Taxi for David Parsons, Tory leader of Leicestershire County Council

Last month I reported that the Liberal Democrat group on Leicestershire County Council had called for the resignation of the body's Conservative leader David Parsons over alleged expenses irregularities.. And informed gossip suggested that his own group was not much keener on him.

Parsons survived that crisis, but he is under renewed pressure today after the Leicester Mercury's revelation that he has cost taxpayers more than £1m in expenses and allowances over the past five years.

At a time when his council is making £74m cuts, Parsons has made extensive use of a chauffeur-driven car:

Trips included media appearances, theatre visits, cocktail parties and journeys which would arguably have been quicker or cheaper by train. 

He arrived at Radio Leicester’s studios on January 9 for an appearance on Desert Island Discs in the civic car. 

For the past three years, he has been driven to and from the Formula 1 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. 

In April, he used the car to visit Curve theatre, Leicester, for a performance of Yes Prime Minister. 

Other theatre visits included a performance of The Little Mermaid, in May 2006. 

The documents released show that in June last year, as he vied to become chairman of the Local Government Association – the most powerful role in local government – he used the car and driver to go to London to have lunch with a leading local government reporter. 

When he flies abroad on council business from Heathrow, a car usually takes him door to door. 

Other events attended in the car included drinks receptions, cocktail parties, a tour of Twycross Zoo, TV appearances and concerts.

Not surprisingly, the Liberal Democrat group spokesman David Bill has said:

"We query whether the amounts spent on travel are value for money for residents in Leicestershire at a time of cuts and austerity."

Taxi for Mr Parsons!

Chelsea beat Napoli and redeem a lot of wasted evenings

I lived without a television for some years. For months after I made this decision I would go to the pub to watch all the big rugby and football games.

Yet at the end of it I would often be left thinking what a waste it had been of an evening or a Saturday afternoon. So after a while I gave up doing this.

Just occasionally, however, a game provides such drama and excitement that you will always remember it. Such a game was Chelsea's victory over Napoli last night.

To get the maximum from a game you have to be rooting for one of the teams and I have been a Chelsea fan since I was seven. I can see that others must dislike the club these days, but you cannot will yourself to fall in love or fall out of it.

These days I have a television again and can have the football on while doing other things. Not that I could take my eyes off the screen last night.

Perhaps the moral is that you have to experience a lot of dull games to be sure you will not miss the ones you will never forget.

David Laws and Tim Farron on Lib Dem priorities for the Budget

You can hear the ranks close with a resounding clang. David Laws and Tim Farron have co-written a Guardian article on the party's priorities for next week's Budget:

Two tests should apply. First, there is at present no case for a net tax giveaway to those at the top – indeed, the super-rich should contribute more. Now is not the time for a repeat of Nigel Lawson's 1988 budget, which gave away billions to the richest. If this was controversial in the boom of 1988, when the budget was in balance, it would indefensible in the austerity of 2012. 

The second test is this – are we taxing the rich in a rational way? Last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a report titled Divided We Stand. This made the case for a fairer contribution from the rich. It argued against raising marginal tax rates, which can increase avoidance and damage incentives. 

Instead, OECD economists proposed higher average tax rates for the top 1%, through reducing tax avoidance, raising wealth taxes, and restricting allowances and reliefs.

In truth, Tim Farron has been advocating tax cuts for some years now, but it is interesting that this tax-cutting agenda for low earners has been embraced by the whole party. You would expect there to be calls for higher public spending (or at least fewer cuts) from somewhere in the party.

The Guardian reviews The Jonathan Meades Collection

Today's Guardian wisely nominates The Jonathan Meades Collection as "your next box set". So far so good.

But when you read the piece, you have to wonder if Laura Barnett is the right person to be reviewing it:

I remember, back in 2009, watching my first Meades – a programme about Aberdeen, part of his Off Kilter series of journeys around Scotland – and staring goggle-eyed as he strode glumly about. I felt he told me almost nothing about the silver city, but a great deal about his passion for obscure vocabulary. I switched off halfway through.

Still, she does link to my post on Meades' Severn Heaven, so she is not all bad.

Alan Garner to complete his Alderley Edge trilogy

A report on the Guardian website carries the remarkable news that Alan Garner's next book, Boneland, will conclude the trilogy he began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and the Moon of Gomrath (1963):

Nicholas Lake, Garner's editor at HarperCollins, called the new book "a masterpiece. It's his crowning achievement, and in the manner of crowning achievements, it makes you reappraise is previous work. So there's a direct line to Weirdstone, but there's also a direct line to Thursbitch," Garner's 2003 novel for adults, "which means that it unites the strands of his writing in one brilliant capstone. I think people will be talking about it for years to come."

Garner was one of the most significant figures in what has been called the "second Golden Age" of children's literature in the 1960s. His later work became more adult and more demanding, but these early works developed a happy development of the children's holiday adventure into the supernatural.

Sometimes reading Garner can be a little like being hit over the head with a volume of British folklore, but it is hard not to feel a thrill of anticipation when you read:

In Boneland, Colin is a professor who spends his days at Jodrell Bank "using the radio telescope to look for his lost sister in the Pleiades. At night, he is on Alderley Edge, watching", said Garner's publisher. "At the same time, and in another time, the Watcher cuts the rock and blows bulls on the stone with his blood, and dances, to keep the sky above the earth and the stars flying."

According to the Fourth Estate website Boneland will be published on 30 August.

Headline of the Day

The Shropshire Star wins with:

Shropshire judo ace in Japan earthquake scare

Goal of the Season 1973: Maverick genius out in strength

The other day I wrote about the lost maverick geniuses of English football.

This Goal of the Season competition from 1973 proves I was not making it up, as several of them feature here. (No disrespect to John Pratt, but he was not one of them.) As Brian Moore is the presenter, it must come from ITV's The Big Match

Here are the results - Blogger cannot cope with the traditional reverse order:

1. Don Rogers
2. Stan Bowles
3. Charlie George
4. John Pratt
5. Bryan "Pop" Robson
6. Peter Osgood

Don Rogers became famous playing for Swindon Town. As Wiltshire's answer to George Best he starred as the then Third Division club won the League Cup at Wembley, beating the strong favourites Arsenal 3-1.

Enjoy the goals. As it happens, Nigel Clough (whom I suggested was about the last of this breed, though he was clearly much better brought up than most of them) was also on The Big Match in 1973.

 

A reminder that Lord Bonkers is here to help you

As I have previously announced, the next Lord Bonkers' Diary in Liberator will see Rutland's most popular fictional peer offer advice to his readers on their problems:

As I pointed out last year (in all modesty), I have unparallelled political experience and I can also claim to be a Man of the World. 

Remember too that I have many friends and employees upon whom I may call. Meadowcroft can tell you when to prick out your begonias, Nanny is an authority on child-rearing and health problems, and the Reverend Hughes on spiritual matters. 

As I also pointed out last year, I fear I cannot enter into individual correspondence, but all your emails will be read - especially if they include a 5/- postal order. 

I should also add that all letters will be treated in the strictest confidence (though I have to have something juicy to bring to the table at the Bonkers' Arms of a Friday evening, obviously).

Several emails have already flooded in, but there is still time to send your problems to the old boy at Bonkers Hall.

Plans to install surface-to-air missiles in Shooters Hill during Olympics

When I saw this tweet saying I assumed it was a spoof or at least about another Shooters Hill entirely.

Not so.

Something has gone wrong with the Pupil Premium

There are good schools and there are bad schools. The good schools tend to have a disproportionate number of children from wealthier families.

In part this is almost a tautology: children from poorer backgrounds tend to bring behavioural or motivational problems with them that make teaching harder. And in larger part it is a reflection of the effect of good schools on house prices: if a school becomes known for its quality and maintains it then after a while only wealthy families will be able to afford to live in its catchment area.

The pupil premium was first suggested by Professor Julian Le Grand in the 1980s as a way of tackling this problem. And that was certainly how it was seen by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats before the Coalition came to power.

Here, for instance, is a Guardian article from 2008 that discusses a report on the subject from Le Grand and the Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange:

The report suggests that a pupil premium might stop schools trying to covertly select more able students by providing an incentive to admit pupils from the toughest backgrounds. 

"A pupil premium would see extra money attached to students from deprived backgrounds," it says. "Schools that take large numbers of such students would be better off, giving them some additional resources to educate harder to teach children." 

"If these resources were used successfully middle-class families would start to be attracted to the school, and schools in wealthier areas might broaden their admissions criteria to attract higher value pupils."

That was certainly my understanding of the Pupil Premium when I blogged about it the following year. And it led me to suggest that the greatest problem with the policy would be selling it to the middle-class parents who were paying for it while seeing their own children squeezed out of the better schools.

That understanding also meant, incidentally, that the Lib Dems would have to lose their hang ups about parental choice and to embrace Michael Gove's free schools - or at least some other way of bringing new suppliers into the maintained education sector.

Three years on, we have a Conservative—Liberal Democrat coalition government and the Pupil Premium is being implemented, but the understanding of it, at least in Lib Dem circles, seems rather different.

Here is a BBC report on Nick Clegg's speech to last year's Liberal Democrat Conference:

Secondary schools will be asked to volunteer to hold the summer schools, which could offer a fortnight of catch-up lessons in basic skills such as literacy for 100,000 pupils. 

The schools could also offer sports-based holiday projects for these 11-year-olds who have just left primary school. 

The £50m will allow the scheme to be run for one year - with the funding drawn from the pupil premium budget, which will help schools to provide extra support for disadvantaged pupils.

There is nothing here about choice or getting poorer children better schools. The Pupil Premium seems to have dwindled into a scheme that positions the poor child as a social problem who needs more money spent on him.

But if that child is in a bad school then it is hard to believe that another two weeks in the classroom or a bit more money for that school is going to make much difference. Perhaps it is the good schools that will run the summer schools, but the original idea of the Pupil Premium was to get poor children into good schools for their whole education, not just a fortnight.

And Nick Clegg seemed to grasp that this diminished Pupil Premium might not be so popular with the children to whom it is going to be applied in his admirable interview with children under the BBC School Report scheme. Having announced that money would be spent on summer schools, he realised that those interviewing him might not be too enthusiastic about attending them.

I am sure that summer schools could be good for children. And as Baden-Powell showed, if you get things right, children will come running.

But, as the it stands at the moment, the Pupil Premium seems to promise a world in which middle-class children in good schools go on holiday while working-class children in bad schools go to summer school.

As a Liberal (and as a former poor child) that is not a world I find particularly attractive.

Horsegate: Undercover police operative breaks silence

Love and Garbage reports:

Two undercover police officers who have spent the past few years masquerading as a retired Metropolitan Police Service pantomime horse have today broken their silence following the arrest of a horse trainer, 49, and a flame-haired woman and former newspaper editor who shall remain nameless in any official utterances from the Metropolitan Police, 43, at their Oxfordshire home.

It seems I was on to something.

Competition versus integration in the NHS: A panel debate

On 2 February the health charity The King's Fund held a panel debate under the title Competition versus integration in the NHS.

Taking part were the Fund's chief executive Chris Ham, Penny Dash, a partner at McKinsey & Company, and Julian Le Grand, Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics.

You can find videos of their contributions below, together with an interview with Richard Lewis, partner at Ernst & Young, that was conducted after the debate.

And, first of all, there is an interview with the Fund's director of policy Anna Young, which outlines the new proposals for competition in the healthcare market and questions whether competition really does improve quality of care.

Its original proposals to encourage competition in the NHS have been watered down, but this remains one of the issues at the heart of the current debate over the Health and Social Care Bill. So I hope these videos may do something to inform the debate within the Liberal Democrats.

The dark side of Eurovision: Forced evictions in Azerbaijan

Six of the Best 233

Simon Goldie has an early review of The Alternative View by Lembit Opik and Ed Joyce. The ideas expressed in the book sound interesting, but I am afraid I lost patience with Lembit some time ago, even though I voted for him as Lib Dem President when he stood against Simon Hughes.

"It is not possible to govern the nation well when the minor party of Coalition behaves like a student collective, reserving the right to withdraw support from legislation according to the whims of its unelected activists and a bizarre vote counting algorithm." I think it is fair to say that Graeme Archer, writing on the Daily Telegraph site, was not impressed by the Liberal Democrats' Spring Conference in Gateshead.

A Liberal MP who solves crimes and brings murders to justice? Steven Fielding writes on Lucy Beatrice Malleson's private detective hero Scott Egerton.

Anyone who moves in journalistic or social media circles in Leicester will know John Coster of Citizens' Eye. Here he is profiled by Derek Howie.

"There is an ethereal quality to many of Goss’ photographs taken in the grey light of dawn, with just a few early birds on their way to work and no traffic at all on the road yet. These are quiet pictures in which silence is only interrupted by the echo of footsteps." Spitalfields Life on Charles Goss's photographs of Bishopsgate a century ago.

Even older are the photographs of the Crystal Palace as it was re-erected in South London in 1854 on The Passion of Former Days.

The twisted moral logic of Eric Joyce

"You can't touch me, I'm an MP," Eric Joyce told the police when they were called to Strangers' bar. He wasn't wholly right, but he was certainly on to something.

If a member of the public had attacked two MPs and two local councillors they would have gone to prison. Joyce got off with a fine and community service.

And Joyce's announcement today that he is resigning from the Labour Party but holding on to his Commons seat seems to me to be the wrong way round.

Membership of a political party is not a reward for living a blameless life. Every party has plenty of members whom it would hesitate to put before the public as candidates, but that does not mean those members should leave the party.

But once you have been put forward as a candidate and elected then you do have certain obligations. And twatting two MPs and two councillors is a good sign that you have failed to fulfill them.

So Eric Joyce should resign as an MP, but no one should object to his remaining in the Labour Party.

Incidentally, this is not a party point. I had exactly the same thoughts when Mick Bates resigned from the Liberal Democrats after being convicted of assault (apparently before the party could throw him out) but kept his seat in the National Assembly for Wales.

Meanwhile, those who hanker after a power of recall should read this first.

Charles Darwin's Shrewsbury

Liberal Democrats need a health policy of their own

The Liberal Democrat Conference has voted by a narrow majority not to mandate our peers to vote for the Health & Social Care Bill as it currently stands.

But does the Lib Dem Conference mandate the party's elected and unelected representatives how to vote on individual pieces of legislation while the are passing through Westminster anyway? It makes party policy, of course, but that is rather a different thing.

So I found it hard to be as moved by events in Gateshead earlier today as the people who were there - and are still shouting about it on Twitter as I write. (Shirley Williams has gone from heroine to dupe within the last 24 hours, for those who are not following it.)

My own view on the Health and Social Care Bill remains that the Conservatives were foolish to bring in a flagship bill on health in the first place. I have blogged about this before.

But I share the mystification of David Boyle that so many Liberal Democrats attach such importance to maintaining untouched the bureaucratic NHS structure bequeathed to us by Labour. Much of what the bill proposes, such as giving GPs an enhanced role in commissioning, seems to me thoroughly sensible - even if it could have been done without the bill.

So I am puzzled by the assertion of the normally sensible Mark Thompson that the Lib Dems "will reap an electoral whirlwind" if the support the bill. I can seen that Labour will blame any future problems in the NHS on the bill, whether it has anything to do with them or not, but nowhere does Mark tell us why he thinks the outcome of the bill will be so dreadful in the eyes of voters.

My own chief concern with the bill was the original draft's removal of the secretary of state's obligation to provide a service. This is all the more important if you introduce more competition and local control into the NHS, because there has to be someone for people to appeal to if things are not working. But I am assured that this - or something that will mean the same if it comes to court - has been restored to the bill in the Lords.

David Boyle also puts his finger on what has been wrong with the Liberal Democrat to health and the NHS for so long:

For ten years, we failed to work out what a Liberal NHS might look like for the century ahead. When the new legislation was being drafted by the coalition, there was a vacuum where major Liberal thinking ought to have been. 

All we could do was to look back fondly to the way we imagined things to be a generation ago, and we clung to it manfully. All we could say about the NHS was – apart from the usual principles – what we didn’t want.

As one way forward, I would suggest we take seriously the proposal for "democratically controlled and clinically led" health boards that John Pugh makes in his new report A Way Through: NHS Reform without strife and upheaval.

Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs: Woolly Bully

Every one knows Woolly Bully by Sam the Sham...

Mind you, I work these days with people who have never used a telephone dial, so I had better that everyone of a certain age knows Woolly Bully by Sam the Sham. But who is Sam the Sham and what is the song about?

The classicbands page for Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs tells all.

Domingo Samudio was born near Dallas Texas to a Spanish speaking couple of Mexican decent. After a varied early career he found himself the front man for a band:

"By that time, everyone was calling me 'Sam', short for Samudio," said Domingo, "and what I was doing, fronting the band and cutting up was called 'shamming'. We got the rest of the name from the movie 'The Ten Commandments'. Old Ramses, the King of Egypt, looked pretty cool, so we decided to become The Pharaohs." 

The band got the chance to record, but their early efforts failed. In the summer of 1964, they went into the studio with a song that used the words "Hully Gully". When told by the record company that they couldn't use that phrase, Sam said, "OK, let's kick it off, and I'll make something up. "The name of my cat was 'Wooly Bully', so I started from there. 

The count down part of the song was also not planned. I was just goofing around and counted off in Tex-Mex. It just blew everybody away, and actually, I wanted it taken off the record. We did three takes, all of them different, and they took the first take and released it. It became the first American record to sell a million copies during the onslaught of the all the British groups." 

The lyrics of "Wooly Bully" were hard to understand, and some radio stations banned it, fearing that the words were suggestive. They weren't of course, and the record went on to sell more than three million copies. It was nominated for a Grammy award and was named 'Record of the Year' by Billboard Magazine in 1965

And it is ow wonder that those stations were confused:

The lyrics describe a conversation between "Hattie" and "Matty" concerning the American Bison and the desirability of developing dancing skills, although no attempt is made to synthesise these divergent topics.

So Woolly Bully was named after a cat and represents a TexMex interpretation by someone who looks like a refugee from Aladdin of Black rhythm and blues as reworked in 1960s Britain. I hope that is clear.

Oxford college plans to deprive Tur Langton of its village hall

This is Tur Langton village hall. It's not a thing of beauty, but in an age when there are so few facilities in most villages beyond private housing for the affluent, it is important to the community.

According to a report in the Leicester Mercury, the land the hall occupies may soon be redeveloped for housing by its landlord Merton College, Oxford. (Those who watched Michael Wood's The Story of England will know that the college is a major landowner in nearby Kibworth Harcourt.)

The position is a little complicated, but the Mercury quotes on of the village campaigners against the loss of he hall, Chris Weston, as follows:

Mr Weston said the village hall was built in 1912, and was acquired at agricultural land value by Merton College as part of a farm purchase in 1936. 

"Initially, the continued use of the site for the village hall was on the basis of an unwritten understanding between the previous owner and the college bursar," Mr Weston said. 

But a lease drawn up to regularise the situation in 1970 expired in March, 2010. In 2004, the college told the council that it was unlikely to renew the lease, but said no definite decision would be given until nearer the time.

Chris Weston, incidentally, was one of the more amiable Conservatives on Harborough District Council when I was a councillor too.

Another of the Tur Langton residents active in the campaign is Martin Corry, the former England rugby captain.

Because of the uncertainty over its future, there has been little work done on the village hall in recent years. But Chris Weston told the Mercury that "there is a large groundswell of support for renovating the existing hall to modern standards".

Merton College has offered a site for a new hall if villagers agree to the development of the old site. But Tur Langton is a small village and, particularly in the current economic climate, those villagers are unwilling to take on the fundraising that would be involved if they agreed to this.

The Mercury, incidentally, tried but failed to get a comment from Merton College on this affair.

Sometimes landlords are more generous. The picture below shows the former village hall in neighbouring East Langton. It was given to the village by my hero J.W. Logan, the Liberal MP for Harborough, in 1898. Logan lived in the village at East Langton Grange.

It was taken back from the villagers by Colonel Hignett when he bought the estate on Logan's death and is still a private house. But that's Tories for you.

The French are finally waking up to cricket

"If the French nobility had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants," the British historian G.M. Trevelyan once wrote, "their chateaux would never have been burnt."

Judging by a report in today's Mail on Sunday, the French have finally woken up to this:

Cricket is being introduced into the national curriculum for French primary schools, and enthusiasts hope the move will lead to cricket becoming a part of French culture. 

"We have far more open spaces here, so beautiful pitches will not be a problem and the French are certainly clever enough to understand the complicated rules," says Gilles Lefevre, an English teacher from Bordeaux, who learnt to love the game on holidays to the UK. 

"Culturally, cricket is all about the English but there is no reason at all why this game should not become a favourite here."