Georges I-IV, Boy George, George Harrison and Henry George

Here's another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.

Georges on my Mind

The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.

George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.

It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.

Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.

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The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true. 

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There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.

Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten: 

I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”

I said: “Terrific, what is it?”

He said: “Peace.”

I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”

I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.

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George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.

After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:

Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.

Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.

Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.

At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes. 

Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game.  A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".

The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.

It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.

I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.

You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.

BOOK REVIEW When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator.

When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis Paperback

edited by Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood

Beecroft Publications, 2025, £15

When We Speak of Freedom, as a football commentator would put it, is very much a book of two halves. The first is historical, philosophical and a little quirky in its approach: the second has chapters by policy experts with concrete proposals for government action in their fields.

The editors, Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood, write that the project began over wine and sandwiches at the home of Elizabeth Bee and Michael Meadowcroft, where a small group talked of “contemporary politics, memories of liberal triumphs past, and our hopes for the future”. Their hope that the book is “suffused with the warmth, intellectual curiosity, and hospitality of that first meeting,” is met in many of the 20 chapters of this engaging collection

I had thought of writing an elegant essay that drew together the diverse themes of the book, but so diverse are they that I decided to go against every canon of reviewing and tell you what’s in the book.

One complaint: there’s no index. I’m sure the John Stuart Mill Institute, who publish When We Speak of Freedom, didn’t have the budget for a professional indexer, but Mill himself does pop up in many chapters, and it would be good to be able to compare what different authors have to say about the old boy. You can ask contributors to a collection like this to highlight the names they quote or discuss, and produce an index of sorts from that.

And so to the 20 chapters…

Michael Meadowcroft has expanded his introduction into a pamphlet – see the note at the end. Here he writes of a “crisis of democracy” and does not see its resolution coming from economic growth or any other of the policy prescriptions that dominate political debate. Rather, he looks to another Victorian sage, John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”

Benjamin Wood looks to two Liberal heroes: Jo Grimond and Hannah Arendt. He sees them as students of Classical Greece who, inspired by a vision of the Greek city-state purged of slavery, sought a politics that is more human in its scale and less obsessed with getting and spending. Wood concludes in language they would approve: “Citizenship must mean more than a flag and a passport” and be “an invitation into a shared project of civic betterment.”

Helena Rosenblatt writes on Mill and On Liberty, reminding us that there’s more to it than the harm principle. She emphasises Mill’s championing of individuality and the flowering of character – both a long way from the atomistic individualism of which Liberals are often accused. Rosenblatt also writes of Mill’s awareness of social tyranny: he said, “the yoke of opinion could often be heavier than the law” – Liberal Democrat habitués of social media please note.

Christopher England and Andrew Phemister contribute a fascinating chapter on liberalism, land and democracy – Henry George, the Diggers and radical crofters are all there. My only regret is that they had to end so soon in the story, as issues like the quality of food, and access to the countryside for health, wellbeing and recreation, will only grow in importance. Let’s take this history as an inspiration.

Emmy van Deurzen looks at the tensions today between individuality and people’s need for community. These can give rise to individual mental health problems and to social problems, such as a widespread withdrawal from engagement in politics. She seeks a cure for both kinds of problems through political change and bringing more philosophy and psychology into our politics. Interestingly, both Mill and Hannah Arendt turn up here too.

Helen McCabe usefully reminds us that there is far more to Mill than On Liberty. She looks at his support for women’s suffrage, and for their liberation more widely, as well as his opposition to domestic violence. Then there is Mill’s advocacy of workplace democracy and producer cooperatives – causes that were still dear to the Liberal Party when I joined it, but are now little discussed.

Timothy Stacey offers a diagnosis of modern liberalism’s ills. He sees it as lacking “that je ne sais quoi that makes us fall in love with political visions”, and as inclined to fuel the divisive public debate that it hopes to dispel. His answer is that we should seek to foster liberal virtues. This I’m happy to agree with, even though I’m not convinced by the list of them he gives, as our view of ethics today is so dominated by rights, with the concomitant duty falling upon the state, that we offers little sense of what the good life looks like to a liberal.

Matthew McManus takes us back to Mill’s wider political views, finding in them an answer to our discontents under neoliberalism. He points to Mill’s support for worker cooperatives, a welfare state, representative democracy with universal suffrage, and his strong commitment to liberal rights. This he terms Mill’s “liberal socialism”, arguing rightly that its more useful to use the plural ‘socialisms’ than to see socialism as the monolith it once was.

From here on, the chapters are less philosophical and more devoted to particular policy areas and what Liberalism can contribute to them.

Edward Robinson on Liberalism and the environmental crisis is the first of these, and he commends three writers to us. First, Mark Stoll, an economic historian who has studied the British economist William Stanley Jevons – Jevons grasped in the mid 19th century that extractive industries would not last for ever and wrote about the moral implications. Second, Brett Christophers, who argues that energy cannot be produced and traded like a conventional commodity. Third, Dieter Helm, who argues that the marketisation of public goods has been a mistake.

Denis Robertson Sullivan argues there has been market failure and policy failure in the provision of housing, meaning government intervention is needed. Home ownership is in retreat, so there need to be policies for providing the sort of rented accommodation that people want. Banks and pension funds must be encouraged or forced to invest more in social housing, and there needs to be new urgency in the fight against homelessness, with government setting targets and publicising the progress made.

Stuart White looks for practical means to bring about the economy of cooperatives that Mill advocated. He discusses the role of trade unions and a sovereign wealth fund, and suggests, I think fairly, that modern Liberals are slow to recognise the existence of structural inequalities in society or the need to organise to challenge them.

Paul Hindley writes on spreading ownership through society, throwing in a good quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” He sees this spread as a way of countering the effects of insecure employment and an increasingly punitive welfare state, and repeats the traditional Liberal call for more taxation of wealth and less of income.

Gordon Lishman examines some dilemmas Liberals face around community, diversity and nonconformity. He doesn’t offer neat problems or neat solutions – in a way his point is that there aren’t any – but he is surely right to conclude that the decline of voluntary associations and the rise of the internet have made it hard to conduct community politics in the way that Liberals learnt to do in the 1970s.

Bob Marshall-Andrews looks at current and not so current challenges to civil liberties – there’s a lot about his opposition to his own party’s more draconian proposals in his years as a Labour MP between 1997 and 2010). He is very good on the way that governments generate fear in order to win support for repressive measures.

Andrea Coomber and Noor Khan write well about prison policy: “The cliff edge on which the prison system finds itself was not approached at speed, but one that we slowly but surely trudged towards.” They argue, unfashionably, that excessive punishment damages not only the individuals concerned, but also the fabric of society, and call for a reduction in the number of people in prison.

Vince Cable, like several other authors of these later chapters, looks to have been given more space. This may be out of deference to his standing or out of a belief in the importance of his subject of immigration. Vince writes very much with his economist’s fedora on, concluding that Enoch Powell was completely wrong about the social and political consequences of immigration, but that a rising population means we must face both our chronic inability to expand the housing stock sufficiently and our decaying infrastructure.

Ross Finnie takes us through Britain’s experience of federalism and looks at its possible future. He is billed as writing from a Scottish perspective, but much of what he has to say is relevant to England. How do we deal with this whale in the bathtub of British government? Ross is an enthusiast for devolving power to England’s regions, as Jo Grimond was before him, but it’s never been clear that the English share this enthusiasm. Still, as Ross points out, the idea has its English enthusiasts today.

David Howarth frames his proposals for constitutional reform as a way of easing Britain’s return to the European Union, or at least of making it possible. Since he wrote this chapter, events in the US have made us wonder how secure our present constitutional arrangements are. Would we have much defence against an executive that usurped powers that did not belong to it? You fear not, given Britain’s dependence upon the ‘good chap’ theory of government. We saw during Boris Johnson’s time at Number 10 what havoc someone who is not a good chap can wreak. As ever with David, his chapter is well worth reading.

Lawrence Freedman writes on Liberals and war, and those same events in the US make you wonder if his chapter should not have been placed first. Yet his conclusion holds: “After Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of Ukraine, there is less interest now in taking the military initiative in the name of liberal values and much more of a focus on the need to defend those values against aggressive states.”

And then Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood return to sum up the book’s arguments, quoting Wordsworth and William Morris as well as Mill.

Some will question the relevance of parts of When We Speak of Freedom – and I’m aware that those are probably the parts that appealed to me most. But I urge you to read this book. The Conservatives are showing us every day the gruesome fate that awaits a party that forgets its own history and its philosophy.

The Joy of Six 1162

Floella Benjamin asks why young people are hung out to dry after they leave the care system: "Increasing the number of care leavers in higher education is something we should all get behind: it would save the taxpayer money, increase the number of bright young people being trained for the jobs we’ll need to build a stronger future, and increase opportunities for many who deserve them."

"Laura Kuenssberg’s tenure as the BBC’s political editor, beginning in July 2015 and ending in the coming weeks, was a catastrophe. On her watch, lies were not just permitted, they were amplified and given credibility by Britain’s state broadcaster. At least partly as a result of this, the UK Government now routinely lies with impunity." Patrick Howse on the consequences of the BBC's political editor.

Josh Self sees signs of a revival of one-nation Conservatism.

Brian Domitrovic reviews a new book on the 19th-century political economist Henry George: "George sold millions of copies of his books and pamphlets, spawned scores of activist reading groups among marginally literate groups of working people, inspired the building of model communities on the basis of the single tax, motivated innumerable “Georgists” successfully to seek elected office, influenced world-historical leaders such as the Mexican Revolution’s Venustiano Carranza and modern China’s founder Sun Yat-Sen, and all but reoriented the agenda of taxation and public works globally as the twentieth century dawned."

"Equally as important as the music in this case was that distinctive and much-discussed You Can All Join In sleeve.  Snapped from above on a stepladder by the Hipgnosis photographer, the front cover shows a rag tag collection of 29 musicians.  Fashionably unsmiling with collars turned up against the wind and hands thrust deep into the pockets of army greatcoats, leather jackets and (real) fur coats on a cold winter’s morning, no one looked too happy to be there at that hour of the day." Stuart Penney looks back at Island Records' first UK sampler disc.

Which pub is the oldest in Nottingham? James Wright weighs up the contenders for this hotly disputed title.