Photo by Bango at Morguefile.com
Here’s the thing: to our untrained eye, a corn field looks more "natural" than an array of solar panels. But a corn field is a biological desert - basically there are no pollinators there at all (corn is self-pollinating) because they are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Put up some solar panels, and add some plants that only need to be mowed once a year or so (sometimes with sheep) and you see an explosion of life.
That's Mike Kiernan talking. He's set up a small non-profit business that grows plants that native pollinators like between the rows solar farms in Vermont and is a neighbour of Bill McKibben, who writes The Crucial Years blog.
And Bill has some more good news about solar farms from pv magazine:
Biologist Matthias Stoefer said the high density of breeding larks in one of Germany’s largest solar parks in Brandenburg, north of Berlin, is astonishing. In his breeding territory mapping, he counted 178 spots within the solar park and surrounding areas.
On average, there are 21 to 47 breeding pairs per 10 hectares. This is the highest lark density he has ever encountered. The reference area on a nearby field has only 33 spots, equivalent to 7.6 lark pairs per 10 hectares. Whether they can breed successfully there when the farmer sprays, fertilizes, and harvests throughout the summer is questionable, however.
The high numbers in the ground-mounted PV systems are also surprising because larks avoid vertical structures. The birds prefer open, wide landscapes away from forests and forest edges. However, the long photovoltaic rows with six modules stacked on top of each other do not seem to bother them. Instead, they benefit from the advantages of the location.
People rarely visit the fenced-in facility. The vegetation is kept short by sheep, which are currently lying in the sun with their lambs between the rows of modules. The sheep’s droppings and a changing selection of flowering herbs provide the birds with a varied insect buffet.
I'm not one to rage against Nimbys: people are bound to be attached to green spaces where they walk their dogs or played as children, and there are other villains in the housing debate who get off too lightly.
But much of the debate about development and the environment is wrongheaded. Suburban gardens are usually much richer in life than the fields they replace; while everyone's favourite target for development - brownfield sites in towns and cities - can be ecologically valuable too.
And now is sounds as though solar farms, properly managed, could be the saving of wildlife on farms.
Members say they walked across part of the 6,000-acre estate, between Stanage Edge and the A57, and found "almost no insect life, few birds and no grouse".
They claim it has been "trashed" by the duke, "who sets it on fire - sending smoke into people’s homes, worsening flood risk downstream and releasing carbon that adds to the climate crisis."
They also state it has been “scoured of wildlife by gamekeepers who kill anything that could affect gamebird numbers.”
The report goes on to say that in October 2023 deliberate fires on the moor blanketed Sheffield in smoke and caused a city-wide pollution incident. Heather is burnt to encourage the growth of green shoots that grouse can feed on.
It also says Moscar has received an average annual subsidy of £175,400 since 2012 under a Natural England stewardship scheme.
The Duke declined an invitation to comment.
Lord Bonkers is, of course, chuckling at this story. I get the impression he finds grouse shooting rather ungentlemanly:
"Shoot at a Rutland partridge and it will take cover and fire back. Now that's what I call sport!"
Anyway, there is more about Reclaim Our Moors online.
London Bridge was first bridge over the Thames in London, but it's been rebuilt several times.
The oldest surviving bridge on the Thames is now Richmond Bridge, which dates from 1777.
But it's not the oldest bridge in London. To find one that's centuries older, head for Kingston and the Hogsmill River.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.
Roland Smith weighs the objections to the European Convention on Human Rights and says we'll need good arguments against them if we're to resist the coming campaign for Britain to withdraw from it.
"I moved to the city eight years ago to study neuroscience at University College London. Since then, rents have nearly doubled but the square footage of my digs has stayed the same. As I grow up in age and out in size, I begin to see that the hoped-for upgrade that should come with time now looks impossible. My generation is running but we’re not moving." Rose Dodd reports on life as a private tenant in London.
Michael Rosen proves that educational research did not begin with Michael Gove.
Londonopia tells the story of a unique London store: "Arthur Liberty wasn’t just flogging fabrics. He was hawking a vision - a sensual rebellion against the stiff moral corsetry of Victorian Britain. Where others sold sensible serge, Liberty offered peacock-feather glamour, hand-painted decadence, and the vague but thrilling possibility that you might run away with an artist and spend your life eating figs in an atelier."
"War is a dreadful thing, amongst all of the horrific things that human inflicts upon other human in the name of 'war' there are some events that stand out as atrocities: one such atrocity took place in the aftermath of the battle of Naseby." Keep Your Powder Dry tries to pin down the exact location of The Farndon Massacre in the villages just south of Market Harborough.
The case was brought by local campaigner and River Action board member Dr Alison Caffyn, supported by River Action. The judgment quashes Shropshire Council’s planning decision and marks a major turning point in the fight against the irresponsible and harmful spread of factory farms and the protection of the UK’s iconic rivers.This victory sends a clear message that planning authorities must:
- Assess the cumulative impacts of having multiple intensive agricultural developments in one river catchment before granting permission for another.
- Consider how livestock production units dispose of the waste from treatment facilities downstream, including from anaerobic digestion plants.
The Rockingbirds were that rare thing, a North London country rock band. They gained some success in the early Nineties, split in 1995, reformed more than a decade later and are still around today.
Restless is a track from their first LP The Rockingbirds (1992), but I first heard it on a Q Magazine sampler CD.
Saturday was Carnival day in Market Harborough. The crowds were so large in town that I gave up trying to photograph the parade and headed for the showground in the afternoon.
The lovely Debbie, who I used to work with, was on the Co-op stall. She's worth knowing as she gives out free bananas.
After covering its lost gardens and the drought of 1947, we're going back to Stonton Wyville.
Reader's voice: At least it's not bloody Snailbeach again.
Jeremy Benson, who has visited every village church in Leicestershire and put together a Bluesky thread with photos of each one, told me Stonton Wyville was one of those villages where he struggled a bit to find something interesting to say.
But I think he found something very interesting, because he put me on to another forgotten disaster. Over to the Leicester Advertiser for Saturday 18 January 1862:
Dreadful Boiler Explosion. - Four men killed at Stonton Wyville
One of the most dreadful boiler explosions occurred on Monday last, the 13th inst., at Stonton Wyville, that has ever been reported in this district. Stonton Wyville is a small agricultural village in the county of Leicester, about six miles from Market Harborough.
Mr. Dunmore, a farmer, has a stackyard upon his farm, about half a mile from the village, and on Monday hired a small thrashing engine, which is owned by a man named Butcher, who resides at Debdale Wharf, Gumley. This engine was about three or four horsepower, but from the remains of it, it did not appear in working order, and this was confirmed by the evidence we could glean.
It appears the pump as it is called that feeds the boiler with cold water, was in a bad state of repair, and had been repaired on several occasions. About twelve o’clock in the day they were obliged to stop working to again repair this pipe, and were wrapping it with string and red lead. nearly the whole of the men, 13 in number, were gathered round the engine while the repairs were going on and it was while they were thus engaged that the explosion took place.
The report goes on to give details of whose body parts were blown off and where they landed, which I shall spare you. But I can say that Thomas Lee, William Woodman and Samuel Ashby were killed at once, and George Woolman died a few hours later. The inquest was held at the Fox and Hounds Inn at Stonton Wyville - there is still a Fox and Hounds Farm there, so this was probably that building.
One point of interest about this inquest is that it had called for expert evidence about the condition of the boiler:
Mr. Gimson, engineer, of Leicester, was present, and made a thorough examination of the wreck of the engine, and will give his evidence at the adjourned inquest, so it would not be fair to give his opinion stated privately, at the present time.
Gimson and Co. was founded in 1840 by Benjamin and Josiah Gimson on Welford Road in Leicester. The firm, says Wikipedia, was listed as "Engineers, Ironfounders, Boiler Makers & General Machinists". it later moved to the still-standing Vulcan Works in Leicester.
So it looks as though the expert witness was Benjamin or Josiah Gimson, or perhaps another member of their family. This is the Gimson family that produced Sydney Gimson, who helped turn Desford Approved School, into a force in Leicestershire junior chess, and Boris Johnson's serial biographer Andrew Gimson.
The Leicester Advertiser report said the inquest was due to be reconvened on 29th January 1862. I'll see if I can discover what happened then.
It was reported in the 15 March issue of the Shrewsbury Chronicle:
SNAILBEACH TO LEAVE ITS SHELL
Plan For New Village In Green Meadows
If the plans now being prepared by the Clun Rural District Council come to maturity the village of Snailbeach will leave its shell among the scars of old industry on the flank of the Stiperstones, and move down to a new site among pleasant green meadows a mile or so nearer to Minsterley.
The site selected is near to the old Smelthouse, the derelict building which stands at the side of the field path from Minsterley to Snailbeach. Over a cup of tea at the Stiperstones Inn Mr. William Humphrey, a member of-the Clun Council, explained to our reporter that it is hoped to build a first instalment of 16 houses out of a total of 40 to 50 within the next year. Provision has been made for a children's playground, and eventually a church and school will appear.
Temporary houses are out of the question, as at present there is no gas or electricity, but every effort will be made to provide modern amenities for both the old and new villages. Lord Bridgeman was interested himself in a project for bringing a light industry to the village, but it is yet too early to say what developments are likely.
Nothing came of the plan, but villages do get moved. Arkwright in Derbyshire was moved to a new site 30 years ago because of the danger of methane gas from a disused coal mine.
I suspect this scheme for Snaibeach is confirmation of what John Wood wrote in his 1944 book Quietest Under the Sun:
Sad to say, this became in the between-wars period one of the most utterly derelict areas in Britain proportionate to its size.
Séamas O'Reilly reports from Ballymena: "To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as 'mindless, unacceptable and feral' and the actions of the rioters as 'a pogrom'. There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.
Hannah Al-Othman and Jessica Murray on increasing concerns over the quality of 'expert witness' evidence in British courts.
"I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978." Frieze interviews Adam Curtis about his new television series Shifty.
The car made pedestrians second-class citizens, and we shouldn't let driverless vehicles push us off the road altogether, says Adam Tranter.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
I remember liking this when it came out in 1974 - it reached no. 6 in the singles chart that June.
One of the members of Scaffold was Mike McGear, who was Paul McCartney's brother. And the track was produced by Paul, who had suggested recording the song to the band.
More than that, in his interview for The Strange Brew podcast, Mike seems to be saying that Wings were the band playing on Liverpool Lou, with the addition of Norman Yardley on harmonica.
The instrument used in the break (played by Paul McCartney) was the Gizmo. This was a device developed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme of 10CC, who partly owned Strawberry Studios in Stockport where Liverpool Lou was recorded. The pair were eventually to leave 10CC to promote the Gizmo.
Though the song Liverpool Lou had been around for years, it had somehow been copyrighted by Brendan Behan’s brother Dominic. As a result, he made more money from Liverpool than anyone.
The Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award.
This story, the judges were at pains to emphasise. is not funny. Few of the stories under the headlines that receive this award are funny if you think about them for more than a moment.
No, they chose this headline because it brings home the terrible randomness of human existence like nothing else they have seen.
Saturday
What with one thing and another – above all my riding the wave of Rutbeat like a portly surfer – I had a good Sixties, but I do have a regret from that enjoyable decade: my failure to make a television detective of Jeremy Thorpe. I imagined him storming the beaches of the South Coast by hovercraft to arrest drug smugglers, people traffickers and holidaymakers who had not paid to use their deckchairs.
The scripts were written – we hit upon the novel idea of making Thorpe a maverick who nevertheless got results – and the show was cast: Peter Bessell as his loyal sidekick; Emlyn Hooson as his boss, who liked things done by the book; Claire Brooks as his housekeeper.
All looked good to go, until it came to filming the pilot episode. The weather was terrible, the technical crew was seasick and, in what I now realise was a mordant irony, his craft was put out of action when a dog bit a hole in its skirt.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
It was building the Great Northern and London & North Western Railway (GN&LNWJR) that brought my hero J.W. Logan MP to the Market Harborough area. You can see, from the sturdy bridges that remain to this day, that Logan & Hemingway knew how to build railways,
Borders and Beeching traces the disused line from Welham Junction, just north of Market Harborough, to Newark, though the stretch through Melton Mowbray is missed out.
As Eastern Leicestershire is not heavily populated, the GN&LNWJR was always more of a freight line, serving many local ironstone quarries and also bringing coal from the East Midlands to London via Market Harborough and Northampton. There were coal concentration sidings at Welham.
Despite what the caption suggests, Medbourne station was not on this line but on a short curve that joined it to the line to Stamford. And when I used our new on-demand bus service to get to Hallaton recently, it set me down and picked me up from the old station site, even though it's a little way out of the village, as though it were meeting a train.
Passenger services officially ended in 1953, but unadvertised trains ran until 1957 and the GN&LNWJR branch to Leicester Belgrave Road saw holiday trains to Skegness as late as 1962.
Goods services ended in 1964, but odd fragments of the line continued to see workings for some years after that. It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the GN&LNWJR to get a clear picture of the life and death of this interesting line.
And there's more border collie content in a recent post on this blog.
Charles Wright looks back on Kemi Badenoch's two years as a member of the London Assembly: "Interestingly, she went on to compare the treatment of 'white and middle class' protestors with the tougher treatment of those arrested during the 2011 London riots, who she said were 'young, relatively working-class and poor, including a 'high proportion of ethnic minorities. 'Why is it that they can get away with criminal damage that young black people doing exactly the same thing get strict sentences for?'"
I don't know how long they are put up at the Bonkers Arms, but I do know that the Stilton mines are always looking for new recruits.
Friday
Sister Sid drops in from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes to lobby me about American tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands, where he has relatives. Cook provides us with an excellent fish lunch and is quite unperturbed by Sid’s requesting his be served raw. “It’s just like that Japanese stooshie you hear so much about,” she observes.
Later we take a turn by the shore of Rutland Water and watch the small boats come in – ever since Reform took over Lincolnshire, refugees from that county have been landing here. Once ashore, they report themselves to Constable McNally in the village and ask for political asylum, whereupon we put them up at the Bonkers Arms and feed them sausages and plum bread.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
This is a great video that tells you a lot about railway politics and engineering in 19th-century Wales and also finds some atmospheric remains.
Why not subscribe to Bob's Rail Relics on YouTube?
And if you like industrial history from South Wales, have a look at my post The Glamorganshire Canal in 1945, which takes you of a film of it lying derelict but complete after its abandonment.
Several Lib Dem figures told PoliticsHome that there have been informal discussions with Tory MPs on the 'left' of their party who are uneasy with shifting further to the right to combat the threat of Nigel Farage's Reform UK.
One Lib Dem MP involved in talks said: “Doors are not being slammed in our faces."
Another told PoliticsHome they have spoken to at least two Conservative MPs who are also unhappy about the party’s stance on net zero, claiming that they are "looking" at the Lib Dems as a potential new "home".
There are no Conservative sources quoted, so I suspect this is a case of Lib Dem MPs love-bombing their Conservative neighbours. Or to put it another way:
PoliticsHome understands Lib Dems are targeting constituency neighbours with whom they have already formed relationships.
The silence of liberal Conservatives as their party is taken over by far-right Nationalists has been deafening. It may be that they have concluded that their party is beyond saving.
To give them encouragement here's a guest post on this blog by Harborough's own Buddy Anderson: Many liberal Conservatives are becoming conservative Liberals.
The Lion Hotel was situated at 169 High Street. This pub was present by 1826 and closed in 1988. It was also known as The White Lion. It is now used as a branch of Poundland. At one time it contained a cattle pound for cattle that grazed Holmes Common.
Thursday
Those bad hats who chopped down the tree at Sycamore Gap are, by all accounts, in for a stiff sentence without the option. I am reminded of the tales told me by colleagues who had been in the House in Mr Gladstone’s day. When the Grand Old Man wasn’t rescuing fallen women or scourging himself, he was to be found felling trees.
The problem was that he didn’t confine himself to the woods at Hawarden, but would often attack random trees on his way to speaking engagements. The result was that there were few Liberal MPs of his era who hadn’t at one time or another had to sweet talk the local rozzers to secure his release from custody and stump up for tickets for the next police ball.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
Nina Stibbe, another member of the Market Harborough school of literature, once wrote about Fleckney in the Guardian:
Fleckney became industrialised in the late 19th century when hosiery companies fled the city. Rowley & Co, whose Leicester works had been stormed by weavers in riots in 1885, built a factory on Saddington Road. Its red brick design included a high wall along the street for protection in the event of further unrest. This wall (itself now protected) reinforces Fleckney’s identity as working-class compared with its more cottagey neighbours.
Leicester’s second best pop, Furnival’s of Fleckney, was still bottled in the village when we arrived; Thorn Lighting had a factory there and the new industrial estate was home to Pukka Pies, where my brother worked part-time during his O-levels - and was once locked in the freezer for being pretentious (he was reading a book).
Fleckney is still an industrial village - the photo above shows one of the older factories there. Because industry came late, it was never on the railway and the canal passes by a couple of fields away.
Furnival's of Fleckney made me [rick up my ears, because the firm used to have a warehouse in Highfield Street, Market Harborough, directly opposite our house. (Don't look for it: It's not there any more.) I think I remember kids climbing over the fence to steal empty bottles so they could claim the deposit back on them. Think of it as enhanced recycling.
But that building wasn't always a warehouse: it had once been a factory. And for a description of it during the war I turn again to this blog's hero Bryan Magee.
This passage comes from his book Growing up in a War - Magee was evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and lived literally round the corner from where I used to live:
The factory in which Kath worked was a few yards beyond the end of our garden, its chimney visible to someone sitting in our back room. Previously it had manufactured swimming costumes, but now it was packing parachutes.
Its chimney emitted not just smoke but noise: about every five seconds it gave a loud, vibrant belch that was a nerve-racking nuisance for everyone living near it. At one level of my mind I got used to it, and ceased to notice it, yet at another I was conscious of it all the time.
The people in the neighbourhood complained to the local authority, but were told that nothing could be done: the chimney had once had a silencer, but this no longer worked, and a replacement was unobtainable in wartime. The factory had to carry on because it was involved in essential war work. So the people around it would have to put up with it. ('Don't you know there's a war on?')
Yesterday I posted a video of Magee reporting on the satire boom in 1963.
Jeff Buckley died at 30, his father Tim at 28. I felt sorry for Jeff, often discussed with reference to a father who hardly bothered with him.
But Tim Buckley was a brilliant musician. Here he is on The Old Grey Whistle Test, with Charlie Whitney from the Leicester band Family one of those backing him.
Wednesday
You find me sousing in a deckchair and enjoying the view across my gardens to the moat. Swifts swoop low across the lawn, snapping up insects to feed their young in nests under the eaves of my stables; flocks of hamwees and wheways scuffle noisily, each convinced that the other started it; a volley of bucolic cursing from within a mature shrub tells me that Meadowcroft is hard at work.
I have allowed myself a particularly lazy afternoon because I am rather proud of a line I phoned in to Davey’s office this morning for use at prime minister’s questions. Here’s my zinger:
“First he came for our steelworkers and carmakers. Now Donald Trump is coming for our world-leading British film industry. Will the PM make it clear to him that if he picks a fight with Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's, he will lose?”
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
Now here's a find: a 1963 report on the satire boom by this blog's hero Bryan Magee.
We see John Bird, Jeremy Geidt, Peter Cook, Bernard Braden, Willie Rushton, Jonathan Miller and Michael Frayn.
I can't recall Braden being discussed as part of the satire boom before, and the most obscure name now is Jeremy Geidt, who is seen in the sketch with John Bird. He went to have an influential career in American theatre and his background was more establishment than that of anyone else in the programme.
Peter Cook is notable bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while Frank Muir describes Magee as looking like "a bit like a young family doctor in a cough mixture commercial". I'm not sure that Magee's thesis that satire is at once centuries old and a bubble that is about to burst quite hangs together.
Muir is there because this is an off-air recording from a 1992 episode of TV Heaven where he chose the items included.
Thanks to Mario Ricciardi on Bluesky.
"The conveyor belt of Trump sycophants appointed by Nigel Farage rolls on.
"Reform is more interested in advancing Donald Trump’s agenda over here, not standing up for the communities that they are supposed to represent.
"This elevation of yet another Trump lapdog is just further evidence of this."
Daisy Cooper gave Reform UK and their new chair a well-deserved hoofing today. The Guardian says she offered as evidence the tweet above and a photo of his television appearance with a bandaged ear in solidarity with Trump after his narrow escape last year.
As the Guardian observes:
With Labour reluctant to criticise President Trump because they have to negotiate with him, and the Tories reluctant to criticise him because they admire him, the Liberal Democrats are the biggest party in the Commons with ample scope for Trump-bashing, and they rarely miss a chance [to] indulge.
Good for us.
"A massive amount of money, intended for buying land which was to be free to access for anyone in the country, and creating youth hostels to help them do this, was now predominantly being used to prop up the aristocracy and their minority culture. What’s more, in passing the houses to the National Trust, this money also often funded a situation in which the family were able to stay in part of the house." Susannah Walker uncovers the scandal of the National Land Fund.
Robyn Vinter reports on new research highlighting how transport funding is concentrated on London: "The East Midlands fared even worse, with an average of £355 per person spent - less than a third of that received by London."
Jonas Opoku-Forson on the disappearance of male teachers.
"As with the fictional New Jersey crime organisation [The Sopranos], Oasis were a conspiratorial and macho family firm in which illicit thrills struggled to mask a long and slow decline that nobody knew how to reverse." Fergal Kinney says what the glut of new Oasis books are leaving unsaid.
Nick Schager praises Night and the City (1950), an authentic film noir that was shot in London and features Herbert Lom, Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan in its cast.
Tuesday
When the Liberal Democrat campaign against the ‘Family Farm Tax’ was launched, I was not greatly interested even when I discovered that we are also opposing inheritance taxes on great landed estates like my own. You see, long ago a leading tax accountant told me that the surest way of not copping for such levies is to avoid dying.
Ever since, I have made the annual trip to Hebden Bridge to bathe in the Spring of Eternal Life that bursts from the ground beneath the former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors and paid through the nose for a particular cordial sold by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.
My ears pricked up, though, when I heard our MPs forecast dire consequences from the levying of VAT on school fees. I reasoned that if parents had already ruled out keeping their children at home, and were now feeling the pinch, then some might take advantage of the very reasonable terms offered by my own Home for Well-Behaved Orphans.
Yet Matron told me at the party last night that we have not gained a single new inmate through this tax. I will confess to feeling Rather Let Down.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
We're used to Trekking Exploration searching for abandoned railway lines, but this time he searches for an abandoned church next door to Nottingham Racecourse in Colwick Park.
As the YouTube blurb explains:
The listed grade II church dedicated to St John the Baptist now stands in ruins near Colwick Hall. It was built by Sir John Byron in the 16th century incorporating 14th and 15th century sections from an earlier church. In the mid-17th century the church was repaired and a chancel and steeple built by Sir John Musters. Later in the century, the tower and chancel were rebuilt. Towards the end of the 19th century, a vestry and an organ chamber were added.
By the early years of the twentieth century, the church was in a poor state. Although repairs were continually made, the condition of the church deteriorated. In 1936 it was finally closed as being unsafe. A new Church of St John the Baptist was built in Colwick in 1950.
While I was writing my article in the current Liberator, I searched for the quotation below - the last paragraph in particular.
I didn't find it, because I was convinced it came from The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, which was published in 2005.
It doesn't. It comes from Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought by John Gray. Impressively, this was published as early as 1997. Perhaps there's something in the idea that Gray's a bit of a seer after all.
Because I couldn't find the last paragraph, I had to write instead:
Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.
I felt a little unhappy with this, because I knew that not everyone in Grantham saw Alderman Roberts as the pillar of civic virtue that his daughter did.
But enough from me. Here's the quote from John Gray:
The self-destruction of British conservatism by New Right ideology and policies is best interpreted as an exemplification of a central neo-liberal theme - the importance of unintended consequences in social, economic and political life.
The radical free market policies implemented in Britain since 1979 have had as one of their principal effects an unravelling of the coalitions of economic interests and the social hierarchies on which pre-Thatcher conservatism depended. In sweeping away the postwar settlement which all major parties endorsed for a generation, Thatcherism demolished the social and economic base on which conservatism in Britain stood, and created several of the necessary conditions for a prolonged period of Labour hegemony.
The medium-term effect of neo-liberal Conservative policy in has been to destroy ethos in institutions such as the Civil Service and the National Health Service by remodelling them on contractualist and managerialist lines. In addition to squandering a large part of Britain's patrimony of civilized institutions, this neo-liberal project of refashioning social life on a primitive model of market exchange has speeded the delegitimation of established institutions of such as the monarchy and the Church.
Further, by stripping democratic local government in Britain of most of its powers and building up the unaccountable institutions of the Quango Sate - the apparatus of committees appointed by central government to oversee the operation of the newly marketized public services, which is now larger in manpower and in the resources it allocates than democratic local government in Britain - the Conservatives have marginalized their own local party organizations and thereby contributed to the steep and swift decline of the Conservative Party itself ...
As for Tory England - that rich network of interlocking interests, social deferences and inherited institutions that Tory statecraft has successfully protected and reproduced for over a century by its skilful adaptation to democratic institutions in Britain - it is now as good as dead.
Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Nick Bano
Verso, 2025, £10.99
The idea that British industry is held back from fuelling a golden age of economic growth only by excessive regulation used to be a staple of right-wing think tanks. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly popular in left-wing think tanks too, with the planning laws seen as the particular enemy.
One reason for this is that people who work for left-wing think tanks have more in common with people in right-wing think tanks than they do with the rest of the population. They live in the same city and went to the same schools, for instance.
And creating a new folk-devil, the Nimby, does save an awful lot of, well, thought. Once you have given people who disagree with you a label, then you need only invoke that label to invalidate their arguments (see also ‘woke’, ‘remoaner’, ‘terf’, ‘boomer’ and many others).
So you can condemn Nimbys and sound left-wing without asking whether planning laws are really the problem when approaching 90 per cent of all planning applications are approved; without asking whether the building industry would be able or willing to participate in a boom large enough to reduce house prices noticeably; and without asking why some children go to the sort of schools that produce people who work for think tanks and some don’t.
Nick Bano, in this short and readable book, argues that our problem is not a shortage of supply but the scourge of landlordism. Fifty years ago, private landlords, from Rachman to Rigsby, were derided and the breed seemed to be on the way out. Now daytime television shows have would-be buy-to-let landlords as their heroes.
The problem, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both argued, is that rented housing is a natural monopoly. The level of rent is set, not by competition between landlords, but by how much tenants can afford to pay for shelter. So, rather than look to more house building to solve our problems, Bano argues, we need more tenant activism and legal reforms.
At last year’s general election, the Liberal Democrats advocated an increase in house-building to 380,000 a year across the UK, but in calling for this figure to include 150,000 social homes, delivered through new garden cities and community-led development of cities and towns, we did show some concern about the form of tenure and the quality of what is delivered.
Oh, and Bano offers a neat label to use in retaliation. If someone calls you a Nimby, call them a Supply Guy in return.
Jonathan Calder
Today he's all about celebrating Liberal Democrat victories, Tizer and the Notswolds.
Monday
The dozy spires of Oxfordshire and the plashy fens of Cambridgeshire are ours. We hold Shropshire from the pubs of Oswestry to the crumbling walls of Ludlow; from the lead mines of Snailbeach to the cliff railway at Bridgnorth. Half a dozen other councils will see Liberal Democrat control after one fashion or another.
I played my part in the triumphs of May Day by dispatching parties of Well-Behaved Orphans to deliver in a number of crucial marginal wards. I am pleased this morning when Matron reports that almost all have returned; I suspect it was my promise of ad lib. Tizer at this evening’s post-election party.
For myself, I shall spend the next few days not taking calls from Freddie or Fiona and enjoying the beauty of Rutland and the Welland Valley. Did you know people are now calling this part of the world “the Notswolds”? The idea being that we have all the beauty of the Cotswolds without the concomitant prices. My only hope is that we don’t attract The Wrong Sort.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
