruitment has been positively affected, both in terms of the quality and number of applicants, and the consequent success in filling vacant posts."

Rowley's intervention fits a pattern of Conservative ministers trying to cause problems for local Lib Dem councils rather than working with them - see Neil O'Brien's attitude towards Oadby and Wigston.

And it fits the pattern of Conservatives opposing anything they think involves being 'soft' on council workers, even when there are clear benefits to the authority or the public. 

When I was a Harborough councillor we brought in flexitime, which was opposed by most Conservative members even though it enabled us to open the council offices at lunchtime.

I'm also pleased to see ideas like the four-day week and basic income tried out, because politics offers so little hope of a better world these days. A little bit of utopianism does us no harm.

The wife of Tory health minister and MP for Harborough Neil O'Brien works for a private firm awarded NHS contracts

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From the Mirror website this evening:

The wife of a Tory health minister works for a private firm that has been handed NHS contracts, it has been revealed.

Neil O’Brien’s spouse is GP engagement lead for Circle Health Group, which operates taxpayer-funded services.

Circle Health was the first private firm to take over an NHS hospital.

It has 54 private hospitals across the UK and advertises that NHS patients can request to have their operations at its sites.

"NHS England Patients can be treated at Circle Health Group offering specialised hospitals with experienced consultant surgeons," it states on its website.

"If you choose to have your NHS treatment at one of our hospitals in England, all the costs will be covered by the NHS."

The Mirror says the Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment on its report.

Harborough's Neil O'Brien stars in the Guardian's Commons sketch

This morning Labour's Angela Rayner asked an urgent question to the minister for the cabinet office on the procurement of personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic.

But it wasn't that minister who came to the Commons to answer it: it was a junior minister from the Department of Health and Social Care, Harborough's own Neil O'Brien.

Why he got the gig I don't know, but John Crace in the Guardian suggests:

His schoolboy error had been to answer his phone.

And boy does Crace have fun with him:

So it was a queasy-looking O’Brien who turned up for the UQ. A man who looked as if he had spent the previous couple of hours throwing up rather than trying to prepare some answers.

Having watched his performance on Commons TV (it starts at 10:37:16) I can confirm that this is unfair, but only a little. O'Brien is not an commanding  performer at the despatch box.

And the government's performance on procuring PPI isn't impressive either. If it had cut corners to secure supply from established providers of PPE, that would have been entirely understandable. 

But contracts were given to people with no record in the field, some of them with worrying political connections, and much of what it bought turned out to be unusable.

There are many questions to be answered here and O'Brien gave convincing ones to few of them.

My MP wants to turn Britain into "the grammar school of the world"

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I think I've found the most Tory tweet ever sent.

And it was sent by my MP - Neil O'Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough - as part of a thread promoting an article calling for large cuts in immigration he has written for Conservative Home.

His argument is that the government must do this because voters thought that's what they had voted for in the European Union referendum.

We should keep our promises to voters and reduce migration. It can be done - but requires sustained focus.

Britain should aim to be the grammar school of the world, maximising upsides and lowering downsides by admitting a very small number of highly skilled people. (12/13)

— Neil O'Brien MP (@NeilDotObrien) August 15, 2022

Well, some did, but the arguments used to win the referendum were so varied and so contradictory that it's impossible to satisfy everyone who voted Leave.

O'Brien, for instance, is concerned that immigration from the EU had been replaced by immigration from further afield.

But this is what many people arguing for Leave said they wanted. I can remember being told that it was racist to favour immigrants from the EU.

Bangladeshi restaurant owners were targeted by the Leave side and told that if Britain voted Leave then they would find it easier to obtain visas for chefs trained in Bangladesh.

I'll leave others to debate the racial politics of O'Brien's article. What interests me most here is the assumption that the world's brightest and best will want to come to his global grammar school.

People who can choose where they work will go for countries where their rights are protected, where the legal system is independent from the government and where the rivers are not full of sewage.

I fear the brightest pupils will not choose a school with an old-fashioned curriculum, petty uniform regulations and overmighty prefects.

Prison contractors want to discharge effluent into Welland tributary

The latest news on proposed second prison outside Market Harborough... 

Wates Construction Ltd, who would be the contractors if the project goes ahead, have applied for permission to discharge a remarkable 8640 cubic metres of "trade effluent" per day into a tributary of the Welland.

If you want to know more it seems you have to contact the Environment Agency to "arrange to see the application documents". Why can't they be online?

That page also gives details on how to lodge an objection to the application.

Remember there is a public meeting to oppose the new "super prison" at the Jubilee Hall, Bowden Lane, Market Harborough, tomorrow at 6.45pm.

And here is Harborough's MP, newly freed from ministerial responsibility, raising the question in the Commons.

I'm glad he's done so, but prison sentences have been getting longer for years. Do we really need them to be longer still?

My question in The House this morning about the upcoming appeal, regarding a new prison next to HMP Gartree in #Harborough

For the reasons I've outlined in my question, this is not the right location and outside of the scope of development outlined within Harborough's Local Plan pic.twitter.com/e3M9iaJ4mo

— Neil O'Brien MP (@NeilDotObrien) July 14, 2022

Free school meals protest reaches Market Harborough

I was wandering the back streets of Market Harborough this afternoon when I came across this lone protest outside the Conservative Party's office.

Well done to whoever was responsible. 'Neil' is Neil O'Brien, the Tory MP for Harborough.

Remember, the Tory leader of Leicestershire has exploded the myth that the government gave councils money to fund free school meals over the Christmas holidays.

Should you wish to add a plate of your own, you will find the office in Nelson Street.

Later. The Harborough Mail reports that there was a protest on free school meals in the town centre, 30 people taking part. Among them was Phil Knowles, leader of Liberal Democrat group on the local council, and representatives of the Labour and Green Parties.