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 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

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"The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University." Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu ask why.

"Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border." Patrick Cockburn reviews For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride.

Kate Moore says we need more trees: "The sooner we plant trees – ideally in groups, as solitary trees are more vulnerable – and nurture them through the early years, the cooler we'll feel.  So, whether your garden is small or large, it’s time to plant trees to give you your own shaded, and naturally air-conditioned space."

Brett DeJager finds that school teachers are "worried about academic dishonesty but also about assessment, student reliance, critical thinking, misinformation and privacy. Those concerns point to a practical challenge schools now face: how to preserve meaningful evidence of learning when AI can produce polished academic work."

From psychiatric wonder drug, to CIA mind warfare to teenage menace. Grant McPhee looks at LSD use through its evolving coverage in British newspapers.

Jospehine Botting watches 21 Days, a film made just before Vivien Leigh took the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and as her affair with Laurence Olivier was blooming. It captures the pair falling in love and on the cusp of stardom, but its producer Alexander Korda thought it was not good enough to release.

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"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Al Carns portrays Labour politics as a form of ancestor worship

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Writing about Blue Labour in Liberator at the start of year, I suggested that:

Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

That makes him a modernist when set against Al Carns, judging by the defence minister's resignation statement in the Commons today.

Here's how Carns began:

As honourable members know, I came into politics for one reason. That was to enact change.

But to be able to work out where you’re going, we must realise where we have come from. The Labour party I joined is one that was chiselled out of the mines of the north-east. It was hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast. And it was forged in the factories of the industrial revolution.

Calloused hands, sore backs, people who did a hard day’s graft and asked for one thing in return – a government that has their back.

That’s the tradition I serve in this house, and it’s a tradition that shaped that decision I took last week.

Commercial shipbuilding had largely disappeared from Britain before Carns was born in 1980 – what remains is almost all in the defence sector. Brian Potter has mapped its demise:

Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90 per cent, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6 per cent to less than 1 per cent. 

British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatised yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01 per cent of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.

Potter's whole article is worth reading. It provides evidence for the view that many of Britain's economic problems stem from the fact that our managers aren't very good.

Returning to Carns's speech, coal mining in the North East of England reached its peak in 1923, with the last deep mine in the region closing in 2005. And the Industrial Revolution is generally reckoned to have begun in the middle of the 18th century.

If these are really Carns's politics, then they have nothing to do with Labour's voters and members or with the British working class today. That class, forced to exist on temporary work and zero-hours contracts, are the very people who would be hurt by his enthusiasm for yet more welfare cuts.

So when Carns went on to talk about modernising defence, you feared he was going to demand that eight Dreadnoughts be built or call for an improved flintlock for the infantry. 

In fact he had sensible things about the need to grasp how warfare is changing, which means we can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't believe the first part of his statement either. 

But he's not the only Labour politician who, when asked to explain it, makes their attachment to the party sound like a form of ancestor worship.

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James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."

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A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism – created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson – has been driving White Lives Matter propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"In a decisive summer for government, you can view the 'doubling' agenda as microcosm of the wider story. Some big decisions have been made and some vital groundwork put in place. Ministers now need to build on this with bolder, faster action if the impact is to be visible by the next election." James Wright on the government's commitment to doubling the size of the co-operative and mutual sector.

Alex Marshall is keeping an eye on the new Green administration in Waltham Forest.

Eli Davies questions a culinary shibboleth: "The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour."

"The police are on the trail throughout. Led by a grimly invigilating inspector they seem an odd bunch, varying from the para-military – pistols and rifles firmly clasped – to the quaintly Victorian, with constables wrapped in immense belted gaberdines and sporting cloche style helmets. A reminder, if any were needed, that Northern Ireland was a decidedly different part of the UK." Simon Matthews celebrates Carol Reed's 1947 film Odd Man Out.

Chris Dyson explores the streets and alleyways of Hull's historic Old Town.

Northern Ireland debates the future of its railways in 1957

From YouTube:

The first documentary produced by the BBC Film Unit in Northern Ireland looks at the problems the railways are facing in NI. Can anything be done to arrest the decline of the permanent way in the face of rising competition from road traffic? Indeed, should anything be done?

Something was done: they were largely closed down, particularly in Nationalist areas. 

The Shortest History of Ireland by James Hawes

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

The Shortest History of Ireland

James Hawes

Old Street, 2026, £15

Teachers tried to tell you many things when you weren’t listening properly, but here’s some history they really didn’t teach you at school. James Hawes tells the story of Ireland from the earliest times to the present day in a way that is constantly surprising and enlightening. I shall first urge you to read this book and then share a few of its most startling insights.

One of the keys to understanding Ireland is that it was never part of the Roman Empire and was thus spared the dislocation that the rest of Europe suffered when that empire fell. Christianity came to Ireland, but it was assimilated into what was in many ways a highly developed Iron Age civilisation. So in the early Medieval period, when Ireland’s population was half of England’s, not the tenth it is today, Irish scholars were prized across Europe, but their independent ways increasingly met with disapproval from thde church authorities in Rome.

The first colonisers of Ireland were not English but French. The Normans who took land there had not troubled to learn English to speak to the serfs they brought with them, but they did learn Gaelic so they could talk to their neighbours. The result was that those Normans soon adopted Irish customs, while the serfs saw many attractions in deserting their positions and becoming Irish. This consistent tendency of settlers to turn Irish frustrated the English Crown’s ambitions: when England finally turned a serious imperialist gaze on Ireland in 1546, the only part of the country it controlled was Dublin. Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee, incidentally, emerges as the first person to have talked of a British empire.

We English tend to see Ireland as sectarian, but the truth is that we exported it there. It was Protestant England that was sectarian, and it saw people who turned Irish as traitors. It was this attitude that explained the massacre of the garrison at Drogheda, and there were plenty of more extreme figures back at Westminster cheering Cromwell on. This was an England, as Hawes reminds us, that did not care that neither William III nor George I could speak English. The only thing that mattered was that they were not Catholic.

In the 19th century Britain spent a fortune trying to turn Ireland into a landscape of small Protestant farmers. The ruins of unwanted Anglican churches across Ireland are a reminder of this doomed project, while the payments to these uneconomically small arable farms. in what had historically been cattle country, were a heavy burden on independent Ireland until it joined the European Economic Community and its Common Agricultural Policy in 1971.

Finally, Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin. Hawes likens de Valera, with his control of the press and closeness to the church, to one of the authoritarian leaders who flourish in Eastern Europe today.

And the book ends on an optimistic note: not even Brexit has slowed the economic and social forces making an eventual reunification look increasingly likely.

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.

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Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.

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"Opinion polls consistently suggest that after the elections on 7 May, England will be flanked by countries run by restless centre-left nationalist parties – Plaid Cymru in Cardiff, the Scottish National party in Edinburgh and, in Belfast, Sinn Féin, which shares power with the Democratic Unionists." Severin Carrell and Bethan McKernan say next week's elections could reshape UK.

"Real names becomes a tool for bullies online – and will force victims either to accept the bullying or avoid using the internet. This, of course, is not just true for bullies, but for overbearing parents, sadistic teachers and much worse. It is really important not to just think about good parents and protective teachers. For the vulnerable children, parents and teachers can be exactly the people they need to avoid." Paul Bernal argues that children need anonymity and encryption online. 

Catherine Heseltine asks if we can build crisis care outside the mental health system: "Being violently locked away and forcibly drugged made my mental health crisis many times worse – an experience shared by far too many people who have been subjected to standard NHS crisis 'care'.  Yet the mental health system seems to resist change like a train with no brakes."

Emma Peplow, with the help of the History of Parliament blog's oral history archive reminds us that Hannah Spencer is not the first new MP to remark on Westminster's drinking culture disapprovingly.

"Football Focus lasted almost two decades after its mothership Grandstand finally came off the air in 2007. The falling number of top flight 3pm kick offs certainly didn’t help though, and that trend might in time make it harder for even Final Score to endure, too." Richard Jones discusses what the BBC's axeing of Football Focus tells us about trends in sports broadcasting.

Londonist takes us to North Korea's London embassy, which stands just off the North Circular in Ealing

James Hawes talks about his book The Shortest History of Ireland

On Monday I went to the launch of James Hawes's new book The Shortest History of Ireland. I'm very glad I did, because Hawes gave a lecture on Irish history that taught me an enormous amount. So I'm happy to recommend his book even before I've read it.

You can hear much of what he said in an interview he gave to Oliver Callan on RTE Radio 1. It really is worth a listen

Early on he reveals that at one time the BBC was keen to adapt his novel Speak for England. It's a great shame for Hawes that they didn't, because he would now be feted as The Man Who Foresaw Brexit.

And it's a shame for us, because it would have offered an alternative version of Lord of the Flies. A version in which the prefects and housemasters survive and maintain their authority, and in which, after the boys are rescued, the headmaster returns to Britain and takes over the country.

A German bombing raid on Dublin in May 1941 killed 28 people

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Here's bit of history I didn't know. The caption for this photograph on Getty Images says:

Emergency services at work in a bomb damaged street in Dublin, Ireland, the day after a German air raid, which killed 34 people, 1st June 1941. The cause of the raid on neutral Ireland remains unclear. 

Wikipedia – it's strange how the advent of AI has changed that site from a near embarrassment to the last online redoubt of human judgement – explains what happened:

In the early morning hours of 31 May 1941, four German bombs fell on north Dublin. That night, a large number of German aircraft were spotted by Irish military observers and searchlights were put up to track them. It was noted that the aeroplanes were not flying in formation but independently in a meandering manner and some appeared to be circling. 

After the German planes did not clear the airspace over Dublin and continued erratically flying over the city, the Irish Army fired warning flares, starting with three flares representing the colours of the Irish flag to inform the pilots they were over neutral territory. followed by several red flares warning them to leave or be fired on. 

After fifteen minutes had passed, the order was given to open fire and Irish anti-aircraft guns began firing at the bombers. Local air defences were weak and the gunners were poorly trained. Although they had shells capable of destroying bomber aircraft, they failed to hit their targets.

Eventually, some of the German planes dropped their bombs. The first three caused many injuries but no fatalities:

The fourth and final bomb, dropped about half an hour later, fell in North Strand, killing 28 people, destroying 17 houses and severely damaging about 50 others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. Ninety people were injured, approximately 300 houses were destroyed or damaged and about 400 people were left homeless.

An article on the Maynooth University site agrees with the figure of 28 fatalities, so I have used that in my headline.

Though some saw the bombing as a warning to Ireland to remain neutral in the war, the most likely explanation is that the bomber crews thought they were bombing Belfast. There were also the inevitable conspiracy theories that Churchill had somehow caused Dublin to be targeted to save British cities from being attacked. Uniquely, in this case Churchill seems to have been their source himself:

After the war Winston Churchill said that "the bombing of Dublin on the night of 30 May 1941, may well have been an unforeseen and unintended result of our interference with 'Y'". He was speaking of the Battle of the Beams, wherein "Y" referred to the direction finding radio signals that the Luftwaffe used to guide their bombers to their targets. 

The technology was not sufficiently developed by mid-1941 to have deflected planes from one target to another and could only limit the ability of bombers to receive the signals.

You can learn more about this "Battle of the Beams" from the links in my recent post on the secret RAF base at Charley in Leicestershire.

Ed Davey flattens Nigel Farage on human rights

On 29 October last year, Nigel Farage put forward his European Convention on Human Rights (Withdrawal) Bill. You can read his speech in Hansard.

This, in full, was Ed Davey's reply:

The speech we just heard totally misrepresents the European convention, and the failure of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) to mention the huge benefits and rights that the European convention has brought to millions of British people says it all. Let me give those attracted by the argument we have just heard one strong reason to think again. Russia under Vladimir Putin is the only country to have withdrawn from the European convention on human rights. Maybe that is what attracts the hon. Member—after all, he said that Putin is the world leader he most admires.

Russia: a country where those who oppose the regime are mysteriously pushed off balconies, and where, if it is not enough to murder a political opponent like Alexei Navalny, Putin has even jailed lawyers who dared to represent him—things not allowed under the European convention. As we have seen Nathan Gill, a leading political ally of the hon. Member for Clacton, imprisoned for taking Russian bribes, perhaps we should not be surprised that the Reform party is so keen to follow Russia.

Besides Russia, where else are people’s hard-fought-for rights under attack? Trump’s America. Of course, the US is not part of the European convention, yet its citizens have benefited from something similar: the US constitution, which was designed to check the power of tyrants and protect the individual from the state. Just as the hon. Member for Clacton desires to remove people’s rights here, his hero Donald Trump is doing the same in America, attacking the courts and the rule of law, and even inciting a violent mob against the US Congress to overturn an election. But of course, the hon. Member has called President Trump “an inspiration”. If we want to know the hon. Member’s intentions for British people’s basic rights and freedoms, we only need to look at Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America. That is not patriotic. It is deeply un-British, and he should be ashamed.

Unlike the hon. Member for Clacton, I am proud of our country; I love our country. I am proud that Britain helped to create the European convention on human rights, championed by Winston Churchill himself. The convention protects the very people who need it most: our elderly and most vulnerable, so that they may live and grow old with dignity; and our children, so that those facing horrific abuse have better protection. It also upholds our freedom of speech so that the press and public can criticise those in power without fear, and it protects our right to peaceful protest.

Seventy years ago, Britain became the first country to ratify the convention, as a leading voice on the global stage for human rights and the rule of law. That is our history. That is who we are. That is Britain at our best. Yet the hon. Member for Clacton wants us to forget our history, dump British values, undermine the rule of law and row back on people’s hard-won rights. I say no.

To help get across how wrong the hon. Member, the Reform party and the Conservatives are on this, let me give some examples. When people died because of poor care at Stafford hospital, their families secured change—because of these laws. When British troops died in Iraq because of poor equipment, the Supreme Court ruled that the Government were accountable—because of these laws. After 96 people were killed in the Hillsborough disaster and the victims themselves were blamed, their families finally got to the truth—because of these laws. When the Metropolitan police failed to properly investigate the horrific assaults of John Worboys, his victims were able to take the police to court—because of these laws.

Time and again, the European convention and its British twin, the Human Rights Act, have brought justice for our people, and protected them from gross misconduct and unfair treatment. These laws help individuals hold the powerful to account—to hold Governments to account. These laws can get justice when the elite and powerful cover up and abuse their power. So it is clear, is it not, that the hon. Member for Clacton is not about standing up for the individual—for the ordinary person, for the people with no voice—but that he is the friend of the elite and the powerful?

If we do not defend our human rights here at home, how can we possibly persuade other countries of the importance of human rights for their own people? If we do what Reform wants, the biggest cheers will come from the Kremlin, from Beijing, from Tehran, from Pyongyang, and from dictators and authoritarian regimes the world over. That would be a betrayal of everything our country stands for. The hon. Member’s plan would damage our country’s ability to shape our world.

Leaving the convention would be another nail in the coffin of Britain’s unique soft power. We have so often influenced world events for the better by being part of international agreements, by upholding international law and by leading. Of course, the hon. Member for Clacton has made his career by damaging our country and our influence. Remember how he led the campaign for Brexit with his Conservative friends? We know what a total mess that has turned out to be. He and his friends argued that Brexit would cut immigration, but immigration has gone up. Just look at how badly he has betrayed the people he claims to speak for. Brexit made the small boats crisis possible.

Before Brexit, we effectively had a returns agreement with every EU country: the Dublin system—a deterrent that worked. Now, undocumented migrants are trying to reach the UK because they know they cannot be returned. Thanks to the hon. Member, his Brexit ripped up Britain’s rights to return people with no right to be here and people who should have claimed asylum elsewhere in Europe. [Interruption.] Conservative Members may shout—they caused it!

Let us look at one of our closest allies, the Republic of Ireland, and a vital part of our country, Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement references the European convention seven times. The guarantee of basic rights and freedoms in the convention was fundamental to securing the Good Friday agreement, to ending the conflict, to stopping the bombs and to getting peace, yet the hon. Member for Clacton stands here today prepared to risk peace in our country—how utterly shameful.

As we approach Remembrance Sunday, let us never forget the sacrifices made for our freedoms today, and let us never forget the lessons that that greatest generation of British people learned and passed on to us— Interruption.] I think the veterans will notice this barracking. Our greatest generation showed us that we needed these laws to protect people from state abuse, to stop authoritarian Governments and tyrants, and to defend people’s rights. The post-war generation knew how costly far right-wing populism had been for our country and our people, so for our greatest generation, for British people today and for our democracy, I urge Members to vote against this Bill.

If the Liberal Democrats could talk about the economy with the same clarity and passion we display when talking about foreign policy and civil liberties, we would sweep the country.

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Dominic Bryan, who has researched the politics of flags in Northern Ireland for decades, sets out what England needs to understand: "We’ve heard predictable claims that the flags are just a display of pride in a British or English identity. This is an easy claim to make as it clearly is, in part, to do with nationalistic pride. The point is that they are being hung in particular places, by particular groups of people and in a particular way that clearly links them to the ongoing debates and hostility to migration."

"Not only have reports of McSweeney’s political genius become as rare as hen’s teeth, but many Labour MPs are coming to the realisation that any recovery for this Government is now wholly dependent on his removal from Number 10." Adam Bienkov on Morgan McSweeney's reverse Midas touch.

Natalie Bennett makes the case for a national play strategy for England: "The sell-off of playing fields and closure of swimming pools is well-documented, but less noticed is the way in which informal play spaces and child-friendly public spaces are often overlooked or treated as expendable; many communities just don’t have accessible, safe places for play." 

"In 1995, after a local school had been destroyed in an arson attack, the MP Roy Hattersley (a former chair of Sheffield’s Housing Committee in the sixties) dubbed the Manor Estate 'the worst estate in Britain' – quite a comedown for an estate which had once been one of Sheffield’s showpieces. The truth, as ever, was more complex but the reality of decline on the now troubled estate was undeniable." Some fascinating social history from Municipal Dreams.

"Sid isn’t simply passable in these films from the 40s – he’s already very, very good. Critic Barry Norman summed up what made him so convincing. 'He never appeared to be acting,’ he noted. ‘And to act without appearing to be acting is an enormous skill.'" Hammer reminds us that Sid James was a tremendous actor long before the Carry On films claimed him.

Bobby Seal remembers Ron Chesterman, an original member of The Strawbs who later became county archivist for Cheshire.

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"What's happening in Gaza is a humanitarian and existential tragedy for the people living there, a moral and political disaster for Israel, the indirect, long-term result of past European barbarism and the subject of a damaging present European failure." Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European double standards and German cognitive dissonance.

Séamas O'Reilly reports from Ballymena: "To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as 'mindless, unacceptable and feral' and the actions of the rioters as 'a pogrom'. There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.

Hannah Al-Othman and Jessica Murray on increasing concerns over the quality of 'expert witness' evidence in British courts.

"I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978." Frieze interviews Adam Curtis about his new television series Shifty.

The car made pedestrians second-class citizens, and we shouldn't let driverless vehicles push us off the road altogether, says Adam Tranter.

Northolt Park Racecourse near Harrow was superbly equipped and the headquarters of pony racing in Britain, yet it had an active life of only 11 years. This local history site tells its story.

Llandow, 1950: The worst air disaster the world had seen

The national anthems at the Wales vs England rugby international in Cardiff today were preceded by a silence for the victims of the Llandow air disaster of 1950.

The disaster involved a plane - an Avro Tudor - that had been chartered to take Welsh fans to and from the Five Nations game against Ireland, which was played at the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast. The Avro crashed at Llandow aerodrome when attempting to land after its return flight.

Eighty people died in the crash - 75 rugby fans and all 5 of the crew. At the time it was the worst air disaster the world had seen.

An inquiry found that the probable cause of the accident was the loading of the aircraft, which had moved its centre of gravity considerably aft of where it should have been.

You can read more in the Wikipedia article on the Llandow Air Disaster. The photo above is taken from The Sphere, 18 March 1950.

Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

The McPeake Family: Will Ye Go Lassie Go

I came across the McPeake family through the obituary of Francis McPeake. He was its third generation of celebrated folk musicians, so was known as Francis III. His grandfather (Francis I) and father (Francis II) are playing the pipes here, and his uncle is one of the harpists.

The obituary gives some family history:

The first piping McPeake was Francis I, who learned to play from John O’Reilly, a blind piper. Francis I won competitions and in 1910 attended the Pan-Celtic Congress in Brussels. At this time, there were very few pipers in Ulster and Francis’s rarity was enhanced by his unprecedented practice of playing the pipes to accompany his singing of traditional songs.

Francis I taught his son, Francis II, to play the pipes, and in 1952, Peter Kennedy, working for the BBC, recorded the father and son playing and singing. This led to a performance at the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s annual festival at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1953 where they were enthusiastically received. Although the instrument was rare in Irish traditional music, the London visit prompted the acquisition of a harp, which was played by Francis II’s brother, James. The trio visited the World Youth festival in Moscow in 1957, followed by first-prize success at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod.

This recording dates from 1960. Will Ye Go Lassie Go was written from some scraps of traditional Scottish verse and music by Francis I as a tribute to his wife after she died. It has become a folk standard under the title Wild Mountain Thyme.

I love the harmonies here. The way they wash over you reminds me of the psalm singing on the Outer Hebrides.

And I'm sorry about the sound quality, but that's authenticity for you.

GUEST POST An essay in identifying Englishness

Stuart Whomsley attempts to do what the frontrunner for the Conservative leadership can't.

Robert Jenrick has recently stated that Englishness is under threat. However, he seemed unable to say what Englishness actually is. He knew the term had currency, but on enquiry he could offer no more. Like a patient trying to blag medication for an illness that they do not have because that medication can be sold on the streets. What are your symptoms? I have the symptoms of that illness. 

But what exactly are your symptoms? The illness symptoms. Jenrick, when asked, could not define Englishness; he looped around about a shared history and culture, but was unable to say what that was or to give any examples.

So I will try to help. How could I not try to help, with Jenrick being the Newark MP where I live? I could say my neighbour, but he does not seem to get here much, even before his leadership bid.

When you try to define Englishness there are problems. The territory of Englishness has been invaded by nationalists in recent years, people who have a fuzzy blur into racists and white supremacists. Therefore, this can make be a tricky topic to engage with; the brand has been sullied.

Another issue to consider is the question of Britishness compared to Englishness. Many of the features of what defines Englishness do cross over into what is Britishness. But there are differences. 

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are much smaller in terms of population, and though punching above their weight, have been the junior partners in the union, and some have felt a sense of subjugation by the English. Something the English themselves have never really felt. That is an English thing; no one will push the English around.

Englishness is about a language, that language, the English language, that has spread around the world and has been a bond between England and all the people around the globe who use it. People from England have also used the language well and we have a strong literary heritage in prose, poetry and song.

The people of England have been shaped by being an island nation, that there is bit of water around us kept us separate from the rest of the world. Maybe, this is one of the reasons why people arriving by small motes have hit a nerve with some people. The moat is being repeatedly breached. 

Being surrounded by water gave us oceans that we could utilise to take over, if briefly, large parts of the rest of the world. We are a nation of pirates, then colonialists. Not a heritage that we can be proud of without reservations. But after we went out and invaded the world some people have followed us back home, which has greatly enriched the nation, more than the Elgin marbles have.

We are a nation that has a proud history of democracy, even if sometimes we have been hypocritical about it, and even if it has been eroded in recent years, democracy is still a value that is dear to the English. 

I remember being on the march to stay part of the EU after the Referendum vote, a man who had been an accidental passer-by, stopped and went red in the face shouting at us that we needed to obey democracy, that a referendum had occurred, and we needed to abide by it.

The religious values of England are unsurprisingly, those of the Church of England. Which is basically Catholicism with the Pope and obedience to him removed - replaced for a while by the monarch, but then only the monarch nominally. It is also a religion without the guilt that seems to be bequeathed to every Catholic. In the Church of England there is nothing to be guilty about: you were born English, and so you are winning, chin up, chest out, sing a hymn.

England has been organised around the class system going back for centuries. It is very English to try and work out where someone else fits, because of how they talk, how they dress, and fitting them within the English sociological landscape. Not that I am a fan of this, but it is part of being English, with the monarch as the lid that keeps it all in place.

The monarch, even for Republicans, still has a central place in our national consciousness, that has long past for many previous monarch ruled countries. We divide our history up by them, we name our streets after them, we still sing about them being long to rule over us. This is very English.

England is a country with a super high density of historical places; you cannot drive very far from wherever you are without soon passing a marker of an historical figure or event. It might not be labelled, but when you stop and check it out, there will be historical treasure piled upon historical treasure. It is simply falling out of the hedgerows and ancient churches whichever way you turn at the next crossroads.

In terms of economics what could be more English than the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, which shaped the post war years? A very English pragmatic approach to economics that stands in the face of the more ideologically driven approaches of communism, monetarism or neoliberalism.

Englishness means being the inventor of rules for games. We might not have been the original inventors of the games themselves, but we were the ones who set to work drawing up rules of how the games are to be played, before teaching everyone else how to play them by our rules (very English), so that they can beat us at them. What can be more English than cricket?  A game that in its proper format, test cricket, is played over five days with meal breaks.

Pets, I have not mentioned pets. The English are a nation of animal lovers. This really got going under the Victorians. We went out into the wild and captured animals and turned them from being wild and free, to being our pets. So it is not all rosy, but we were at the front of animal welfare, and our love of pets, particularly our dogs, is a defining feature of Englishness. This is one of the British owned features too.

The people I know, directly or indirectly, whose parents were migrants seem to have picked up what it means to be English, no problem. It is some kind of osmosis achieved by growing up here, no matter where your family come from you are taking on Englishness, from the details of regional accents, to the bigger values stuff. They get it. They get what it means to be English. They too can fail at penalty shoot-outs. Did I mention the English sense of humour?

Ironically, and what could be more English than irony, the people who often make a big fuss about Englishness do not seem to be looking at England for their values base, but are instead looking at the USA and longing for us to be the 51st state, thus undermining Englishness.

So going forward, Englishness will continue to thrive, in part because of the people who migrated here in more recent times than the Angles, Saxons or Normans. They migrated here because they too wanted to be part of the English dream.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.