A German bombing raid on Dublin in May 1941 killed 28 people

Embed from Getty Images

Here's bit of history I didn't know. The caption for this photograph on Getty Images says:

Emergency services at work in a bomb damaged street in Dublin, Ireland, the day after a German air raid, which killed 34 people, 1st June 1941. The cause of the raid on neutral Ireland remains unclear. 

Wikipedia – it's strange how the advent of AI has changed that site from a near embarrassment to the last online redoubt of human judgement – explains what happened:

In the early morning hours of 31 May 1941, four German bombs fell on north Dublin. That night, a large number of German aircraft were spotted by Irish military observers and searchlights were put up to track them. It was noted that the aeroplanes were not flying in formation but independently in a meandering manner and some appeared to be circling. 

After the German planes did not clear the airspace over Dublin and continued erratically flying over the city, the Irish Army fired warning flares, starting with three flares representing the colours of the Irish flag to inform the pilots they were over neutral territory. followed by several red flares warning them to leave or be fired on. 

After fifteen minutes had passed, the order was given to open fire and Irish anti-aircraft guns began firing at the bombers. Local air defences were weak and the gunners were poorly trained. Although they had shells capable of destroying bomber aircraft, they failed to hit their targets.

Eventually, some of the German planes dropped their bombs. The first three caused many injuries but no fatalities:

The fourth and final bomb, dropped about half an hour later, fell in North Strand, killing 28 people, destroying 17 houses and severely damaging about 50 others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. Ninety people were injured, approximately 300 houses were destroyed or damaged and about 400 people were left homeless.

An article on the Maynooth University site agrees with the figure of 28 fatalities, so I have used that in my headline.

Though some saw the bombing as a warning to Ireland to remain neutral in the war, the most likely explanation is that the bomber crews thought they were bombing Belfast. There were also the inevitable conspiracy theories that Churchill had somehow caused Dublin to be targeted to save British cities from being attacked. Uniquely, in this case Churchill seems to have been their source himself:

After the war Winston Churchill said that "the bombing of Dublin on the night of 30 May 1941, may well have been an unforeseen and unintended result of our interference with 'Y'". He was speaking of the Battle of the Beams, wherein "Y" referred to the direction finding radio signals that the Luftwaffe used to guide their bombers to their targets. 

The technology was not sufficiently developed by mid-1941 to have deflected planes from one target to another and could only limit the ability of bombers to receive the signals.

You can learn more about this "Battle of the Beams" from the links in my recent post on the secret RAF base at Charley in Leicestershire.

The Joy of Six 1475

Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.

The Joy of Six 1465

"The evidence shows that when local people are involved in welcoming newcomers – helping to secure housing, navigate services, and build early social connections they learn local languages more quickly; move into employment sooner; and become part of community life in ways that benefit everyone." Tony Vaughan, Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe, calls on his government to publish a clear plan for the implementation of a community sponsorship scheme for refugees.

Lewis Goodall posts some hard truths from Minnesota: "The United States under Trump is no longer our military ally (Greenland), our strategic ally (Ukraine and Russia), our political ally (a National Security Strategy which openly advocates backing far-right parties to disrupt European democracies facing 'civilisational erasure'), nor our economic ally (tariffs)."

"In its manifesto, Labour promised 'to restore and protect our natural world' and 'to unlock the building of homes … without weakening environmental protections'. Sadly, for me and many other Labour supporters, the tone of the language soon changed." David Jobbins says "growth at all costs" is threatening Britain's wildlife.

Jonathan Liew sees England's hapless cricket team as a metaphor for the country: "Of the under-19 squad currently playing in the World Cup in Harare, only four did not come through the private school system, where you are eight times more likely to have access to a turf pitch and 10 times more likely to have a qualified coach. The £35m in grassroots funding announced by Rishi Sunak in 2024 turned out not to exist."

Discontinued Notes comes across an unexpected book – a collection of short stories about wartime Germany by Antony Lambton, a former Conservative minister who resigned after a long-forgotten political scandal in 1973.

"As Colin Harper once observed, Briggs wasn’t just a singer; she was 'the bridge'. She made the ancient oral traditions of the British Isles credible, sexy, and attainable for a generation of icons, including Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, Led Zeppelin, June Tabor, Christy Moore, Richard Thompson, and Dick Gaughan." KLOF Magazine on the importance of Anne Briggs.

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"At its core, A Christmas Carol is the transformation of a man without empathy, to a man with empathy. It accomplishes this through forcing the character Ebenezer Scrooge to remember the past, witness the present, and to consider the future. It is through seeing other human beings as human beings with lives equal in worth to his own, that forms the basis of Scrooge's transformation." Scott Santens sets out the science behind Charles Dickens' famous story.

Barbara Speed on the shocking scale of the abuse perpetrated by the Jesus Army: "The ... coroner returned an open verdict, but noted his 'concern' about the two strange deaths and the letters he had received from parents of young people in the fellowship, who were worried about their children’s safety. These incidents were closely reported by local media but never became national news."

Welcome to the working week - Microsoft Teams will soon start telling your boss where you are, reports Zak Doffman.

"I think, therefore I am" isn’t the best translation of Descartes’s famous pronouncement "cogito, ergo sum", argues Galen Strawson.

Owen Hatherley has been watching a new box set of immediately post-war films from the DDR: "'Rubble films' were sponsored by the Soviet occupiers of Eastern Germany and East Berlin as part of the project of de-Nazification, with the theory being that mass market film was uniquely suited to forcing ordinary Germans to understand and come to terms with what they had done. It was a brief moment, necessarily compromised ... but the films are fascinating as attempts to make antifascist commercial blockbusters, in a devastated society that would have preferred to think about almost anything else."

Gavin Speed looks at the latest research into Saxon Leicestershire: "Along the River Welland in south-east Leicestershire, extensive fieldwalking surveys have identified several settlements close to the north of the river, and close to former Roman roads."

Neal Ascheron on Frederick the Great and the draining of the Oderbruch

One of my favourite writers is Neal Ascherson. Among many other achievements, it was he, and not Tony Benn, who came up with the well-known quotation above. (There's chapter and verse on this blog.)

Here is Ascherson reviewing The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn for the London Review of Books in 2006 - Frederick is Frederick II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia:

In Frederick’s time, marshlands were regarded as sinister, useless places, breeding malarial vapours and sheltering not only dangerous wild beasts but primitive human beings beyond the reach of law. Today, we would treasure the lost Oderbruch as one of the marvels of Europe. 

On its way to the Baltic, the river frayed into countless shallow channels and lagoons, into swamps, shoals and muddy islands. Twice a year, it flooded up to ten or twelve feet deep, nourishing a dense cover of waterlogged bushes. Here lived ‘an almost unimaginable range of insect, fish, bird and animal life’, including wolves and lynxes. 

Blackbourn has the sense to rely heavily on the travel writings of Theodor Fontane, the most lovable and observant of German writers, who explored the drained Oderbruch in the 1850s and collected memories of pre-reclamation times. Fontane was told of the enormous shoals of countless species of fish, of pike hordes so dense that they could be scooped up in buckets, of crayfish which escaped the hot summer shallows to swarm in trees from which they could be shaken down like plums. 

And he wrote also about the old inhabitants. They were not Germans but Wends, Slavs who had survived in the marshes since the Germans colonised the fertile land almost a thousand years before. The Wends lived on mounds hidden in the swamp, their huts encircled by ramparts of cow-dung which kept out the floods and served as pumpkin beds.

There's more about The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany on the Penguin website.

The Joy of Six 1399

Rei Takver reports on fears that Labour’s new data access law would allow a future Reform UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab: "If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating 'government waste', and decimating the UK’s net zero projects."

The British right is adopting an increasingly extreme form of ethnic identity politics, while failing to explain what the rest of us are supposed to be so worried about, argues Jonathan Portes.

Toby Buckle insists American liberals should stop trying to act as the referees of political debate and recognise that they are partisans for one side of it: "The liberalism of the early twentieth century was a project aimed at social reform. That of the mid-century – of the New Deal, Great Society, and civil rights eras  – while certainly complicit in many of the evils of its world, was also a creed with a strong sense of its own values. Far from being content to 'neutrally' enforce existing rights, it sought to expand them and create new ones."

Katy Holland says The Sound of Music has never been popular in Austria because it challenges the way the country likes to paint itself as a victim of Nazi Germany: "Austrian officials, sensitive to the implications of wartime collaboration, initially objected to the use of swastika banners in Salzburg to depict the Anschluss, and relented only when filmmakers proposed using archival footage of Hitler being welcomed by cheering crowds in the city."

"Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently 'found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition.' ... Based on inclusions of trash amongst the sediments, such as a discarded coin, some of this rock could not have been more than 36 years old.'" BLDGBLOG has news of rapid geological change.

"There is only ten years between the two tv adaptations but technically a lot apparently happened in that ten years. The Children of Green Knowe looks as fresh as ever; it’s very difficult to believe that it is thirty years old. A Traveller in Time, only eight years older, looks visually awful." Maureen Kincaid Speller compares and contrasts television adaptations of two children's books.

Hitler and Mussolini both claimed to have killed Nessie

The Loch Ness monster became a popular newspaper story in the 1930s. The result of this was that, in an attempt to undermine British morale, both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy claimed to have killed Nessie.

The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported in December 1940 on Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' 'Monster Fairy Tale', saying: "It is reported from Glasgow, via Stockholm, that the Loch Ness monster has struck a mine, and its body has been found washed ashore in pieces on the west of Scotland." 

Perhaps unsatisfied with the lack of reaction from that news, a The World's News article published in 1941 reported that Italian newspaper Popolo d'ltalia claimed an Italian pilot had "bombed and destroyed a huge, serpent-like animal on the surface of Loch Ness". 

The illustration above shows Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster. Lord Bonkers tells me she was wounded in an encounter with a U-boat, but made a full recovery.

Book Review... How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev

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

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

Peter Pomerantsev

Faber, 2025; £10.99

In September 1941 German civilians began to pick up enticing new radio broadcasts. In the salty language of an army veteran from Berlin, ‘Der Chef’ complained bitterly about food rationing and excoriated leading Nazis as inefficient and sexually corrupt. “It’s a pity we can’t cut our meat from the buttocks of the SS.”

But Der Chef was not a disaffected insider: he was in reality Peter Hans Seckelmann, a German political exile broadcasting from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire under the control of the British black propagandist Sefton Delmer.  

It is Delmer’s story that Pomerantsev tells – his boyhood in Germany during the First World War; his time as a journalist there during the Thirties when he became close to the Nazi leadership; his difficulties in proving to the British authorities that he was loyal and that his skills should be used.

Though Der Chef was a crude character, he was used in subtle ways. When he complained, for instance, that some German civilians were getting round rationing by buying clothes on the black market, his broadcast was designed to normalise this behaviour, encourage more people to take it up and speed the breakdown of the rationing system.

As the war went on, Delmer invented more characters and radio stations. Father Elmar – a real priest, though Austrian not German as claimed – broadcast religious programmes about the sins of the Nazi regime, emboldening believers with their own doubts about Hitler. And Delmer devised a whole station that combined subtle propaganda with a supply of genuine news about the home front and the welfare of troops that no German station could match. Ian Fleming, for instance, then working in Naval intelligence, fed him the results of the U-boat football league. Another writer, Muriel Spark, was on Delmer’s staff and later drew on this experience for her novel The Hothouse by the East River.

Pomerantsev shares Delmer’s experience of growing up in both liberal and authoritarian cultures. He is the son of political dissidents from Kyiv, was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. Early in this century, he lived in Moscow and worked as a TV producer. He sometimes draws parallels between Putin’s propaganda and that deployed by the Nazis or Delmer. His readers may be left wondering if some of Delmer’s tactics could be adopted by those seeking to counter the far right today.

Jonathan Calder 

The Joy of Six 1381

"Any real 'change' promised in Labour’s manifesto has been betrayed by a continuity with tired and damaging tropes of deserving and undeserving people. This is contributing to the sense, a year in, that this Labour government is merely repeating past government failures rather than striking out in a new direction." George Newth identifies the paradox at the heart of Keir Starmer's first year in power.

Aisha K. Gill sets out how we can make sure that the new grooming gangs inquiry is the last.

Andrea Pitzer on why we shouldn't talk about 'Alligator Alcatraz': "It’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed."

"While terms like 'gaslighting' have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fuelled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word." Angela Haupt picks 10 such terms and explains their precise meaning, which can soon be lost when they escape the consulting room.

"Despite extensive state support for over-the board chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge; as Taylor Kingston shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players, as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war." Tim-Jake Gluckman reviews a new book on chess in the Third Reich.

Dan Liebke considers the overlap between cricket and comic books, and asks if Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.

The Joy of Six 1372

"What's happening in Gaza is a humanitarian and existential tragedy for the people living there, a moral and political disaster for Israel, the indirect, long-term result of past European barbarism and the subject of a damaging present European failure." Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European double standards and German cognitive dissonance.

Séamas O'Reilly reports from Ballymena: "To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as 'mindless, unacceptable and feral' and the actions of the rioters as 'a pogrom'. There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.

Hannah Al-Othman and Jessica Murray on increasing concerns over the quality of 'expert witness' evidence in British courts.

"I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978." Frieze interviews Adam Curtis about his new television series Shifty.

The car made pedestrians second-class citizens, and we shouldn't let driverless vehicles push us off the road altogether, says Adam Tranter.

Northolt Park Racecourse near Harrow was superbly equipped and the headquarters of pony racing in Britain, yet it had an active life of only 11 years. This local history site tells its story.

The Joy of Six 1355

"It needs to restore its reputation for economic credibility, which means that it cannot deny the damage done by Brexit – and support measures to mitigate that damage by moving closer to the EU.  It should be willing to be very critical of Donald Trump.  And it needs to wholeheartedly make the case against Reform and Farage not on tactical grounds - 'vote Reform, get Labour' - but because it is a very bad idea to get Reform at all." David Gauke charts a path to recovery for the Conservatives, but doubts they will take it.

Simon Fletcher fears Keir Starmer's rightward shift is laying the ground for Nigel Farage: "It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments - and indeed left of centre governments around the world - is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support."

James Hawes argues that we should not be surprised that AfD polls so well in eastern Germany. For reasons rooted in history, voters there have chosen authoritarian parties ever since they got the vote.

"As a chartered psychologist, I decided to read Spare to learn more about a topic that deeply interests me; the adverse childhood experiences of children from materially privileged homes. This topic is thoroughly addressed within the text. However, I didn’t predict that I would be left with such an aching sadness for Harry, his brother and his mother and to some extent his father; normal, flawed human beings trapped and tormented within a crumbling, cruelly dysfunctional gilded cage." Pam Jarvis reads Prince Harry's book.

Simon Matthews watches Ridley Scott's The Duellists from 1977.

"The helmet was made of iron covered with silver and gilt, consistent with early Imperial Roman cavalry helmet types found on the Continent. Over 1000 coins in the same pit provide a mid-1st century date, suggesting that the helmet was buried at the same time as the coins in the entranceway. The reason why the helmet was buried within a British shrine remains uncertain – it may have belonged to a Briton serving in the Roman army, or was possibly a diplomatic gift." The Hallaton Fieldwork Group on the discovery of an Iron Age shrine outside this Leicestershire village.

The Joy of Six 1352

"He inherited an economy from Wilson suffering from low growth and high inflation which threatened to destroy all Callaghan and his party held dear. 'There are,' he told MPs on his election, 'no soft options facing Britain.' His solution - attacked by the left as the one Conservatives would have followed - was to reduce public spending while encouraging private sector investment." Steven Fielding argues that Jim Callaghan is the prime minister Keir Starmer most resembles.

"Both sides of the culture war profited from caricatures of Francis as Pope Woke. The reality was less clear-cut. He distrusted the liberal impulse to make the church a vague, hand-wringing Roman branch of the human rights campaign. His positions on war, free-market exploitation and climate change were all in the mainstream of Catholic Social Teaching, though articulated with unusual directness and clarity. His interviews often gave the impression that he thought the church’s hang-ups about sexuality were just that - symptoms of an un-Christlike clerical trend to flee from real humanity." James Butler on Pope Francis.

Eliza Apperly examines how Hilter's favourite film director, Leni Riefenstahl, spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine.

"The story of the divide between the right and left brain has become one of the most cherished ideas in psychotherapy. It shows up virtually everywhere we look, branching into a myriad of techniques and approaches, creating an entire ecosystem." But, ask Pascal Vrticka and Ana Lund, is there any truth in this story?

Keith Frankish remembers the philosopher Daniel Dennett: "Dan didn’t see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together - how a world of subatomic particles obeying strict physical laws could at the same time be a world of free, conscious agents, with thoughts, hopes and dreams."

The Digital Dickens Notes Project allows you to explore the working notes Charles Dickens kept as he wrote his novels in monthly or weekly installments. In as few as 19 pages per novel, his notes are concise, dynamic records of Victorian serial composition.

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Hannah Forsyth surveys the history of the commercialisation of higher education and concludes: "Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose."

John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses – of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally."

"G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them." Martin Robbins argues that Donald Trump - and Robert Peston - have broken the news, and that it's probably time to rethink your information diet.

Many of the oligarchs who supported Hitler ended up in concentration camps, reports Timothy W. Ryback.

David Trotter reviews the new British Film Institute book on Ken Loach's Kes (1969): "Kes marked a conscious departure from the 'go-in-and-grab-it' style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal."

"In the popular imagination, Birmingham isn’t thought of as an artistic bohemia. The city’s historic stereotype, judging by the backdrop to the likes of Peaky Blinders or the risible Tolkien biopic from 2019, is summed up by no-nonsense men bashing iron in huge factories, often to a heavy metal soundtrack." But there's more to the city than that, says Jon Neale as he looks at the role of the Arts and Crafts movement in its history.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi

Then again...

I love this: you hardly need to ask for subtitles. German satire could be the trend of 2025. 

The comforting lie de Gaulle told France after the second world war

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson has a piece in the new London Review of Books. It's a review of Julian Jackson's France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.

Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:

Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. 

But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.

Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. 

Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.

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Pragna Patel argues that the establishment of Britain's first Sikh court threatens women's rights: "The use of religious laws to regulate minority women’s lives is not only discriminatory, it is immensely harmful in a context where domestic abuse and related femicides of South Asian and other minority women remain persistently high."

"People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline "Paddy Pantsdown" ("dreadful, but brilliant," he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce." Alwyn Turner looks back to the Nineties - "Britain's golden age of sleaze" - which seem strangely innocent today.

David Ward says it's time to regulate NHS Trust managers, because they act as "judge, jury and executioner" when whistleblowers raise patient safety issues.

"It suited almost everyone after Mussolini’s fall from power in 1943 to blame him personally for the disasters of the war, and to argue that most Italians had always been anti-fascist. The ‘bad Germans’ had forced the ‘good Italians’ into the war. They had been responsible for the massacres of civilians, not the Italians. They had persecuted and killed Jews, while the Italians had tried to save them." John Foot questions the 'bad Germans/good Italians' narrative that grew up around Italy's involvement in the second world war.

"After clearing the rubbish away, Natalie started with a few potted plants before turning her attention to the rest of the ginnel. With the help of another neighbour, Emily, they were able to secure a £1500 Neighbourhood Investment Fund from Manchester City Council. Most of the money went towards getting hanging baskets and hiring a joiner to make the planters. Natalie tells me that the ginnel had helped sell a house last year, over in the next street. An estate agent took a photograph and included it with the property." Dani Cole explores the beautiful, ingenious ginnels of Levenshulme.

Bob Fischer and Vic Pratt review the latest DVD collection of Children's Film Foundation treasures: "I watched Circus Friends, from 1956, and I knew I’d seen the young girl lead somewhere before, but I just couldn’t place her. It was only when the end credits rolled that I realised it was Carol White, from Poor Cow!"

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"AI skeptics - who are legion, and not necessarily part of the fringe tin foil hat crowd - are begging Silicon Valley to take a beat before unleashing AI to the world. But tech companies, faced with the most powerful computing innovation in a generation, are running around like kids who just found their dad’s gun." Allison Morrow reveals Silicon Valley's determination to produce an AI dystopia that no one has asked for.

Matthew Pennell reviews the Liberal Democrat performance in the London mayoral election: "A few activists have asked the Lib Dem leadership to be bolder in the context of Conservative implosion and Labour timidity. We saw exactly that in the London Lib Dem campaign - a manifesto focused on reforming the blue light services - the Met Police and London Fire Brigade. It was unprecedented to see a politician from a mainstream party run on a platform of police reform and it set us apart from the other parties."

Justin Garson looks to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to help him understand the nature of depression.

"When Germany began to reconstruct its modern history after 1945, angels were needed to replace the recent legions of devils. The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by it." Charles Darwent finds the truth is less comforting.

"One of the most startling things about the enigmatic man who became the architect of the new Houses of Parliament was that he was born and brought up in Westminster itself and knew the area inside out even before the competition which changed his life." Caroline Shenton on Charles Barry.

Francesca Wade says George Eliot made her life, as well as her fiction and art, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.

GUEST POST A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit

Peter Chambers argues that Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford provides a model that explains why Leave was able to win the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George Box, statistician 

Brexitland describes political processes leading up to the Brexit referendum of 2016 and since. Unlike most Brexit books, it is not a journalistic narrative. It is based on data from social surveys and  analysis done by the authors, so is rigorous. 

They propose a compact model of the changes in our society that led to Brexit, and explain why our political class missed what was going on. 

The authors are clear what they omit. Economics, class, right/left and authoritarian/liberal are all held to be secondary to the factors that drove the shock. 

The two proposed drivers are: 

• the rise of mass higher education;
• mass immigration, leading to significant minority populations 

To many of us who are politically involved today, it is difficult to imagine Britain in 1945. Then  Britain was approximately 0 per cent minority, rather Christian and 3 per cent degree education. Most people  left school at 15 and started work right away. Degrees were for clerics, professions and the upper classes. 

The most recent census shows 20 per cent minorities (and rising), while the official Higher Education  Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) is around 50 per cent. It was 35 per cent in 2010 and 15 per cent in the 1980s. 

The compact model in Brexitland is there are three broad viewpoints. Necessity identity liberals are the minorities who believe that majority should not discriminate against them (so 20 per cent of  voters). 

Conviction identity liberals are graduates and believe that discrimination is always wrong. They are modelled as the HEIPR fraction of the 80 per cent white voters. Other work has shown  that higher education is the best predictor of voting Remain. 

The third group is the identity conservatives, who are mostly non-graduates, older and non-metropolitan. They are ethnocentric - this is a belief that there is an in-group (us) and an out-group (them) - though this is not always about ethnic origin. 

Member of this group tend to disengage from mainstream politics. Their drive is to protect the in-group from perceived threats from the out-group. When scarcity looms, the in-group has first call on resources, with the out-group being served later. Inequality is seen as legitimate. 

The identity conservatives have been targeted by right-wing populists in the UK, as the AfD has done in Germany. There is value in persistent engagement with many ordinary  people, as our community politics work showed back when we used to practise that. It may be  worth reinvesting in participatory democracy. 

As time passes, the fraction of graduates in society tends to the 50 per cent that Tony Blair wanted and a service-based economy needs. This means that a modelled end-state is 20 per cent necessity identity  liberals, 40 per cent conviction identity liberals and 40 per cent identity conservatives. 

The tipping point between a majority of identity conservatives and identity liberals was reached in the 2010s. During that decade voting patterns were indeed a "50-50 deal": someone feels under siege. 

The linkage between ethnocentrism and the EU is partly an artefact of culture around the Conservative Party, and partly of the failure of attempts to reduce headline immigration rates because of Freedom of Movement. Indeed, unrestricted immigration from the "Accession 8" states  during the New Labour era caused the issue to become salient for a time. This was unintended. 

Once all this was in place, there was a narrow window when identity conservatives could be activated for a one-time campaign against Freedom of Movement and the European Union. 

Peter Chambers is a Lib Dem member from Hampshire.

Neal Ascherson and fables of the reconstruction of Germany

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson writes on the former East Germany in the current London Review of Books:

Travelling around Mecklenburg in 1991, in what had been the GDR six months before, was a disorienting experience. Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. 

There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East Germany to loot its collapsing industrial and service economy. While silent locals stood with their bicycles in the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. 

As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National People’s Army and the immense web of the Stasi and its informers – found themselves out on the street.

Since then the gap between living standards in the former East and West, though still 26 per cent in 2020, has narrowed. And yet, just as sophisticated Manhattanites despair at the South’s refusal to forget a past that would be better forgotten, West German ‘Wessis’ are unnerved to find how many ‘Ossis’ insist on remembering a disconcertingly ‘other’ life in that phantom Germany.

Ascherson writes beautifully and is endlessly interesting. Another point he brings up is that the East German Communists saw themselves as the true heirs and interpreters of Karl Marx's thought, and thus morally and intellectually superior to the ruling party in the Soviet Union.

Market Harborough schoolboy assaulted for not giving Nazi salute

Embed from Getty Images

No, we've not been invaded. This story appeared in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 14 September 1933:

English Schoolboy Assaulted

Nazi Attack Because He Did Not Salute

An English schoolboy, J. R. K. Preedv, Market Harborough, last night, in London', told remarkable story of an experience had in Germany on August 31 when Nazis brutally assaulted him because he did not salute Hitler's standard. 

1 was walking with some German friends along the Stresemannstrasse in Berlin, and met a column of Hitler's Jugend (young men), he said. 

On each side of them on the pavement were about eight or ten Nazis about eighteen years of age. They were put there for the purpose of seeing that everybody saluted, and I was told afterwards by my German friends that they would have attacked anybody who did not salute. 

Exempted by Order

I did not salute the standard as the others did, being English, and therefore exempted from it by an order of Hitler's. 

Suddenly I was attacked from behind by the Nazis on the pavement. 'Some held me while others kicked me. No great damage was done, but my glasses were completely smashed. It happened so suddenly that my friends saw little. I am claiming compensation for my glasses. 

The people he was staying with told him it was lucky he made no resistance, or he would have been severely beaten up. '

A search of other reports of this incident reveals that the lad's first name was John and that he was a pupil at Wellington - presumably the public school Wellington College. And after the war there was a medical researcher called J.R.K. Preedy with a number of publications to his name.

The reports also reveal that John Preedy was the stepson of the owner of Nevil Holt preparatory school, Frederick Phillips.

A post of mine, which still attracts worrying accounts of abuse from former pupils of the school, quotes a now-vanished Times Educational Supplement story about Phillips:

A headteacher who faked his name, age and qualifications to run a boarding school in Leicestershire for 40 years has been exposed as a fraud by his son.

Frederick Phillips cheated parents, pupils and his bank manager into believing he was a qualified French teacher and aristocrat with military honours in order to buy and run Nevill Holt preparatory school in Market Harborough. He died in 1982 ...

Swansea-born Frederick Phillips changed his accent and pretended he was a graduate from the Sorbonne to get a job teaching French at Nevill Holt.

He had, in fact, only attended summer school at Besancon university, France.

In 1927 he adopted the double-barrelled name Serille-Phillips and claimed he was the son of a gentleman (his father was a wheelwright) to secure a bank loan of £12,000 to buy the Grade I listed 13th century school building.

He said he was 30, to substantiate a lie that he was a former squadron leader, secret service agent and medal-winner in the First World War. In fact, he had only just completed his military training at Uxbridge.