Six of the Best 589

"Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within." Read Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

Evan Harris claims Hacked Off are not hypocrites for their stance on John Whittingdale.

You can never have enough takedowns of Seumas "Christopher Robin" Milne. This one by Peter Wilby is particularly good.

Felicity Cloake asks why eating has become so complicated.

Backwatersman pays tribute to the England batsman James Taylor, who has been forced to retire because of a heart condition: "When he took on ... great lummoxes like Andre Nel and Tremlett he might have been Chaplin outwitting Eric Campbell with a deft swish of his walking cane. In fact, one of the many things I remain hugely grateful to him for is allowing me to recapture (quite late in life) that childlike pleasure of having a favourite player, one whom I liked more than I could ever quite rationally account for."

"The locks known as Caen Hill ... rise 237 feet over two miles – with 16 of them virtually back to back.Each trip up and down takes five hours." David Hencke and friends take on one of the inland waterways' greatest challenges.

Trivial Fact of the Week links Blow-Up and the Double Deckers

Nicholas Whyte has been ploughing a lonely furrow with a series of posts on the early 1970s children's television series Here Come the Double Deckers.

Although this fell precisely into my era, I fear I can recall disliking it at the time. Even then I sensed it was peopled with stage-school brats and aimed too shamelessly at the American market.

As a result I viewed the later careers of two of its stars - Brisnley Forde of Aswad and Peter Firth - with mild scepticism.

I struggled with Spooks in particular. MI5 just would not employ a former member of the Double Deckers and that is the end of the matter.

Still, I am the last blogger qualified to complain about obscure enthusiasms, and Nicholas's latest Double Deckers post has turned up a top piece of trivia. In fact he wins my Trivial Fact of the Week award.

That trivia concerns an episode of the show called Barney, in which the children befriend an entertainer down on his luck and (inevitably) put on a show with him.

Barney was played by Julian Chagrin, who a few years before had been one of the tennis players watched by David Hemmings at the end of Antonioni's Blow-Up. You can see this scene in the video above, which Nicholas included in his own post.

He calls it "the very odd 1966 film Blow-Up," but I think he meant to call it "a key moment in both the creation and the examination of the myth of Swinging London".

Nicholas also reveals that Chagrin appeared as the secret lemonade drinker in the R.White's television commercials.

The song in them was sung by Ross MacManus, the father of Elvis Costello.*

But you knew that already.

* I like Carl Wilson's observation that "a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Elvis Costello's own songs.

Lord Bonkers explains the dancing gorilla of Twycross Zoo

This video of a gorilla at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire apparently dancing has been very popular on Youtube.

Here, exclusively for Liberal England, Lord Bonkers explains what lies behind it:

There is nothing the older residents of the Bonkers Estate enjoy more than the tea dances I host at the village hall. 

However, we have a problem. The toll taken by the local industries of Stilton mining and pork pie production mean that many more ladies than gentlemen survive to enjoy an active retirement. 

A couple of years ago the ladies prevailed upon me to provide them with more dancing partners. After no little thought, the solution sprang upon me: train the gorillas at Twycross Zoo. 

This initiative has proved a great success. When I proposed it some warned me of the danger of ravishment, but I am happy to report that to date no gorilla has complained of molestation.

Incidentally, Lord Bonkers gave his own recipe for long life in the foreword he contributed to the 2014 Liberator Songbook:

I strongly recommend that you either bathe regularly in the spring of eternal life that bursts from the hillside above what used to be headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors in Hebden Bridge or get your hands on the cordial sold by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

Jonathan Coe on the Long Mynd

Photo © Dave Pickersgill 

Thanks to A Portfolio Life for posting this passage from Coe's novel The Rain Before it Falls:

Places like this are important to me – to all of us – because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century....It is all immaterial, all irrelevant...You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted you there.

Coe is right and there is something of this quality to much of the Welsh Border.

I remember once walking from Kington in Herefordshire up to Offa's Dyke. I had the feeling that if I met a Dark Age warrior coming towards me we would just nod to one another and continue on our way.

Individuality is not the opposite of belonging to social groups

I was rather pleased with my post "Why Twitter doesn't work, Labour won't win and the Lib Dems are irrationally cheerful."

But I was aware there was what looked like a weak point in its argument:

[Brooks] goes on to say we should "scale back the culture of autonomy," which makes my liberal hackles rise and suggests Brooks too is in danger of wanting the state to eclipse every other social authority. 

As a liberal I believe in individuality, and we express our individuality through the groups we choose to join. There must be a liberal route to the revival of social bonds.

What I had in mind there is something that turns out to have been written in 2004, the first year of this blog's existence.

There I said:

I am increasingly aware that what I value is not so much individualism as individuality - the flourishing of different sorts of people and different ways of life. (I believe I came across this distinction in Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin. It is a useful one.) 

It is a concept that has something to do with the old schoolmaster's ideal of "character" and I suspect that the development of individuality requires strong institutions, such as schools that are not under central control. Teenage culture does suggest that individualism does not always produce individuality; and it is undeniable that one of the clearest ways we choose to express our individuality is through he groups we decide to join.

I should record that when I later flicked through Ignatieff's book I could not find any such passage. But whoever thought of it - it may even have been me - this is a useful distinction.

Last year I posted the video above, where the social psychologist Alex Haslam argues that you are the groups you belong to.

Disused stations in Powys

Time for another one of these videos, I feel.

Enjoy.

Jeremy Corbyn grows up 30 years overnight

"I knew him when we were 18 or 19, and his views have not changed. We are talking about the thick end of 50 years ago."

So said one of Jeremy Corbyn's old friends when interviewed by the Shropshire Star last year.

That planting a red flag on top of the Wrekin is the most endearing thing I have read about Corbyn, but his friend's comment did play into the fear that his politics do not represent an engagement with the world around him.

So it was good to hear him today accepting political reality and arguing Britain should remain in the European Union.

As Martin Kettle says:

The Labour leader finally caught up with the pro-EU shift that his party made under Neil Kinnock in the 1980s.

That pro-EU shift did arise partly out of despair at Margaret Thatcher's repeated victories, but it also recognised that the world was changing. Westminster was not the only seat of power, and battles that could not be won there might be won somewhere else.

Throughout this period, Jeremy Corbyn clung to his anti-EU beliefs. He was a supporter of the Labout left's 'alternative economic strategy' and its emphasis on import controls.

There is a danger in getting less radical as you grow older - "I used to be a bit of a firebrand when I was your age, but you can't change human nature" - but there is a greater danger in living inside your head and not engaging with contemporary problems.

Somewhere in the background of every young radical is the ghost of Billy Liar and his imaginary kingdom of Ambrosia.

So I was pleased to see Corbyn accepting reality and arguing for continued British membership of the EU.

For the result of Brexit would not be the socialist paradise of his dreams, but - as he recognised - a more right-wing government glorying in the opportunity to remove protection from British workers.

Someone should tell Jenny Jones the same thing when it comes to environmental legislation.

Martin Kettle goes on to say:

Meanwhile the feebleness belongs to David Cameron. He called this referendum. He always knew he would be campaigning to stay in Europe. But he did little to prepare the ground and has given practically no thought to the alliances that will be required to ensure a remain win. A reckless budget and an inept response to the Panama Papers means that Cameron comes to the campaign starting line like an athlete lining up for the race of his life after a night on the tiles. 

All of which adds up to the extraordinary truth that, for once, Cameron desperately needed Corbyn to rise to the occasion. Labour votes will be crucial on 23 June, and until now Corbyn has allowed the idea to get around that he is not massively bothered by the outcome of the referendum. That made Thursday a speak-for-England moment for a Labour leader who is an instinctive sectarian – yet it was one that he seized.

This is a little strong: I doubt that Corbyn will appeal to the sort of Labour voters who are or have been tempted to vote Ukip,

But he is right that Cameron has been feeble. And not just Cameron.

I wrote in Liberal Democrat News (remember that?) five years ago:

For years the main parties have engaged in something close to a conspiracy. The issue of Europe has been taken out of general elections, with the promise that it will be decided through a referendum. Those referendums never take place. The result has been an infantilisation of debate on Europe, as politicians are allowed to take up self-indulgent, extreme positions they know they will never have to defend to the electorate.

Well, that referendum could not be put off for ever and it is fast approaching.

The political class will survive it unscathed: it is the rest of us who will suffer.

Six of the Best 588

Malik Jalal on what it is like to find yourself living on a drone kill list.

Eight Labour candidates are standing for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Stephen Glenn asks if it is time for the Liberal Democrats to fight those elections too.

Anthony Painter explains his conversion to support for Universal Basic Income.

"At the time of its Berliner re-launch, the Guardian had a daily sale of nearly 400,000. Ten-and-a-half years later this has slipped to 165,000." Stephen Glover speculates on the future of what is, for all its faults, my favourite newspaper.

Chris Heather uncovers a sad tale of murder and suicide in the National Archives.

"Alighting from Swindon station in 1910, she hired a driver to take her to Coate but before arriving was dropped off so that she could amble to the farm and reservoir and immerse herself in the sights and sounds of so-called 'Jefferies Land'." Barry Leighton introduces us to Kate Tryon, an American artist and admirer of Richard Jefferies.

The missing apostrophes of Leicester

On the way to Filbert Street I photographed some lovely vintage signs.

One the thing they have in common is that none bothers with an apostrophe. Today there would be complaints that it was missing.

Since you ask, the boys had to make do with this.

Palmerston: From Battersea to the Foreign Office

A star is born.

Why Twitter doesn't work, Labour won't win and the Lib Dems are irrationally cheerful

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It's hard to have sensible conversations with people from other parties on Twitter. Too often, name-calling or petty point-scoring takes over from rational discussion early in the proceedings.

Labour activists find it particular hard to talk to Conservatives because they have convinced themselves that the Labour Party is the fount of virtue. Therefore, they reason, anyone who votes Tory must be an evil person.

Let's call it the Hesmondhalgh Doctrine.

It's predominance in Corbyn's Labour Party mean that it cannot talk to the many voters who have no great love for the Conservative Party but suspect that it is more to be trusted from an economic point of view than Labour.

Meanwhile many Liberal Democrats, when they have been traumatised by the result of the last general election, shrugged, declared a #libdemfightback and carried on as if not much had happened.

An article in the New York Times by David Brooks puts a finger on the social changes that are behind these phenomena.

He writes:

In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole. 

But starting just after World War II, America’s community/membership mind-set gave way to an individualistic/autonomy mind-set. The idea was that individuals should be liberated to live as they chose, so long as they didn’t interfere with the rights of others. ... 

The individualist turn had great effects but also accumulating downsides. By 2005, 47 percent of Americans reported that they knew none or just a few of their neighbors by name. There’s been a sharp rise in the number of people who report that they have no close friends to confide in.

Brooks cites Marc J. Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor, as arguing that

people are good at tending their inner-ring relationships - their family and friends. They’re pretty good at tending to outer-ring relationships - their hundreds of Facebook acquaintances, their fellow progressives, or their TED and Harley fans. 

But Americans spend less time with middle-ring township relationships - the PTA, the neighborhood watch.

These middle-ring relationships sound like Edmund Burke's little platoons and Dunkelman sounds very like Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone we all read at the turn of the century.

What has this to do with the state of party politics?

Brooks continues:

With fewer sources of ethnic and local identity, people ask politics to fill the void. Being a Democrat or a Republican becomes their ethnicity. People put politics at the center of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life. This is asking too much of politics.

Once politics becomes your ethnic and moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. If you put politics at the center of identity, you end up asking the state to eclipse every social authority but itself. Presidential campaigns become these gargantuan two-year national rituals that swallow everything else in national life. 

If we’re going to salvage our politics, we probably have to shrink politics, and nurture the thick local membership web that politics rests within.

He goes on to say we should "scale back the culture of autonomy," which makes my liberal hackles rise and suggests Brooks too is in danger of wanting the state to eclipse every other social authority.

As a liberal I believe in individuality, and we express our individuality through the groups we choose to join. There must be a liberal route to the revival of social bonds.

But the idea that we are asking too much of politics is one I have long been toying with.

Political activists do tend to make their political affiliation central to their identity. More than that, they find their social life, their friends, even their partners, through their activism.

That party membership is such a minority taste now suggests that the 19th-century model of political parties we still embrace is hopelessly outdated.

Yet no politician has the vision or overweening ambition to wrench it apart and allowing something more attuned to our needs today to take its place.

Lalla Ward profiled at the age of 14

A Whole Scene Going must have been quite a programme, Last year I posted a feature on the Spencer Davis Group that it broadcast on 16 March 1966.

The week before it had shown this profile of Lalla Ward, who was only 14 at the time.

She grew up to be an actress, writer and artist. She played Romana the Time Lady in Doctor Who, was briefly married to Tom Baker and is now married to Richard Dawkins.

I always thought I'd see James Taylor bat one more time again

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There was something close to a shrine to James Taylor in the pavilion at Leicestershire's Grace Road ground before he left for Nottinghamshire and made his England debut.

His international career took a while to revive after that, but by the end of last year he had played 7 tests and 27 one-day internationals.

He look set to build on that substantially, perhaps particularly in 50-over cricket. There his thoughtful approach was a counterweight to the headless, everyone thrash and get out for 15 tendency that is the flipside of England's new positivity.

So the news that a heart condition has forced him to retire from the game with immediate effect came as an awful shock to his admirers.

I wish him well for future. For, as another James Taylor almost sang,: "I always thought that I'd see you batting one more time again."

Touring Leicestershire with W.G. Hoskins

A drive around East Leicestershire following Tour 1 from the 'Touring Leicestershire' booklet by W.G. Hoskins, 1948. Villages and places on the route include Great Stretton, Kings Norton, Gaulby, Skeffington, Tugby, Launde, Withcote, Tilton and Billesdon Coplow.

Six of the Best 587

Lynne Featherstone explains how the state killed her nephew. "The crucial papers were destroyed according [to] the Department of Health."

Max Seddon looks at Putin's new army: "Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites."

"I had no idea small children could walk so far. We skipped three miles one day and two miles the next, albeit incentivised by fish and chips or ice creams. At night, the children fell asleep like well-exercised puppies." Patrick Barkham says we have betrayed our children from love of cars.

Kashmir Hill on how an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell.

London bombsites are photographed today by A London Inheritance.

Tom Cox explores Dunwich.

Filbert Street: Where Leicester City used to play

Take a look at these houses. It looks like just another Victorian terrace in Leicester, apart from the oddly bodged ground floors.

The reason for those is that there used to be a gap here. Until 2002 that gap was the entrance to Leicester City's Filbert Street ground - a wonderful symbol of how professional football used to fit into working-class life.

Go round the corner into Filbert Street itself and you will find the former ground is largely a wasteground. There is, of course, a block of student education - "Filbert Village" - but much of the land remains undeveloped.

It used to be a car park, appreciated by people going to Leicester City's new ground, the nearby King Power Stadium, but the council had it closed.

I am not one to moan about land not being developed for student accommodation, but I would have liked to find more remains of the old ground - perhaps a crumbling terrace colonised by buddleias.

Filbert Street, rather wonderfully, is but one of a number of streets named after nuts. There's Walnut Street, Brazil Street and Hazel Street too.

Lineker Street, which runs across the wasteland, was named after the ground was demolished. At least the graffiti artists seem to have anticipated City's miraculous 2015-16 season.

Thanks to the Leicester Mercury for sending me down to Filbert Street.

Shropshire gags councillors over Church Stretton Library case

St Laurence's, Church Stretton

On Wednesday I blogged about Shropshire Council's decision not to contest the judicial review of their decision to move Church Stretton Library to a less central location in the town.

The mighty Andy Boddington, a Liberal Democrat member of the authority, tells us what happened next:

We had a high court case over libraries last week. The council withdrew and lost the case. 

Since then it has launched a vitriolic campaign against the local campaigners in three press releases. 

Late on Friday, the chief monitoring officer and chief executive slammed a gagging clause on all councillors. The gagging memo is phrased as a “request” but I know that if any councillor ignores this request is ignored, flack will fly in their direction. 

We are told we cannot comment in any way on the case. That probably means that I can’t comment on the council reaction. Or why it has decided to attack a local community at the same time it is planning to work more closely with local people.

Peter Maxwell Davies: Farewell to Stromness

This popular short piece by Sir Peter Maxell Davies, who died last month, is taken from The Yellow Cake Revue.

This was a collection of cabaret-style pieces that he performed with Eleanor Bron, as part of the 1980 St Magnus Festival, in protest at plans to mine uranium ore in Orkney.

Farewell to Stromness is played here by Ezra Williams.

George Mackay Brown said Stromness "is but a tumbling stone wave, a network of closes, a marvel of steps from the seaweed up to the granite of Brinkie's Brae".

I've been there and he's right.

Leicester Oral History Trail 2: Theatre Royal

The Theatre Royal used to have entrances on both Horsefair and the Market Place.

It closed in 1957 and was demolished the following year.

Read more about it on The Music Hall and Theatre History Site.

Why #PanamaLeaks may damage David Cameron and the Tories

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"I thought I was running for the leadership of the Conservative party, not some demented Marxist sect," fumed Douglas Hurd in 1990.

That was when he found his Etonian background being held against him in the Conservative leadership election that followed the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher.

Sure enough, he lost out to the Brixton boy John Major.

Fast forward to 2008 when, in admonishing Nick Clegg for an insensitive remark on pensions, I wrote:

Just because Tony Blair and David Cameron have made it look easy to be a public school type in modern Britain and not rub people up the wrong way does not mean that it is easy. Be yourself, Nick, but do be aware of the effect your attitude can have on other people.

Maybe things were changing by then, because in 2010 I observed:

Being "posh" was, until a year or two ago, just about the worst sin imaginable in British society. In as far as "posh" was used as a synonym for "educated" this was a pernicious development. 

It represented a foolish attempt to keep Labour's working-class roots, despite that fact that many of the people using this style of arguing were pretty posh themselves.

All this is a prologue to saying you should read John Rentoul on the Independent site:

The biggest setback of their first government, the cut in the top rate of income tax, damaged them because it trashed the rhetoric of being “all in it together” and reinforced the image of the Conservatives as the party of the rich. At the time, I wrote that, if Cameron lost the 2015 election, the 2012 Budget would have been when it happened. 

That is what makes Cameron’s victory last year all the more remarkable: that he won the grudging votes of people on low incomes who thought he had no idea what their lives were like and yet who still trusted him more than the leader of the people’s party. It is a tribute to Cameron’s skill that he could win with the handbrake of poshness on.

I have seen nothing that suggests anything illegal on the part of the Cameron family. And I suspect that the sort of people who might conceivably vote Conservative at the next election will tend to approve of doing all you can to pass your wealth on to your children.

But the Panama leaks affair may damage the Cameron and the Conservatives in two ways.

First, it reminds us just how damned rich he is. The WebCameron was and his talk of his "Dad" is an attempt to make him sound just like one more father of a middle-class family. The truth is different.

Second, it is a reminder that the idea you will be secure if you "work hard and do the right thing"is not true. You need to come from a family where two or three generations have worked hard and done the right thing - and enjoyed reasonable luck - to be secure. The Conservatives' emphasis on family breakdown in their definition of poverty recognised this truth.

I hope Cameron will ride out this storm: he represents our best chance of winning the referendum campaign and keeping Britain in the European Union.

But I suspect the Conservatives would be wise to choose a successor to him who has not been to Eton.

However, that decision is in the hands of Conservative members. They are not wise and they love Boris Johnson.