Asbos: It gets worse

Today's Guardian reveals that Antisocial Behaviour Orders, or the threat of them, are now being used to threaten free speech:

A man who published jokes about the Pope's death on a spoof village website was yesterday threatened with an antisocial behaviour order.

Read the full story here.

This is not the news

There are two news stories that used to appear regularly 20 or more years ago but do not today.

One involves air crashes. In the 1970s the loss of an airliner, sometimes with hundreds of casualties, seemed to be reported on a monthly basis. While fashions in news change, if this were still going on it would certainly be reported, so we can take it that air travel is a lot safer than it used to be.

The second news story involves people swimming the English Channel. Shivering figures larded with goose grease used to appear on our screens regularly, but we don't see them any more. What is going on?

Thinking about it, the most popular story in this category was that a particular child had become the youngest person to swim the Channel. A little research reveals why we don't get these any more.

Dover Museum's website records that the youngest person to have made the crossing is Thomas Gregory, who did it in 1988 at the age of 11. The same site records that since 1994 the rules have forbidden solo attempts by swimmers under the age of 14. Another example of modern safety culture, or were there a series of unfortunate drownings that the authorities hushed up?

Thinking about it, the sort of news stories we don't get nowadays tells us a lot about our society and the way it has changed. There are no more great industrial strikes any more and we don't hear of several Formula 1 drivers dying each season as we used to. The picture is of a safer but less colourful world.

More on Asbo Concern

I still can't find a home page for this organisation, but there are more details here.

Ann Keen in hot water

The Evening Standard reports:

A Labour MP has been accused for the second time in a week of using schoolchildren to distribute "party" propaganda.

Ann Keen, MP for Brentford and Isleworth, sent a letter to secondary schools highlighting Government moves to encourage students to stay on after 16.

Some headteachers refused to send the letter on to parents on the grounds that it would be inappropriate while at those schools that did get involved, parents complained about their children arriving home with the letter.

A few days ago she was accused of using a primary school and nursery in Chiswick to distribute a letter hailing the recent Budget's new cash for education.

The question, of course, is why the schools' heads allowed anything of the sort to take place.

A song for the Lib Dems

Over at Liberal Dissenter Simon Titley has been seeking his readers help in choosing a campaign tune for the 2005 general election.

By a happy chance his final choice is the song that was my very favourite when I was four years old or so. Read his choice and the reasoning behind it here.

Blair's traditional values

Tony Blair made an immediate bid for the Daily Mail vote yesterday by having himself photographed in front of the last boys in Britain still to wear sailor suits.

A few more days of liberty in England

The government will not attempt to force its ID card bill through before the general election, reports the BBC.

Asbo Concern

There is an article by Matt Foot in today's Guardian advertising the launch of the group ASBO Concern:

The reason for the diverse nature of Asbos is the ridiculous breadth of what constitutes criminal anti-social behaviour under the Crime and Disorder Act 1988. You can be served with an order if you have behaved in a way "likely to cause alarm".

If the argument of Straw, Blunkett and Clarke is right and people are "terrorising" housing estates, why haven't the police arrested the "terrorists"? Surely they would be liable for arrest under, say, affray, harassment or perhaps even terrorism laws.

ASBO Concern, which does not seem to have its own website yet, will be launched on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Friends Meeting House, London.

Not as fast as we used to be

One of the beliefs we have grown up with is that sporting performance improves year by year. But it seems that things are more complicated than that.

Alan Buckingham writes on Spiked about the crisis in British long-distance running:

Despite an estimated £2.2 billion of government and lottery spending on sport each year, both at elite level and club level distance running is getting slower. In 2003 not only was the fastest British male marathon runner eight minutes slower than in 1985 - a chasm in competitive running terms - he was also slower than Paula Radcliffe.

The picture is mirrored at the club level. During the 1980s the qualifying time to obtain guaranteed entry to the London Marathon for a senior male was 2 hours 40 minutes; today it is 3 hours. Put another way, if the old qualifying time still remained, this year a mere 186 British male runners would have made the standard.

His article reminds me of a piece in the Guardian last year by Peter Radford. He showed that there is plentiful evidence that the times recorded by professional athletes in the eighteenth century were much faster than the records set by Victorian amateurs. So much so that the first four-minute mile may well have been recorded 150 years before Roger Bannister achieved his feat.

Red kites over the Chilterns

Amid all the postings about the general election, it is pleasing to find this one by James Oates, the Lib Dem candidate in Wycombe:

As we walked we caught sight of the most dramatic of all of the creatures of the hills - a Red Kite. These magnificent birds, extinct for so long in England, were of course reintroduced to our area a few years ago. Since that time, they have thrived. Indeed, as we walked we saw more and more of the birds as they soared over the woodlands behind Skirmett. We lost count after 27 individual birds.

People who like this sort of thing will also be interested in the Ospreys at Rutland Water.

Lord Bonkers writes: And quite delicious they are too.

Chelsea players and my vocabulary

Richard Ingrams' magazine The Oldie used to have (and may still have) a feature called "Still With Us". It contained articles about people you thought were dead but turned out not to be.

Someone who falls into this category is Brian Mears, the chairman of Chelsea FC before Ken Bates. He is interviewed by Bryan Cooney in this piece from the Sunday Herald. I am posting it partly because I am a Chelsea fan and partly because Cooney is the first football writer in 29 years to teach me a new word.

In 1976 Brian Glanville described the young Ray Wilkins (still sometimes known as Butch Wilkins in those days) as a "gamin" figure on his England debut. Here Cooney calls Peter Osgood "pavonine", which my dictionary tells me means "of or resembling a peacock".

To be fair, the journalist done great.

Iain Right, Right, Right (Lab, Hartlepool)

Harry's Place has a good posting on the right-wing populist campaign that the by-election victor Iain Wright appears to be running. One of his press releases runs:

The Liberal Democrats’ crime plans would mean the killers of James Bulger could not have been brought to trial and would let young troublemakers run riot in Hartlepool knowing the courts could not touch them.

And so on and on.

My Name is Legion by A N Wilson

Unwilling to let Whittington take up all my blogging time, I have made a new posting to my anthology blog Serendib.

It is an extract from My Name is Legion by A N Wilson. This is a gutsy novel about modern Britain and the tabloid press; the extract I have posted looks at the self-contradictory belief system of his Daily Legion, which owes more than a little to that of the Daily Mail.

Having read it a couple of weeks ago, I now remember My Name as Legion as no more than a superior airport novel. But I may be biased by the fact that I bought my copy at Aberdeen airport.

The best of British

Tim Worstall has posted his latest round up of the best of British blogging here.

Gore Vidal

Vidal is always good value, and this interview is no exception:

I'd say the downward skid certainly began with Reagan. I came across a comment recently, someone asking why we had gone into both Grenada and Panama, two absolutely nothing little countries who were no danger to us, minding their own business, and we go in and conquer them. Somebody said, well, we did it because we could. That's the attitude of our current rulers.

Thanks to Charlotte Street for the tip.

Whittington is back

By popular demand, if only in the cat world, Susan Kramer's cat Whittington is writing a diary of the forthcoming general election campaign. You can find it here.

Susan Kramer will be the Liberal Democrat candidate in the Richmond Park constituency, which is currently held by another Lib Dem woman, Jenny Tonge. I helped Whittington write what has a claim to be the first British political blog when Susan stood in the first London Mayoral campaign.

Reading Lord of the Flies today

I went to school in an era when it is was pretty much obligatory to study William Golding's Lord of the Flies for O level English Literature. In those days the novel was presented to us as an allegory about original sin, although my English teacher contested this conventional view and asked how civilisation ever arose if evil is inherent in man in the way that Golding appears to argue.

The conventional view, however, is still offered by this website for modern-day high school students in America:

We see the innate evil within the boys which is a reflection of the evil within the entire mankind.

I wonder if we do still see this. One of the characteristics of forgeries is that they are much easier to detect 50 years on. When one looks at Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers today, some of the faces have a distinctly 1930s look. Presumably people at the time could not see this: they were to close to the era in which the forgeries were made.

Reading Lord of the Flies today it seems to me to have a strong scent of 1950s England that critics at the times were unable to detect, again because they were too close to that decade. As I wrote the other day, the 1950s - and in particular their educational practices - now seem very strange to us. This was brought home to me by a couple of books I read recently: Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries and Tim Jeal's Swimming With My Father.

Gray's book is fun though ultimately insubstantial, but Jeal's memoir of parents is a book that stays with you. I quote here two passages from it which convey well the mentality which a certain sort of 1950s education gave rise to:

Schools like Boarzell seemed to be preparing boys for a harsh life on the frontiers of an Empire, which, by 1953, was doomed. Soon I took on, as my own opinion, the regulation view that boys who complained about physical hardships, such as cold showers in February, and playing rugby on frozen pitches, were contemptible. Even before I came to this conclusion my letters home needed no vetting. Only recent new boys tried to express what they felt, rather than what they soon knew they ought to feel. It was strange how we added rules of our own to an already rules-bound existence. Our prohibition on "sneaking" to a master about bullying, or thieving from tuck boxes, might have enabled us to hold out in a German prison camp without betraying the location of an escape tunnel, but in the 1950s it merely meant that our daily lives were much nastier than they need have been.

And:

I never mentioned to my parents the mauve and purple bruises that dappled my buttocks in term time and which earned me admiring comments in the showers. My fear of being guilty of unmanly whingeing only partly explains my reticence. I may have feared that my parents' sympathy would pierce the defensive hide I was trying to grow. Worse still, if I told them how I really felt, and they failed to remove me, how would I be able to think that they still loved me?

Jeal is describing private education of 50 years ago, not today, though his bruised bottom should get me a few hits from the dirty mac brigade. And a little reticence would be welcome in our emotionally incontinent age.

Nevertheless, having read Swimming With My Father I am less inclined to see Lord of the Flies as a timeless allegory. Its violence and the tribalism seem exactly what one would expect from a group of boys who had been subjected to British prep schools in the 1950s.

Derek Wyatt

Anyone following the link to the 1976 Five Nations in the previous post may be interested to know that the D M Wyatt who came on as a replacement for England at Murrayfield is now Labour MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.

English rugby: The bad old days

The death the other day of Charles Kent at the early age of 51 brings back memories of an era when one did not so much support the English rugby team as suffer with it. (We heard faint echoes of them in the international season that has just ended.) Every selection seemed to contain half a dozen new caps, and the coaches were obsessed with elaborate tapped-penalty moves which never, ever came off.

Kent's selection - he won five caps at centre in 1977 and 1978 - was based upon the insight that if England tried to string more than two passes together they invariably dropped the ball. His approach upon receiving the ball was to run headlong at the opposition's midfield with an almost insane courage, whereupon the English pack (a strength even in those dark days) would wade in to support him. His was not the only selection of those days based upon despair of winning by more conventional means: England fielded a remarkably chunky scrum half - Mike Lampkowski - throughout the 1976 Five Nations.

England were not helped by the ramshackle nature of their club rugby. The best players were scattered amongst dozens of clubs which seldom played one another. Nevertheless, the talent was there: the bulk of Bill Beaumont's 1980 grand slam XV, playing as North & Midlands, had beaten the touring All Blacks several years previously.

As the Irish hooker Ken Kennedy said at the time: "England have the players; what they have to do is find the selectors who will pick them."

Heading for the Swiss border

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

Last farewells

The adjournment debate before the Commons rose for Easter saw several MPs make their farewell speeches. With everyone expecting the election to be called early next week, last Thursday offered the final chance for most backbenchers to be heard in this parliament.

Sir Teddy Taylor, standing down in Southend East, has been an elder statesman for as long as anyone can recall. You have to be venerable to remember Tory MPs in Glasgow. He is so venerable he used to be one.

Such speeches are often sad, but Taylor’s felt sadder than most. He spoke of his opposition to devolution and all things European. You sensed a career spent swimming against the tide, and that the tide had won.

Another cause of this melancholy was his concern that young people are no longer interested in politics. He described meeting a group of 17-year-olds. A few hated the government, but had no enthusiasm for the Tories either: “There was no capitalist pig stuff or anything like that. They just thought that they were totally irrelevant and they had no views on them at all.” Only one intended to vote Liberal Democrat. But that was one more than intended to vote Labour or Conservative.

Taylor contrasted this with his own student days when “everyone was involved in a party or movement of some sort”.

Perhaps the idea that young people ought to be madly political relies on a rosy view of the 1960s (or, in Taylor’s case, the 1950s). Maybe you need to have lived a bit to become politicised – to have lost a job or seen the legal system at work.

And maybe the increasingly long apprenticeship we impose upon teenagers – mentored and counselled to within an inch of their lives – saps their confidence. Meanwhile the health professions are inventing a new category of “young adults”, convinced no one can cope with mainstream services until past 25.

A happier note was struck by our Richard Allan, who is leaving voluntarily for a career outside. “I have the fake passport printed and the tunnel dug,” he told the House.

In such cases it is usual to disguise yourself as a Flemish factory worker and head for the Swiss border. I hope he sends us a postcard when he gets there.