The Joy of Six 1537

David Howarth reminds us that both Tony Blair and Keir Starmer said pluralist things in opposition, only to go back on them in power: "Given that history, why should Liberals believe that Andy Burnham would be any different? He has already backtracked on his previous anti-Brexit pronouncements and his only promise on electoral reform is that he might include a 'pledge' on it in Labour’s next manifesto. We know what such 'pledges' from Labour are worth."

A deliberate strategy to push the British right – from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – into a radicalising auction over the mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens is being underwritten by the owner of 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"The party holds one seat in a chamber that has grown from 60 to 96 members, meaning their proportional presence is smaller now than at any point since devolution began." Elsie Jones asks why the Welsh Liberal Democrats underperformed in last month's Senedd elections.

Andy Bull looks back on Brendon McCullum's career in New Zealand: "All of which may, or may not, be a timely reminder that McCullum's dressing rooms have not always been the sort of free-and-easy open-to-all environments they seem to be when the team are winning. That, expert as he is handling his players, he is also a pretty ruthless dressing-room politician, a man who knows how to instruct a media team and even deploy his lawyers during a crisis."

Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn on popular music and on the gender sensibilities of The Smiths, Van Morrison and The Velvet Underground in particular. 

"I had never been so far below sea level, it was difficult to comprehend, the layers of rock, millions of years old above us." Neala shows that being an archives volunteer at Manchester Central Library is more exciting that you might expect.

The Joy of Six 1525

"Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. 'They are careless of the strife they cause,' he said. 'They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.'" Ian Dunt says John Major is a better former prime minister than Tony Blair will ever be.

Hannah Fearn argues that there is no sudden epidemic of laziness: "What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work."

Stefan Collini examines the roots of Britain's higher education crisis: "The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called 'producers' cartel' that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices."

"But when it comes to AI chatbots, the doctors have learned to proceed with caution. People may tolerate the idea of talking to a computer when booking a holiday or motor insurance but discussing something as personal as your health is quite a different matter." Rory Cellan-Jones on one GP surgery's mixed experience of introducing AI.

Gill Pain discusses what made Agatha Christie so successful: "There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them."

"In order to attract puffins to the island, they created 100, lifelike weather resistant decoy puffins and anchored them to the cliffs. To make the illusion as convincing as possible, the team also installed solar powered speakers to blast continuous puffin calls out to sea to catch the attention of passing juveniles." Eva Cahill reports an ingenious attempt to attract puffins back to an islet off the Isle of Man where they once thrived.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

Shabana Mahmood shares her vision of total state surveillance with the Tony Blair Institute

Embed from Getty Images

How did you celebrate Christmas? At the Tony Blair Institute they asked Shaban Mahmood along to their Christmas reception to share her dream of total state surveillance.

She talked of AI and technology having a transformative impact on "the whole of the law and order space", and told them:

"My ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times."

Bentham's Panopticon was a design for a prison with a circular layout that would allow wardens to observe every prisoner at all times. Though it was never built in Bentham's day, the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault saw the Panopticon as the model adopted schools, factories and police surveillance.

To Foucault, a key feature of the Bentham's design was the central tower from which a single warden could see all the inmates without their knowing when they were being watched. The result would be that the prisoners would internalise the warden's gaze, even if they were rarely or never watched.

It's hard, as a Liberal, not to conclude that Mahmood was saying the quite bit of Labourism out loud.

But let's leave the last word to Foucault's mum:

Foucault: Schools serve the same social function as prisons and mental institutions.

Foucault's mum: You're still going.

The Kinks: Autumn Almanac

Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.

Ray Davies once explained its genesis:

The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.

And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:

It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.

Thanks to PowerPop for these quotes.

The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.

So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.

Tony Blair's school was stolen from the poor children of Edinburgh

Tony Blair attended Fettes College in Edinburgh, which is often called "the Eton of Scotland". I've come across a footnote about the school's origins in Stiff Upper Lip by Tim Renton:

Sir William Fettes founded the college with a bequest of £14m (in 2017 money) for the "maintenance education and outfit" of orphans and to help people "who from innocent misfortune during their lives, are unable to give suitable education to their children". In 2012 only five of 750 children enrolled were paying no fees.

So it really is the Eton of Scotland. Eton College was founded by Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys.

This "grand theft of ancient buildings and endowments that had been specifically set up to educate the poor", as Renton puts it, was put beyond legal challenge by the Public Schools Act of 1868. With its encouragement, Fettes College opened in 1870.

The Joy of Six 1417

"Muscular patriotism of the flag waving variety marries rather well with aggressive nationalism - and we’re seeing quite a bit of that all over the world. Neither impulse allows for complexity instead it demands loyalty of the 'for us or against us' variety." Ritula Shah explains why the aggressive flag flying of recent weeks has bothered her so much.

Carole Cadwalladr investigates the opaque workings of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, its funding from friends of Israel – including billionaire Larry Ellison – and an emerging right-wing media takeover of the global information space.

Timothy Garton Ash talks to Catherine E. De Vries about writing, freedom and the lost art of disagreement.

"If the BBC had kept the Boat Race and paid more for the privilege, the Telegraph’s angle could well have been to talk about a waste of money on an event whose viewing figures have been in decline over the years. The key thing with any story about the BBC in the right-wing press is that the corporation must always be in the wrong." Mic Wright on the way the Boat Race's move to Channel 4 was used to attack the BBC.

In 1873, a choir of formerly enslaved African American students from the newly established Fisk University, Tennessee, embarked on a fundraising tour of the UK during which they sang for both Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone. The National Archives tells the story of the Jubilee Singers.

Madeleine Brettingham discusses her favourite situation comedy: "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is an early crack in the post-war sitcom’s floral wallpaper. The protagonist, Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, is a restless, self-directed twenty-first century man trying to break out of a claustrophobic twentieth-century show."

The Joy of Six 1407

"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

How Tony Blair won Runcorn for Reform UK

People vote all sorts of ways in parliamentary by-elections for all sorts of reasons. But when the candidate has a majority of only six votes, the temptation to find a single cause is overwhelming.

So let me try this theory on you: it was Tony Blair who won Runcorn and Helsby for Reform UK.

It was clear at once that the by-election was going to be a close contest between Labour and Reform UK. And, sure enough, analysis of the result shows that the Conservative vote largely went to Reform and the Liberal Democrat vote largely went to Labour. The party whose vote Labour couldn't squeeze was the Greens. 

Now what happened in the last couple of days of the campaign that could have made Green Party supporters unwilling to lend their votes to Labour?

Here's the Guardian from Tuesday of this week:

Tony Blair has called for the government to change course on climate, suggesting a strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is "doomed to fail".

In comments that have prompted a backlash within Labour, the former prime minister suggested the UK government should focus less on renewables and more on technological solutions such as carbon capture.

Blair said people were "being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal". He said "any strategy based on either 'phasing out' fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail".

If I were a committed Green I would have given up any idea of voting Labour after that.

h/t Dan Cole on Bluesky.

Tony Blair meets Phil Harding in 2003

One was a universally loved and admired figure: the other had been Pri...

You can see where this is going.

An interview with Carl Cashman, leader of the Lib Dem group on Liverpool City Council

Read on Substack

Follow the link to Substack to hear Aaron Ellis interviewing Carl Cashman, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Liverpool City Council and surely a rising star of the party.

The blurb for this interview with one of the party's rising stars runs:

Carl Cashman is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool. He does what Sir Ed Davey hopes to do nationally — be the official opposition to Labour.

Aaron and Carl discuss the actual differences between the two progressive parties, if the LibDems should give up ground on the centre-left in order to win over more disillusioned Conservatives, and whether or not the Coalition government should be “rehabilitated”.

They also talk about The Master — Tony Blair.

Aaron is chief strategist for a health technology company and describes strategy as "achieving your ambitions as stuff outside your control tries to stop you".

Or as Harold Macmillan might have put it: "Stuff, dear boy, stuff."

Thought for the Day: Lord Macaulay on coalitions

I've just been sorting out some old papers, including a folder of press cuttings that I obviously thought might come in useful one day for something I was writing. Today they would be Chrome bookmarks.

One cutting is what looks like a Guardian Diary item inspired by Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair's grand strategy. It includes this comment on the errors of Fox and Lord North from one of Lord Macaulay's essays on the younger Pitt:

They ought to have known that coalitions between parties which have long been hostile can succeed only when the wish for coalition pervades the lower ranks of both.

Discuss with relation to the Cameron-Clegg coalition of 2010-15.

Keir Starmer, Lord Alli and the good chap theory of government

Lord Hewart - see my review of Neil Hickman's book on him in the current Liberator - had little time for the argument that, because the Civil Service has such high standards, we shouldn't worry about civil servants being ungranted unexamined, quasi-judicial powers.

In a paper written for The Constitution Society in 2019, Andrew Blick and Peter Hennessy gave this attitude to government more generally a name:

In the UK, we have trusted politicians to behave themselves. We have long assumed that those who rise to high office will be 'good chaps', knowing what the unwritten rules are and wanting to adhere to them, even if doing so might frustrate the attainment of their policy objectives, party political goals, or personal ambitions – the argument being that 'good chaps' (of different sexes) know where the undrawn lines are and come nowhere near to crossing them: hence ‘the good chap theory of government.’

I thought of this theory when I saw the defences of Keir Starmer decision to put himself in Lord Alli's debt that Labour supporters mounted on Twitter this morning. They boiled down to the claim that we needn't worry about it because Alli is a good chap - all he wanted in return for his donations was the election of a Labour government.

This may well be true, but another maxim that developed out of the rulings of Lord Hewart is that justice must not only be done: it must be seen to be done. In this case I think that means that though we may accept that Starmer has done no favours for Lord Alli, he still should not have put himself in this position.

My chief feeling about this affair is one of surprise that Labour had not seen that it might damage them - Private Eye noticed some time ago that Starmer has a fondness for freebies. Similarly, though it has been inflated by the media, I don't know what else Labour thinks it has given them to talk about since coming power. They seem to have gone from obsessive media management under Blair and Alastair Campbell to giving up any attempt at it.

And, yes, the Tories were far worse, but I've already argued here that whataboutery won't get Labour out of trouble here. I suggest Labour examines the idea of putting a frugal limit on how much an individual can donate to a political party. Until last week at least, many of their supporters seemed keen on it.

The Joy of Six 1269

"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

GUEST POST An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough?

The threatened reunion of the Oasis brothers is a stark warning of the potential breakout of Britpop across the entire UK region, warns Stuart Whomsley.

Last year’s reunion of the Blurists should have been a warning. The so-called Pulp group (PG) have been rumoured to be in a studio creating new material.

A Labour government’s election this year has also been seen as a catalyst for this worrying development. The previous Labour inhabitant of Number 10, Tony Blur, was an advocate of the Cool Britannia movement.

After 14 years of Tory rule that brought us UK Grime and Drill, a new Labour government could see a return to more troubling times, with its leader Kagool Starmer a self-confessed follower of Britpop bands.

Now the whole of the UK wakes each day in fear of a resumption of Beatles and Status Quo influenced musical pap being bombarded at us on a daily basis.

Those who were unfortunately alive in the Nineties have issued warnings to those born this century not to be drawn into this cultist movement through speculation of what a Wonderwall or a Champagne Supernova might be.

Propagandists for Britpop, Steve Lamaque and Stuart Maconie, have already been on the airwaves, making ominous predictions. These are truly worrying times, when one can indeed look back in anger.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

The Joy of Six 1247

"The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteering, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious intraparty debate to minimize the chance of a second Trump term, they’ll have broken faith with their supporters." Jonathan Chait says the Democrats will be making a terrible mistake if they stick with Jo Biden.

Paul Bernal warns against heeding Tony Blair's call for the introduction of digital ID cards.

"Doing the right thing economically ... meant Labour opened the door to the Conservatives who enthusiastically exploited popular frustration with austerity - as articulated in the famous 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. This allowed the party to appeal especially to middle-class voters who had supported Labour for the first time in 1945." Steven Fielding warns Labour against repeating the mistake made by Clement Attlee.

Humanists UK provides a history of non-religious prime ministers and other politicians.

"As she sings in Backwoods Barbie (2008), 'Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book.' When fans dig into Parton’s songs, books, films, and autobiography, they uncover an egalitarian vision of social cooperation." William Irwin examines Dolly Parton's philosophy.

Katya Witney thinks England chose the right time to retire James Anderson: "In the last Ashes series in Australia, Anderson took eight wickets in the three Test matches he played. He hasn’t played more than three Tests in an Ashes since the 2017/18 series, a calf injury limiting his participation in 2019 and being less effective than Mark Wood and Chris Woakes keeping him out of the XI last summer."

GUEST POST A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit

Peter Chambers argues that Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford provides a model that explains why Leave was able to win the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George Box, statistician 

Brexitland describes political processes leading up to the Brexit referendum of 2016 and since. Unlike most Brexit books, it is not a journalistic narrative. It is based on data from social surveys and  analysis done by the authors, so is rigorous. 

They propose a compact model of the changes in our society that led to Brexit, and explain why our political class missed what was going on. 

The authors are clear what they omit. Economics, class, right/left and authoritarian/liberal are all held to be secondary to the factors that drove the shock. 

The two proposed drivers are: 

• the rise of mass higher education;
• mass immigration, leading to significant minority populations 

To many of us who are politically involved today, it is difficult to imagine Britain in 1945. Then  Britain was approximately 0 per cent minority, rather Christian and 3 per cent degree education. Most people  left school at 15 and started work right away. Degrees were for clerics, professions and the upper classes. 

The most recent census shows 20 per cent minorities (and rising), while the official Higher Education  Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) is around 50 per cent. It was 35 per cent in 2010 and 15 per cent in the 1980s. 

The compact model in Brexitland is there are three broad viewpoints. Necessity identity liberals are the minorities who believe that majority should not discriminate against them (so 20 per cent of  voters). 

Conviction identity liberals are graduates and believe that discrimination is always wrong. They are modelled as the HEIPR fraction of the 80 per cent white voters. Other work has shown  that higher education is the best predictor of voting Remain. 

The third group is the identity conservatives, who are mostly non-graduates, older and non-metropolitan. They are ethnocentric - this is a belief that there is an in-group (us) and an out-group (them) - though this is not always about ethnic origin. 

Member of this group tend to disengage from mainstream politics. Their drive is to protect the in-group from perceived threats from the out-group. When scarcity looms, the in-group has first call on resources, with the out-group being served later. Inequality is seen as legitimate. 

The identity conservatives have been targeted by right-wing populists in the UK, as the AfD has done in Germany. There is value in persistent engagement with many ordinary  people, as our community politics work showed back when we used to practise that. It may be  worth reinvesting in participatory democracy. 

As time passes, the fraction of graduates in society tends to the 50 per cent that Tony Blair wanted and a service-based economy needs. This means that a modelled end-state is 20 per cent necessity identity  liberals, 40 per cent conviction identity liberals and 40 per cent identity conservatives. 

The tipping point between a majority of identity conservatives and identity liberals was reached in the 2010s. During that decade voting patterns were indeed a "50-50 deal": someone feels under siege. 

The linkage between ethnocentrism and the EU is partly an artefact of culture around the Conservative Party, and partly of the failure of attempts to reduce headline immigration rates because of Freedom of Movement. Indeed, unrestricted immigration from the "Accession 8" states  during the New Labour era caused the issue to become salient for a time. This was unintended. 

Once all this was in place, there was a narrow window when identity conservatives could be activated for a one-time campaign against Freedom of Movement and the European Union. 

Peter Chambers is a Lib Dem member from Hampshire.

Terry Venables and the summer of 1996

The first Chelsea game I can remember is the 1967 FA Cup Final, when we lost 2-1 to Spurs. Terry Venables, a former Chelsea favourite, was playing for our opponents.

Legend has it that he was in the habit of stopping the Chelsea team in the tunnel after the manager Tommy Docherty's team talk and countermand it with one of his own. Docherty tired of this, sold him and bought Charlie Cooke to be our playmaker instead.

But then his mother had told the Chelsea official who came to her house with a contract for the young Venables to sign that her boy would make a better manager than player, because he never stopped talking about the game.

Terry Venables' death has made me remember the summer of 1996. England's 4-1 group victory in the European team championship, which we hosted, is just about the finest performance by an England team that I have seen. Every time we attacked we looked like scoring.

England felt European that June. There were visiting supporters from 15 other countries (including Scotland), the sun shone and even we played sexy football.

Venables' charm was part of the attractive England package, and since he was forced out of the England job over his financial affairs - a Labour MP called Kate Hoey was among his most persistent critics - being an England fan has rarely felt as good

It's more evidence that as far as Britain was cool in the 1990s, it was cool under John Major rather than Tony Blair. Oh yes.

Rev., Tom Hollander and the shrinking market for Nick Clegg trivia

I went to put some flowers on my mother's grave this afternoon. When I got back I saw a tweet by Andrew Male about rewatching Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev. He said it has lasted well and even looks prescient:

I now realise how much it was a show about a changing Britain, one where humanity and generosity were gradually being replaced by something more cruel and corporate.

That made me think about how the series and I how I would watch it on DVD with my mother in the days when she was still well enough to come over to my house. 

Andrew Male says that, like Doctor Who, it's all on iPlayer at the moment.

Then a tweet arrived from a Senior Welsh Liberal Democrat Who Now Writes Political Thrillers, asking if I knew that Nick Clegg had been directed in a play by Sam Mendes. I didn't know it. 

Peter Black's tweet sent me to one by Marie Le Conte. which quoted a 2010 Guardian article about... Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev.

The vital passage says of Hollander:

At Cambridge, where he studied English, he took the title role in a memorable 1988 production of Cyrano de Bergerac that brought together an interesting array of talent. Sam Mendes, a childhood friend from Oxford, was the director, their pal Tom Piper was designer and Nick Clegg, then a frequent student actor, played Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, captain of the cadets.

The market for Nick Clegg trivia has been falling for years, yet I can remember when a blog post about his great great aunt was enough to get you a column with the New Statesman website.

And Tom Hollander's verdict on him has lasted as well as his sit com:

Hollander can't recall Clegg's student performances, but thinks he did well in this year's televised leadership debates. "I would say he's a better actor than Gordon Brown and a worse actor than Tony Blair."

But it was when Blair stopped acting, and everyone else despised him, that I came to have a grudging respect for him.

Now Labour retreats on a right to roam for England

With every month that passes, the prospect of a Keir Starmer government grows a little less enticing. The latest radical policy to be jettisoned is a right to roam in England along the lines of the one that has operated in Scotland for 20 years. This is reported - sorry, 'revealed' - by the Guardian today.

The paper quotes the former Labour shadow nature minister Alex Sobel speaking in the Commons earlier this year:

"Labour’s approach, like in Scotland, will be that Labour’s right to roam will offer access to high-quality green and blue space in the rest of Britain. We will replace the default of exclusion with a default of access.

"Research shows that people with a stronger connection to nature were more likely to behave positively towards the environment. It’s quite simple: the more people engage with nature, the more likely they are to protect it."

Now all that has gone in the face of opposition from the NFU and the Countryside Alliance.

It's telling how the latter, set up to defend the life of the countryside as a distinct form of culture in the diversity-loving Blair years, switched to a full-blown "Get off my land" manifesto the moment the Tories took power.

This story matters, and not just because greater public access to the country is an important issue - read The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes for more on this.

It matters because of what it tells us about what a Keir Starmer government would look like.

The really radical things that Tony Blair did were done in his early years as prime minister. The minimum wage. Assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff. Reform of the House of Lords.

If Starmer begins this timidly, what will he be like after four or five years at No. 10?