Friday, January 17, 2025

Calum Miller makes the case for a much closer relationship with the European Union

Calum Miller, MP for Bicester & Woodstock and the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, was one of the panellists on Question Time last night. The show came from Northampton, the largest town in a county that voted solidly for Leave.

Notice the audience applause as he makes the case for much closer relations with the European Union - politicians are at last beginning to state the obvious truth about Brexit and, in particular, the way it was enacted.

I also note that the people who were so angry about the EU before the referendum our no happier today - they've just found new things to be angry about.

The Bailey Head, Oswestry, is CAMRA's Pub of the Year


Congratulations to Grace Goodlad and Duncan Borrowman whose Oswestry pub The Bailey Head has been named Pub of the Year by the Campaign for Real Ale .

Grace and Duncan were both Liberal Democrat councillors in Bromley. Duncan is also a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate and was a member of party staff at Cowley Street for many years.  I visited their pub last summer.

Grace told the Mirror today:

"We are thrilled, we hope we can live up to the award. In our wildest dreams we never thought we would win CAMRA Pub of the Year. From small beginnings nine years ago, we have taken everything one step at a time, through COVID, slowly improving to the point where we now have twelve handpulls serving six cask beers and six ciders and perries, plus sixteen other draught lines.

"When we bought the pub nine years ago it was failing and had been listed as an Asset of Community Value by the local CAMRA branch. That listing made it possible for us to save it from potentially becoming housing and turn it into the pub it is today."

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Rare 1950s film of Thomas Cubitt's stuccoed streets in Pimlico

The billing on YouTube says of this film:

These pieces of originally silent film appear to have been either outtakes, film made for atmosphere or just as a recce of the area.

They were made for two British feature films made in the 1950s.

Most of the clips are connected to the film Hunted which starred Dirk Bogarde, and was released in 1952.

Some are connected with the later film Innocent Sinners starring Flora Robson and David Kossoff, and released in 1958.

Both these films use extensive outside shots in and around the Pimlico area, and for lovers of this unique "village" in the heart of London, they are well worth looking out for.

Both Hunted and Innocent Sinners are among my children-and-bombsites films. The first two clips here are clearly outtakes from Hunted, because you can see young Jon Whiteley in them.

Incidentally, most of the Pimlico scenes in Passport to Pimlico were shot in Lambeth - some on a set built on a bombsite off the Lambeth Road.

The music hall songs the poster has used as a soundtrack, have reminded me that, when I was young, my mother sometimes sang She Was Poor But She Was Honest.

And she included a verse that I cannot find anywhere online:

See 'im riding on an 'orseback
With his friends in Rotten Row,
While the victim of his passion
Slinks away to Pimlico.

That would have fitted well here.

The Joy of Six 1313

"With Meta’s recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations of people from the United States." Joseph Cox points to parallels between these changes and events in Myanmar in 2017, when Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate, and the military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture and rape against the Muslim minority population. 

Eliza Mackintosh has better news from Finland, which is winning the war on fake news - a war it sees as crucial to safeguarding its democracy.

The Ferret fears that farmers' protests are being hijacked by conspiracist groups: " One farmer has described being added to a campaign WhatsApp chat after an invite by [James] Melville. He claimed the group was 'toxic' with members 'fighting amongst each other' about Covid-19 vaccines and discussing 'uprisings' against the WEF."

"There are over a thousand beavers living in the Tayside region of Scotland, for instance, widely thought to descend from beavers deliberately, and illegally, released in the early 2000s. In England, the New Forest population of pine martens are similarly thought to originate from illegal releases in the early 1990s." George Holmes, Darragh Hare and Hanna Pettersson report that illegal attempts to reintroduce lost species are surprisingly common.

Joel Morris explains how its producers make The Traitors such compelling viewing: "The first edit is of the round table scene at the end of each show (the climactic confrontation between the contestants, where they level accusations at each other and attempt to root out the rats in the nest). The editors cut together this part first, even though it’s the end of the show. Once that sequence is 'locked', they go back and make the events of that round table scene seem inevitable, by editing the day’s footage to set up the dramatic payoff that you see at the end."

"Aside from being a deliciously dark and humorous noir-tinged thrilled with some wicked one-liners, especially from Walker, Strangers on a Train is rich in Surrealist symbolism. Bruno is a madman, and the Surrealists were fascinated by madness." Sabina Stent argues that  Hitchcock's film is a truly Surrealist piece of art. 

Ed Davey says Trump is a threat to peace and calls for a UK-EU Customs Union

You can read his speech in full on the Liberal Democrats' website:

Let’s not kid ourselves. The incoming Trump Administration is a threat to peace and prosperity in the UK, across Europe, and around the world.

For the next four years, the UK cannot depend on the President of the United States to be a reliable partner on security, defence or the economy.

So how do we deal with Donald Trump? We need to do it from a position of strength.

And that means urgently strengthening our relationships with the UK’s other partners – most importantly our European neighbours, whose economic and security interests are so closely intertwined with ours.

That is why, today, I am calling on the Government to negotiate this year a brand-new deal with the EU.

Not just tinkering around the edges of the Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal, but agreeing a better deal for Britain. A deal to form a new UK-EU Customs Union by 2030 at the latest.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

******

Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

New Statesman: Lib Dems cheered and baffled by Kemi Badenoch

Embed from Getty Images

The Liberal Democrats have two strategic objectives in this parliament. 

One is to be a better opposition than the Conservatives by focusing on issues of substance, like social care reform, rather than ones of style or personality.

The second is to embed our new MPs as local champions, so that even voters profoundly disillusioned with Westminster will welcome their achievements in their communities.

That's according to George Eaton writing on the New Statesman website.

He goes on to say:

From an electoral perspective, the Lib Dems’ aim is to "finish the job” in the Blue Wall. Of their 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories. That Kemi Badenoch has displayed little interest in defending – or reclaiming – such territory has cheered (and baffled) the Lib Dems.

But Davey’s team also believe they have opportunities against Labour. “We want a Liberal voice back in the cities,” an aide told me. Early targets include Nick Clegg’s former seat of Sheffield Hallam (Labour majority: 8,189) and Simon Hughes’s former seat of Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Labour majority: 7,787).

Elsewhere in the article, I was surprised to read that it was Paddy Ashdown who pioneered "pavement politics".

This approach, under the grander name "community politics" was developed in the previous decade by the Association of Liberal Councillors and graduates of the Young Liberals' radical era.

At that time Paddy was still... Well, if I told you what he was doing in those days, I'd have to shoot you.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Back to Butterley Tunnel on the Cromford Canal

Remember the great video Trekking Exploration video in which he traced the route of Butterley Tunnel? That's the collapsed tunnel that's likely to prevent full restoration of the Cromford Canal.

The good news is that he's gone back to this fascinating industrial and natural landscape for another look.

The blurb on YouTube explains:

In this video I explore the abandoned and drained Butterley Park Reservoir, out of use since the 1930s and once a lifeline of water for the Cromford Canal in Derbyshire. 

I then follow the routs of the Reservoir before meeting up with a disused railway bridge, Swanwick Junction on the Midland Railway and then discover a Butterley Tunnel canal shaft that I can shine the light down to the water at the bottom. 

I finish off by looking for a mystery set of stone steps and a doorway to a valve control that was used to allow water from Butterley Reservoir into the canal via Butterley Tunnel

Follow the Trekking Exploration YouTube channel.

The Joy of Six 1312

Emma Burnell on the new Conservative leader's poor start: "Badenoch is going to have to do something reasonably soon to show that she has a grip on at least one of the three roles she has. Because the Tories may have made it harder to get rid of her but, as the manoeuvrings of Robert Jenrick show, not all of her party believes it is impossible to do so."

"The coronarvirus outbreak showed the dangers of an inadequate sick pay system. Lots of frontline workers were forced to choose between falling into poverty because they got no or little sick pay, or continue to work and risk spreading the virus." Tim Sharp calls on ministers to act on their expressed view that no one should be faced with such a choice.

Tegwen Haf Parry says the similarities between police uniforms and those worn by people working in many other fields can create confusion about the powers they wield.

"Heinlein filled his fiction with loudmouthed men who claim to be accomplished polymaths. They boss everyone around, make decisions on a whim and ignore advice regardless of the consequences." Jordan S. Carroll argues that Robert Heinlein's Sixties SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the key to understanding Elon Musk's politics.

Ray Newman finds the post-war British new town, as presented in the films of that era, is an uncanny space - heaven, hell or somewhere between, but certainly not quite real.

"How long before the red-ball game becomes properly marginalised by those top-down forces? How long before Ashes cricket is essentially a kind of morris dance meets the Ryder Cup, an exhibition event staged off to one side in strange traditional dress?" Barney Ronay asks if next winter's Ashes series could be the last.

There's nothing unique about the tradition that you don't reveal whodunnit in The Mousetrap

Much is made of Mousetrap omerta - the taboo against revealing the identity of the murderer in Agatha Christie's record-breaking play. But it never used to be a unique tradition.

Whodunnits were one of the staples of weekly repertory theatre, and it was common for such plays to end with one of the cast saying something like:

"We hope you enjoyed the play and will tell your neighbours about it - but please don't tell them who the killer is."

An example of this comes in one of the funnier anecdotes in David Hemmings' memoirs.

The summer of 1960 saw him in rep at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. This doesn't sound like the top of the tree for a young actor, but he was 18 and wanted to be with his first wife Jenny Lewes. This newspaper cutting comes from that summer. 

To make the sometimes very ordinary plays more fun, the cast had evolved a game where they had to pass an apple to each other without altering an action of the play. So if you had the apple, passing a letter to another actor would present a perfect opportunity for getting rid of it. And the actor left with the apple at the end of the play had to buy the first round of drinks.

In one performance of a whodunnit, Hemmings was the detective. Alone on the stage with the victim's corpse, which was under a sheet, he was giving the final speech, explaining how the murder had been done. As the corpse had the apple, he reckoned he was safe.

Suddenly, the corpse reared up, dragged itself across the stage issuing horrible guttural noises, passed the apple to Hemmings under cover of the sheet and then died again at his feet.

After that, says Hemmings, it didn't seem worth asking the audience not to reveal the ending of the play - it would never end that way again.

If you do want to know the murderer in The Mousetrap, there's Wikipedia. Or you can listen to Tom Holland blurt it out in one of the better editions of The Rest is History.

Labour are losing more votes to the Lib Dems than Reform

Luke O'Reilly has been looking at YouGov's first voting intention survey since the general election for Labour List:

Only a slight majority of Labour’s 2024 general election voters, at 54%, would still vote for the party if a general election was held tomorrow, the survey found.

Former supporters are jumping ship to the Lib Dems, 7%, the Greens, 6%, Reform, 5%, and the Tories, 4%. A further 17% of the 2024 Labour voters say they don’t know who they would vote for currently.

The polling leaves Labour with a voting share of just 26%.

The survey also shows that the Conservative Party has slid into third place at 22 per cent, three points lower than Reform, who now poll as the second biggest party at 25 per cent.

Given that our record haul of 72 seats at that election was the result of widespread dissatisfaction on the part of previous Conservative voters and a willingness among Labour supporters to vote tactically where we had a chance of winning, this is all very encouraging for the Liberal Democrats.

It also suggests Labour is too worried about Reform and not worried enough about us and the Greens.

Monday, January 13, 2025

No Hiding Place (1963): The joys of live television drama

No Hiding Place was a police drama that ran on ITV between 1959 and 1967. Some early episodes were broadcast live - obviously including this one.

Press play, and we cut from a studio set, to a clip of pre-recorded film and then to another studio set... only to find a member of the crew wandering through it carrying a script.

"Get out of there!" hisses the director. And on we go.

Lib Dem election review: Are we a church or a fast-food franchise?

The Liberal Democrats have published a review of their performance in last years general election - you can read it here.

There's a lot in it to digest, but one thing that struck me is the pull on us of two different views of a political party.

One view is put forward by Tim Farron, who chaired the review, in his foreword:

Community politics is in our blood, yet we take it for granted and at times some of us can be sniffy about it: it’s small beer, it's just pavement politics, it’s just a dolled up set of election tactics…. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The antidote is to build deep relationships with our communities, to serve them at an immersive level, to ‘keep in touch and get things done’, to win trust and to continually earn it.

This sees a political party as a local, community-based organisation. Maybe, and this is not a dig at Tim, it has much in common with a church.

The other is seen at the start of chapter 1:

Thanks to strong leadership, a clear strategy and iron-fisted discipline the party enters 2025 with strength, optimism and momentum on its side.

I hope it means 'self-discipline', because I doubt anyone will be attracted to joining an organisation by the prospect of being subject to iron-fisted discipline.

More representative of this second view, perhaps, is one of the points in favour of bulk buys for literature: "securing message and design discipline".                                        

"Design discipline" sounds like something a fast-food franchise would worry about. 

So maybe this is the choice all political parties face: church or fast-food franchise?

Or perhaps you can plot all parties, even all organisations, somewhere along a continuum from one to the other. If you want to be pretentious you could talk about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

I'm aware that some churches are strong on discipline, so 'church' may not be the best characterisation of that end of the organisational spectrum, but it makes for a good headline.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival, February 2025

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809, and the 21st DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival celebrates his legacy with a month-long programme throughout his birth month.

About 40 events are scheduled, including guided tours, music, lectures, art exhibitions and interactive activities

An extensive programme of music and talks will highlight Darwin’s life story, home and garden, impact on modern science, relationship with his wife, Emma Darwin, and musical connections

Interactive educational opportunities for children and families will run throughout February half-term.

Full details here.

The Joy of Six 1311

Luke Clements says everyone should be talking about Tash Ashby. "Tash Ashby was 21 years old when she died. At the time of her death, she was street homeless, living in the undergrowth around Hereford bus station. Her lifeless body was found in her tent. Tash Ashby was taken away from her birth parents in 2011. Both her birth parents were at her inquest, along with her sister. Their pain was evident."

Chris Grey looks at the new year's Brexit news: "So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made."

Over the past three years, Garry Kasparov has repeatedly argued that any chance at Russia becoming a democratic country not only requires its total military defeat but a shedding of its imperialistic legacy — a stance not widely embraced by other Russian opposition figures. Read an interview with him by The Kyiv Independent.

"For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking." Facebook fact checks were never going to save us, argues Natasha Lennard, they just made liberals feel better.

Simon Taylor reflects on the ideas about public health and landscape design shared during a recent symposium.

"It’s one of the genre of midcentury English novels that feature little boys (usually travelling home from boarding school) who must bridge the gap between the pagan and the Christian in the haunted English landscape." I just wanted to share this comment by Katharine May on Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe.

Joan Armatrading: All the way from America


As a successful Black singer-songwriter from the UK, Joan Armatrading was once a phenomenon, in the Seventies, even unique.

I can remember Noel Edmonds playing her records early in the decade (see? we were all young and cool once), but this is the title track from her second album, which came out in 1980.

Americana UK reckons the song is about just what it seems to be about: a woman in a transatlantic relationship that's going nowhere:
The song is from the pre-internet age when it took about a week for a letter to cross the Atlantic. Shockingly expensive overseas phone calls often had a randomly iffy quality with delays, static, and extraneous noise that made a conversation challenging. 
Even timing a call so that the five- to eight-hour time difference could work out required military-level planning. A long-distance relationship with so much unavoidable silence and expense was not for the faint of heart.

A notoriously and unapologetically private person, Armatrading has only provided a sliver amount of information about the song’s inspiration. The subject’s identity has never been divulged. 
She told Songfacts, “That song was somebody who was in America who was trying to persuade me to go out with them and would call all the way from America when I got back to the UK.” 
She added in another interview, “He would phone…nice bloke, but obviously just going to be a friend.”

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Emma Raducanu ‘badly bitten by ants’ on eve of Australian Open

The judges were sorry to hear of Emma's ordeal, wish her a swift recovery and hope she enjoys every success in the tournament. 

Nevertheless, they still gave the Independent our Headline of the Day Award.

Friday, January 10, 2025

Michael Mullaney condemns Tory plan to cancel Leicestershire County Council's elections

Michael Mullaney, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicestershire County Council, has condemned the Conservatives decision to seek government permission to cancel this years elections for the council.

He told Leicestershire Live:

"People have a right to go and vote in May’s elections. Cancelling them is just a way for the county council’s Conservative leadership to try and rush through their plans to see boroughs and districts abolished.

"To create a huge super authority, containing most of Leicestershire and possibly Rutland too, would see decision making taken further away from people’s lives. These plans are not about devolving power to local communities, they are about centralising power and making it more remote from people.

“It’s also about avoiding an election where the Conservatives were likely to lose a lot of seats and possibly the control of Leicestershire County Council.”

Abolishing the county's district councils was the ambition of the county council's former Toru leader Nick Rushton. (He is currently taking a back seat for health reasons - I wish him well.) But the plan was always vocally opposed by Leicestershire's Tory MPs.

This time we have heard nothing from them. Too few? Too insignificant? Too busy on social media?

If it's because the Tories are afraid of doing badly in May, this seems shortsighted - no party wins every round of local elections. Still, it's typical of our new government's adroitness that they have given their main opponents the chance to make that choice.

Oh, and what will happen to Rutland?

An interview with Carl Cashman, leader of the Lib Dem group on Liverpool City Council

Read on Substack

Follow the link to Substack to hear Aaron Ellis interviewing Carl Cashman, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Liverpool City Council and surely a rising star of the party.

The blurb for this interview with one of the party's rising stars runs:

Carl Cashman is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool. He does what Sir Ed Davey hopes to do nationally — be the official opposition to Labour.

Aaron and Carl discuss the actual differences between the two progressive parties, if the LibDems should give up ground on the centre-left in order to win over more disillusioned Conservatives, and whether or not the Coalition government should be “rehabilitated”.

They also talk about The Master — Tony Blair.

Aaron is chief strategist for a health technology company and describes strategy as "achieving your ambitions as stuff outside your control tries to stop you".

Or as Harold Macmillan might have put it: "Stuff, dear boy, stuff."

The Joy of Six 1310

Helen Coffey argues that The Traitors, where intelligence is a hindrance that should be hidden at all costs, is a metaphor for society's increasing suspicion towards, and rejection of, intellect, especially when it comes to those in charge.

"It’s really nice when we get people through the yard – the positives far outweigh the negatives ... Farms are very isolated places. It used to be tens of people working on this farm and now it’s just me and my husband." Patrick Barkham meets some of the growing number of farmers who are joining forces with right-to-roam campaigners to boost public access to the countryside.

Harriett Baldwin, a former chair of the treasury select committee, argues that the power afforded to 11 Downing Street can have unintended and negative consequences for democracy.

"For some, school meals evoke memories of austerity and control, as in Daniel’s recollections of being forced to eat everything on his plate. For others, they represent moments of community and care, as Julia’s experience of encouraging her children to embrace school dinners illustrates." Heather Ellis and Isabelle Carter introduce their oral history project on school meals.

"What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts." Richard Williams reviews the second volume of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records.

Casmilus watches the 1971 film Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which stars David Hemmings and is set in a minor public school: "Like all films set in such locations, it gives an insight into the early character formation of the men who play a large role in running Britain for the next 50 years."

Thursday, January 09, 2025

A goods train from Wisbech to March in 1996

There has long been talk of reopening the railway from March to Wisbech, but what was it like when it was open? It closed to passengers in 1968, but goods trains ran until the year 2000.

So here from 1996 is a train running from the Purina factory in Wisbech to March. Expect wonky track and, this being Fenland, level crossings.

The fact that the person filming this train was able to overtake it so often suggests that line speeds were very low by then.

Still, who can resist an unexpected halt at a level crossing in a bleak setting?

Write a guest post for Liberal England


I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England, whether they're on politics or wider culture. And I'm happy to entertain a wide range of views.

But I'd hate you to spend time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish, so do get in touch first.

These are the last 10 guest posts on Liberal England:

A post for Lion & Unicorn: No Room at the Inn (1948) and the death of Dennis O'Neill

I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.

No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.

And Dennis O'Neill died 80 years ago today.

Read the post on Lion & Unicorn.

Wednesday, January 08, 2025

Peter Wyngarde and James Bolam in Noel Coward's Present Laughter (1964)

Noel Coward wrote Present Laughter in 1939, and it was in rehearsal when war was declared. As a result it wasn't performed until 1942. Many thanks to Classic British Telly for posting this Granada adaptation of it (if only by mistake) from 1964. There are lots more good things on that YouTube channel.

It was shown as the first in a season of four of The Master's plays - A Choice of Coward. There are a fair number of fluffed lines, so it was either shown live or recorded under time pressure.

Yes, the acting is theatrical, but then it has to be. This is Coward satirising the theatre and satirising himself - he even starts to do so in his short prologue to camera.

Peter Wyngarde is convincing in the lead role, and James Bolam - 1964 was also the year The Likely Lads began - is an an eccentric young playwright. His appearance is surely based on that of Leicester's leading existentialist, Colin Wilson.

If you want a good read, try the Wikipedia entry for Peter Wyngarde,

No one expects Josh Reynolds' inquisition

Before Christmas it was Amazon, yesterday it was the fashion e-commerce platform Shein that was interrogated by the Liberal Democrat MP Joshua Reynolds at a hearing by the Commons business and trade select committee.

Josh later wrote on Bluesky:

With their poor record on modern-day slavery, I was hoping that they could reassure us they were taking the issue seriously...

The Joy of Six 1309

"The proposals increase the number of directly elected executive mayors, whether local people want one or not. (West Yorkshire didn't, but got one anyway).  This system, borrowed from the US, places the emphasis on personalities rather than policies.  The personality may be  good at both publicity and policy (Andy Burnham?) or maybe just good at publicity (Boris Johnson.)  Government by councillors elected to implement policies may sound dull bit is likely to be more effective." Peter Wrigley is critical of Labour's plans for local government.

Alistair Carmichael says Labour's dissembling to win power was a gift to the Farages and Trumps of this world.

"At the very least, health-care privatisation has almost never had a positive effect on the quality of care. But outsourcing is not benign either, as it can reduce costs, but seems to do so at the expense of quality of care. Overall, our Review provides evidence challenging the justifications for health-care privatisation and concludes that the scientific support for further privatisation of health-care services is weak." A study by Benjamin Goodair and Aaron Reeves, published in The Lancet Public Health, suggests hospital privatisation is linked with worse patient care.

"As industrial, productive capitalism is abandoned and Britain embraces an economic model based on finance and rentierism rather than making things, graduates and non-graduates will soon end up working alongside one another in call centres, Amazon warehouses or hospitality." Dan Evans argues that its graduates without a future that politicians need to woo.

Gladys Mitchell, one of the major figures of the golden age of crime writing, was interviewed about her work and her favourite authors by B.A. Pike in 1976: "I find every book difficult to write, partly because, even if I make a plan, I seldom keep to it. Then I am apt to get new ideas as I go along, and this often necessitates a certain amount of rewriting."

"Eventually we got to New Mills where we had to pull the canoe out to get past the weir. The kestrel took the opportunity to hop out but then looked unsure what to do next. I encouraged it onto my paddle and then it jumped on to my arm and then flew across the water and perched on the railings. The whole thing was quite magical." Liam Calvert shares a canoe trip through Norwich with a hitch-hiking kestrel.