Film emerges of antisemitic campaigning by Lib Dem shortlisted as London mayoral candidate

From PoliticsHome today:

The Lib Dems have shortlisted a candidate who was seen launching an antisemitic campaign against her election rival during an unsuccessful effort to become an MP.

PoliticsHome has seen footage of Geeta Sidhu-Robb using a megaphone to urge Muslim voters not to vote for her Labour opponent, Jack Straw, because he is Jewish.

The Lib Dems announced on Tuesday that Ms Sidhu-Robb, a former corporate lawyer turned health food entrepreneur, would go head-to-head with councillor Luisa Porrit for the party's nomination for London mayor, with the winner due to be announced on 13 October.

But in footage from the 1997 election campaign, Ms Sidhu-Robb, who was at the time standing as the Conservative candidate for Blackburn, was filmed saying she planned to inform voters about Mr Straw's faith, adding "how is a Muslim going to vote for someone who is Jewish?”

You can see the footage in question above.

It's clear that Geeta Sidhu-Robb should never have been shortlisted. Besides this antisemitic outburst she has some strange and silly opinions.

An earlier PoliticsHome article quoted a London Liberal Democrat activist as saying:

"I am astonished Ms Sidhu-Robb has been shortlisted as our potential candidate. An out-of-touch millionaire who flogs juice detoxes to celebrities is not someone we should be asked to consider.

"We want to be back out there talking about the issues that matter to Londoners, but instead we have shot ourselves in the foot with this baffling selection."

Later. A statement from London Liberal Democrats says Geeta Sidhu-Robb has been suspended from the party.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band: One of My Kind

One of My Kind, explains AllMusic, was:

A casual documentary chronicling the formation of Conor Oberst's Mystic Valley Band during the early days of 2008 and their subsequent tour, One of My Kind appeared as a free download in 2009 and then a re-edit was packaged for an official release in 2012, accompanied by a soundtrack of the same name. 

Considering how raggedness is part of the band's appeal, this collection comprised of B-sides, tour-only EPs, re-recordings, and outtakes from the band's two albums emphasizes that ramshackle charm.

This is the title track from that soundtrack.

There's more from Conor Oberst and the various bands he has been part of on his own website.

Burton upon Trent and Uttoxeter in 1957

ATV's film of rural North Nottinghamshire from 1957 turned out to include scenes of child sacrifice in Sherwood Forest.

There's nothing so dark here, but there is some industrial steam in Burton and a memorial to Dr Johnson in Uttoxeter, where the great man did penance in the market place.

Click on the still above to view the film on the British Film Institute website.

The last hundred yards of the River Jordan

I walked the last hundred yards of the River Jordan today, from its confluence with the Welland back to the Kettering Road bridge.

With the railway on an embankment above me on one side and trees almost meeting overhead, I felt as though I was walking a long-abandoned canal, albeit one that it might be possible to restore to navigation.

But then this almost certainly is an artificial cut. The Jordan used to wander through Little Bowden, passing the church and looping around the village green.

At some point, and it may have been when the railway came, it was diverted, and after the war some an ugly concrete channel was provided for it further upstream.

So much like a canal does this stretch feel that it was a surprise when the towpath did not continue under the Kettering Road bridge.

Tommy Kearins on the making of The Maggie

I have written before about the 'Ealing Apocrypha' - the film comedies the studio produced that have been largely forgotten, like The Magnet and Barnacle Bill.

The best of these is Alexander Mackendrick's The Maggie from 1954, which is like a less sentimental version of Local Hero. An American businessman makes the mistake of entrusting his furniture to the skipper of an ageing steam vessel for delivery to his holiday home in the Hebrides and never looks like getting it back.

Among the crew is Dougie, a boy, played by Tommy Kearins. Here he gives his memories of the making of the film.

Six of the Best 958

"I will never forget the relentless anxiety of living hand to mouth. When you're in that position, you go through every possible emotion. Shame. Panic. Fear. Ultimately everything becomes about survival." Liz Jarvis makes the case for a basic income.

David Henig explains the fundamental problem with Brexit now: "The problem is not the UK, whether Labour or Conservative, wanting a deal. It is that the deal that the UK seems to want, of privileged non-membership access without cost, it not available, has not been available since 2016, and that neither Labour or Conservative Party is prepared to admit this."

Karen Shalev Greene says that children transitioning from care to adult life are being badly let down and falling prey to criminal gangs.

"Extraordinarily, we now live in a world in which the best evidence that Royal College of Psychiatrists has been able to muster for the real-world effectiveness of ECT exactly parallels the claims for homeopathy," claims Peter Kinderman.

Gareth Dennis investigates the role that capital from slave owners played in the development of the railways.

William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind, argues Mark Vernon.

Cricketer Usman Khawaja's brother apologises for making false terror claims against love rival

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The Guardian goes down under to claim our Headline of the Day Award.

Iain Sinclair walks around The Last London

Time for a walk with the daddy of London psychogeographers, Iain Sinclair.

His 2017 book The Last London was reviewed in the Guardian:

The Last London is an elegy for a London that is now over. The artists, the homeless, the eccentrics - the people Sinclair has always been on the side of - are moving out, or being moved out. The city seems to want him out too. He receives cards from estate agents urging him to "sell up, cash in, get out". 

His children and grandchildren have been forced out by rising rents, part of the great London exodus to the coast: "Artists settling, mobbing like gulls at the tideline, after being expelled from their London warehouses and railway arches." (Sinclair himself bought a flat in St Leonards-on-Sea a few years ago, though he’s yet to sever the umbilical cord completely). 

Global capital and political meddling have conspired to bring about, he concludes, "a strategic destruction of the local".

Dismal turnout in Green Party leadership election

From Left Foot Forward:

The Green Party’s co-leadership team has been re-elected following a vote of members.

Jonathan Bartley and Siân Berry were re-elected with 49% of the first preference votes. Rosi Sexton received 27% of first preference votes, while Shahrar Ali received 24% of first preferences.

A total of 7,503 ballots were across all the internal elections, giving a turnout of 16%, according to the party. There are nearly 48,000 members of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Turnout for the leadership – at around 14% – was the lowest since Natalie Bennett was elected unopposed in 2014.

I'm not gloating: the turnout in the recent Liberal Democrat leadership election was only 57.6 per cent. But this is dispiriting news for the Greens and for anti-Conservative politics in Britain more generally.

Mourning the death of A level General Studies

The Oscar-winning writer Ronald Harwood died earlier this week. I first came across him in 1978 when he took over from Melvyn Bragg as presenter of BBC One's Sunday evening book programme Read All About It.

In those days I got a lot of my cultural education from it and Barry Norman's Film programme, which occupied the same slot for part of the year. I used to lug our black-and-white portable up to my room to watch these shows in bed.

So you could say they helped me get to university. In fact they did so quite directly, because I wrote about them in my A level General Studies exam.

I have blogged about how taking that exam helped to get me a place at York to read Philosophy, so I was sorry to read this summer that it has died out.

This wasn't just personal nostalgia: there is something to be said for allowing students to display knowledge and enthusiasms that lie outside the approved curriculum. 

I am also struck by this paragraph from a 2015 TES report saying A level general studies was to be axed:

Research suggests the qualification is harder than it has been given credit for. A 2007 analysis by Durham University found general studies was the subject in which pupils were least likely to achieve high grades. And John Hutton, emeritus professor of economics at the University of York, stated in August that general studies was the “only predictor worth considering” for results at the university in his subject.

Paradoxically or not, General Studies was the only subject in which I got an A.

At least in my sixth form days, the exam consisted of two three-hour session, which both involved a raft of multiple-choice general knowledge questions and a choice of topics about which you had to write an essay.

To be honest, the general knowledge questions did not present a great challenge to someone who was to win the BBC East Joint Account quiz with his mum a couple of months later, but I can still remember the two essays I wrote.

One was about the idea that we should treat people equally. I said we should, but argued that this did not always mean treating people the same. I remember it as being short and (I hoped) elegant, and it is at least a position I would defend all these years later.

The second essay was on television arts coverage and I contrasted the Read All About It approach of inviting a panel of celebrities on to discuss the week's new paperbacks with the Film 1978 approach of having one informed critic discuss the latest releases.

I came down firmly in support of the Barry Norman approach, but I bet Bragg and Harwood's guests looked like The Athenaeum to the people who get on television panels today.

The whole of Waking the Dead is on the BBC iPlayer

Perhaps because I have fond memories of watching Trevor Eve in Shoestring, I liked Waking the Dead. And the good news is that for the time being at least every episode of it is on the BBC iPlayer.

Watching them now I find that the first part of each introduces us to an intriguing mystery reawakened by the discovery of a body, while the second spins off incoherently in all directions while Eve shouts at people.

But I am glad they are there and you do find serous actors like David Hemmings and James Fox turning up in the cast.

Welcome to The Generous Society

The Generous Society is a new vision for a more liberal UK. It reframes the timeless values that brought us many of our most cherished freedoms for a time in our national life that is defined by division, anger, and deceit.

This is not an exhaustive list of policies. It is about defining the country liberals want to live in – the ‘good life’ and what it might look like for each individual. It is time to give everyone the best possible chance to live that life, taking away barriers to freedom, and providing support where it is most needed.

A welcome development today has been the publication of The Generous Society, which has been written by Tom King in consultation with a group including David Howarth and Julian Huppert.

It is welcome because for years the Liberal Democrats have struggled to rise above the minutiae of policy and articulate what it is that they are about.

The emphasis on human flourishing in The Generous Society gets close to the heart of that. We should talk about it more in future.

You can read The Generous Society on its own website.

How I became anti-nuclear: Windscale Fallout by Ian Breach

Ever since Michael Gove said "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts" the left hasn't been able to get enough of them.

Yet if you are on the left then at some point you will have decided that Important People are wrong.

For me it was the debate over nuclear power. At the start of 1978, when I was still 17, Lord Justice Parker recommended in his inquiry report that a thermal oxide reprocessing plant be built at Windscale and the government went ahead with the idea.

I decided Parker had got it wrong. I remember asking a visiting speaker at school, who was there to promote nuclear, why we didn't develop renewables instead.

And I had a 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks' T-shirt and bought a Penguin Special on the subject: Windscale Fallout by Ian Breach. 

Though they sound like something out of the 1940s, Penguin Special were very much a thing in those days. They felt serious and grown up and I liked them in the way I liked the New Statesman because it had its leading article on the front cover.

I've found a review of Windscale Fallout from Australian Left Review:

The scene that Breach describes is familiar: A company which has been doing a profitable business in reprocessing nuclear fuel wants to expand its operations. It already has a very lucrative contract with Japan. The workers are in general in favour of this expansion. And so is the Labour Government. The expansion goes along with future plans for a commercial fast breeder reactor program. But because the company has been secretive about the safety of its operations, because local people are concerned, the Government is induced to hold a public inquiry.

The wide terms of reference of the inquiry encourage those who have objections, mostly environmentalists, to throw a great deal of time, effort and money into presenting their case. They raise the issues of safety, civil liberties, nuclear proliferation, the need for public participation in setting safety standards and making energy policy. In the end, the Commissioners write the report which the company and the Government expected and wanted.

Not much has changed in more than 40 years.

Breach was an interesting figure who became one of the BBC's first environmental correspondents before, his Guardian obituary records, being sacked by John Birt for demanding the corporation devote more airtime to the environment.

Powell and Pressburger on Radio 3 and in Shrewsbury

The BBC website has a series of short talks on films by Powell and Pressburger that were first broadcast on Radio 3.

You can listen to:

The Red Shoes - Deborah Bull

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - Ian Christie

A Matter of Life and Death - Richard Coles

Black Narcissus - Peter Bradshaw

I Know Where I'm Going - A.L. Kennedy

And another of their films, Gone to Earth, is being shown at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury on Friday and Saturday.

I am sorry if it looks a little melodramatic, but the Shropshire hills are like that.

Stolen narrow boat retrieved after low-speed chase

From the Leicester Mercury:

A stolen narrow boat was boarded by officers after possibly the slowest police chase ever encountered.

The tension, for police and suspects alike, must have been unbearable as the 13-mile 'pursuit' unfolded earlier today on the Grand Union Canal.

It ended up being a cross-county border affair - at speeds of up to 4mph - as officers with Leicestershire's Harborough Police teamed up with Northamptonshire colleagues to bring the incident to a safe conclusion.

The photo above shows North Kilworth in Leicestershire, where the boat was stolen. Contrary to the hope expressed by one of my Twitter followers, the police did not give chase in a pedalo.

Ode to Joy as a Nazi anthem

I heard an extraordinary programme on Radio 3 yesterday. Looking at the history of Beethoven's ninth symphony, it opened with an extract from the performance that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted for Hitler's birthday in March 1942.

Though some have claimed to detect a subtle protest in it, with those added drums it sounds a full-blown Nazi anthem to me.

I have added it above as I don't know how long the radio programme will stay on the BBC site,

The piece it reminds me of is Laibach's reworking of Queen's One Vision to reveal the totalitarian impulse that can be present in unthinking rock.

Elsewhere in the programme you will hear from Nigel Farage and learn that the tune of Ode to Joy was used for the Rhodesian national anthem.

Oh, and Auschwitz had a children's choir used to dupe visitors about the nature of the place, which revealed a new circle of human depravity to me.

"Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more"

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Fifty years ago, the Labour MP for my home town of Lincoln was Geoffrey de Freitas. In those days, Lincoln was a very safe Labour seat and Geoffrey de Freitas was a very wealthy man.

In common with many MPs of that era, de Freitas did not maintain a home in his constituency (a practice that at least had the merit of incurring no controversial expense claims). Indeed, he spent little time in his constituency at all. On the rare occasions he paid a visit, he and his wife would get in the Rolls Royce and drive north to Lincoln, his chauffeur following in a Morris Traveller. When the convoy reached the constituency boundary, it came to a halt. Mr and Mrs de Freitas would get out of the Rolls and into the Morris, and make a suitably modest entry into the city. The chauffeur followed at a discreet distance in the Rolls.

Simon Titley died almost six years ago, but I thought of that anecdote today because it opens an article he wrote for Liberal Democrat Voice in 2008 about politicians who claim to 'listen'.

As Simon went on to observe:

Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more. In the 1950s, most MPs – not just Geoffrey de Freitas – put in only token appearances in their constituencies, while local councillors were never seen from one election to the next. Yet electoral turnouts and party memberships were at an all-time high. 

Nowadays, most elected politicians conduct regular surgeries and carry unprecedented loads of casework; they are accessible online via e-mails, websites and blogs; they deliver leaflets and appear regularly in various local media; and they conduct frequent surveys and polls. Today, a politician with Geoffrey de Freitas’s hauteur would not even get selected, never mind elected. Yet people still moan that politicians are “out of touch”.

He goes on to argue that there is certainly a widespread sense of powerlessness and alienation among voters but that, given all the listening that is going on, it is doubtful that more of it is the solution.

Instead be recommends the report of the Joseph Rowntree Trust's Power inquiry, which had just been published and is still worth reading.

Simon was writing at a time when the whole party was being urged to listen, but his words still have resonance:

Politicians of all parties must stand for something, not blow with the wind. Their job is to lead, not follow; to persuade, not accept public opinion as a given. This does not mean being arrogant. Politicians should engage in debate and connect with people’s concerns. But they can do this effectively only if they have a clear sense of right and wrong, and they should not be afraid to communicate that moral clarity to the electorate. The people have the right to elect or reject them on that basis. But any politician who has no idea of what he stands for and instead can only ask “you tell me” is unfit for office.

You can find an archive of Simon Titley's writings on the Liberator website.

Six of the Best 957

"It’s a crisis for education, but it’s also an opportunity to put everything on the table and consider ideas that would have been impossible before COVID. Outdoor school, long relegated to the Waldorf fringe, is getting a serious look. The pandemic is forcing conversations about equity in education, and both parents and teachers are asking how we can reimagine the school day to prioritise student well-being and mental health." Anna Nordberg asks if the Covid-19 pandemic could change education for the better.

James Rebanks on how to save British farming and the countryside.

David Graeber died a few days ago. Read him on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

James Robert Wood praises T.H. White's studies of the 18th century - and there's a mention for Shropshire's Mad Jack Mytton.

"I’m old-fashioned enough to think that for something to count as a cult, it should be dark, subterranean and bound up with sacred mysteries. On that definition, Penda’s Fen (1974) may be the only authentic cult TV I’ve come across." Robert Hanks celebrates David Rudkin's television play.

"He was a lovely man, a consummate professional and treated us as equals when clearly we were not. I consider myself very lucky to have played that day and witnessed a magnificent all round appearance both on and off the field." Stan Heaton pays tribute to the England cricketer David Capel.

Former leader suspended by Harborough District Council's ruling Conservative group

Well now.

Neil Bannister, the former Conservative leader of Harborough District Council, has been suspended from the ruling Tory group for six months.

According to the Leicester Mercury:

Neil Bannister has been given a six month suspension from the Harborough District Council Conservative councillors group after he wrote a letter to Leicestershire County Council about the 2,750 home Lutterworth East scheme.

The former Conservative police and crime commissioner candidate was a member of the district council planning committee that decided in July, by a single vote, to approve the controversial housing scheme, proposed by the county council which owns the 550 acres of farmland earmarked for development.

Having voted to approve the scheme, Cllr Bannister subsequently wrote a letter, seen by LeicestershireLive, to county council leader Nick Rushton and chief executive raising concerns over elements of development.

He wrote in his capacity as chairman of the South Leicestershire Conservative Association and purported to set out the views of Tory MP Alberto Costa who had spoken in support of the application at the district council planning meeting.

According to the Mercury, the county council’s director of law and governance has said there was 'strong concern' about what Cllr Bannister had written.

Later. You can download Neil Bannister's letter and the reply from director of law and governance on the county council website.

The Cairo Gang: Take Your Time

Take Your Time is a track from The Cairo Gang's 2013 LP Tiny Rebels.

KUTX said of it at the time:

One listen, and you might think that you were listening to a long, lost outtake from The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension. About halfway through the tune, the gentle, folky psychedelia yields to hallucinogenic, snaking, Eastern-flavored guitar lines before circling back. Kelly expertly guides the organized chaos in the back-half as the action starts to rise once again, and when the song ends it’s a beautiful release.

'Kelly' is the band's leader Emmett Kelly.