The Joy of Six 1558

"Someone who attended a private school in London or the South East is 24 times more likely to become a permanent secretary than someone educated at a state school in the North. For a seat in the House of Lords, the gap is 23-fold. That is not class inequality plus regional inequality. It is what happens when they multiply." Nick Harrison asks if No 10 North will change who runs Britain.

Janice Mak says American schools are increasingly questioning whether every student needs a laptop: "This distinction between passive consumption and purposeful use is increasingly shaping school policy. Updated policies also reflect an emerging emphasis on age-appropriate screen use, student well-being and ensuring that technology can support, rather than replace, direct instruction and student collaboration."

Adam Sherwin reports on the plans to turn off Freeview television and the threat that poses to Talking Pictures TV.

Scott Barry Kaufman argues that the role of luck in successful lives is far greater than we realise.

"Do not be lulled into complacency by the family-film aesthetics. When Mom the Sheepdog instructed Babe the Pig to dominate other animals by abusing them, demeaning them, and telling them what to do, and Babe refused because disrespecting another living creature would be wrong? That moment might have radicalised a generation." Roxana Hadadi discusses the politics of Babe (1995).

"From the end of the Victorian period, Broadstairs was strategically marketing its Dickensian connections through postcards, guide books and festivals. In 1897 Alfred Harmsworth (founder of the Daily Mail) was one of the organisers of a ‘Dickens Village’, which recreated scenes including Defarge’s wine shop, Peggotty’s boat, the Great White Hart at Ipswich and the Old Curiosity Shop. The festival was successful enough to be repeated the following year." Carolyn Oulton on the long history of Dickens tourism in Broadstairs.

The Joy of Six 1556

"Dartford Warblers skim across the heather before diving into the vegetation, defying all but the quickest observers. At dusk Nightjars churr from the isolated trees or fly overhead, the males clapping their wings in display flight." David Jobbins mourns what has been lost to the fire at Dunwich Heath.

Sam Power explains why Reform UK will find it hard to shake off questions about its donors: "An important thing to note is that the legal onus rests almost entirely on the donor. The party in receipt of the donation simply needs to show that it has conducted a permissibility check on them. In the case of Reform, some of its biggest donors (like Tice) are effectively woven into the party apparatus. This makes it much harder for the party to be seen to be one step removed from the money."

An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.

Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.

Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.

"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.

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."

Our universities aren't just managerialist: they're authoritarian

Britain's universities aren't just getting rid of the arts and humanities: they're getting rid of collegiate governance too.

Here's Krzysztof Nawratek, senior lecturer in humanities and architecture at the University of Sheffield, writing in Times Higher Education:

I started my university career in Poland in 1988, a year before communism collapsed. I joined an underground anti-communist student association, went on strike and saw my hierarchical, conservative university slowly crumble.

However, even within the oppressive communist regime, Polish universities held on to one core belief: the university belonged to its academic community. Rectors and deans were elected. Senates and faculty councils had real authority. Leadership was temporary and accountable to those it served. The university did not belong to its managers; in fact, it’s hard to say if there was any real management at all.

When I moved to the UK in 2008, I expected universities not just to be more autonomous but more democratic. Instead, I found institutions that were independent from the state but whose autonomy lay with their executive teams and governing bodies, not with the university as a whole.

British universities are clearly part of the late capitalist system,¹ and critics typically point to their neoliberal agenda and managerialism. But I think that description no longer fits. British universities are becoming not so much managerialist as authoritarian. 

This might sound harsh but I am not talking about dictatorship. The atmosphere of fear and expected obedience reminds me of my time as a student in Poland but the reason I use the word authoritarian is more banal: leadership is immune to any actionable feedback from below. Consultation still exists but nothing anyone says can change the decision or remove those who made it.

This trend away from democratic decision-making towards managerialism and ultimately authoritarianism can be seen across British society, not just in universities, but in local councils, professional bodies and even sport.

At the heart of it lies the belief that democracy, discussion and consultation are inefficient, but that belief is mistaken.

As it's Karl Popper's birthday, let me quote again his greatest British populariser, Bryan Magee:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship. 

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies. 

It is not – as, again, had been believed by most people before – because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

That comes from Magee's intellectual biography Confessions of a Philosopher.

Notes

1. I am suspicious of the expression 'late capitalism': it suggests a claim to knowledge of the future, or at least a confidence in how it will turn out, to which the writer is not entitled. I fear that what will come after late capitalism is even later capitalism.

Alexander Mackendrick and Sweet Smell of Success

At Ealing Studios, Alexander Mackendrick directed one masterpiece, The Ladykillers, and four more of the best films made there: Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, Mandy and The 'Maggie'.

When Ealing folded he went to Hollywood, where his first film was the noir Sweet Smell of Success. Though it failed in America on its release in 1957, it is now recognised as another masterpiece and is the subject of this superior video masterclass.

Mackendrick then suffered the indignity of being taken off two consecutive films and so did not complete another until 1963, when he made Sammy Going South for his old Ealing boss Michael Balcon.

Realising that he was no Hollywood hustler, Mackendrick turned, as you will see in the video, to academia. He became the founding dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts (now the CalArts School of Film/Video), giving up that position in 1978 to become a professor there.

A collection of his hand outs and lectures was published as On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director in 2005, with an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

When I mentioned another Ealing film, Hue and Cry, in a piece for Lion & Unicorn, I suggested that it "feels more Roberto Rosselini than Ealing." What I didn't know when I wrote that was that the wartime British official who gave Rosselini permission to shoot Rome, Open City was Alexander Mackendrick.

Soho Parish primary: Without this school it’s all just tourists, isn’t it?

We're used to stories of rural primary schools closing, but yesterday the Guardian had something different: a report on the uncertain fate of Soho Parish C of E primary school:

Sandwiched between a strip club, a West End theatre and a pub might not be the most obvious location for a school but Soho Parish C of E primary has thrived for decades among the colourful charms of inner London.

But in an area that once had 16 schools, Soho Parish is the last remaining and its time may soon be up, a victim of the post-Covid downturn and falling pupil numbers that are forecast to close hundreds of primary schools across England.

In his article, the paper's education editor Tim Adams quoted a couple of parents. One said:

"The problem is that people around here aren’t having children. There’s actually council housing hidden here and there but there’s nothing much for families. It’s mainly old people and single people. That’s up to the council."

And a second:

"Without this school it’s all just tourists, isn’t it?"

But this sort of story about urban schools will soon become familiar. Adams says:

Westminster has already experienced the largest decline in primary pupil numbers among local authorities, a fall of 16 per cent in the past five years. And new national forecasts suggest England is going the same way, with primary and nursery numbers falling by nearly 473,000 between now and 2031, the equivalent of more than 1500 primaries without pupils.

The Soho school is organising to resist closure and drawing up plans for the future, and it may be distinctive enough to survive. But may other urban primaries won't.

The Joy of Six 1549

Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story."

A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such deaths over the last five years have not been reviewed, reports Karin Goodwin.

"If I can get 15 minutes with parents and policymakers, the argument becomes much more nuanced. Parents actually breathe a sigh of relief. They can make all the decisions they want to about how tech-free or tech-full they want to be, based on their values and what they want for their family – but they don’t have to make it with this threat that it's going to lead to horrible outcomes for their children." Amelia Gentleman interviews the psychologist Candice Odgers, who is a sceptic on social media bans for teenagers.

Alan Lester looks at the politics behind arguments about the teaching of the history of the British Empire in schools. 

Ferdinand Mount writes about M.R. James, ghosts and sex.

"As the narrator lies on the doctor’s couch, revealing her thoughts in a candid, unguarded manner, a harrowing picture begins to emerge. We learn how every aspect of her life has been dictated by men, from her upbringing to her choices of husbands and the nature of their marriages to the control of her physical and mental health." JacquiWine says Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Easter is the best novel she has read this year.

Ben Maguire welcomes dissolution of multi-academy trust over discipline concerns

There have been a growing number of stories in recent years about extreme disciplinary regimes in schools run by multi-academy trusts.

One of these has come to a head today, with the announcement by the Athena Learning Trust that it will dissolve itself transfer its schools to other organisations. The trust runs nine schools across Devon and Cornwall.

Ben Maguire, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, reports BBC News, welcomed the announcement saying it was "an important step for pupils and parents". 

The report also says:

MP Ben Maguire said he had met a number of concerned parents, students, trust representatives and Department for Education officials in recent months following reports of "serious issues relating to SEND provision and concerns around student punishments".

In February. Cllr James Ball, the deputy leader of the Independent group on Cornwall Council, who has a child at one of the schools, organised a public meeting for parents after almost 3,000 suspensions were handed out, external at Camborne Science and International Academy during the 2023/24 academic year:

Ball said he had been told children had been removed from the classroom for reasons including a pen running out, putting their hand up at the wrong time and for looking out of the window.

The flourishing of such unreasonable regimes suggests there is a lack of democracy in British education today. Cornwall Council had no power to intervene because MATs are governed from the Ministry for Education in London.

The Joy of Six 1547

"The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University." Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu ask why.

"Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border." Patrick Cockburn reviews For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride.

Kate Moore says we need more trees: "The sooner we plant trees – ideally in groups, as solitary trees are more vulnerable – and nurture them through the early years, the cooler we'll feel.  So, whether your garden is small or large, it’s time to plant trees to give you your own shaded, and naturally air-conditioned space."

Brett DeJager finds that school teachers are "worried about academic dishonesty but also about assessment, student reliance, critical thinking, misinformation and privacy. Those concerns point to a practical challenge schools now face: how to preserve meaningful evidence of learning when AI can produce polished academic work."

From psychiatric wonder drug, to CIA mind warfare to teenage menace. Grant McPhee looks at LSD use through its evolving coverage in British newspapers.

Jospehine Botting watches 21 Days, a film made just before Vivien Leigh took the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and as her affair with Laurence Olivier was blooming. It captures the pair falling in love and on the cusp of stardom, but its producer Alexander Korda thought it was not good enough to release.

Tory fury at VAT on school fees is all about social class

There was a story the other day about dozens of Labour MPs failing to mention the private schools they had attended in their Who's Who entries. I wasn't surprised by this: if I find it difficult to discover which schools a Labour MP attended, I generally assume they were privately educated.

But what was striking was the accusation by the Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake that 

"Their hypocrisy knows no limits. While they plot around the Cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations. They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them."

Because it is a naked appeal to upper-class solidarity. If you benefited from an unfair educational system, it implies, you are duty-bund to ensure that people of your class can continue to enjoy that advantage.

In reality, there's nothing hypocritical about deciding that a system you went through yourself should be reformed or abolished. I'd say it is a sign of a mature intellect, and we expect the Labour Party, even the timid version of it we see today that never mentions social class, to believe in fairness.

But sending their children to private schools is what upper class people do. It's an important part of their identity. Question the practice, and the clang of closing ranks is resounding.

And that solidarity can take extreme forms, as Alex Renton discovered when he went public about the abuse he had suffered as a small boy at his expensive prep school:

The reaction to my story was immediate – and shockingly personal.  "You’re a class traitor," said one friend, whose son had just started at  Eton. I thought she might have been joking – but she wasn’t the only one.

A few days after publication I was at a smart Edinburgh art gallery  party, standing with a glass of free wine in a group of people I  vaguely know. "Don’t stand too close to Renton!" one of them, an old  Etonian businessman, suddenly announced, grabbing my arm. "He might put  his hand down your trousers!" Most of the group chuckled. 

You may disagree with Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees, but there's nothing hypocritical about the policy.

The Joy of Six 1545

"Progressive politicians must see social media as a means to an end. If they’re swallowed by social media, they’ll lose their moral core. What’s more – and much worse – making social media the training school of modern politics risks giving a megaphone to fascists and racists who are able to preach their gospel of hate to millions without interruption." Sam Bright on the curse of influencer-politicians.

Jack Dyson reports on the consequences of falling school rolls. One in three councils expect more than a fifth of primary school places will be unfilled next year. 

"We used to think AI-generated fiction would always be obvious, and we were not prepared. Over the coming years, agents, editors, and slush readers at every level are going to need to educate themselves on how AI writes." Bona Books inadvertently bought a short story written by Artificial Intelligence for an anthology of queer speculative fiction.

Jennifer Davey offers a short round up of football-related contributions to Hansard over the years.

Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s delegate to the game's governing body FIDE and a candidate for its next deputy president, is interviewed about the long fight to break Russia's political grip on chess: "Russia has basically hijacked FIDE – just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal and so on."

"This is as much a novel of working class intellectualism (Hamer deploys a quotation from Macbeth without ostentation) as it is about the compromises of electoral politics. Shawcross and his children want comfort and security and health, but they also want the fruits of the knowledge and experience held by this culture that has turned them into marginal drudges of the machine age." With the accession of Andy Burnham imminent, Discontinued Notes looks again at the work of Howard Spring, 'the Dickens of Manchester'.

Jonathan Liew tots up the price English cricket has paid for Bazball

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Ben Stokes's final text innings was embarrassingly self-indulgent. As Jonathan Riew says in a great article in the Guardian today, it "managed to capture in a single moment everything people dislike about this team".

But he also looks far deeper into what ails English cricket. So he praises Stokes's "legendary" talent, endurance, ambition and competitiveness, and says those qualities could have inspired England to big series wins if they had been intelligently harnessed:

Instead, English cricket was more interested in commodifying Stokes’s talent than channelling it. Under the directorship of Andrew Strauss in the mid-2010s, and then again under McCullum from 2022 onwards, there was a clear culture shift away from team ethic towards individual expression. Play your shots. Fill your boots in franchise cricket. Be where the noise is. Party hard. 

A 2019 ECB strategy document stated that the job of the England team was to "create heroes", noting that young fans were often more inspired by individual athletes than the team they played for.

The results achieved under this new regime were impressive for a year or two, but have long been more disappointing than anything else. And, writes Riew, we have paid quite a price for those so-so returns:

Let’s consider some of the collateral damage English cricket has generated over the past two decades: the terrestrial television audience, state school cricket, the smaller counties, people who can no longer afford England tickets, an entire generation of players who were told they were a useless anachronism with no chance of making it for England. The Blast, detonated to make space for The Hundred, which has now been sold off, along with most of August.

And the future?

Once more, a new era is coming. Most probably it will be Brook, a man with no discernible leadership skills who bats like he left the oven on, but does generate excellent content. 

Perhaps we may even be treated to a display of performative humility, a fleeting attempt to reconnect with the public ahead of next year’s ticket deadline. As ever, we eagerly await the next chapter. Equally, there comes a point when you run out of things to burn down.

I can claim some prescience here, for I wrote this in Liberal Democrat News back in 2004:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

But then I suspect that goes for the British upper classes as a whole. 

The Joy of Six 1539

Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

The rigged system Freda Jackson overcame to become an actress in the 1930s

I wrote about the actress Freda Jackson's background on Central Bylines:

Jackson was born in Nottingham in 1907, the daughter of a railway porter. She was educated at High Pavement School and the city’s University College. In 1933 she was teaching English and Drama at Haywood School, Sherwood, and spending her evenings acting with a local theatre group, when a letter to the director of its repertory company won her an audition at Northampton’s Theatre Royal.

Yesterday's purchase Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92 tells us what happened after that successful audition:

Miss Jackson's status for her first five months in Northampton was that of pupil, which meant that she received no salary. She had originally applied to Herbert Prentice, by then at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, since the pupil system did not operate there, he advised her to try Northampton. The pupil arrangement was confined to actresses, young actors being in such short supply that they could command a salary from the outset.

The dedication of the pupil actress extended not only to support herself without salary, but also to providing an adequate personal wardrobe for modern plays, a much more onerous requirement than for her male colleagues.

Were young male actors really in such short supply, or was it simple sexism that saw them paid from the outset when young actresses weren't.

Whatever the reason, this arrangement made it next to impossible for a young working-class woman to embark on a theatrical career. It explains why maids in Thirties films, of which there were many, were usually played by upper-class girls with unconvincing cockney accents.

We are seeing a return to such an arrangement in Britain today: every well-endowed private school has its own theatre, but the public facilities open to youngsters from poorer homes are under increasing financial pressure.It's no wonder we see the same limited group of privately educated actors snaffling the star roles in British films. And narrowing the pipeline of talent entering the acting profession can only result in a reduction in quality.

Anyway, you can see Freda Jackson above as Mistress Quickly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V.

The other actors in the scene are Robert Newton as Pistol and two who were to be dead within months of shooting it: Frederick Cooper (with the nose) as Nym and Roy Emerton as Bardolph. The boy is unmistakably a young George Cole.

School uniform, boys in skirts and Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance'

For years, just as the coming of the Christmas season is marked by the appearance of the first disappointing 'Santa's Magic Xmas Wonderland, so the arrival of High Summer has been marked by a news story about boys being banned from wearing shorts to school in hot weather and, after a careful reading of their school's uniform regulations, turning up in skirts as a protest.

There is an inferior story of this sort in the Manchester Evening News. A father has protested because his son was almost banned from taking a mock exam because he turned up for it wearing shorts:

"She told me it isn't a policy for girls or boys, it's just a uniform policy," said Chris, a contracts manager. "I asked if I'd sent him in a skirt would he be allowed to sit his mocks and was told 'yes'. I said 'do you understand how stupid that sounds'. When I asked 'what's the difference between him wearing shorts or a skirt' she said that's our rules."

This tolerance of boys in skirts appears admirable – "we understand that some students want to experiment with their gender identity and we're cool with that" – but in reality the school is still enforcing petty uniform regulations. Today's teachers are the spiritual great grandchildren of the teachers who made small boys wear shorts in the snow.

And the school's apparent tolerance reduces the possibility of disagreement with its rules. For the power of such protests lies in the notion that the boys have been driven to do something ridiculous, but how can boys wearing skirts appear ridiculous in such an understanding school?

The story says the school has backed down, as schools generally do when confronted about such unreasonable rules, but I think for the first time I understand Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance".

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

The Joy of Six 1526

Daniel Katz report that the Makerfield by-election has become a poisoned chalice for Reform UK because of its choice of candidate.

"Over the past couple of decades, many progressives have found themselves in an awkward and novel position. As defenders of existing political institutions, as defenders of norms of civility and moderation, as technocratic policymakers shifting policies at the margin in response to past evidence." Ben Ansell argues that the left has ceded political radicalism to the right.

Lorna Finlayson defends universities as a 'space for exceptions': "The perception is that students and academics do nothing all day but doss around and mull over the meaning of life. It’s not really true – academics work on average far more than their contracted hours, while many students have developed concerningly puritanical tendencies – but, in my view, things were better when it was truer: people not only had a better time, but probably did better and more interesting work, when they were less pressured and given more slack."

Peter Jukes on the leaked documents that show the Kremlin’s influence machine now combines paid influencers, fake citizens and "cognitive strikes" to inflame tensions and shape European politics.

"Dead of Night exerted its greatest power through the manipulation of time. By sliding temporal planes over each other and curling events round to their beginning, the film found a fiendish new way to mess with a viewer’s head." Malcolm Gaskill praises Ealing Studios' 1945 portmanteau horror film.

"It’s hard to imagine so many being spooked by a soft-spoken woman who didn’t consume alcohol, smoke, or even drink caffeine, but in an industry so used to dominating over female singer-songwriters, dealing with a forthright black woman who had no intention to follow the rules probably sent a few industry bigwigs over the edge." Stephanie Phillips salutes Joan Armatrading.

Victorian schoolboys were not at all Victorian

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Here's more grist for my theory that the Victorians were far less Victorian than we imagine.

In Uppingham the other week I picked up a copy of Gillian Avery's Victorian People. Here she is on the Victorian schoolboy:

Much was to be written of godliness and manliness in reference to the education of Victorian boys. But manliness as understood by the early and mid-Victorians did not include reserve and a stiff upper lip. This was a much later development. Both in reality and in fiction, there were frequent, unashamed displays of emotion in boys' schools. 

Boys wept and flung their arms around each other as they protested eternal friendship; they threw themselves on the ground and clasped their masters' knees as they expressed their penitence, the schoolboys at Wellington wept as they heard their headmaster's last sermon. Master and pupil would kneel together to pray for guidance, a headmaster and his staff sometimes wept during staff meetings if there was a difference of opinion, friendships between boys between master and pupil were of an intensity that would now be considered dangerous.

This must be borne in mind by the modern reader of Tom Brown and Eric. The scenes where the dying Arthur persuades Tom to give up the use of cribs in preparing his Latin; or where Eric, on his knees, "his blue eyes drowned with tears," implores the headmaster to show leniency towards his friend, are not extravagant inventions of the writers concerned, but were perfectly possible in the emotional climate of the mid-19th century.

The caste of mind we think of as Victorian did not flourish until the later years of the queen's reign and it reached its fullest development well into the 20th century. I suspect the British stiff upper lip reached peak rigidity as a reaction to the unthinkable losses of the First World War.

And if private schools were designed to produce men fitted to keeping up the British Empire, they went on doing so for years after than empire had ceased to exist.

Victoria reigned for almost 64 years, so applying her name as an adjective to describe a rapidly changing society across that period is a foolish thing to do. It's almost as silly as using the term "Elizabethan" to describe British society between 1952 and 2022 would be.

The Joy of Six 1525

"Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. 'They are careless of the strife they cause,' he said. 'They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.'" Ian Dunt says John Major is a better former prime minister than Tony Blair will ever be.

Hannah Fearn argues that there is no sudden epidemic of laziness: "What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work."

Stefan Collini examines the roots of Britain's higher education crisis: "The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called 'producers' cartel' that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices."

"But when it comes to AI chatbots, the doctors have learned to proceed with caution. People may tolerate the idea of talking to a computer when booking a holiday or motor insurance but discussing something as personal as your health is quite a different matter." Rory Cellan-Jones on one GP surgery's mixed experience of introducing AI.

Gill Pain discusses what made Agatha Christie so successful: "There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them."

"In order to attract puffins to the island, they created 100, lifelike weather resistant decoy puffins and anchored them to the cliffs. To make the illusion as convincing as possible, the team also installed solar powered speakers to blast continuous puffin calls out to sea to catch the attention of passing juveniles." Eva Cahill reports an ingenious attempt to attract puffins back to an islet off the Isle of Man where they once thrived.

The Shortest History of Ireland by James Hawes

This review appears in the new Liberator – issue 435. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

The Shortest History of Ireland

James Hawes

Old Street, 2026, £15

Teachers tried to tell you many things when you weren’t listening properly, but here’s some history they really didn’t teach you at school. James Hawes tells the story of Ireland from the earliest times to the present day in a way that is constantly surprising and enlightening. I shall first urge you to read this book and then share a few of its most startling insights.

One of the keys to understanding Ireland is that it was never part of the Roman Empire and was thus spared the dislocation that the rest of Europe suffered when that empire fell. Christianity came to Ireland, but it was assimilated into what was in many ways a highly developed Iron Age civilisation. So in the early Medieval period, when Ireland’s population was half of England’s, not the tenth it is today, Irish scholars were prized across Europe, but their independent ways increasingly met with disapproval from thde church authorities in Rome.

The first colonisers of Ireland were not English but French. The Normans who took land there had not troubled to learn English to speak to the serfs they brought with them, but they did learn Gaelic so they could talk to their neighbours. The result was that those Normans soon adopted Irish customs, while the serfs saw many attractions in deserting their positions and becoming Irish. This consistent tendency of settlers to turn Irish frustrated the English Crown’s ambitions: when England finally turned a serious imperialist gaze on Ireland in 1546, the only part of the country it controlled was Dublin. Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee, incidentally, emerges as the first person to have talked of a British empire.

We English tend to see Ireland as sectarian, but the truth is that we exported it there. It was Protestant England that was sectarian, and it saw people who turned Irish as traitors. It was this attitude that explained the massacre of the garrison at Drogheda, and there were plenty of more extreme figures back at Westminster cheering Cromwell on. This was an England, as Hawes reminds us, that did not care that neither William III nor George I could speak English. The only thing that mattered was that they were not Catholic.

In the 19th century Britain spent a fortune trying to turn Ireland into a landscape of small Protestant farmers. The ruins of unwanted Anglican churches across Ireland are a reminder of this doomed project, while the payments to these uneconomically small arable farms. in what had historically been cattle country, were a heavy burden on independent Ireland until it joined the European Economic Community and its Common Agricultural Policy in 1971.

Finally, Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin. Hawes likens de Valera, with his control of the press and closeness to the church, to one of the authoritarian leaders who flourish in Eastern Europe today.

And the book ends on an optimistic note: not even Brexit has slowed the economic and social forces making an eventual reunification look increasingly likely.