Did a pair of twins really marry?

It is a story that made headlines all over the world, often told in a very colourful way. Here, for instance, is a recent example from Canada:

A member of the British House of Lords recalls being told by a judge about an astounding incident in which a man and a woman who were both adopted met each other, felt an instant attraction and decided to get married.

It wasn't until they sought information about their birth parents that they discovered the sickening truth - they were actually brother and sister, twins who had been separated at birth, adopted by different parents and never told of each other's existence. When they met by accident, they didn't realize their attraction was more familial than amorous.

Yet in this morning's Guardian Jon Henley asked the question that has been worrying me for the past few days. Is the story actually true?

As he points out:

it all came from a single remark more than a month ago by the vehemently anti-abortion Roman Catholic peer and father of four, Lord Alton, in favour of all children having the right to know the identity of their biological parents.

He had heard about this particular case, he said, from the judge who handled the annulment. Or perhaps (he later admitted) a judge who was "familiar with the case". Britain's top family judge, Sir Mark Potter, has never heard of the story. And, as the excellent Heresy Corner blog notes, the whole thing is statistically improbable, procedurally implausible (for 40 years, adoption practice has been to keep twins together) and based on the equivalent of a friend in the pub saying, "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day."

I still have a soft spot for David Alton. If only because, long ago, as secretary of York Liberal Students I twice invited him to speak to our group. In those days he was one of the party's great radical heroes. So I don't want to impugn his integrity.

And you don't have to be a Roman Catholic to wonder if it is a good thing for somone's commitment to fatherhood to begin and end with masturbating into a testtube. (Why, incidentally, does Henley tell us that Alton is a father of four if not to say "look at these Catholics and all the children they have"?)

But two truths have to be admitted.

The first is that it is not unknown for anti-abortion campaigners to tell horror stories that turn out not to be true upon investigation.

The second is that judges tell all sorts of entertaining anecdotes - particularly after the port has been round a couple of times - but that does not mean they are the gospel truth.

Are Liverpool the new Newcastle United?

It must be more fun supporting some football teams than others. Not so much because of the success they enjoy or the entertainment they provide as because of your expectations.

So if your team is Crewe Alexandra you are probably happy - not just because of your club's charming name or its tradition of good football, but also because you have no pretentions to be being better than you are. If you get promoted it is pleasing: if you get relegated the following year it is not the end of the world.

By contrast, there are a lot of clubs whose supporters think they are entitled to be in the Premiership and feel cheated if they are not there. Wolves are one example and there is even an element of this attitude amongst Leicester City fans.

I remember a fan of Stoke City - one of the better English sides in the 1970s - saying that it took years for the club's team and the crowd to shake off the view that they were bound to get into the top division soon. The result is that no one put in the the required effort, and Stoke never did get promoted again.

Such an attitude can exist even at the top. As an armchair Chelsea fan (though I was there when we drew the FA Cup final in 1970) the advent of Gullit and Vialli and "sexy football" seemed like a restoration of the natural order of things. Chelsea should be a glamour club that wins a cup now and then. The subsequent Premierships under St Jose were something quite outside the expectations or experience of the club's fans.

But Newcastle United fans are different. Despite not having seen their club win anything since Methuselah was in short trousers, they still remain convinced that their is a great club that should be winning trophies. For this reason, their brush with glory under Kevin Keegan in the 1990s left them dissatisfied in a way that it would not have done the fans of most clubs.

The result is that any manager of Newcastle United is bound to fail because the expectations of the club's supporters are so unrealistically high.

I am rambling on like this because I see a danger that Liverpool may become the new Newcastle United. Despite not having won the English title since 1989-90, they still see themselves as the biggest club in the country and, more destructively, somehow deserving of success simply because of who they are.

You will say that they won the Champion's League a couple of years ago, which spoils my theory. But (beside the fact that the ball was never over the line in that semi-final against Chelsea) I suspect Liverpool fans should have regarded that as a wonderful exception to the order of things rather than their natural right.

The next BritBlog Roundup

On Sunday I shall be hosting the BritBlog Roundup here on Liberal England.

If you see any blog posts you think particularly fine over the coming week, please send the link to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Any posting from a British-based blog or a British-born blogger made before Sunday lunchtime can be be nominated.

And, yes, you can nominate something from your own blog.

Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Borrowed from Wikipedia, this has to win Photograph of the Day.

It shows the young Adolf Hitler and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein at school together at the Linz Realschule in 1903/4.

You have probably heard of Hitler, but Wittgenstein may need some introduction. When I studied for a Philosophy degree in the late seventies and early seventies, Wittgenstein - particularly the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations - was the dominant figure in the discipline (though that dominance was drawing to a close).

Many journal papers tackled philosophical problems through an exegesis of one of his gnomic remarks. As a tutor at Cambridge just after the War he had clearly exerted a crushing effect on an entire generation of British academic philosophers.

Read more about Wittgenstein and his work in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

One further thing: Hitler came from a humble background whereas Wittgenstein's family owned the Austrian steel industry. Is their being at school together a tribute to the egalitarian education system that pertained in fin de siècle Vienna?

How the Lib Dem leadership contest almost turned into a bloodbath

The current issue of the House Magazine has an article on the challenges facing Nick Clegg, written by Greg Hurst.

More striking, however, are Hurst's claims about the tensions behind the scenes during the recent leadership contest. Writing of the tension between Nick and Chris Huhne, Hurst says:

Things could have been still worse. Sir Menzies, who blamed Huhne henchmen for undermining his leadership and hastening his departure, had to be restrained from launching a public attack upon him during the election. We must await the publication of his memoirs to judge Sir Menzies' determination to settle such scores.

Similarly, Charles Kennedy remains aggrieved at the role played by some younger MPs in forcing his resignation and seizing control of the party by backing Sir Menzies and then Nick Clegg. Several close Kennedy allies threw themselves into Chris Huhne's campaign in the hope of wrestling back the leadership from the "Orange Book" upstarts.

There was, briefly, a real prospect of the two ex-leaders turning on the rival candidates; in the event, threatened with the mutually assured destruction of the Lib Dems' remaining credibility. a Cold War-like stand-off was achieved.

I don't know how much truth there is in all this, but I do know that Chris Huhne's attempt to draw Nick Clegg out on his beliefs on public services was entirely legitimate. The fuss over the headline "Calamity Clegg" should not blind us to this.

Given how well Nick's speech at the weekend has gone down with the press and the party (to judge by Lib Dem bloggers, at least), he would have done better to be more forthcoming on what he had in mind as leader.

BritBlog Roundup 152

Thanks to Clairwil.

Tony Greaves on Labour jargon

Niles's Blog points us to Lord Greaves's contribution to a Lords debate on community engagement:

Having read the report we are debating today, I had a vision of someone saying to their husband or wife, “I’m just off down the neighbourhood hub for a bit of community empowerment. We have been quality assured by the national empowerment partnership, and tonight we are embedding our practitioner learning and capturing and sharing it through the national neighbourhood management network”.

As Niles says:

Language like this is everywhere and sad to say, all too often, it is there to cloud meaning not to illuminate it.

Clive Gregson and Christine Collister: I Specialise

When I was a district councillor back in the 1980s (I was only 14 when I was elected) I served on the IBA committee which oversaw the Leicester commercial radio station Leicester Sound.

One of the programmes I got into the habit of listening to was John Shaw's Here Be Dragons on Sunday evenings. Shaw (who is still around on Smooth FM) played a lot of folk and world music, and this is a record I remember from that time. Collister has a wonderful voice and the song's bleak sentiments appeal to me.

There is more on Gregson and Collister for those who want it. And you get a second song ("It's All Just Talk") with this video too.

Later. Not any more you don't. I have had to change the video after the first one disappeared from Youtube.

Foyle's War disappears again

It seems that we shall have to learn to treat each episode of Foyle's War as a drama in its own right rather than as part of a series.

Anyone tuning into ITV at 9 p.m. this evening was encountered with Dancing On Ice: The Skate Off and Kingdom. The latter did feature some nice shots of Happisburgh lighthouse, but as an evening's television it is hardly in the same class as Foyle.

If you want to see Honeysuckle Weeks you will have to catch her in a touring production of The Turn of the Screw.

More on Nick Clegg and Free Schools

Further to my posting on Nick Clegg's speech today...

Andy Mayer gives something of the flavour of the Lib Dem manifesto conference:

An auditorium speaker repeated the mantra that people don't want choice they want a good local school and hospital. Half the audience cheered. Tom Papworth highlighted that, while that's right, the point is how you get those good schools and hospitals. Choice helps drive up standards faster than just voting out incumbent Councillors every four years. The other half of the audience cheered.

Meanwhile, Jo Anglezarke is inspired by Nick Clegg's talk of Free Schools:

One school you should read about as truly Liberal, and one I am tempted to send my future children to is Summerhill School. It's a totally free school, where lessons are given, but only to children who have chosen to go to them. I have A.S. Neil's autobiography in my bookcase and have read it with fascination.

It's a model school which gives children both choice and confidence.

I am delighted to see a Liberal Democrat supporting innovation and diversity in education. And there is certainly a role for schools like Summerhill.

But I wonder if this is the kind of establishment that inner-city parents from ethnic minorities, who are the people most likely to benefit from Free Schools, will have in mind.

Nick Clegg's speech on the reform of public services

Nick Clegg made his first big speech today at the Liberal Democrat Manifesto Conference, which was held at the London School of Economics. See Paul Walter for a comprehensive survey of the media coverage it has received.

His proposals on education - allowing parents dissatisfied with existing provision to set up their own schools - are exactly what I have been wanting the party to support for years.

Here is an extract from Clegg's speech (I was not there to "check against delivery" as the drafts they send journalists always say):

There is plenty wrong with the government’s Academies programme - from the selection rules to the absurdity of trying to run schools all over the country at the behest of one Minister in the House of Lords.

But there is nothing wrong at all with allowing schools the freedom to innovate.

Nothing wrong with bringing committed people and organisations into our education system.

And nothing wrong with allowing schools to exist outside direct daily local government management - as long as they are under local government oversight.

And it makes me angry when I hear people attacking new schools which have replaced old, failing, local authority schools many of which consigned generations of children who could have done much better to the educational scrapheap.

So, with these principles in mind, I want us to look at establishing a new liberal model of schools that are non-selective, under local government strategic oversight but not run by the council, and free to innovate to drive up standards for all our children.

They could be established by any suitable sponsor, including parents, educational charities, voluntary and private organisations with the right credentials.

Sponsors should be independently assessed for their expertise, with no ministerial involvement.

This new generation of schools - let us call them Free Schools - will have the funding to help those children who need the most support; the obligation to be accessible to all; and the freedom from unnecessary political and bureaucratic interference to innovate in the best interests of their pupils.

I could hardly have put it better myself.

The devil, as ever, will be in the detail. What exactly will "local government oversight" mean in practice? Will central government have to intervene where - as is overwhelmingly likely - Labour councils prove hostile to the establishment of new schools that are not part of their empire? And will Evangelical businessmen be able to set up Free Schools, just as they have set up Academies?

The BBC and James Graham (a powerful combination) seem to believe that the principles which will govern Free Schools will be extended to all schools. Auntie thinks we are ruling out selection by aptitude at existing specialist schools. James discusses the abolition of faith schools and grammar schools.

I don't read the proposals that way, and would be very surprised if this is what Nick Clegg intends. But we shall learn more soon, no doubt.

Besides there is something odd, in a country whose politics is increasingly dominated by the products of selective fee-paying schools, about the way that selection by academic ability in the public sector is now treated as anathema by almost every mainstream politician.

Avram Grant's family and the Holocaust

The Jewish Chronicle has an interview with the Chelsea manager, who has been rather an anonymous figure until now.

The newspaper begins by describing the fate of Grant's family during the Second World War and says that he:

knew nothing of their fate until one night when he was only 15.

He heard his father screaming in his sleep and rushed into his room to find that he was having a bad dream.

His father explained he had been dreaming he was back in the Russian forest in which he had been forced to dig graves for his parents and five brothers and sisters as each, in turn, died of cold or starvation. Only he and one brother survived.

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns

Photo by Sabine J Hutchinson
http://www.virtual-shropshire.co.uk/

The BBC reports:

The South Shropshire Hills celebrate their fiftieth anniversary as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) this year.

Beacons are to be lit on the Long Mynd and Brown Clee on Sunday 13 January as the first of several special events.

Which seems like a good reason for reproducing another lovely photograph from Virtual Shropshire.

When Norwich City played at The Nest

On the Guardian Sportblog Scott Murray chooses his six favourite football grounds.

Buried in the comments is a reference to the most extraordinary football ground you could imagine. Norwich City played at The Nest between 1908 and 1935. The ground was situated in a disused chalk pit off Rosary Road in Norwich.

A feature in the Eastern Daily Press (from which I have borrowed the photograph) describes it as follows:

Footballers risked injury by crashing into the massive concrete wall which held up the cliff that dominated the arena and rose sheer, barely a couple of feet from the touchline. And the manner in which up to 20,000 fans regularly crammed into the precarious looking stands built into the old quarry would have had ground safety officers in a real panic had they existed in those days.

“It should never have been a football ground and I was glad to get away from the place – it was a wicked ground,” said 90-year-old former City stalwart Bernard Robinson, who played at The Nest for the first four years of his career.

“At one end of the ground it just went straight up and to stop all the earth coming down on to the pitch they had a huge cement wall. It was five or six feet from the touchline so wingers had to be careful.

“Behind the other goal were the dressing rooms and a small stand and apart from that there was just a row of houses and the gardens were 15 to 20 feet below the level of the pitch. There was a big wire netting fence to stop the ball going in there. It was very dangerous.”

Pakistan and Kenya from a distance

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

Telescopic philanthropy

Governing is such an easy business. Not in the UK, you understand, where we have intractable problems like invalidity benefit, the credit crunch and teenage gangs. But governing in far off places like Pakistan and Kenya. In fact, the further you are from a situation, the easier it is to know what should be done.

Take Pakistan. On Monday David Milliband, the Harry Potteresque foreign secretary, praised Benazir Bhutto’s courage. That quality "is now required of others as they take forward the drive for democracy and modernisation".

Yes, courage is a virtue and it was shown, for instance, by politicians from both communities during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Some even gave their lives to keep representative democracy alive.

But if Milliband had looked up he would have seen the floor-to-ceiling glass screen that walled him off from the public gallery. Not much sign of courage there. And when MPs did face a threat - in the shape of a couple of Father 4 Justice activists with a bag of flour - the Tory chief whip drove his troops from the chamber in a way that brought letters of complaint from headless chickens.

Crossing the Indian Ocean, Milliband praised the conduct of the recent election where "millions of Kenyans queued for hours, peacefully and with dignity, to cast their votes for parliamentary and presidential candidates".

Yet dignity is precisely the quality Labour has leeched from elections here. The push to increase turnouts by encouraging postal voting has led to serious doubts about the conduct of British elections for the first time anyone can remember. And a government commission recently suggested that people who vote in local elections should be entered into a draw with cash prizes.

The Tories find politics easier from a distance too. William Hague said "Kenya’s leaders have a clear responsibility to compromise and work together". This from a politician whose reputation rests on his mastery of the Punch and Judy show that is prime minister’s questions.

In Bleak House Charles Dickens created the immortal Mrs Jellyby, who worries about the natives of Borrioboola-Gha while her own children fell into the grate. Dickens described her attitude as "telescopic philanthropy". It is rapidly becoming the hallmark of British politics.

The era of the flying boats

BLDGBLOG has a posting all about a wonderfully eccentric plan for floating runways for flying boats in the middle of the Atlantic that was published in Modern Mechanix in 1936. You will see I have borrowed the illustration that blog reproduces.

It reminds me of an item I heard on Radio 4 before Christmas about the Foynes Flying Boat Museum in County Limerick, Ireland. As the museum website says:

Foynes, Ireland, became the center of the aviation world from 1939 to 1945. On July 9th 1939, Pan Am's luxury Flying Boat, the "Yankee Clipper" landed at Foynes. This was the first commercial passenger flight on a direct route from the USA to Europe. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, this quiet little town on the Shannon became the focal point for air traffic on the North Atlantic.
During this period, many famous politicians, international businessmen, film stars, active-service-men and wartime refugees passed through Foynes. In fact, the site was initially surveyed in 1933 by Colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife Ann, who landed in Galway Bay flying his Lockheed Sirius. In December 1935, the Irish Times announced that Foynes would be the site for the European Terminal for transatlantic air services. Colonel Lindbergh returned again representing Pan Am in 1936 to inspect the facilities and also in 1937 to view the departure of "Clipper III".

Finally, a word about Loch Lomond Seaplanes, who operate from the centre of Glasgow. One day I would like to arrive on Skye or even the Outer Hebrides that way.

Nick Clegg should have made his education speech during the leadership contest

This morning's Guardian told us breathlessly:

Nick Clegg will unveil plans to end state interference in schools this week as he moves to bury the Liberal Democrats' traditional approach to public services.
In his first keynote speech since becoming party leader, Clegg will challenge many of the party's supporters in teaching and local government by issuing proposals which will "effectively take schools out of state control", according to one official.

David Laws, the Lib Dems' schools spokesman, paved the way for changes to the party's approach at its annual conference in September, pledging to inject more choice into the system by making it easier for parents and community groups to set up new schools. The plans won the backing of the conference, although some activists and MPs are uneasy about the approach - which chimes with many of the policies proposed by the Conservatives.

The more you read this, the more you realise that Clegg may not be intending to do much more than reaffirm existing party policy.

I am all in favour of people being able to set up new schools. The present regulations make it hard to do this in area with vacant places in existing schools. But that can often be a sign that those schools are not very good and that this is just the sort of area where new schools are needed most. New schools can be desirable for other reasons - see this posting about Northern Ireland.

I am all in favour of getting the state out of education. I am not convinced that two decades of league tables, initiatives and the national curriculum have achieved very much at all beyond the demoralisation and infantilisation of the teaching profession.

As David Laws is no fool, I will do him the credit of assuming that he does not intend to end the role of local government in education. I will settle for a recognition that some councils do not do a good job of running their schools and allowing people to do something about their children's education in those areas.

It is a great shame that Nick Clegg did not put forward his ideas during the leadership campaign. When challenged on the Politics Show his reaction was to throw up his hands and then make an official complaint. He will not be able to do that in the Commons or during a general election campaign.

If he had been a bit braver, I might well have voted for him.

Finally, like James Graham, I suspect that the way the Guardian presented this story is that it has been spun to them by the leader's office as "Clegg takes on Lib Dem activists".

Stop it, boys and girls. Now.

Did the greens make a return to nuclear power inevitiable?

What do governments do when faced with a crisis?

Easy. They spend enormous amounts of money.

Which is why the enthusiasm with which the environmental movement has talked up the threat posed by human-induced climate change was always likely to lead to the government deciding to back the nuclear option in a big way.

Despite Windscale and Chernobyl, the chief argument against nuclear power has never been the safety one but its cost. The huge and unquantifiable sums needed to build and run nuclear plants has meant that they cannot been built without being subsidised with public money - if only in terms of guarantees over footing the bill for their eventual decommissioning.

But make the sense of crisis deep enough and the economic argument no longer works. If we're threatened with The End Of The World As We Know It then everyone will say that the government should spend billions.

Nick Clegg and the price of fuel

Nick Clegg got through his first PMQs unscathed and the commentators have been quite complimentary.

For instance, Michael White writes:

How did he do? Quite well, I thought, watching it on TV like most people do, though colleagues actually in the chamber report that his voice is too soft to allow him to overcome the background hubbub with ease.

Plenty of time to sort that out, important though it is. Sharp-eyed students of the weekly drama might also have spotted that he moved three seats along from the traditional leader's corner seat, so he appeared surrounded by colleagues - "doughnutted" as they say - rather than isolated.

That doughnutting was forecast on this blog yesterday, of course.

White also implies that Nick Clegg's decision to ask about fuel costs may have been a good one:

Steve Webb, the Lib Dems' left-leaning social policy expert (who backed Clegg over Huhne) later chipped in with a back-up question. The typical family is paying £300 more a year than four years ago and that sum more than wipes out the winter fuel allowance, he pointed out. The PM reminded him that the allowance used to be just £20.

It left me wondering whether, with higher prices and the growing risk of brown-outs and even blackouts in the colder winter months, the energy giants - many of them foreign-owned - are not set to become the public bad boys they have long been in the United States. When the Daily Mail writes about them treating Britain like "Treasure Island" it's time for them to sit up and concentrate.

Politicians in tears

When I went to bed last night Barack Obama was going to win the New Hampshire primary by 10 per cent. When I woke up he had been beaten by Hilary Clinton.

One factor in her victory, the pundits all say, was her almost appearing to cry when interviewed a couple of days before the contest. But tears do not always help American Presidential hopefuls.

In 1972 Senator Ed Muskie was the early favourite to win the Democratic nomination and he headed the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire. However, his emotional response to newspaper allegations that his wife Jane had a drink problem was widely thought to have damaged his chances.

Muskie claimed that what people thought were tears were really melting snowflakes - the speech was made out of doors. But his campaign lost momentum and the Democratic candidacy went instead to George McGovern, who went on to be trounced by the Republican incumbent Richard Nixon.

The story goes that Harold Macmillan was asked what he would have said if his own wife's drinking had been used against him. He replied that he would have said: "That's nothing. You should have seen her mother."