BBC Inside Out South West on Jersey child abuse

The Jersey blogger Voice for Children has posted a video of this week's BBC South West documentary about the investigation into child abuse on Jersey. He describes it as a fair account of the affair, given the limited time the makers had available.

He also has a comment on the programme from Lenny Harper, Jersey's former Deputy Chief Officer of Police, who is interviewed in it. Another interviewee, the less than impressive Home Affairs Minister, Senator Ian Le Marquand, did not take up the opportunity to comment.

The sound quality of this recording suggests it was made in someone's front room. But you can watch the original programme on the BBC iPlayer for a few more days - even if the person who wrote the blurb for it was more interested in guillemots.

West Mercia's police and crime commissioner wants to make his election agent his deputy

Last week I wrote about the newly elected police and crime commissioner for Northamptonshire and his decision to appoint the Conservatives’ political assistant at Northamptonshire County Council as his 'strategic adviser'.

From the Shropshire Star comes news that Bill Longmore, the independent PCC for West Mercia, wants to appoint his election agent as his deputy on a £50,000 salary.

The Star, which reminds us that the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act allows PCCs to appoint a deputy, says the West Mercia Police and Crime Panel has delayed its decision because of concern at the selection process.

The Ripon Hornblower

This is George Pickles, the Ripon Hornblower, Setting the Watch around the obelisk in the city's market square. It is, says his website:

which has been carried out every evening on the market square without a miss, not for one single day, for 1125 years. It is the longest ongoing unbroken daily ceremony in the world.

"And no, madam," I heard him say, "it's not been me all that time. There were two more before me."

Mr Pickles carries out the ceremony with due seriousness, and then chats to the tourists who have gathered to watch him at 9 p.m.each evening.

Is Theresa May a KGB agent?

When I was an undergraduate the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall were still in existence. And in those days how people responded to repression in the Soviet bloc seemed to me a good pointer to a their moral worth.

Though outright admiration for the Soviet Union - "All them cornfields, and ballet in the evenings" as Peter Sellers' Fred Kite put it in I'm All Right Jack - was rare by then, there were plenty on the left who argued that we should engage with the Warsaw Pact powers and played down questions of human rights.

So, while Jim Callaghan was prime minister, Romanian-built locomotives began to appear on Britain's railways.

In those days, admittedly, Nicolae Ceausescu was supposed to be the great liberal hope of Eastern Europe. The leader of the British Liberal Party David Steel even gave him a labrador. The dictator named it Corbu.

But it remains an uncomfortable fact that you were far more likely to find articles about human rights abuse in the Soviet Union in the Spectator than you were in the New Statesman. I seem to recall that you could even subscribe to a scheme that distributed the Spectator behind the Iron Curtain.

The Conservatives had their blind spots - there were plenty of them who were happy to support Apartheid South Africa - but this history gave me some hope that the Coalition would be more respectful of our liberties than Blair and Brown had been.

Especially when the Coalition agreement said:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

But when you read Theresa May's absurd comments in support of her Communications Data Bill you can see that these hopes of the Conservatives have come to nothing.

Here she is taking to the Sun:

“The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public. 

“Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives. 

“We would certainly see criminals going free as a result of this. 

“There will be paedophiles who will not be identified and it will reduce our ability to deal with this serious organised crime.”

You can say that May is too keen to appeal to her party's right wing or lacks the strength to stand up to the security establishment.

But her thuggish attitude to her liberties do remind me strongly of the mind-set that ruled the Soviet Union - and not a little of the briefing we Lib Dem bloggers were given when this bill first appeared. I am very glad to see Nick Clegg has now had second, better thoughts on it.

Could it be that Theresa May is a Soviet sleeper - an agent put in place when she was but a schoolgirl?

Can any among you remember Theresa May's schooldays? Were there perhaps pictures of Leonid Brezhnev on the dormitory wall? When the other girls were playing hockey was she poring over Soviet coal production figures?

Did she - and this would be the clincher - have a signed photograph of Corbu?

Headline of the Day

The Daily Telegraph wins with:

Novak Djokovic buys up annual supply of donkey cheese

Thanks to Dr Mark Pack.

Citizen's arrest - Market Harborough style

From the Harborough Mail:

Have-a-go heroes wrestled a thief to the ground after a chase that they described as “a Benny Hill moment”. 

Nick Staff and a friend, who did not want to be named, were on their way home from a dinner party in Great Bowden with friends when they heard the alarm going off at Welton’s shop in the village...

Write a guest post for Liberal England

Sometimes it feels like I'm doing all the work on this blog.

So here is a reminder that I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. So far 31 have appeared.

And as you can see from the list of the 10 most recent guest posts below, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects.

If you would like to write a guest post for Liberal England yourself, please send me an email so we can discuss your idea.

Anthony Burgess in Leicester - Phil Beesley

Why you should visit The Bog - Paul Davis

Blogging for happiness - Ellen Arnison

An economic liberal case for a consumer-driven economy - Matt Burrows

John Locke and Wrington - Lisa Harding

Spelling out the reason to vote Liberal Democrat - Andrew Brown

Tommie Smith - The man behind the image - Matt Roebuck

Don’t make the dull middle class go to university - Dr Anonymous

House of Lords reform in a 1950s whodunnit - Charles Beaumont

The difficulty of getting started in farming - Joshua Metcalfe

Julian Huppert calls for an end to the war on drugs

Julian Huppert, Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, writes for Comment is Free following the publication of the home affairs select committee report on drugs policy:

Despite 50 years of criminalisation, illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil. Presidents of supply countries, such as Colombia, are desperately calling for a rethink. 

We're stuck in a pointless "war on drugs". It's not working and it costs us heavily, in human terms – with people addicted, incarcerated and burgled – and in financial terms. The UK spends more on drug policy than any other country in Europe, but has the highest usage of several class A drugs. 

Every person who uses drugs in Britain is treated in exactly the same way: as a criminal and a prisoner. Far too little effort and support is given to treatment; to helping people come off addictive drugs.

Cyril Davies All Stars and Long John Baldry: See See Rider

On Monday, when I posted TV appearance by Rod Stewart and Steve Winwood from 1965, I said the real star of that show was Long John Baldry. So here he is again.

Baldry died in Canada in 2005. As his Guardian obituary said, he "played a key role in the growth of the British rhythm and blues movement".

A tribute quoted on the official Long John Baldry website goes further:

John had a knack for discovering talent. Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck and Brian Jones all worked with him early on. Elton John played piano in one of his bands, other Rolling Stones too – Charlie, Ron Wood, and Keith. In 1962, when The Rolling Stones were just getting started, they opened for him in London. Eric Clapton has said many times that John was one of the musicians that inspired him to play the Blues. And for their internationally televised special in 1964, The Beatles invited John to perform his version of 'I Got My Mojo Working'.

Baldry was also openly gay in an era when that was still rare and brave. Perhaps that is why, when they young keyboard Reg Dwight was looking for a stage name, he took elements from the names of two bandmates in Bluesology: Elton Dean (later of Soft Machine) and Long John Baldry.

But who, I here you asking, was Cyril Davies?

As the website devoted to his memory makes clear:

Some fellow musicians called Cyril 'Squirrel' Davies a musical genius with a purist's vision. Cyril sang, played banjo, guitar and harmonica and was among a small group of young British musicians in the late 1950's who simply became possessed by a seemingly mystical musical form - the BLUES; these like minded musicians were affected by its purity, simplicity, and by the depth and honesty of emotion that was accessible through its traditional patterns. Cyril, though, narrowly defined the acceptable boundaries of this blues tradition. 

Just as Cyril was hitting his stride musically, his failing health proved too much for this 'tough as nails', panel beating blues shouter - and he passed away at 31 year old, a few days shy of his birthday. 

Cyril left a deep impression on all who had seen him perform - whether it channelling Leadbelly, playing his Grimshaw 12 string guitar at the Round House, blowing harp on the frontline with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, or fronting his own 'force of nature', the R&B All Stars - some familiar faces remember:

The history of the British Blues gets more interesting the more you study it.

The politics of The Hobbit

I once knew a Liberal student politician who was fond of dismissing green and communitarian ideas as "hobbit socialism". (He later went to work for Friends of the Earth and was awarded an MBE.)

But I have always had a weakness for such ideas, so I was taken by a Larry Elliott in today's Observer on the politics of The Hobbit:

Tolkien became a cult figure among hippies in the 1960s, for whom LOTR worked on a number of levels: peace-lovers versus warmongers; military-industrial complex versus local smallholders; the lust for power versus individual freedom. These days he would have celebrated the victory of the people of Totnes in their campaign to keep a branch of Costa out of their town.

Yet those who believe in a small state and self-regulated markets could also claim Tolkien as one of their own. The Shire had hardly any government: families, for the most part, managed their own affairs and the only real official was the mayor, who oversaw the postal service and the watch.

Hobbits enjoyed a pipe and a mug of ale: it is unlikely Tolkien would have been a fan of smoking bans and minimum unit prices for alcohol.

The most encouraging thing about the article is the comments of the economist Elinor Ostrom, the first and so far only woman to win the Nobel prize for economics, who died earlier this year.

I do not know when Elliott interviewed her, but he quotes her views in the article:

Ostrom would have been pleased by this rare meeting of minds across the political spectrum. She talked about the "panacea problem" – policymakers' belief that there was a "best way" of doing things. "For many purposes, if the market was not the best way, people used to think that the government was the best way. We need to get away from thinking about very broad terms that do not give us the specific detail that is needed to really know what we are talking about," she said. 

Governance systems that worked in practice were not those that stemmed from a theory of what ought to work but had, on the contrary, evolved from local conditions. "There is a huge diversity out there, and the range of governance systems that work reflects that diversity. We have found that government-, private- and community-based mechanisms all work in some settings."

What is particularly encouraging about this is that Elliott tells us that Ostrom was once invited to deliver the Hayek lecture by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

What passes for libertarian thought in Britain generally involves either a concern with lifestyle issues that would best be met by moving out of your parents' house and getting your own place or support for the naked exercise of corporate power.

If British libertarianism could find room for a little hobbit socialism it would be the better for it.

Vince Cable interviewed in the Observer

The Liberal Democrat Business Secretary shows why he one of the most popular politicians in the country in this interview from today's Observer:

Unlike most politicians, he has few airs and graces and rarely resorts to defensive obfuscation. He sees an interview as an exercise in which a journalist puts questions and he answers them. 

So when asked if Britain's economy might endure a Japanese-style "lost decade", he admits it might well. "There is a real worry about [that], a real risk of that," he says. At every turn he is disarmingly frank. Most ministers would run for safety if asked whether the economy could be heading for a "triple dip" recession but Cable takes the question head on. "Well, there is certainly a risk," he says without the slightest hesitation. "I always try not to get drawn into forecasting arguments [but] there clearly is a risk. The most likely outcome is that we continue bumping along the bottom." ... 

After an hour, Cable remembers that he has failed to read out a glowing script he had prepared. A piece of paper lies ignored on the floor. "I haven't given you my speech yet on all the wonderful things I've done," he says, before donning a cycle helmet and heading off to a constituency surgery in the freezing cold.

The Station, Richmond

The Station - Richmond's former railway station. once the terminus of a branch line from Darlington - advertises itself as "the region's most exciting tourist destination":

beneath the sympathetically restored, high vaulted ceiling of this historic Victorian railway station sits a contemporary café bar and restaurant; a modern, two-screen cinema; an art gallery over two floors; a free heritage centre; and a collection of meeting rooms available for private hire. 

There is no visitor attraction quite like it. Pulling in 350,000 tourists a year and offering each and every one a unique experience, The Station is also home to six artisan food producers - open to the public and selling their produce. Visitors can buy from a medley of Yorkshire delights from a bakery, cheese-maker, micro brewery, ice-cream parlour, fudge house and honey-maker. 

The Station also runs a full programme of events throughout the year, including live music, literary festivals and seasonal food and craft fairs, and is a hive of activity among local residents, many of whom attend workshops in a wide range of subjects from jewellery-making, to painting, photography and creative writing. 

No wonder this innovative £2.7million not-for-profit community enterprise has attracted national attention and won several prestigious awards. Why not come and see for yourself?

I am not sure I would rank it as more exciting than Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, but The Station is well worth a visit and saved from an excess of worthiness by the presence of those cinemas.

Even so, I found the audio-visual presentations about the station's history (passenger services ended in 1969) the most interesting thing there. The ice cream is very good too.

Ad Lib: From the desk of the Junior Whip

My copy of the first issue of Ad Lib - the pocket glossy monthly intended to replace the weekly Liberal Democrat News - arrived today.

As is apparently obligatory in Lib Dem publications, it carries a mildly satirical article by me, though what appeared in the magazine (reproduced below) is not exactly what I sent in.

Whipped: From the desk of the Junior Whip

The Chief Whip is not going to be pleased. He got very excited when he heard about Nadine Dorries being on I’m a celebrity… and insisted that I get a couple of our MPs on to it too. Something about having them out of the country before next week’s votes. But there was nothing doing. Apparently after Lembit they vowed never to have another Lib Dem. Not even when I offered to pay for the wallaby testicles.

***
I am currently working as an intern here in the Lib Dem Whips Office. It is probably best that you don’t know my name. Call me the Junior Whip.

I quite fancy being an MP myself in a year or two. I have my eye on a seat where the sitting MP retires at the next election.

This chair I am leaning back on is normally occupied by Alastair Carmichael, the Chief Whip. So is the desk I have my feet on.  Fortunately he is at home in his constituency at the moment and I am minding the shop.

On the shelf behind me is his bottle of  Auld Johnston, that most celebrated of Highland malts, which is marked, damn him. The Chief is a Scot, likes his whisky and trusts no one. Probably wise in his job.

Alongside the whisky is a boxed set of Francis Urquhart DVDs (I tell him they are black comedies: he insists they are an instruction manual), and the Black Book.

The Black Book? Passed down from chief whip to chief whip, it has the dirt on every Liberal and Liberal Democrat MP for more than a century.

It is the most entertaining thing I have ever read. And you know that Lib Dem MP who is retiring? He doesn’t know it yet, but I do.

Want to know more? Come back and see me again next month.

The Junior Whip spoke to Jonathan Calder

Six of the Best 303

Most of us have done our best to forget 'alarm clock Britain', but What You Can Get Away With remembers it  - and also "the most vapid, soulless and content-free article ever published on Liberal Democrat Voice".

How funny are prank calls? Not at all funny, says Libdem Child.

Andrew Hickey resists the canonisation of John Lennon: "Lennon was, in many ways, a fairly horrible human being. He regularly mocked the disabled on stage, made some arguably racist comments, was a terrible father to his first child, and was a violent thug who beat at least his first wife regularly."

History Today has recently put its very first issue from 1951 online. This article from it  tells the strange tale of Johann Frederick Struensee, Denmark's 18th century German dictator.

"This is the direction that the music poured forth - a burning point of eternity embraced by the timeless countryside - or as recited by Francine Heiman, the six year old who was featured on Hole In My Shoe: 'A place where happiness reigned, and music played ever so loudly'." In an old article on the Winwood Fans site, Dan Ropek goes in search of the cottage where Traffic got in together in the country.

The cats of Spitalfields are celebrated by Spitalfields Life.

Richmond and Richmond Castle, North Yorkshire

Richmond ... was like no other town they had ever seen. When they reached the top of the hill they were in one corner of an enormous cobbled square. In the centre was the squat building of a church, in the sides of which were really built some shops. At the top of the huge market square beyond some parked buses, was a great stone pillar crowned with a ball, round which were some steps on which dalespeople were sitting. Shops and inns were round the four sides of the square and between them, the children noticed, were the narrow entrances to many little courts and alleys.
The Secret of Buzzard Scar (1955) Malcolm Saville

The whole castle wall has long since fallen, all along the edge of the rock overlooking the river. Now the mown grass comes to the edge, and there is a fence, not to keep out any strangers, but to keep in the visitors. But the rest of the walls round the great court are there still, hiding the town from the castle and the castle from the town; but there is enough to show clearly what the castle was like
Earthfasts (1966) William Mayne.

My favourite children's writers had given me a clear enough picture of Richmond, yet somehow I had got it wrong. I had imagined a castle high above the town - something like the set up at Montgomery.

In reality, the castle is more intimately connected with the town than any I know. The castle old bailey is the town's market square.

My guidebook says that the ruins of Richmond Castle represent "one of the most important surviving examples of early medieval domestic architecture in the country".

They are right, but that it is not what strikes you most about the castle ruins. Its setting - perched high above the River Swale - is hugely impressive, and its modern history is important too.

Richmond Castle was used to house conscientious objectors in World War I - the Richmond Sixteen. There drawings and writings still exist in the castle gatehouse, though they are too fragile to put on display to the public.

The military authorities' plan, apparently, was to ship them to France, where they could be shot for refusing orders in the face of the enemy. This plan was thwarted, but many of the Sixteen found themselves social outcasts after the war - but they were in the right, were they not?

The castle yard was also the site of barracks of  the North Yorkshire Militia from 1855, and those buildings were the home of Robert Baden-Powell for two years until 1910 - just the period when his Scouting movement was taking shape.

The barracks building were demolished in 1931. Had they survived until the present day, they would surely have been preserved as an important part of the site's history. I met the same change in attitudes at Tynemouth Priory this summer.

Six of the Best 302

"The Alliance Party says enough is enough. Over a violent 48 hours it has seen one of its representatives forced from her house, others attacked in their home, the shutters brought-down at a string of its offices, and a party advice centre gutted by arsonists. On the face of it, the rampage is linked to loyalist anger over restrictions placed on flying the Union flag from Belfast City Hall. But Alliance now says this crisis follows ten years of intense unionist political campaigning aimed at stifling the liberal party’s growing appeal – as well as loyalist paramilitary intimidation that Alliance has previously played down." The Detail on worrying developments in Northern Ireland.

Thinking Liberal suggests a way for the Liberal Democrats to avoid wipeout at the next European elections.

Jennie Rigg has been reading the first edition of Ad Lib, the new magazine from the Liberal Democrats.

How are the Republicans getting on after their defeat in the recent US Presidential elections? Not very well, reports The New Republic.

"I guess the favourite Western for most movie buffs (of a mature age) came from this period with many selecting Sergio Leone’s 1966 film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. While this is a great must see classic movie, for me his 1968 release of Once Upon a Time in the West is the best Western ever." So says Movies My Dad Likes.

The lead-mining country of the North Pennines was an early inspiration for the poet W.H. Auden. Robert Forsythe discusses how he may first have come the village of Rookhope there.

Northamptonshire PCC, cronyism and the politicisation of the police

The Northampton Chronicle & Echo reports that Stuart McCartney, the Conservatives’ political assistant at Northamptonshire County Council, has been appointed as the new strategic adviser to the county’s Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner Adam Simmonds.

Not only that:

Meanwhile, the leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition at County Hall, Councillor Brendan Glynane, has reacted with “astonishment” to Mr Simmonds proposing to create 17 new jobs. 

He said: “I am absolutely stunned at his actions. All throughout the campaign he refused to say what he would do if he was elected. Now we know why. He is creating 17 jobs on huge salaries for his Conservative campaign team, financed by the hard-pressed taxpayers of Northamptonshire. 

“Many people said they were concerned about the politicisation of the police during the election. However, I don’t think anyone expected this – 17 jobs at high salaries, many of them going to Tory loyalists. 

“The Conservatives are creating an entire party political office to run our Police force.” He added: “Even more ludicrously, one of these political appointments will be a ‘value-for-money’ officer. You just couldn’t make it up. People will be outraged and rightly so. The total cost to the taxpayer could exceed £800k per year. 

“To add insult to injury his first duty was to email existing staff and tell them there was no money and their jobs were at risk. The Conservative PCC appears to be using taxpayers money to pay for jobs for the boys and girls. 

“This is political cronyism writ large.”

If there are to be such party appointments across the country then the complaint that the introduction of PCCs represents a politicisation of the police will be strengthened.

And, whomever they appoint, if PCCs are going to employ staff on this scale then the argument that the new system is diverting funds that should be used for everyday policing is strengthened too.

As the Chronicle & Echo says:

The Government has yet to say whether it will release additional central funding for the UK’s 41 PCCs, but if that is not forthcoming, the cost of the new commission is likely to come from the existing police budget.

Isaiah Berlin's pluralism

Philosophy Bites has a podcast of an interview with Henry Hardy about Isaiah Berlin and his theory of pluralism.

Berlin argued that the tragedy of the modern Liberal is that there is no guarantee that the values we cherish - notably freedom and equality - are mutually compatible. More than that, when those values conflict there is no formula that will tell us which value should trump the other,

I think Berlin is right, and no amount being told to read T.H. Green or L.T.Hobhouse by people who have not read those thinkers themselves, will convince me he is wrong.

Badgers fight back in High Leicestershire

From the Leicester Mercury:

Badgers have been blamed for forcing the closure of a country lane by tunnelling underneath it, causing it to collapse.

Two large craters appeared in the surface of the 1.5 mile lane between Somerby and the hamlet of Newbold, making it impassable to most vehicles.

Highways engineers examined the damage on Friday and say the road will be shut for at least three weeks.

One theory is that the badgers had been told David Heath would be passing that way.

Blog Headline of the Day

Well done to the estimable Chris Abbot:

Redcar's refurbished groynes will be restored to their original height

And quite right too.