A short film on the two cliff railways of Hastings. When I was in the town the other week, I went up to the clifftops on the West Hill Railway but didn't get to travel on the East Hill Railway.
The latter enjoys some great sea views because it doesn't run through a tunnel.
Get benefits claimants back to work - cleaning our filthy streets
That article is behind the paper's paywall, but Vox Political has a few quotes. If they give a fair representation of the piece, it is designed to evoke disgust, not just of dirty streets, but of the people who live in them.
But Oakeshott's partner Richard Tice was in no doubt of its quality, retweeting it with the words:
Let’s make Welfare work…..
Let’s get Benefits claimant’s cleaning Britain….
Let’s ignore the howls of woke lefties….
And his deputy as leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, chimed in:
Absolutely right Richard.
The human condition requires work to be settled. It is good for the people and good for the country.
I like clean streets too, but I like them to be cleaned by people who are paid a good wage for doing the work and who belong to trade unions.
But this hankering after an army of unpaid workers is creeping in on the right of British politics.
When I saw tweets about Oakeshott's article, I was reminded of a an article by my own MP.
Blogging is what Neil O'Brien seems to do most of the time these days, which pleases me as a fellow exponent of a dying art. But this was not on his own Substack but Conservative Home.
And there he wrote:
In the 1990s, the visionary New York police chief, Bill Bratton, put Broken Windows policing into effect, and crushed crime. It has two elements: creating orderly places, and making sure lower level crimes get swift and certain punishment.
To create orderly places, community payback offenders shouldn’t simply beput (sic) into charity shops. Instead, they should be helping deliver a massive national drive to reduce graffiti and tidy town centres.
So there's another reserve army that can clean up Britain while undercutting council workers: prisoners.
What will be suggested next? Making this free labour available to private companies? That's what already happens in the vast US prison system - see this article from the American Civil Liberties Union.
And you could read Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie, which long ago alerted me to look for this trend. It's one we should all fear.
News from the BBC Media Centre:
BBC Factual today announces an exciting brand new Factual Entertainment competition format, Chess Masters, for BBC Two and iPlayer. Across eight episodes, passionate and highly-skilled players from all backgrounds will battle it out across a series of rapid chess games before one will be crowned the title of Chess Master. ...
Catherine Catton, Head of Commissioning, Factual Entertainment and Live Events, says: "In a market of competitions that celebrate physical feats we’re really excited to back an idea that foregrounds strategy and smart-thinking. Curve has devised a format that makes chess both entertaining and accessible for all."
Camilla Lewis, Executive Producer, Curve Media, says: "Chess Masters has been a joy to develop with the BBC. We are delighted to be making this warm, inclusive and clever series, where the emotional as well as strategic stakes are high. There is untapped talent out there. Amateurs from 8 to 80 will get the opportunity to compete with the best and the audience will get unique insights into the psychological and practical gameplay of this age-old but highly accessible game played by all cultures and by people of all kinds."
Malcolm Pein from the English Chess Federation adds:
The world’s oldest game has evolved into a 24/7 365 activity as well as a big money e-sport that has appeal across the generations. The way chess almost uniquely crosses all boundaries of age, sex, language and culture convinced me that our national broadcaster is its natural home.
"The chess community has waited over thirty years for the game to return to our screens and everyone is hugely excited at the prospect of creating an innovative format with the best broadcasting professionals to bring the 64 squares to life for the millions of new players and for those whose chess journey has not yet begun."
It is indeed 30 years since chess featured on the BBC in the shape of its coverage of Nigel Short's unsuccessful challenge to Garry Kasparov for the world championship.
And back in the Seventies, the BBC screened the innovative programme The Master Game. As I blogged last year:
When the BBC tried to sell The Master Game, a series of televised chess tournaments, to other national broadcasters, they were told: "We've tried doing chess on television, but it doesn't work." Then the representatives of those stations heard the players apparently voicing their thoughts during the game and bought the programme.
What format the new programme Chess Masters will take remains to be seen, but the return of chess to be BBC has to be welcomed.
Here in 1975, introduced by John Arlott, is Phil Edmonds in his blond Adonis phase, making his test debut. In his first 12 overs for England he took 5 Australian wickets for 17, his victims including both Chappell brothers.
He was to bowl much better than this for England, but never with so much luck. Still, his sudden appearance on the test scene was part of the revitalisation of the team under Tony Greig's captaincy.
From his debut until his last test, against Pakistan in 1987, Edmonds only played 51 of a possible 126 games for England.
In part this was because we rarely played two spinners, though Edmonds and John Emburey were fixtures in two successful Ashes series in the 1980s. But it was also because he came to be seen as a difficult character.
Sometimes the selectors went to ridiculous lengths to avoid picking him. In 1982 Edmonds took 80 first-class wickets for Middlesex, but three off spinners (Eddie Hemmings, Vic Marks and Geoff Miller) were taken to Australia that winter and there was no place for him.
Tory critics are urging Rishi Sunak to promote Right-wingers to an “election war Cabinet” after the local elections, which are predicted to deliver sizeable Tory defeats.
Two Tory MPs have endorsed the idea to The Telegraph, with Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Robert Jenrick put forward as possible names to be in contention.
One name jumps out here: that of Jacob Rees-Mogg. That's because he had to be hidden from the public during the last general election campaign.
On 11 December 2019, the eve of polling day, a Guardian article looked at the politicians who had been prominent during the campaign and those who had been absent from the fray.
This is what it said about Rees-Mogg:
From being a near-perennial fixture of political coverage in 2019, Rees-Mogg vanished from the airwaves following uproar over his comments about the Grenfell tragedy.
His presence among the top 20 most prominent campaigners in the press and TV in the campaign’s first week was largely a result of coverage of the Grenfell issue – and by the second week he had disappeared.
Instead, a series of pictures on the politician’s Twitter account suggests that he has been instructed to largely restrict himself to his safe seat of North East Somerset.
And it wasn't just the Guardian that notices. When Rees-Mogg took his mini-me son with him to the polling station the next day, the Express reported:
Mr Rees-Mogg has rarely been seen during the last few weeks of campaigning.
This may have been due to controversial comments about the people who died in the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
The Tory MP told LBC host Nick Ferrari that the victims would have survived if they’d have just ignored what they were told by London Fire Brigade.
He added that he would have left the building as “it just seems the common sense thing to do”.
Mr Rees-Mogg then did not attend the Tory manifesto launch at the Telford International Centre, despite other Cabinet ministers attending.
If bringing back Rees-Mogg is the best card the Tories can play now, they're in even more trouble than we thought.
It’s odd the things that political journalists think important, isn’t it? On Saturday evening a somewhat obscure Suffolk MP crosses the floor, and it’s headline news. Meanwhile, nearly 100 councillors have defected since the New Year, and it barely gets a mention in their local paper.
Obviously, the actions of a former health minister have more immediate impact than those of a sometime chair of the highways and byways subcommittee on Slagthorpe Borough Council, but the cumulative effect of numerous small-scale defections might, on balance, be rather more significant.
So far this year there have been net defections of 49 Conservative councillors, 42 Labour, 1 Lib Dem, 5 Greens and 2 Nationalists. The balancing figure is a net increase of 99 'Independents', broadly defined.
There are only 12 examples of councillors defecting directly from one political party to another - five prefiguring Dan Poulter MP and moving from Conservative to Labour, four from Conservative to Lib Dem, one from Lib Dem to Labour and one each from the Conservatives and Labour to the Greens.
My thesis is a simple one: a councillor defecting from a political party means that they will be less likely to vote - and, more importantly, to work - for that party at a general election. Their families and friends might withdraw from the fray as well, and their local knowledge of their ward will be lost to the party they formerly represented.
Does it matter? Well, that depends on how important you think leafleting, canvassing and sitting outside polling stations might be for a parliamentary election. A winning team in a close contest needs to expend thousands of volunteer hours, a process which is very difficult to organise, manage and motivate.
Perhaps that’s why some bright young things would rather try to maximise support and get voters to the polling stations via social media alone, but personally I still think a bit of physical effort is required.
The well-reported mass defections of Labour councillors have continued this year, notably the 10 in Pendle. This action has been replicated on a smaller scale elsewhere, with some Labour defectors expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s position on Gaza and other, undefined, 'leadership issues'.
As a consequence, several new, ostensibly 'Independent' groups have been established in some authorities by ex-Labour councillors. Meanwhile, Reform, the People’s Party and Alba have all attracted new converts, but they remain scarce.
The local election results on Thursday and Friday will no doubt overshadow Mr Poulter’s resignation, and all of those tallied above, but it might not be long before pressures, personalities and politics create fissures in the newly elected council groups.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
Now it's the US's turn to live through a political scandal about a shot dog.
Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was one of the favourites to be Donald Trump's running mate this November. But she appears to have ruined her chances of becoming Vice President by publishing a book.
The Guardian takes up the story:
"Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old," the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an "aggressive personality" and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going "out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life".
That's a picture of Cricket above.
The Guardian report goes on to say:
"I hated that dog," Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself "untrainable", "dangerous to anyone she came in contact with" and "less than worthless ... as a hunting dog".
"At that moment," Noem says, "I realised I had to put her down."
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
"was not a pleasant job," she writes, "but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done."
Yes, she also shot a goat the family owned.
According to Noem, it was "nasty and mean", because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled "disgusting, musky, rancid".
Donald Trump is 77.
Conceived in 1996 as one of the first private finance initiative contracts, between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency on the one hand and computer company ICL on the other, the Horizon IT system had an unpromising start. It had been set up to create a swipe card system for payment of pensions and benefits from Post Office branch counters.
When, in May 1999, the plug was finally pulled on what the Commons public accounts committee called 'one of the biggest IT failures in the public sector', taxpayers had lost around £700m. Something had to be salvaged, however.
So, against the better judgement of its IT specialists, the Post Office decided to use the system to transform its paper-based branch accounting into an electronic system covering the full range of Post Office services. The new Horizon project became the largest non-military IT contract in Europe.
And, though I can't find the reference today, I have read that considerable pressure was put on the Post Office. Its executives were told they could whistle for more government investment if they didn't buy Horizon.
All of which reminds me of Roger James, who wrote a book seeking to apply the insights of Karl Popper's philosophy to public affairs. That 1980 book, Return to Reason, can be found online.
One of the useful concepts James introduces is 'solutioneering', which he characterises as:
Jumping to a solution before clearly formulating what the problem is (or indeed if there is one at all) or how success or failure are to be judged. Achievement of the solution then becomes the goal; and, when opposition develops, the problem becomes how to get the solution accepted, while the question of how best to solve the original problem, if there was one, never gets discussed at all. I call this mistake solutioneering.
Horizon wasn't a solution to one, clearly defined problem, but the Post Office was nevertheless determined to defend its reputation at all costs. Anyone who raised doubts about whether it could do all that was being asked of it was treated as a threat to the organisation.
Judy Dyble was the original female singer with Fairport Convention, but was ousted when the band met Sandy Denny.
Jackie McAuley was the keyboard player with Them and played on their most famous records - Baby, Please Don't Go, Gloria and Here Comes the Night - alongside Van Morrison.
In 1970 the two got together as Trader Horne and recorded a single album, Morning Way, which Wikipedia claims "has reached legendary status and it is considered one of the lost gems of the 1960s", though someone has added 'by whom?' and 'citation needed' afterwards.
Here Comes the Rain is not on the album but is the second of two singles that Trader Horne released.
According to Wikipedia:
The band was named after DJ John Peel's nanny, Florence Horne, nicknamed "Trader" in reference to explorer Trader Horn.
I suppose there should have been a Nineties band called Tiggy Legge-Bourke.
"The learning process of having your opinions tested, being exposed to new information, or accepting there are multiple, nuanced but rational positions on many contentious issues, should be an ongoing lifelong pursuit, but if children and young people are not exposed to this approach within schools, how do we expect them to achieve this?" Claire McGuiggan and Peter D'Lima make the developmental case for free speech in schools.
A right-wing political and media ecosystem pushing a US-style anti-abortion agenda is gaining traction in the UK, says Sian Norris.
Michael Bacon found going to a child psychoanalyst four times a week for three years bad enough: reading what she wrote about him was worse. His article a powerful indictment of the harm that 'therapy' with no scientific basis can do.
"Being a gardener means learning how to care for and appreciate the little things in nature. This involves a sense of pride in your work as well as respect for the space around you – an approach you can carry into other areas of life, the environment and interpersonal relationships. Our species is more fragile than we often like to think but we have a greater chance of survival if we learn to work with nature and not try to be its master." Susie Porter on the mental health benefits of gardening.
A London Inheritance visits the Waterman's Arms on the Isle of Dogs: "The audience at the Waterman’s Arms attracted not just the locals, but also those from the West End, and a global set of celebrities from the early 1960s. Names such as Lord Delfont, George Melly, Groucho Marx, Lionel Bart, Trevor Howard, Tony Bennett, Mary Quant, Norman Hartnell, Judy Garland and Clint Eastwood (who wrote the word ‘rowdy’ in the guest book)."
The Guardian published a number of letters in response to the prime minster's claim that Britain is suffering from a "sicknote culture".
One of them, from the associate professor of psychology and medical anthropology, Dr James Davies, got it exactly right:
Rising distress may not be a medical problem, as Sunak claims, but it is certainly a social one, as Sunak ignores.
We need to stop overmedicalising mental distress. As a psychological therapist, I know first-hand that most people seeking help aren’t suffering from “mental illnesses” in any biologically verifiable sense, but from understandable reactions to life and work conditions that are harming and holding them back; conditions that medicine was never designed to treat.
By misrepresenting socially caused distress as a medical issue, we run the risk of wrongly individualising, pathologising and ultimately depoliticising that distress, and so exonerating social conditions from responsibility.
Overmedicalisation is indeed a problem, but not for the reasons Sunak thinks.
I've not read the book, but Dr Davies is the author of the book Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis.
This is an interesting little video. Winchelsea Beach, where we had a family caravan holiday when I was seven, is a small resort that has developed on land that was reclaimed as the sea retreated.
Winchelsea, which was once a major port, now finds itself a couple of miles inland, but the sea used to lap at the foot of the cliffs on which it stands. It is Winchelsea Beach that stands by the sea and is at risk from its moods.
I suspect these floods in 1931 inspired the plot of Malcolm Saville's third Lone Pine story, The Gay Dolphin Adventure, which was published in 1945.
You will see at least one old railway carriage in the video, which makes me think that Winchelsea Beach may have begun less as a holiday resort than as plotlands of the sort which Jonathan Meades led me to at Bewdley.
A post on English Buildings suggests I was right.
Indeed, two of its partners are due to give evidence to the inquiry in June - I believe the firm was retained by the Post Office for a time. (No doubt someone will be on hand to whisper "Remember you're a Womble" in their ear before they take the stand.)
Naturally, I was curious about a lawyer called Womble, and the Womble Bond Dickinson site does give some of the family history in a 2016 obituary for William F. Womble, Sr. - or Bill Womble, Sr. if you knew him well.
Bill's father, and the first of the lawyer Wombles, was B.S. Womble. That's Bunyan Snipes Womble.
And Bunyan Womble had a brother, also a lawyer, called Calder.
I shall not forget Calder Womble.
Incidentally, if you follow the Womble family back through American genealogy sites, and it's surprisingly easy to do so, it seems their name was originally Wombwell.
Mark Menzies has resigned from the Conservative Party but is to remain as a member of the House of Commons until the general election.
This is what generally happens when an MP gets into hot water, but it has long seemed to me that it gets things the wrong way round.
It's being a member of the Commons that requires a degree of probity, not belonging to a political party. I suppose if your behaviour while a party member is bad enough you will be slung out in disgust or from fear you will become a liability, but all parties have members they would not dream of putting up as Westminster candidates.
Menzies has denied the allegations against him, but he still strikes you as an unhappy bunny. I suspect he's going to need his friends in the coming weeks, whatever action the authorities decide to take.
And if he's anything like most politicos, many of his friendships and much of his social life will have been found through his party. Now he has resigned from the Conservative Party, he is much less likely to meet those friends.
I suppose I'm saying political parties have a duty of care towards candidates who get elected, and that duty becomes more important when those successful candidates run into personal trouble.
It's a podcast with young men, so there's lots of top bantz, but in between Mason Crane - England, Hampshire, Sussex and now Glamorgan - has some interesting things to say about how we can encourage spin bowling in the County Championship.
Well, gentle reader, I did it. I walked away from the most amazing and most magical (and most badly paid) of jobs.
I don’t really know how it happened, but for the last few months I have been in a different world, working in a care home remembering the Britain of the 1940s to the 1970s with a group of my most elderly fellow citizens.
It was a bit like being Dominic Sandbrook but without the podcast and the Daily Mail rants. We walked back to happiness, we had never had it so good, we were so cheerful it kept us going and, most of all, we laughed in the face of dementia and we cocked a snook at the grim reaper.
The home is kind and warm, but with me gone it loses its last member of staff with any British heritage of any kind. It loses the Beatles, the rationing, the 1966 World Cup and the nostalgia which is a vital anchor for those with dementia.
If you have Alzheimer’s the short term is hard, but a shared past becomes ever more rich and comforting.
The retro noticeboard featuring the Grand National, D-Day, homemade lavender bags and silly snaps has been replaced with corporate photographic prints and a cheesy hotel lounge vibe.
On the wall behind some of the frailest residents, the new slogan reads: It's a Good Day to be Happy.
Homes Under the Hammer flickers on to the omnipresent telly as I leave. What are they are all going to do all day now?
The Secret Support Worker, a Liberal Democrat member, was paid £11 an hour and had a budget per activity session per resident of 3p. The home has an annual turnover of a million pounds and the proprietor a flash car with personalised number plates.
Thanks to both for giving me an excuse to post a photo of one of the large and healthy gulls I met in Hastings last week. Clearly, scavenging is the way to go.
🟠SUTTON & CHEAM: one source says the hustings have been postponed because two comp
— @Tomorrow'sMPs (@tomorrowsmps) April 21, 2024
laints were received, and the source suggests John Sweeney and Trish Fivey may now have been added to the shortlist. Can anyone confirm or deny any or all of this? https://t.co/CVJdQbVwZK
This presumably means that Sutton & Cheam’s former prospective parliamentary candidate David Campanale has finally been ousted from that role after an interminable series of appeals that began last summer when the constituency first sought to remove him.
Although Campanale was originally a Liberal Democrat he left to join the highly socially conservative Christian People’s Alliance and rose to be its leader and author of its 2010 general election manifesto. Some of this was unexceptionable but it also said: “A new hierarchy of rights has put the needs of sexual minorities above religious freedom” and inveighed against “sex in view of families enjoying parks and open spaces” (Liberator 416).
He stood as a Lib Dem candidate in Spelthorne in 2019 - though few outside the area appear to have noticed - but Sutton & Cheam is a rather more serious proposition as the party held it from 1997 to 2015.
Some Sutton members felt they should have been better acquainted with Campanale's past by the party before the original selection meeting and were unimpressed to be told they should have looked on Google.
When Ratcliffe was opened in 1968 by the Central Electricity Generating Board, the very first series of Dad’s Army was about to be broadcast, the Beatles were topping the charts and coal power was in its heyday.
Coal-fired stations mushroomed through Britain’s mining heartlands in the late 1960s and 1970s to provide baseload power for Britain’s electricity network. The 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe broke up the skyline for drivers on the new M1 motorway, and provided power to heat and light 2m homes.
It was built in an area rich in coal, where collieries employing tens of thousands of miners dotted the landscape. By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe was burning 65% of south Nottinghamshire’s coal output.
The new power stations were built at speed. At the time, their scale and engineering complexity were unprecedented, and their impact on the climate unforeseen.
When Ratcliffe generates its last megawatts this year, it will represent the final dismantling of Britain’s coal heritage and end almost 150 years of coal-powered economic growth.
“It’s the end of the first Industrial Revolution, really,” says engineering manager Nigel Bates. He first stepped on to the Ratcliffe site more than 40 years ago, as a 16-year-old mechanical apprentice with a handful of O-levels. “Coal started it all, and soon we’re going to end it,” he says.
I'll miss the giant cooling towers that became an important part of the landscape of postwar Britain. They were at their most dominant in the Trent Valley.
My photo shows the towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar from the place where the Erewash Canal joins the River Trent.
You'll love this Trivial Fact of the Day, particularly if you remember county cricket from more than 50 years ago and TV talent shows from the early years of this century.
Here's Cricinfo:
Roger Davis was the fielder who nearly caught Garry Sobers during Glamorgan`s Championship match with Nottinghmashire at Swansea in 1968 when the great West Indian all-rounder became the first man in cricket history to hit six sixes in an over in first-class cricket. Davis was fielding on the long-off boundary and off the fifth ball of Malcolm Nash`s historic over, Davis caught one of Sobers` mighty blows, but in so doing, he fell over the boundary and the umpires signalled six.
Three years later, another blow almost ended Davis` life, as for a few awful moments during Glamorgan`s Championship match with Warwickshire at Cardiff in 1971, it looked as if Davis would not recover from being hit on the side of his head whilst fielding at short-leg. After being struck, Davis collapsed, went into convulsions and had to be given the kiss of life by a doctor who ran onto the ground from the member`s enclosure. Thankfully, this helped to save Davis` life and after a brief spell in hospital, he fully recovered, and by the following season, Davis had regained his place in the Glamorgan side.
And who was the doctor who saved Roger Davis's life?
An article on Wales Online reveals that it was a Dr Colin Lewis: "the grandfather of Welsh opera star Rhydian Roberts."
That's right: Rhydian off of X Factor!
I suspect my blog has peaked with this, but if you enjoyed the post then you will probably also like:
Brian Klaas argues that we need objectivity, not 'balance', from the media: "If someone says the sky is green and another person says it’s blue, you shouldn’t have a blue/green panel on the Sunday shows. But when it comes to election denialism, the media is accused of 'left-wing bias' if it doesn’t give equal platforms to authoritarian election deniers who live in a fantasy world and parrot Trumpian lies. That’s ridiculous."
In one of his last interviews, the philosopher Daniel Dennett talked to Nigel Warburton about some of the books that had influenced him most.
Eleanor Janega finds that we are more prudish than medieval people were.
Georgy Jamieson celebrates the career of a much loved performer: "Leslie Phillips was much more than his screen image. He was a household name thanks to the Carry On and Doctor films, but also a producer, director and in later years a fine character actor doing some very heavy-weight and interesting work."
"There’s no more Pinteresque character in Pinter than Harold Pinter on the cricket pitch. His dreams have not come true - his hero: Len Hutton; his highest score: 39 - but he dreams them nonetheless, while honing a curt line in dialogue for his fellow close fielders." Richard Beard on the playwright and cricket.
It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.
Since you ask, here are the books I studied:
O level
You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.
A level
I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.
When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.
And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.
So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.
You can download the full report from the campaign's website.
The words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’.
Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other.In Braudel’s analogy, long phases of economic history are layered one on top of another like the storeys of a house. At the bottom is ‘material life’, an opaque world of basic consumption, production and reproduction.
Above this sits ‘economic life’, the world of markets, in which people encounter one another as equals in relations of exchange, but also as potential competitors. Markets are characterised by transparency: prices are public, and all relevant activity is visible to everyone. And because of competition, profits are minimal, little more than a ‘wage’ for the seller.
Sitting on top of ‘economic life’ is ‘capitalism’. This, as Braudel sees it, is the zone of the ‘antimarket’: a world of opacity, monopoly, concentration of power and wealth, and the kinds of exceptional profit that can be achieved only by escaping the norms of ‘economic life’.
Market traders engage with one another at a designated time and place, abiding by shared rules (think of a town square on market day); capitalists exploit their unrivalled control over time and space in order to impose their rules on everyone else (think of Wall Street).
Buyers and sellers on eBay are participating in a market; eBay Inc. is participating in capitalism. Capitalism, in Braudel’s words, is ‘where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates’.
Maddy Costa wrote about the Raincoats in the Guardian back in 2009:
When Gina Birch and Ana da Silva decided to start a band in the late 1970s, they were art students who "knew nothing" about music. "Ana knew a couple of chords," says Birch, "and I could sing along with a few hymns and rock'n'roll tunes."
But this was the do-it-yourself punk era, and the pair felt so inspired by their nights out at notorious London clubs like the Roxy (and by another female-fronted band, the anarchic Slits) that they forged ahead as the Raincoats. Only later did they realise that most punk musicians were more proficient than they let on.
But the Raincoats had their admirers. In 1992, Kurt Cobain went into the Rough Trade Shop in Talbot Road, London in search of a new copy of their first LP. He was sent round the corner to see da Silva at her cousin's antique shop.
Cobain wrote about this meeting in the liner notes of Nirvana's Incesticide album. In late 1993, Rough Trade and DGC Records reissued the Raincoats' three studio albums, with liner notes by Cobain and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon.
Others were less complimentary. Danny Baker wrote of an early Raincoats appearance in the NME that they were so bad that "every time a waiter drops a tray, we'd all get up and dance".
Me? I love the home-made, anyone-can-do-it aesthetic of punk. You found it earlier in skiffle and later in the glory days of blogging. But just as they have music, the big corporations have taken over the internet, and the world has grown grey from their breath.
It's little wonder that readers of Malcolm Saville's The Gay Dolphin Adventure* think the Mermaid in Rye was the model for the Gay Dolphin.
And the Mermaid surely was the model for its building. But if you read the book carefully you will find the Gay Dolphin occupied a different position in Rye - one with a view across the river to Winchelsea and Romney Marsh.
That position, in real life, is occupied by the Hope Anchor Hotel, which is why you will find this Malcolm Saville Society plaque there.
* No sniggering please. Enid Blyton once published a book called Mr Pink-Whistle Interferes.
A Tory election candidate branded Volodymyr Zelensky an "enemy of the people" as he suggested we should stop supporting Ukraine.
Ian Glass, who is standing to represent the party on Hartlepool Borough Council, dismissed the war hero as a “puppet”. ...
Mr Glass, a personal trainer, posted his criticism of Mr Zelensky when the Ukrainian President visited the UK in February last year. After Mr Sunak tweeted a photo of the two leaders together, he wrote: "The puppet installed president (after coup) meeting an unelected PM, both enemies of the people."
In another post in January this year, he suggested that Vladimir Putin's regime isn't as bad as it's presented and hit out at the sums the Government has pledged to help Ukraine defend itself. He wrote: "It's over with Sunak and Crew, people will not vote for Cons, they sick of the boats, money going to Ukraine and this BS that Russia wants to rule the world."
The Mirror says the Conservatives have not responded to requests for a comment on Mr Glass and his opinions, but the local party has continued to promote him as a candidate.
I'm blogging about this because I suspect Mr Glass is not so untypical of today's Tory activist. As I said after a fake Tory campaign on speed limits in Wales was exposed earlier this year:
It does confirm my impression that the average Tory activist is now less likely to be a pillar of the local business community than a keyboard warrior or social media troll.
If these new-look Tories like fascism so much, they should go and live in Moscow and see how much they like it then.
I came back from Hastings via Ashford and the HS2 line to St Pancras. I noticed Doleham because it was the only station between Hastings and Ashford that we didn't call at, so I decided it was time to post this video again.
Until 2005 Doleham enjoyed an hourly service in each direction. But then, until 1959 there was an even more remote station north of Doleham called Snailham Halt.
And things could be worse. I first used the Ashford to Hastings line on the way to a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967, and I clearly remember that there were people collecting signatures against the closure of the whole line.
Following a reference in the Journal of Lib Dem History I recently came across the most extraordinary labour of love, a biographical directory of people who have been Liberal, SDP and Lib Dem parliamentary candidates from 1945-2019.
This is a 20 year piece of work by Lionel King who I find from the directory is 87, fought Kidderminster in 1964, Sutton Coldfield in 1970, and Walsall South 1987, is former chair of Birmingham University Liberal Society, worked as a teacher and then TV/Media lecturer in FE and held many roles in the Birmingham and West Midlands Party.
The directory is divided into 14 parts, by region and gives a fascinating insight into the range of people attracted to become our parliamentary candidates over the years.
I came across Lionel King's directory for the West Midlands myself a few years ago and blogged about it here.
The whole directory is now online. Lionel would love to hear from people who can help him fill out the entries.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill would "make it an offence to sell tobacco products to anyone born after 1 January 2009". It passed its first reading on 16 April, supported by the five Liberal Democrat MPs who voted, including Ed Davey.
Yet Lib Dems online have not been unanimous. They have presented some nuanced liberal responses, taking into account concerns for personal liberty, public health, differential laws for different age cohorts and the dangers of the black market in tobacco products.
Sensible Lib Dems have taken different positions. Some, such as Linda Chambers and Ed Davey, support the bill. Others, including Caron Lindsay and Liberal England’s own Jonathan Calder, have expressed reservations.
This discussion within the party has centred on consumer choice: 'Should people have the freedom to smoke?' But I wonder if this is a sufficient way for liberals frame the question of tobacco policy.
This isn’t just a case of regulating consumption, but also of regulating production and distribution. In other words, ‘Should people have the freedom to produce and distribute tobacco?’ or even 'Should people be free from manipulation by the tobacco industry?'
The latter question has in part been answered by controls on tobacco advertising, in the UK and worldwide. But the chemical effects of addiction remain, and some social cachet too. And the tobacco industry spends a great deal on political lobbying.
In these terms, the question is less one of consumer choice, and more one of how much freedom we should allow wealthy companies to pursue a socially harmful activity. Tobacco is big business, and the tobacco industry has a poor record, not only on public health, but also on tax avoidance and the environment. The profits of tobacco are in part reinvested in lobbying legislators, in the UK and internationally.
I suggest that Lib Dem discussions of this topic are too focused on consumers, and not enough on considering the political economy of tobacco in the round.
It is welcome that the Bill undermines the tobacco industry. This is in sympathy with current party policy, which seeks "a new levy on tobacco companies to contribute to the costs of healthcare and smoking cessation services".
But I’d like to see the Lib Dems address the issue more systematically. It is hard to see a justification for tobacco companies to exist in their current forms. If tobacco is to be produced and distributed, then this should be done by entities which are not devoted to maximising returns for shareholders and payments to directors.
Rather, they should be in some sense state or social enterprises, driven not by financial imperatives, but by the need to wind down tobacco usage over the years. Within the UK this, of course, means wholesale distribution, rather than production.
The exact form that this would take isn’t something I’ll go into now, but the Lib Dems ideas for water companies are interesting in this context. In short, a more thoroughly liberal approach to tobacco would include the political economy of tobacco, beyond consumer choice.
Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.
I've just got back from three days in Hastings. While I was there I made the pilgrimage to Winchelsea and Malcolm Saville's house there.
I went to look for the blue ceramic plaque that the Malcolm Saville Society installed there. I think I was at the ceremony back in the Nineties, but it still took me a while to find the right house.
And the house next door now has a plaque too. It's in honour of the historian Asa Briggs, who lived there.
Were Saville and Briggs neighbours for a time? It seems they were.
This was where Malcolm Saville lived for some years before his death in 1982 - his office was on the second floor.
And the particulars for Brigg's house on an estate agent's site say that he lived there until 1981.
Jonn Elledge asks if the Tories are deliberately posting terrible social media: "It's worth noting, though, that the most damning comment I heard from anyone while reporting this piece came from a Tory strategist: 'The conspiracy theory I’ve always liked the most is the one that presumes that behind something inexplicably dumb there must be some grand plan or deep rooted super secret scheme designed in these smokey backrooms of government. It’s terrifically flattering,' they explained. 'My god, I wish it were true. I mean, have you met us? We really are just this shit.'"
Andrew Kersley meets the parents of truant children hit by the single justice procedure: "Imagine receiving a letter through the post, informing you that you’re about to be prosecuted for a crime you did not commit. Your defence and plea of not guilty won’t be considered. Instead, you will be found guilty in a private ruling, with only a single judge present in the room. There’s no prosecution, no defendant, no press, and no witnesses. And after all that, you will be left with a criminal record that could cost you your job."
"In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe." Peter West on the neglected British philosopher Susan Stebbing.
Jessica Kiang celebrates Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was released 50 years ago.
"The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), an undergraduate at Christ Church in the mid 1920s, would bring visitors here to show them what he considered to be the embodiment of 'The Waste Land' described in TS Eliot's poem of the same name, of which he was a great admirer." Local History in South Oxford takes us to St Ebbe's Gasworks.
Another transport video that I've posted before and is overdue a repeat.
This colour film shows a journey from Oxford to the National Festival and Rally of Boats held at Market Harborough held at 1950.
Enjoy footage of the old railway swing bridge over the canal at Oxford and then the canal through city, with the campanile of St Barnabas easily recognisable.
Then it is on to some some broad locks that must be on the Grand Union somewhere near Braunston. This part of the film is then repeated, but no one will mind, I am sure.
After that it is on to Watford locks, Foxton locks and the canal basin here in Market Harborough.
Another outing with Trekking Exploration - find out how to support this channel.
Another video that is worth another posting.
The Go-Between was filmed in 1971 by Joseph Losey. In this video, Dominic Guard, who played Leo, talks about the experience of making the film.
It's required listening for anyone who admires the film or the novel. And, as Guard grew up to be a child psychotherapist, it has things to say about the issues they raise.
Many of us have the mistaken idea that previous experience of poverty makes it easier for someone to take further hard knocks, argues Nathan Cheek.
Remember Amazon's 'just walk out' grocery stores? As James Bridle explains, they were not what they seemed: "An employee who worked on the technology said that actual humans - albeit distant and invisible ones, based in India - reviewed about 70 per cent of sales made in the 'cashier-less' shops as of mid-2022."
Charlie Clinton on the campaign to defend small music venues.
Anne Billson presents six films from the 1980s that should be better known: "Mike Hodges’s offbeat gothic thriller isn’t so much a film that has fallen into obscurity as a a film that never got a decent shot in the first place."
"The Trip stands in Brewhouse Yard which was part of Nottingham Castle until the 17th century when the present building and caves were created. The earliest reference to its use as a pub, called the Pilgrim, comes from 1751. By 1799 the name had been changed to the Trip. The earliest mention of the Trip as the oldest pub in England comes from around 1910 when the landlord drummed up trade with new signage." James Wright goes in search on the oldest pub in England - it's clearly not the one shown here.
This is from a hootenanny long ago.
The Ronnie Scott's site tells us about Ruby Turner:
Ruby Turner began a successful run as a solo artist in the late 1980s, landing a chart-topping hit with "It's Gonna Be Alright," and releasing numerous respected albums and singles over the coming years that traversed soul, gospel, and pop. She became a frequent collaborator with Jools Holland and performed with an array of high-profile stars from Mick Jagger to Steve Winwood.
Her debut album, Woman Hold Up Half the Sky (1986), was a critical and commercial success, and she went on to release another 13 albums over the course of the next three decades, including 1989's Paradise, which peaked at number 39 on the Billboard R&B chart. She also charted eight singles throughout the '80s and '90s, the most successful of which was "I'd Rather Go Blind," which made it to number 27 in England in 1987.
On 4 June 2012 Ruby performed 'You Are So Beautiful' with Jools Holland at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace in London. In autumn 2012 Ruby was a guest judge on BBC 'The Choir: Sing While You Work with choirmaster Gareth Malone' and in 2013 Ruby was a guest judge on BBC 'Songs of praise gospel choirs competition. In June 2016 Ruby was awarded an MBE.
Ruby Turner was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and in 1967, at the age of nine, moved with her family to Handsworth in Birmingham. She has also enjoyed a substantial acting career.
Steve Winwood may be familiar to regular readers of this blog.
I had planned it as a sort of existential protest against starting the cricket Championship so early to make room for The Hundred in midsummer. I expected to be wrapped in woollens and sipping a thermos of Bovril. As it turned out, the forecast was for a dry and sunny day.
The weather didn't quite live up to that - the morning was lovely, but it clouded over after lunch and eventually the floodlights came on - yet I've been much colder at cricket matches later in the year than this.
And I met my old council colleague Mark Cox on the gate. It turned out that, just as it was when I was 13, it you're not a member you have to walk down a dismal alley and pay at the other end of the ground.
I don't begrudge county members their privileges: they may be the only people who resist the England and Wales Cricket Board's plans to get rid of half the first-class counties, Leicestershire and Sussex included.
Leicestershire won the toss and batted, with their opener Rishi Patel making a stylish 87. After he was caught behind for 87 early in the afternoon, they found scoring much harder. Sussex did well to keep up their intensity, because the pitch didn't appear to be doing very much. The ended with the game evenly poised: Leicestershire were 326/8, with the stubborn Liam Trevaskis not out on 82.
I went to the cricket here twice in 1973. I saw the a day each of Leicestershire vs Derbyshire and Leicestershire vs Middlesex.
To be honest I don't remember the Derbyshire game at all, beyond speculating with the friend I went with about whether Fred Trueman, who had turned out in the Sunday league for Derbyshire, might be playing, He wasn't.
I must have seen the second day of the Middlesex game because I remember seeing Mike Smith - M.J. Smith- score a century before lunch. It was also one of John Emburey's first games for the county. Despite Smith's feat, Leicestershire went on to win the match comfortably.
In 1973 Leicestershire were as strong as any county, and their attack was dominated by spin. In the Derbyshire game they fielded two England off spinners - Ray Illingworth and Jack Birkenshaw - and two left-arm spinners - John Steele and Chris Balderstone.
Sussex used only one spinner: Jack Carson from County Armagh.
