Two police and crime commissioners leave the Conservative Party

Two Conservative police and crime commissioners - Marc Jones in Lincolnshire and Alison Hernandez in Cornwall and Devon - have announced that they are leaving the party and will serve out their terms as Independents.

The interesting thing is that neither of those news reports give the impression that the PCC is about to jump ship to Reform. Both are in their third term as PCC, which means they joined the Conservative Party before it abandoned Conservatism to became an English Nationalist party.

So perhaps these resignations are symptomatic of a flight of sensible people from the party (though a study of Hernandez's Wikipedia entry suggests she is not as sensible as all that).

The government has announced that PCCs will be abolished in 2028 and you can see why. The reports on Hernandez's resignation tells us she is

supported by a team of around 30 non-political staff led by a chief executive who will "continue holding the police to account" and fulfilling their statutory obligations.

The creation of PCCs was championed by those scourges of bureaucracy Daniel Hannon and Douglas Carswell.

The Leave campaign – Nigel Farage included – called for more non-EU migration to Britain

You'd never know it from the debate on immigration today, but:

In 2016, the official Vote Leave campaign actively advocated for more immigration from non-European countries. This wasn’t a fringe message – it was a central pillar of the campaign. 

This is a quote from an excellent article by Sam Bright, who reminds us that "every element of the Brexit campaign advocated for more non-white immigration – including Nigel Farage".

He backs this with quotes from a contemporary Financial Times report on Leave strategy and from Saqib Bhatti (now a Conservative MP and shadow education minister), Gisela Stuart, Priti Patel, Daniel Hannan, Boris Johnson and Douglas Carswell.

And here's what Nigel Farage had to say during the referendum campaign:

A Daily Mail headline on 8 June 2016 stated:

"More black people will be allowed into Britain if we leave the EU and immigration will become a ‘non-issue’, says Nigel Farage."

Farage claimed that Britain had:

"been stupid to turn our backs on the Commonwealth in favour of EU membership."

He argued that EU freedom of movement had made it "very difficult" for "qualified and skilled migrants from India and Africa" to come to Britain.

According to The Mail, after the Brexit vote, Farage favoured implementing an Australian points-based immigration policy, which would lead to “more black people” qualifying to enter the UK.

Ironically, Boris Johnson’s government – now the whipping boy of the far-right – implemented a points-based immigration system that directly reflected Farage’s favoured position prior to the vote.

That none of this is ever mentioned is a condemnation of the British media and of our politicians.

Harald Hardrada in Constantinople, Alfred the Great in Rome

Three weeks before he was defeated at the Battle of Hastings, Harold Godwinson - the last Anglo-Saxon king of England - had defeated Harald Hardrada, the king of Norway, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

That's Stamford Bridge the town to the east of York, not Stamford Bridge the football stadium, though fixture congestion was obviously a thing in the 11th century too.

Reading Cat Jarman's River Kings - one thing being a carer has done is give me time to read - I learnt something extraordinary: as a young man Hardrada had spent around 15 years in Constantinople and had commanded the Byzantine Empire's elite Varangian Guard

This should not be suprising - it is in Hardrada's Wikipedia entry - but it is does not fit with the picture we have of British history before the Norman Conquest. We are equally gobsmacked to learn that Alfred the Great was educated in Rome.

I once blogged about an appearance by David Starkey on Richard and Judy's television show: 

Starkey said the idea that 1066 is the most important date in British history is a recent one. In fact it dates from 1914 - the year when all things French became good and all things German bad. German Shepherd Dogs turned into Alsatians and the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha turned into the House of Windsor. 

Until then we had been very aware of our Saxon heritage and believed that the roots of our democracy lay in that era. After 1914 the Norman Conquest became almost a Year Zero and the Saxon kings were relegated to become a faintly embarrassing pre-history.

It's only Daniel Hannan who makes the point, so all my Twitter followers laugh at it, but it remains remarkable that the most famous date in English history - 1066 - marks our conquest by a foreign power.

Daniel Hannan's group told to repay €535,000 of EU funds

Now here's a thing:

A European conservative group co-founded by the Tories and led by Brexit campaigner and MEP Daniel Hannan has been asked to repay more than half a million euros of EU funds following an investigation into their spending, the Guardian has learned. ... 

Hannan, who has championed Brexit for more than a quarter of a century and was ACRE’s secretary-general until December 2017, is told that there are grounds to suspect a conflict of interest on his part, in leaked documents seen by the Guardian. Hannan called that conclusion "absurd" and accused investigators of making false insinuations that were "outrageous".

That from a Guardian exclusive by Jennifer Rankin.

She goes on to report:

British conservative sources sought to distance themselves from ACRE, an organisation they helped to create, which has been described by some party insiders as "Daniel Hannan's travel agency".

Don't blame Ladybird Books for the rise of Daniel Hannan

Otto English is someone I retweet a lot and I was pleased when he started a blog this autumn at Pin Prick.

But I have to take issue with his latest post, the wonderfully titled Ladybird Libertarians: Dan Hannan, Paddington and the pernicious impact of 1970s children’s literature on Brexit thinking.

I am the last one to say that the books people read as children have nothing to so with their later political views - after all, I am always banging on about Malcolm Saville here.

But the attempt to pin the blame for Daniel Hannan on Ladybird Books seems to be wrong for a number of reasons.

For instance the timing does not work. Daniel Hannan was born in Peru in 1971 and packed off to an English prep school at the age of eight. (Remember, when the Conservatives tell you that they are the party of the family that they have always been ruthless about depriving their children of family life if they think it will bring social or educational advantages.)

This mean he arrived at St Custard's or wherever it was just as Ladybird's heyday coming to an end.

As Anna Moore once wrote in the Guardian:

The iconic Ladybird world we remember probably stretched from the 50s through to the 70s. By the 80s, when Britain was changing and Ladybird wasn’t changing at the same pace, there was a feeling that those books were naive and a bit naff.

This seems exactly right to me: by the 1980s children's books were expected to be about "issues", not the simple enjoyment of the world around us that Ladybird offered.

But would you have found Ladybird books in a prep school in any year? I suspect their market was state primary schools and the children who went to them.

The children in the Peter and Jane books from which my mother taught me to read before I went to school (yes, I have reasons to be grateful to Ladybird) may look well scrubbed to modern eyes, but that does not put them into the prep-school-attending classes.

In an earlier Guardian article Chris Arnot talked to Harry Wingfield, who illustrated those books:

There was no real-life Jane. Or Peter, for that matter. Their images were forged from any number of photographs of local children, some taken on the new council estates that were springing up in the late 50s and early 60s.

"They were the sons and daughters of respectable workers," he says, "and they were well dressed. You didn't want dustbin kids. But they weren't as middle-class as everyone made out."

But the most serious thing the Pin Point gets wrong is the nature of Ladybird Books. I cannot think of a more progressive children's published in their era.

Yes, there were the books about the Kings and Queens that Otto objects too, but as he recognises there was also a series called 'People at Work.

And it you still think of Ladybird as twee, have a look at this Dirty Modern Scoundrel post on Ladybird Books and Modernism.

Even Peter and Jane moved with the times. In the books from which I learnt to read in the early 1960s, Peter resembled the young Prince Charles. By 1970 he had been redrawn with long hair and a cheeky grin and got to wear long trousers.

There are other children's books you can blame for the Brexit cast of mind - see my own exposé of Enid Blyton's proto fascism on the Guardian website - but Ladybird Books are innocent (in more than one sense of the word).

Leave campaigners implied Britain would stay in the Single Market

This video comes from the Open Britain website.

Why should 1066 be the most famous date in our history?

Embed from Getty Images

Daniel Hannan says the Norman Conquest was "a cataclysm for the English people" and for once he is right.

Certainly, there is something odd about the way that 1066, the date of an invasion, has become the most famous date in our history - the date that every schoolboy used to know.

Why should this be?

The answer may lie in a post I wrote remembering an afternoon when David Starkey appeared on Richard and Judy:

Starkey said the idea that 1066 is the most important date in British history is a recent one. In fact it dates from 1914 - the year when all things French became good and all things German bad. German Shepherd Dogs turned into Alsatians and the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha turned into the House of Windsor. 

Until then we had been very aware of our Saxon heritage and believed that the roots of our democracy lay in that era. After 1914 the Norman Conquest became almost a Year Zero and the Saxon kings were relegated to become a faintly embarrassing pre-history.

Starkey, in between the academic bitchery, does sometimes come up with something profound.

I remember him saying that David Cameron and Nick Clegg has modelled themselves on Tony Blair. But the Blair playbook said nothing about economic recessions, with the result that they were at a loss to know what to do when they came to power in the middle of one.

Later. If you want to improve your own knowledge of the period, Michael Wood's series King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons is currently on the BBC iPlayer.

Six of the Best 630

"Is it possible for someone to crave something for so long, and then be deluded about why it happened? To strive and strive, only for the country to fall into a different, meaner, poorer future?" Sam Knight profiles Daniel Hannan, the man who brought you Brexit.

'Baby-boomer' is thrown about a lot these days, usually in a pejorative sense. But, as Flip Chart Rick explains, the concept does not really work in the UK.

"In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, the American academic Deborah E. Lipstadt called David Irving, a British amateur historian, 'one of the most dangerous spokesmen for Holocaust denial'." Ian Buruma reviews Denial, a new film about Irving's unsuccessful libel action.

Jim Burt celebrates the rise of outdoor learning.

Elvis Costello grew up in England but is an New Yorker at heart, says Wendell Jamieson.

Catherine Hokin examines the strange case of the green children of Woolpit.