Martin Scorsese selects hidden gems of British Cinema

The great American director Martin Scorsese has curated a series of striking but undervalued British films. It opens at the British Film Institute tomorrow and runs until the end of the month. You can find the programme on the BFI website.

You could argue that Went the Day Well? and It Always Rains on Sunday have now been given their rightful place in the canon, but it's a very good selection. 

Scorsese was interviewed about the season for Sight and Sound by James Bell. He talks about is love of British films in general and, enticingly, of the long list of films he originally chose.

Mark Kermode writes about the season in the Observer too.

Lord Bonkers on the retirement of Lord Owen

"It was when his candidate barely succeeded in defeating Dr David Owen's hilarious "Continuing SDP Party" at the first Bootle by-election of 1990 that my old friend Lord Sutch decided to step back from the front line of politics."

The Joy of Six 1263

"It doesn't matter what statistics Musk does or doesn't announce, or which advertisers stay or which leave - this statistic is the real ballgame. Engagement numbers that can't even reach a dozen, for an account that boasts over 30,000 supposed fans, is an outright apocalypse." Hunter Lazzaro offers a post titled How to Kill Your Tech Company (Elon Musk edition).

Katie Rosseinsky claims Euston Station is hell on earth: "You stand, neck craned towards the departures board, squinting under artificial lights that seem perfectly calibrated to induce migraines. You dodge passengers who stampede like wildebeests towards platforms announced moments before trains are due to leave."

Simon Price says Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. Hear him.

"Art historians look carefully at images to search for incongruities. In authenticating or attributing a painting, we don’t just look at brushstrokes and pigments. We consider the painting’s ownership, the hands through which it has passed, and other information about the history that the painting has accumulated along the way." Sonja Drimmer suggests the profession will be invaluable in the battle against misleading AI-generated images.

"For many urban planners, desire lines are a sign of failure; evidence that a public space hasn’t quite met the needs and wishes of the people who use that space. And there’s some truth in that. But for me, they’re also a reminder that our cities are uniquely human places, and the ones that function best are those that are safely navigable not by private vehicle, but on foot." Laurie Winkless celebrates desire lines - the unofficial footpaths the public makes for itself by repeated use.

J.J. Jackson on the ticking time bomb that threatens south Essex: "The SS Richard Montgomery was a United States Liberty Ship. It was transporting explosives from the USA, to use in the war against the Nazis. She ran aground and broke her back off the Kent coast in August 1944. Salvage crews were able to remove 5,000 tons of explosives after the wreck. But they had to abandon the attempt, leaving 1,400 tons still on board."

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:

• 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
• The future’s bright, the future’s orange - Stuart Whomsley
• An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough? - Stuart Whomsley

In which I show two philosophers the real-life models for some of Malcolm Saville's Shropshire locations

As well as visiting new places, you can fight off holiday nostalgia by meeting new people. For all its faults, this is something that social media has made easier. 

So it was that I found myself outside Church Stretton Co-op waiting to meet two philosophers from Crete. We had arranged for me to give them a tour of some of Malcolm Saville's Shropshire locations.

The philosophers were Keith Frankish and Maria Kasmirli, who also brought their young teenage daughter Matea. I have got to know Keith on Twitter over the years through a shared affection for Malcolm Saville's books. 

The first location we went to was Hamperley Farm, the Ingles Farm of Saville's Lone Pine stories. You can see it in the photo above, which is by Keith Frankish.

Malcolm Saville describes Ingles Farm in Mystery at Witchend, the first Lone Pine book:

Ingles' farm was not very big, but the farmhouse of red brick was well set back from the road with a big lawn on the right and cowsheds on the left.

The real farm isn't red brick  and, though there is a lawn, it's on the left as you face it. I was surprised that there was a lawn at all, because it's not there on the photos I took of the farm when I was last here in 2012 nor even on Google Street View today - a clear case of Shropshire being "more like it was now than it was then".

And, just as happened to the twins in Mystery at Witchend, we got asked inside. I can reveal that the farmer's family name is Foulkes, but he does have a son called Tom.

You can stay at Ingles Farm yourself. Some of the farm's outbuildings have been converted into two beautifully appointed holiday cottages and you can see them in the photos below. (Follow the link for more information.) There's even a sweet little postbox if you want to send postcards.

Then we went up the lane to the real Witchend - it's a private house, so please respect that if you ever make this pilgrimage yourself. This photo was taken on a sunnier day than the one we had.

After that we went around the southern end of the Long Mynd and then north through Wentnor (where the Crown is currently closed) and on to the Bridges Inn at Ratlinghope for a pot of tea.

This is the pub that featured in The Green Green Grass, while Malcolm Saville fans will know it as the Hope Anchor from the second Lone Pine book, Seven White Gates. Again this is a picture from a sunnier day when it was still called the Horseshoes Inn and looked shabbier than it does today.

Then is was up to the Stiperstones ridge.

 I once heard a talk by Malcolm Saville's younger son the Revd Jeremy Saville in which he said he was pretty sure his father hadn't visited the Stiperstones when he wrote Seven White Gates. Even so, it's quite possible that Malcolm was right to paint the way from the pub to the Stiperstones as a rough, stony track rather than the metalled road it is today.

As we approached the car park near the Stiperstones ridge, we found that the Devil was in his chair - as the locals are supposed to say when the rock formation the Devil's Chair is obscured by cloud. By the time I took this photo, you could see it was going to clear from the west.

At this point I had better to pause to thank Maria for all the driving - the A roads in south Shropshire are single carriageway with lots of lorries, and the minor roads can be narrow and hilly. Not least the road we then took along the western side of the Stipersones through Stipersones village and Snailbeach, which has hairpin bends. And so we got back to Shrewsbury.

Thanks to Maria and Keith for their company - I even found time to talk philosophy with them too.

Stewart Lee: The John Robb interview

Stewart Lee on psychogeography, being adopted, the history of comedy and the decline of regional differences between audiences.

Seeing him so engaged and amused reminds you that his stage persona is not the real man.

John Robb runs Louder Than War.

Dave Mason: Steve Winwood's black-hatted bad fairy

The 2010 BBC profile of Steve Winwood, English Soul, was enlivened by the appearance of his former Traffic bandmate Dave Mason as a black-hatted bad fairy. Winwood, according to Mason's account, was jealous of his success as a songwriter and threw him out of the band as a result.

Fourteen years on, he is no more reconciled to those events. Today's Guardian has a interview with Dave Mason by Jim Farber about his memoirs Only You Know & I Know, and he's still complaining about them. Not just for that reason, he doesn't come over as particularly likeable.

My impression is that the roots of the clash between Winwood and Mason lay in a different approach to songwriting. Winwood wanted to jam with the band and allow songs to emerge, while Mason wanted to write the words, write the music and tell the others how it was to be played.

The problem with the Winwood approach, particularly if you add in the consumption of waccy baccy, is that it wasn't calculated to produce an album's worth of new songs to a deadline. Hence the band's need for Mason's more direct approach.

It also has to be said that Mason really didn't get psychedelia, but was determined to write it. It's a shame that Traffic are best remembered in Britain for Hole in My Shoe, but at least it has better words than Mason's House for Everyone:

My bed is made of candy floss, the house is made of cheese;
It's lit by lots of glow-worms, if I'm wrong correct me please.

I've chosen the video above because it shows Traffic in the days when everyone was talking and because I suspect it's the nearest thing we have to the band jamming at their cottage while they got it together in the country.

Gustav Holst had a brother who was a Hollywood actor

In a Liberal England first, our Trivial Fact of the Day comes from Bluesky. Many thanks to Joanna Wyld over there. (You can find me on Bluesky too: @lordbonkers.bsky.social.)

The composer Gustav Holst was born Gustavus Theodore von Holst in Cheltenham in 1874. He had a younger brother, Emil Gottfried, who enjoyed success as an actor in the West End, New York and Hollywood under the name Ernest Cossart.

His greatest hour in London came when he appeared in the world premiere of Bernard Shaw's Too True to Be Good.

In films, where he found regular employment in the 1930s without becoming a star, he tended to play English butlers or Irish priests. You can see him in King's Row with Ronald Reagan, the 1940 American version of Tom Brown's Schooldays (not to be confused with the 1951 British version with John Howard Davies) and The Jolson Story.

Play the video above (staying on this site rather than going to YouTube) and you will see him in this last film as Father McGee.

What lies beneath Sheffield Station? Welcome to The Megatron

Martin Zero says on YouTube:

Join me for an exploration of the Victorian tunnels and culverts that run underneath Sheffield Station. These tunnels were built to divert watercourses in the area, so they could build the station on top. Also known as The Megatron. 

The Porter Brook, one of the rivers that flows beneath the station, has given its name to Porterbrook Leasing, one of the Rosco's - rolling stock companies - created when the railways were privatised.

Leeds Station was also built on arches above a river, but the Dark Arches there are easier to explore on foot.

Conservationists say beaver bombing is the fault of government

Why are there now so many beavers living on rivers across the south of England? Patrick Barkham will tell you:

"Beaver bombing", covertly releasing beavers into the countryside, is increasing in England because successive governments have not fulfilled promises to permit some planned wild releases, conservationists are warning.

Beavers now live freely on river systems across swaths of southern England, and conservationists are calling on Labour to allow official releases of free-living beavers and produce a national strategy to maximise the biodiversity and flood alleviation benefits delivered by the industrious mammals.

Eva Bishop, of the Beaver Trust, said: "Beavers are a native species with lots to offer in terms of landscape resilience, boosting biodiversity and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It would be crazy not to look at wild release as a key tool for the government."

When, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered there are hundreds of beavers living wild on the rivers of Kent, I was astounded. But Patrick Barkham confirms those reports here:

An established population has been living freely and largely unnoticed in lowland Kent for years and now numbers 51 territories – more than 200 animals.

And, he says, beavers have turned up on river systems across Devon and spread through Somerset to Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

Vaughan Wilkins: The writer in wartime

I've found the transcript of a radio interview this blog's hero Vaughan Wilkins gave to the BBC's North American Service in 1943. 

It formed part of a programme in a series called Bridgebuilders. This edition looked at the book trade in wartime and, as well as the novelist Wilkins, a bookseller and a publisher appeared.

A transcript of the programme was printed in the 5 August 1943 issue of The Bookseller. Wilkins was interviewed by Nicholas Stuart.

Stuart: Before you can sell your book or publish it, it's got to be written. So to give us the low-down on that side of the question, here is Vaughan Wilkins, author, among other publications of the best-selling novel And so Victoria. Now, Mr. Wilkins, just you tell us all about writing books in war-time. 

Vaughan Wilkins: Writing is a difficult business at the best of times. Don’t you believe it if anyone says otherwise. When I was a newspaper editor, I thought it was easy. Now I know better. And it is far harder in war-time Britain. 

Stuart: Well, I guess that’s quite understandable.

Wilkins: There are two reasons. One physical, and the other psychological. 

Stuart: Perhaps you’d care to expand that statement, Mr. Wilkins. 

Wilkins: Like the publisher and the bookseller, the author suffers from labour shortage - his own labour. In peace-time, if that happens, it is usually his own fault - his own laziness. But to-day he is not the master of his own labour. He can’t do or not do, what he chooses, or does not choose. If an author is of military age and fit he may be called up. Even if he isn’t, there are still lots of duties which he owes to his country, civil and home defence duties of all sorts. Difficult to write books, you know, when you’re soldiering or sailoring, or even Home Guarding. Take my own case. My publishers in London and in New York - that means you, Lathom - will tell you that I have been behind time - horribly behind time - on those books I contracted to write for them. 

Stuart: What are your particular difficulties? 

Wilkins: When war broke out, I was struggling to write a book with six children under twelve years old evacuated from London billeted in my house. They were fine brave children, as good as gold. But to have one’s paternal responsibilities suddenly increased by half a dozen, doesn’t speed up book production. 

Stuart: No, I'll bet it doesn’t. 

Wilkins: Well, then, I was also billeting officer for my parish. Which meant that I was at the beck and call of some 70 or 80 evacuees and their hosts. A cross between a quartermaster-sergeant and a fairy godmother. Another hold-up there! Then the invasion threat came, and with it the formation of the Home Guard as it is now called. Well, we dug trenches. We made rifle pits. We flung together against the invader barricades of farm carts and barbed wire. We learned to throw bombs. We keep watch. Doing that doesn’t help getting a book written. In the mere matter of time for writing. 

Stuart: That must be so indeed. But you mentioned psychological reasons, Mr. Wilkins ? 

Wilkins: Many people read books just to escape for a little from the present. There can be no reason why they shouldn’t. But all they’ve got to do is to open the book and read it. It’s a very different matter for the author: He’s got to sit down and write that book of escape in cold blood. He’s got to withdraw himself from the present, in which Britain's fate, and the fate of humanity, are in the balance. And when it comes to war books. The tremendousness of the issue, the tragedy and the glory and the speed of the drama are so vast that the imagination is overwhelmed. Here in Britain one sees made manifest the actuality of our new brotherhood: the truth that Britain and America are, in the words of the Atlantic Charter, "met together". I have come to London to find the streets thronged with Americans - our Allies, more than that, our brothers. No, one doesn't have to search for inspiration now, the problem is dealing with it.

Stuart: And that bridgebuilders was the voice of the author. You may like to know that Vaughan Wilkins' new book, Being Met Together, is appearing in your country very soon.

It was when a friend and I noticed that every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books of edition of Fanfare for a Witch, and I mean that literally, that I started collecting him, almost as a joke.

But I do remember enjoying his first book, And So - Victoria, when it was serialised for Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 in 1976.

RFK Jr faces call for investigation into claim he chainsawed whale’s head off

 

Don't worry, it's just the Guardian winning our Headline of the Day Award.

The Joy of Six 1262

"The default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after." Sarah Jeong says the world we grew up in, where photographs provided strong evidence for the truth, is about to disappear.

Kate Moore argues that allotments beat food poverty, boost mental health and bring back the insects and bees.

"The 1902 Metropolis Water Act set up the Metropolitan Water Board. Eight existing private companies – plus the water undertakings of Tottenham and Enfield Urban District Councils – were taken over, with £30m compensation paid to the shareholders. Henceforth, London’s water would be provided by a public utility with an indirectly-elected board comprising 67 members from all the affected local authorities." A Municipal Dreams article on the municipalisation of London's water supply has many contemporary resonances.

"Sven took over an England team that had long been the international equivalent of a domestic ‘yo yo’ club - a Norwich, Fulham or West Brom - who go up and down, down and up. And he quickly transformed them into an embedded upper top-tier club which might just one day win something again: like an Arsenal, Aston Villa or Tottenham of today." John Sturgis pays tribute to Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Adam Scovell goes on a pilgrimage to discover the locations used for the filming of Powell and Pressburgere's A Canterbury Tale: "Relying on some fictional places as well as some camera trickery and illusion, the picturesque German Expressionist-influenced cinematography of Erwin Hillier brings the settings a fantastical, mysterious, even spiritual character."

Steve Richards has some remarkable photographs from 1973, when trains bound for Ruddington Ordnance & Supply Depot had to reverse at Weekday Cross in the heart of Nottingham. 

Ronald Lampitt: The Ladybird artist as social historian

This illustration, A Farm in February, is not from a Ladybird book, but it is by a Ladybird artist, Ronald Lampitt.

And if you're tempted to dismiss it as an exercise in nostalgia for that reason, you should read an article by Adam Chapman:

Lampitt has captured a time of change. The Labour government’s 1947 Agriculture Act secured prices and hastened investment and development and here we can see the tangible results in affordable technology. This farm is perhaps the result they imagined. 

That’s most obvious in the juxtaposition of bright red tractors - the nearer pulling a disc harrow, breaking up the heavy Kentish clay, the further ploughing. The Second Word War brought American tractors to the British countryside in huge numbers (the same ‘Lend Lease’ programme supplied tanks and planes in their thousands). 

Chapman also says:

Even the animals signify the time. The black and white cows that most urban dwellers think of as normal (on milk bottles and children's books) are Holstein Freisians, another post-war introduction. These were the tools by which farmers boosted milk production, but they displaced native breeds like the Dairy Shorthorn and native, dual purpose (milk and meat) breeds.

And he concludes:

Ronald Lampitt saw all this and recorded it for Treasure Magazine. It can be dated, just by what it shows, to a February day in the late 50s [the picture was published in 1963 but may have been produced a few years earlier] but the details it includes show the past and present of this small farm and hints at its future.

The biography of Ronald Lampitt on the Ladybird Fly Away Home site reveals that he illustrated nine books for them. Among them were Understanding Maps, which I had as a boy, and a pair on what to look for inside and outside a church.

I was touched to find these two when I cleared my mother's house and have kept them.

GUEST POST An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough?

The threatened reunion of the Oasis brothers is a stark warning of the potential breakout of Britpop across the entire UK region, warns Stuart Whomsley.

Last year’s reunion of the Blurists should have been a warning. The so-called Pulp group (PG) have been rumoured to be in a studio creating new material.

A Labour government’s election this year has also been seen as a catalyst for this worrying development. The previous Labour inhabitant of Number 10, Tony Blur, was an advocate of the Cool Britannia movement.

After 14 years of Tory rule that brought us UK Grime and Drill, a new Labour government could see a return to more troubling times, with its leader Kagool Starmer a self-confessed follower of Britpop bands.

Now the whole of the UK wakes each day in fear of a resumption of Beatles and Status Quo influenced musical pap being bombarded at us on a daily basis.

Those who were unfortunately alive in the Nineties have issued warnings to those born this century not to be drawn into this cultist movement through speculation of what a Wonderwall or a Champagne Supernova might be.

Propagandists for Britpop, Steve Lamaque and Stuart Maconie, have already been on the airwaves, making ominous predictions. These are truly worrying times, when one can indeed look back in anger.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

Robert Harris's Precipice, Asquith and Venetia Stanley

Billericay Dickie had a love affair with Nina in the back of his Cortina. Mr Asquith, it seems, had one with the socialite Venetia Stanley in the back of his prime-ministerial 1908 Napier.

Today's Observer has an article on Precipice, Robert Harris's forthcoming novel about the summer of 1914 and Britain's entry into the First World War.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley three times a day, and those letters have been central to Harris's research for his new novel:

“I became fascinated by this aspect of Asquith’s story," said Harris. "We can account for so much of his time in the run-up to the first world war, but this enabled me to tell that story day by day through the 560 letters Venetia kept."

In his last days in No 10, having resigned and invited the Conservatives to form a coalition government after a fateful weekend in 1915 when he was unable to reach Stanley, Asquith is believed to have disposed of her letters. "He had a huge bonfire, but I could put together her replies, I realised, from what he had said and from the bits he quoted."

The claim that the physical element of the affair has been underestimated, Harris believes, is supported by the fittings of the PM’s car: "It was not how we might imagine now. It was totally sealed, like a bedroom on wheels, with blinds on the windows and only a push-button intercom to speak to the driver."

But sex is not the only missing component. Stanley and Asquith also discussed everything. "He enjoyed talking to her because she was clever and not trying to get a job or anything," said [Harris] ....  "So I feel that Venetia, like so many significant women behind the scenes, has been somewhat excised from history. If nothing else, I hope my novel will help give her the place she deserves."

Lord Bonkers, no doubt, will be consulting his lawyers, but I shall leave you with Charles Masterman's account of those summer days before Britain declared war:

It was a company of tired men who for twelve hot summer nights, without rest or relaxation, had devoted their energies to avert this thing which had now come inevitably to pass. No one who has been through the experience of those twelve days will ever be quite the same again. 

It is difficult to find a right simile for that experience. It was like a company of observers watching a little cloud in the east, appearing out of a blue sky, seeing it grow, day by day, until all the brightness had vanished and the sun itself has become obscured. 

It was like the victim of the old mediaeval torture enclosed in a chamber in which the walls, moved by some unseen mechanism, steadily closed on him day by day, until at the end he was crushed to death. 

It was most like perhaps those persons who have walked on the solid ground and seen slight cracks and fissures appear, and these enlarge and run together and swell in size hour by hour until yawning apertures revealed the boiling up beneath them of the earth's central fires, destined to sweep away the forests and vineyards of its surfaces and all the kindly habitations of man.

And all this experience - the development of a situation heading straight to misery and ruin without precedent - was continued in the midst of a world where the happy, abundant life of the people flowed on unconcerned and all thoughts were turned towards the approaching holidays and the glories of triumphant summer days.

Isley Brothers: Summer Breeze

This graced the UK singles chart in 1974, when all about it was Mud. And Gary Glitter.

A year later, and the Isley Brothers' soul might have been tinged with disco, but here the additional styling is rock. Note the gratuitous closing guitar solo, which you get on many Seventies hits - Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, for instance.

I don't remember the solo from the time, so I suspect it was shorn from the radio version.

Summer Breeze was written by the US duo Seals and Crofts, who had a hit with it over there in 1972.

The Joy of Six 1261

"One gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system. Indeed, the authors conclude with several reasonable goals - deduced from their empirical findings - for the party: "re-empowering the local", "a socially liberal party", "future proofing the party", and "the Liberal Democrats as a movement?" each of which would put the party on firmer ground." James Dennison reviews a new study of the party.

"We already have the Bob Willis Test at Edgbaston (prostate cancer) and the Ruth Strauss Foundation Test at Lord's, so why not the Graham Thorpe Test at The Oval? An event around the Test that raise awareness of mental health issues and money for mental health charities." James Buttler on the reaction to Graham Thorpe's death and his own mental health struggles.

Jacqueline Garget reports on the harnessing of technology to combat the invasion of American mink: "At the start of 2024, the team announced that it had cleared East Anglia - its 'core area' accounting for almost 5 per cent of England - of mink. The work had started in earnest in 2020, and for the last two years there was no evidence of mink reproduction following extensive trapping."

Dave Osland has been reading a study of the socialist journalist Paul Foot's career. 

"In Coalbrookdale at Night (1801), coke hearths above blast furnaces release giant plumes of yellow and orange smoke into the sky. The ironworks have cast the rest of the landscape in shadow, with a portion of the moon visible on the right. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon travels along metal rails that had been installed in 1767 to facilitate the transport of materials across the site." Stephanie O'Rourke looks at the way British landscape painting reacted to the Industrial Revolution: 

Brian Phillips celebrates the children's writer Joan Aiken, whose "favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead."

Exploring what remains of Sheffield Victoria

I don't remember Sheffield Victoria being open, but I do remember when Sheffield to Huddersfield trains ran via Penistone and passed through the closed station.

Paul from Wobbly Runner Exploring is your guide to what remains of it today.

Sheffield Victoria was a mainline station opened in 1851 by the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, which later became the Great Central Railway. The station closed in 1970, when passenger services over the Woodhead route to Manchester ceased.

Arms company drops plan to test bombs at world heritage site owned by Lib Dem peer

Today's Guardian reports that a British arms company has abandoned plans to carry out live fire testing of anti-personnel bombs dropped by drones in the middle of the Flow Country world heritage site. The planned testing ground is owned by the Liberal Democrat peer John Thurso.

The paper says: 

The Flow Country became the first peat bog in the world to be granted world heritage site status by Unesco in July, in recognition of its rarity and its importance to conservation and combating the climate crisis.

The bomb tests have now been cancelled after the Guardian told Overwatch that the area earmarked for them included part of the Strathmore peatlands site of special scientific interest, a heavily protected peat bog home to rare and threatened birds, such as dunlin, golden plover and greenshank.

The paper quotes John Thurso:

Lord Thurso said he was unaware that Overwatch had planned to use drones, did not know that fragmentation bombs were involved, and did not know that the CAA application included part of the Strathmore peatlands.

He said a deep quarry he owns near the peatlands had been used for “all sorts” of military and munitions testing for 20 years without incident.

He said “there is absolutely no way” he would have approved the use of drones or explosives over Strathmore. “Certainly we would never give permission for people to go dropping bombs in the blanket bog.”

Lord Bonkers ponders: I suppose they'll be looking for somewhere else to test their infernal contraptions.

Asda charges customer £400 for 2 limes and refuses refund

Thanks to the East Anglian Daily Times, we have our Headline of the Day.

Lib Dem MP Calum Miller backs campaign against the reopening of Campsfield House immigration detention centre

Calum Miller, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bicester and Woodstock, took part in an Oxford demonstration yesterday against the Labour government's decision to reopen Campsfield House, the controversial immigration centre near Kidlington.

The centre was closed in 2018 after years of problems, including riots, escapes and complaints about conditions.

Calum told BBC News:

"I have to say I'm both shocked and angry to hear this news.

"There are many different pathways to addressing the problems in the system short of announcing in the middle of the summer that they are planning to increase detention."

He as also written to the home secretary Yvette Cooper, and you can see his statement on the subject above.

Will that "free speech" disclaimer provide protection in law? And just how far can you go online?

None of the information posted or repeated on this account is known by its author to be false, nor intended to stir racial or any hatred of, nor cause psychological or physical harm to, any person or group of people (howsoever identified).

This disclaimer appeared on the Twitter accounts of various right-wing social media figures a few days ago.

Will it provide them with a Get Out of Jail Free card if they are thought to have overstepped the mark and incited violence or hatred against people? 

Alan Robertshaw thinks not, and also discusses the legal position on such prosecutions.

Missing skunk found close to home of prominent Lib Dem blogger

It's the news we all hoped to hear. Dominika the missing skunk has been found and is now back home in Braybrooke.

The HFM News report on the happy ending to the story that has gripped Market Harborough says:

There had been numerous sightings of Dominika on the Ashley Way estate since she escaped from her owner’s home in Braybrooke last week, but the animal had proved hard to catch.

She was eventually found sleeping in a shed on Rookwell Drive in Little Bowden and later reunited with Jayne McLaughlin, after the homeowner initially called a veterinary surgery for advice.

Rookwell Drive? That's close to where I live. I've seen foxes around here, but never skunks.

The Joy of Six 1260

George Peretz on how governments can rein in Elon Musk: "There is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms ... That would in turn encourage all the users of X who currently use X to monitor government activity (journalists, businesses, many ordinary citizens) to open and use accounts on those competing platforms."

"Praising a recent Murray article, he said it was 'thoughtful, original, and generated more subscriptions than any other article we published this year'. There it is: hate sells. And since Murray’s opinions sell, sacking him would be bad for business. Those are the priorities." Brian Cathcart argues the Spectator can't defend Douglas Murray but can't afford to sack him either.

Phoebe Weston asks if we should intervene to accelerate the natural migration of tree species in the face of climate change.

"I was expecting to find that all graduates liberalise, but that those studying arts, humanities and social sciences ... become more socially liberal and less racially prejudiced than those studying more technical subjects (such as STEM subjects)." University graduates tend to be more socially liberal than the rest of the population - Ralph Scott summarises his research into why this is the case.

Dale Fox reports that more than half of UK school librarians have been asked to remove books from their shelves, with LGBTQ+ literature being disproportionately targeted: "One anonymous librarian, given the pseudonym Emma, described how she was instructed to remove all LGBTQ+ themed books following a single parent’s complaint about one title."

Carry On Spaceman. Carry On Robin [Hood]. Carry On Escaping. Retroboy is our guide to the 10 Carry On films that were planned but never made.

Bluesky: At last we have a serious alternative to Twitter

I caught the bus to Ludlow with every intention of taking lots of photos of the architecture, but didn't get the good weather I had imagined. Still, I did like this little industrial building near the station.

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— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) Aug 19, 2024 at 22:20

Elon Musk's determination to ruin Twitter has led a lot of people to explore an alternative, Bluesky.

I've had an account there myself for a while - you can find it here - and have been making more use of it since I got back from holiday.

Not only is the atmosphere more pleasant on Bluesky, it is also proving a good way of increasing the readership of this blog.

Twitter used to be great for that, but over the past year or two the number of Liberal England readers has dropped noticeably. I suspect that's because the changes Musk has made to the Twitter algorithm mean that fewer people are seeing my tweets.

But one retweet from a journalist on Bluesky has made my post on the Tories and foreign money the most read one on here for months.

So it looks as thought we finally have a viable alternative to Twitter in the shape of Bluesky.

I shall stick around on Twitter, at least for a while, but a fair number of civilised people have already closed their accounts. (You can also find me on Instagram, incidentally.)

Ludlow wall's down and England's done

Twelve years ago, a section of Ludlow's medieval town wall collapsed. When I visited the town a couple of weeks ago I found that repairs have still not begun.

Andy Boddington reported at the start of this year that there has been a dispute over who is responsible for the repairs, You suspect that has been fought with such tenacity because no public authority has the money to fund the work if they cop for it.

Someone I knew in planning used to tell me that Ludlow was safe from insensitive development because it's one of the towns foreign dignitaries are taken to show them the best of England.

Now it seems we can't afford the upkeep of the place.

A nephew of Ian Fleming wrote the lyrics for two tracks on Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver

This blog's hero Steve Winwood has never been a great one for talking to journalists, so I was pleased to come across a 10-minute interview from a 2010 edition of Front Row on BBC Sounds.

Winwood discusses his career and casts a little light on the remarkable period when, as a young teenager, he was playing guitar to back some of the blues greats when they toured Britain.

I've also discovered a bit of Winwood trivia. 

There are seven tracks on Arc of Diver, the 1980 album that relaunched his career. The lyrics for four of them are by Will Jennings, the university English lecturer turned top rock lyricist, and those on the title track are by the great Viv Stanshall.

That leaves two - Second-Hand Woman and Dust - and they both have lyrics by someone called George Fleming.

He turns out to be a friend of Winwood's and the son of Richard Fleming, who was a younger brother of Ian Fleming, the inventor of James Bond. Richard Fleming owned an estate near Winwood's own in the Cotswolds.

George Fleming's words for Second-Hand Woman would have been turned down by Spinal Tap as too sexist, but Winwood manages to make those for Dust sound a little mysterious and rather better than they are.

Andrew George on Labour's housing policy and why it won't work

It's clear that Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives again after nine years, has little time for the idea that if only developers weren't encumbered by the planning laws they would flood the market with so many new houses that prices would come down.

He writes for the Cornish Voice newspaper:

Having tracked the way the housing market works in places like Cornwall over recent decades, it seems clear that development tracks house price inflation and slows when the market stagnates. 

Higher housebuilding targets are reflected in higher hope values land adjoining every community around Cornwall; land value speculators sit on those sites until planning permission granted enables a maximisation of development value and undermines the viability of affordable developments suitable to meet local need.

Cornwall doesn’t have a major problem with NIMBYs resisting development. Cornwall has been the one of the fastest growing places in the United Kingdom – nearly trebling its housing stock in the last 60 years – and yet the housing problems of local people have got worse. 

Housebuilding targets are a means to an end. The intended purpose is to meet housing need. Yet, in Cornwall, this is one of the best examples of how that policy completely fails.

The late Ian Jack explained why it fails in the London Review of Books five years ago, with a little help from Oliver Letwin:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

All of which means that the Lib Dems' emphasis on building social housing - seen in the motion passed at last year's autumn conference but less evident in this year's manifesto - must be taken on by the government if they are to fulfil their ambitions.

I should add that everyone I talk to who knows about housing says there is an endemic shortage of the relevant skilled labour in Britain. This too must be tackled by government if its housing policies are to succeed.

Daniel Day-Lewis's first adult screen role was in Shoestring

I say 'adult' because, perhaps helped by having the actress Jill Balcon for his mother and the boss of Ealing Studios Michael Balcon for a grandfather, Daniel Day-Lewis had a small, uncredited part as a child in the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday.

So here he is, in his very first adult screen role. playing a self-satisfied local radio DJ in a 1980 episode of Shoestring alongside the stars of the series, Trevor Eve and Michael Medwin.

If you watch the whole thing on YouTube, rather than the short section I have picked out for you hear, you'll also find Pam St Clement with a Worzel Gummidge accent and the wife from Gourmet Night at Fawlty Towers.

US money will drag leading Conservatives further to the right

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Suella Braverman has made £60,000 on the international speaking circuit, says the Guardian. Reading between the lines of its report, this money was made over the last parliamentary year.

Braverman is not taking part in the current Conservative leadership election, but for most of that year she will have been intending to do so. And she will certainly have her eye on the contest after this one.

And if such a lacklustre figure can earn this figure, think how much must be on offer to the few remaining big beasts of her party.

If you're not sure, the Guardian helpfully spells it out:

Boris Johnson in, 2023 declared an income of £4.8m within the first six months of leaving No 10, including an advance payment of £2.5m for an unspecified number of speeches.

Most of this money is American, and a study of Twitter tells us what the American right wants to hear about Britain at the moment. It's that we are ruled by mullahs and all live in fear of arrest for saying the wrong thing.

If you're old and worldly like me, you may say that saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another is one of the most important political arts. But it has become much harder in the age of the net and social media.

But the temptation to tell American audiences what they want to hear, and to earn the big bucks that this will bring, is will prove hard to resist.

Heard back in Britain, such sentiments will sound extreme, even unpatriotic. to most voters. And so the Tories' shift to the unelectable right will continue.

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The Secret Barrister takes apart the online myths about Britain having two-tier justice.

"Disinformation is easily and automatically spread on social media using bots, fake stories, fake bits of information and video clips. Anything digitised can be manipulated. Governments have known this for a long time. But 2024 has been, thus far, a ‘super-year’ of elections across the globe ... All have faced an onslaught of online disinformation and this threatens to increase in intensity in the run-up to the forthcoming US election." Juliet Lodge asks what can be done to stop thugs and bots gaming democracy.

"As local jails have morphed into some of the largest mental health treatment facilities in the US, many counties have outsourced medical care to private companies that promise to contain rising costs." Cary Aspinwall, Brianna Bailey and Sachi McClendo look at the dark side of this move.

Nicola Davis reports on research that suggests that arts and crafts give greater life satisfaction than work: "The results revealed that people who engaged with creating arts and crafting had greater ratings for happiness, life satisfaction and feeling that life was worthwhile than those who did not, even after taking into account other factors known to have an impact."

Adam Pickering reminds us that Nottingham was the first place in Britain to hold such a Caribbean carnival, beating even Notting Hill.

"As ever county cricket will find a way to jump the hurdles. Until, that is, it doesn’t. And then it will be too late." The contempt with which the One-Day Cup is being treated by the game's authorities is a cricketing disgrace, argues Sam Dalling.

Laura Marling: Patterns

Laura Marling is wondering whether to sacrifice her career for motherhood, she recently told Rachel Aroesti in the Guardian:

The 34-year-old singer-songwriter, who first found fame with her enchanting yet earthy folk as a teenager, has decided to stop touring completely after becoming a parent. In fact, she might pack in the whole music thing entirely. 

“One of the great privileges of my life is turning out to be that I started my career early, and I can sort of wind it down,” says Marling with cool-headed contemplation: her conversational trademark.

But she's issuing a new album later this year, and this is the first single from it. Aroesti calls it "the kaleidoscopically celestial, meditatively finger-picked Patterns".

Reviewing the album (Patterns in Repeat) on Stereogum, Chris Deville says it's "fleshed out with a gorgeous string arrangement, and it’s liable to send you careening* into your feelings".

Reading that Marling's father is a fifth baronet who ran a recording studio does nothing to dispel the idea that, like so many other sporting and cultural fields, is now largely a preserve of the upper classes. Her husband is "a songwriter turned charcutier".

But it turns out that the first baronet was Sir Samuel Marling, Liberal MP for Gloucestershire West from 1868 to 1874 and for Stroud from 1875 to 1880. So that's all right.

* For some background of this use of 'careen', see World Wide Words.

John Grindrod: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding

It's remarkable how many people have the wrong idea about Ladybird Books, dismissing them as nostalgic, conservative and twee. 

Someone who very much does get Ladybird is John Grindrod:

Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism (article here) I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise. 

Picking up copies in second hand bookshops I've started to see a much more concerted effort to portray a positive image of the rebuilding of Britain in these books than even I'd given them credit for. 

With their warm and sensible illustrations and no-nonsense prose, Ladybird has an incredible knack of bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the fairy-tale and the starkly realistic, taking the fear out of everything and showing a unified, positive and optimistic vision of life. 

And so this selection of images portrays a top ten in that mould: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding.

And at the top of this post you will find one of those ten images.

The Craven Arms is falling down

On Bonfire Night last year, I blogged about plans to convert part of the Craven Arms, the hotel that gave the town its name, into flats.

I illustrated that post with a photo I took in 2017. In it, the Craven Arms didn't look too bad. I think it was nominally still open then: I recall wandering the cavernous interior looking for someone to pull me a pint and failing to find them.

Last week I photographed it again and, oh, the difference.

This time I had a drink at the Stables Inn, which is indeed open again after, landlady confirmed, being an Indian restaurant for a short time.

The latest on the Labour Party and Hakluyt

Liberal England takes an interest in the 'strategic advisory, firm Hakluyt, and its deepening relationship with Labour, for the recherché reason that it was co-founded by a son of the long-forgotten historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins.

Peter Geoghegan keeps us up to date with the latest news of Hakluyt and Labour in the London Review of Books:

Labour is said to have turned last September to another ‘strategic advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying. 

Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on Greenpeace activists on behalf of oil companies is supposedly a thing of the past. 

The company’s website looks more like that of a private bank than a corporate espionage outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. 

‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told me. ‘It’s incredibly well connected. That’s how it can charge so much. Hakluyt wouldn’t get out of bed for less than a hundred grand.’ 

Its contact book is set to become even more valuable now Starmer has appointed its managing partner, Varun Chandra, a former investment banker who helped set up Tony Blair Associates, as his special adviser on business and investment (Chandra duly resigned from Hakluyt). He might well be joined in government by Olly Robbins, the former Brexit chief negotiator and a Hakluyt partner. Another Hakluyt executive is Tony Benn’s granddaughter Emily Benn.

The Honourable Emily Benn is the daughter of Stephen Benn, who became the third Viscount Stansgate upon the death of his father Tony Benn.

Lib Dems repeat call for free-to-view Premiership games as new football season begins

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On the opening day of the new Premiership football season, Calum Miller, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bicester and Woodstock, has called for some games to be shown on free-to-viws television channels.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary he says:

"I am calling on you to have discussions with the Premier League to tear down the paywall and give football back to the country."

The Lib Dem manifesto at the general election included a pledge that at least 10 Premier League games would be screened free of charge.

According to the Mirror, an agreement with the television stations and football authorities sees one La Liga game shown free each week. So it is possible for such arrangements to be put in place.

I support this benignly populist measure, but what I really want to see is the new government overturn Nadine Dorries's decision on who Chelsea's new owners should be.

And maybe call a judge-led inquiry.

Market Harborough Skunk Update: She's called Dominika and comes from Braybrooke

HFM News has the latest on the Market Harborough Skunk.

She's called Dominika and belongs to Jayne McLaughlin from Braybrooke. The video in my post from this morning was taken in a garden near Ashley Way in Market Harborough.

And in an interview with HFM News, Jayne says there are reports of spooked dogs in the woods by Stinford Leys.

Her advice if you find Dominika in your garden is not (for obvious reasons) to try to pick her up, but to find a way to keep her contained there.

And Jayne's phone number is at the end of the HFM News report.

There's a skunk on the loose in Market Harborough

 I still rely on Twitter and @solarpilchard for all my local news. (Read the this afternoon's update!)

@RSPCA_official @ChrisGPackham here is a visiting skunk - no less - to our garden last night in Market Harborough. After some Facebook community sleuthing work today, someone missing a skunk that looks just like this has been in touch to try and entice it back tonight at dusk…! pic.twitter.com/CL9rqPpcwH

— Alison H (@AlisonHooper) August 15, 2024

Trivial Fact of the Day: Syd Barrett and Richard Thompson were distant cousins

A passing mention in this video has led me to a snippet from an Uncut interview with Richard Thompson:

"Syd Barrett wasn't a great musician in the orthodox sense but he had a good instinct for the possibilities of music I recently learned that Syd's father's great-grandmother was a cousin of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain's first female doctor who was my mother's great-great-aunt. Syd and I were, in fact distant, cousins."

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"The middle-income professionals in the seats we have just won will take a lot of persuading to pay more for better prisons, probation officers and children’s services, even if told that alienated teenagers turn into rioters, and criminals without rehabilitation reoffend. Those saving to send their children to private schools will be reluctant to pay more tax for the state sector. Getting comfortably-off taxpayers in the home counties to contribute to regeneration of the north will be very difficult." William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats need to have a clear position on public spending.

Alex Krasodomski argues that the UK riots have forced Western democracies to confront their reliance on technology giants.

"The Peak District and Exmoor were found to have concentrations of antibiotics at a level that could be of concern for human health as they were beyond the threshold that can contribute to antimicrobial resistance. This could affect anyone entering the water for swimming or water sports, the researchers said." Lucie Heath on new research into pharmaceutical pollution of English rivers.

Charlotte Llewellyn celebrates the very English anarchist Colin Ward, who "put people, especially those most marginalised by society, at the centre of his work. He recognised the creativity, knowledge, and talent of ordinary people and their ability to make change happen, as well as emphasising the importance of working co-operatively towards a better future."

Ingrid Skeels explores the history and benefits of 'playing out', where children enjoy informal sport for free in the community where they live, and She how 'play streets' are revitalising communities across the UK and further afield. And she does it on the England and Wales Cricket Board site too.

"We could ask if Yoda's Theme would be Yoda’s Theme without Yoda. Or, does Jaws' theme need a shark to be frightening? Do we need to see E.T. fly across the moon in order to be moved by the film’s soaring theme? Does the Close Encounter’s five-note motif only work if we see Richard Dreyfus playing with mashed potatoes?" Edwardo Pérez discusses the film music of John Williams.