Why are you IN Europe?

Last night's Liberal Democrat party political broadcast.

Pennsylvania case shows the dangers of private enterprise in the prison system

Back in 2009 I blogged several times about the scandal in the Pennsylvania juvenile justice system.

Judges in the state's juvenile courts were revealed to be taking payments amounting to $26m from the operators of juvenile detention facilities in return for ensuring that a steady supply of youngsters were given custodial sentences -even if their offences did not warrant them.

Eventually one of the judges involved, Mark Ciavarella Jnr, was sentenced to 28 years for his part in the affair.

This video from Democracy Now tells the full story of the Pennsylvania scandal and sounds a serious warning about the involvement of private enterprise in the prison system.

I can also recommend Niles Christie's book Crime Control as Industry.

David Laws goes to war over Ofsted and academies

In an interview with the Independent, the Liberal Democrat education minister (and much esle) David Laws has demanded reform of the system for making key public appointments to prevent cabinet ministers installing political allies.

David wants to stop Michael Gove imposing Theodore Agnew, a Tory donor whose Inspiration Trust runs seven academies and free schools, as Baroness Morgan’s successor as head of Ofsted.

There should be no question of such an appointment: it would represent a clear conflict of interest. But, incredibly, while Ofsted has the power to inspect individual academies, it has no power to inspect chains of schools like those run by Mr Agnew's trust.

David Laws told the Independent:

“When the academies programme started, it had a lot of enemies and was regarded as a precious flower that needed protection. But this flower has now grown strong enough to survive in the full heat of the sun. 

“There are some really good local authorities and there are still some terrible ones. In the same way, there are some good academy groups doing an absolutely fantastic job – like Ark and Harris – and some not doing so well. ...

“Ofsted must be able to shine a spotlight wherever it wants to. I don’t want there are to be any constraints. It ought to be able to inspect the chains.”

And he is right.

Dawlish and the case for a new rail route to Plymouth

Photograph by Martin Bodman

The loss of the sea wall at Dawlish, and with the Great Western mainline to Plymouth and Cornwall, should not come as a surprise.

It has long been known that this stretch of track is vulnerable to storms and that climate change will only make the situation worse.

As a result there has been interest in the idea of reopening the old London & South Western route from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton and Tavistock. Stretches of the line is still in use at either end.

In 2010 Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives in Cornwall, said:

"If the assessment is the problems on the line [through Dawlish] are overwhelming then it would be sensible to plan for the future," he said. 

"When you contrast the amount of money – the billions – spent on major improvements to services in the north to south, it would be quite wrong to leave Plymouth and Cornwall cut off if that were to happen in the next century."

The same newspaper report quotes a Network Rail spokesman as saying that any thoughts of a re-routing of trains around Dawlish were "wishful thinking". Perhaps the idea does not seem so foolish today.

Still, the spokesman was on the ball in one respect:

Funding to improve the line through the Somerset Levels, which is also prone to flooding, was a more attractive option, he said.

Secrets of the Bakerloo Line

We have already looked at the District, the Central, the Jubilee and the Northern.

Leaving out Kevin Pietersen is a sign of weak management

In 1974 and 1975 England left out John Snow, their best fast bowler, because he was thought not to be a good team man.

Snow was one of my favourite players and at the time I held the England captain, Mike Denness, but it later turned out to be the fault of the chairman of selectors, miserable Alec Bedser. He may have been a great bowler in his day, but by then he was a dreadful moaner.

When the time came to select the party to tour Australia in 1982-3 the selectors picked three off spinners, so desperate were they not to include the 'difficult' Phil Edmonds. It was a ridiculous decision - a sort of secular version of the Year of Three Popes.

"Can Eddie Hemmings and Geoff Miller bowl out Australia?" the BBC asked us, trailing the final day's play in the second test at Brisbane. To no one's great surprise they couldn't and Australia won by seven wickets.

The third offie on the tour, incidentally, was the saintly Vic Marks.

Today comes news that the England management has decided that Kevin Pietersen's international career is over. Whoever takes over as the new coach will have to manage without one of England's best players, whatever his opinion of him.

Leaving out strong characters in favour of lesser but more tractable players is not a sign of strong management. It is a sign of weakness.

Remembering David Penhaligon

This project, hosted by the Cornish Audio Visual Archive, Cornish Story and the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, aims to record the memories of friends and acquaintances of David Penhaligon – MP for Truro from 1974 to 1986.

We aim to build a website which will host the recorded memories, audio or video, of interviews with those that wish to contribute to the project. Many of these interviews will come from his native Cornwall, whether from school friends at Truro School, at Cornwall Technical College, when he was an engineer at Holman Brothers or as the sub-post master at Chacewater.

Of course, most of the interviews will focus on his time as a Liberal candidate, then Member of Parliament for Truro. Penhaligon first contested Totnes in 1970 and then Truro twice in 1974, winning at the second attempt. He increased his narrow majority in 1979 and again in 1983. Many Cornish residents will have memories of these elections and of David as a hard-working local MP in Cornwall and we really want to capture these memories, however personal.

To achieve a credible picture of David Penhaligon we want as many interviews as possible, whether you met him once when he knocked on your door in an election campaign or if you were close friends. We want to make this website an online resource for local and historical research into one of Cornwall’s most famous voices.

Read more and donate on Rembering David Penhaligon.

Portsmouth Liberal Democrats get tough with Mike Hancock

As ever, the real story is on Lib Dem Voice.

I am sorry about the East European subtitles, but I suspect Mike Hancock would appreciate them.

Social Liberal Forum claims Danny Alexander has gone native

The Independent reports concern among Liberal Democrats that Danny Alexander has "gone native" at the Treasury by endorsing George Osborne’s plans for more spending cuts well beyond next year’s election.

It quotes Prateek Buch, co-chair of the SLF, as saying:

“Cuts on the scale planned by Osborne just cannot be delivered. So why should Lib Dems endorse the Chancellor’s straitjacket? 

“It is beyond me why Danny would sign up to what appears to be joint Lib Dem/Tory spending plans going beyond the end of the next parliament, when no such figures have been agreed by his own party. 

“It is unhelpful to pre-empt the party’s manifesto process in this way. Besides, the plans take no account of the need to invest, or what will happen to GDP. What happened to differentiating ourselves from the Tories?”

The paper also quotes an unnamed "ally of Danny Alexander" as saying:

"These were figures drawn up by independent officials at the Treasury. They are not Conservative numbers or Lib Dem numbers. If he was setting out long-term spending plans, he would not do it in a press release attacking Ed Balls.”

As Stephen Tall pointed out when talking to the BBC - the video is embedded in this Lib Dem Voice post - Danny's enthusiasm for spending cuts has it limits: "He is making sure there are nice little sweeteners going the way of his constituents in Scotland."

What poverty does to people's thinking

The American Psychological Association website has a fascinating interview with the Princeton University psychology and public affairs professor Eldar Shafir.

Professor Shafir talks about his research into the degree to which people's minds are less efficient when they feel they lack something - whether it is money, time, calories or even companionship:

One of the classic errors that poor Americans are criticized for is taking "payday loans," those very high-interest loans that at the moment seem like a good solution but two weeks later cause them to owe high interest. So, we decided to run a study with Princeton undergraduates, who nobody would say are unsophisticated. 

Working with Anuj Shah, we had them play a "Family Feud"-like computer game and randomly assigned them to be rich or poor in the amount of time they had to answer questions, giving the rich 50 seconds per round and the poor 15 seconds. Half of the participants were also given the option to borrow time, but every second they borrowed cost two seconds from the entire bucket of time they had available for the game. 

We found that when people were rich with time they were very judicious, needed it less, and only very occasionally took a loan. But when they were time-poor, these sophisticated Princeton students grabbed these available loans to try and do well in the game and ended up making less money than the time-poor students who weren't given the option to borrow. These students made the same mistakes that we observed among poor people. 

What surprises you most about scarcity? 

What's most striking is that these findings make a very strong case for the idea that people who look very bad in conditions of scarcity are just as capable as the rest of us when scarcity does not impose itself on their minds. 

What's interesting about a lot of behavioral research is that we don't have full intuitive access to it. For example, research on the use of cellphones in cars has been striking because we all have the illusion that we can manage calls just fine. But the findings are clear that when you are on a cellphone in the car, even when it's not hand held, your reaction time is comparable to being legally drunk. That's not intuitively available to us because most of us just don't feel it. 

The same thing happens here. People know they're busy and distracted, but the impact and the consequences of that distraction are much more impressive than we realize

Lib Dem MEP fights to save the BBC's fake Chagall

I enjoy Fake or Fortune? - it's a painless way of learning about art history. But I imagine that the people who provided last week's painting were rather taken aback when they learnt that, thanks to the BBC, they face having it destroyed.

On reflection, though, I think this sort of jeopardy could improve a lot of BBC formats. You can still take your Troika or Clarice Cliff to Flog It!, but if it fails to reach its reserve at auction Paul Martin will smash it while making a weak pun.

Anyway, the Liberal Democrat MEP Edward McMillan-Scott is doing his best to save the fake Chagall. According to Politics.co.uk he has written to the internal markets commissioner Michel Bernier to plead for a stay of execution.

"I write to ask you to protect my constituent's rights in this matter by asking the Chagall Committee to take no action while some less drastic solution is found," he wrote. 

"At the very least, the picture may be evidence in a future criminal proceedings."

Meanwhile, you can read about the genuine Chagall windows at All Saints, Tudeley.

Norman Baker: At home at the Home Office

Norman Baker is interviewed in the new issue of Total Politics:

Baker’s colleague Vince Cable recently came out in support of the Guardian for publishing documents leaked by the former CIA employee, Edward Snowden. Baker also supports the paper and says he is particularly concerned about the accountability of the security services. 

“If you go back to history it was always the case that the security services were able to intercept every letter that was posted, or listen to every telephone call. But there was a process in place: they identified a person or a group of interest, they then produced some evidence and they then were authorised by an external person, such as the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary. 

“We need to make sure anything which is done is accompanied by proper processes which are accountable to parliament... if we can get that process right then I think that’s more important than what actually [the security services] are able to monitor”

Phil Daniels and Michael Aldridge in Raven

I have vague memories of the children's television series Raven and even of owning the paperback novelisation of it, but in truth I was a bit old for that sort of thing by 1977.

A bit of googling finds this video and a summary of what it was about:

Raven, a 15-year-old Borstal boy, is released on probation to live with Professor Young, an archaeologist immersed in research into Arthurian legend, and his wife, an amateur ornithologist. The professor is working in deep underground caves whose carved symbols suggest that King Arthur may have used them as a hiding place, and Raven is intrigued by his belief that Arthur was not one man, but a succession of chiefs...

And it turns out to star Phil Daniels and Michael Aldridge, who also played Percy Alleline and Seymour Utterthwaite.

Nice pyjamas, Phil.

The Pupil Premium is hitting the middle classes

A report in the Daily Telegraph last week said:

The future of England’s grammar schools is under threat because education funding is being diverted towards deprived pupils with poor exam results, the head teacher of the country’s top-performing secondary has warned. ... 

Paul Evans, the head of Colyton grammar in Devon, said tackling underperformance in poor areas was a “laudable aim” but insisted it had “serious unintended consequences” for schools such as his.

I find myself unconcerned by this. Not because I think grammar schools are wicked, but because this is exactly the effect the Pupil Premium was meant to have.

Some have seen the Pupil Premium as rooted in the fact that children from poor families are more likely to have problems and therefore they require more funding.

That is true to an extent, but I have always seen the Pupil Premium having a different genesis. It recognises that there are good schools and bad schools, and that children from poor families tend to be steered towards the bad schools - I blogged about this theory a couple of years ago.

The idea of the Pupil Premium thus becomes to give the good schools an incentive to take more children from poor families. As I suggested back in 2009, the inspiration for this may come from higher education, where universities have always been keen to recruit students from overseas because they pay higher fees.

So the answer for Colyton grammar is to find more bright pupils from poor homes. If they cannot or will not do so, then any moral case for its continued existence as a grammar school is weakened.

The question for the Liberal Democrats then becomes, as I pointed out in that 2009 post, how we are to sell it to middle class voters when their children will not benefit from it or even suffer from it.

Part of Market Harborough police station to be demolished to save money

From the Leicester Mercury:

Part of a town's police station is to be knocked down to save money on heating and provide four extra parking spaces. 

Plans have been lodged for the building in Fairfield Road, in Market Harborough. 

It follows a £150,000 programme last year when all the windows were replaced to save on heating bills.

The Lilac Time: American Eyes

As I wrote years ago when choosing a song by Clive Gregson and Christine Collister, I used to listen to John Shaw's radio programme on Sunday evenings.

I remember him interviewing Stephen Duffy about his new band The Lilac Time. In those days Duffy was known as a founder member of Duran Duran and had had hits as Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy, but The Lilac Time - its name taken from a Nick Drake song - was clearly an attempt at seriousness.

During the interview Shaw played a Lilac Time tracks called American Eyes and here it is.

These days Duffy is best known for his writing and production for Robbie Williams and people make documentaries about him.

All Through the Night (1960)

Time for another of the Rank Organisation's "Look at Life" films. This one - made in the year I was born - looks at long distance lorry drivers who travel through the night to get the goods delivered.

Six of the Best 417

"The crucial thing for the Liberal Democrats is whether differentiating themselves from the Conservatives, the visceral anti-Toryism of progressive voters, and Ukip, can save the suburban and south-western seats they hold against the Tories." Lewis Baston discusses how the Liberal Democrats will do at the next election over at Progress Online.

Lynne Featherstone wants us to join her campaign to end female genital mutilation in a generation.

"The Hudson was so polluted that wooden boats from the Caribbean would sail up the river so that the water’s poisons would kill the bore worms that were damaging their hulls." Joseph Berger writes about Pete Seeger's role in saving the Hudson River in the New York Times.

"Bagehot is not entirely forgotten ... but exactly who or what he was is now a little fuzzy in our minds. A few stray bons mots about the monarchy, some connection with the Economist (which keeps his memory green in the pseudonym of a regular columnist) – that is as much as most of us can dredge up." Ferdinand Mount reviews a biography of Walter Bagehot for the London Review of Books.

The Plains of Almeria - under the title "The strange case of Gael Kakuta" - asks if Chelsea's policy of loaning their starlets to lesser clubs is backfiring: "Josh McEachran is a prime example of a player who has impressed in the Chelsea first team but struggled to make an impact on loan."

English Lakes Blog on a homage to the lost Eric Ravilious mural at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe.

Pompey by Jonathan Meades

I had to collect a parcel from the sorting office this morning. It turned out to be a  novel I had ordered to help me understand recent events in the Liberal Democrats.

In his introduction to Pompey Simon Heffer writes:

This is an epic of the South Country, stretching over thirty years (and this is just in its English locations) from Wiltshire to Southampton and finally to the eponymous city itself, Portsmouth, a place brim-full of freaks and monsters and restless social mobility for whom 'dystopian' is an inadequate adjective.

You will see what I mean.

There is a claim about recent events in Portsmouth that disturbs me, but that I feel I am bound to pass on.

Adrian Lee says of Mike Hancock in the Daily Express:

He is said to have wooed her with wine, House of Commons mints and Steve Winwood music.

Northampton Past and Present 5

People who enjoyed part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 are in for a treat.