Shepperton Babylon

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an enthusiastic post about Matthew Sweet's new book Shepperton Babylon. I have now read it and am just as enthusiastic.

Sweet offers a history of British cinema in ten chapters, arguing that the conventional critical wisdom that home-grown films are irredeemably second rate is based on simple ignorance. He sees that history as far more interesting than is generally realised - hence the subtitle of his introduction "Strange England".

The first chapter - in many ways the most interesting - looks at the lost history of British silent films. Not only are the stars, who in their day were as big here as anyone from Hollywood, forgotten but their films are lost too. As the recent television series on the films of Mitchell and Kenyon showed, the early cinema was run by travelling showmen and local entrepreneurs. Only with the advent of sound did the theatrical profession move in.

Mention should also be made of the eponymous hero of Rescued by Rover who, in a later film

pounds off in hot pursuit, jumps into the driving seat of the abductor's car and, paws on the steering wheel, chugs his charge back to safety along the road from Shepperton to Walton.

No wonder Sweet calls The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper "a minor masterpiece of British surrealism".

After that he pursues a zig-zag course himself, avoiding the most critically respectable British films (Powell & Pressburger, Carol Reed) in order to recover lost films and long-buried scandals.

Chapter 2 looks at the career of Ivor Novello and chapter 3 at that of Nerina Shute, the teenage, bisexual film gossip columnist from the 1920s who died last year. Chapter 4 makes a case for revisiting the "quota quickies" of the 1930s.

Chapter 5 looks at Basil Dean's stewardship of Ealing before the War and his Kane-like attempt to make a star of his second wife Victoria Hopper. Sweet found her as an old lady, living in a cottage on Romney Marsh. He has less time for the two stars Dean did make. Gracie Fields is described as "a rugby forward in a dress" and George Formby has the face of "a human being reflected in a tap".

Trivia fans may like to note that Formby's morbidly jealous wife had Betty Driver (who is still serving her hotpots in the Rover's Return) thrown of his first picture and that Formby's mother died in 1981 at the age of 102.

Chapter 7 celebrates the female stars of the Gainsborough films: Patricia Roc, Phyllis Calvert and Jean Kent. Chapter 8 looks at J. Arthur Rank, emphasising how many of the greatest British films he financed in the 1940s.

Rank's films from the 1950s have a poor reputation, but Sweet challenges this critical orthodoxy. Dirk Bogarde, for instance, was often seen (not least by himself) as having broken out of Rank's bonds and moved from being a matinee idol to being an internationally recognised ac-tor. Sweet points out that some of Bogarde's later films were not distinguished and that he made many interesting films at home in the 1950s (such as Hunted and The Spanish Gardener).

And who needs Scum when, in The Boys in Brown, Bogarde can "suggest barrack-room bullying and buggery just by the way he leans on his mop"?

Sweet has great fun with The Singer not the Song, the impossibly British camp Western in which Bogarde starred. And he pins down the failings of Bogarde's British contemporaries. There is John Mills: "Watch his pre-war films, and you'll be struck by a salient aspect of his performances: he can't act". And there is Kenneth More:

He was heroic in a cocky, big-brotherly way - like a public-school prefect who might have saved a new boy from a beating, but expected three terms of shoe-polishing and crumpet-toasting in return.

The book ends with chapters on cheap horror films of the 1960s and the sexploitation films of the 1970s. These are in many ways the least interesting in the book, but you forgive Sweet everything when he tells you that Valerie Singleton narrated Nudes of the World in 1961.

In short, a book that anyone with an interest in British films or 20th century British history should read.

Peter Hain on civil liberty

This book review by Peter Hain, published in the Guardian last year, is full of ironies that he is obviously blind to himself. He is writing about the memoirs of the anti-Apartheid activist Hilda Bernstein:

We met Hilda for the first time in the 1960s when she called at our Pretoria home seeking help for locally held black detainees. This was the time of the state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville shootings, and by then my parents were regular visitors to black townships, as they were increasingly drawn into the same struggle, being jailed in 1961, followed wherever they went by the special branch, and then both subject to banning orders blocking them from political activity and even social contact. However, the Bernsteins had it much tougher.

At the time of the Rivonia arrests in July 1963, Rusty had already spent nine months under house arrest: only able to leave his house between 6.30am and 6.30pm (except on Sundays and public holidays, when he couldn't leave at all), obliged to report to police HQ between noon and 2pm each day and confined to the Johannesburg magisterial district.

He had been carrying out his architectural work from their bedroom since his release from jail in 1960 and Hilda's description of the family waiting for him to get home before the 6.30pm deadline on the day that he was arrested at Rivonia makes riveting reading.

Though acquitted at Rivonia, Rusty was immediately rearrested, charged with breaches of the catch-all Suppression of Communism Act (you were a communist if the minister said so).

Charles Darwin explained

The Shropshire Star reports:

A blundering badger sparked a major rescue operation in Shrewsbury after falling more than 20ft into a 200-year-old ice house on land once owned by Charles Darwin.

As every schoolboy used to know, Darwin came up with his theory of evolution after being hit on the head by a falling badger.

BritBlog Roundup

Many thanks to Tim Worstall for putting together a Best of British blogging selection - and particular thanks to him for starting his first one with my posting Listen to Gladstone.

The least I can do is add his blog to my list of links.

Ambridge riots

Sometimes it is hard to escape the conclusion that some people working in the public sector would be happiest living in a totalitarian state.

Take this report in today's Observer about reactions to Brian Aldridge outburst at Alice's intention to leave her fee-paying school and do her A levels at a further education College. (We're talking about the BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers, stoopid.)

The paper quotes him as follows:

"Borchester College?" exploded Brian. "Has she been on the horse pills? It's sheer madness. The college is full of Neanderthals ... Have you driven past it lately? Half of the students don't appear to have opposable thumbs." He then claimed the only facilities it had was to teach 'advanced hairdressing and media studies'.

Well, I imagine that is pretty much what a bone-headed Tory farmer like Aldridge would say in such circumstances. But good drama has no place if you are a certain kind of public sector professional.

Listen to Anne Piercy, vice-principal of Stafford College:

his ill-informed criticism is hurtful to those who study and work at further education colleges and could have a very serious impact by dissuading people from choosing a learning environment which may be enormously beneficial to them.

Leaving aside the apparent implication that any view anyone might find hurtful should be left out of drama, look at what nonsense this is. For "a very serious impact" to be felt, hordes of young people would have to tune to Radio 4 rather than any of the music stations, catch The Archers and then sympathise with a right-wing, middle-aged character. It hardly sounds likely.

Then there is Claire Boxall, "communications manager" at Mid-Kent College in Chatham. She is quoted as saying that "this sort of coverage is not helpful". A splendidly pompous phrase that. Since when has the BBC existed to provide programmes that are helpful to Mid-Kent College?

And there is a head of faculty at Stoke College:

I am horrified: we all know that Brian is both opinionated and frequently wrong, but for the casual listener, it puts further education in a bad light.

If she finds The Archers horrifying she must have led a pretty sheltered life. Note also the implication that while she is quite clever enough to understand drama, other listeners are not up to it.

She goes on:

It comes exactly at the moment young people and their parents are choosing between the options of sixth forms and further education and the negative exchange could easily be used as evidence to base their decision.

A soap opera covering an issue just at the time when people are in the real world are considering it too? Clearly, the government must act, particularly as the public are obviously so impressionable.

The Observer reports that:

John Brennan, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, has attempted to calm the situation by offering his services to The Archers' producers as a consultant on future plotlines concerning Alice's education.

I do hope the BBC tells him what he can do with his offer.

Sayeed saved

Conservative MP Jonathan Sayeed has survived an attempt to deselect him in a row over allegations he had profited from private tours of Parliament ...

On Thursday night he won a vote of confidence by 173 to 126 votes at a constituency party meeting in Mid-Bedfordshire.

Constituency president Sir Stanley Odell resigned in protest.

reports the BBC.

Meanwhile the authoritative voice of Biggleswade Today makes it clear that the of disquiet in the local party goes well beyond Sir Stanley.

Does anyone have Martin Bell's phone number?

Listen with Gladstone

Here is today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Voices over

Labour is fighting the general election with verbless slogans like “Forward not backwards” and “Your children with the best start." Soon people will not be able to speak at all – quite possibly in my lifetime.

How different from the nineteenth century! Then thousands of working men would stand in the rain for two or three hours to listen to Mr Gladstone. Lately I have been taking solace from listening to him myself.

It is possible. The other day I went to the bookshop at the British Library. That’s the new building in Euston Road that looks rather like a railway station. It is next-door to St Pancras, which looks very like a national library. There I bought a double CD (Voices of History) of recordings of the great and the good.

The quality of the Gladstone recording is poor. It was made on a cylinder in 1888 and he sounds as though he is broadcasting from somewhere far away. No doubt it could be cleaned up, but it is somehow right that it has not been. With the help of a transcript, you can hear his Victorian optimism: “wonders upon wonders are opening before us”.

Florence Nightingale is also hard to make out, but the rest are clear as day. There are the dictators Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, as well as Trotsky speaking in English. There are the royals, going back as far as George V. There are Lloyd George, Asquith, and two other Liberals: Herbert Samuel and Margaret Wintringham, who was MP for Louth between 1921 and 1924.

Winston Churchill dominates the discs, particularly when set against his Conservative contemporaries Baldwin and Chamberlain – you can almost smell the fusty overcoats as they speak. The odd thing was that for many years Churchill was not seen as a particularly good speaker in the Commons. There was so much preparation that he was unable to deal with interventions.

He also struggled with a tendency to lisp. When Churchill was home secretary and presiding over the Siege of Sidney Street, his deputy Charles Masterman was on holiday in France and becoming increasingly alarmed at the accounts in the newspapers. When he got back he burst Churchill's room at the Home Office with the query "What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?" The reply was: "Now Charlie. Don't be croth. It was such fun."

And then there is Attlee, telling us that we must show the same sense of purpose in peace that we did to win the war. This is the dream that haunted Labour for decades. The idea that socialism involved giving up our liberties for the common good. You still see its effect today, with Charles Clarke’s enthusiasm for identity cards and house arrest.

Which brings us back to the death of civilisation as we know it.

More on Ken Livingstone

There is an article by Jennie Bristow on the Spiked website which takes a similar line to the New Statesman editorial I discussed earlier. She makes another point that is worth quoting:

Ken 'Ban It' Livingstone has spent so much of his seasoned life campaigning to censure people whose remarks could be construed as racist and offensive, this seems like a just punishment: he has fallen foul of the intolerant climate that he helped to create.

Unfortunately, this is not simply a story about a po-faced politician getting his come-uppance. It reveals the petulant and censorious spirit of our times, in which references to the Holocaust are bandied about like common swear words and the response to anybody feeling offended is to call for official censure.

Cleobury Mortimer

Last month we had to report that the little Shropshire town of Cleobury Mortimer was "strife torn" and had been "plunged into chaos".

The latest news is that it is "crisis hit". I am not sure if that it is an improvement

Ken Livingstone

There is a very good editorial in this week's New Statesman which makes the important points about the story that has been filling the papers this week:

Ken Livingstone is a fool and a hypocrite. Leaving a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Chris Smith "coming out" as the first openly gay MP, he asks a London Evening Standard reporter (who happens to be Jewish) if he is "a German war criminal", suggests that he should seek treatment and describes the reporter's employers as "a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots". This is foolish because doorstepping a London party is hardly on a par with running an extermination camp, and to equate the two is to trivialise the latter; it is hypocritical because, a few years ago, Mr Livingstone himself acted as the Standard's restaurant critic. It would be good manners for Mr Livingstone to say sorry to Oliver Finegold, the reporter. But it is also absolutely no business of anyone else's whether he does so or not.

and

The demand for ritual recantation and punishment whenever someone expresses themselves "inappropriately" (itself a prissy, nannyish sort of word) has become an inhibition on free speech. A football manager loses his job when he "insults" disabled people; an editor's career is endangered when his magazine "insults" Liverpudlians; a commentator is thrown off the airwaves when he "insults" tsunami victims with a feeble pun. The worst sin of all (and rightly so) is anti-Semitism; but to place Mr Livingstone's remarks in that category is another example of trivialising the genuine article.

Frank Furedi on academic freedom

There is a new article by Furedi on the Spiked website. In it he argues that academic freedom is a deeply unfashionable concept and that the threat to it comes from within the university as much as without. He points to ethics committees, learning outcomes and the fear of giving offence through one's language.

This last point interests me as it chimes with my concerns about the Standards Board for England, originally posted here.

Anyway, here is Furedi:

That academics are expected to work within such a code, which explicitly demands that the pursuit of knowledge and expression of ideas should be restrained by the need to spare the feelings of others, is a symptom of our times. Such censorious speech codes have been institutionalised through the UK, without any serious opposition from staff or students. Once upon a time, instructions on the use of language were for schoolkids; today they are aimed at restraining the speech of the academic.

Of course words can offend. But one of the roles of a university is to challenge conventional truths - and that means academics questioning the sacred and mentioning the unmentionable. A proper university teaches its members how not to take hateful views personally, and how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas.

The Orange Book

Remember The Orange Book? I thought not, but I have posted my Liberator review of it from last autumn to Lord Bonkers' website anyway.

Liberal Democrats look away

There is absolutely nothing funny about the photograph accompanying this story from the Shropshire Star.

Rum in Brum

Labour has admitted that the behaviour of some of its supporters "may have fallen short of the high standards that the electors have the right to expect," reports the Birmingham Post. Such talent for understatement should be encouraged.

For more on the murkier side of Birmingham politics, see John Hemmings' blog.

Standards Board: latest developments

Double Standards has the latest news on the Paul Dimoldenberg case, which I discussed in my a recent House Points column:

A local politician who faces disqualification after blowing the whistle on Westminster council broke new ground after winning the right to mount a public interest defence.

Goodbyeed Sayeed?

Trust Biggleswade Today to have the latest news:

"Humiliated" MP Jonathan Sayeed is fighting for his political life after being suspended from Parliament.

Mid Beds Conservative Association is holding an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss the MP's future.

A glimpse of the future

SUTTER, California (AP) -- The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

More details on the CNN site here. The impressive thing about the full report is the level of oppostion from parents. In Britain, you fear, they would be all in favour.

Anorak heaven

Visit Vote 2005 for all the predictions, argument and gossip about the forthcoming general election.

Thanks to Paswonky's Blog for the tip.

Right to roam in Shropshire

The Shropshire Star reports that there is to be an appeal hearing on Tuesday over the designation of Bromlow Callow as moorland. (Moorland is covered by the new right to roam legislation.)

To see why it is important that the appeal fails and that people are free to enjoy the area, see this picture.

Miss Marple meets Taxi Driver

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Tory Blues

Imagine an English village. Cricket on the green. Blue skies. Red telephone box. The sun shining upon the ancient stones of the church, the mellow bricks of the rectory and the thatch of the cottages.

A bobby cycles into view. He stops at one of those cottages and makes his way through the hollyhocks to the front door. When it opens, he can’t help noticing the corpse stretched out in the hall

“What’s all this then, madam?” he asks. “It’s a burglar, Constable McNally,” she replies. “He broke in during the night and my husband shot him.” “In that case I won’t take up any more of your time,” replies the officer, and rides off.

It’s a curious world – Miss Marple meets Taxi Driver – but it seems to be the one the Tories want to live in. On Friday they turned out in force to support Patrick Mercer’s private members bill allowing householders to use anything short of “grossly disproportionate force” to tackle intruders.

Mercer was addressing a real problem: the fear of crime in rural areas where police are far away. But rather than proposing a practical solution, such as more special constables, he went off with the fairies.

People do worry they will end up in court after defending themselves against burglars, though the figures suggest they have little cause. But even under Mercer’s law they would face investigation if a burglar was killed or injured. No real officer would behave like our PC McNally. And what constitutes “grossly disproportionate force” would ultimately be decided by juries, so some cases would still go to court.

This episode illustrates the decline of the Conservatives. To be a Tory you have to rather like life the way it is. Newspapers still reflect this. Spend an hour with the Guardian and become depressed. Read the Daily Telegraph and you come away convinced the world is full of things to enjoy.

Tory politicians no longer feel that way. Some demand the impossible, always clamouring to “bring back” something – usually matron or the birch. Others stoke fears over crime or immigration and offer solutions as bizarre as Mercer’s.

Of the old Conservative Party – that collection of contented people with a fat stake in the status quo – there in now little sign.

The boyhood of Blair

Do you remember Tony Blair's extraordinary lies about his own childhood? How he once stowed away on a flight to the Bahamas and how he used to watch Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle?

I have come across an article by Francis Wheen which gives the details and posted a couple of paragraphs to my other blog Serendib.

Wedding of the year to take place at castle

Not Charles and Camilla, you booby.

The Shropshire Star has details of Lembit and Sian's plans. They will marry at Powis Castle in October.

Sayeed suspended from the Commons

Yesterday's Hansard carries a full report of the Commons' decision to suspend Jonathan Sayeed for two weeks.

Sayeed himself made a distinctly Vicky Pollard apology, and this was followed by a headmasterly contribution from Sir George Young, the chairman of the Committee on Standards and Privileges, which set out the facts of the case.

Note particularly his comment that:

The Committee on Standards and Privileges will need to reflect on whether he has responded fully to our recommendations that he apologise fully to the House in the light of some of his qualifications.

Manners maketh man

As widely predicted, Conservative MP Jonathan Sayeed has been suspended from the House of Commons for two weeks.

This gives us the opportunity to have another snigger at the website of The English Manner Ltd, the company that got him in trouble with the Commons authorities. Here is part of the blurb for their "Seminars on Social Graces":

Etiquette is a word rarely used today. The idea of social niceties and proper protocol can seem prim and old-fashioned for the fast-paced world where we live and do business.

But many otherwise intelligent and educated individuals are lost when making a formal toast, hosting a dinner party—or even when choosing which fork to use. These people lack an important element for success in both their work and personal lives.

By coincidence, Manners is the family name of the Dukes of Rutland. Their seat Belvoir Castle hosts some of the company's events and resembles a less ambitious version of Bonkers Hall.

Democrat nomination 2008

The campaigning has already begun, reports Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (drawing upon a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer):

Former Sen. John Edwards "is already stumping for 2008 - a mere 1,365 days away - because, apparently, a minute wasted is a minute lost. His ex-partner, John Kerry, is in the final stages of setting up a money-raising machine; Hillary Clinton is talking more about religious values; a red-state senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, is staffing up, having hired an Ohio turnout expert; and a governor with independent wealth, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, will soon headline a political dinner in Georgia.

You read it here first.

Bye bye Big Blunkett

I have removed Big Blunkett from my list of links as it is no longer being updated. I suppose the site saw its purpose as being fulfilled when the bearded authoritarian resigned.

In the last post on the blog the author urges readers to support the No2ID campaign.

Lord Bonkers' website

I have begun the process of updating Lord B's site. I had serious spyware problems last summer and then got interested in this blog. (Don't tell him, for Gladstone's sake.)

Now Lord Bonkers' Latest Diary is just what it says, even though it comes from 1906.

Only in Shropshire...

Oswestry, to be precise. From the Shropshire Star:

An old toilet block, earmarked for possible demolition, might have to stay put - because it could be holding up the remains of a Shropshire castle.

For more on Oswestry Castle in happier days, click here.

The cup that cheers

Today's Guardian carries a long extract from the new book by Peter Hyman, the former New Labour apparachik who has gone into teaching. Oddly, what strikes the reader most is not the radical break Hyman has made but how similar his new career must be to his time working for Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street.

Let me explain.

My new boss is Trevor Averre-Beeson, headteacher of Islington Green school. The first time I meet him, he is standing like a new father next to his pride and joy - his Fender Stratocaster guitar. On the wall of his office there is a Beatles calendar.

Working for someone who made his love of rock and roll a little too public to be true? That must have seemed strangely familiar.

He is over six feet tall and broad-shouldered; mid-40s, in a blue suit, a pale blue shirt and a purple tie. He is middle-class...

I think we had gathered that from his job and his name.

...yet has a classless feel to him.

That's all right then.

He radiates dynamism.

Grrr, tiger.

"Welcome," he says. "Water or coffee?" I later discover that anyone who asks for tea annoys Trevor intensely. He has coffee brewing permanently and water is easy. He doesn't want to waste time making tea.

What greater condemnation...

Let's go back into black ink.

What greater condemnation could there be of a man than that he is not prepared to spare the time to make tea? We see here, all at once, what is wrong with the modern world, the state of education and New Labour.

Up the wooden hill

A story in the Yorkshire Post neatly ties together two recent concerns of this blog.

The paper suggests that Sue Catling, recently deselected as the Tory candidate in Calder Valley, is being talked as a possible replacement for Jonathan Sayeed in Mid Bedfordshire following his recent embarrassment.

Politicians and comedians

A sign of the times.

This morning the BBC Radio 4 Today programme interviewed Rowan Atkinson about his opposition to the government's plans to make incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence.

At the end of the item the interviewer said "Thank you for your time".

This from a programme that routinely treats cabinet minister with contempt.

Harborough woman gives birth to cat

Details here.

Nice Belvoir

The Tory MP Jonathan Sayeed is facing suspension from parliament for two weeks, has had the Tory whip withdrawn for a month and is now threatened with deselection in his Mid Bedfordshire constituency. Full details from the BBC.

But if you want a really good laugh, visit the website of The English Manner Ltd, the company run by Sayeed's parliamentary aide Alexandra Messervy.

In the words of the Guardian:

The English Manner's website promised unique travel experiences, courses in etiquette and seminars in social graces. The organiser, Mrs Messervy, promised "once in a lifetime trips to recreate a classic English country house party by enabling guests to stay with members of the aristocracy in castles and stately homes throughout Britain". She also promised "tutorials led by the British political, cultural and artistic elite".

The tours included staying at Belvoir Castle, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, and private tours round Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace.

How much does this combination of snobbery and wishful thinking cost? A four-day visit to Britain, staying as guests of the Duke of Rutland, will set Americans back an eye-watering $4440 per person.

If gullible people want to stay in an aristocratic home in Rutland, I suggest that they contact my old friend Lord Bonkers instead. I can guarantee them a holiday they will never forget - and at a fraction of the price.

The Standards Board for England

Here is today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. It owes something to an earlier posting on this blog. Simon Titley has also taken up the cause, but I did not feel Lib Dem News was ready for a phrase like "a large festering vat of rancid goat semen".

Fighting talk

Labour came to power pledged to wage war on sleaze. In part because the last days of John Major’s government made Sodom and Gomorrah looks like genteel Cotswold villages. But more because there was little to differentiate them from the Tories on policy and they needed something else to talk about.

One of the fruits of this war is the Standards Board for England. Set up in March 2001, it describes its role as ensuring that “members of local authorities are seen to live up to the high standards the public has a right to expect from them”.

But there are increasing concerns that the Board is being used by local politicians and activists as a weapon against their opponents. Three or four thousand complaints are made about councillors every year.

More worrying is the suggestion that councils use the Board to discourage scrutiny. On Tuesday in Westminster Hall Peter Bradley raised the case of Paul Dimoldenberg, the leader of the Labour opposition group on Westminster. Dimoldenberg was reported to the Board after leaking an e-mail which countered claims that Dame Shirley Porter was unable to pay a £42m surcharge because she was down to her last £300,000. He also exposed the council’s unenthusiastic approach to recouping the lower settlement it finally reached with Dame Shirley.

Instead of being awarded the freedom of the borough, Dimoldenberg was reported by his own officers and has already run up more than £6000 in legal costs.

Most cases the Board handles are not this dramatic, but there are many where councillors are facing investigation or sanctions for what sounds remarkably like doing their job.

What is happening stems partly from our exaggerated modern concerns for others’ feelings. Politics, local politics included, thrives on conflict and strong argument. If something is worth saying, it is likely to offend someone.

And partly it arises from the centralisation of government. Local politics in Britain is now a form of community management where councils deliver the initiatives and crackdowns decreed from above. Councillors who insist on acting as representatives of the people are viewed with suspicion.

The Board clearly needs reform. In the mean time, anyone reported to it for fighting on behalf of the electors should wear the distinction with pride.

Parents and the Guardian

There was an article in the Guardian yesterday which epitomises the agonies its readers go through as parents.

What should you do if your child uses bad language? The thought that you might tell them not to seems hardly to occur to the author, Pete May. Instead he reserves his approval for Jan Parker and Jan Stimpson who in their book Raising Happy Children, he reports, suggest having a rule that certain rude words can't be used in the house by either children or adults. At all costs, we must refrain from treating children differently from adults.

You will also find in May's article two other tactics used by those who defend such views.

There is the claim that concern with good manners and the like is middle class - always a pejorative term in the Guardian, which is odd when you consider who reads it:

"It's also a class thing," says Julie Targett. "Swearing is accepted more in upper- and working-class families. But my family is Daily Mail-reading middle-class."

And there is the assumption that the only alternative to a lax approach is something absurdly repressive:

Do any of us want grown-up kids who are terrified to swear in front of us?

I was also struck by May's conclusion:

Maybe all we can do is try to keep swearing out of the house until our children become adolescents - when parents and children will probably swear at each other as much as they effing well like.

Someone should write a history of are concept of adolescence. When did it become accepted that teenagers will be impossible to live with? I suspect it was surprisingly recently. Those who defend this view will do so in terms of raging hormones, yet they are people who would reject biological determinism in every other sphere of life.

I suspect that it has more to do with the abdication of adult authority that we see in May's article. I am reminded of some lines of W. H. Auden (full poem here), which apply equally well to modern parents and children:

Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Erewash: Where's that?

Readers who have the misfortune not to live in the East Midlands may not be too clear on the whereabouts of the constituency Robert Kilroy-Silk is to fight. This profile from the BBC will help you:

Erewash is in south east Derbyshire, and lies inbetween Nottingham and Derby, and is named after the river which flows from north to south through the seat and enters the Trent near Long Eaton. 

The seat’s main towns are Long Eaton and Ilkeston, and there also several small villages and open countryside in the area. The M1 also cuts down the middle of the constituency. 

The Erewash seat is home to many East Midlands commuters, but has a good deal of industry also. Long Eaton is still a lace-making centre, and though coal mining is no more, engineering, textile, and furniture-making industries remain. Most of the workforce is employed in manual trades, but a relatively low unemployment rate, high level of owner-occupancy and a near all-white population.

British films: not so cosy

On 17 February Matthew Sweet will publish his Shepperton Babylon. It's a great title, promising a British equivalent of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. The Faber website describes it as:

a history of home-grown movies that includes the scandals, the suicides, the immolations and the contract killings - the product of thousands of conversations with veteran film-makers.

It's not just that this is a fascinating subject in itself, but Sweet is the author of one of the most remarkable history books I know: Inventing the Victorians.

In it he argues that we have got the Victorians all wrong. They were not as, well, Victorian as we imagine. They did not cover the legs of pianos because they thought them indelicate - that was a joke they told at the expense of the prudish Americans. (See this column of mine, which acknowledges its debt to Sweet, for more details.) John Ruskin was not dumbfounded by the sight of his bride's pubic hair on their wedding night. And Prince Albert did not have a Prince Albert.

Sweet is talking on British films at the University of Warwick on 26 February. Full details here.

More on the Liberal Democrats' escape from house arrest

The Guardian reports:

The Liberal Democrats will today strike out against the government's plans for the house arrest of suspected terrorists by saying they will oppose the measure in the Lords, arguing that it requires derogation from the European convention on human rights.

Veritas to change name?

Europhobia suggests that Robert Kilroy-Silk's new party may have made a poor choice of name.

Not because everyone is calling them Vanitas, but because Veritas is a trademark of the Veritas software company.

Two new links

I have added a couple more links to the list on the right - or the "blogroll", as young people call it.

1. Edis Bevan's MKNE Political Information, which has awoken after a dormant period;
2. The surprisingly palatable Chicken Yoghurt.

Lib Dems see sense on house arrests

"Plans for keeping terrorist suspects under house arrest are to be opposed by the Liberal Democrats," says the BBC News website.

I should think so too.

Referees, authority and David Mellor

I am writing this listening to Arsenal vs Manchester United. Like all good Chelsea fans, I am hoping for a draw.

The commentators are saying that the players and both benches are yelling at the referee every time he makes a decision. This typifies our modern inability to submit to any authority at all.

I am reminded of David Mellor and his successful attempt to reinvent himself as a populist football pundit on BBC Radio Five Live. He did two things. The first was to do affect an estuary accent - rather like Tony Blair on Richard and Judy. If you had heard Mellor broadcasting on classical music in his normal voice Radio 3, and then doing his football show on Five, you would not have realised it was the same person.

The other thing Mellor did was to acquire some attitudes that he thought would appeal to the masses. Chief among these was contempt for referees. The most one-eyed fan ringing in to complain his team had been robbed was sure of a sympathetic hearing.

If former Tory cabinet ministers have no respect for figures of authority like referees, what chance is there that anyone else will? This supports the claim I made the other day that Conservatism no longer exists as a political philosophy in this country.

Richard Sennett's Authority is supposed to be a good discussion of the subject from a left-wing point of view. I borrowed it recently from Leicester University's library, but some bastard recalled the book before I could read it.

Jo Grimond

There is a pleasant short tribute on the website of the Orcadian newspaper.

No one's votin' for Oaten

Peter Black AM has joined the outcry:

If any issue required a clear Liberal steer then this is it. This is an opportunity once more for the Liberal Democrats to stand at the head of those concerned about our drift into totalitarianism and to speak out on behalf of people's liberties. It is also our duty to point out the ineffectiveness of these measures as a weapon against terrorism. It is time for Mark Oaten and Charles Kennedy to assume that position publicly and loudly.

Simon Titley on Mark Oaten

Trenchant stuff over on Liberal Dissenter:

When a Law Lord and a Labour MP can demonstrate a better grasp of liberalism and express it in forthright terms, while our parliamentary spokesman ends up batting for the opposition, what hope is there?

Chris Morris

There is a profile of the great man in today's Observer.

Thanks to Nick Barlow for the tip - I didn't buy a Sunday paper.

I shall write this only once

A few days ago we reported the sad state of the little Shropshire town on Cleobury Mortimer. It is "strife torn" and has been "plunged into chaos", according to the Shropshire Star.

But the inhabitants are not down-hearted. They are doing what English people always do when they want to cheer themselves up: dressing up as nuns, French waitresses and SS officers.

The Star says:

Today Mavis Cartwright, director of the Cleobury Players, said she hoped people would turn out in big numbers to see the local performance of Allo Allo. She said people in the town had put a great deal of work into rehearsing the production and it was expected to be a hit.

The Westminster Bookshop...

...opened at 8 Artillery Row, London SW1, in October last year. It's the same premises that Politicos occupied before it went virtual.

Now the Westminster Bookshop has a website where you can browse and order political books to your heart's content.

Better than any anti-ageing cream?

Spiked has a pleasing dissection of those annoying Teacher Training Agency advertisements, written by Dolan Cummings:

It's bad enough that TV should be dominated by a cult of youth and the celebration of banality. Is it too much to ask that schools should encourage pupils to aspire to something more?

Gambling and 24-hour drinking

Here is today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Ayes down

Casino Royale, the first James Bond book, begins: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”

The government has reached the 3 a.m. stage with its gambling bill.

At first ministers were excited by their plans to revive moribund resorts with casinos. No more sitting around in bus shelters waiting to be allowed back into your boarding house. Peter Hain believed they would “provide an opportunity for families to go out and eat, have some entertainment and … indulge in some leisure gambling in an adult fashion.”

But they have been shaken (not stirred) by the opposition they have run into, and the idea has turned sour. People realise the gambling industry is not planning the sort of establishments that sophisticates likes Hain or James Bond would enjoy, but sheds with row upon row of slot machines.

A similar thing has happened with the licensing laws. Town centres were going to be given new life by allowing more bars to open. But we have not seen the flourishing of a Continental café culture. We have seen the decline of traditional pubs and the opening of more and more superbars where there are no tables or chairs and young people are crammed in.

It’s called vertical drinking, but some customers don’t remain vertical for long. Now they have seen what it can mean, it’s no surprise that further liberalisation strikes many as a doubtful idea.

John Pugh’s Southport constituency is the sort of place the gambling bill is meant to help. But he described it as an industry-led proposal and said the town is regenerating itself without any. He felt the bill’s planning controls are too weak, with the local community receiving little in return for its concessions to the gambling industry.

One thing the government has done is to take powers to bar children from seaside arcades. Very New Labour.

It’s as though it had announced a free-for-all on hardcore pornography and then, when there was an outcry, reassured voters with the news that it was considering banning the Beano.

Patrick Hamilton

I have posted a new entry to my anthology blog Serendib: the opening lines of the novel The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

I tend to discuss newpaper articles on this blog and reserve Serendib for passages from books. I have not posted there much recently, so the moral must be that I have not read enough good books lately.

Anyway, Hamilton is one of those writers whom I have meant to investigate for years. You can read more about his career here.

Julian Le Grand

There is a feature in today's Guardian about Tony Blair's inner circle. One of the people profiled in depth is Julian Le Grand.

I met Le Grand a few years ago when he gave a talk to the John Stuart Mill Institute at the National Liberal Club. It was based on work that was later published as his book Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights, Knaves, Pawns and Queens.

I found his ideas interesting, but the Guardian reports that:

Some, including the unions, claimed that it put him outside the social democrat family since it did not assume public sector workers are purely motivated by altruism.

Purely by altruism? I doubt there has been anyone born who is motivated purely by altruism.

One of the dangers of left and liberal politics is that they will become merely a reflection of the interests of those working in the public sector.

Yes, the public sector ethos is valuable. And, yes, public sector workers are bound to play a prominent part in any successful anti-Tory movement.

But it is nonsense to pretend that all those working in the public sector are finer souls than the rest of us, and to make that the basis of our politics.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Yesterday Charles Clarke announced plans to introduce house arrest to Britain. What did the Independent put on its front page? Auschwitz.

Remembering the Holocaust ought to give us a sharper nose for tyranny, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. Nick Cohen, in a thoughtful article published in 2000, quotes the historian Peter Novick as saying:

The principal lesson of the Holocaust, it is frequently said, [is that] it sensitises us to oppression and atrocity. In principle it might, and I don't doubt that sometimes it does. But making it the benchmark of oppression and atrocity works in precisely the opposite direction, trivialising crimes of lesser magnitude.

And Cohen gives an example of how it can work in this paradoxical way:

A few months ago, I shared a platform with Sion Simon, a new Labour cheerleader. I had a go at the government's assault on trial by jury, and his instant response was: "Nick Cohen thinks Blair's Hitler." I pointed out that I thought nothing of the sort, and asked if all criticism of new Labour's record would be illegitimate until the day the Cabinet dressed in black leather and invaded Poland.

For many years Nazi Germany gave the British a clear sense of what we were not like. I was not born until 1960, but central to my opposition to compulsory identity cards is a sense that they are simply not British coupled with a vague feeling that not having to carry a card was part of our reward for having won the Second World War.

Later, overlapping with this period, the Soviet Union served a similar purpose, aided by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, served a similar function. Both tyrannies provided us with models of what we did not British society to become, and there was a tendency to judge new government proposals by the extent to which they represented steps down the slippery slope towards them.

But the Berlin Wall has come down and Big Brother means something very different to a later generation, so our sense of what tyranny feels like is less vivid than it used to be. Meanwhile, we have lost our confidence in Britishness as something stable or even desirable.

The result is a void that our leaders have not been slow in filling. The memory of the Holocaust ought to increase our scepticism about politicians: instead we have to suffer Tony Blair on the evening news employing his hammiest just-choking-back-the-tears voice to point the moral lessons he wants us to learn.

By all means observe Holocaust Memorial Day if you wish, though personally I have always found Blair's eagerness to behave like a headmaster choosing the theme for morning assembly one of his less appealing characteristics. But do not let it blind you to the failings of our present day leaders, trivial though their crimes are in comparison.

Nor should you overlook the fact that the occasion itself is not without its shabby compromises. Cohen, in another article, asks:

If we had to have a Holocaust Day, why 27 January, when Auschwitz was liberated by a Red Army that went on to subjugate half of Europe? What was wrong with 15 April when the British Army reached 40,000 inmates in Belsen - a moment which, whenever it is recalled, can make even my unpatriotic eyes prick?

And, in the first article I quoted, he reminds us that in the first Holocaust Memorial Day:

BBC executives and the government ... banned references to the Turkish slaughter of 1,500,000 Armenians in 1915, the first 20th-century genocide, and one that has many impolitic resonances. Turkey does not like to be reminded of the parallels between its treatment of the Armenians 85 years ago and of the Kurds today; earlier this year, it threatened to deny the Americans use of air bases on her territory if Bill Clinton formally accepted the massacres were genocide.

We should certainly remember the Holocaust, but we should be wary of allowing our modern-day leaders to tell us the lessons we should learn from it.

Later. The only freely available version of one of the Cohen articles referred to here is to be found on David Irving's website. The link is not an endorsement of anything else to be found there.

MPs' working hours

MPs have voted to restore late-night sittings on Tuesdays by a surprisingly large majority of 67. The Commons will now sit from 2.30 to 10.30 on both Mondays and Tuesdays.

Some will see this as a retrograde step, as MPs will not be home to read Jack and Chloe a bedtime story on Tuesdays. But think again.

There was an article in the Guardian this morning by Douglas Alexander and David Milliband in support of the status quo. But if the sharpest, most ambitious young ministers in a government want something, it is generally a good idea for backbenchers to vote against it.

I expect it was their contribution that swung the vote.

Michael Howard on immigration

The policies the Tories are putting forward on immigration prove two things. The first is that they do not expect to win the forthcoming general election. The second is that Conservatism, as a coherent political philosophy, is just about dead in Britain. Let me explain.

In order to put into place the annual limit on people granted asylum he proposes, Howard - by his own admission - would have to withdraw from the 1951 United Nations Convention on refugees. Equally, the BBC reports, a spokesman for European Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini has said that the plans would contravene EU asylum policy and the UK could not simply refuse to hear an asylum case.

No doubt it would break many other treaties too. This is not a sign that Britain is now ruled from Brussels or by the UN. It is a sign that. Unless it is North Korea or Hoxha's Albania, then any nation will have taken on numerous reciprocal obligations with other nations that it cannot wish away over night.

Michael Howard is aware of this, of course. Which suggests that his policy is not designed to be put into practice in a few months' time by a Conservative government after the next general election, but is intended to rally the core vote and limit the scale of his defeat.

He should be careful though. Benjamin Netanyahu, much to his surprise, was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1996 on a just such a manifesto and his premiership was a failure as a result.

Then there is the death of Conservatism as a philosophy in Britain. If Conservatives really do believe in the family, the centrality religion and the preservation of established authority, then they should be enjoying an enthusiastic reception for their views from many immigrant communities and renewing themselves from the same source.

As it is, the Conservatives seem to have nothing to say to those communities. This confirms the impression that the Tory Party exists to enable the wealthy to stay wealthy and to pander to the less attractive prejudices of their dwindling membership.

And, as I never miss an opportunity to point out, it is all Mrs Thatcher's fault.

Listen with Gladstone

As today was meant to be the most depressing day of the year, I took it as holiday and went to London. I renewed my House of Commons Press Gallery pass, met a couple of friends and did some shopping.

One of the things I bought was a CD of historic recordings from the British Library's sound archive. It includes the voices of several liberals: Gladstone, Asquith, Lloyd George, Margaret Wintringham and Herbert Samuel. I have not listened to it yet, but it promises to be fascinating.

Daily Telegraph bemoans the Vicky Pollard generation

Here is a good harrumphing piece with more than a little truth to it:

The "don't-blame-me" mentality personified by Vicky Pollard - the Little Britain character who refuses to accept responsibility for anything - is becoming more prevalent, according to a new study.

Researchers say that young people increasingly believe that their fate is out of their hands and that parents, schools, government or bad luck are to blame for their misfortunes.

You may have to register with the Telegraph site first. (It's not my fault.)

Cleobury Mortimer: "Strife torn", "Plunged into chaos"

Forget Beirut or Baghdad. According to the Shropshire Star, it's Cleobury Mortimer we should be worrying about:

Two new rows have blown up in a strife-torn town near to the south Shropshire border, which was plunged into chaos when four parish councillors quit their local authority in protest.

The new rows blew up today in Cleobury Mortimer, which has been at the centre of a series of controversies during the past 18 months.

Those rows in full

Former parish councillor Jim Reynolds, who was sacked as editor of the town's Cleobury Bulletin newsheet (sic.), today refused to hand the publication over to the parish chairman.

And:

The second row centred on parking after Councillor Griffiths was accused of blocking spaces along the High Street for a second time this week.

At least in Market Harborough we only have underground rivers to worry about.

Jerry Springer - The Opera

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News:

Banning the Beeb

There's nothing like imminent retirement to make a politician talk sense. Invited on Monday to condemn the BBC for showing Jerry Springer - The Opera, Estelle Morris robustly refused.

"I would rather have free speech than try to legislate against people being offended," she said. "What is broadcast or printed is not and never should be a matter for the government."

Quite right too. This is the sort of programme - taking something enjoyed by the metropolitan elite and making it available to everyone - that justifies public service broadcasting.

It's different from the early days of this administration. Then Stephen Byers was so ambitious he demanded a Teletubbies video to allow him to judge whether it was suitable viewing for children.

As ever, it was Tory MPs who were keen to attack the BBC. In part it was their native philistinism: it is always high art which annoys them. There were similar rows in over Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Tony Harrison's poem V.

But there was more to it than that. Some Tories, having seen George W. Bush win twice with the votes of the religious right, fancy they can appeal to its British equivalent. It is doubtful that such a thing exists, and their attack on the BBC raises the question of what it is the Tories want to conserve.

For most of us, Auntie is central to our idea of what it means to be British. Think Alvar Liddell. In Town Tonight. Muffin the Mule. Mrs Dale's Diary. Franklin Engelmann. The Clitheroe Kid. David Jacobs. Listen with Mother. Raymond Baxter. Gardeners' Question Time. Valerie Singleton. Dr Who. Richard Dimbleby and all his children.

Do they want to abolish all that? Do they believe the commercial sector has higher standards? Or do they want the state to censor the BBC's programmes? That is precisely the sort of society we used to congratulate ourselves on not having.

Elsewhere on Monday, two Tories had a more promising idea. They demanded to know what progress was being made with encouraging Britons living abroad to register to vote here.

This is an important intellectual breakthrough. They have grasped that the people most likely to vote for a Tory government are those who will not have to live under it.

More Lib Dem blogs added

It's a big Liberal England hello to Dominic Tristram and No Geek is an Island, which have both joined the list on the right.

Under Market Harborough

From the Leicester Mercury:

A flood defence network may be delayed by the discovery of a suspected underground river, it was revealed today.

The cost of Anglian Water's £1.8 million scheme in Market Harborough town centre is expected to increase as a result.

Click for the full story.

Well, it's fascinating if you live here.

Reclaim the swastika

Proof that life in a multicultural society is more complicated than the average politician grasps comes in the form of this report from the Scotsman:

The Hindu Council UK today called on all MPs and MEPs to oppose a proposed EU move to ban the swastika symbol because of its Nazi associations.

The council is urging politicians to fight the move as the symbol has been used for thousands of years and for Hindus represents a highly-sacred sign of wisdom

I am reminded of an incident when I was a governor of a primary school here in Market Harborough. ("I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.") The children went on an outing to a Hindu temple in Leicester and were given coconuts carved with sacred symbols as presents. They had to go home with letters to their parents reassuring them that they had not been to a meeting of the BNP.

There must also have been a vogue for the swastika in Britain in the early 20th century. The standard edition of the works of Rudyard Kipling had it stamped on the spine. Indeed, Kipling seems to have adopted it as a sort of personal logo. (That's wasn't funny. See me afterwards, Eagleton.) See this article for further details.

And, ironically given Prince Harry's recent idiocy, if you go to Balmoral Castle and inspect the memorial to estate workers who died in the First World War (my kinsmen among them, almost certainly) that stands just outside the gates, you will find that it is heavily decorated with swastikas. There is a small picture of the whole memorial on this page and a clearer one of the decoration here.

Des Wilson off his long run

Just before Christmas I posted a complaint about the English and Wales Cricket Board's decision to sell the rights to home test matches to BSkyB, with the result that they will no longer be shown on terrestrial television.

Now Des Wilson, once the darling of radical Liberals everywhere, has joined the debate:

"while there have been assurances that the deal will help the developmental and recreational aspects of the game, there are no plans, let alone guarantees. In the meantime the 18 first-class counties are rubbing their hands in expectation of more money to spend on employing too many expensive overseas players and on other short-term projects."

Smells and flashes and bangs

There is a good article by Josie Appleton on the Spiked website that links modern concerns for safety in schools with the decline of children's interest in science:

Jack Pridham, emeritus professor of biochemistry at Royal Holloway, University of London, says it was the "smells and flashes and bangs" that drew him to chemistry as a boy. "Now all the exciting stuff has gone out of the window."

Teachers say that they are increasingly cautious about old explosive favourites - burning hydrogen gas in air to create water, the thermite reaction (producing iron from a mix of iron oxide and aluminium), or the reaction between phosphorous and oxygen. The fractional distillation of crude oil (to show its different components) is avoided, because crude oil is considered carcinogenic (cancer-causing) - apparently some schools use ink and water instead.

Articles bemoaning the modern world tend at heart to be a complaint that young people are having too much fun these days. This, like many on Spiked, are based on the theory that they do have enough fun any more, which is why I am happy to plug it.

I win an award

In my day job I am communications officer for the British Psychological Society's Division of Clinical Psychology. I was looking through some press cuttings at work today when I came across a column from the Financial Times by one Michael Skapinker. (You can read it via this page, but you have to be a subscriber.)

In it, Skapinker announces his Barely Managing Awards for 2004. And the award for the Most Heroic Extrapolation of a Research Result goes to a press release which I wrote.

In my defence I can say that this is better than winning the award for the Best Piece of Research Proving the Bleeding Obvious (which the Society also received) and the release did lead to a lot of press coverage - there is an example here.

And I shall be adding the line "Winner of Financial Times journalism award 2004" to my c.v. in future.

The tallest MP ever

It is wonderful what you find when you are surfing the net looking for something else. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you will come across the claim that the:

Tallest MP was Sir Louis Gluckstein who represented Nottingham East between 1931 and 1945 was over 6ft 7inches tall.

Lord Bonkers writes: He captained the parliamentary basketball for many years and was frequently employed by the Searjeant at Arms to reach things down from high shelves.

Alan Bennett

This weekend I looked through Alan Bennett's collection Writing Home again and posted a short diary extract about the auditions for his play Forty Years On to my other blog, the anthology Serendib ("Much loved, little visited.")

Now, via The Virtual Stoa and Charlotte Street, I find that someone else has been doing more of the same. Click here for further quotations from the great man.

Nick Cohen on the family court system

The best left-wing journalists writing in Britain at the moment is Nick Cohen - you can find an archive of his columns in the Observer here. He is consistently original and entertaining, and the best thing in any Sunday's papers, even when you disagree with the line he is taking.

When he supported the war in Iraq, you felt he did so because he really believed what he was saying. With other pro-war journalists (it would be invidious to mention David Aaronovitch or Johann Hari in this context), it was hard to dismiss the suspicion that they were merely following the Downing Street line.

Yesterday's column is a good example. A lesser journalist would have used Lord Falconer's appointment of an old friend with a background in commercial law as the new president of the family division as the occasion for a piece on new Labour cronyism. Cohen does those very well, but this time he gives us far more.

It is worth reading in full, but here are a few quotations to give whet you appetite:

If Charles Dickens were around today, he'd be writing The Family Division. You might think that as a British citizen you are innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And so you are when you are charged with a criminal offence.

But if you are ever unlucky enough to be faced with the prospect of having your child taken into care - a far worse punishment than a jail term for most parents - you will find that the state need only prove that you are guilty on the balance of probabilities.

And:

You might think that it's a basic tradition of the English law that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done and that secret justice is no justice at all. Not so in the Family Division. Enter into its courts and you enter a British Guantanamo where basic traditions no longer apply...

It's not merely that the cases are held in secret. Nothing about them - court papers, expert reports, statements from witnesses - can be made public without the permission of the court.

And:

Like all closed systems, family law is prone to attacks of collective mania. Delusions sweep the minds of otherwise sane men and women because there are no sceptical outsiders to bring them up short. In the 1980s and 1990s, the modern witch-crazes of satanic and ritual abuse swept through social service departments and the courts. They died down only to be replaced by Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, an impressively difficult name for a criminally-vague theory, which purported to explain otherwise inexplicable deaths and injuries by asserting that parents were seeking attention by harming their children.

And:

The most notorious incident was during the Rochdale witch craze when children were dragged from their homes by social workers convinced they had uncovered a coven of Lancashire devil worshippers. Parents went to their councillors, who could do nothing because they had been warned that it was illegal to ask what was going on.

And finally:

If to make reform work Lord Falconer has to parachute in a crony, well three cheers for cronyism. Let's have more of it. If Dame Elizabeth doesn't like it, that's good. If Family Division judges are resentful, that's better. We should urge Lord Falconer to cram the bench with lawyers who haven't been contaminated by decades of secrecy. If he runs out of legal cronies, there's always his milkman, postman, lady who does and teenage children. Anything and anyone will be better than the status quo.

I seem to have ended up by quoting most of the article, but as always with Cohen, it is worth reading him for yourself.

More on Mardy Jones

If you want to know more about the unfortunate Thomas Isaac Mardy Jones, then click here for his photograph.

You will see that he died in 1970 at the age of 91. I hope the headline that day was not Rail Ticket Man Dies.

House Points: The wrong side of the blunkett

Here is my column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

The good old days?

Now that David Blunkett and his little lad have slipped from the headlines it is time to note two things. The first is that many authorities believe this affair gave rise to the expression “born the wrong side of the blunkett” to denote illegitimacy.

The second is a sad historical parallel with one of the less dramatic aspects of Nannygate. You will recall that Blunkett was found to have misused two first class rail tickets assigned to him for his work as an MP. We taxpayers are more forgiving than many employers: after he repaid the £179 they were worth, the matter was closed.

Things were not always so civilised. In 1922 Mardy Jones was elected Labour MP for Pontypridd. He had begun work in the mines at the age of 12, and like many working-class Members found life difficult financially.

Payment for MPs was one of the Chartists’ demands in the 1830s. It was not introduced until the Liberal government’s 1911 Parliament Act. In Jones’ day the salary was small, but MPs did receive a perk in the form of vouchers that could be exchanged for railway tickets between their constituencies and Westminster. As Matthew Parris reports in his Great Parliamentary Scandals, those tickets were strictly non-transferable.

Mardy Jones broke the rules. He sent two tickets to Wales to allow his wife and young daughter to make a rare trip to London. Unfortunately, one of them was six weeks out of date and the Great Western Railway pressed charges.

Despite an ingenious defence involving vital papers that had to be brought to him, Jones was found guilty and fined £2 plus costs. Worse, he was obliged to resign his seat before the case came to court.

David Blunkett, one newspaper suggested, attributes his fall attributes to “a millionaires’ plot to destroy a working class lad” and not his own disastrous judgement. But he doesn’t know the half of class prejudice.

When Jones was convicted the magistrate declared: “However disgusting this case is, and I think it is very disgusting, we have to remember that Mr Mardy Jones has risen to his present position from a coal mine.”

David Blunkett, more than most of us, should be thankful he does not live in the good old days.

More Lib Dem Blogs

Two promising blogs by Lib Dem candidates have appeared recently. They are written by Simon Radford and John Hemming. I have added links to both to the list on the right.

Strawberry Fields NOT Forever

The Strawberry Fields children's home immortalised by The Beatles is to close, reports the BBC.

Heil Harry

Harry's choice of costume does not such a surprise when you consider the career or his great uncle - the husband of one of Prince Philip's sisters:

Philip's sister had married a cousin, Prince Christoph of Hesse. Prince Christoph had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and by 1935 was a standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler and chief of the forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research) - in reality a special intelligence operation using new electronic intelligence gathering methods.

Their son was named Karl Adolf after Hitler.

Peter Berresford Ellis's article from the Irish Democrat has much more scurrilous gossip about the royal family.

The alarm bells about Harry began to ring three years ago following after reports that he had been drinking and taking drugs at a pub near Highgrove. Far more serious for supporters of the monarchy, though, was the allegation that he had been thrown out after insulting the staff.

One can understand any young person experimenting with cannabis or alcohol, but for a prince to be rude to the lower orders is unforgivable.

Tony Blair: "Palpably absurd"

When the inspectors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for:

• ten thousand litres of anthrax;
• a far reaching VX nerve agent programme;
• up to 6,500 chemical munitions;
• at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, possibly more than ten times that amount
• unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons;
• an entire Scud missile programme.

We are now seriously asked to accept that in the last few years, contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, he decided unilaterally to destroy the weapons. Such a claim is palpably absurd.

Tony Blair, 18 March 2003

With little fanfare, U.S. President George Bush's highly publicized search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended before Christmas.

Officials with the Iraq Survey Group told the Washington Post the man in charge of the search, Charles Duelfer, is back in Washington writing his final report that pretty much reiterates his report from September that said there was nothing found.

UPI, 12 Janaury 2005

Even grimmer up North

The Yorkshire Post has more on the feuding amongst Conservatives in Calder Valley (a constituency in which I naturally take an interest).

Bear in mind that this is not a hopeless seat for the Tories but one they must gain to make any sort of dent in Blair's majority at the next election. The result last time can be found here.

Mobile phones, children and safety

A few months ago I wrote about children and mobile phones:

The reason that we worry about children having mobile phones is not safety at all. It is because we feel that it is somehow not fitting that they should have them. They are too young. But to say so sounds so hopelessly old-fashioned that we treat it as a question of safety instead.

It is interesting, then, that there is a transcript of a phone-in contribution on the BBC website in which a father gives his reasons for being in favour of his son to have a mobile phone:

I decided to give my son a mobile phone last year.

All his friends had a mobile phone and he was asking for one. When I upgraded my phone, I gave him my old one.

The reason we gave it was because of safety.

He's going to a secondary school and he has to go to school on his own, so if there was a need for him to call us at any time, then the phone would be there available for him.

It is not just that we talk about safety a lot when it comes to children these days. We hardly talk about anything else.

Grim up north for the Tories

Thanks to Tory Trouble for alerting us to this amusing story from the Halifax Today site:

Tory candidate Sue Catling today faced the ignominy of being locked out of the constituency party office which she has been using as a base for her General Election campaign.

Catling has taken it badly:

"This is another despicable trick to try to scupper me."

And we particularly liked the comment from her association treasurer:

"There are only two registered key holders and if we wanted a third it would be someone who lives a lot closer than Cheshire."

Jerry Springer - The Opera: What the BBC is for

It is always high culture that rouses the forces of reaction to fury. The last time there was a row comparable to that over Jerry Springer - The Opera was in 1987 when Channel 4 broadcast a film of Tony Harrison's poem V.

This encyclopaedia entry reminds us what happened then

His best-known poem is the fairly long V.(1985), written during the UK miners' strike of 1984-5, and describing a trip to see his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery "now littered with beer cans and vandalised by obscene graffiti". The title has several possible interpretations: victory, versus, verse etc.

Proposals to screen a filmed version of V. by Channel 4 in October 1987 drew howls of outrage from the tabloid press, some broadsheet journalists, and MPs, apparently concerned about the effects its "torrents of obscene language" and "streams of four-letter filth" would have on the nation's youth.

Indeed, an Early day Motion entitled "Television Obscenity" was proposed on 27 October 1987 by a group of Conservative MPs, who condemned Channel 4 and the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The motion was opposed by a single MP, Mr Norman Buchan, who suggested that MPs had either failed to read or failed to understand V.

The broadcast went ahead, and the brouhaha settled quickly after enough column inches had been written about the broadcast and reaction to the broadcast.

Jerry Springer - The Opera is the sort of programme that justifies the existence of public service broadcasting. The BBC took a production that had been seen largely by the metropolitan elite and made it available to a much wider audience.

It is the acres of lifestyle programming and reality shows that make me begrudge paying the licence fee. Broadcasts like this one reconcile me to it.

Round Winter Nonsuch

Another rare apple has turned up in a south Shropshire orchard, reports the Shropshire Star. Give it up, please, for the Round Winter Nonsuch.

When we noted the rediscovery of the Gipsy King variety a few months ago we gave a plug for the excellent organisation Common Ground, which cares about things like this. Here is another plug for it.

Cricket: Good news and bad

The good news: Bangladesh have won their first test match, beating Zimbabwe by 226 runs at Chittagong. Some have questioned whether they should have been granted test status in the first place, arguing that they are simply not good enough. But we should remember that it took New Zealand around 50 years (from the 1920s to the 1970s) to cease being a pushover at test level. So well done, Bangladesh.

The bad news is that the lime tree on the outfield at the St Lawrence ground in Canterbury has blown down. Some may ask why a cricket ground should have a tree on it, but they merely show that they understand nothing about cricket. (If a shot hit any part of the tree, four runs were awarded.)

The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq

I have added my review of this book by Rohan Candappa to the collection on Lord Bonkers' website. It can be found at the bottom of that page and first appeared in the 17 December 2004 issue of Liberal Democrat News.

Alternative comedy is the new establishment

On New Year's Day Channel 4 broadcast The Comedians' Comedian - a countdown of the top 50 comedians as voted for by more than 300 comedy performers, writers, producers and directors. Like all these "best of" programmes it was introduced by Jimmy Carr, but it was a class above most of them. Paul Ross was nowhere to be seen and there were no D list celebs intoning: "We always watched Magpie. Blue Peter was for posh kids."

The winner was Peter Cook, which seems fair enough. You could argue for days about whether he was the funniest, but it is a matter of fact that he has been the most influential comedian of modern times.

More interesting, though, was the treatment of some of the performers who came further down the list. Anyone who did not fit the required mould for a modern comedian - left-wing, swears a lot, at Cambridge with Stephen Fry and so on - was treated with contempt. So though such minor figures as Reeves & Mortimer and French & Saunders were revered, when Charlie Chaplin and Bob Monkhouse were being discussed there were as many clips of people disparaging them as there were of praise.

I always had a guilty liking for Monkhouse because of his professionalism and lines like: "Fifty years ago, when I said I was going to be a comedian, people laughed. They're not laughing now." Chaplin is a more interesting case. In terms of fame and the way he provides a link between Dickensian London and Hollywood he has a claim to be one of the great men of the twentieth century.

Is Chaplin funny? The odd thing is that, watching him today, you can see that he is a brilliant performer but you don't laugh. Normally, when comedy ceases to be funny it becomes merely embarrassing, but this has not happened to Chaplin. Whatever you think of him, he deserves better than to be patronised by the likes of Ben Elton and Richard Curtis in Blackadder.

And now that Elton is the compere of the Royal Variety Performance we can see clearly that the Alternative generation has become the new establishment. More than that, it is every bit as blinkered and self-satisfied as the Jimmy Tarbucks and Bruce Forsyths they replaced.

The meaning of disasters

There is a characteristically interesting article from Frank Furedi on the Spiked website looking at the different meanings humanity has ascribed to disasters down the years.

His own website has a link to a .pdf of a longer article on the same subject - "Coping with catastrophe" - published in the BBC History magazine last September.

Sing levy dew

In recent days several people have found Liberal England thanks to the New Year carol I posted the other day. I know it from a setting by Benjamin Britten in his collection of children's songs Friday Afternoons. (Come to that, my Christmas verse by Robert Southwell comes from Britten's A Ceremony of Carols.)

What does the New Year carol mean? The website School of the Seasons gives some background:

Trefor Owen describes the context for this song in Wales. Very early on New Year's Day about three or four o'clock in the morning, groups of boys came round to the houses in the neighbourhood, carrying a vessel of cold spring water, freshly drawn, and twigs of box, holly, myrtle, rosemary or other evergreens. They sprinkled the hands and face of anyone they met for a copper or two. In every house, each room was sprinkled with New Year's water and the inmates, who were often still in bed, wished a Happy New Year. For this service and wish they were also gifted with coins. The doors of those houses which were closed to them were sprinkled with the water. The verse was sung during the sprinkling.

In certain parts of Wales this custom is called dwr newy (literally, new water). The exact meaning of the phrase, “levy dew” is unknown, although there have been attempts to trace it to llef I Dduw (Welsh for “cry of God”). This seems to be an imposition of a Christian interpretation on a much older custom. Although the fair maid is now equated with the Virgin, Owen thinks it likely that this custom derives from “an early well-cult made acceptable to medieval Christianity by its association with the Virgin and perpetuated both by the desire to wish one’s neighbour well at the beginning of a new year and by the small monetary payment involved.”

All very interesting, and enough, I hope, to refute the suggestion of Simon Titley (who writes the blog Liberal Dissenter) that it sounds like the work of Rambling Sid Rumpo from Round the Horne.

The Independent: It's not, I am

When the Independent went tabloid I wished it well and often bought it instead of the Guardian. But I have become increasingly irritated by the way its front page tells me what to think every day.

Today, for instance, the front page acted as a cheerleader for the three minutes' silence for the victims of the Indian Ocean tidal wave. Little sign of independence there: for a sceptical view you have to go somewhere like the Spiked website and this article by Josie Appleton.

Yesterday's front page was much worse. "Could the tsunami disaster be a turning point for the world?" it asked 15 celebrities, including Sue MacGregor, Bill Bailey and Dinos Chapman. Next week: Des O'Connor on whether Britain should adopt the Euro.

The Independent no longer gives the impression that it thinks for itself in the way it did in its early days. Remember how it refused to report trivial stories about the Royal Family? While I agree with the stand in took against the invasion of Iraq, for the most part the views it puts over with such stridency these days are not particularly interesting.

So its intellectual ambitions have shrunk with its physical size. This raises again the question of whether a quality tabloid is a contradiction in terms.

Certainly, if a newspaper cannot report the news properly on its front page, there is something wrong with its format.

Top story of the holiday

In case you missed it, here is a BBC report from New Year's Eve:

There is "no hard evidence" government files have been shredded ahead of new openness laws, a watchdog has said.

Well there wouldn't be, would there?

Not as funny as it used to be

Watching Remember the Secret Policeman's Ball? over Christmas I came to two conclusions.

The first was that, on the whole, the older the performers were, the funnier they were. The Beyond the Fringe sketches had lasted better than Monty Python, and Python was infinitely better than the French and Saunderses and Lenny Henrys who came after. Even Alexei Sayle, of whose comedy and writing I am a great admirer, came over as simply ranting.

Of course, this is a reflection of my own tastes and experience, though the comedy that most formed my sense of humour came immediately after Monty Python - Fawlty Towers and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. For what it is worth, I have not watched Reggie Perrin for years, but every time I see Fawlty Towers it is a little more dated (it is firmly rooted in the 1970s, which has its positive aspects) and John Cleese's performance seems a little more over the top.

My second conclusion is that there has been a radical change in left-wing politics. Broadly speaking, comedy of the 1960s and 70s was bitterly critical of the judges and looked to a new generation of classless politicians for salvation. Now we have those classless politicians, and we look to the judges to save us through human rights legislation.

House Points, 24 December 2004

Here is my most recent column from Liberal Democrat News.

Glorious gaffes

Christmas is a time for returning to favourite books. One of mine is Read My Lips, a collection of politicians’ sayings put together a few years ago by Matthew Parris and Phil Mason.

At its best it captures personalities in a single quotation. So John Major reveals his grasp of geopolitics while paying tribute to the late President Mitterand: “He made a great contribution to public life, especially in France.” And Lady Olga Maitland shows why her Women and Families for Defence was such a success: “Of course we are not patronising women. We are just going to explain to them in words of one syllable what it is all about.”

Not every example is so clear, but you get a hint as to why Sir Ivan Lawrence failed to hold Burton on Trent for the Conservatives in 1997 from this paragraph in his election address: “Sir Ivan has appeared in many famous trials, including the Christine Keeler and Fanny Hill cases. He also acted for the defence of the Kray twins, serial killer Dennis Neilson, the Brighton Babes in the Woods murders and the Brinks Matt gold bullion robbery.”

Some quotations are sad. There is Louis XVI’s assurance that “The French people are incapable of regicide.” And the despairing insight of the Russian anarchist Alexander Shubin: “We must organise now.”

Others are chilling. Nothing conveys Labour’s mind-set better than Hugh Scanlon’s “Liberty is conforming to the majority.” Though we should give an honourable mention to the party’s manifesto for the 1976 Forest of Dean district elections: “Rates: this was once a problem for the rich. Because Socialism has improved our way of life, it is now a problem for everybody.”

How do Liberals come out of Read My Lips? We find David Steel summing up the Alliance years: “The fact that we can be in two places at once is a good advantage.” And a young Charles Kennedy describes his predecessor’s first year as leader: “Paddy Ashdown was dealt a difficult pack of cards – but he kept his eye on the ball all the way through.”

But if any quotation sums up what the Liberal Democrats stand for, it is this one from Ashdown himself. Asked on a radio phone-in which word best sums up his character, he replied: “Er… perhaps ‘decisive’?”