Matthew Engel foresees the strange death of Labour England

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Labour is in many ways clueless, disunited and perhaps in terminal decline. Whatever happens in the by-elections, it faces another crisis in the mayoral elections in May: the Tories are now favourites to win in Birmingham and there are worries even about Corbyn’s former rival Andy Burnham in Manchester.

Last summer I reviewed Engel's England, in which Matthew Engel visited all 39 English counties.

He has been on his travels again, visiting the Labour campaign in Stoke-on-Trent Central for the Financial Times. He found it in an almost comically suspicious of him:

Even before I left home, Chris Lee, the Labour party’s press officer in the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency, made it clear that the Financial Times would not be allowed to interview their candidate in this month’s by-election. Nor could I accompany their canvassers on the streets. 

On arrival, the restrictions were tightened. I could not talk to any other Labour members either. Asked if it was OK to speak to anyone at all in Stoke-on-Trent, Lee seemed to think it over before concluding that might be a problem.

He need not have worried. The Labour campaign is also inept, so these restrictions soon fell apart.

Engel also offers an interesting analysis of the reasons for this long-term decline, quoting Mark Seddon:

“Within the party the soft middle-class drifted away over Iraq. The hard left stayed and fought their corner,” says Seddon. Thus, a decade later, the left had the numbers in the constituencies to elect Corbyn."

Corwen to Rhyl: The Vale of Clwyd Railway

This North Wales line opened in 1858. It was closed to passengers in 1955 and to freight in 1962.

You can read its history on the Rhyl History Club site and on the Corwen station page on Disused Stations.

Conservative councillor in "Donald Trump-style rant" says "I'm not giving my pay rise back"

Note to local councillors: do not get on the wrong side of the local paper.

Here is the Surrey Comet:

Councillor David Barnard, who received a basic allowance of £4,500, along with a ‘Special Responsibility Allowance’ of £7,875, as well as claiming ‘Travel and Subsistence’ expenses of a further £1,426.65 for the tax year 2015/16 derisively slammed public opinion tonight calling for him and fellow Conservative councillors to return the money in Letchworth. 

In an astonishingly angry diatribe Mr Barnard, who represents the ward of Hitchwood, Offa and Hoo, shouted loudly, pointed aggressively and threateningly during his rant – stunning those assembled to debate North Herts District Council’s 2017/18 budget at a public meeting held at the town’s historic Spirella building. 

A visibly distressed Mr Barnard thundered defiantly: “I will not be giving my pay rise back.” 

Referring to previous Comet stories about the contentious pay rises of between 11 and 19 per cent which Conservative councillors voted themselves, Mr Barnard shouted aggressively about ‘the local rag’ angrily pointing his finger at the media desk in an apparent loss of control.

Blimey.

The only good thing to come out of this sorry affair is that Hitchwood, Offa and Hoo is our Ward of the Week.

Welcome to Northamptonshire and the 1980s

I took this photograph in the early 1980s, but the county sign makes it look as though it could have come from a Shell guide of the 1950s. Except there would probably have been more hedgerows in those days.

It was taken by the A427, just east of Market Harborough. I remember walking up to Dingley and then back to town via Braybrooke.

The social and religious background to John Smyth

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Cathy Newman and Channel 4 News have been offering some good reporting in recent days, investigating the case of John Smyth.

The late Mary Whitehouse's go-to lawyer, he has been accused of savagely beating teenage boys and young men in Britain, and other allegations of inappropriate behaviour have emerged in in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

So far he has made no statement admitting or denying the allegations.

Today I have come across two article that fill in the social and religious background to the affair.

Matthew Scott was a pupil at Winchester, the school to which Smyth attached himself. He describes the religious atmosphere of the place of the wider upper-class circles in which the man moved:

Smyth’s apparent taste for flagellation first came to the attention of the Church in 1982 after his behaviour was reported to the Iwerne Trust, a Church organisation that, amongst other things, organised “Christian summer camps” for public school-boys. One of the aims was to foster their leadership potential. Mr Smyth was the Chairman of the Trust. 

To my mind, even without the beatings, the camps sound perfectly horrible on every conceivable level, and so they apparently were for some of those who came under the spell of Mr Smyth.

Meanwhile, Giles Fraser is critical of the church authorities' haste to deny any connection between abuse and some forms of religious teaching.

And he says that failure to face the truth arises naturally from the movement of which Smyth was a member:

Beatings aside, the other problem with the Smyth holiday camps was that they discouraged theological reflection. The camps were founded by Rev Eric Nash – or Bash as he was unfortunately known. He called himself the “commandant”, his deputy was the “adjutant”, other leaders were “officers”. 

Even among evangelicals, he was noted for his hostility to the critical reflection of theology. He “regarded theologians with suspicion and mistrust”, said Rev Michael Green. 

Moreover, as John King wrote in his book The Evangelicals, “controversy is eschewed by ‘Bash campers’; it is held to be noisy and undignified – and potentially damaging. As a result, many issues that ought to be faced are quietly avoided … any who question are liable to find themselves outside the pale. It does not give a place to the process of argument, consultation and independent thought.” 

From Alpha to archbishop, these camps produced the current leadership of the Church of England.

Let us end by noting that evangelicals fought to keep corporal punishment in British schools even after the teaching unions had given up on the idea.

Oh, and Smyth's son is pastor of the Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is cut from the same religious cloth and has in the past had its own problems with accusations of abuse.

Six of the Best 665

"While a number of British think tanks are open about who funds them ... some of the most influential think tanks which impact on current Tory government policy are extremely secretive." David Hencke looks at a new report on who funds the people who work to influence government policy.

Sidney Blumenthal offers a riveting history of the Trump family.

Richard Smith discusses the career of Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal foreign secretary who led Britain into the First World War.

"She told me so much about those strange and unhappy children, and she was puzzled and perplexed by what she might have been able to do to connect with them in some way. She never knew what it was called, but she was an Autism Advocate well before her time." Yvonne Newbold on her mother and 70 years of autism.

Heather Rae on the significance of the dual bodies of hybrid monsters in Greek mythology.

"House cats would not exist without humans, but we didn’t really create them, nor do we control them now. Our relationship is less about ownership than aiding and abetting." John Gray examines what cats can teach us about how to live.

Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex

We had a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 (the Summer of Love) when I was seven.

I remember the train from Ashford to Rye and that there were people collecting signatures to keep the line open. Luckily, they succeeded.

Anyway, this is another banter-rich video from Londonist.

Hamster fed LSD-spiked Tizer and cannabis in Heysham

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award, but please don't try this at home kids.

The importance of the archaeology and standing buildings of Leicester

Matthew Morris, one of the leaders of the dig that found Richard III, gave this talk last November to a conference on 'Planning Leicester - Town Planning and the Historic Environment since the 1960s'.

Lib Dem candidate is the favourite in West of England mayoral race

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The Bristol Post has promising news:

Former Bristol West MP Stephen Williams has been chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate for the Metro Mayor election in May – and has immediately become the bookies' favourite to win. 

Mr Williams, a former Local Government Minister, was nominated by party members after a vote between himself and former Bristol cabinet councillor Simon Cook.

According to the Post, Ladbrokes is quoting the following odds for the contest to be mayor of the West of England:

Stephen Williams (Lib Dem) - Evens
Conservative - 11/10
Labour - 7/1
Green - 50/1
Ukip - 100/1

I am not the greatest fan of elected mayors, and the idea of a mayor for the West of England sounds silly.

But it turns out to cover a sort of Greater Bristol, taking in the Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire council areas as well as the city itself.

Liberal England wishes Stephen the best of luck for the contest (and hopes he will now drop the 'MP' from his Twitter handle).

If you want to help him win, Andrew Brown on Lib Dem Voice tells you how.

Angela Rayner thinks the Tories are "selling off" the green belt

The gov't should not be selling off our green belt to private developers;we need low cost housing built with the right public infrastructure

— Angela Rayner MP (@AngelaRayner) February 7, 2017

We know Richard Burgon is a laughing stock, but Angela Rayner has been getting good notices - at least from her colleagues.

So how to explain this tweet she sent today?

The government, of course, cannot sell off the green belt because it does not own it. The debate is about whether local authorities should be allowed or compelled to grant developers permission to build on it.

I think we are entitled to expect a member of the shadow cabinet to have grasped that.

But then I am puzzled by all the talk in the media about local authorities being forced to sell their land.

Are local authorities really sitting on large land holding? Maybe large authorities are, but when I was a councillor in a rural district 30 years ago we owned very little land even then.

I suspect a lot of journalists don't understand this debate either

Bentlawnt and the Hope Valley, Shropshire

This is deep Shropshire, west of the Stiperstones and hard against the Welsh border.

The video blends stunning drone shots from today with photos from 50 years ago or more.

Some of the locations have featured on this blog, including Hope church and the new Hope school.

In one of the photographs of the farm sale you can see the while hillocks of Snailbeach in the distance.

The structure shown on the 19th century photograph of the lead workings at Roman Gravels was blown up by the Royal Engineers during Word War II as a training exercise.

Stewart Lee joins the Liberal Democrats

He probably looked fat and depressed when he did it, and he is certainly operating two levels of irony beyond the appreciation of his keenest fans, but Stewart Lee has joined the Liberal Democrats.

The news was announced in an Observer column yesterday:

My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat.

Welcome aboard, Stewart. Some of us admitted defeat when we were teenagers.

These passages in his column caught my attention:

But, with Trump’s trade deal help, at least our bananas will be bendy again. And on 1 February 2019, a man dressed as a sensible pirate will stand at the foot of an obelisk in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and blow an enchanted bendy horn, a horn only to be blown in Britain’s hour of need. And when that bendy horn is blown, as if by magic, all the straight bananas in Brexit Britain will suddenly bend once more, never to be straight again.

And:

Ripon constituency’s referendum split reflected pretty much the national percentages, at 52% to 48% in favour of the reinstatement of perpetually bendy bananas, hence its horn duty. I have already booked a room at the Weatherspoon’s in Ripon square for 2019, in order to be at the epicentre of the people’s populist banana-bending revolution. 

Weatherspoon’s owner Tim Martin, a vocal opponent of straight bananas, funded a boisterous chapbook ridiculing the insolent yellow fruits, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Straight Bananas. And Tim has promised to be at his Ripon outlet personally on bendy banana day, handing out free bendy bananas to his regular clientele of terminally nostalgic drinkers and plucky all-day breakfasteers, toasting their own imminent obsolescence.

It did so because I have stayed at the Weatherspoon's in Ripon square. There it is in the photograph above.

I am not a Weatherspoon's fan, but it was a large, clean room with a big television and there was another pub serving the rarer Timothy Taylor's brews just round the corner. What more do you need?

I like Europe and Stewart Lee and the Ripon hornblower and its obelisk. One day we shall draw them all together.

Tim Farron backs John Bercow over Donald Trump

The leader of the Liberal Democrats was interviewed on BBC1's News at Six this evening.

He was right to support John Bercow.

Market Harborough canal basin before redevelopment

The warehouse in a pleasingly derelict state has now been restored and is The Waterfront - restaurant and home of Market Harborough's first gin bar.

You can see footage of the town's canal basin before it was redeveloped in another post on this blog.

Embraced by the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness

The Sunday Times reports:

Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools, including one Church of England primary that has had a “100% Muslim population”. 

St Thomas in Werneth, Oldham, is reported by the local diocese to have no Christian pupils, while at Staincliffe C of E Junior School in Batley, West Yorkshire, 98% of pupils “come from a Muslim background”, according to its most recent religious inspection report in 2015. 

The Church of England estimated that about 20 of its schools had more Muslim pupils than Christians and 15 Roman Catholic schools had majority Muslim pupils, according to the Catholic Education Service.

At that point the paywall kicks in so I can't tell you any more, but I suspect we are meant to disapprove.

I think it is good news.

And to show you why, here is a passage from Timothy Garton Ash's 2004 book Free World. I liked it so much I put it on my long-neglected anthology blog Serendib:

The manner in which people of different nationalities and ethnicities coexist in London, and to a lesser degree in other British cities and regions, is unmatched in Europe. Here is a peculiarly British way of tolerance. It starts, perhaps, with the habits of privacy and mutual indifference (“live and let live”, “an Englishman’s home is his castle”). 

It continues with the baggy, undemanding nature of “Britishness”, a woolly duffle-coat of an identity that from the start had to embrace four national identities English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. Only in pragmatic, illogical Britain could a rugby match between England and Scotland be called a “home international”. But as the world has come back to the post-imperial island, so the duffle-coat of Britishness has stretched to accommodate many other identities. 

In future censuses, we are told, we shall be able to categorise ourselves as “Afro-Caribbean English”, “Chinese Welsh”, or “Asian Scottish”. Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah. 

So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.

Kevin Ayers: Oh! Wot a Dream

Last week's magpie went down well, so here is another bird.

Oh! Wot a Dream is about Kevin Ayers' friend Syd Barrett,the founder of Pink Floyd. I detect the influence of Lewis Carroll and Viv Stanshall too.

This performance comes from the same Old Grey Whistle Test session as Shouting in a Bucket Blues.

Six of the Best 664

"The Liberal Democrats led a battle in the Lords to get the Government to change the law to pardon all those gay men convicted under the dreadful Labouchère amendment and similar Acts." John Sharkey on the success of a Lib Dem campaign.

Alex Massie says people who protest against Donald Trump are not the problem: they are right. And in The Spectator of all places.

"Reading it in January 2016 seemed strangely appropriate, as we grapple with new authoritarianism and protest. The scenery may change but the stories remain similar." Nicholas Whyte encounters V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore,

Stephen Pentz blogs an essay on beauty.

Backwatersman now has a second blog. On it he walks from Luton Airport Parkway to Harpenden.

"Playing 'one of the stately homos of England' and 'the greatest god of all' within the span of a year had a huge impact on a generation of young teenagers, of which I was one at the time. Frank Collins pays tribute to John Hurt.

Row over fantabulosa servicette at Cambridge theological college

The news today is that Westcott House in Cambridge, a leading Church of England theological college, has apologised for its students attempts to 'queer' evensong.

As the Guardian tells it:

Student priests at Westcott House in Cambridge organised the evensong service on Tuesday in the college chapel. Advertised as a "Polari evening prayer in anticipation of LGBT+ history month”, it was described as a “liturgical experiment" ...

A prayer referred to the "Fantabulosa fairy" and ended: "Praise ye the Duchess. The Duchess’s name be praised." Psalm 19 was reworded to refer to "O Duchess, my butchness".

Speaking as an atheist, I find this rather endearing.

But then Polari reminds me of childhood Sunday lunchtimes and Round the Horne, In that wonderful radio comedy Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, as Julian and Sandy, introduced the wider world to this gay argot.

I have read that the downside of this was it lost its usefulness to gay men - Polari is not a good way of hiding your meaning if your maiden aunt can understand it because she listens to the radio.

The story also reminds me of my reactions the first time I attended evensong in a cathedral - it was York Minster.

My reaction was first that Christianity feels very Eastern and it is remarkable that it established itself so thorough in these green, Western islands.

And second it was that the service was not just theatrical, but camp - men in frocks, pretty boys and so on - which made it more appealing.

So I think the students at Westcott House may have been on to something, and one day we shall find out who was right.

As Paul wrote of heaven to the Corinthians,

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then eek to eek.

Richmond station departure board, 1983

Note that in 1983 North London Line trains still terminated at Broad Street.

I photographed that long lost terminus too and will share my shots with you one day.