Six of the Best 699

"Grenfell Tower should mark a point of no return. No return to the frenzied deregulation, cost-cutting and rampant inequality of the last four decades. These are not new evils. They have been lurking for many years. But it took the light of a burning building for the whole nation to see them." Jonathan Freedland says this disaster must be a turning point.

And Henry Porter says it has become a metaphor for Britain's year from hell.

Alwyn Turner looks at the appeal of revolutionary violence to the ageing Labour left: "When the Tories and their friends in Fleet Street attacked the current Labour leadership for past association with terrorists and enemies of the country, it wasn’t a smear campaign; it was an admittedly lurid but essentially truthful account. It may not have had the impact on the general election that was intended, but the facts remain."

Politics meets neuropsychology as Jerry Useem finds that leaders tend to lose mental capacities - most notably for reading other people - that were essential to their rise.

"The murky water of Dunwich conceals so much: not just porpoises but old merchant houses and graves and churches and even, perhaps most astonishingly of all, an ancient aqueduct." Tom Cox visits Britain's lost city.

Millie Thom on the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln Fair.

Six of the Best 618

"The Brexit camp, as represented by The Spectator magazine, which proclaimed “Out—and into the World” when it endorsed the Leave campaign, seems to have absolutely no understanding of international trade or Britain’s dependency on Europe," says. Henry Porter.

"It’s been accused of evading reporting guidelines on suicide, of reckless journalism, and of acting as a left-wing clickbait factory." Marie Le Conte on the success of The Canary.

Wayne Arnold looks at New Zealand's experience of abolishing farming subsidies.

Sarah Barns examines the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who changed our understanding of cities.

Will Alsop discusses Leighton House, and what its architecture says about the artist Frederick Leighton who commissioned it.

"One of the most imaginative children’s movies we’ve ever seen was made in 1981 by the king of the bizarre, the grand maester of visual storytelling, the American odd man out in the Monty Python British lineup—the one and only, Terry Gilliam." Cinephilia & Beyond champions the everlasting importance of Time Bandits.

Nick Clegg: You shouldn't trust any government

From an interview Nick Clegg gave to Henry Porter for the Observer in February 2011:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

The Coalition should withdraw its sinister Annoyance Bill

Great news from the House of Lords this evening. The government has suffered a massive defeat over its plans to bring in injunctions against 'annoying' behaviour. Peers defeated the clause that would have introduced IPNAs - Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance - by 306 votes to 178.

Alex Stevenson on politics.co.uk quotes some of the speeches made against the proposal, including Patrick Cormack:

"I find it difficult to accept a Conservative-led government is prepared to introduce this lower threshold in the bill," Tory backbencher Patrick Cormack said. 

"We are sinking to a lower threshold and in the process many people may have their civil liberties taken away from them."

And I find it difficult accept that a government of which the Liberal Democrats are a part is prepared to introduce it.

For years, when asked to explain what we stand for or even to justify our existence as a separate party, we Lib Dems have said that civil liberties are at the heart of what we believe. Yet, given a taste of government, we appear happy to make things worse in this area.

This measure also marks a retreat from the original Coalition agreement, which promised:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

And on a more personal level, I spent years writing columns for Liberal Democrat News pouring scorn on New Labour's contempt for civil liberties.

It wasn't just the party's promotion of the concept of 'antisocial behaviour', which had the paradoxical effect of making the police feel they could turn their backs on some crimes, it was the extraordinary pettiness of their concerns.

The post Berlin Wall, pre 9/11 years of the 1990s, with their growing economy, now seem close to a political Shangri La, but that was not how New Labour saw them at the time. They were concerned about aggressive begging. They were concerned about noisy fireworks. Many of their backbenchers were obsessed with leylandii hedges.

Back in 2014, this bill is made worse by the fact that it is being piloted by one of my favourite Lib Dem MPs, Norman Baker. He has tried to justify IPNAs both on Lib Dem Voice and on his own website.

I do not find these articles reassuring, if only because - as Caron Lindsay points out - it is not going to be Norman Baker making the decisions on how this legislation will be used. I dread to think what uses it will be put to in the hands of Labour councils.

Caron also reminds us of the words of Nick Clegg to Henry Porter:

You shouldn’t trust any Government, actually including this one, full stop. The natural inclination of Government is to hoard power and information, to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.

The headline on Porter's article is:

Why we should believe Nick Clegg when he promises to restore liberties stolen by Labour

I do hope this will not be another case of Nick wooing an interest group with almost exaggerated language, only to let them down when given a chance to do something about that issue.

Why we should believe Nick Clegg when he promises to restore liberties stolen by Labour

That was the headline on an interview that Henry Porter conducted with Nick for the Observer in February 2011.

I don't know how well founded the BBC News story is that:

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon

but this is a good rime to recall why many of us were pleased to see Labour leave government and the Coalition enter it.

Here are a few quotation from Henry Porter's interview:

The page on liberty and rights has been turned, he says. Although the [Protection of Freedoms] bill doesn't achieve everything that he, or indeed campaigners, wanted, it is a good start and alters the tone of government by asserting – by implication – respect for the public's privacy and rights.

And:

He hasn't changed his views since we met five years ago when he was home affairs spokesman for his party and I was beginning to get to grips with the attack on liberty and privacy by the Blair government. We were both astonished then at the range, depth and stealth of the campaign and the surprising truth that few people seemed to notice or care about Blair's authoritarian project, which did so much to reduce the citizen's standing in relation to the state

And:

Negotiation over the bill has been long and intense, especially with the Home Office and police over the deletion of innocent people's DNA from the national database, which accounted for the three-month delay in publication. "I am amazed how far we pushed the whole security establishment and the Home Office in a liberal direction," he says. "They are in such a different place to where they were a few months ago."

And:

Clegg says the restoration of liberty is ongoing, and urges campaigners to "hold the government's feet to the fire".

And:

In good times, the weirdly phlegmatic British public took little notice of the loss of liberty and, I suspect, in rougher times, when people are pressed, they will be equally unresponsive about this bill. It's worth remembering, however, that the people out on the streets in Cairo last week, in Tunisia last month and in Iran 18 months ago, would be astonished by our complacency. For them liberty is everything.

I hope the BBC report is an exaggeration or a misunderstanding or a kite in the wind, but if we wait too long before making a fuss we have far less chance of opposing the proposal if the report proves to be well founded.

And here is a younger Henry Porter in a Jonathan Meades programme.

Jonathan Meades and Henry Porter

I was watching old Jonathan Meades programmes on YouTube, like you do, when I came across Brick and Mortars, his discussion of military architecture, from 1990.

And who should turn up at 5:16 but a young Henry Porter?

Much more from Jonathan Meades at the MeadesShrine. And Henry Porter has his own website.

Rupert Murdoch as Don Corleone

Yesterday, discussing an Observer article by Henry Porter and Toby Helm on News International's threats against the Liberal Democrats, I mentioned Phillip Blond's tweet "it sounds more like Sicily than London".

Funnily enough, Henry Porter develops just the same comparison in another article in todays' paper:

Murdoch has probably never been rougher than in defending the company against the phone-hacking allegations that imperilled the deal once it was referred. Direct threats were made to senior figures at newspaper groups.

One was delivered in a private meeting last March with Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny Lebedev, who owns the Independent group of newspapers and the London Evening Standard. The meeting, which was initiated by Murdoch, was presented to the Lebedevs as an informal chat where they would get to know each other and talk about the newspaper business.

Soon after their arrival, the atmosphere changed and Murdoch began to remonstrate with them about the Independent's coverage of his affairs. He said he had three volumes of clippings from their newspapers, attacking him. He was particularly exercised about the offence done to his family – and called the coverage "a vendetta". He ended with a threat. Until then he had held James back from launching an attack on the Lebedevs, but he didn't know how long he would be able to do that.

One is reminded of Vito Corleone speaking about his headstrong son, Sonny, and indeed the Murdoch obsession with family seems strikingly Sicilian.

Observer: News International threatened Lib Dems over BSkyB bid

Henry Porter and Toby Helm report in tomorrow's Observer:

Rupert Murdoch's News International launched a campaign of bullying against senior Liberal Democrats in an attempt to force through the company's bid for BSkyB, high-level sources have told the Observer.

Lib Dem insiders say NI officials took their lobbying campaign well beyond acceptable limits and even threatened, last autumn, to persecute the party if Vince Cable, the business secretary, did not advance its case.

According to one account from a senior party figure, a cabinet minister was told that, if the government did not do as NI wanted, the Lib Dems would be "done over" by the Murdoch papers, which included the now defunct News of the World as well as the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

The accounts are only now coming to light, say sources, because the minister involved feared the potential for damage to the party, which was already suffering a dramatic slide in popularity after going into coalition with the Tories.

If this is true, and if the reports of the company conducting surveillance on the lawyers of people it had wronged are true, it suggests that News International's activities went far beyond anything that can be described as journalism.

As Phillip Blond tweeted the other day, it sounds more like Sicily than London.

Six of the Best 74

Writing in the Observer, Henry Porter praises the coalition government: "Despite George Osborne's budget, despite what we know is coming down the pike in the way of spending cuts, unemployment, the erosion of pensions and the possibility of a deeper recession, the coalition is popular, or at least tolerated, because the daily exercise of power seems more humane, reasonable and commonsensical than at any time during the last five years under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown."

But how, asks The Devil's Knife, will people be able to vote for the coalition at the next election if they share Porter's enthusiasm? The comments suggests possible answers.

Les Bonner quotes Norman Baker on his ambition to be "the first virtual transport minister".

"You're sipping a cold beer on a hot summers evening seated outside a bar in a beautiful cobbled medieval street surrounded by marvellous ancient buildings. Brugge? Ghent? Vienna? Munich? Well yes, but what if this could be in cosy old Leicester?" Only in Leicester calls for the reopening of the Castle Inn within the bailey of the city's Norman castle.

Foxy Lady, the writer of Garden Fox Watch, reports that her cats are well able to show the fox cubs growing up the back garden who is boss. The photo above has been borrowed from this blog too.

IanVisits takes us down to the spooky catacombs under West Norwood Cemetery in South London.

Six of the Best 28

Lib Dem TV has a 28-minute video which features Chris Huhne and the delights of Lib Dem conference.

Talking of videos, A Very Public Sociologist has one putting the staff side in the British Airways dispute.

While Stumbling and Mumbling suggests that management may be "a con-trick, promising - but never actually delivering - increased efficiency."

Longrider points us to an article by the excellent Henry Porter: "The last days of this dreadful government are being accompanied by an attack on rights and privacy that seems unprecedented during Labour’s 13-year rule."

The Marrakesh Express is taken by On An Overgrown Path.

While Left and to the Back remembers Clodagh Rodgers: "Failing to win the Eurovision Song Contest in 1971 surely can't have helped her career (and she even received death threats from the IRA for representing the UK)."