The Joy of Six 1513

"The taboo around the word 'membership' has been maintained not by principle but timidity. Farage built his project on lies. The least we can do is have the courage to tell the truth about what those lies have cost us in our classrooms, laboratories, training colleges, concert halls, and our standing in a world that badly needs Britain to be more than a bystander." Caroline Lucas goes where Certain Other Politicians fear to tread.

Barry Gardiner points to an important lesson of the Mandelson affair: "Most leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they think they want to hear. Good leaders surround themselves with people who are not afraid to tell them the truth."

"Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end." David R. Lurie warns about what may come next from Trump: 

Samantha Booth and Ruth Lucas report on worries that the effects of poverty and deprivation are being treating as Special Educational Needs, relocating what is a social problem in the psyches of individual children.

"The first exhibition space includes several of Eardley's social-realist figure depictions of 1950s inner-city Glaswegian children. The works have a joyful, raw, playful spirit to them, in spite of the squalid slum environment the children were living in. No artist has painted Glasgow's 'weans'  in the way that Eardley has." Blane Savage on the Joan Eardley exhibition at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two.

John Connors pays tribute to Richard Carpenter's long career in children's television from Catweazle to I Was a Rat.

Zack Polanski's first encounter with the Corbynite left

Zac Polanski's pitch for the leadership of the Greens is centred on the idea of attracting the sort of urban, left-wing voters who were enthused by Jeremy Corbyn.

Which makes this Buzzfeed news story from 2016 unexpected reading:

The man who heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally on Wednesday evening is a Liberal Democrat activist who stood for the party in last month's London Assembly elections.

Zack Polanski told BuzzFeed News he decided to interrupt the meeting of Corbyn supporters because the Labour leader's "passivity and ambivalence for Europe" had contributed to Britain voting to leave the EU in last week's referendum.

The rest of the crowd reacted very angrily to the heckle, with one man stood in the crowd next to BuzzFeed News shouting, "You Tory heckler! You piece of shit!"

But what would a Polanski leadership mean for Green attitudes to Europe in 2025?

I'm no expert on the internal politics of the Green Party, but Polanski wants Britain to withdraw from NATO, and it's fair to say that the Greens have often not always been as pro-EU as they appear today.

Caroline Lucas began as a Eurosceptic, while Jenny Jones wrote an article for the Guardian on the eve of the EU referendum that was headlined 'The EU is an outsized behemoth beyond reform – the Green case for Brexit'.

Jones has since partially recanted, but there is no guarantee that the Green Party will support Britain rejoining the EU if it makes the pitch for left-wing voters that Polanski promises.

But for the mean time, this appears to be his position...

Brexit has been a disaster. We campaigned against it and it's turned out even worse than we feared. Deregulation in particular is a huge risk. Rejoin customs union & eventually rejoin when conditions are right.

— Zack Polanski (@zackpolanski.bsky.social) 27 April 2025 at 12:50

The Joy of Six 1290

Linsey McGoey listened to Trump voters and suggests the Democrats will have to do the same if they are to win power again.

"The language of social justice - 'wokeness' if you will - is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite." Kenan Malik reads We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi.

Pam Jarvis fears many multi-academy trusts are putting copious amounts of public money into the pockets of non-teaching managers while giving the nation’s children less quality for more funding.

Alfie Steer asks if Caroline Lucas was really Britain's first Green MP: "One other former MP could plausibly claim this historic title: Cynog Dafis, Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire from 1992 to 2000. The reasons why reveal a unique, and largely forgotten moment in Welsh and British, political history."

"Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive." Russell Moul on why we believe in ghosts.

"At St Mary de Castro ... the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves." Iain Sharpe goes back to Leicester.

Roz Savage to table Climate and Nature Bill in the Commons

Roz Savage, the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds, has chosen the Climate and Nature Bill as her private member’s bill. She finished third in the recent ballot for these bills, meaning she has a realistic chance of getting legislation on to the statute book.

If passed, reports the Independent, the Bill would compel the government to adopt climate and nature targets, including "limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels".

Ministers would also have to draw up a strategy with yearly targets in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, halt oil and gas exploration and imports, and reverse nature decline so it is "visibly and measurably on the path to recovery.

The Independent report also quotes Roz:

"I’m really, really feeling that groundswell," Ms Savage ... told the PA news agency, adding she had already spoken with Labour MPs who have indicated their support.

"Every day really does count and it feels like since this Bill was first tabled, there’s been such a growing awareness of these twin crises of climate and nature that … its time has come.

"There’s such public demand, if my mailbag is anything at all to go by, I have had so much correspondence from people urging me to pick up the Climate and Nature Bill."

Similar bills were promoted in the last parliament by the former Green leader Caroline Lucas and the Labour MPs Olivia Blake and Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley), but none became law.

The Joy of Six 1137

"There was never any reason to suppose Johnson could be a successful prime minister. Nothing in his record suggested he was fit for the job. His sole success came in living down to expectations. If he had been a tolerable success as mayor of London that was, in large part, simply because the mayoralty was, in his hands, little more than a PR job. As foreign secretary, rather more importantly, he was palpably out of his depth." Alex Massie says goodbye and good riddance to Boris Johnson.

Michael Crick argues that Keir Starmer will come to regret purging the Labour left.

"Her concerns stretched beyond monetary union. She voiced fears over the EU’s tendency to centralise and erode national barriers, warning that 'the rush to a Single Market … is corroding the social, employment, and environmental structure of our continent.' She even noted how EU freedom of movement would have a depressionary effect on wages." Richard Johnson reminds us that Caroline Lucas used to be a Eurosceptic.

Sarah Menkedick asks why American children are treated as a separate species.

Jonathan Meades reviews a book on heritage and conservation: "Seventy years ago, Augustus John advised in his autobiography Chiaroscuro that we ought not to admire hedges and drystone walls no matter how handsome the patchwork they form, for they are instruments of ownership. Stourton overlooks John. He comes up with the familiar justification that great estates have spared the country mass housing. Familiar but, frankly, bollocks."

Steven Smith, Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne all played club cricket in England. Scott Oliver looks back to those days.

The Joy of Six 1137

Caroline Lucas, Wera Hobhouse MP and Olivia Blake argue that the Climate and Ecology Bill is our best chance to tackle the climate crisis.

"The root of the asylum controversy in the UK is that our system for determining refugee status works so poorly. It should allow the country quickly to decide who is a refugee and who is not. But it is set up and operated so that most refugees do not have their claims properly recognised in a timely way." David Cantor sets out an alternative to the Illegal Migration Bill.

"From the bin crews in Cambridge Council to Citizens Advice, Dunelm, Atom Bank, some NHS trusts and Sainsburys, the idea is spreading and growing in popularity. Soon it may be the employers who have not tried this who are left behind." Mo Kanjilal asks if it's time we all moved to a four-day week.

"When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as 'a "woke activist" with an agenda'." Samira Shackle on the backlash against research into slavery.

Nathan J. Robinson on a Jordan Peterson fan who lost his faith and the lessons we can learn about drawing people away from right-wing ideology.

James Brooke-Smith spent lockdown watching vintage chat shows: "Instead of the torrent of bile and invective and dark mutterings about secret paedophiliac plots orchestrated from pizza parlours in Washington - as the less salubrious corners of the internet would have it - I entered a halcyon world of charm and erudition, wit and glamour."

GUEST POST Why we need a GCSE in Natural History

Mary Colwell says a GCSE in Natural History could be the first step in a revival of nature in our education system. 

Whenever I listen to Brain of Britain on Radio 4 my sense of inadequacy grows as the programme progresses. I simply don’t know that many facts.

In March, I caught the first heat in the quest to find the greatest knowledge-guru of 2019 and I barely got off the starting blocks. Maybe I could have answered one or two questions given more time, but I can’t recall fast enough. I hugely admire those who have this kind of info sitting in an accessible part of their brain.

Then, one of the questions was on natural history. The question master, Russell Davies, asked, “Daubenton’s, Brandt’s and Leisler’s are three species of which British mammal?” The answers proffered were hedgehog, otter, badger and shrew.

I found this surprising. Brandt’s and Leisler's are not as well-known as Daubenton's, but I was taken aback that not one of the highly intelligent and well-informed contestants guessed, or knew, they were bats. It was equally surprising that they thought there was more than one species of hedgehog, otter and badger in the UK.

This observation is in no way meant to put down the people taking part in the programme, but it did highlight that the names of common British mammals are considered specialist rather than common knowledge.

Why is this so important? Is it simply enough to know there are bats and badgers? Or is it useful to know that there is only one species of badger in the UK, but there are 18 species of bat, 17 of them breeding here? And – is it important to name them?

I think there is a good argument for doing so. When a creature is named it is conferred autonomy while at the same time we affirm its place alongside the rest of the nameable world. If we care enough to name something, we might be more inclined to embrace its existence alongside our own. 

Conferring the dignity of a name allows us to embrace the creature as familiar - the root of empathy. Understanding, familiarity and empathy are essential for a fully-human, holistic and meaningful relationship with the world.

As an example, that flitting shadow seen over the local park lake on a summer night is not just a generic, flapping animal, it is a bat. More than that, it is a Daubenton's bat, a fascinating creature that is sometimes referred to as a ‘water bat’ because it skims over the surface of water bodies feeding on insects flying close to the surface. Sometimes it scoops them up with its large feet.  After one night’s feeding it can increase its body mass by over 50 per cent.

Daubenton’s bats spend the winter in caverns underground, adding further mystery to their nocturnal lives.  A Pipistrelle bat, on the other hand, is our smallest and commonest bat. It is often found in urban settings and the one you are most likely to see in the garden or roosting in your roof. It can live in colonies of over a thousand.

Names matter if we want to add richness to our understanding of the world.

Bats, along with other wildlife, are not just biological specimens. They come marinated, as it were, in folklore and cultural attitudes. We are creative and inventive creatures, we love stories, and have long gazed at the life that accompanies us on our journey on earth and have conjured up all manner of associations.

Bats fly at night, at a time when we find it hard to see. We are easily scared by a flitting, frantic shadow. It is no surprise that bats have been, and still are, connected by our inner fears to death and the mystery of the unknown beyond life. Films about vampires and distressed souls feature bats to add a shock factor tinged with the unknowable.

To see a bat is to observe a flying amalgam of story and scientific fact. The animal that streaks past the streetlight seems to bring forth a range of emotions that enhance our existence.

Names matter, associations matter. Without the ability to look at the natural world around us and be able to name it and give it a place in our cultural lives, we become diminished.

In 2011, I came up with the idea of a GCSE in Natural History. It arose from a realisation that the world is unfamiliar to so many. Although we live here, breathe the air, eat what is grown in the earth and watch programmes that celebrate the natural world, many people know little about their surroundings.

This was not the case 50 years ago. There has been a steady erosion of the rock that kept us stable on the planet - our understanding of nature and our place in it. 

After a couple of attempts to drum up support, including a government petition in 2017, it wasn’t until Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, contacted me to ask if she could help that the idea was transported into the corridors of power and progress is being made.

A GCSE in Natural History isn’t just a qualification in naming things, it is a course that provides young people with the ability to observe, record and name the planet.

It will teach them to work with the realities of a messy, unpredictable world and be able to use the data they collect. It will require patience and an ability to think outside the box. It will sharpen the senses and broaden horizons. It will require an understanding of biology, geography, maths, English, technology and outdoor pursuits.

It will also, crucially, connect the natural to the cultural world through the relationship between nature and art, music, literature, poetry and digital media. A GCSE in Natural History will bring the nature into the heart of the city, the town and village. It will start to nurture those weakened connections to the living world that have been so eroded through the 20th Century.

If the GCSE is established then the school system will begin to gear up to prepare children through the primary and early secondary years. It may go on to an A Level, and who knows, I’d love to see degrees in Natural History.

The late and very great Aubrey Manning had the esteemed title of Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University. I’d like to see those positions in every learned establishment.

A GCSE in Natural History is the first step in what I hope will be a revival of nature in our education system.

Mary Colwell is a producer and writer specialising in nature.

Brighton Hippodrome is threatened with redevelopment

Brighton's daily paper The Argus has revealed that the city's derelict Hippodrome has been bought by a property developer:

In a recent update to his LinkedIn social media profile, Mr Sheikh wrote: “We are pleased to announce the purchase of a [sic] iconic site in Brighton. For the development of a boutique 5 star 70 bed hotel, 25 high end serviced apartments and a concert, theater[sic], conference and banqueting venue.”

This is the old theatre I blogged about in the spring when I was down in Brighton as part of the day job.

Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, is quoted opposing any such redevelopment:

"Such a move would be a real tragedy, if it meant that it destroyed any hope of returning this amazing venue back to its former glory. 

"If restored, the Hippodrome could be central to the regeneration of the Old Town area which has recently been listed as ‘at risk’ by Heritage Britain.The Hippodrome is still number one on the Theatres Trust’s list of Theatre Buildings at Risk ... for the fourth year running. 

"With that in mind, I have been doing all that I can to support the ‘Save the Hippodrome’ campaign group in their efforts to re-open Frank Matcham’s magnificent auditorium."

Six of the Best 515

"When I started at Lochaber High School, the prizes he had won as a school debater adorned the walls; as pupils knew, at university he had gone on to win the national championship for Glasgow. It was clear that he was a phenomenon." Danny Alexander pays tribute to Charles Kennedy.

Affordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East, says Oliver Wainwright.

Scottish Nationalists and English Tories obsess about the BBC because they want it to be more not less biased, argues Nick Cohen.

David Boyle discussed local economics and inter-party collaboration with Andrew Simms and Caroline Lucas at the Hay Festival.

"Until well into the 20th century, the horse played an important role in the running of Britain’s railways." RailwayManiacs Blog tells a forgotten story.

The Downstairs Lounge explains how an album recorded in a small Welsh rugby club created a star of 1970s comedy.

Natalie Bennett should beware the sharp elbows of Caroline Lucas

I have a soft spot for Natalie Bennett. She and I used both to be members of the team that took turns to host the Britblog Roundup.

But her performance on the Sunday Politics the other week has led some to wonder whether the Green Party would do better to field Caroline Lucas in the leaders' debates later this year.

And Natalie should be careful, because Caroline Lucas has sharp elbows and previous form.

Brighton Pavilion was the Greens' best prospect of a gain at the last general election largely because a local activist called Keith Taylor had built it up.

Then in 2007 Lucas descended on the town, professed her "admiration and respect" for Taylor and took the nomination from him.

If she expresses her admiration and express for the Green' current leader, Natalie really will be in trouble.

David Heath to promote new laws to control spying agencies

Tomorrow's Guardian says that the former Liberal Democrat minister David Heath is to demand new laws to make sure Britain's spying agencies do not intercept calls or email data without a specific warrant:

He told the Guardian there were gaps in legislation governing the intelligence services that had to be closed, and called for the UK to follow America's example in looking at how to address the issue.

The report goes on to say that Heath attempt to bring in a new bill from the backbenches will have cross-party support. The paper names Labour's Tom Watson, the Conservative former diplomat Rory Stewart, Caroline Lucas, of the Greens, Elfyn Llwyd, the Westminster leader of Plaid Cymru, and Simon Hughes.

Certainly, something needs to be done in the light of recent revelations. Parliament, or at least the dimmer Conservative backbenchers, appears to believe that all we need do is prosecute the Guardian.

But then, under Labour, Blair's deceit over Iraq was set aside in favour of a campaign against the BBC.

The Later Careers of Moderately Successful University Bowlers of the 1970s: 2. R. le Q. Savage

Backwatersman has a post about Leicestershire's recent defeat at the hands of the Leeds/Bradford MCC Universities XI. He explains why losing to a bunch of students is not the cause for shame that it would have been a few seasons ago.

In describing the sort of players turning out for these MCC Universities sides these days he says:

It’s all a very long way from the Wingfield-Digbys and R. le Q. Savages of yore (decent players though they both were).

You will recall that I found the Revd Andrew Wingfield-Digby holding a living in the pleasant suburbs of North Oxford a couple of summers ago.

But whatever, I hear you ask, became of R le Q. Savage?

A little googling provides the answer that he is a) a teacher and, b) married to the Green MP Caroline Lucas.

Vic Marks adds:

He was a gifted bowler, who propelled fast off-breaks at about the same pace as Don Shepherd used to do. He was a very enthusiastic cricketer and quite an emotional one. I captained him for a couple of seasons in the Parks and I enjoyed the experience. But my guess is that Caroline controls him better.

Why aren't the Greens doing better?

The Democratic Audit report The Bradford Earthquake is now online.

Reading that report - or at least its executive summary - I am struck by how the themes of Labour complacency and its inability to fight when put to the test in its heartlands recall those that emerged during Liberal local government successes in earlier decades - this Liverpool in the 1970s and Tower Hamlets in the 1980s.

Now that we are in coalition with the Conservatives we Liberal Democrats will find it harder to present ourselves as the tribunes of the dispossessed in inner-city Britain. And George Galloway cannot stand for Respect everywhere, which suggests (as Mark Thompson argues) that Bradford West may be a one off.

But there is a party, untainted by government or coalition with the Conservatives, that could hope to take on Labour in the inner cities: the Greens. Yet they are nowhere to be seen?

Why not? It is not as if the Greens have tried fighting Labour in the cities: they do not appear to have tried it at all.

Maybe Green politics were a luxury of the years before the current depression. Maybe people like Green policies less the more they are exposed to them. Maybe, in the shape of Caroline Lucas, they share Respect's problem of having only one electable parliamentarian.

Whatever the reason, I am surprised the Greens are not doing better and even more surprised that they do not appear to be trying very hard.

The nonsense of Labour's welfare policy

I am with the Liberal Democrat MPs who rebelled over the one per cent cap of benefit increases after yesterday's debate.

As Caroline Lucas said:

The Secretary of State brandishes the figure of a 20 per cent increase in benefits in the past five years. In cash terms, jobseeker’s allowance has gone up from just £59.15 in 2007 to £71 in 2012. In other words, in each of those past years JSA has gone up by just £2.50.

And as David Miliband said of the politics behind this move:

The truth is that this rancid Bill is not about affordability; it reeks of the politics of dividing lines that the current Government spent so much time denouncing when they were in opposition in the dog days of the Brown Administration. It says a lot that within two years they have had to resort to that dividing-line politics. We know the style: you invent your own enemy, you spin your campaign to a friendly newspaper editor, you “frame” the debate. But the enemy within in is not the unemployed; the enemy within is unemployment.

But what really struck me about the debate was this complaint from Liam Byrne:

Some 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will be hit by this Bill.

But why are such people receiving money from the government at all? A common complaint about welfare systems is that they use public money to subsidise bad employers, but here the government is using it to subsidise a perfectly reasonable employer - itself.

Worse than that, the last Labour government had no great appetite for making the rich pay tax. And even if a government does have that ambition, it turns out to be rather hard to do.

The result is that the tax credits for soldiers, nurses and teachers have to be financed by people in reasonably but not highly paid jobs. People like soldiers, nurses and teachers, in fact.

In other words, the whole system is a complicated way of leaving people pretty much where you found them.

The Coalition has the right idea in cutting tax rates for lower paid workers and reducing the reach of the tax credit system. They should use some of the money they have saved to protect the poorest of all from inflation.