Lib Dem energy guarantee would cut prices for all households

BBC News reports today's announcement by Daisy Cooper of new Liberal Democrat proposals for reducing consumer energy prices:

Under the scheme every household would receive an "Essential Energy Allowance", which would provide "enough to get by" and be charged at a discounted price.

There would be an extra allowance for families with more children.

Households that need more help, such as those on the lowest incomes, or with extra needs such as charging an electric wheelchair or a home ventilator, would receive a "discount on all their energy".

Cooper said her party estimated it would mean a saving of £100 a year on average for every household, with the poorest 20 per cent of families saving an average of £140 a year. Those in the most need would see the biggest benefits.

She said the plan would lead to longer-term savings for the state as the cost to the NHS alone of dealing with the consequences of people living in cold and draughty houses was £1bn a year.

It would be funded by the Liberal Democrats ordering the energy regulator Ofgem to "claw back" an estimated £5bn in extra profits they believe energy firms will make by 2028.

Cooper said domestic energy suppliers "operate as total monopolies" and her party believed the regulator should "force energy companies to pay back" what she said were windfall profits and not the product of investments they had made.

The Liberal Democrats also want families on low incomes to be able to insulate their home and install heat pumps for free.

They want to remove green levies on household energy bills and instead have a targeted windfall tax on banks, and to "break the link" between electricity and gas prices and invest in more renewable generation.

The party says these measures together with the new "Energy Guarantee" could save £900 a year from average bills by 2035.

You can watch and read the announcement on the party website, but I have a feeling that a few bullet points and a short interview with Daisy recorded on someone's phone would be of more use to activists.

Still, it's all good stuff and I'm pleased to see a bit of Liberal populism – consumers vs Big Energy – being promoted. 

Green and Lib Dem Southwark brings government closer to voters

Community councils, which last operated in Southwark in 2016, are to be restored by the Green and Liberal Democrat coalition that took control of the borough from Labour at last month's elections.

Victor Chamberlain is the Lib Dem deputy leader of the council and holder of the neighbourhoods, strategic planning and wellbeing portfolio. He told Southwark News:

"This is something that both parties are very passionate about and making sure that we are supporting and empowering our diverse communities.

"That’s best done by bringing the council back into their neighbourhoods and making sure the council is visible and responding to different challenges.

"We have different challenges but by looking at those issues at a community level, we can create change in a more effective way and spend money more efficiently than presuming that everything is the same, which the previous administration did by being so top down and having everything run from this glass Town Hall on Tooley Street.

"But actually if we talk to communities, if we empower them again, we’ll be able to deliver better change and more long-term change for the communities."

Bringing councils closer to the people is an authentically Liberal agenda. Labour by contrast, has embarked on another round of centralisation in local government.

The mysterious mole men of New York caught on video

Adam Gabbatt reports from New York for the Guardian:

The first sewer episode happened on 5 May, at 2am. Three people, wearing hip waders and carrying flashlights, walked to a manhole cover in the middle of the road, hauled the circular cover aside, and clambered down into the darkness.

That was that, until Thursday 28 May, when a group of people shifted a manhole cover and climbed into the sewer in south Brooklyn. Hours after that, a group of people lowered themselves into a sewer hole in north Brooklyn.

"I could tell they were up to no good," Aki Jakupovic, who witnessed the first event, told NBC New York. "They went in there, closed the cover, like, you know, they were never here."

He added: "Three random guys walking around in a strange suit. Open the sewer, [and] go in like the Ninja Turtles."

 He goes on to quote an email from the city's department of environmental protection:

"Sewers can contain numerous hazards, including noxious and potentially deadly gases, unstable surfaces, flooding risks, and confined spaces. For these reasons, members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall."

No mention of the alligators that are rumoured to live down there, you note.

Whatever these modern ninjas are up to, they are not alone down there. Gabbatt tells us:

The sociologist Terry Williams spent two decades visiting people who live in tunnels, hidden passageways and abandoned railroads, documenting their lives in the 2024 book Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York.

And New York isn’t the only place with a track record of people seeking refuge underground. Hundreds of people live in tunnels beneath Las Vegas, in passageways designed as storm drains to manage flash floods. Last year, Greater Good Charities, a non-profit, estimated that 1,500 people live in 600 miles of tunnels and culverts under the city.

But how many people are there living beneath London?

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

Blondie: Sunday Girl

Here's something I didn't know: this chart-topping Blondie single from 1978 is an elegy to a lost cat.

Sunday Girl was written by the band's guitarist Chris Stein about Debbie Harry's lost cat Sunday Man. He once told Jools Holland:

"The cat ran away and we were very sad. It was just a sort of plaintive, evocative number."

This is not the first such record to feature here on a Sunday. Henry Gross wrote Shannon about the death of a red setter that belonged to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Knaptoft: The very heart of England

The passage below is from W.G. Hoskins' Midland England. Published as part of Batsford's The Face of Britain series, that book captures the charm of this part of the world better than any other I know:

There is, for example, the green deserted country around Knaptoft in the south of Leicestershire, where the pastures of central England hardly touch five hundred feet above the sea and yet they are the watershed between Trent and Severn; and streams gather here that end in the Humber, the Wash and the Bristol Channel.

This, more than anywhere, is the very heart of England: Knaptoft, with its ruined church, its font under the trees, its village under the sheep-pastures since Henry VII's time, its medieval manor house marked only by a rectangular island within a drying moat, and the later Elizabethan hall itself falling into slow ruin at the top of the field.

Once full of life, a thriving village of plough-land and meadow in the thirteenth century, the squire within his moat and the parson in the newly built church, now it dreams its life away in the autumn sunshine, deserted by all save occasional blackberry-pickers.

Remembering Liz Truss and her dogs that barked at drones

A news story on the Shropshire Live website has put me in mind of one of Liz Truss's early triumphs in the House of Commons.

That story begins:

Police are reminding the public that drones are forbidden in the airspace over HMP Stoke Heath and surrounding villages. 

The prison is a men’s prison and young offender institution on the outskirts of Market Drayton, and there are currently robust plans in place to respond to sightings of drones and any suspicious activity near to the prison. 

Drones are often used to drop illegal contraband into prisons, contributing to issues within the facility and Organised Crime Groups outside.

Lib Dems are reviewing policy and strategy says PoliticsHome

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The Liberal Democrats are undergoing an overhaul of strategy and policy, "with key areas of discussion including the economy, welfare, and, as the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, a bolder stance on the European Union", reports PoliticsHome.

Unusually for such articles, which generally rely on anonymous senior Lib Dems and party strategists, this one by Matilda Martin and Zoe Crowther has quotations from named MPs.

One is Tom Gordon from Harrogate and Knaresborough:

Lib Dem MP Tom Gordon said that while the results last month were generally positive for his party, losses in the North that weren’t seen during the coalition years rang “alarm bells” for him.

For Gordon, the results were a "warning sign" that the Lib Dems have been operating in "a very cautious way" so far.

"I don't think it was necessarily the wrong approach, but just given the nature and the timeline of where we're at in this parliament and the political events and that fragmentation, I think there is now a rethinking of what we do, what we offer, how we're more punchy, how we're bolder, and what the offer from us is."

And the other is Layla Moran from Oxford West and Abingdon:

"There's definitely a frustration that it feels like we've been talking about the same things – social care and rivers – and that just felt like we weren't really moving forward.

"So us evolving the position and being quite mindful about how we do that now is really important.”

Daisy Cooper also spoke to them on the record.

The authors found a broad consensus too that how Lib Dem policies are then communicated to the public is key, with multiple sources telling them that the party is growing its social media teams in a bid to boost its digital operation.

Layla Moran said told them the party needs to be better at selling Moran admitted that the party needs to be better at selling policy:

"That’s not just Ed – it's all of us. We all need to get literate on social media; we all need to make this sexy again. We all need to understand how to sell this stuff in 30 seconds."

The media rarely do us any favours, but there is a worrying sense that the Lib Dems' concentration on so few policies has left us, despite our 72 MPs, somehow irrelevant to the national political conversation. If we could write our own headlines, what would they be?

And, when both Labour and the Conservatives are both so unpopular with voters, it is a worry that our performance in opinion polls is so static. So such a review is certainly needed. What will it come up with?

Northern Ireland debates the future of its railways in 1957

From YouTube:

The first documentary produced by the BBC Film Unit in Northern Ireland looks at the problems the railways are facing in NI. Can anything be done to arrest the decline of the permanent way in the face of rising competition from road traffic? Indeed, should anything be done?

Something was done: they were largely closed down, particularly in Nationalist areas. 

"The old savage England": D.H. Lawrence visits the Stiperstones

From St Mawr by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1925:

They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of the hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood still flows in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. The rocks, whitish with weather of all the ages, jutted against the blue August sky, heavy with age-moulded roundnesses.

Lewis stayed below with the horses, the party scrambled rather awkwardly, in their riding boots, up the foot-worn boulders. At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow valley with farms, and the rather bare upheaval of hills, slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slantingly. Yet it had a strange effect on the imagination.

The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

The Disneyfication of Hayley Mills

By definition, a child star is a temporary phenomenon; and making the transition to adult roles is rarely straightforward.

So writes David Buckingham in an article on Hayley Mills. He discusses the way the films that she made for Disney in the US failed to recognise the social changes of the Sixties, which were by then underway.

And his conclusion could apply to many more successful child actors:

The contrast between Mills’s experiences in low-budget British films and in the Disney Studios must have made this transition more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Tiger Bay and Whistle Down the Wind offer very different representations of childhood from the Disney version – and very different opportunities for Mills as an actor. 

Of course, the production context of Disney Studios was (and still is) very different from that of independently produced British cinema, in all sorts of obvious ways. Yet in these two British films, there is an element of genuine spontaneity in her performances.

It was this spontaneity that Disney clearly noticed, and yet in taking it and using it, he transformed it into something merely cute. Mills later credited her time at Disney for giving her the opportunity to "learn her craft"; but in fact it was a particular kind of craft she was learning – and one that did not easily transfer to more mature, adult roles. 

In her Disney films, it is as though Mills is self-consciously acting the part of a child, and doing so in quite narrowly defined terms. When she could no longer do this, there was really nowhere for her to go. In this sense, Hayley Mills was "Disneyfied", in a way that did not ultimately serve her very well.

Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

Why non-fiction books need their indexes

I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.

Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.

I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.

Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.

Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.

The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.

My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:

The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.

But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil;
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris.

The Joy of Six 1527

"In the Wigan constituency, which has always been Labour-held but where Reform picked up 24 out of 25 seats in last month’s local elections, the governing party’s by-election message is focused squarely on Burnham. It is a cartoon of his face emblazoned across leaflets and Correx boards, along with the words “ANDY FOR US”. Labour branding is limited, pretty much, to what is legally required." Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the Labour campaign in the Makerfield by-election.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley interviews Gisèle Pelicot, whose courage transformed the debate around abuse, about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation.

Flip Chart Fairy Tales notes the end of the right's state-shrinking dream: "Far from Brexit being the cue for the Thatcher revolution’s last phase, it may mark the end of it altogether. ... It’s no wonder the small-staters are so exercised. They have now realised that tomorrow belongs to someone else."

"When you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." Brian Phillips nominates the 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech.

JacquiWine praises Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita: "I loved this evocative, immersive read, a psychologically astute exploration of the impact of a woman’s adulterous affair and subsequent divorce on her two adolescent children, fourteen-year-old Hugh Clavering and his younger sister Caddie, who is almost twelve."

"Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was raised in a railway carriage in a field in Leeds in a family full of inventors, free thinkers, and social reformists with connections to women's suffrage." Eleanor Tait talks to Duncan Fisher about his father, the man who invented Spirograph.

Spencer Davis Group: Watch Your Step

The closing track of the Spencer Davis Group's second album, which was imaginatively titled The Second Album. It was Bobby Parker, a Black American artist, who wrote and first performed this song.

Professor Quatermass in Hemel Hempstead

Last night I watched Quatermass 2 on Talking Pictures TV – it's currently on the stations catch-up service TPTV Encore.

In the clip above you can see Professor Quatermass sweeping into the remote settlement of Winnerton Flats. In reality, it's the new town of Hemel Hempstead under construction.

The road we see him driving down is Galley Hill, the houses where he stops of ask directions are in Someries Road and the community centre is on Boxted Road. See Reelstreets for some now and then photographs.

This is of particular interest to me as I lived in Boxted Road as a small boy from 1964 to 1969. Everything was completed by then and I don't remember anything as temporary-looking as the community centre.

Not far from these film locations in Hemel Hempstead you will find a Quartermass Road and Quartermass Close. A misspelled tribute to the film? No, they have a darker origin.

Here's a report from the Derby Daily Telegraph for 17 July 1896:

A Girl Outraged and Murdered at Hemel Hempstead 

At six o'clock on Thursday night the dead body of a young girl named Quatermass was found by the side of lonely lane near Hemel Hempstead, Herts. There was every evidence that the child had been brutally outraged and murdered. 

A blow, apparently with a heavy, sharp-edged instrument, had been inflicted the back of her head. There was large pool of blood in the lane, and the body had been carried some 50 yards and hidden behind the hedge. 

The child had been Fields End Farm, Boxted, and was on her way home when attacked. No arrest has been made.

Note the name used in this early report: Quatermass. The girl's first names were Katharine Mabel or Katie.

It seems the family used or was called both Quatermass and Quartermass, but later reports, such as that from the inquest on the child where such things were presumably checked, used the latter form. And if "outraged" meant sexually assaulted in newspaper reports of the day, then the later consensus is that she was not attacked in this way.

There is a Fields End Farm nearby – indeed, I used to play there in the Sixties – but most reports, and the story was reported across the country, say that Katie had called at Boxted Farm because she was murdered.

No one was ever convicted of the killing. The shepherd who found her body was charged, but the case was thrown out early on as the evidence was deemed to weak to form the basis of a conviction.

I don't suppose Hammer Films knew this story when they sent Professor Quatermass to Hemel Hempstead, so it stands as a remarkable coincidence.

Two snorts and a smile: A new study of James Bryce reviewed

James Bryce was an academic who became a Liberal MP and then a diplomat – he served as Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1913. He doesn't sound or look the sort of person to give rise to humour, but Jonathan Parry's review of a new study of Bryce for the London Review of Books won two snorts and a smile from me.

First snort (I have a dark sense of humour):

His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Second snort (some seats always have generated more casework):

He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885.

The smile (I've always had a weakness for donnish humour):

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his "genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains.")

This is a good opportunity to recommend again Parry's recent short book Liberalism, which I reviewed for Liberator last year. 

He argues that we should not see thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse as staking out a new path, which the Liberal Party then followed. Rather, they were attempting to systematise and justify what Liberal politicians and journalists were already doing and saying.

Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026)

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Sad news on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning: Michael Meadowcroft has died at the age of 84.

His victory in Leeds West in 1983 – the first Liberal gain from Labour at a general election in decades – was one of the few high points of what was, in the context of the Alliance's hopes and ambitions, a deeply disappointing election night.

By then Michael already had a reputation as the Liberal Party's thinker – I remember the frisson when he turned up on the final day of a Union of Liberal Students conference in Leeds in 1979. His pamphlets for Liberator gave you some hope that there was still a coherent Liberal philosophy that was distinct from centrism or social democracy.

Michael was unable to hold Leeds West in 1987 and the West Leeds Dispatch summarises his later career:

Following his defeat he turned to journalism and was a columnist in The Times and The Yorkshire Post. In later years he wrote obituaries of political figures for both The Guardian and Yorkshire Post.

From 1990 he was a consultant to new and emerging democracies and for 26 years led or was a member of 50 missions to 35 different countries

His attempt to run a continuing Liberal Party after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats soon foundered, and he later joined the merged party. It's a mark of his forbearance that he never once objected to my purloining his name to give to Lord Bonkers' gardener.

John Rogers wanders the City of London’s passages and alleyways

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons the "London isn't safe" propaganda has gained such a hold is that the city has changed so much in recent decades. I hardly recognise the skyline from the days when I worked there in the 1980s.

But maybe London has always been like that. Go back another 40 years from when I knew it well and you would find a very different cityscape of bombsites and ruins.

Still, a lot of "the old London" remains. In fact, I was surprised how much of it John Rogers found on this walk.

Here's his YouTube blurb.

Join me on a fascinating London walk through the City of London's narrow alleyways, passages and lanes, where many secrets of its past are revealed. 

We explore the rich London history, discovering historical plaques that mark sites like the Worshipful Company of Masons and Jonathan's Coffee House, a pivotal location for early stock market activity. 

This journey into hidden London offers unique facts about the city's enduring legacy from Roman London through Tudor London to the modern day.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

The fault, dear Mandy, is not in your stars, but in yourself

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Someone once  asked Max Clifford: "Max, if you're so brilliant at public relations, why does everyone think you're a cunt?"

Similarly, I would like to ask Peter Mandelson why, if he's such a master of the dark arts, he's always being found out.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in this character sketch by John Crace:

Betrayal is Mandelson’s lifeblood. It’s there in his treatment of Wes Streeting. Poor trusting Wes. A man more used to stabbing others in the back. Wes looked up to Mandy. Treated him as a mentor. How did Peter repay him? By bitching about him being "pathetic" and going through an "early mid-life crisis". 

Then there’s Pat McFadden. Peter encourages Pat to confide in him. Gets him to say the government is directionless. That Keir is weak. That Labour MPs just go on about what taxes to raise so they can give welfare payments to others. Pat’s reward? To be dismissed in an email to Patrick Vallance as an insignificant lightweight.

Nor is Keir Starmer spared. There’s no sense of gratitude for the prime minister having taken a punt on him for the Washington job. For Peter that was no more than he had rightly deserved. The culmination of a lifetime’s brown-nosing the rich, the corrupt and the powerful. So Mandelson happily trash talks Keir to anyone willing to listen. "Rubbish in, rubbish out."

He doesn’t even bother to conceal what he's doing. He’s never happier than when he’s promoting discontent and division. Turns out he hates Labour every bit as much as the Tories do.

People who never use AI are very bad at spotting AI-generated text

AI use is seeping out of business and science writing and into the  world of literature. And that, says Malin Hay in a post on the London Review of Books blog, is a problem, because literary editors may be the worst equipped to spot text generated by it:

Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored "at a similar rate to random chance", while the five who used chatbots almost every day at work collectively misidentified only one in three hundred texts.

So how do you spot AI-generated fiction? Hay says familiar tells include a fondness for em dashes and for the formulation "not x, but y", which it has favoured since GPT-3. But at the start of her post Hay quotes three passages that use neither of these but still have a distinct whiff of AI.

She offers suggests some more sophisticated indicators of the use of AI fiction:

Some of the markers seem to be lexical: AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting in AI-generated texts, as well as a lot of promising, a lot of permitting and a lot of filling up. 

Another sign is the overuse of tricolons ("something neat, something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful"). And bots often leave out definite articles from phrases where they’re not strictly necessary: "Coffee and cocoa leaned wild", "rain in teeth" or, from later in The Serpent, "Sita became obstacle by existing."

There is a flatness or evenness to AI-generated texts: Wikipedia's guide to detecting AI says that LLMs "tend to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts" and "replace them with more generic, positive descriptions". 

The strange thing about this evenness is that it isn’t usually couched in neutral language: "a flood that chokes but insists upon being swallowed" is violent, but not vivid. Even if you had your face shoved into a cake, it wouldn’t "flood" your mouth. The prosody is so smooth that you feel a lack of pressure despite the description of gross or vile acts; it rings hollow. It fills you with its nothing.

The Serpent is a short short by Jamir Nazir called The Serpent in the Grove which recently won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, only to give rise to suspicions that AI played a part in its production. You can read it and judge for yourself.

Incidentally, I have long been fond of parenthetic dashes myself, but use en dashes for the job on this blog. That's because em dashes tend to look clumsy in online text. 

This fondness dates back to the days when I wrote for David Boyle at Liberal Democrat News. I noticed that whenever I used brackets in my writing he struck them out, but he let dashes through.

The Joy of Six 1526

Daniel Katz report that the Makerfield by-election has become a poisoned chalice for Reform UK because of its choice of candidate.

"Over the past couple of decades, many progressives have found themselves in an awkward and novel position. As defenders of existing political institutions, as defenders of norms of civility and moderation, as technocratic policymakers shifting policies at the margin in response to past evidence." Ben Ansell argues that the left has ceded political radicalism to the right.

Lorna Finlayson defends universities as a 'space for exceptions': "The perception is that students and academics do nothing all day but doss around and mull over the meaning of life. It’s not really true – academics work on average far more than their contracted hours, while many students have developed concerningly puritanical tendencies – but, in my view, things were better when it was truer: people not only had a better time, but probably did better and more interesting work, when they were less pressured and given more slack."

Peter Jukes on the leaked documents that show the Kremlin’s influence machine now combines paid influencers, fake citizens and "cognitive strikes" to inflame tensions and shape European politics.

"Dead of Night exerted its greatest power through the manipulation of time. By sliding temporal planes over each other and curling events round to their beginning, the film found a fiendish new way to mess with a viewer’s head." Malcolm Gaskill praises Ealing Studios' 1945 portmanteau horror film.

"It’s hard to imagine so many being spooked by a soft-spoken woman who didn’t consume alcohol, smoke, or even drink caffeine, but in an industry so used to dominating over female singer-songwriters, dealing with a forthright black woman who had no intention to follow the rules probably sent a few industry bigwigs over the edge." Stephanie Phillips salutes Joan Armatrading.

Jill Sobule: I Kissed A Girl

When Jill Sobule died last year, GLAAD reported:

Sobule’s manager, John Porter, said in a statement to media: "Jill Sobule was a force of nature and human rights advocate whose music is woven into our culture. I was having so much fun working with her. I lost a client and a friend today. I hope her music, memory, & legacy continue to live on and inspire others."

Long before Katy Perry’s version, in 1995, Sobule released a song titled "I Kissed a Girl" and it hit the mainstream making history by becoming the first song with blatantly queer themes to break the Billboard Top 20.

And when Perry released her "I Kissed a Girl", Sobule said:

"As a musician I  have always  refrained from criticizing another artist. I was, 'well, good for her.' It did bug me a little bit, however, when she said she came up with the idea for the title in a dream. In truth, she wrote it with a team of professional writers and was signed by the very same guy that signed me in 1995. I  have not  mentioned that in interviews as I don’t  want to sound bitter or petty... cause, that’s not me. 

"Okay, maybe, if I  really think about it, there were a few jealous and pissed off moments. So here goes, for the first time in an interview: Fuck you Katy Perry, you fucking stupid, maybe 'not good for the gays,' title thieving, haven’t heard much else, so not quite sure if you’re talented, fucking little slut. 

"God that felt good."

She later had to be explain to outraged but dim Perry fans that she was being facetious.

"I invited guests to play with bomb in my garden"

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BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award:

Valerie, however, feels sorry to see it gone.

She says she stood the bomb by her shed so anyone who wanted to could look at it. "People used to think 'that's marvellous, where'd you get that from? Is it alright?'.

"They all used to play about with it and say it was a bit of a party piece.

"When anyone came around, I'd say: 'Do you want to see the bomb?'."

Victorian schoolboys were not at all Victorian

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Here's more grist for my theory that the Victorians were far less Victorian than we imagine.

In Uppingham the other week I picked up a copy of Gillian Avery's Victorian People. Here she is on the Victorian schoolboy:

Much was to be written of godliness and manliness in reference to the education of Victorian boys. But manliness as understood by the early and mid-Victorians did not include reserve and a stiff upper lip. This was a much later development. Both in reality and in fiction, there were frequent, unashamed displays of emotion in boys' schools. 

Boys wept and flung their arms around each other as they protested eternal friendship; they threw themselves on the ground and clasped their masters' knees as they expressed their penitence, the schoolboys at Wellington wept as they heard their headmaster's last sermon. Master and pupil would kneel together to pray for guidance, a headmaster and his staff sometimes wept during staff meetings if there was a difference of opinion, friendships between boys between master and pupil were of an intensity that would now be considered dangerous.

This must be borne in mind by the modern reader of Tom Brown and Eric. The scenes where the dying Arthur persuades Tom to give up the use of cribs in preparing his Latin; or where Eric, on his knees, "his blue eyes drowned with tears," implores the headmaster to show leniency towards his friend, are not extravagant inventions of the writers concerned, but were perfectly possible in the emotional climate of the mid-19th century.

The caste of mind we think of as Victorian did not flourish until the later years of the queen's reign and it reached its fullest development well into the 20th century. I suspect the British stiff upper lip reached peak rigidity as a reaction to the unthinkable losses of the First World War.

And if private schools were designed to produce men fitted to keeping up the British Empire, they went on doing so for years after than empire had ceased to exist.

Victoria reigned for almost 64 years, so applying her name as an adjective to describe a rapidly changing society across that period is a foolish thing to do. It's almost as silly as using the term "Elizabethan" to describe British society between 1952 and 2022 would be.

The suspicions of Beaver Hateman: Kate Summerscale on the Uncle Books

I read the first ‘Uncle’ book in the British Council library in Santiago, Chile, when I was about eight and my father was working as a diplomat in the city. I borrowed the next five volumes of the series in turn. 

I was delighted by Uncle – a millionaire elephant who wears a purple dressing gown, engages in savage skirmishes and is wildly generous to his followers – and he became more famous in our family than Babar. When we returned to England, I was amazed that no one seemed to have heard of him.

So wrote Kate Summerscale in The Complete Uncle, a collected edition of all six of the Revd J.P. Martin's books that was published in 2013.

It now fetches silly prices, just as the individual titles did before it was published. Which makes you wonder why the books have not remained in print.

Years before The Complete Uncle appeared, Imogen Russell Williams asked the same question in the Guardian, under the headline The Elephant Not in the Room:

Bizarrely, Jonathan Cape, the original publishers, don't want to reissue Uncle because the protagonist is rich, capitalist and deeply complacent, and therefore the books are "classist". But no one can fail to detect the gleeful humour and wry justice in the lampoons propagated by the Badfort tribe, even as they applaud the righteous wrath with which Uncle "kicks up" offenders 50 feet into the air. ...

Insurgent little pamphlets are dropped by Hitmouse from rickety biplanes: "TO ALL FREE CITIZENS: This is to announce that we have at last completed our plans against Uncle, the arch-bully, tyrant, and boaster!" Described by the Independent as "Animal Farm for pre-teens", Martin's sly ridicule of the imperious and pompous master of Homeward should be required reading for all baby Lefties.

With his hating book, where he writes the names of his enemies, and the skewers he uses as weapons, Hitmouse anticipated the modern journalist. But I will admit his Badfort News was my model when I wrote Focus leaflets.

Anyway, if you ever see one of the Uncle books at a reasonable price, snap it up. You will enjoy it.

I shall end by:

• admitting that Uncle was a subconscious influence on my creation of Lord Bonkers, though it took me years to realise it;
• sending you off to read my post on the discovery that the Revd J.P. Martin and Stanley Unwin, two giants of the British nonsense tradition, were both attached to Daventry transmitting station during the war.