L.A. Salami: Generation L(ost)

David Christiensen explains:

London-based Lookman Adekunle Salami, known as L.A. Salami, is equally adept playing a full club or a quiet living room. On stage he’s a whirl of acerbic energy, eschewing guitar to throw himself into singing and leading his band in between asides to the audience. His songs are crowded with restlessness observations of modern life and indictments of modern urbanisation, the treatment of refugees and race.

He released this single last year.

Floods at Nottingham Station, 1947

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This extraordinary photograph shows Nottingham station - Nottingham Midland as it would have been in those days - during the floods of 1947.

I once blogged about those floods, which hit the Fens hardest but affected other areas too.

The waters that inundated Nottingham Midland must have come from the Trent via the Nottingham Canal, which runs beside the station.

You can also see the overbridge that carried the Great Central on its way to Nottingham Victoria and Sheffield.

I remember it from my trainspotting days in the 1970s - in fact it was used by freight trains until 1973.

These took a complicated route involving the locomotives running round their trains in the city centre to serve the Ministry of Defence depot at Ruddington.

The need for the bridge disappeared when a simple curve was put it at Loughborough for the Ruddington trains to use and it was removed in the early 1980s.

When Nottingham's new tram system was extended south of the city a few years ago, a viaduct was built on the same alignment.

Ian Jack on The Causes of Brexit

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England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. 

Charles Dickens skewered a certain school of political journalism in Bleak House, but that school is pre-eminent today.

It's all about who's up and who' down among a small cast of players. Hot takes are filed on the hour. And, though I have always had a weakness for gossip myself, it's almost all instantly forgettable.

At my more thoughtful I prefer commentators like Neal Ascherson and Ian Jack who can bring a historical perspective to bear on contemporary events.

In today's Guardian Ian Jack sets out The Causes of Brexit (as he had to The Causes of the First World War as a schoolboy) and identifies eight of them:

• Deindustrialisation
• Immigration
• Cultural dementia
• The Dam Busters
• English exceptionalism
• The playing fields of Eton
• The newspapers
• Complacency

He writes under this last head:

During the Scottish referendum campaign in the summer of 2014 I met a painter and decorator on the island of Bute who said he was voting for Scottish independence. “You have to.” Why? He knew people in Sunderland, “and every one of them wants to leave Europe”. Sunderland, with its big car factory that exported cars to the continent? Surely not. “Yes, they want to leave.” He laughed at the daftness of it. I didn’t believe him.

And there was a lot of complacency about.

David Cameron and George Osborne had convinced themselves they were political geniuses. So what if the right wanted to limit who could vote in the referendum to skew the electorate in favour of Leave? They were bound to win it anyway.

Who was put in charge of the Remain campaign? Jack Straw's son, whose life had hardly been one of political struggle, and the mastermind of the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election campaign.

And if half the passion that has been put into Remain since the referendum had been evident during the actual campaign the result might have been different. That said, much of that passion has been devoted to laughing at or demonising the people who voted Leave, which is hardly likely to win them over.

Anyway, read Ian Jack's piece for yourself and read him in the Guardian every Saturday - there is an archive of his columns on the paper's website.

Six of the Best 773

Rally round Theresa May? No chance, says Cicero.

Tim Crook argues that the public has a right to know about Max Mosley's past: "His past connection with the xenophobic Union movement clearly haunts his present. Its participation in British elections exploited and sowed the winds of interracial conflict. It was associated with violence and it caused fear and anxiety for so many non-white British people."

"It is important that we are viewed as integral and valued members of university otherwise universities view us merely as financial pawns and our concerns will only ever be tackled from a financial perspective." Maelo Manning says students should support striking university staff.

Philip Wilkinson celebrates The Leaves of Southwell.

"To get here Barry’s had to battle through a mile of snowdrifts, cross the swing-bridge over the canal, negotiate two major roads and cross the hilly disused farm behind the library that will soon become a shopping centre. On his own. In the snow. Five days after his own ninth birthday." Things really were different in 1963, as Ronnie Hughes shows.

JohnBoy pays tribute to the Leicester-born humourist Michael Green, who has died at the age of 91.

Stewart Lee and Iain Sinclair on The Last London

We've heard Iain Sinclair talking with Alan Moore about London. Here he is doing it with Stewart Lee.

As the blurb from the London Review Bookshop says:

Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life, and if any of us can even begin to understand this peculiar sort of city that we sort of call a sort of home, then it's with Sinclair that we begin. 

The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent. 

At our event at St. George's, Bloomsbury, he talked about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere.

The Lib Dems checked Stasi files for Agent Cob

An intriguing paragraph from Keven Maguire's Commons Confidential in the New Statesman:

Maybe the Sun, Daily Express,​ Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph weren’t particularly interested in the truth when smearing Comrade Corbyn as a Cold War spy. 

But Mansfield’s expensively humiliated Tory vice chair Ben Bradley could have saved himself a small fortune and a grovel if he’d asked the Lib Dems. 

The sneaky yellow peril checked Stasi files three years ago and discovered that Corbyn wasn’t on the books. Eastern bloc agents were uninterested in the secrets of Jezza’s damson jam recipe.

Once gaining such intelligence would have involved Paddy Ashdown conducting a break in like Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

These days we probably send a student along to the library with a packet of sandwiches.

Demolition of Bishop's Castle chapel put on hold

From the Shropshire Star:

Work was scheduled to start on January 22 to bring down Bishop's Castle Methodist Chapel, which members say is no longer fit for purpose. 

But when fences and machinery appeared at the site, concerns were raised to Shropshire Council about what the loss of the building would mean for the town. 

The council has now issued an 'Article 4 Direction' on the building, which introduces the requirement for planning permission for something which would not normally need it - in this case demolition. 

The direction, under the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 2015, will expire after six months unless it is confirmed by the council in that time.

It's not a great building, hut it is an important part of the Station Street scene and I hope it will be saved.

George Osborne finally hits an economic target

From BBC News:

David Cameron and George Osborne have hailed their austerity plan after the former chancellor's deficit reduction target was finally met. 

The day-to-day deficit has been eliminated two years later than Mr Osborne wanted when he set it in 2010. 

Mr Osborne tweeted: "We got there in the end - a remarkable national effort." Mr Cameron replied: "It was the right thing to do."

Six of the Best 772

"To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy?" William Davies tries to work out the answer.

Adam Bennett argues that the Liberal Democrats should adopt Universal Basic Income as a policy.

"While the Lancet paper is a nice piece of work, it tells us very little that we didn’t already know, and it has a number of limitations. The media reaction to the paper is frankly bananas." Neuroskeptic takes a cool look at the widely reported study of the benefits of antidepressants.

"My university and, I’m betting, the lion’s share of universities in the pre-92 sector, have a peculiar sickness: an addiction to free labour. Like other addictions, it started innocently enough, but has become an all-consuming monster." Marianne O’Doherty offers a personal view of the university pensions strike.

Terence Towles Canote on how Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte changed television history.

The original giant station clock from St Pancras can be found on a farm at Thurgaton in Nottinghamshire. Thurgarton History explains why.

Jonathan Meades in the New Forest

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The great man has reviewed New Forest: The Forging of a Landscape by Hadrian Cook for the Literary Review:

There have also been clearances. The forest’s gypsies suffered the ignominious fate, almost a century ago, of being herded into compounds, which Augustus John described as concentration camps. John, unmentioned by Cook, also railed against fences, hedgerows and enclosures as manifestations of land theft, to be corrected by squatting - hence places such as Nomansland. 

All along the beguiling, ragged forest edges - within or without the boundaries, according to which agency’s map and regulations you consult - there were proto-villages and scrappy hamlets that have been lost forever. They were precious and perhaps inevitably destined to be provisional. There was some affinity with plotlands and even Appalachian dirt farms.

Don't go along with Jacob Rees-Mogg's act by attacking him for being posh or old fashioned.

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The thing about really posh people is that they make it look effortless. Think of Prince William or David Cameron. 

True, Cameron's inner Flashman could soon appear if he was thwarted, but Prince William probably does not even think of himself in this way. It just comes naturally to him. 

At the other end of the spectrum are those for whom being posh is hard work. They make everything a little bit too obvious. 

Take Boris Johnson. He was plucked from the same North London primary school the Miliband brothers attended and sent to prep school and then Eton. 

You feel that he has been trying a little too hard to fit in ever since.

That is from a post I wrote last autumn.

I went on to suggest that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Johnson not a Cameron.

Michael White, writing in The New European recently, shared this analysis:

It prompted me to make inquiries of my own into the Rees-Moggs, routinely described in newspapers which should know better (but no longer do) as aristocratic. That is not so and prompts one of my grander friends to dismiss Mogg’s elaborate style as “very nouveau, a faux gent”. 

Reference books quickly reveal that Richard Mogg (1690-1729) purchased the medieval manor of Cholwell in Somerset in 1726 and that by 1805 the family’s heiress, Mary Mogg Wooldridge, had married a Welshman, called John Rees who doubled up their names and coats of arms. 

The couple’s son, William Rees-Mogg, pulled down Cholwell in 1855 and rebuilt, as upwardly-mobile Victorians did. Minor gentry on the make, vicars, farmers, soldiers, sheriffs of Somerset, a familiar story to readers of Trollope novels. 

Jacob’s own father, another William Rees-Mogg (1928-2012), was editor of the Times and much else, a great quangocrat who married his secretary and ended up in the House of Lords. Cholwell had long been sold, the Moggs had become Catholic – William’s mother was an Irish-American, a Catholic and (Heaven forbid!) an actress.

As well as from his business activities, Jacob's money comes from his marriage to Helena de Chair, the daughter of a Conservative MP and his heiress fourth wife,.

Jacob's father William Rees-Mogg ended up as editor of The Times, but it took him a long time to be accepted into the establishment.

When he did his National Service in the RAF he was not given a Commission. Too brainy, presumably. Not in the 1st XV at Charterhouse.

Being a Rees-Mogg is hard work, as an Old Etonian informant of White's confirmed:

"True blue bloods were always rather lovable yobs, like mongrels," he explains. "Would-be grandees accumulated behavioural traits they had read about in PG Wodehouse. Jacob doesn’t get noblesse oblige, an ethical system destroyed by Thatcher. His clothes are issued by a theatrical costumer, his children’s names a pale imitation of Evelyn Waugh."

Which suggests that if there is a political point to all this is that we should not play along with his act by calling him "the Member for the 18th century" or anything like that. It is just how he wants to be seen.

Meanwhile, the only electorate that matters to Jacob Rees-Mogg at the moment is the rapidly declining and rapidly ageing Conservative membership.

They love someone playing the toff. After all, they fell for Boris Johnson's act and have now fallen for Rees-Mogg's more elegant one.

If I were an ambitious young Tory I would go the full Bertie Wooster, wear a monocle and play the banjolele. That electorate would probably fall for it.

Theresa May warned two days before the referendum that Brexit would make a hard Irish border inevitable

MUST WATCH: shocking video in which Theresa May tells the truth about what Brexit will really mean for the Northern Ireland border.

Everybody needs to see this so they know the real facts. Please RT: pic.twitter.com/s8HBLr5JVw

— Open Britain (@Open_Britain) March 1, 2018

We shall see if she has the courage to repeat that truth in her speech tomorrow.

This video was posted on Twitter today by Open Britain.

Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair on The Last London

Two of the grand old, grumpy old, men of psychogeography in conversation at The House of the Last London, Gallery 46, Whitechapel.

There will be no Arts Fresco this year

The organisers of Arts Fresco - Market Harborough's celebrated street theatre festival - have announced that it will not take place in 2018:

The organising committee for the Arts Fresco street theatre festival in Market Harborough has unanimously agreed to give the festival a year off in 2018. 

After another tremendously successful event in 2017 with record visitor numbers, high profile UK and international performers, and highly positive feedback from acts and the audience, we now need to focus on generating more sustainable, longer-term funding models to secure the festival’s future, and also to give the volunteer organising committee a well-deserved break. 

The festival will return on Sunday, 22 September 2019.

First news of the plans for next year will appear on the Arts Fresco website.

Six of the Best 771

Waseem Yaqoob explains why university staff are striking: "The success of the strike will depend to a large extent on how students respond. Jeremiads about the future of the universities depict the students as consumerist monads. But a survey carried out earlier this week reveals that, though students are split on the strike, most of them blame the government, their university or their vice chancellor. Only one in twenty blames the union."

"Many of the students I see complain that the moment they have a free hour, their parent rushes in to fill it." William Stixrud and Ned Johnson make the case for "the self-driven child".

Generation Tree pays tribute to the pioneers who planted trees in Britain's parks and streets.

Scientism is taken to task by Massimo Pigliucci. It's: "An exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)."

"Tippett’s music is brimming with energy and ebullience, seemingly celebrating the challenge of humanity to bring together darkness and light. It engages with questions of war, sexuality, race, and class in ways that are highly relevant in today’s world of heightened political and social tensions." Will Frampton says Michael Tippett is a composer for our time.

The Gentle Author on the rediscovery of three lost panels by East End artist Cecil Osborne (1909-96) that once hung in St Pancras Town Hall.

Private Eye, snobbery and The Antiques Roadshow

There is a silly little item in the current Private Eye.

It begins:

Hard times at the BBC, where it appears even the treasured Antiques Roadshow must make cutbacks. 

The roster for the forthcoming series has been announced and settings will include the spectacular Crathes Castles (sic) in Aberdeenshire, Buckfast Abbey in Devon, Eltham Palace in Greenwich and, er, Media City in Salford.

It's years since I made a point of watching the show, but what made Antiques Roadshow interesting was precisely that ordinary people could turn up with extraordinary and valuable objects.

And in its early days at least, the programme often came from pretty mundane locations - Market Harborough Leisure Centre, for instance.

In fact it was Roadshow's later obsession with historic houses that put me off it. The inserts in which the presenter fawned over Lord and Lady Muck and their treasures were usually a bore.

Behind this item, I fear, lies Private Eye's original sin of snobbery. How, they ask, could people in somewhere like Salford possibly have anything of interest to show us?

Church spires should be beacons of energy in the landscape

From BBC News the other day:

Church spires could be used to boost mobile and broadband coverage in rural areas under an agreement between the UK government and the Church of England. 

The government has committed to achieving good-quality mobile connectivity across the UK by 2022. 

While the agreement encourages churches to sign up, they will still have to negotiate the usual planning process. 

Digital analysts welcomed the development but said "the devil would be in the detail".

I have heard of churches being used to boost signals in this way before and I like the idea. They are and should be beacons of energy in the landscape.

The danger, I suppose, is that this scheme may bring ancient ley lines to life and cause wolves to run or the darkness to rise. Worse, it may turn out that it is the Devil in the detail.

But on the whole I think it's a chance worth taking.

Eels: The Deconstruction

This is the title track from an album to be released in April.

It sounds very Nineties to me, but then that is when Eels started out.

Round 94 of Andrew Bridgen vs Keith Vaz

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It is no secret that Andrew Bridgen (Conservative MP for Leicestershire North West) and Keith Vaz (Labour MP for Leicester East) do not get on, much as it was no secret that relations were a little strained between the Montagues and Capulets.

The latest round in their long bout can be found in a Mail Online article from last week.

Pow!

Andrew Bridgen wants the National Crime Agency to use new powers created to crackdown on crime gangs to investigate the Labour MP. 

Mr Bridgen claimed in a letter that Mr Vaz owns eight homes in the UK, more property in India and sends his children to fee-paying schools on his MP salary of £74,962. 

Mr Vaz received an extra £15,025 a year during his time as chairman of the home affairs committee until he resigned in September 2016 amid a rent boy scandal. 

Mr Bridgen said in the letter this income did not justify the expenditure and called for an 'Unexplained Wealth Order investigation'.

Zap!

Mr Vaz referred MailOnline to Carter Ruck. A spokesman said: "Mr Vaz considers Mr Bridgen's cowardly actions in peddling malicious, highly defamatory and utterly false allegations in this way to be wholly reprehensible, albeit unsurprising given Mr Bridgen's track record. 

"Mr Vaz will be considering appropriate legal action against Mr Bridgen and also ask the NCA or other relevant authorities to investigate Mr Bridgen for wasting public resources by pressuring them into investigating his vexatious and malicious 'complaints''."

Lib Dem councillor takes temporary charge of City of York Council

The Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser once described Ludlow Town Council as "beleaguered" and "in meltdown".

So far The Press (which was called the Yorkshire Evening Press when I was a student) has avoided such language when talking about City of York Council, but the day cannot be far off.

Take yesterday's report:

York's Conservative leader says he is "in talks" on renewing the deal to run the city council with the Lib Dems, after councillors failed to agree on a new leader. 

Cllr Ian Gillies was elected leader of City of York Council's Conservative group earlier this month, but last night could not get enough votes to become the council leader - with the Liberal Democrats and opposition councillors voting down his nomination. 

With his predecessor Cllr David Carr resigning and accusing his fellow Conseravtives of betrayal, that left with authority with no leader and Lib Dem deputy council leader Cllr Andrew Waller in temporary charge. 

A second Conservative councillor, Suzie Mercer, also resigned from the party.

Since the 2015 elections the council has been run by an uneasy Conservative and Liberal Democrat administration.

Relations between the two parties were not helped when David Carr had two Lib Dem councillors suspended from the executive for reasons that remain obscure.