Six of the Best 209

"Clegg should have sat next to Cameron - laughed off the inevitable jibes that would have headed his way - and in the unlikely event he was allowed to make an intervention used the opportunity to explain why he disagreed with the PM and the Euro-loony tunes behind him. But also made it clear that disagreement was healthy and the in the nature of a coalition between two different parties." Living on Words Alone gets in about right on yesterday's events.

Richard Kemp gets it about right too: "For the last 20+ years we haven’t been so much educating our kids as getting them to pass exams. They used to be the same thing – now they are not."

Who were the top five Victorians? The Victorianist recently ran a poll on Twitter. I voted for John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Josephine Butler and William Gladstone. Follow the link to see how the overall voting turned out.

The Hairy Bikers have been to Kayal, one of Leicester's most celebrated restaurants, reports Eyes on the Prize.

A Penguin a Week looks at one of T.H. White's less well-known books: Farewell Victoria.

"As the first new bridge across the Thames in decades, the competition to design the Millennium Bridge attracted a large number of wild design ideas, some of them more sensible than others. Firmly in the latter category was the proposal knocked up by those merry pranksters at FAT for a crossing that tapped into the zeitgeist: it was inspired by the late Princess Diana, with a verdant grass surface modelled on her family’s Althorp park and the lyrics of Elton John’s turgid re-tread of ‘Candle in the Wind’ etched into the balustrades. We might well laugh now, but if you’d asked the general public in the heady days after her death, they’d surely have voted for it." Londonist looks at some of the city's unbuilt buildings.

Edinburgh in the 1960s

Yesterday's trolleybuses seemed to go down well on Twitter, so here are some more vintage street scenes from that era. This time they come from Edinburgh.

Note the inscription on the Canongate Kirk at 1:21. James VII is the king known south of the border as James II.

Cohesive Communities 1: David Boyle & Jonathan Calder

Blogging becomes addictive once you are reasonably well established. You post a few paragraphs and immediately you get a respectable number of readers. Because of the availability of this instant reinforcement, it can be hard to get down to longer pieces of writing.

For that reason I am going to republish two or three longer essays that I have produced over the years.

Cohesive Communities, was written with David Boyle while we were both on the party's Federal Policy Committee (FPC). My recollection is that the committee considered an earlier paper with this title, but did not much like it. So David and I volunteered to come up with something different.

Perhaps to our surprise, the resultant essay was approved by FPC without any changes in January 2004. Despite this, the party showed no signs of having any intention to publish, and eventually we gave up and published it as part of the Liberator "Passports to Liberty" series in time for the party's 2005 Autumn Conference. You can find it it volume 6 ("A Different Country Now") alongside an essay by Adrian Sanders.

As it is over 5000 words I shall be publishing Cohesive Communities in two parts. The first, which analyses the problem is below. For the solutions you will have to read part 2.

At this remove I cannot remember exactly how David and I collaborated - I suspect he wrote more if it than I did - but I do recognise some of my hobby horses alongside his more evidence-based proposals.

Think of it as an early Liberal Democrat contribution to the Big Society debate.


COHESIVE COMMUNITIES Part 1

Since the foundation of the Liberal Party in the 19th century, Liberal thought has recognised that people achieve their goals in life by working together for the local good, that their understanding of local needs makes them the experts in their own administration, and that good government is underpinned by neighbourhoods working together. When these truths are forgotten, the rift between government and governed becomes a dangerous gulf, and the administration and cost of public services become unmanageable. Liberal Democrats believe that administration is best carried out by the people closest to those that it affects, and that the right to work together locally to manage things differently is a guarantee of liberty.

Recent research, particularly in the USA, has pinpointed cohesive communities as the key missing ingredient to a whole range of intractable policy issues that are undermining the ability of governments and their welfare systems to struggle on. The biggest and most expensive study in the history of criminology, carried out by theHarvard School of Public Health and which reported recently, found that by far the most important influence on local crime is the willingness of neighbours to act for each other’s benefit – and especially for the benefit of each other’s children.

This and the research known as ‘Broken Windows’, which was the inspiration for the major reduction in crime in New York City, demonstrate that it is often very little things that make the biggest effect on local life, among which is a range of equal partnerships between local neighbourhoods and local police, often instigated – as in Boston – by the churches. This makes cohesive communities not just a stand-alone outline of policy in a narrow area, but a central idea in Liberal thinking in health, crime, social policy, family policy and a range of other areas.

It is true that people’s need for community is, to some extent, now satisfied by workplace communities, communities of interest and even sometimes virtual communities, but it is geographical communities and their cohesion that underpin these other aspects of policy.

Pressures on community
The constitution of the Liberal Democrats tells us that we exist “to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community”.
When the Liberal Party committed itself to ‘community politics’ in 1970, it was clear that that this approach represented something radically different. It was different both in its content – representing a reaction against the narrow economic concerns of government in that era – and in its campaigning style, representing an attempt to energise the political process by involving people more directly in it where they lived, and to work alongside them to improve their lives.

Today we face a different problem. The word ‘community’ is used so widely as to be almost meaningless. It is used as an adjective to cast a warm glow over the, often disreputable, noun that follows. So the Poll Tax was officially described as the ‘Community Charge’, and today people talk about ‘the intelligence community’, as though spies babysit for one another and organise jumble sales together.
There are threats to the idea of community.

Pressure from the market
One of the greatest threats to community life is economic change. It is traditional to laugh at the Luddites, but it remains a fact that those who suffer the costs of economic change are rarely the same as the people who reap its benefits.

Individual communities and ways of life are rooted in particular economic forms and, when those forms collapse, they collapse with them. This phenomenon can be seen dramatically in the fate of the pit villages after the closure of coal mines in the 1980s. It also operates more gradually: the decline of the Romanies in Britain arises from the fact that, 50 years ago, there was a need for a casual agricultural workforce and today, because of changes in farming brought about in part by government and EU subsidies, there is not.

The combination of monopolistic retail practices and damaging government policies have stripped many neighbourhoods of the basic necessities of local life: 20 per cent of corner shops, grocers, high street banks, sub post offices and local pubs disappeared from British villages and high streets between 1995 and 2000 and a further 28,000 outlets are expected to be lost by the end of next year. There is an equivalent stripping of local green space and playing fields – the equivalent of seven Hyde Parks in London alone since 1989.

These losses undermine the ability of communities to sustain themselves economically or socially, or to determine their own economic lives, and lead to a tipping point where complete collapse is inevitable, and go against the expressed wishes of the people who live there.

Pressure from communitarians
Our Liberal Democrat embrace of liberty, equality and community echoes the Jacobin slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Perhaps the idea of ‘fraternity’ is irredeemably sexist, but it does convey a warmth and spontaneity that are often absent from ‘community’ as it has been understood by governments of either Labour or Conservative. Certainly, they are absent from the idea of community held by New Labour communitarian theorists.

In as far as communitarianism reminds us of the point we note above, that communities are rooted in particular forms of life, then it acts as a useful corrective to the varieties of liberalism that consist of nothing but free-floating rights. But there are strong objections to the sort of policy measures that communitarianism has inspired in Britain. They are often simply authoritarian, have little sense of tackling causes, and have in general been directed against particular social groups who are singled out as a problem. The debate on anti-social behaviour, for instance, assumes that problems always occur on ‘estates’ and that the solution lies in threatening to take away the tenancies of the perpetrators or their parents. This is factually wrong, in that home owners are quite capable of being anti-social too, and should alarm Liberal Democrats in that it makes one section of the community (council tenants) liable to penalties (the loss of their homes) that do not apply to anyone else.

Another group singled out by communitarian policies is children and young people – a fact seen most clearly in the introduction of general curfews for particular age groups. Some will object to these policies because they violate children’s and young people’s rights but, even if one is sceptical of the existence of such ideas, there are still good reasons for being alarmed by policies of this kind.

The first is that much of the impetus for the introduction of curfews arises from a lack of contact between the generations. Groups of teenagers hanging around on street corners can seem threatening to older people but, if communitarian policies and blanket restrictions lead to less contact between the generations, then such groups will come to seem even more threatening and there will be calls for curfews to be made even more restrictive.

The second objection is that such policies undermine communities’ faith in their ability to police themselves. Research in the USA shows that this ability is the most important determinant of the local crime rate. British communitarian policies simply require people to hand over the problem to the police, the council or their local community safety officer.

Perhaps the clearest distinction between communitarian and Liberal outlooks can be seen when we consider the idea of the gated community. To Liberal Democrats, this represents the ultimate failure of community, but David Blunkett recently called for their extension to “the many not the few”.

Pressure from traffic and planning
Almost the only point on which, until recently, all three main parties agreed was that the post-war policy of clearing terraced housing and replacing it with tower blocks was a disastrous mistake. It arose, Liberal Democrats would argue, partly from a distrust of the spontaneity of communities and a desire to impose a more rational pattern upon them. This tendency can be seen in socialism as far back as Engels’s account of Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

The failures of the tower block as a ubiquitous solution to all social problems and the housing needs of all age-groups are well-known, but the rigorous planning policies favoured in recent decades have also had serious effects. What we would now recognise as small businesses were for many years regarded as non-standard planning uses which threatened neat zoning of residential areas and industry. This had the effect of reducing employment in villages and working-class areas of cities and putting more pressure on the surrounding suburbs and countryside.

A related problem over the same post-war decades was the assumption that communities should be planned around the motor car – Milton Keynes, famously, was planned in the 1960s on the assumption that every resident would own one. This assumption has contributed to the construction of new retail developments away from established high streets, leading to the decline of some and tending to exclude many people from using them. At the same time, the car’s dominance of the street has excluded other users, diminishing the freedom of children to roam, in particular.

This should not suggest that planning is, by its nature, destructive of communities – quite the reverse. Good planning and urban design enhances local life; bad planning undermines neighbourhoods.
Unfortunately, Labour’s policies in London are now returning to high-density, high-rise building with its consequent loss of green space, amenity space and traditional streetscapes, with the most damaging effects falling on those communities which require public green space the most. The failure of both Labour and Conservative policies in housing – demolishing community centres and similar facilities, subsuming public housing tenants into equally gigantic and faceless housing associations – are both storing up problems stemming from the loss of community for the future.

Pressure from over-professionalisation
Hilary Clinton once published a book on raising children with the title It Takes a Village. She was right in that, in a healthy community, childcare will be a general responsibility, but the subtext was that it takes a great many professionals.

For decades, the dominant view on the Left has been that progress consists in applying the insights of social science to society, and that anyone or anything that gets in the way of this is a reactionary force that must be opposed. So, for instance, when people on the Left talk of giving children the best possible start in life, they take it for granted that this means they will be brought up, at least in part, by someone other than their parents.

There are two arguments against such an assumption. The first is that it relies upon a very partial view of history, because it is by no means true that the professionals have been on what we would now regard as the side of the angels. For decades, working-class parents who objected to their children being beaten at school were treated as figures of fun by the education press, and the teachers’ and headteachers’ unions were the last groups to campaign for the retention of corporal punishment. Similarly, the improvement in the lot of children in public care marked by the Children Act of 1948 was made in the teeth of opposition from the childcare charities, who favoured barrack-like homes and had hitherto regarded themselves as experts in the field.

The second argument against this distrust of parents is that it tends to undermine people’s confidence in themselves. It is a strange paradox that, the better educated and more affluent society becomes, the less autonomy people are thought able to cope with and the more they are encouraged to seek the expertise of other, wiser people.

The increasing dependence on professionals at neighbourhood level has led both to the exhaustion of public services and the increasing powerlessness of their clients. The truth is that the successful operation of teachers, doctors, police and social services depends on working as equal partners both with clients and with their neighbours – all three have a critical part to play in any successful regeneration. This basic truth, and the resources that it represents, have been increasingly forgotten as politicians puzzle over why their spending on public services are so ineffective, and as even the community development sector finds itself expecting and achieving very little from the localpopulation.

Pressure from bureaucracy
When pressed to defend their continued relevance after long years out of power, Liberals used to point to Keynes and Beveridge. They were both Liberals, and they more than anyone else were the architects of the modern world. The post-war settlement has come under a lot of strain since then, but Liberals still instinctively defend the Welfare State. This is a healthy instinct in as far as it shows concern for the poor, but there are still criticisms to be made.

The social security system was originally predicated upon the idea of the claimant as passive – someone who lacked a job. The transformation of the unemployed person into the jobseeker in recent years has tended to reinforce this passivity. True, people are supposed to be actively seeking work – even to the extent of being compelled to attend training courses – but they are discouraged from doing anything else. This approach to unemployment tends to deny its economic and social roots by treating it as a form of individual delinquency.

Yet a healthy community depends upon a rich tapestry of voluntary work, unpaid work and reciprocal favours, and the welfare system can make it more difficult for anyone who is involved with it to play their part. The enforced disappearance from community life of many parents, because the government wants them earning money rather than spending time bringing up their children, has also impoverished neighbourhoods and made them more vulnerable to rising crime. Families, in all their diverse forms, are the bedrock of communities and policy must support them.

Now read part 2.

Nick Clegg and Sara Ludford on Europe

Two emails have landed in my inbox this afternoon.

Nick Clegg writes:

As I have made clear since Friday, I am bitterly disappointed by the outcome of last weeks summit, which ended with the UK in a minority of one. There is now a real danger that over time the UK will be isolated and marginalised within the EU and as a consequence, our influence in the world will shrink. That is not good for jobs and growth; and will do nothing for struggling families across the country. 

There is no doubt that we were in a difficult position because of the refusal to compromise from some member states and the eurosceptics in the Conservative Party. It was clear that some combination of guarantees on the operation of the single market, including in financial services, was necessary if we were going to ensure the safe passage of the package through Parliament. I regret the negotiations failed to arrive at a compromise, as I had hoped.

And Sarah Ludford, the London Lib Dem MEP, writes:

I think some of what Cameron asked for in Brussels was reasonable insofar as it sought to ensure that decisions in the Eurozone could not trump the single market and exclude the UK, for instance an assurance that the European Banking Authority would stay in London. Some of it though was too technical and/or was pushing the envelope in trying to get a veto over financial services legislation instead of the normal majority voting which applies to all single market laws. 

The basic problem was that the other leaders were just not willing to listen to more demands for UK ‘exceptionalism’, although admittedly Sarkozy was determined anyway to be as unhelpful as possible. Cameron’s credibility with Angela Merkel and others who might have been expected to want Britain involved was at zero because of the hostile ravings of the Eurosceptic rabble.

I gave my own views on Saturday. I am increasingly struck that the people most outraged at David Cameron's failure to reach an agreement in Brussels are those who are usually most opposed to austerity measures.

Thomas Cook is also commemorated in Kibworth

We have seen that Thomas Cook is commemorated in Leicester and Market Harborough. He is commemorated in Kibworth Harcourt too.

The photograph above shows the village's Congregational chapel, which closed a few years ago, and the neighbouring manse.

As an old article from the Kibworth Chronicle tells the story:

One day in 1841 the world famous traveller, Thomas Cook, was walking from his home in Market Harborough to a Temperance Meeting in Leicester. As he passed the Chapel he had a brilliant idea for his first railway excursion. From this small beginning Thomas Cook went on to establish one of the largest travel organisations in the world.

Sure enough if you peer through the gates of the old chapel, now a private house, you will see a plaque similar to the one in Adam and Eve Street, Market Harborough...

Trolleybuses in East London

Paying Leicester's politicians

[Later. BBC News reports that Lady Alison Soulsby, Sir Peter's wife, has died after a short illness -  a reminder that many things are more important than party politics I have changed the title of this post in the light of this news.]

We are all familiar with the nonsensical idea that laws should be passed to "send a message". But Sir Peter Soulsby, Leicester's elected Mayor, has come up with a variant on it: the city should send a message by paying him a very large salary.

The Leicester Mercury reports the representations that Soulsby, his deputy Rory Palmer and other Labour councillors made to the independent pay panel have now been released. The paper says that Sir Peter told the panel that the salary for the post of city mayor should reflect its "symbolic importance".

And it goes on:

In his meeting, Sir Peter said his role was very different to that of the former leader in terms of public expectation. 

He also noted that while an MP had significant influence an elected mayor had more direct power. He said he worked up to 70 hours each week. 

Deputy city mayor Councillor Palmer said he saw his role was "unique" and similar to that of a chief of staff linking the mayor to council officers. 

He told the panel that if any politicians were recognised as having full-time roles – which he says his role is – they should also be entitled to severance pay when they quit.

You can read more about this saga on the blog of Ross Willmott, chair of the city's scrutiny committee and, it is fair to say, not Sir Peter's closest friend.

In the words of the Mercury:

Former council leader and fellow Labour politician Ross Willmott used his personal website yesterday to criticise the stance of the mayor and deputy mayor on the pay issue. He said: "It is clear that both the mayor and deputy were arguing for considerable increases. "So the amount of surprise when the panel's findings were released does now look rather strange." Sir Peter hit back, saying: "I haven't read any of his silly, obsessive blog posts for many months. Ross hasn't got over the fact that he didn't get selected as Labour candidate for mayor, and his stream of obsessive blogging shows that.

The latest news, again courtesy of Ross Willmott, is that Soulsby has now said he is now not seeking an allowance of £100,000.

He has also sacked the independent panel, which suggests that it is not as independent as all that.

Back to the original Mercury post, which quotes a Labour councillor as telling the panel:

"I am now working full-time in a role which involves a lot of responsibility, analysis and judgement for less than minimum wage." 

She told the Mercury yesterday: "I don't want loads of money, just enough to manage on."

But should you expect being a councillor to provide you with a living wage? I have never thought so.

Judie Tzuke: For You

A month ago I chose At Seventeen by Janis Ian, who kindly left a comment thanking me.

In the hope that the trick will work again, here is another distinctive seventies single by a female vocalist. I think of For You in the same bracket as At Seventeen, though it turns out to have been released in 1978, three years later than Janis Ian's song.

I assumed at the time that she was American, but the Judie Tzuke website explains that she was born in Britain with Polish ancestry, and that both her parents were in show business.

The website also explains that For You

was released in the summer of 1978 ... and was greeted with great critical acclaim and substantial air-play but only reached the top 40.

Here is a live version of the song (albeit with a recorded vocal backing track) from Glastonbury 1982.

Liberal MPs in the movies

Make Mine Mink from 1960 is a pretty dire film, despite some nice Terry-Thomas moments and an interesting cast including Billie Whitelaw, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams, Jack Hedley (the senior British officer in the Colditz television series) and a young Peter Vaughan.

But another bit player really grabs the Liberal viewer's attention. Because, yes, that is Clement Freud, later to be Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely from 1973 to 1987, behind the Bonkeresque moustache.

So did any other Liberal MPs appear on screen?

This blog has already recorded one other example from a far more distinguished film. Cecil Beresford Ramage, later to play the Crown Counsel in Kind Hearts and Coronets, was Liberal MP for Newcastle West between 1923 and 1924.

Over to you, readers...

Six of the Best 208

Writing for the New Economics Foundation, David Boyle fears the lamps are going out all over Europe: "What we must work towards is the urgent multiplication of new forms of exchange across the continent, as soon as possible, to meet people’s economic needs. Not everyone can afford gold; fewer people will be able to afford the euro. So our mission has to be to provide them with exchange mechanisms they can use, and which are on the side of life against technocracy."

Strategem XXXVIII also takes a forthright line on recent developments in the European Community.

The death of Socrates reminded Living on Words Alone of a certain Monty Python sketch.

Popular Mechanics discovers what happened to Air France 447. It's scary stuff, but I suppose the encouraging moral is that you have to try very hard before you can crash a modern passenger jet.

The Cat's Meat Shop visits the new Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London.

Like me, Self-Styled Siren has been to see Martin Scorsese's Hugo: "Scorsese is still Scorsese, and he hasn’t become an old softy. Still, Hugo glows with the deep love that comes from cherishing one thing or one person over the lengthening years. More than that, it’s about age and youth reaching out to each other. The film flatly rejects the notion that movies cease to speak to us after the passage of too much time, even after more than 100 years."

My Christmas stocking fillers

Liberal Democrat Voice recently asked a number of bloggers to give their recommendations for Christmas stocking fillers.

Neither of the DVDs I chose will have come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog.

Small row in Europe, not many hurt

During the August riots I was on holiday in Shropshire. I didn't buy a newspaper and spent my evenings planning days out in places like Ironbridge and Bishop's Castle rather than watching the television news.

What contact I did have with the world of telegrams and anger was via Twitter, and because I was on holiday in a quiet part of England it was hard to relate to the picture it painted. Evan Harris, for instance, didn't like it when I poked gentle fun at his call for the Army to be deployed.

Four months on, and my reaction does not seem so silly, because the riots have been largely forgotten. Yes, there have been inquests - Iain Duncan Smith blames The X Factor, the Guardian blames the police - but all those claims that the riots showed that British society was going to have to change fundamentally now seem a little silly.

Well, I have been on holiday again this week and, perhaps as a result, I have the same feeling about events in Europe. I just don't see that Britain's failure to agree to a new economic treaty is as important as is being claimed.

This is for a variety of reasons.

The first is that I think that the attempt to shore up the Euro is probably doomed in its current form. However strict the new rules about reducing public sector deficits, I do not think that they will be enough to keep the likes of Greece on board. (Besides, the problem in the past was not these rules, it was the fact that everyone ignored them when it suited them.) So this week's events are likely to no more than a footnote to this more important story.

The second is that the agreement the European Community comes to without Britain will make little difference to Britain. We will not be bound by it, but whatever government is in power here will have to adopt an austerity programme for the foreseeable future, EC or no EC.

 

The third is I simply do not feel a sense of outrage that the British government has failed to agree a treaty that would pass over significant control over the British economy. You may think it would be a good idea to do this, but no party advocated such a move at the last general election. I think there is debate to won here first.

I am not happy that David Cameron exercised his veto to help the City of London. Even among Conservatives there is agreement that the economy needs to be rebalanced, with manufacturing having a greater role and finance a lesser one.

And I am also attracted by the idea of a Robin Hood tax. But it does rather depend what you are going to use the money for. When I went to New York with Oxfam last year everyone I met was sure that it should be use to fund development in poorer nations. Then I went to a training event with Save the Children and there was a widespread feeling that the proceeds of the tax should be used to reduce the cuts to public services in Britain.

I find both those ideas attractive. But the idea now seems to be that the EU should tax the financial sector and use the proceeds to ensure that its less well-governed members don't have to pay for their folly in borrowing or spending more they can afford. I find that a far less attractive prospect.

Finally, I note that the new proposals would effectively make Keynesian reflationary measures illegal. Such measures are unlikely to be possible for years to come (we are suffering because we forgot the bit in Keynes about the government running a surplus in the good times), but I am enough of a Liberal to find that upsetting.

Hugo: A children's film by Martin Scorsese

As regular readers will know, this blog likes orphans and railway stations. So I was bound to enjoy Martin Scorsese's Hugo. What children will make of it, I don't know. I suspect it may be a little long and slow for some of them.

It tells the story of its eponymous hero who lives within the walls of a great Paris station tending its clocks and trying to avoid being carted off to the orphanage. The story tells of the way he makes sense of his own history and, even more, the history of cinema.

As Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review said:

Hugo is pitched as much to cinephile adults as children, and insists, in a fervent if rather pedagogic way, on that magical quality of cinema which children and grownups generally feel without needing to be told. 

This is a spectacular and gorgeously created film, with allusions to Harold Lloyd and Fritz Lang, and it's an almost overwhelming assault on the senses from the very first shot: a vision of post-first-world-war Paris which sees the city as one gigantic clockwork contrivance. We are then treated to a terrific camera move, whooshing into a crowded railway station where the action is to commence, and where the audience will feel like rubbernecking in awe at a cathedral of digital detail.

And it is an extraordinary spectacle, though perhaps my breath was taken away in part because Hugo is the first 3D film that I have seen.

It marries two likeable child stars (now there's a rarity) with a wonderful collection of familiar British faces: Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Christopher Lee.

Another of them, Sacha Baron Cohen, plays the station inspector whose life's work is to hand orphans over to the authorities. He looks so like office Crabtree from 'Allo 'Allo that it makes you laugh. I wonder if Scorsese knew this? Anyway, Hugo's life is made difficult by the fact that the inspector can be pissing by the door at any moment.

Indeed it is a very British film. It's not just the cast: we are told that Hugo's mother came from England, even though this has no relevance to the plot.

Somewhere behind this is another very British - very English - story. Scorsese played an enormously important and honourable part in restoring the reputation and films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. If you watch Hugo you will sense the echoes.

And this film is edited by Powell's widow Thelma Schoonmaker.

Fisking Allison Pearson on school examinations

Inspired by the newspaper's investigative coup this week, Allison Pearson has a column in today's Daily Telegraph discussing the failings of our school examination system in much the same terms that I did yesterday.

However, I have to take issue with this paragraph:

When I was my daughter’s age, I barely knew what an exam was. Your teacher might take an educated guess at what would come up on the paper (Henry VIII’s foreign policy last year, so probably domestic this time), you swotted up as hard as you were inclined, went into the hall with a leaky fountain pen and blotting paper, read the questions, picked the one you knew most about and wrote until your hot little hand got cramp. The only tactic we learnt was to ostentatiously walk to the front after 20 minutes and ask for more paper to psych the others out.

Because, as I revealed three years ago, I was in the same class as Allison Pearson (Allison Lobbett as she then was) until I was 16. And these are the facts:

• Our History O level covered the period from 1760 to the Spanish Civil War, so there would have been little point preparing an essay on Henry VIII's policy, foreign or domestic.
• By 1976 no one used a fountain pen: we all used biros. I can still recall the groove its barrel would wear in your finger in the course of a three-hour exam.
• You did not walk to the front for more paper: you raised your hand and waited for it to be brought to you.

And, let me record here, I was not intimidated. In fact I sometimes asked for paper before Alison Lobbett did. (Jane Cummings was the one you really had to fear in the extra paper department.)

A day at the London Chess Classic

I have spent the day at the London Chess Classic at Olympia. This is a tournament featuring the very best players in the world and the best in Britain.

There was plenty of space for coffee and casual games, but the tournament hall itself is surprisingly poor. The four tables are crammed on to a narrow stage and the audience appeared to consist largely of bronchitics with a serious boiled sweet habit. Conditions for the top players were far better in the Sheffield sports hall used for the British Championships this summer.

But I was there for the games and they were good.

Lev Aronian is the only one of the players that I knew next to nothing about. He shares Garry Kasparov's Jewish-Armenian background and has twice led Armenia to the chess Olympiad gold and this year helped his country win the Word Team Championship. Armenia has a population of three million.

Today he was white against the world's highest rank player, Magnus Carlsen from Norway. Carlsen played a slightly precious opening and found himself with his pieces on some odd squares when Aronian found a way to blow the centre open. For a while it looked as though Aronian was getting somewhere, but Carlsen defended calmly and the game was a dead draw when it became the first to finish.

The other three boards were a Britain vs Rest of the World match, which we lost 3-0 - or 9-0 if you prefer the new-fangled scoring method of three points for a win and one point for a draw being used here. (Traditionally it has been a point for a win and half a point for a draw.)

Two years ago David Howell finished third in this tournament without losing a game, despite being the lowest rated player. This year he appears out of sorts and out of form, and he lost tamely to the American Hikaru Nakamura. There is no shame in that: Nakamura is ranked 10 in the world and is widely tipped to join the world elite.

The British champion Michael Adams was black against the Russian former world champion Vladimir Kramnik (who bears a resemblance to our own James Graham). For a while the experts in the commentary room liked Adams' position, but eventually Kramnik worked his way to a favourable ending and won efficiently.

And Nigel Short pressed hard with white against the world champion Vishy Anand. My impression was that he tried too hard to win, but Short said afterwards that he had just lost the thread of the game. Even so, I thought that Short missed some chances towards the end and that Anand could have won more quickly after that. I suspect, however, that says more about my rustiness as a player than it does about the quality of their play.

The idea of having a player with a bye in each round is that he can discuss the other players' games in the commentary room. But Luke McShane, who manages to combine having a day job in the City with being the British number three player, proved spectacularly uncommunicative.

It was a fascinating day and there is no shame in British players struggling in this company. But the problem or British chess is that our two top players, Michael Adams and Nigel Short, and both in their forties. See an  earlier post of mine for the reasons why there is a missing generation behind them.

Daily Telegraph revelations about school examinations come as no surprise

This morning's Daily Telegraph carried revelations that examination boards charge teachers large fees to attend events that tell them how they can help their pupils cut down on the amount of work needed to those boards' examinations.

And tomorrow's edition has another story on the theme:

Steph Warren, a senior official at Edexcel, told an undercover reporter posing as a teacher who was considering using the firm’s tests that “you don’t have to teach a lot” and that there is a “lot less” for pupils to learn than with rival courses. 

Miss Warren, who sets geography exams for tens of thousands of teenagers, said she did not know “how we [Edexcel] got it through” the official regulation system that is supposed to ensure high standards in GCSEs and A-Levels.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. Examination league tables are now pretty much the only way that schools are judged (by officialdom, though perhaps not by parents). And the setting and marking of those exams have become a multi-million pound business.

Put those two factors together and it was pretty much inevitable that this would happen.

I always treated exams as a sort of hoop you had to jump through in return for being given the time to study the things that really interested you. I don't suppose such an attitude would prosper today.

Headline of the Day

Today's prize goes to the Evening Standard:

Hunt for man who slammed door on Zinzan the abseiling police dog

Don Foster denies Christmas single plans

From the Daily Mirror:

A Liberal Democrat MP was forced to deny he was releasing a Christmas single today after local journalists failed to spot a press release he issued was a spoof. 

Don Foster, the party spokesman for culture, media and sport, sent out an email to reporters entitled "Bath MP plots late charge for Christmas No 1", claiming the North Somerset MP was "releasing his first solo record in an attempt to gain the coveted top spot in the singles chart this Christmas" 

It went on to claim the MP would release a number showing off his skills on the ukulele after being inspired by Sir Cliff Richard's comments this week that "X Factor had killed the Christmas Number 1" and by Rage Against The Machine's bid to pip The X Factor to the Christmas 2010 top spot.

I can't help feeling that is a shame. It could have been key to holding those West Country marginals. Take it, George:

Pantomime Horse Grand National: Lembit Opik trails in behind Kerry Katona

The Daily Mail has the full SP.

Christmas in Town Hall Square, Leicester

The tableaux of children's book or television characters in Town Hall Square are one of the pleasures of Christmas in Leicester. There are always two of them - usually one inspired by a literary classic and one by something more contemporary.

This year it is tradition all the way, with displays inspired by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. Add to that a nativity scene and a "Christmas Greetings" banner on the front of the Town Hall in Britain's most ethnically diverse city and it seems Christmas is safe for a few years yet whatever the Daily Mail says.

But then my view of multiculturalism has always been that we should celebrate any festival going, not cancel them all in case we offend someone.