Andy Burnham peddles an absurd view of the North

It's been floated by Boris Johnson, so there will be no more substance to it than there was to his bridge over this Irish Sea, but I like the idea of moving the House of Lords to York.

York is a wonderful historic city and the upper house should be elected from the nations and regions and meet well away from London.

Not everyone is happy with the idea:

Oh dear! This is a misunderstanding of York, which is indeed a lovely city, with a superb Minster. But (sadly) we do also have food banks, and homeless people, and hungry children. We had it in Joseph Rowntree's day and we have it now. We do.

— sue mendus (@mendus_sue) July 12, 2020

At least Morrell Professor Emerita in Political Philosophy Sue Mendus, who taught me at the University of York many years ago, put Burnham right.

Burnham has always traded on being from the North of England, but this is not the first time he has adopted a view of the region that accords with the most ignorant Southerner's stereotype of it.

In the Greater Manchester mayoral election he tweeted:

Bit bizarre hearing these right-wing calls for a "Barista Visa". God forbid the idea of waiting longer in the morning for their posh coffee.

— Andy Burnham (@AndyBurnhamGM) April 17, 2017

Fortunately, this fantasy North of Burnham's that lacks historic buildings or coffee shops has little to do with the real thing.

Working boats on Black Country canals in 1965

Beautiful footage of commercial canal traffic on the Birmingham Canal Navigation in 1965, some of it horse drawn, which features railways and industrial desolation too.

If you enjoy this, look at the canal trip from Berkhamsted to Aylesbury I posted the other day and also at the 1967 television series Flower of Gloster.

York residents continue to find big food as woman ‘shocked’ by huge crisp

Not for the first time, the York daily paper The Press wins our Headline of the Day Award.

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"People can privately believe what they like but we have to be very careful who we publicly associate ourselves with - especially when gifts and donations are concerned." Andrew Page says Liberal Democrats should have no connection with those who advocate conversion therapy for LGBT+ people.

Amy Clarke on the need to challenge those who blame Leicester's Covid-19 lockdown on minority communities.

James Harper believes that "The government’s recent proposal to suspend jury trials is a potential threat to the Rule of Law – i.e. a legal system that treats everyone equally and which you can access, no matter who you are."

If we can rewild river catchments and floodplains we can ease some of the severity of flooding, argues Rewilding Britain.

Isle of Dogs - Past Life, Past Lives has some wonderful photographs from the 1960s.

"Drake sold so few records in his lifetime he was scarcely a professional threat, but his blank immunity to approval and his unshowy refusal to compromise presented a form of unspoken challenge to Martyn, who affected not to care about such things but probably in the end cared too much." Graeme Thomson has written a book about the friendship between Nick Drake and John Martyn.

Lost futures of East London

Another walk with John Rogers, who this time takes us from Leytonstone to Fairlop. He promises a "hauntological expedition".

If you want to support his YouTube channel, visit John's Patreon page.

Dominic Cummings boosts business in Barnard Castle

Good news from the Evening Express, which refuses to be confined to its Aberdeen beat:

Businesses in Barnard Castle have noted an upturn in visitors as lockdown eased after it was made famous by Dominic Cummings’ controversial family trip.

TV antiques expert David Harper who has a shop in the picturesque market town said local businesses could never have afforded the exposure Barnard Castle received from the affair.

Mr Cummings visited the riverside at Barnard Castle on Easter Saturday after traveling from London to Durham to stay at a property on his parents’ farm when he and his wife fell ill.

The Downing Street adviser said they took a trip to Barnard Castle, where he was spotted by a retired chemistry teacher, as he planned to travel back to London the next day and he wanted to check he could drive safely, particularly as his “eyesight seemed to have been affected by the disease”.

That comment led to many jokes about opticians in the town.

Indeed, brewers BrewDog have sold more than 810,000 cans of their IPA called Barnard Castle Eye Test.

British Medical Journal: England’s chaotic Covid-19 testing system cost lives in Leicester

A British Medical Journal editorial published last week begins:

With the flare-up of Covid-19 and re-imposition of lockdown, the population of Leicester is suffering the fallout of a chaotic testing system that seems to have forgotten its prime purpose, namely to trigger prompt, targeted measures, informed by local knowledge and up-to-date surveillance. Without swift and decisive action by those at local and national levels who understand communicable disease control, England will see further lockdowns and more avoidable deaths.

Leicester was a city at risk, with high levels of social deprivation and ethnic diversity. We now know that cases spiked in late May and that new cases were being detected throughout June at rates of over 100 per 100 000 population per week. But these data were made available to the local authority only days before lockdown was re-imposed on 30 June1 and were not made public for several days after that.

It ends by calling for national action to reform our current 'chaotic' Covid-19 testing regime:

We need transparent and timely sharing of data, proper investment in local public health infrastructure, no more standalone testing systems, a fully functioning “find, test, trace, isolate, and support” system as set out by Independent SAGE, and a new determination to reduce levels of circulating virus, if we are to avoid the 30 000 additional deaths by next April implied by England’s chief medical officer.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

Do you want to have your say on the Liberal Democrat leadership election or the future of the party?

This is a reminder that I welcome guest posts on Liberal England.

As you can see from this list of the 10 most recent guests posts, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects beyond the Lib Dems

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

• Why am I a Liberal Democrat - Simon Beard
• How the Revoke policy harmed Lib Dem chances - Michael Mullaney
• Unionism is making the Scottish Lib Dems irrelevant - Mark Stephens
• With Valour and Distinction: The 2nd Battalion Leicestershire Regiment in the First World War - Nigel Atter
• Belloc, Chesterton and the Distributist League - David Boyle
• Liberal Democrats for the Heart of England - Michael Mullaney
• Time for the Lib Dems to learn from social democracy - George Kendall
• What one Lib Dem councillor has done under lockdown - Sebastian Field
• A lifetime among the Liberals - Paddy Briggs
• Around Tolworth in the footsteps of Richard Jefferies - Lucy Furlong

Keep Britain Bona

How, you will ask, did this ever get broadcast in the 1960s?

The answer is that Kenneth Horne was seen by the powers that be at the BBC as a safe pair of hands and  a good sort. "If Horne's involved it's probably all right."

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams' Julian and Sandy proved wildly popular with listeners and were saved for the end of the show to stop them going anywhere, much as Peter Sellers' Bluebottle had been on The Goon Show a decade before.

Incidentally Kenneth Horne's father Silvester Horne was a Liberal MP and a celebrated orator. I once went to visit his grave in Church Stretton.

But then Hugh Paddick is a distant cousin of the Lib Dem peer Brian Paddick.

Rank and File - A British Cinema Blog

Though the last post dates from three years ago, Rank and File - A British Cinema Blog is a welcome recent discovery.

Written by an anonymous father and daughter team, it deals in the sort of almost good British films that the channel Talking Pictures TV has made it easier to watch in recent years.

There are stills, notes on the cast and on costumes that crop up again in other films.

The still above, borrowed from Rank and File, shows the tragic Joan Dowling in Murder Without Crime from 1950::

She was perhaps best known for her role as the tomboy Clarry in the 1947 Ealing Studios production Hue and Cry, a story set among the rubble and buildings of post-war London about a group of school children who discover that crooks have been sending coded messages about forthcoming jobs to their gang using the pages of a children's comic. In 1951 she married Harry Fowler, another actor from the cast of Hue and Cry.

Joan Dowling took her own life at the ago of 26.

Michael Meadowcroft's Guardian obituary of Diana Maddock

Michael Meadowcroft has written an obituary of the Liberal Democrat peer Diana Maddock, who won a famous and unlikely by-election victory at Christchurch in 1993.

He writes:

Maddock ... had considerable organising ability and a great skill in recruiting party workers, as well as in persuading others to take on jobs. It was this proficiency that almost kept her in a backroom role rather than becoming the byelection candidate. 

Following the death of the Conservative MP for Christchurch, Robert Adley, in May 1993, the Conservative party moved the byelection writ almost immediately and Maddock was quickly engaged in telephoning potential candidates. 

However, a number of those she phoned told her that she ought to stand herself, and eventually, at the last minute, she contacted party headquarters to put her name forward.

My own favourite memory of Diana Maddock is of delivering Good Morning leaflets with her on polling day in the 1995 Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election.

Badfinger: Day After Day

Michael Heatley told the story of Badfinger in Classic Rock:

The story of Badfinger is probably one of the most tragic in rock’n’roll. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong – twice – while their occasional triumphs over adversity never seemed to bring them their rightful reward. When Harry Nilsson first heard Without You (his future worldwide No.1 hit single), written by Badfinger’s Pete Ham and Tom Evans, he assumed it was a Beatles song. 

It was an understandable mistake, given that Paul McCartney had taken the band under his wing, signed them to The Beatles’ Apple label, and even written a hit for them in Come And Get It. Badfinger also backed George Harrison on his Bangladesh concerts. But their connection with The Beatles would become a double-edged sword.

‘The new Fab Four’ label earned Badfinger respect in the States, where they found their greatest success. But with the whole Beatles business empire fragmenting around them they found themselves left in a limbo. Having inaccessible management in another country didn’t help. And, ultimately, even the authorship of Without You was disputed.

Ham and Evans both took their own lives, but Heatley says the band is being discovered by new fans because their track Baby Blues was used in the final episode of Breaking Bad.

Little Bowden Crossing signal box, Market Harborough

This box stood on the line from Market Harborough to Northampton and could be found in the former at the junction of Scotland Road and Northampton Road.

It closed with the line in 1981 - I took this photo a year or so before that - but had an afterlife. Today you can find it on the Northampton & Lamport Railway under the name Pitsford and Brampton.

Meanwhile, there is no news on whether Little Bowden Junction box on the Midland main line survived the closure of Coventry's Electric Railway Museum. I fear it did not.

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In 2016 Paul Pettinger wrote a Social Liberal Forum paper arguing that centrism doesn't work as a strategy for minor parties.

"The government failed to activate the full network of laboratories at its disposal - within the NHS, as well as in universities and independent research facilities. When the government did finally roll out wider testing, months later, it again bypassed existing labs and set up three, new mega-facilities whose operations - managed by Deloitte under the banner of 'lighthouse laboratories' - have been based on contracting arrangements about which there’s little public disclosure." Rachel Shabi says the British government's response to Covid-19 has been pro-privatisation shock therapy.

Sarah Simons says meritocracy is a myth but education can still open doors.

"Numerous studies have shown the mental and physical benefits of spending time in nature, but for some people, it took a pandemic and stay-at-home orders for that desire to spend more time outdoors to feel like a necessity." Children’s behaviour may suffer from lack of access to outdoor space, argues Meg St-Esprit McKivigan.

Jem Poster examines Richard Jefferies' influence on the poet Edward Thomas.

The lost hills and walkways of Nottingham city centre are explored by David Lowe.

Ed Davey calls for action on pollution of the Wye

Ed Davey's Lib Dem leadership campaign risks being too focused on not upsetting moderate Tory voters in seats in the South of England where we are in second place. But maybe he has found an issue that is dear to my heart.

Powys's County Times reports that last month Ed raised concerns about the pollution of the River Wye in the county in the Commons.

Though its report seems to refer to a written question from Ed, the paper quotes him at length:

"Our natural environment is precious and there is none more precious than Wales’ beautiful River Wye," Sir Ed said in the House of Commons last month.

"I have very fond memories of youth hostelling along the River Wye with school friends and it is a vital resource to both the natural environment and the economy in Wales.

"We clearly need to see an action plan drawn up between Powys County Council and the Welsh and UK Governments that protects this beautiful river, the tourist economy that it sustains and supports the farming community that is helping feed the nation."

Ah well, no man who loves the rivers of the Welsh border can be all bad. And generating local newspaper coverage across the region from a written question is impressive.

Shrubs stolen in Stow-on-the-Wold

This sad story of rural crime, nominated by a reader of Liberal England, wins the Cotswold Journal our Headline of the Day Award.

Fear in the Furrows: The rise of folk horror

In this BBC documentary Simon Hollis explores the darker underside of the pastoral idyll and the traditions of Folk Horror being revived by a new generation of writers, musicians and filmmakers.

Contributors include fantasy writer Alan Garner, musician and composer Sharron Kraus, writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell, author Ben Myers, field folklorist Jonathan Huet, occult historian Gary Parsons, Piers Haggard the director of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and Maxine Sanders "Queen of the Witches".

There's even a snatch of Steve Winwood and Traffic.

A poem from Lucy Furlong's The Sward

As well as her guest post Around Tolworth in the footsteps of Richard Jefferies Lucy Furlong sent me one of the poems from her chapbook Sward.

The poem's narrow column echoes the long thin strip of central reservation.

Skin of the Earth

Humans don’t walk here. I see

drivers stare at me through

windshields and wound down

windows as they pass by. One

day a woman and a girl stop to

look at me as I kneel to take a

photo of red clover. They double

take as I double take. A horse

and trap careers across the dual

carriageway at the Jubilee Way

junction – a time warp - a bright

sunny day. I am teetering at the

end of one part of the sward,

waiting to cross – a bride and

groom, resplendently fancy,

billowing clouds of gypsy white

wedding. I see them holding on

to each other, laughing as the

driver races away, and I miss the

shot. But people do inhabit the

sward – if not for long. There is a

tiny path worn across the grass

where lads cross over to play

football. At the end of May there

was a human-sized patch in the

waist-deep grass, where

someone had slept by the lime

tree. Amongst the wildflowers

there is rubbish, probably

thrown from car windows *

achillea * birds foot trefoil * ragwort *

red clover * plastic bottle * buttercup *

speedwell * cigarette packet

* mallow * cigarette butt * dandelion *

 daisy * sweet wrapper * plastic

bottle * plantain * hawkweed *

ragwort * ragwort * plastic bottle *

buttercup * nitrous oxide bottle *

teasel * plastic bottle * bristly ox

tongue * hub cap * crisp packet * plastic *

Berkhamsted to Aylesbury by canal in 1965

This video shows a canal journey from Berkhamsted to Aylesbury in 1965. Note that steam locomotives were still working the West Coast main line that year.

I used to think our first family canal holiday took place that year, but I have a clear memory of hearing Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night playing on a taxi radio at Oxford station at the end of the trip and that dates it to 1966.

Layla Moran: I think we should be leading with things that are a bit more bread-and-butter

Embed from Getty Images

Layla Moran has given a major interview to Matt Withers of the New European in which she attempts to sweep away the characterisation of her coming from Ed Davey's camp.

Think of the unworthy "We don’t need to lecture the electorate about what they ought to think" from Tim Farron.

Or as Withers puts it:

Moran is also eager to dispel some of the murmurings among those backing Davey that she will be a "woke warrior" - my words, not hers - focusing on trans rights and statues, important issues but rarely those which come up on the doorstep.

So Layla says:

"I think we need to major on the things that matter to the broadest number of people, and you’ll notice in my three pillars of education, the environment and the economy, that’s what I’ve chosen to really focus on," she says.

"But that doesn’t mean that we give up on those important progressive issues. And the Lib Dems have always been at the forefront of that bit of society - you know, we were one of the first ones who spoke about equal marriage."

"I don’t think we should concede that ground. But I think there has been a perception that that’s all the party talks about. And I think we should be leading with things that are a bit more bread-and-butter."

And that sounds very like Ed Davey something might have said. Which suggests we may not hear a lot about policy differences in this Lib Dem leadership election - but then we usually don't.