GUEST POST No sign of an end to defections in local government

Thanks to Augustus Carp for his latest bulletin on local councillors changing parties, though I'll have him know that I lived in Hemel Hempstead between the ages of 3 and 13.

Well, it's been three months now since the General Election, and in Parliament we have seen several expulsions from the Labour Party together with a rather sudden resignation. In my innocence I had assumed that people would have left their political parties before the election, rather than in the immediate aftermath, but the evidence shows that resignations have continued apace amongst our local councillors.

Since July, there have been 17 defections from the Conservative Party, 13 from Labour, 17 from the Lib Dems and 6 from the Nationalists. The net beneficiaries have been the Greens (up 3) and Reform UK (up 12). The balancing figure is described, perhaps not accurately enough, as 'Independents', who have picked up the remaining 37.  

If I had more time and patience I would no doubt try to do a bit of analysis of the various independents. I am using the category to cover ratepayers, residents associations, localists, single-issue hobbyhorse jockeys and people who are incapable of working within any sort of group structure, and many more besides.  

Some councils have one or more competing groups who fall into the Independent category. Note that councillors sometimes become Independent as a sort of casualty clearing station, where they reside after resigning from A before seeing the light and joining Party B.  

Of the 103 defections, only five councillors have made a direct swap between parties - 2 from Labour to Green, 1 from Tory to Green, 1 from Lib Dem to Labour and 1 from Labour to Lib Dem.  

One trend that seems prevalent at the moment is a disproportionately high number of defections in Wales. Since July, 14 councillors have changed their colours – 5 from Labour, 4 from the Conservatives, 3 Independents (who have transmogrified into a Reform group in Torfaen) and a Liberal Democrat.  The situation is similar in Scotland – 4 each from the Tories and the Nationalists, 3 from Labour and 1 Independent. 

The dramatic move for the Lib Dems was the mass defection of eight female councillors in Dacorum, over allegations of sexism and bullying. 

It's a matter of conjecture whether personal grievances or political ideologies are the main reason for councillor defections – there might be a doctoral thesis in it for someone with a high pain threshold.  

Incidentally, the reason the local authority is called Dacorum is to prevent the residents of Berkhamsted from having to say that they live in Hemel Hempstead.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Al Pinkerton: "The Chagossians have been dispossessed again"

Al Pinkerton, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Surrey Heath, posted a thread on Twitter last night that gave a perspective that had been missing from the day's heated debate on the Chagos Islands. It was that of the Islanders themselves.

Here is the full thread:

A few weeks ago, I became a member of the Chagos APPG, Vice Chair of the APPG on Gibraltar and the Secretary of the Falklands APPG. It would be fair to say I have more than a passing interest in U.K. Overseas Territories and a fair bit of accumulated knowledge.

A few key points:

1. The Chagos decision has no legal bearing whatsoever on the sovereignty of the Falklands, Gibraltar or the U.K. Sovereign Bases. The prominent conservative commentators who are opportunistically making that claim play into the hands of counter-claimants.

2. It was the Tories (Truss and Cleverly, in particular) who began the process of negotiating away the Chagos islands following the 2019 ICJ advisory + the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Cries of “weak, weak, weak” are deeply hypocritical.

3. While the U.K.-Mauritius agreement announced this week is consistent with international law, it is, in my opinion, a disgraceful abandonment of the Chagossian people, who have been serially failed by the U.K. since the 1960s.

4. Dispossessed and forcibly displaced from their islands by the U.K. in the 1960s-70s, Chagossians have now been dispossessed again through the bizarre spectacle of the ICJ giving force to a kind of ‘judicial colonialism’ by Mauritius.

5. The U.K.-Mauritius deal may be a “triumph of diplomacy” (as Biden has apparently claimed), but it’s also a distasteful reminder that, in 2024, the rights of a people to self-determine their future can be still be merrily set aside for the maintenance of western geo-strategy.

6. MPs should be given time to scrutinise and debate this decision next week. The right of Chagossians (who are UK citizens, or have the right to be) to determine their own future deserves to be heard in Westminster. Anything less risks legalised colonialism by the back door.

Owen Bowcott has detailed the Chagos Islanders long struggle for justice in an article for the Guardian.

As so often, it's the continuities between the Conservative and Labour approaches to this question that strike you, not the differences. 

Morecambe and Wise and Leonard Rossiter

Following on from my post earlier today about Leonard Rossiter, here he is on the 1978 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show.

Stage presence is a strange thing. With Eric and Ernie, it was always Eric you watched. But here, right from the start, you can't take your eyes off Rossiter.

Welcome to The Shropshire Witches Podcast

Good news for lovers of the Shropshire supernatural: the first edition of The Shropshire Witches Podcast has gone live. 

Its writers and presenters, Alix Chidley-Uttley and Amy Boucher, warn us to expect witches, folklore, hauntings and all things with a superstitious and murderous history.

The first episode features severed penises, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General and a misogynistic king.

"In a very real sense Leonard Rossiter is with us here today"

Embed from Getty Images

There's something about appearing in a successful situation comedy that makes an actor immortal. Leonard Rossiter is still a living presence to those who remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp, yet it's now 40 years since he died.

But he was far more than a sitcom actor, as the Guardian's superb survey of his career makes clear. He was a peerless stage actor and, because the best directors recognised his worth, he has a habit of turning up in films where you don't expect to see him.

I saw Rossiter in his final stage role as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, though I've forgotten how long before his death this was.

Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult, but I suspect that, as the Guardian article suggests, this was because he was a perfectionist about his own performance and expected no less from those around him.

When I talked to the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death, he said Rossiter had been a wonderful man. (Murray directed a Manchester production of Loot that created new interest in the play after it had bombed on its first appearance in the West End.)

I mentioned Rossiter's difficult reputation, saying something like: "He turned up for the first rehearsal word perfect and expected everyone else to be too." Murray, ever the director, bristled and asked: "What's wrong with that?"

Oh, and my title here is based on something the vicar said from the pulpit when Reggie Perrin was obliged to attend his own memorial service.

The Joy of Six 1274

Anthony Broxton looks back to Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference - and gives us a sense of the leadership the Conservatives now need but won't get: "In just one passage of speech, Kinnock flipped the trajectory of the party and, most importantly, the dynamics of party conference on its head. The left - for so long used to a monopoly on the righteous anger of leadership betrayal - was now being told to wear their own failures of the working class."

"A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbours." Anne Applebaum says Russia must be defeated.

"It is now indisputable that companies rigged safety tests with the complicity of the testing authorities, that politicians refused to act on safety concerns because to do so might have obstructed deregulation, that a social landlord which loathed its tenants ignored and concealed fire safety notices." James Butler reads the report of the Grenfell Inquiry.

Marlow Bushman reports that red squirrels are repopulating Aberdeen city centre.

"Few authors manage to publish bestsellers in one decade, let alone six. Agatha Christie managed to accomplish that feat, selling enormous quantities of her books throughout her career. Christie’s popularity kept growing throughout her life, but the settings of her novels changed with the times. When many people think of Christie’s books, they think of the interwar period, country estates, and quaint English villages; but during the 1960s Christie’s stories don’t fit these templates at all." Christie in the 1960s looks at her novels from that decade.

Books on the Line on the Crumlin Viaduct and the filming there of the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren film Arabesque.

The 'Silk Road' is a myth: Trade with the East went by sea and India was at its heart

In the course of his review of William Dalrymple's The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World in the London Review of Books last month, Ferdinand Mount quotes a passage from a book by Warwick Ball:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. 

Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. 

Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

That is from Ball's Rome in the East, which was published in 1999. William Dalrymple, according to Mount, takes a similar view:

He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story.

Dominika the roving Braybrooke skunk is found again - in Corby

Remember Dominika the Braybrooke skunk who, last month, escaped from her Braybrooke home and was recaptured around the corner from me?

I didn't tell you at the time, because it was too upsetting, but she escaped again shortly after she got home. 

But now there's good news again. Here's HFM News:

A pet skunk missing from Braybrooke has been found safe and well over 10 miles away in Corby after spending five weeks on the run.

Dominika escaped from owner Jayne McLaughlin’s home last month and had not been seen since a sighting in Market Harborough the following week.

The animal was spotted around a bin area in Hooke Close in Corby and after the sighting was shared on Facebook, Jayne was alerted and went straight to the area armed with some food.

There are lots of websites saying that skunks can make good pets, but none mentions wanderlust.

Anyway, this childhood favourite of mine sounds as though it might be a tribute to Dominika - sort of - so take it away, sisters.

Woodhead railway tunnels to Hadfield today

I first saw the Woodhead route - the lost railway from Sheffield to Manchester - in the summer of 1978. In those days Sheffield to Huddersfield trains used it to reach Penistone, running through the derelict Sheffield Victoria station on the way and also taking sweeping curves about the valley of the Don.

At Penistone you could watch a constant stream of goods trains taking coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield to a power station at Widnes or returning empty.

The class 76 locomotives were unique to this line and you could tell they had been designed in the 1930s, before the war put a temporary stop to electrification.

And I did manage to ride on the whole route shortly before it closed. In the winter of 1980/1 the Hope Valley line, the alternative way to Manchester that all Sheffield trains now use, closed for engineering works on Sundays and passenger services were diverted via Woodhead. I can still remember coasting past the reservoirs you see in the video on the way down to Manchester.

This is an excellent video from Trekking Exploration, showing the remains of the line between Woodhead and Hadfield today as well as some archive footage and photos of its last days.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The new political season has begun. 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:

• 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
• The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club - Jo Colley
• An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart Whomsley

Fascinating Paddington London history walking tour

I've gone down with a cold, so I'll leave you in the excellent company of John Rogers:

A London walking tour exploring the ancient village of Paddington, famous for its railway station (and Paddington Bear of course). Originating as an Anglo-Saxon village, Paddington has a long and rich history. We cross the Grand Union Canal, Harrow Road and the Westway to visit Paddington Green and St. Mary's Church. 

From here we have a mooch in Church Street Market and wander down Edgware Road. In Praed Street we see the place where Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin  at Saint Mary's Hospital. We then look for the Tyburn Milestone and the burial ground where Laurence Sterne was laid to rest. 

Finally our walking tour takes us to Bayswater Road and the Smallest House in London, the Tyburn Convent and the site of the Tyburn Tree.

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

Michael Gove on why elected politicians have to fight against 'Treasury brain'

Rachel Reeves is starting to make Danny Alexander look like a maverick economic expansionist, but maybe the reason they succumbed to orthodoxy lies in the Treasury rather within them.

Michael Gove, stay with me, spoke to Jo Timan of the Manchester Evening News, and the interview is discussed in today's Northern Agenda email from Rob Parsons:

Describing an issue that's all-too-familiar to Northern leaders, he criticised so-called “Treasury brain” in government​ ahead of a Budget due on October 30.

On the way in which civil servants review investments, he said: “The way it works unfortunately means that the nominal return, say, on improving train times between Guildford and London is weighted disproportionately in such a way that it looks much better in terms of bang for your buck than improving rail links between, say, Sheffield and Manchester.”

Mr Gove said the phrase “Treasury brain … speaks to two things”, and claimed officials would have raised concerns with the 1944 D-Day landings on the basis they were “novel and contentious”.

He said: “The Treasury is where the brightest brains are in government but it’s also the case that the Treasury brain – and it’s quite a small-c conservative thing – looks at different propositions and it takes the view: ‘Hmm, you sir are saying that if we invest now, we’ll secure all sorts of benefits later.

“‘I’ve heard that a hundred times. All I know is you’re calling on me to invest now, that means spending money. These benefits, they may never come.’

“So there’s a classic sort of Tory scepticism of utopianism within the Treasury, but the parallel to that is there’s also a scepticism of anything which is anything which is in Treasury phrase ‘novel and contentious’.”

It's well worth subscribing to Northern Agenda, which bills itself as 

Read by policy-makers from the North's town halls to Whitehall, you'll get a bitesize guide to the stories that matter in our region from journalists outside the Westminster bubble.