Lib Dems push hard for extra rights at Westminster after huge jump in number of MPs

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From the Financial Times:

The Liberal Democrats are pressing to clinch extra debate days and other parliamentary rights from the Conservatives, arguing that a reallocation is due following their record election result and the Tories slumping to become the smallest official opposition in recent times. 

Sir Ed Davey’s party is set to petition both the parliamentary authorities and the government to reallocate various Commons rights and responsibilities that by convention are extended to the main opposition party. 

The paper quotes a Lib Dem official as saying:

"The Conservatives have chosen the topics for each of these days and didn’t dedicate a single day to the NHS and social care, which is what we’ve been wanting to talk about. It’s quite a shocking absence in the debate,"

And the Lib Dems have won support from both the former House of Commons clerk Paul Evans and Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government.

The Conservative response, as quoted by the FT, suggests they have learnt nothing from their trouncing on 4 July:

A Conservative spokesperson hit back against the Lib Dems’ proposal, arguing: “What’s the point when they agree with the Labour party on every issue?”

Good news about that derelict site close to Market Harborough market hall: A new public garden is planned

Harborough District Council, which is run by a Lib Dem, Green and Labour coalition, is planning to turn a derelict site in Market Harborough town centre into a friendship park.

HFM News reports that the scheme:

Would see new trees and shrubs planted, gravel walkways put down and benches installed. Signs would also be erected to encourage people to speak to someone if they are sitting alone.

The overgrown site was once the garden of a long-vanished house, and the gateway in my photo below was used as a short cut to reach the equally vanished Symington's food factory.

It was earmarked by the previous Conservative administration for a coach park. For a time the town was a popular stop for coach parties, but that seems to be killed off by the Covid pandemic.

The park plan will go ahead provided it is agreed by the council's cabinet.

Recently, the site was partly cleared. HFM News says it was because of concerns about antisocial behaviour and dangerous trees.

There was a couple living on the site in a tent for a short while last year - I leant them my phone to make a call once - but I saw no signs of antisocial behaviour. They were from the town and their camping felt more like staying out for the summer than destitution.

As far as I know the phone mast will remain, but perhaps it will be possible to grow ivy up it. 

Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South (1966)

 

The town's newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Josh Babarinde never misses a chance to repeat his claim that Eastbourne is the sunniest town in the UK.

So it's a shame that Talking Pictures TV is showing the short film Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South from 1966 at 4.40 tomorrow morning - an hour when, Lord Bonkers maintains, all new MPs should be in bed.

The film will probably be available afterwards on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore. But in case it's not, I am posting Sun Trap of the South here for Josh and everyone else to enjoy.

Richard Jefferies' grave at Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing

Here's a pilgrimage I should make myself one day. Richard Jefferies is buried at Worthing because he spent his last days near the Sussex coast. It was hoped that the sea air would ease his tuberculosis, but it had no such effect and he was dead at 38.

Another notable rural writer is buried at Broadwater Cemetery: W.H. Hudson:

William Henry Hudson was one of Britain’s greatest nature writers but was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina of English parents in 1841. His powers of description when writing about the countryside were said to be unrivalled. 

He died in 1922 and expressed a wish to be buried near Richard Jeffries but this was not possible as that part of the cemetery was full. He claimed to have seen the ghost of Richard Jeffries while walking near Goring Church. ... 

There is a memorial to him and Jeffries at the entrance to the cemetery and a Garden of Remembrance in the North West Corner.

It's a shame the cemetery website spells Jefferies' name incorrectly, but then this blog's hero Malcolm Saville made the same mistake whenever he mentioned him.

More adoring press coverage for Steve Darling's guide dog Jennie

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I just hope this piece in Big Issue doesn't go to her head:

The most popular newcomer in parliament knows I’ve been eating bacon and sausages. Jennie leans on my knee and licks my hand. But she’s not fussy. She nibbles on the end of a banana which Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat MP for whom Jennie is a guide dog, feeds her as she wiggles in excitement beneath the table.

As Darling and I munch on the breakfast served up in parliament (£2.75 for pretty much an entire full English), Jennie sits loyally at his feet. She’s not suited up in her guide dog’s uniform right now, so she can enjoy chilling. ...

Jennie’s a welcome addition for parliamentary staff too, who rush to bring her a bowl of water which she gulps down with speed while we sit outside the Commons overlooking the Thames opposite the London Eye.

Security guards outside parliament - "scary men with big guns" - look at Jennie with adoration, as though she is their newborn child, Darling tells me. 

The interview does eventually get on to Steve's work as an MP:

On Monday (22 July) Darling handed in a Federation for the Blind petition against ‘floating bus stops’, which have a cycle lane between the stop and the pavement, and can be “terrifying” for disabled people.

He also wants better support for disabled people to get into employment, to ensure that “more employers are alive to disability issues”, and for the government to fix the “broken” benefits system which is trapping people in poverty.

But if you want to read ore about saintly dogs, I recommend the Instagram account devoted to Ginger, a pit bull terrier who fosters kittens.

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The new voter ID rules rolled out in this month’s General Election may have prevented 370,000 people from casting their ballots, disproportionately affecting women and people of colour, reports Josiah Mortimer.

Huw Lewis examines how Vaughan Gething's short period as first minister fell apart and what it means for Welsh Labour: "As we look ahead to the next Senedd election in 2026 (which will be fought using a fully proportional electoral system), the multiparty nature of Welsh devolved politics is only likely to increase. How Labour responds to that challenge is a question that the party should consider carefully as it moves to elect its third Welsh leader within a year."

"The constant blaming of [Andrew] Tate for the rise of misogyny is making me increasingly uneasy. Not because I want to diminish his role or responsibility. But because if all this *waves hands manically at young men increasingly hating women* is Tate’s fault, it lets everyone else off the hook." Sian Norris on men and misogyny. 

"Boundaries have always been fuzzy, and the further a concept moves away from the diagnostic criteria, the fuzzier they become. Once a diagnosis is 'liberated from conventional psychiatric nosology', then it will mean very different things to different people." Naomi Fisher discusses the societal effect of the rise of psychiatric self-diagnosis.

Adam Wren looks at how The Lord of the Rings has influenced the politics of Donald Trump's vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

Stephanie Gaunt takes us to the Crossness Pumping Station at Abbey Wood on the lower Thames: "It is very much a work in progress. Only one of the four massive engines, the Prince Consort, is in working order, and another, Victoria, is in the process of restoration. The other two are huge inert masses of rusty iron."

England's forgotten bowling genius Bob Appleyard in action

When Bob Appleyard died in 2015 I wrote a tribute to him. I'll quote most of it below, but the reason for this post is that I have found a clip of him bowling. I can't embed it here, so hurry over to YouTube. 

If I'm right, Appleyard is the bowler staring his run up at 0:20 and 1:37. You can also see the England bowlers Freddie Trueman and Johnny Wardle, who is the left-arm spinner. The tall bowler hitching his trousers is Philip Hodgson, who played only a few games for Yorkshire.

I believe it is from Sussex vs Yorkshire at Hove in August 1954, when the Southern county were made to follow on but played out time for the draw in what must have been a rain affected game.

If you want to learn more about Appleyard, I recommend an episode of the Oborne & Heller on Cricket podcast. Stephen Chalke talks about his experience of interviewing cricketers from an earliest generation, including Ken Taylor, Fred Rumsey and Appleyard.

And he also gave a long interview to Christopher Martin- Jenkins, which I have put at the top of this post.

Anyway, this is what I wrote nine years ago:

Appleyard's story is simply extraordinary. His development was held up by the Second World War, with the result that he did not make his debut for Yorkshire until he was 26, playing a few games at the end of the 1950 season.

The following summer, in his first full season in county cricket, Appleyard took 200 wickets for Yorkshire at 14.14 apiece.

But his health was already failing. The next summer he played only one game before being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had an operation was not expected to live.

By 1954 he was fit enough to play county cricket again, and he took 154 wickets at 14.42, He made his England debut against Pakistan that summer, taking 5-51 in the first innings he bowled in.

His form won him a place on Len Hutton's historic tour to Australia in 1954-5. The Ashes were regained largely because of Tyson and Statham's fast bowling, but it was Appleyard, the stock bowler at the other end, who topped the England bowling averages.

After that his career began to decline. He played his last test in 1956, as he was displaced by the rise of Jim Laker, and injury meant that he was released by Yorkshire after the 1958 season.

In 152 matches for Yorkshire he had taken 708 wickets at 15.44 apiece, and in his nine tests he had 31 victims at 17.87.

Beyond the figures, Appleyard was a remarkable bowler in that he was able to bowl fast medium and off spin off the same run and apparently with the same action.

Appleyard's Telegraph obituary, to which I am indebted for the statistics in this post describes him as "one of the greatest bowlers of the post-war period".

But it continues:

There were judges in Yorkshire who were inclined to go further. The former England fast bowler Bill Bowes, for example, held that Appleyard achieved a level of excellence matched by only two other bowlers – Sydney Barnes and Bill O’Reilly – in the history of the game.

When Jennie met Larry: It's the picture everyone was waiting for

And it was taken by Danny Chambers, who is now the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester.

When @rthonjennie clocked @Number10cat

Hoping not to have to put my veterinary training to use. pic.twitter.com/a5zknvyjjr

— Danny Chambers MP 🔸🩺 (@DannyVet) July 24, 2024

Incidentally, Danny has announced he will no longer practise as a vet now's he's in parliament.

Which will come as a disappointment to Lord Bonkers:

I have always rather envied my setters when I take them to our local vet. He doesn’t ask them lots of damn-fool questions or tell them they're drinking too much. If this fellow gets in, I shall see if he will take me on to his books.

Nottingham Victoria Götterdämmerung

This is a wonderful compilation of footage showing some of the last t rains to serve Nottingham Victoria station - the last of all ran on 4 September 1967 - and then its demolition.

Victoria was the city's main station on the Great Central Railway's London Extension, and opened to passengers on 9 March 1899. The site was cleared for the builders of the station by the railway contractors Logan & Hemingway - as in this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

Whatever happened to Close Up toothpaste?

Stretch your mind back to the early-to-mid 1970s. If you can't, just ask your grandparents.

In those years, Close Up toothpaste was a big seller in this country. It was a clear red jelly with a flavour of cloves or cinnamon. It was the brand my mother bought.

Then it seemed to disappear from supermarket shelves and I've not seen it on sale since.

Why the vanishing act?

As I remember it, there were news stories about people having an allergic reaction to Close Up, though not in any great numbers.

More importantly, I suspect, there was a major report on dental health that emphasised the importance of fluoride in toothpaste.

For all I know, Close Up may have contained fluoride, but this report turned people back towards the idea that toothpaste that was good for you was white and tasted minty.

The odd thing is that if you google it, Close Up turns out to be one of the world's leading toothpaste brands today. So why can't you buy it in Britain?

Later. I've searched for "Close Up toothpaste" on the British Newspaper Archive site, and the results suggest my memories are about right. 

Most of the results are supermarket advertisements. The first is from 1971 and they tail right off after 1978. The last of these adverts are from the mid-Eighties, and the only mentions of Close Up this century are in business reports about the brand being bought and sold.

Pippa Heylings and the reintroduction of beavers

Politics Home has an article on Pippa Heylings, the newly elected Liberal Democrat MP for South Cambridgeshire:

Heylings was recognised on the first ever ENDS Power List of political environmental champions earlier this year, alongside London Mayor Sadiq Khan and former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. 

The Power List recognised her career negotiating between national and local governments on climate issues, attending UN Climate and Nature summits, and spearheading the creation of the Galapagos Islands Marine Reserve. She also acted as a key mediator in the successful reintroduction of beavers to the UK.

This confirms my impression that our new parliamentary party is now positively dripping with talent. And my eye was, of course, caught by her role in the reintroduction of beavers.

To learn about that, go to the website of Pippa's company Talking Transformation:

Beavers became extinct in England 400 years ago as a result of overhunting for meat, fur and making perfume.

Re-introducing the beaver into areas of the English countryside after all this time is now possible but controversial. Is it possible for co-existence between beavers and humans in a much altered landscape? ...

Talking Transformation was contracted by Natural England to design and facilitate workshops to understand the conflicting perspectives and find ways to enable reintroduction in a way that maximises the benefits but minimises the risks, and to give stakeholders a voice in decision-making for a national framework for beaver reintroduction.  

It's worth reading the whole article, which is a reminder that rewilding and the reintroduction of species require widespread support if they are to work, not just a romantic impulse.

Grandmother fined for climbing on freight train

BBC News wins our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

And there's a local angle to the story below:

A grandmother who climbed on top of a freight train as part of a climate protest has escaped a prison sentence.

Karen Wildin, 60, managed to stop the goods train as it travelled to Drax power station in North Yorkshire on 11 November 2021.

The wagons were transporting wood pellets which Wildin objected to being burned for fuel.

She appeared at Leeds Crown Court on Monday and was told to pay a £3,000 fine.

The private tutor, from Leicester, waved an Extinction Rebellion flag during the protest, which took place during the COP26 climate change conference.

This was clearly a principled protest rather than vandalism. Nevertheless, the judges were insistent that I post their favourite video again.

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Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss argue that the harsh sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil protestors are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest.

"In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for 'glorifying violence'. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'." Andrew O'Hagan went to the Republican National Convention.

"It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals." Susanna Rustin searches London for memorials to early feminists.

Ray Casey dreams of reopening the coastal railway line from Middlesbrough to Scarborough.

"A former miner, he recounted being trapped by a rockfall and waiting for hours to be rescued without being able to move a millimetre. There must be mental powers of concentration and stamina bound up with this experience which were probably transferable to the experience of playing endless frames of snooker." Conrad Brunstrom pays tribute to Ray Reardon.

Patricia Herlihy on the flowers to be found in her garden in July: "A few might seem to be weeds to some, but I find them to be useful as pollinator foods and very pretty as well."

Well, that about wraps it up for Sherlock Holmes

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I have my doubts about Sherlock Holmes’s method of reasoning. Take what is probably his most famous formula:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

It sounds impressive, but it really isn’t.

Every event, I would suggest, has an infinite number of possible explanations. And if you don’t buy that, you still have to agree that every event has an enormous number of possible explanations. Which means that eliminating impossible explanations is not a practical way of investigating a crime.

Perhaps Holmes meant it more pragmatically – something like, if you have several suspects then once all but one has been eliminated then the person left must be guilty. But that won’t do either. Your original suspects may all have been innocent.

I can see Holmes’s approach working in a closed system like formal logic, mathematics or chess, but not in solving messy, real-world problems.

I saw another of Holmes’s lines the other day, and I think it’s equally suspect:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Again, there is an infinite amount of data. In order to gather it for an investigation, you must already have theories about what is likely to be useful. As Karl Popper says somewhere, if you tell someone to “observe”, they will ask “Observe what?” Observation, like data-gathering, is necessarily laden with theory.

And while twisting facts to suit theories is obviously wrong, twisting theories in the face of facts is dangerous too. What can happen is that once you have a suspect, you think of ingenious tweaks to your theory to account for new information that appears to exonerate them. There comes a point where, to be rational, you have to abandon your theory rather than twist it.

I was encouraged to write this post when I heard Ron Warmington interviewed the other day. He was one of the two authors of the Second Sight report that revealed that the Post Office was persecuting and prosecuting innocent sub postmasters.

Before working for Second Sight, he had been a fraud investigator with multinational companies. And he said that his approach if someone was suspected was to assume they were guilty and then look for ways of proving they were innocent.

If this approach had been adopted by Post Office investigators, they would have found that none of the supposed thieves had thousands in the bank or had just bought a flash new car. They would have found that the missing money had never existed.

So maybe Sherlock Holmes was not as clever as he thought?

Of course, he may have been misquoted by Dr Watson or Conan Doyle. I'd like to give my thanks to Oolon Colluphid and Karl Popper for the inspiration.

Shropshire Independent group leader joins the Lib Dems

David Minnery, who represents Market Drayton West on Shropshire Council,  has joined the Liberal Democrat group on the authority. 

Cllr Minnery, was leader of the Independent group on the council, previously served as the Conservative cabinet member for finance. He now feels that the Conservatives have "lost control" of the county finances.

He says his decision has been influenced by a desire to support Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem MP for North Shropshire, and his view that the Lib Dems need to win a majority and "get the change Shropshire needs" in next May’s council election.

At this month's general election, the Lib Dems polled more votes than any other party across the three Shropshire constituencies.

Thanks to Mark Pack for the story. As a former councillor for Market Harborough North, I feel some affinity with David Minnery.

Mazzy Star: Ride It On

I remember new wave, but since then many new genres have whooshed over my head without me noticing them.

In 2018, Pitchfork nominated its 30 best dream pop albums, including Mazzy Star's She Hangs Brightly from 1990 at no. 29.

What was 'dream pop'? Pitchfork doesn't really help us:

The term has meant different things to different audiences at different times, because it was always more of a descriptor than a proper genre. So in assembling this list, we took the descriptive quality of the term and ran with it, assembling a list of 30 records that felt like they belonged together even as they came from different scenes, eras, and geographic locations.

Pitchfork also tells us that Mazzy Star were "born out of the ashes of Opal, guitarist David Roback’s Paisley Underground band".

Paisley Undergound? This time the website is more helpful, giving us a link to a Guardian article about the psychedelic music scene in the Los Angeles of the 1980s.

Dismiss musical genres from your mind, Jeeves, they have no bearing on the matter in hand. I chose Ride It On because I like it.

So does Pitchfork:

On the heartbreaking “Ride It On,” for example, every stroke of the guitar and beat of the tambourine fall with perfect precision.

You can watch the film No Room at the Inn (1948) online

Good news: you can watch the 1948 film No Room at the Inn online. And it's the 90-minute version that Talking Pictures TV has shown - there used to be a shorter version online, but that disappeared.

The only downside is that it's on a Russian website, but my antivirus software is happy for me to watch it.

You may recall I got very interested in this remarkable film two or three years ago, in the the harder-hitting play it was based on and in its star Freda Jackson.

The play was first put on in the spring of 1945 and was in part inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill earlier that year - another recurrent subject on this blog.

In the play - here come the spoilers - Mrs Voray does not fall downstairs, but is 'accidentally' smothered by two of the children as they retrieve the coal shed key from her as she lies in a drunken stupor.

It's open to question how accidental that smothering is, but the audience did not mind. A Nottingham Post article on Freda Jackson records that the audience stood and cheered when she got her comeuppance. 

Freda Jackson was a wonderful actor. She was Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V, Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and the farmer Sheila Sim goes to work for in A Canterbury Tale.

Yet, perhaps because of the power of her performance as Mrs Voray here, she ended her career playing grotesques. At least she lived to appear in Blake's Seven.

Virgin on the ridiculous: The Guardian wins Correction of the Day

Today's Guardian has an article on the last hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

Very interesting, but my eye was caught by a note at the end:

This article was amended on 20 July 2024. The Duke of Norfolk is not a descendant of Queen Elizabeth I as stated in an earlier version.

Jo Swinson's appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

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Well, Jo Swinson certainly proved a more forceful witness than Ed Davey, who seemed to fall back on a masochism strategy from the start.

The first sentence of Nick Wallis's blog post on her appearance yesterday puts it well:

During her evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry former minister Jo Swinson today highlighted the mendacity of the Post Office and what she saw as the conniving “duplicitous” behaviour of her chief civil service advisor.

Or you can read a more colourful version on Twitter: 

'She was an ordained minister. I believed her [pause] I believed her.'

Jo Swinson puts Paula Vennels under the bus, gets in the bus, drives over her, reverses, then drives over her again to make sure. 🤔

— Charles Wheeler (@tweetcmw) July 19, 2024

You can see Jo's evidence in two videos - one and two - on YouTube, but for some reason they are age-restricted so you'll have to watch them there.

In that second video she is followed after 20 minutes or so by the former Post Office chief executive Dame Moya Greene, whose comments got press coverage too.

It's time we had a talk about the birds and the bees

I saw a butterfly this morning. It was only a cabbage white but, as it's the first I've seen this year, still worthy of celebration.

Many people have noticed the lack of butterflies and bees this summer.

This video from Professor David Goulson tells us that one poor summer for insects after a long run of wet weather is nothing to worry about.  

Then he looks at the long term, and it's frightening. It's not just insects that are disappearing: the birds that depend on them for food are getting rarer too.

As I wrote a couple of years ago: 

I can't remember the last time I heard a cuckoo, yet when I was a child you expected to hear one on any spring or summer walk.

At least Lincoln Lib Dems are trying to do something about it.

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Alistair Carmichael argues that 'popular Conservatives' are killing their party: "It takes a special sort of intelligence to see an election in which you have lost hundreds of seats to liberal and centre-left parties, including 61 in Tory heartlands to the Liberal Democrats, and interpret that as a mandate to run screaming to the Reform-lite fringe."

"If we sit by and shrug at what happened to Andrew Malkinson we accept that the CCRC is part of the disease and not part of the cure." Maximilian Hardy lays bare the failings of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

"New Civil Engineer recently revealed that National Highways does not know when the majority of attenuation ponds collecting runoff from around the M25 were last cleaned, meaning they could be full of hazardous waste that could join watercourses." Tom Pashby on the catastrophic damage caused by water running off roads.

Arash Abizadeh is doing something about the lucrative scam of academic journal publishing: "Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place."

Luke McLaughlin describes how Great Britain won the Cricket gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

"She’s an orphan, her family is bankrupt, the estate is in ruins, and she’s spent her whole life alone, raised amidst the faded grandeur of her family’s past by a cruel Governess. Then one day, while exploring the wild grounds, Maria stumbles upon an amazing discovery: a lost colony of Lilliputians! Kidnapped and brought to England as carnival performers in the 18th century, these tiny humans long ago escaped and built a new homeland on her family’s ancestral lands." Nathan Goldwag celebrates Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White.

Ed Davey gives his evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Here are the videos of the Lib Dem leader's appearance before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

He began to give evidence shortly before the lunch break - that's the video above, which should start where Ed's evidence begins - and returned for a much longer session after it. That's in the video below.

Ed suffered sounded increasingly contrite and suffered some awkward moments. I'll add more comment when Nick Wallis has published his blog post on his evidence.

Later. Wallis has now posted his piece on Ed Davey's evidence and it's not flattering. You can read it on his Post Office Scandal blog.

A taste:

Ultimately ministers continued to swallow the guff coming from their officials and the Post Office in preference to what they were being told by the JFSA [Justice for Postmasters Alliance], MPs, Second Sight, a few journalists and, eventually, a whistleblower. 

As the Inquiry has seen, government officials were all too ready to actively collude in the Post Office’s lies because it was the easier thing to do.

The Rest is Unprintable: Mark Oaten and Lembit Opik have their own podcast

Of course they do. Every former politician now has a podcast.

And, no, I've not listened to it.

If you want to - and it's your right in a free country - you will find the pair of them on YouTube.

Why the New Yorker's article on Lucy Letby was blocked in the UK

The new Private Eye has an article on Lucy Letby that the magazine was unable to publish at the time of her second trial.

I don't know if there's anything in it that hasn't appeared in the press since that trial concluded, but it is well written and leads you disquieted about the prosecution and verdict.

During this trial, an article on the case on New Yorker site was blocked in the UK. Here the barrister Alan Robertshaw, whose legal videos I have praised before, explains why.

He also reveals some shenanigans over a jury member that threatened to derail the trial, though they turned out to involve what seems to be a malicious accusation.

Do wealthy evangelicals think there's a separate heaven for the privately educated?

You may know the story of Mary Whitehouse's fellow campaigner John Smyth QC. The new Private Eye reminds us:

In a purpose-built garden shed at his home in Winchester, Smyth administered sadistic beatings to his victims until they bled. When his criminal abuse was first revealed to church leaders in 1982, Smyth was hustled out of the country to Zimbabwe there he is set up his own network of Christian camps were at least 90 children were abused and one died.

And the Eye reveals that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those who funded Smyth's religious camps in Zimbabwe, even though "he had been warned he was up to no good".

As a young man, Welby helped at the Iwerne Trust's camps in the UK, and Smyth was a leading light of the organisation.

This link between them appears to have stymied the Church of England's efforts to investigate Smyth's activities. The church has now apologised 15 times for delays to the inquiry.

Four of Christ's disciples were fishermen, but to get invited to a Iwerne Trust camp you had to be a pupil at an exclusive public school. It makes you wonder if wealthy evangelicals hope there will be a separate heaven for the privately educated.

Anyway, the best guide to the Smyth affair is Bleeding For Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone.

Don't force Clive Lewis to take an oath he doesn't mean

If you force someone to swear an oath, you are not trying to change their mind but humiliating them.

It was, I believe, Conor Cruise O'Brien who said that, in his biography of Edmund Burke, thinking of the British Crown's treatment of the people of Ireland in the eighteenth century.

I thought of his point when I heard that Clive Lewis was being made to take his oath of allegiance to the king again because be omitted some words the first time.

It ought to be possible for MPs to be republicans, just is at possible for them to be atheists. MPs are given the option of affirming rather than swearing on a holy book, and everyone thinks that's right and proper.

Yet it took a long battle by Charles Bradlaugh, a Liberal MP from Northampton, to win the right to affirm.

Would those who have accused Lewis of "student politics" say the same of Bradlaugh?

What the authorities should do is devise a tweak to the oath, producing either one that every MP can take or a subtly different version that republicans can take.

There would be a row at first, but soon we would be congratulating ourselves on a typically British piece if pragmatism. And not long after that, we would imagine that it has always been like that.

Photo by Rwendland.

Lady Maud Montgomery and the barefoot Irish boy

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Lady Maud Montgomery, nee Farrar, wife of Bishop Montgomery and mother of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, out shopping in Moville, Ireland. A barefoot young boy helps her with her purchases. Original Publication: Picture Post - 1556 - Lady Montgomery Goes Back Home - pub. 1943 (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Getty Images)

The camera never lies, which is why someone tweeted this photograph and its blurb from Getty Images, adding "No words."

Except, as a couple of replies to that tweet and to people who commented on it show, there are words, and those words show the picture is not what it seems.

It doesn't do for the English to make light of poverty in Ireland, but that's not what's being shown here.

The photograph is presenting a backward picture of Ireland - one which find a particular market in the US - and it's hard to see that being useful to anyone.

Another tweet, further down the thread, shows the best response to this attitude.

Incidentally, Field Marshall Montgomery hated his mother. He refused to allow his son David to have anything to do with her, and refused to attend her funeral in 1949.

That's from Wikipedia, so we know it's true.

Ryanair bar UK couple from flying over passport tea stain

Our Headline of the Day Award sees a rare victory for the Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser, which has pictures of the stain.

The judges advise everyone to be careful when drinking tea as they don't mess about at East Midlands Airport.

Jane Ashdown: "I can't wipe the grin off my face"

Jane Ashdown, the widow of the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, has been talking to Somerset Live about her delight at the general election result:

"I can't wipe the grin off my face - it means everything. I just wish Paddy was here to see it and to celebrate. 

"He would have been especially thrilled to see two Lib Dems elected locally, Adam [Dance] in Yeovil and Sarah [Dyke] in Glastonbury and Somerton. But his interest was in the whole party. He would be gobsmacked at the national result - just speechless, which didn't happen very often.

"Paddy would have been so proud of Ed (Davey) who was part of his original office team in the 1990s. He would have greatly admired the energy Ed has put into the campaign and the attention to the issues he has received by doing all those incredible things on the campaign trail. 

"Paddy used to say that if you want someone to listen to you, you've got to make sure that they know that you are listening to them. Ed has done that through the campaign and has carried the party and voters with him."

The Joy of Six 1248

"Travelling to Russia to meet the head of a government under EU sanctions, which has disregarded the territorial integrity of another state, is unprecedented. Doing so in the week Hungary has taken over the rotating Council presidency is bulldozing the norms of the presidency as set out by the EU treaties." Armida van Rij says Viktor Orbán is using Hungary’s EU Council presidency to bulldoze EU norms.

Jess Brown-Fuller, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Chichester, describes her first week at Westminister: "The parliamentary estate consists of more than 3 miles of corridors, 1,000 rooms and 100 staircases. Any MPs wanting to escape the 'Westminster bubble' first need to be able to find the exits."

Mick Channon looks at the causes of an environmental crisis that people are beginning to notice: "Over the past 50 years, the global insect population has plummeted by an alarming estimate of 75 per cent. This drastic reduction is the result of a multitude of human activities that continue to wreak havoc on natural ecosystems."

The number of children's homes is soaring as the number of foster parents children falls, reports Mithran Samuel.

"The Channel 4 team accepts that the eye-catching “superhuman” branding of its 2012 and 2016 coverage was controversial, to say the least, and that many disabled people felt it did more harm than good." Lucy Webster on the channel's decision to rip up its approach to the Paralympics.

"[Paul] Hewitt said the dam-building work of the beavers had helped to create ponds, pools and mudscapes covering an area half the size of a football pitch. All of it was positive, he said. The new ecosystems are attracting so much more wildlife, including kingfishers, grey herons and Daubenton’s bats, which feed in the ponds and pools. He added of the beavers: 'They have been gone for 400 years and you soon realise what we have been missing as a result.'" Mark Brown helps the National Trust celebrates the birth of baby beaver on the Wallington estate in Northumberland.

The Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is now just for show

Salisbury Cathedral's foundations are so shallow that it effectively rests on a bed of gravel and water. If the water gets too low, it has to be topped up to keep the building up.

Which is why the cathedral, as well as attracting dubious Russian tourists, inspiring The Spire by William Golding and housing a bust of Richard Jefferies, has a dipstick.

This was used to measure the water level under the cathedral, so it could be topped up if necessary.

Paul Whitewick says a system of sluices was built to make this possible, but today the water is monitored automatically by the Environment Agency, so the Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is just for show.

But he couldn't discover where the water it taken from.

A hotbed of Liberalism in Northampton

Northampton's history doesn't get the attention it deserves, says Mike Ingram, plugging his book in an interview with Northants Live. 

The building he talks about in particular is the working men's club in St Giles' Street. That's the club we saw John Rogers and Iain Sinclair discuss in a video recently. The one I used to play chess for in the national club knock-out cup.

Ingram says the club was established in 1863 to provide evening classes and was intended  to be "a diversion from public houses".

It was the idea of the Rev Robson from St Giles' Church in Northampton, and he secured a donation from George Whyte-Melville to help fund it. Whyte-Melville was the author of numerous sporting novels, one from 1861 entitled Market Harborough.

There is a pub named after him at Boughton, a village near Northampton, and the club he helped finance was still known to members as "The Whyte-Melville" in the days when I pushed a pawn there.

The club lost some of its early high-mindedness, and alcohol was sold from 1869. At the same time the management of the premises was handed over to the members' committee.

Ingram told Northants Live:

"Numbers shot up and [it] was soon boasting a number of societies (at least one still survives) and a debating club. 

"By 1893 it was regarded as a hotbed of Liberalism."

There's a moral there about the importance of self-government (and alcohol).

I agree with Mike Ingram that Northampton deserves more attention from the historians. His book Northampton: 5,000 Years of History is on Amazon.

Ed Davey, Jo Swinson and Vince Cable to appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, will appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday.

Two former leaders of the party are also about to give evidence to the inquiry. Jo Swinson will give evidence on Friday and Vince Cable on Thursday of next week (25 July).

My impression as a follower of these hearing's is that Jo's name has cropped up in proceedings more often than the other two, but I suspect those who think responsibility for the scandal will be pinned on past government ministers are in for a disappointment.

Writing in the Guardian, Jane Croft suggests:

The toughest questioning is likely to be reserved for politicians who held office under Conservative governments from 2015, when the scandal was regularly hitting the headlines. ... 

Greg Clark, business secretary between 2016 and 2019, will testify in late July, as will ... former ministers Margot James and Kelly Tolhurst.

GUEST POST The future’s bright, the future’s orange

Stuart Whomsley on how voting Liberal Democrat last Thursday has changed his life.

I voted Liberal Democrats, for the first time, for three reasons: 

• Through my union membership I got to vote for the Labour leader. I voted for Starmer. I voted for him on the basis of promises that he later broke. Fool me once, shame on you: fool me twice, shame on me. 
• The Lib Dem manifesto had more policies that I agreed with, particularly rejoining the EU. I had been on a London march for that. after all. 
• A website algorithm said that they had most in common with my views. 

However, tactical voting was what I was had been thinking about. Wasn't voting Labour the best way to keep the dreaded Robert Jenrick from being re-elected here in Newark? 

If he survived and became party leader, our town would become the heart of darkness. It gave me the chills. 

Even so, I considered those three points and stuck to my guns. So come the day, my cross went in the Lib Dem box. 

As I left the community centre I sensed a change coming over me. I started to experience the world in new ways: its sounds, its colours, its opportunities. 

Ever since, I have been relishing the words 'Liberal' and 'Democrat'.

Liberal: willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. 

Liberal: a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. 

Liberal: a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise. 

Democrat: an advocate or supporter of democracy. 

I ask you, what's not to love in those words? 

The colour orange suddenly has a fascination for me. I find myself wearing it more and more. It suits my complexion. Orange the colour of youthfulness, enthusiasm and happiness. 

This brings me to… The Ed Davey effect. I cannot now go past a tombla without giving it a spin. A cheese is something to roll down a hill and chase. Zumba classes? Morris dancing and swing? Count me in. 

By the way, The Ed Davey Effect would get a session on John Peel if he were still alive. 

Gone are the memories of Nick Clegg, another oath breaker. The Coalition seems a lifetime away. The Tories used and abused the Lib Dems then targeting their seats in 2015. Now was the time for revenge.

 Ed was coming after the blue wall, treating it like a tower of blue Jenga blocks to be pulled apart and crashed down all over the South West. 

So, after 14 years of being a supporter of the opposition to the government, I now face the prospect of many more years in opposition. 

But in a different way. No longer in despair at the incompetence and cruelty of the government, I shall instead be giving the new government friendly pokes in the ribs and telling them: "You can do better than that." 

And, yes, Jenrick won, but it was by thousands, so my vote made no difference. My vote could not transform Newark: all it could transform was me.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers: I'm Your Witchdoctor

In all my excitement at the rise of Talking Pictures TV, I've been guilty of neglecting my first love ITV3.

But I did watch an episode of Heartbeat on ITV3 the other day, and it provided me with this week's music video.

Heartbeat was a police drama set in the Sixties and with a soundtrack to match. Whoever chose the music tended to be literal-minded - Keep on Running by the Spencer Davis Group turned up regularly to accompany someone fleeing the rozzers - but they knew their stuff.

So my episode of Heartbeat this week, which was about a herbalist who was overreaching himself and poaching patients from qualified medical professionals, threw up this track.

I'm Your Witchdoctor was an unsuccessful 1965 single for John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.

Mayall, who was a hugely important figure in the development of the British blues scene, wrote the song and is the singer.

The guitarist is Eric Clapton, the bass player is John McVie (later of Fleetwood Mac) and the drummer is Hughie Flint (later of McGuinness Flint).

And the producer is someone called Jimmy Page.

Andrew Hickey says somewhere that in order to make British blues work, you needed an outstanding singer. 

Maybe Mayall, who is still with us and was recording up to a few years ago, wasn't that, but as a spotter and encourager of talent, he was unrivalled.

The Joy of Six 1247

"The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteering, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious intraparty debate to minimize the chance of a second Trump term, they’ll have broken faith with their supporters." Jonathan Chait says the Democrats will be making a terrible mistake if they stick with Jo Biden.

Paul Bernal warns against heeding Tony Blair's call for the introduction of digital ID cards.

"Doing the right thing economically ... meant Labour opened the door to the Conservatives who enthusiastically exploited popular frustration with austerity - as articulated in the famous 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. This allowed the party to appeal especially to middle-class voters who had supported Labour for the first time in 1945." Steven Fielding warns Labour against repeating the mistake made by Clement Attlee.

Humanists UK provides a history of non-religious prime ministers and other politicians.

"As she sings in Backwoods Barbie (2008), 'Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book.' When fans dig into Parton’s songs, books, films, and autobiography, they uncover an egalitarian vision of social cooperation." William Irwin examines Dolly Parton's philosophy.

Katya Witney thinks England chose the right time to retire James Anderson: "In the last Ashes series in Australia, Anderson took eight wickets in the three Test matches he played. He hasn’t played more than three Tests in an Ashes since the 2017/18 series, a calf injury limiting his participation in 2019 and being less effective than Mark Wood and Chris Woakes keeping him out of the XI last summer."

Lower Robert Street: A hidden way in London's West End

Jago Hazzard eschews (hem hem) his usual subject of railways and shows us instead a secret road in the West End.

To explain Lower Robert Street's existence and obscurity, he reveals the interesting history of the Adelphi district. 

Londonist has an article on The Adelphi Story and the district's Wikipedia entry lists the famous people who lived there.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The general election is over and there are 72 (count 'em) Liberal Democrat MPs.

What should Lib Dem strategy be in this brave new world? Is there a policy you would like to see us adopt? Any heretical thoughts you want to confess?

You're welcome to share your ideas in a guest post for Liberal England. 

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do get in touch first.

And, as you may have noticed, I'm happy to cover topics far beyond the Lib Dems and British politics.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• The Lib Dems approach the general election in a far weaker position than in 1997 - Anselm Anon
• A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit - Peter Chambers
• No smoke without political economy - Anselm Anon
• In old age a shared past is rich and comforting - The Secret Support Worker
• So far this year, 49 councillors have left the Tories and 42 have left Labour - Augustus Carp
• Singing the songs of the Cambrian Railway - Eric Loveland Heath
• Councillors changing party: general election update - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems achieved a wide and remarkably deep success - Alex Folkes
• The Lib Dems must meet the challenge of the Greens in the new political landscape - Anselm Anon
• This blog is not suitable for kids - Laurence Warner

A scarecrow duel and a child actor's memories of making the Worzel Gummidge television series

I've not finished with Worzel Gummidge yet, because I've discovered that The Laughing Stock YouTube channel has most of the episodes from the four series that Southern made between 1979 and 1981. There are lots of other good things on there too, so I have subscribed to it.

This extract comes from The Return of Dafthead in series 3. It illustrates the folk horror aspect of this version of Worzel that appeals to me.

Don't worry: Worzel doesn't die and does get his head back. The Crow Man is a benign deity, giving life too and overseeing the scarecrows.

I've also come across an episode of the Distinct Nostalgia podcast that interviews Jeremy Austin, who played the boy John in Worzel Gummidge. His sister Sue was played by Charlotte Coleman, who died aged only 33 having enjoyed great success as both a child and an adult acting in television and films.

Austin talks about his fortuitous casting, the fun of making the programmes and his eventual admission that he was not going to sustain an acting career as an adult.

Listening between the lines, Jon Pertwee was a perfectionist and could be hard to work with. But he never lost his temper with the children and made a point of introducing them to any guest stars himself to emphasise their importance to the show.

And it has to be said that Pertwee is superlatively good in Worzel Gummidge.

I'm also intrigued by when the series is set. It's clear from the cars and the children's clothes that it's not 1979 - and when Worzel tries to do away with Dafthead in another episode by dropping him off a bridge in front of a train, it is a steam train.

But nor is there anything to anchor the series in a precise decade. I like my nostalgia precise, but this diffuse approach may be more emotionally appealing.

Steve Darling on Jennie: "I'm afraid to say she is a tart"

Favourite interview of the week - new Lib Dem MP Steve Darling on his guide dog Jennie stealing the show in the Commons.

More on the pod, inc @GraemeDogfather on what dog Starmer should get
🎧 https://t.co/ffgoWIQSq5
pic.twitter.com/jYakn1BF30

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) July 11, 2024

By common consent, the star of the new Liberal Democrat intake is Steve Darling's guide dog Jennie.

Here Steve gives a candid portrait of her and of her many splendid qualities.

This was tweeted by Matt Chorley of Times Radio. You can hear the full interview on his podcast Politics Without the Boring Bits.

GUEST POST This blog is not suitable for kids

With the open web under threat in Britain, Laurence Warner argues that it may be time to make it a child-free zone. 

Last year I warned Lib Dem Voice not to follow Iran in banning encrypted messaging like Signal and WhatsApp. Ofcom now can, since the Online Safety Act passed near intact through parliament. 

Just as Big Tech finally adopts encrypted messaging - with Apple on Google’s RCS and Meta the Signal protocol - Britain’s two illiberal governing parties called law’n’order on progress. 

Whilst a Lib Dem Lord who watched the act sail by assures me Ofcom’s "expert" won’t pull the plug until (implausible 'cake and eat it') tech is in place, I believe we need to be proactive at encouraging Ofcom to direct their new regulatory powers in one specific area: children’s safety. 

The internet is not, and probably cannot be, safe for children. Being reached by bad people - cyberbullies or predators - and bad content – addictive or Adult material - is putting a generation in danger. 

I know this first-hand: I was exposed to Adult content online - like a quarter of British GenZ - by age 11. We only know this shocking statistic due to a Children’s Commissioner survey that Ofcom commissioned; it’s still a taboo topic for many parents like mine. 

Only through paternal supervision (an internet firewall and therapy) was I able to kick the habit. It’s why on my upcoming 2024 collection of Big Tech diss-tracks Ctrl-Alt-Rap, I’m taking aim at porn barons in Recovered to inspire us to destroy their business model of addicting young people like our parents were by Big Tobacco. 

Look, deregulation has been a great strength of the web: permissionless publishing and access, coupled with encryption, has been the unlikely open-closed blend that’s made the web a place where Brits want to spend a quarter of their waking lives. 

But if we continue to let youth harms spiral, those building blocks - of free expression and the right to privacy - will be entirely swept away for everyone by a Chinese approach infantilising all citizens. 

I believe Ed Davey’s care-full Liberal Democrats can strike a winning balance on this: maintain core digital privacies like encryption and rights to access content for adults, whilst actively seeking to protect children from such harms. 

Ofcom has floated efforts to cherry-pick age-gating Adult websites. And though these are popular in principle (80 per cent of voters), Open Rights Group - whose Don't Scan Me! campaign I supported at parliament - warn that botched implementations might threaten all citizens' privacy. We may need to consider more radical approaches that ask whether any of the web - including social media - should be accessed by children. 

Any such radical policies would involve thorny implementation questions: such as whether the age cutoff would 13, the earliest age US law lets Silicon Valley grab their data, or 18, the age which Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology is advocating. I personally think 16, the age at which Brits gain the majority of citizen freedoms such as being able to leave home, seems like a realistic target. 

Until then, the government should build upon their phone-free classroom policy and force caregivers (90 per cent of whom currently abdicate their responsibility) to use Big Tech’s monitoring tools at home too. 

How likely would such a seemingly paternalist policy be from our Liberal party? At Spring Conference’s tech policy huddle in York, I saw both sides: on the regulation side, a concerned mother from the Smartphone-free Childhood community worried about her kid turning 9, versus an employee who wants to protect Big Social’s ability to operate amongst over-13s and trusts in Asimov's First Law (AI can protect young humans). 

The only sensible approach is that liberal policies shouldn’t automatically be applied to children to whom we owe care, as even Rousseau argued. 

Gen Alpha is just turning 11: this year we have an opportunity to help them spend the next five or seven years free of unsought exposure to Adult content (and degenerate adults), until they gain full citizenship rights to choose to access it. 

We would do better to target internet regulation specifically at children rather than risk the whole of Western society going behind a Great Firewall. 

Sorry kids, you won’t like this. 

Laurence Warner is a singer-songwriter-rapper at LaurenceWarner.com, currently making Alternative-Rap about Big Tech’s social impact. He’s also a Lib Dem member in his hometown Eastleigh and blogs about the arts and tech at wa.rner.me.