The Fourth Carnival on Modern Liberty

Courtesy of The Yorksher Gob.

Clapton and Winwood hit the road

The good news is that Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood are playing 14 more concerts in June of this year.

The bad news is that they are all in America.

Oh well, there is always Youtube.

Why is Chris Huhne acting as Jacqui Smith's human shield?

Chris Huhne was on the Today programme this morning, defending the government's decision to ban Geert Wilders from entering Britain. He has just been on Channel 4 news doing the same thing.

I think the government is wrong to ban him. You need only see Wilders' hairstyle to realise that he is a vain and silly man. The idea that his presence will be enough to incite violence against Muslims in Britain is ridiculous. Rather, the ban has given Wilders what he craves: publicity.

This argument was put very well on Channel 4 by Maajid Nawaz. I wish they had been put by the Liberal Democrat representative.

But even if you think Chris is right, you have to ask what he is doing working so hard to defend the government position. Let Jacqui Smith go on the radio and television to defend her actions and take the criticism. Don't act as her human shield.

The fact that Smith has been nowhere near the media today suggests she realises hers was a pretty shabby decision. So why is Chris making her life easier?

The Independent makes George Orwell move school

Simon Turnbull beings his piece on Scotland's team for Saturday confidently:

Thom and Max Evans were both schooled at Wellington College in Berkshire. So was Eric Arthur Blair, or George Orwell as he preferred to be known when he wrote "Down And Out In Paris And London".

Wrong. Orwell attended Eton.

I shall remember this next time a journalist moans about bloggers.

Later. I take it back slightly. According to Wikipedia, Orwell spent a single term at Wellington before going to Eton.

Market Harborough's place in Scottish rock history

Last month I wrote about what Dire Straits owed to Market Harborough. But according to an intriguing snippet on the Scotsman website, the town played a part in Scottish rock history too:

January 1963 ...

The Mark Five, featuring Manny Charlton who later plays in Nazareth, walk from Edinburgh to London, hitching a ride whenever photographers were not present. The walk is a publicity stunt to protest about the lack of record companies coming to Scotland to see Scottish bands, and a ploy to demand a record deal.

They are met in Market Harborough by a record company executive and offered a contract. The Mark Five release a version of the Isley Brothers' Tango but are soon dropped by the label.

There is a little more on the FAME website in a recent article about Nazareth.

Do Australian soap operas cause multiple sclerosis?

Sunday's Observer had an article suggesting that health campaigns to encourage people to avoid the sun , lest they get skin cancer, may be doing more harm than good.

Because exposure to sunlight produces vitamin D in the body, and deficiency in that vitamin has been linked with the development of diseases like diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer and tuberculosis. The newspaper also cited new research suggesting that a lack of vitamin D can play a part in the development of multiple sclerosis.

More than that, said the Observer:

In 2007, the Department of Health revealed that up to one in 100 children born to families from ethnic minorities now suffer from rickets, a condition triggered by lack of vitamin D in which children develop a pronounced bow-legged gait. The disease once blighted lives in Victorian Britain but was eradicated by improved diets. Now it is making a major resurgence, a problem that has been further exacerbated in ethnic communities by women wearing hijabs that cover all of their bodies and block out virtually every beam of vitamin-stimulating sunshine.

The newspaper went to to say:

A major health campaign, offering dietary advice and vitamin D supplements has since been launched. But for many doctors, it is not enough. The nation's health service needs to re-evaluate completely its approach to vitamin D as a matter of urgency; establish new guidelines for taking supplements; and scrap most of the limits on sunbathing currently proposed by health bodies.

I have always been puzzled at the speed with which concern about the sun and skin cancer swept enveloped Britain and was taken up by the Guardian-reading classes in particular. For most of the 20th century, the liberation of people - children in particular - from restrictive clothing and their exposure to the sun was seen as a thoroughly progressive cause. Just look at any propaganda for the National Health Service and the welfare state from the immediate post-War period.

Why did things change so quickly in the 1990s?

It is not as if skin cancer poses such an overwhelming threat that it can wholly explain the change. Back in 2005 Sam Shuster, Emeritus Professor of Dermatology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, wrote on Spiked:

To find an explanation for the rise of concern about exposure to the sun, we have to look elsewhere. That rise took place in that odd period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Rather than congratulate themselves in living in a happy age, people looked for something else to worry about - hence the emergence of strange scares like the satanic ritual abuse of children and the millennium bug. Maybe skin cancer was another one of those.

And we cannot ignore the rise of environmental concern - and in particular concern about man-made global warming - in the period. There was a widespread feeling that there was something wrong with the climate, and you heard people say that they "never used to burn like this". Hence people began to worry about exposure to the sun.

But maybe there is a clue in Professor Shuster's article. He writes:

The high incidence of skin cancer in Australia is the product of a high UV exposure in a population whose ancestors included many with pale, freckled skin and red hair. It should not be extrapolated to different populations living in sun-deprived climates.

And, of course, things Australian were all the rage in the Britain of the 1990s. Their cricket team was sweeping all before them. Australian bars were opening everywhere. And Neighbours and Home & Away were on our televisions.

If you doubt this, remember the rise of uptalk. This was the habit of raising their voices at the end of a sentence that many younger people acquired in the 1990s? It had the effect of turning every statement into a question?

One theory is that this habit entered Britain's youth via Australian soap opera. If that did happen, then there is no reason why an exaggerated concern about exposure to the sun should not have come along the same route. Certainly, this BBC Cornwall webpage makes use of the language of the Australian Slip-Sl0p-Slap campaign.

So maybe we should blame Kylie and Jason for some of our health problems?

Pennsylvania judges accused of locking up children for cash

Many years ago I reviewed the first edition of Nils Christie's book Crime Control as Industry for Liberator. As a review of the third edition by Peter Wagner says:

Crime Control as Industry ... tracks how an industry has arisen to manage crime. And like any industry, the crime control industry is not about to say on its own: "Stop, we have enough of the market. We don't need to grow."

Wagner goes on to summarise two more of Christie's important arguments:

First Christie argues that the applicable political economy to describe prisons is not slavery, but of the old work-houses, where the objective was not profit for the State, but for private parties to relieve the State of its unwanted population at the lowest cost possible. 

The second sharp observation is that justice itself has been mechanized to cope with the influx of raw materials and remove a democratic restraint upon growth. Mandatory minimums and the sentencing guidelines have served to remove discretion from judges, turning them into little more than secretaries for the legislature.

As the the profit motive has invaded the judicial system to such an extent, and judges have lost their status, we should not be surprised by stories like this one from the Associated Press:

For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses. 

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench. 

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

The London Olympics are the new Millennium Dome

Liberal Democrat Voice points us to an article in The Times which begins:

Taxpayers face a multimillion-pound maintenance bill at the Olympic Park after organisers admitted that they had failed to find a commercial operator to take over the main venue after 2012.

Amid growing concerns of a repeat of the £1billion Millennium Dome fiasco, The Times has learnt that the Olympic stadium will cost at least £800,000 a year to keep open.

Projected revenues from athletics events and a proposed sports academy will leave a big funding shortfall at the venue, where building costs have already spiralled from £282 million to £547 million. There are fears that the final bill could be much higher.

The Times goes on to quote Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrats' Olympics spokesman:

“Ministers have presented a vague wish list of legacy proposals rather than concrete plans. The lack of detail raises the fear we'll still be left with another Millennium Dome.”

I fear he is right. Back in May 1997 I began a House Points column like this:

The Liberal Democrats should have come out against London bidding for the 2012 Olympics. It would have taken courage: in those days Tony Blair still had a little gloss left on him and we did not want to sound like killjoys. So at our Brighton Conference last year we trooped in to listen to Sebastian Coe and watched the Chariots of Ming video.

But it’s becoming clear that London 2012 is the Millennium Dome crossed with the NHS computer fiasco and the national identity card scheme with several more noughts after it and a cherry on top.

And that is the line I have consistently taken on the London Games, with the exception of a silly but prophetic posting at the time we were about to be awarded the games:

Why London must gain the Olympics

It's not because they will make us money. I fully expect the games to be a financial disaster and to cost us zillions.

It's not because they will improve transport in London. If things are wrong they need to be put right now because people are suffering, not because they may inconvenience the Polish women's water volleyball team one day.

It's not because they will galvanise the nation's youth. If watching sport on television made you active our youngsters would be the fittest in the world, rather than out of their skulls on Sunny D and Turkey Twizzlers.

No, the reason we must win the games is that we have to put one over on the French in general and Jacques Chirac in particular.

Salaam Bombay!: 20 years before Slumdog Millionaire

I must be the last person in Britain not to have seen Slumdog Millionaire, but the more I read about it the more it reminds me of another film.

Salaam Bombay!, directed by Mira Nair, was released in 1988. It won the Audience Award at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Roger Ebert's review for the Chicago Sun Times describes the genesis of the film:

The history of the making of "Salaam Bombay!" is almost as interesting as the film itself. The filmmakers gathered a group of the street children of Bombay and talked with them about their experiences, visiting the streets and train stations, bazaars and red-light districts where many of them lived. Out of these interviews emerged a screenplay that was a composite of several lives.
Then many of the children were enlisted for weeks in a daily workshop, not to teach them "acting" (for that they already knew from hundreds of overacted Indian film melodramas), but to teach them how to behave naturally in front of the camera.
Out of those workshops a cast gradually emerged, and it was clear almost from the start that the star was an 11-year-old street child named Shafiq Syed, whose history was unknown, but who proved to be such a natural filmmaker that he sometimes reminded the directors of errors in continuity.

And he also discusses some of the questions it raises:

One of the questions asked, but not answered, by the film is, what should be done about these children?
At one point Chaipau and some friends are rounded up by the police and herded into a large institution that combines the worst features of an orphanage and a prison, but that doesn't seem to be the answer, and we are left with the troubling impression that in Bombay, at any event, the children seem to fare better on the streets. There they have an identity, and a measure of hope.
Of course, in the best of possible worlds something would be "done" about them, but "Salaam Bombay!" takes place far from such a world, and the movie is about children doing the best they can for themselves.

This is a philosophy that would have appealed to Charles Dickens. And I remember Salaam Bombay! as a thoroughly Dickensian film, though he might well have provided a more conventional happy ending.

It sounds as though Slumdog Millionaire does this. Maybe it will prove to be a less satisfactory film as a result?

John Thurso joins campaign for Captain Mainwaring bank managers

Last week I noted that two journalists had cited Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army as the sort of bank manager we should return to.

Now John Thurso has taken up the theme while questioning the four bank executives as part of the Commons public accounts committee. The BBC reports:

An MP has called for the return of old-fashioned Capt Mainwaring-style bankers while questioning bank bosses at a Treasury Committee meeting.

John Thurso said 99% of his constituents would not care if merchant bankers and arbitrage traders "disappeared down a black hole".

The Scottish Liberal Democrat added: "Could we get back to Capt Mainwaring running a bank we could trust?"

Leicestershire County Council to oppose Pennbury eco-town

The cabinet of the Conservative-run Leicestershire County Council has voted to object to plans for a 15,000-home eco-town at Pennbury - or Stoughton as we call it round here.

The BBC reports:

After the meeting, Leicestershire County Council's deputy leader Nick Rushton, said: "We are objecting to Pennbury because it is in the wrong location, we don't have all the key facts and we have major concerns about the impact on transport, regeneration and the economy."

Horse riding and taking drugs

This evening I am writing my House Points column for Friday's Liberal Democrat News.

It is about Professor David Nutt's observation about the relative dangerousness of riding horses and taking ecstasy. And Lord Bonkers' recent tweet (he is on Twitter as lordbonkers) suggesting riding may be more dangerous if the horse has been taking the drug will feature in some form. (Later. It does.)

This incident has reminded me of a Steve Winwood story - I think it comes from Simon Napier Bell - that I probably won't have room for.

Traffic were playing outside their cottage in Berkshire when the local hunt rode past. One of the horsemen rode over to them, and the band expected him to complain they were making too much noise and disturbing the hounds.

Instead, he said: "I say, you chaps haven't got any speed have you?"

Chelsea and Jose Mourinho: "Come back, Shane!"

Since the sacking on Phil Scolari was announced yesterday afternoon, there has been a steady stream of people arriving at this blog after searching for phrases like "Mourinho Chelsea return".

It's a lovely idea, but I can't see it happening. It is the football equivalent of shouting "Come back, Shane!"

Sandy Denny

I have just found a blog devoted to this great British female singer, best known from Fairport Convention, who died in 1978 at the age of 31.

It is not updated very often, but it is all good stuff.

Hilaire Belloc was a Liberal MP

Madelaine Bunting had an article in the Guardian today arguing that David Cameron should embrace the "neglected tradition of English radical conservatism" if he wants to attract voters back to the Conservative Party.

I think that Cameron senses this intellectually, even though he is by nature a narrow economic Tory in the Thatcherite mould.

The thinkers Bunting elects to this "red Tory" tradition are William Cobbett, John Ruskin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Cobbett and Ruskin are fascinating figures who could - and should - be claimed by both left and right. Chesterton was a Liberal of sorts, as is seen in his widely quoted:

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.

But Belloc was no Tory: he was even a Liberal MP. Though he became disaffected with the party afterwards, he sat for South Salford between 1906 and the second general election of 1910.

Belloc's most important political book was The Servile State. As Bunting says, in it he argues that both capitalism and socialism enslave the masses to their dictates. We modern Liberal Democrats should read it and reclaim Belloc for ourselves.

Later. Read David Boyle on red Toryism too.

Ashby de la Zouch: Golliwog capital of Britain

From the Leicester Mercury:

A shop owner has vowed to continue selling "golly" dolls, despite the controversy which surrounds the toys.

David O'Neill and wife, Angela, of Ashby, have received numerous poisonous e-mails accusing them of being racists.

Interest in the cuddly toys had been sparked by the national row involving Carol Thatcher.

The broadcaster and journalist was axed from her role on the BBC's One Show for referring to a tennis player as a "golliwog" in a private conversation.

Mr and Mrs O'Neill's business, Ashby Bears.com, based in Rushton's Yard, off Market Street, in Ashby, sells teddy bears and gollies to collectors across the world.

Mr O'Neill, 49, said: "Since the controversy over the BBC affair, we have received a number of nasty e-mails, but also messages of support."

It turns out that Carol Thatcher's crass remarks and the overhyped reaction to them was not the first Gollygate. Guernsey had its own one at the end of last year.

The Guernsey Press reported on 21 November 2008:

Deputy chief minister Bernard Flouquet is today at the centre of a race row after telling a racist joke at a press briefing.

Opening a presentation yesterday on the work needed at Guernsey Airport, he told journalists he wanted to lighten the mood with a funny story he had heard.

It included a reference to American president-elect Barack Obama and the Americans agreeing to allow golliwogs to be put back on jam jars in return for being allowed to use the Queen’s head on their stamps.

Deputy Flouquet, pictured, last night issued an unreserved apology. However, pressure on him to resign as deputy Chief Minister was growing this morning as a result of the gaffe.

He survived a resultant motion of no confidence last week by 24 votes to 21.

Britblog Roundup 208

On The Wardman Wire.

Last Resort: The Film They Couldn't Guess

Nineteen of the 20 of the lines in The Great Liberal England Movie Dialogue Quiz have now been correctly identified (there is some discussion on the comments to a later post too). But one defeated everybody:

Film 7
Vindaloo. Evil. It's a beast of a curry, yea, it's a real wicked bitch. Pilau rice, sweet rice, yellow rice. Rice is rice, and forever more shall be so. Potatoes with cabbage. Bombay sag potatoes. Have you ever had 'em? Beautiful. I promise you.

These lines come from Last Resort. Made in 2000, it is simply the best British film I have seen in years. Which makes me rather sad that no one else seems to have seen it.

Shadows on the Wall gives a good brief review:

This remarkable little film takes a startlingly honest look at foreigners who get caught up in bureaucracy and inflexibility in a strange country. Clever and very funny, yet also deadly serious, the film feels almost like a documentary as it follows single mother Tanya (Korzun) and her early-teen son (Strelnikov) on their odyssey. 

Arriving from Moscow at London's Stansted Airport, they don't understand why Tanya's English fiance isn't there to meet them. In a panic, Tanya claims political asylum, thinking she can sort things out as long as they can stay in Britain. But they're sent to a holding area on the seaside--a bleak and long-abandoned resort town where they must stay while their application is processed. Basically, it's like being sentenced to 18 months on Alcatraz! 

Two men offer to help in very different ways: a friendly shop owner (Considine) and a sleazy internet pornographer (Honey). But can Tanya ever trust a man again? 

Director-cowriter Pawlikowski obviously knows what he's talking about: Everything here has the ring of authenticity, from the way the film looks to the actions and reactions of the various characters. Korzun and Strelnikov are so bracingly natural that it's disarming--we instantly take an interest in them, feeling both their frustration and desperate hope. Considine (A Room for Romeo Brass) delivers another fascinating performance that wins us over completely, even though we don't quite trust him either. 

And the film looks fantastic ... in a very unusual way. Pawlikowski has a gifted eye for capturing a sense of place; the film's setting is relentlessly drab and grim--sprawling yet claustrophobic, modern yet falling down. What should be a quaint, lively English seaside is far more desolate than anything Tanya and her son might have left behind in Russia.

And here is the trailer...

Unfair to Marie Antionette

According to the Mail on Sunday, the Tories were all set to use this poster until David Cameron decided it would be seen as "too personal" by the voters.

I don't know about that, but this is a good opportunity to point out that Marie Antionette never said "Let them eat cake".

As The Straight Dope ("Fighting ignorance since 1973 - It's taking longer than we thought") says:

The peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions it in his Confessions in connection with an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while working as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up something to eat along with it.) He concludes thusly: "Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: 'Well, let them eat cake.'"

Now, J.-J. may have been embroidering this yarn with a line he had really heard many years later. But even so, at the time he was writing--early 1766--Marie Antoinette was only ten years old and still four years away from her marriage to the future Louis XVI. Writer Alphonse Karr in 1843 claimed that the line originated with a certain Duchess of Tuscany in 1760 or earlier, and that it was attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789 by radical agitators who were trying to turn the populace against her.

That campaign went on to force her young son to testify that he had been sexually abused by her, which makes the cake story seem almost benign.

Blind Faith: Under My Thumb

It was 40 years ago today, this website suggests, that rock's first supergroup was formed. Certainly, Marmalade Skies says that Blind Faith were formed in February 1969. Hence this week's music video.

Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood go back a long way. As I wrote a year ago:

Alan Clayson's biography of Winwood has a photograph of the pair of them on stage together with Sonny Boy Williamson at a concert at Birmingham Town Hall on 28 February 1964. Which means that Clapton was 18 and Winwood only 15.

I have since discovered that there is a recording of that occasion on Youtube. In view of the inflated claims made in the information there, it is worth recording what that photograph shows. Chris Dreja and Eric Clapton are on guitar, Paul Samwell-Smith is on bass, Keith Relf on tambourine, Jim McCarty is on drums and Art Themen is on sax. The singers are Williamson, Winwood and Long John Baldry, with Spencer Davis watching rather than singing.

In 1968 Winwood and Clapton were hanging out together at Clapton's newly acquired mansion, just enjoying playing and spending time together. Word got out that they had some project in mind and Clapton's old bandmate from Cream, Ginger Baker, turned up on the doorstep. As Clapton tells it in his biography, he was full of foreboding but Winwood's eyes lit up and the idea of a new group was formed. It was completed by Rick Grech from the Leicester band Family.

Blind Faith made there first appearance at a free concert in Hyde Park and today's video, a cover of the Rolling Stones song, is taken from that event. It is an interestingly subdued version when compared with the original - and markedly superior to the cover by The Who.

An LP was released - it contained what are now regarded as some great songs but was padded out with a long drum solo from Baker. Blind Faith set off on a US tour, but they were short of material and, in any case, the American audiences wanted to hear more of Cream's powerful rock and not Winwood and Clapton trading phrases on acoustic guitars.

Eric Clapton soon decamped to the traditional blues group Delaney and Bonnie, and Blind Faith were no more.

One of the reasons I have got so into Steve Winwood is seeing the video of him and Clapton playing Blind Faith's songs at the Crossroads guitar festival a couple of years ago. Compare the 1969 and 2007 versions of "Can't Find my Way Home" and you will see that they had still got it 38 years after that Hyde Park concert. (And that Winwood has moved effortlessly from organ to guitar.)

Finally, here is Dylan Jones writing about the occasion:

I watched the concert – London Hyde Park 1969 – on Sky Arts about six weeks ago and so far I must have watched it seven or eight times. Because it is awesome. To read reviews of the concert you'd think that it was little more than a soundcheck, and even Clapton has been disparaging about the event (claiming their sound system wasn't big enough), but watching the film now, the concert seems almost magical, and has a timeless quality, as though it happened in a vacuum, or some sort of parallel universe. 

Winwood is something of a revelation, and watching him sitting behind his electric piano in the mid-afternoon sun, in his purple ranch-style shirt and his red hipster trousers, with his impossibly boyish face, his mouth wrapping itself around the expertly crafted blue-eyed soul, he looks like nothing but a genuine pop icon. 

Forget Elvis, forget Hendrix, forget Jim Morrison – for one day, 40 years ago, in the summer of 1969, Steve Winwood was the coolest man on God's earth.