Alexander McCall Smith on publishing novels in serial form

Occasionally a writer will still publish a novel in instalments as the Victorians did. In the preface to his 44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith describes the genesis of the book in his meeting Armistead Maupin at a party in California. Maupin had originally published the first five of his celebrated Tales from the City books in this manner. 

On his return to Scotland, McCall Smith wrote an article about this meeting in The Scotsman, saying it was a shame that newspapers no long published serialised novels. The newspaper’s editorial staff took up the implicit challenge and, over an optimistic lunch, he found himself agreeing to publish a novel in that paper's pages in daily instalments:

The real challenge in writing a novel that is to be serialised in this particular way – that is, in relatively small segments – is to keep the momentum of the narrative going without becoming too staccato in tone. … Above all, a serial novel must be entertaining. This does not mean that one cannot deal with serious topics, or make appeal to the finer emotions of the reader, but one has to keep a light touch.

When the serial started to run, I had a number of sections already completed. As the months went by, however, I had fewer and fewer pages in hand, and towards the end I was only three episodes ahead of publication. This was very different, then, from merely taking an existing manuscript and chopping it up into sections. The book was written while it was being published. An obvious consequence of this was that I could not go back and make changes – it was too late to do that.

McCall has now written written 17 volumes in this 44 Scotland Street series, but I don’t know if he published any in serial form beyond the first two.

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.

Tony Blair's school was stolen from the poor children of Edinburgh

Tony Blair attended Fettes College in Edinburgh, which is often called "the Eton of Scotland". I've come across a footnote about the school's origins in Stiff Upper Lip by Tim Renton:

Sir William Fettes founded the college with a bequest of £14m (in 2017 money) for the "maintenance education and outfit" of orphans and to help people "who from innocent misfortune during their lives, are unable to give suitable education to their children". In 2012 only five of 750 children enrolled were paying no fees.

So it really is the Eton of Scotland. Eton College was founded by Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys.

This "grand theft of ancient buildings and endowments that had been specifically set up to educate the poor", as Renton puts it, was put beyond legal challenge by the Public Schools Act of 1868. With its encouragement, Fettes College opened in 1870.

Zack Polanski and Alistair Darling: Two soft rides from the Guardian

I'm late to the party on last week's Guardian interview with Zach Polanski, but I've still decided to come.

Reading it today, I find it's not the first time the Guardian has allowed the politician to present a carefully edited version of his past without challenge.

Zoe Williams¹ tells us that Polanksi:

started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016. “That was for one very clear reason,” he says. “Proportional representation – it’s always been really important to me.” He joined the Greens the following year...

But Polanski didn't stand in a London borough election: he stood for the Greater London Assembly. And, a prominent figure on social media, he clearly had higher ambitions with the Liberal Democrats. 

Some say he had his eye on the by-election in Richmond Park, and made up his mind to leave the Lib Dems once the local party decided to stick with Sarah Olney as their candidate.

And then there was that notorious article where he told a Sun journalist he could make her breasts bigger by using hypnosis.²

Reading it now, it looks like a puff piece for his business rather than a hatchet job. Yet Williams defends it on the grounds that "he was only just 30".

But this is not the first such interview I've seen in the Guardian. Here's Decca Aitkenhead profiling the late Alistair Darling back in 2008:

Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. "I was just quite interested in getting things done." His manifesto favoured "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member.

The truth was rather different and will surprise anyone who remembers Darling in days as Gordon Brown's chancellor.

Here's George Galloway remembering a meeting with Darling in 1973:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

And joining Labour didn't curb his militant tendencies:

Later ... he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze.

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy.

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left.

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been.

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

A reader asks: So what's the moral of all this?

Liberal England replies: I suppose it's that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Guardian.

The reader persists: That a bit obvious, isn't it?

Liberal England admits: I suppose it is. To be honest, I just wanted to repeat that George Galloway story one last time. Oh, and to show that I've found how to do the numbers for footnotes in superscript.³

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I won't hear a word against Zoe Williams: in my press officer days she was always a pleasure to deal with. Polly Toynbee, by contrast, once made me miss my train.
2. I'm not scandalised by that Sun article, it's just that it reminds me of when P.G. Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts, turns out to be a designer of ladies' underwear. And Polanski's suggested strategy of concentrating on winning an urban, Corbynite vote will appeal to many Green members.
3. See?

The Joy of Six 1335

"We may think that the dangers we face today are unprecedented (and in some ways perhaps they are) but history has a way of circling back on itself. When Jo warned that 'Europe still needs Britain, and Britain, Europe' and called for a moment of 'political initiative' to build partnerships, it feels as timely and as necessary now as it did then." Marking 75 years since Jo Grimond was first elected as MP for Orkney and Shetland, Alistair Carmichael finds inspiration in a famous speech by the former Liberal leader.

Rachel Hewitt argues that telling boys and men that they're disadvantaged only hinders them further - and, anyway, it's not true: "If we really want to help boys and men be happier, then perhaps, as a society, we could forge a different and more positive outlook on masculinity, in which we focus less on how men are purportedly hard done by and emasculated compared to the last century, and more on the genuinely fulfilling opportunities that are open to them in this brave new world."

Liam Geraghty on a report that finds new housing estates are forcing their residents to rely on cars.

Only a quarter of students at the University of Edinburgh are Scottish, with the result, says Melissa Knight, that they have found themselves the unwanted target of discrimination from English snobs who often look down on, and mock them due to their accents or working-class backgrounds.

Alwyn Turner reminds us of an earlier politician who had ambitions to take over a party led by Nigel Farage." As far as the media were concerned, Kilroy-Silk was 'UKIP’s star turn', its leader-in-waiting. But he didn’t wish to wait. The man who’d once called on socialists to act with ‘a tint of arrogance’ was now sixty-two and impatient. At the party conference in October 2004, he set out his stall in a typically assured performance."

"Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling." After many years, Adam Roberts reads the Gormenghast trilogy again.

'LIKE A ROCK' Cops hunting Edinburgh bike ned who battered man with an onion

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Scottish Sun for this tale of life in the nation's capital.

The Joy of Six 1219

Andy Boddington, a Lib Dem councillor in Ludlow, explains why he won't be signing a petition on Gaza organised by a Shropshire resident: "How can you be a peace campaigner when you accuse people who won’t sign as having extreme views without knowing their views or reasons for not signing. Mr Robbins should withdraw his reckless attempt to name and shame councillors and to put them in danger. He should work towards peace in the Middle East not towards creating conflict in Shropshire."

"When I explained my situation to my manager, they said I had just two weeks off on full pay. After that, I’d get what is known as statutory sick pay from my employer, paid at just £109.40 a week. I could hardly believe it." After experiencing the financial blow that being diagnosed with cancer also brings, Danny Berry has joined the Safe Sick Pay campaign.

"The point is - there were no pro-slavery societies. People who wanted to carry on benefiting from slavery for as long as possible counseled delay and inaction - that was the only realistic course. It would not have been tenable for Dundas or any other public figure to argue in favour of slavery. In that sense, there are analogies with climate change." Jackie Kemp looks at the different ways the story of slavery is represented by Edinburgh's monuments."

Historic England considers Cornwall's under-researched queer literary history.

"Eight new villages were planned for the Forest, Kielder itself would be the largest - 'new village communities of estate workers, adequately and compactly housed, and enjoying a high standard of local amenities'." Municipal Dreams on a postwar experiment in rural housing.

Stephen Wagg likes Kenneth More far more as an actor than I do, but I still enjoyed his discussion of the sudden decline of More's career: "More ... received an offer from David Lean to play the lead in an adaptation of Richard Mason’s interracial romance novel, The Wind Cannot Read. He says he turned it down, unsure if the public would accept him in a 'Rupert Brooke-style' part; More later called this decision his biggest professional mistake."

Alistair Darling's politics were not as dull as people are saying

I'm sorry to hear of the death of Alistair Darling. We owe him our gratitude as, together with Gordon Brown, he did much to stabilise the world financial system after the global crisis of 2007-8.

He is being written of as an outwardly dull politician who was funny and charming in private life.

While such figures today seem to belong to a more civilised but vanished order, it's fair to say that Darling's politics were not always dull.

So let me, in a spirit of affection, repeat the George Galloway's reminiscences from the Daily Record in March 2008:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf. 

Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze. 

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy. 

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. 

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time. 

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been. 

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

Yes, Darling's politics were once so exciting that the Scottish Labour Party sent George Galloway to talk some sense into him.

The Joy of Six 1182

"Highlighting these cases is vital because they take place day in, day out, in courts up and down the country, and until this year, with the introduction of the pilot, we’ve not been able to shine a light on this important area of court business." Polly Rippon reports from the normally secretive family courts.

Anna Minton says the tide may finally be turning against the demolition of council estates: "Estate regeneration schemes have seen more than 100 of London's council estates demolished and replaced with developments of predominantly luxury apartments, redefining the British capital and fuelling the housing crisis. Communities across London have been displaced and tens of thousands of new homes have been built, but the vast majority are financially far out of reach for people seeking to buy a home, while thousands lie empty and unsold."

Mary Gagen explains why keeping one mature street tree is far better for humans and nature than planting lots of new ones.

"We’re  shocked  saddened and disgusted to see that our fellow Kensington blog From The Hornets Nest have been taken down. Yes. The whole blog." THis Is North Kensington on the worrying reason for the sudden disappearance of a popular blog.

"In April 1948, when the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos football team requested permission to play a charitable football match against an English select side at the New Meadowbank sports ground, they were denied permission by the City Corporation's General Purposes Committee. When they had been allowed to play there in 1946, 17,000 spectators had turned out to watch a 2-2 draw." Threadinburgh on the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos, the trailblazing women’s football team denied a sporting chance by the authorities.

Ian Visits chooses five Doctor Who episodes that feature the London Underground.

Stuart Henry broadcasting on Radio One in 1973

Here's a clip of the Radio One and Radio Luxemburg DJ Stuart Henry in action and talking about his approach to the job. I wrote about him when choosing Queen Bitch by David Bowie on Sunday.

A product of Stewart's Melville College and Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, Henry was an actor before he went into music radio. His career on the pirate stations was short-lived because he suffered terribly with seasickness, but he found safe harbour at the BBC until his health began to decline.

In his obituary of Henry, Chris Welch quoted Johnny Beerling, a former controller of Radio One:

"Stuart was a great guy. He used to do a spot called 'She's Leaving Home', which was all about missing youngsters. 

He showed a concern for social action broadcasting a long time before Radio 1 was ever involved with it. He'd say, 'I'm no asking you to go back, my friend, what I want you to do is let your parents know you're all right." He'd get people to ring in and make contact. (He used the old Beatles song as a theme tune.) 

He also campaigned about nuclear testing and had an environment spot on his Saturday morning show, before it was a popular issue."

Splinter: Costafine Town

On Thursday the Lib Dems gained a seat in Edinburgh's Corstorphine/Murrayfield ward, which naturally put me in mind of this obscure record from 1974. 

So I did a bit of research.

The first thing I found was that Costafine Town wasn't obscure in its day: it made No. 17 in the UK singles chart.

And Splinter were the first band signed by George Harrison to his Dark Horse Records label. Not only that: he produced this single and is playing bass on it.

As to Costafine Town itself, the song doesn't sell the place to me. The detail in the verses goes against the chorus's claim that "it's a fine town". Still, local patriotism is in a fine thing.

But where is it?

Splinter were a South Shields band, and Literary Corstophine tells us:

No 'Corstorphine Town' currently appears on the map in South Shields, but that is not surprising. Not only was the north east of England a significant target for German bombs during WWII, it was also heavily redeveloped in the decades just after the war. 

All that appears to remain of Corstorphine Town is a single pub called the Commercial Hotel. It is to be found in the Riverside area of South Shields.

That website is not sure whether the locale was named after after a businessman named Robbie Corstorphine, after someone who came from what was then a village west of Edinburgh or after anything at all, but the local pronunciation became 'Costafine'.

This second video also tells retails that history, including an interview with Bob Purvis from Splinter who wrote the song.

And right at the end, the Scottish presenters teach me the correct pronunciation of the Edinburgh Corstophine.

Lib Dems seek more influence in Edinburgh after yesterday's thumping by-election win

Last night the Liberal Democrats gained an Edinburgh Council seat from the SNP, with our candidate Fiona Bennett taking 56 per cent of first preferences in the Corstorphine/Murrayfield ward.

Corstorphine / Murrayfield (Edinburgh) council by-election result:

LDEM: 56.7% (+6.5)
SNP: 13.4% (-5.4)
CON: 9.8% (-6.3)
IND(s): 7.7% (+7.7)
LAB: 7.0% (-0.9)
GRN: 5.2% (-1.8)
LBT: 0.2% (+0.2)

Votes cast: 8,078

Lib Dem GAIN from SNP [multi-member ward].https://t.co/DHvzhDJ4AS

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) March 10, 2023

The Edinburgh Evening News says:

The result leaves the SNP with 18 seats, the Lib Dems 13, Labour 12, Greens 10 and Tories nine, with one independent. The fact the Lib Dems have now overtaken Labour, the party they helped into power as a minority administration after last year’s elections, could see them bid to increase their influence, demand a coalition or even bid to take control of the council themselves. 

The party was already in buoyant mood after their budget proposals were adopted by the council after tactical voting by the Greens ensured Labour’s package was defeated.

Kevin Lang, Lib Dem group leader, told the paper:

"This is a historic result for the Liberal Democrats. It's the highest number of votes we have ever got in a council by-election in Edinburgh or anywhere in Scotland ... 

"I'm over the moon for Fiona Bennett. She was a first class candidate and I think she will make a big contribution to Edinburgh council in the months and years ahead."

Princes Street: Edinburgh's lost railway terminus

Closed to passengers in 1965 and largely demolished by 1970, Princes Street was once the Edinburgh station for Glasgow, Carlisle and most English cities.

But British Rail wanted rationalisation, and though Princes Street had a street-level entrance, the rather subterranean Waverley was larger, more central and had access to the East Coast Main Line. So Waverley was chosen to be Edinburgh's only principal station.

Jago Hazzard doesn't find much of it left today, but you can see some photographs of Princes Street station in the Edinburgh Evening News.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Labour will target NO Liberal Democrat seats as the next election

The Daily Mail has a story today...

OK, let's get this bit over with...

The Daily Mail has a story today under, at least on its website, the headline:

Labour will target just TWO Liberal Democrat seats to win the next election in anti-Tory manoeuvre

But when you read the story those two seats turn out to be Sheffield Hallam and somewhere unspecified in Scotland.

Sheffield Hallam, of course, is a Labour seat. And there is no Liberal Democrat seat in Scotland where Labour are within a mile of being anywhere near having a chance of running us close.

It may be that Labour is worried about the Lib Dems eyeing Edinburgh South, which used to be a target for us, but it's hard to think they have much to worry about there at the moment.

Anyway, it follow from this that the Mail should have headlined its story:

Labour will target NO Liberal Democrat seats to win the next election in anti-Tory manoeuvre

The Joy of Six 1073

"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.

Six of the Best 997

"Many Liberal Democrats don’t know that the late great Paddy Ashdown leaned heavily on the concept of a Basic Income as a fundamental component of his 'Citizens' Britain', arguing that 'every step we take towards a basic income liberates power in the hands of the citizen.'" Daniel Mermelstein believes universal basic income is a fundamentally liberal policy and a vote winner.

Shane Burke says the status quo in undercover policing threatens political rights.

"It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end." Lorna Finlayson explains why she walked out of school at 13.

Henry Grabar looks at what New York could do if it took a quarter of its roads away from cars.

"Upon arrival in Scotland, Heron was thrown in for his debut against Morton in a League Cup tie; the Jamaican adding Celtic’s second goal in a 2-0 win with a 20-yard first-half strike." Did you know Gil Scott-Heron's father played for Celtic? Craig Stephen will tell you all about him.

Stefan Sagrott looks at Edinburgh's Innocent Railway.

Highland Journey (1957)

In this British Transport Films production we follow a coach tour from Edinburgh to the Highlands.

As a site devoted to these films explains, the route taken meets the Highlands at Killin, and then goes over Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe to Ben Nevis, the entrance to the Great Glen. Here we meet the West Highland railway line, and follow it on its journey through the Bonnie Prince Charlie country to Mallaig. 

Returning to the Great Glen we rejoin the coach route out through the Glen Foyne and Glen Shiel to the Kyle of Lochalsh, and take the ferry over to Skye.

Scottish Lib Dems target their lost heartlands

The Quiraing, Skye

The Scottish Lib Dems' election co-ordinator Alex Cole-Hamilton is notably bullish in an interview for Scotland on Sunday.

He says: "We’re very excited about the prospect of a general election whenever it comes."

Among the former Lib Dems Westminster seats he lists as good prospects are Charles Kennedy's old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber; Aberdeen South; Argyll and Bute; and North East Fife.

There's more:

The traditional stronghold in the Borders seat of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk – which the party held for decades – is also in play. The Lib Dems are even confident of muscling their way into the Edinburgh North and Leith, the seat held by the SNP’s Deidre Brock.

What is most encouraging is Alex's claim that "It’s true to say that the Highlands are rediscovering their liberal traditions."

Viewed from a distance, the Scottish Lib Dems have so far based their welcome recovery on emphasising their unionist credentials. It is good to see them going beyond that.

Looking back on the golden age of blogging

One of the stars of the early years of Liberal Democrat blogging was Nick Barlow.

The other day he announced (on Medium) that he had decided to let his blog What You Can Get Away with disappear - though it is still available via the Wayback Machine.

In making that announcement he wrote:

In the way that all ageing men looking back on their youth remember it as a golden age, that period up to around 2005 was the heyday of British blogging, especially political blogging. 

There was a community and a network of writers, reading and responding to each other, fed into by a wave of commenters who’d pop up across a range of blogs to contribute to the debate and it all felt like one big conversation. It could get challenging and angry at times (this was the period of the Iraq War) but it felt like something interesting and different was going on. 

And then, like so many other things, it just got too big. The “blogosphere” (a terrible word, but I never found a better one) started to become a place where people realised they could make a name for themselves, and blogs started becoming more about self-promotion and developing your own community, not just one part of a wider and bigger conversation. 

Twitter and Facebook started nibbling at the edges of what blogging had been, especially the conversational aspects of it, and blogs started becoming more content repositories than anything else.

I would place the good old days a little nearer than that.

In saying that I am thinking of the wonderful unconference Caron Lindsay organised in Edinburgh in 2009 and my trip to New York (courtesy of Oxfam) the following year.

Just after I got back from the US I was given a free pizza by Domino's after posting about them, which means my two best freebies from blogging came back to back.

But whenever the golden age of blogging was, we can agree that it is now long over.

I originally set up Liberal England as a way of promoting a long-vanished site I posted for Lord Bonkers, but blogging soon became my passion.

As you may have noticed, I fell in love with Twitter too, but every time I have got close to having a Facebook page something has happened to put me off. Maybe, deep down, I am afraid that it would supplant this blog.

I am aware that I ought to write more articles and even books, but I remain hooked on the instant rewards that blogging brings.

And I have never found a platform that has tempted me away from dear old Blogger.

Alistair Darling and councils setting illegal budgets

Embed from Getty Images

I see Dawn Butler has spoken in praise of Labour councils that refused to set a balance budget because of the limits Margaret Thatcher's government set for them.

Which gives me a perfect excuse for reprinting one of this blog's favourite quotations.

Here is George Galloway reminiscing in 2008:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf. 

Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze. 

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy. 

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. 

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time. 

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been. 

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.