The Joy of Six 1555

Benjamin Goodair says Andy Burnham is right to want for‑profit firms out of social care: "The majority of social care in England is run for-profit. The consequences of this go far beyond unfair profiteering. It actually worsens many of the core problems with England’s social care systems – making it less available, of worse quality and widening inequalities."

Children from poorer families do worse at school. Nadia Siddiqui explains why and what can be done to narrow the gap in attainment.

Steff Aquarone makes the case for a minister for coastal communities: "Too many coastal towns face lower than average wages, poorer transport connections, seasonal economies, shortages of affordable housing and increasing pressure from coastal erosion and climate change. Despite their enormous contribution to our economy, our heritage and our identity, they are too often overlooked when national investment decisions are made."

"Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers' fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45." Ruth Cherrington celebrates Coventry's Camley Estate.

Ben Duckett is puzzled that attendances for cricket's Hundred tournament are falling, despite the presence of more star names, reports The Sports Encounter. What he and the games administrators need to grasp is that British sports fans' attachment is to teams, not to individual players.

Claire Madge has been to see the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy: "There is no moment of finding 'madness' in Dadd's work, whether it was completed before his breakdown or after. Even the eyes of his figures from scenes of Hamlet completed in 1840 and the strange fairies that ring a sleeping Titania from 1841 show an artist with an ability to capture the uncanny and one who could easily get lost in the detail even before his psychosis came to the fore."

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"From where I’m sitting, it seems inevitable that Farage will suffer the same fate as Johnson. They are beneficiaries of false advertising, who eventually become its victim. That is because they eventually have to deliver on their populist promises. And while they’re willing to turn on their chameleon charm prior to entering office - happy to play the role of anti-establishment antagonist - their natural instincts take over in the corridors of power." Sam Bright goes into the prediction business.

Tim Farron says UK immigration policy fails young people.

Luke Cawley Harrison, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the London Borough of Haringey, argues that Keir Starmer must stand up to Donald Trump: "The reality is his sycophancy has achieved little: Trump continues to publicly praise Putin, undermine Ukraine, and now suggests 'peace' should come from Ukraine surrendering the land Russia currently occupies from its illegal war. Meanwhile, the UK faces the same senseless tariffs as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the penguins in the uninhabited Heard & McDonald Islands."

"Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as 'modern mental health care'. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care." Jordyn Jensen on the return of psychiatric imprisonment to the US.

Jay Hulme visits Coventry Cathedral and takes some wonderful photographs.

"The Great Gatsby is a slippery text. It means different things to different people. To some it is a monolith of American literature - a key contender in the Great American Novel sweepstakes - whereas, to others, it has become a cartoonish portrait of a bygone era. Some read it as an excoriation of materialism, others as a vindication of excess. For some it is sibylline, for others, passé." Nick Hilton revisits a classic.

In praise of Ladybird Modernism and classless aspiration

I think it was those parodies from a few years back - some of them published by Penguin, who would once have looked down their beak at the idea - that cemented a false idea of Ladybird Books in the public mind.

The truth is rather different:

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. 

That's John Grindrod writing on his imagined Ladybird Book of Post-War Rebuilding. He presents much the same material in the video above.

Before I moved to Leicestershire at the age of 13, I lived in the new town of Hemel Hempstead. In many ways it was, for the reasons Grindrod gives, like living in a Ladybird Book.

I am tempted to use the term 'Ladybird Modernism' for the sort of humane, pre-Brutalist variety of modernism that flourished for some 25 years from the end of the war. Examples of this include Hertfordshire's postwar primary schools, Coventry Cathedral and the University of York's original campus.

Another criticism of Ladybird, and of their Key Words reading scheme in particular, is that they presented a middle-class lifestyle as the ideal to aspired to.

It may be here that the Key Words scheme was unfortunate in being launched in 1964. Because from my observation of crowd photographs, 1965 was the year everything changed in Britain.

Take the crowds thronging the platforms of obscure railway stations after on railway enthusiasts' excursions. Before the change, the men were in sports jackets and flannels, and the boys were in short trousers. Then suddenly everything changed and everyone was wearing jeans and anoraks.

So it was that Ladybird felt it necessary to commission new illustrations for the Key Words books. The 1964 Peter was dressed as the young Prince Charles had been: the 1970 version got to wear jeans and had longer hair and a cheeky grin.

And there is a danger in dismissing these books as designed to make the working class aspire to a middle-class lifestyle. Because any group taken up by the left is in danger of losing agency as part of the bargain.

Where is the evidence that working-class aspirations are different from those of the working class? Aren't a bigger house and a garden things that everyone would like to be able to afford? Or do they really crave a larger bath to keep their coal in?

The social position of Ladybird is well described in a brochure created to accompany an exhibition of  Ladybird illustrations by Harry Wingfield held at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, from 1 February 2002, which was shortly before Wingfield died:

They were aimed at the (predominantly white) families who were moving from the back-to-back terrace housing of their childhood to the newly built, green-field council and private estates of the 60s and 70s. 

Peter and Jane and their family supplied aspirational role models, intended to represent happiness and family unity, as well as teaching children how to read.

The brochure 

Follow that link to admire Wingfield's work and see what Ladybird gained by commissioning leading commercial artists to produce illustrations. His alarm clock is a work of art.

Looking at the Ladybird website, it appears that the Key Words books are now illustrated with cheap cartoons. Can't we do better for out children today than that?

Coventry Cathedral Choir: The Coventry Carol

This recording by the boys of Coventry Cathedral Choir is on an LP issued in 1971.

The 16th-century Coventry Carol was traditionally performed in Coventry as part of a mystery play, The Pageant of Shearman and the Tailors, which relates the Christmas story from the second chapter of the Gospel of St Matthew and refers to the Massacre of the Innocents. It takes the form of a lullaby sung by the mothers of the doomed children.

And on that cheerful note, let me wish all my readers a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

How Stanley Unwin and Uncle the elephant won the war

Before he became a performer, Stanley Unwin worked on the technical side of radio:

In 1940, Stanley successfully applied for a job at the BBC working on transmitters as a 'key thumper'. The Second World War was now underway and the Corporation desperately needed Morse operators across the country so he went off to do his bit at the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry.

Writing the foreword to the history of the station - Daventry Calling the World - in 1998, Unwin remembered that:

All of us at Daventry belonged to the Home Guard, having daily drills and rehearsals for potential air raids. A password was given each time a shift changed.

And there were air raids:

In 1942 a daylight raiding German plane strafed the buildings where we were ensconced, causing me to dash under the desk in the transmitter room. Mr Bill Gilbert, of Middlemore Farm, Daventry, informed us that it was a Dornier 215 fighter bomber. 

During the blitz on Coventry the drone of the raiding bombers accompanied the sound of the BBC monitored programmes as the incendiary bombs illuminated the horizon. Even the buzz of falling shrapnel from the anti aircraft fire could be heard on the transmitter site.

But Stanley Unwin wasn't the only giant of the British nonsense tradition at Daventry during the war. 

One of his grandchildren write about the Rev. J.P. Martin, author of the Uncle books:

With the beginning of the second world war he was minister in Daventry to the BBC engineers who were transmitting to the Empire at war and across occupied Europe.  Before the war they had secret experiments in the development of radar, the weapon which enabled the Spitfires to win the Battle of Britain. German planes crossed his Northamptonshire skies to destroy Coventry and its cathedral. ...

My mother Stella with my brother Andrew and myself was evacuated at three hours notice because Colchester was the initial target for Hitler’s Operation Sealion for the invasion of Britain in 1940. We were the most fortunate of refugees in Daventry with Nancy and J.P Martin. As a child one was always being told Uncle stories which J.P. Martin had dreamed up in the night.

It was exciting to see J.P. Martin collected in a jeep as a chaplain to conduct services at the army munitions depot at Weedon, which had been built in the Napoleonic wars. He was preaching again to men who again were fighting for freedom, dying in yet another war. Little did he think when he had volunteered as a chaplain in 1918 that he would be talking to his own sons, both born in the first world war and now of an age to be killed for their country.

Did Unwin and the Revd Martin meet? Were they friends? I'm sure they would have got on.

Photo-identity for voters, racism and the Electoral Commission

Forcing people to show photographic identity before they could vote in May's local elections led to racial and disability discrimination. That's the conclusion of a report published today by the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution.

I can't find the report online, but the Guardian says:

The report, which has been seen by the Guardian, says: “The current voter-ID system is, as it stands, a ‘poisoned cure’ in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.”

The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.

They highlighted the case of Andrea Barrett, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling station after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.

The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barrett the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”

The point that demanding photo ID from voters disenfranchises more electors than it protects will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on the issue.

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the local elections:

A 2014 report by the Electoral Commission arguing in favour of voter ID – which the organisation continues to back – conceded that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud.’

But he said much more about what turns out to have been a worrying document:

The 2014 Electoral Commission report, signed off on by its then chair, Jenny Watson, is written in an odd key. Rather than enumerating, in bureaucratic, quantitative terms, the scale of the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. 

It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s happening – where, in the report’s words, there appears to be ‘a greater risk of cases of alleged fraud being reported’.

Who are the people who suspect foul play, and whom do they suspect, and why? The commission hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. 

‘We have heard some strongly held views,’ the report states, ‘based in particular on reported first-hand experience by some campaigners and elected representatives, that electoral fraud is more likely to be committed by or in support of candidates standing for election in areas which are largely or predominately populated by some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh.’

The Electoral Commission isn't racist, you understand, but it believes we have to humour voters who are by changing the law to put a burden on all of us and deny some people their votes.

I tried to download the report from the commission website, but was met with notices saying 'The requested page could not be found' and 'We have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack. Find out about the data affected, the potential impact, and the measures we’ve taken.'

In view of the sensitivity of some of the date the commission holds, it's worrying to come across this story on BBC News:

The Electoral Commission has confirmed it failed a basic cyber-security test around the same time hackers gained entry to the organisation.

A whistleblower told the BBC that the Commission was given an automatic fail during a Cyber Essentials audit.

Last month the Commission revealed that "hostile actors" accessed its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.

A spokeswoman said the Commission had still not passed the basic test.

This makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be safer to allow councils to look after their own electoral data.

And, though the idea of a body independent of government to supervise elections is appealing, the Electoral Commission does not come across as being that body.

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"The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley - all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War." Helen Lewis on the end of the second Elizabethan Age.

Max Ghenis, Nikhil Woodruff and Charles Bauman make the case for bringing the taxation of land values and universal basic income together.

Tom Ravenscroft looks at 20 significant buildings opened by the Queen during her 70-year reign.

"We read to prepare for life. It follows, then, that we are raising our boys to dismiss other people’s experiences, and to see their needs and concerns as the centre of things. We are raising our boys to lack empathy." Caroline Paul says boys should read books with female protagonists.

"Harold was in high spirits, and read to us his favourite lines about cricket, from Francis Thompson’s poem 'At Lord’s', with added relish: 'For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,/ And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,/ And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host/As the run stealers flicker to and fro...'" Shomit Dutta remembers playing cricket with Harold Pinter.

David Cantwell senses a Creedence Clearwater Revival revival.

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Richard Sears examines research suggesting that the overuse of psychiatric drugs is worsening public mental health in America.

"Each day on Twitter someone is held up for widespread public ridicule, and you want to make sure that it’s not you, because your job in life is never to do anything that might result in you getting made fun of by others." Freddie deBoer suggests we should not spend all day ridiculing others from afar on social media.

In the post-war era, Coventry was rebuilt as an optimistic, modernist city. But the selling off of the city centre since the 1980s has made this year's City of Culture feel more like a City for Developers, says Owen Hatherley.

"The gaze of the elf on the child’s real world (as opposed to play world) resonates with the purpose of the panopticon, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century design for a model prison (a central tower in a circular structure, surrounded by cells). Backlighting in the central tower made it impossible for prisoners to discern whether or not they were being watched." Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin uncover the sinister side of The Elf on the Shelf.

"Eardley’s short career is one of the most fascinating of her generation. She is a feverish, romantic successor to Goya and Soutine, and in these Glasgow pictures she is essentially a storyteller, capturing a community as it vanishes. The other pole of her painting life had nothing to do with urban Glasgow, but was situated among the seascapes and fields of Catterline, a village on the Kincardineshire coast that she began to visit in the early 1950s." Andrew O'Hagan celebrates the artist Joan Eardley.

Ed Simon on the rediscovery of the work of Thomas Traherne: "Circumstances surrounding the occasional rediscovery of the poetry of the 17th-century divine Thomas Traherne are as something out of one of his strange lyrics. Intimations of the allegorical, when in the winter of 1896—more than two centuries after he’d died—and some of his manuscript poetry was discovered in a London book stall among a heap that was 'about to be trashed.' ... How eerily appropriate that among that refuse was Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which included his observation that the “world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.” Not until he chances upon it in a London book stall."

Department for Transport halts work on East Midlands leg of HS2

The Birmingham Post reports:

Work on the eastern leg of the High Speed Two rail line has stopped, the project's chief executive has admitted. Officials are busy preparing plans to extend the HS2 line north west to Manchester, but they have been told by the Department for Transport to halt work on the planned section between Birmingham and the East Midlands, and onwards to Leeds.

HS2 Chief Executive Mark Thurston said: "We wait to be guided by the Department on what we do with the eastern link."

It has been rumoured for some time that the East Midlands leg of HS2 is under review. And, as someone who has always found this project hard to love, I am not heartbroken at this news.

I know the arguments about HS2 increasing the capacity for regional services, it's just that they appear not to hold true here in the East Midlands.

As Jones the Planner blogged back in April 2013:

The HS2 business case claims that 80% of passengers from Nottingham will transfer from MML to HS2, and to help this heroic punt come true, hidden in with the small print, you find the assumption that direct trains from the new Nottingham Hub to St Pancras will be cut by half. Well, that will do a lot for city centre competitiveness, I don’t think. 

So actually Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield get a worse train service to their city centres, where most people want to be, than they do now - but great if you want to drive to a Parkway station. Leicester, a city of some half a million people will no longer have a mainline service as such. 

It is bizarre if not surprising that a project which started with the aim of boosting provincial cities should end up promoting plans which will hugely undermine city centres and urban economies and positively promote exurban motorway sprawl.

For this reason I would rather see money spent on the electrification of the Midland main line all the way to Sheffield and on local improvements, such as the proposed 'diveunder' at Nuneaton to allow a direct from Nottingham and Leicester to Coventry.

Building Coventry Cathedral

Historic England introduces this video on YouTube:

Using photographs from Historic England’s Archive, KS2 students learnt more about their local heritage. The students carried out oral history interviews with people who constructed Coventry Cathedral and together they visited the building.

Trains between Leicester and Coventry to return after 20 years?

Embed from Getty Images

The Leicester Mercury reports:

Plans to revive direct trains between Leicester and Coventry and Nottingham for the first time in 20 years have been hailed a 'once in a generation' opportunity.'

Midlands Connect want to bring back the direct rail links to improve current connections which Leicester mayor Sir Peter Soulsby calls 'appalling.'

As it stands, the train journey from Coventry to Leicester takes close to an hour despite the cities being so close.

New plans would introduce two new trains each hour which would also call at Loughborough, East Midlands Parkway and Nottingham, made possible by a new 'dive under' at Nuneaton.

You can download Midlands Connect's report from its website.

I have always mourned the loss of this service. It provided useful connection at Coventry to Oxford, Reading and the South.

And some of my earliest visits to Shropshire went via this route too. In those days you could pick up the Euston to Shrewsbury service at Coventry, which removed the need to change at Birmingham New Street.