More than a million homes granted planning permission since 2015 have not yet been built

To listen to some, you would think that the only thing holding back a boom in house building is our planning laws. Reform those, we are told, and there will be millions of new houses built and tumbling prices.

A story on Professional Builder suggests things are not so simple:

The inaugural Planning Portal Market Index has found that more than a million homes granted planning permission since 2015 have not yet been built.

This equates to around a third of the total given the green light over the period. The figures cast doubt on the near-exclusive focus of the major parties on boosting housebuilding numbers by tweaking the planning system.

The Index suggests the causes of this lack of building include high interest rates, skills shortages in the construction industry and materials shortages.

Me? I remember what the late Ian Jack wrote in the London Review of Books five years ago:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

Andrew George on Labour's housing policy and why it won't work

It's clear that Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives again after nine years, has little time for the idea that if only developers weren't encumbered by the planning laws they would flood the market with so many new houses that prices would come down.

He writes for the Cornish Voice newspaper:

Having tracked the way the housing market works in places like Cornwall over recent decades, it seems clear that development tracks house price inflation and slows when the market stagnates. 

Higher housebuilding targets are reflected in higher hope values land adjoining every community around Cornwall; land value speculators sit on those sites until planning permission granted enables a maximisation of development value and undermines the viability of affordable developments suitable to meet local need.

Cornwall doesn’t have a major problem with NIMBYs resisting development. Cornwall has been the one of the fastest growing places in the United Kingdom – nearly trebling its housing stock in the last 60 years – and yet the housing problems of local people have got worse. 

Housebuilding targets are a means to an end. The intended purpose is to meet housing need. Yet, in Cornwall, this is one of the best examples of how that policy completely fails.

The late Ian Jack explained why it fails in the London Review of Books five years ago, with a little help from Oliver Letwin:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

All of which means that the Lib Dems' emphasis on building social housing - seen in the motion passed at last year's autumn conference but less evident in this year's manifesto - must be taken on by the government if they are to fulfil their ambitions.

I should add that everyone I talk to who knows about housing says there is an endemic shortage of the relevant skilled labour in Britain. This too must be tackled by government if its housing policies are to succeed.

Our problem is landlordism not a shortage of housing

The conventional wisdom is that house prices are so high in Britain because we do not build enough new houses. It also holds that this is because of restrictive planning laws and self-centred Nimby campaigners.

Several things puzzle me about this view. The first is that every town I know is ringed with street after street of new housing.

Take Desborough, whose vanished high street so occupied me last month. There is almost a second town at Desborough, built in recent years up the hill from the original town, that has its own Sainsbury's and M&S food store.

The second is that district councils cannot turn down planning applications just because they are unpopular with existing residents. They have targets for housing approvals to meet and the pressure on their budgets means that they are wary of turning down applications in case they have to bear the costs of a successful appeal.

And the third is something I blogged about five years ago. However many permissions to build councils grant, the interests of developers will dictate how many new houses are built.

In that post I quoted the late great Ian Jack:

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

I have never seen anyone in the 'build baby build' camp address this point. They tend to see the answer as lying in even more market freedoms for developers and campaign for the loosening of planning controls. How those developers will be prevailed upon to act against their own economic interests is made clear.

But there is an article in today's Guardian that does address the point, and it agrees with Letwin:

The yimby argument has always seemed flimsy. Its strange logic is that speculative developers would build homes in order to devalue them: that they would somehow act against their own interests by producing enough surplus homes to bring down the average price of land and housing. That would be surprisingly philanthropic behaviour.

The article is by Nick Bano, who also argues that there is no evidence that Britain has a housing shortage:

In London, as the Conservative Home blog notes, there is a terrible housing crisis “even though its population is roughly the same as it was 70 years ago”, when the city was still extensively bomb-damaged by the second world war.

In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. 

Bano argues that our problem is not a shortage of housing but its cost. And the reason for that is landlordism.

For an answer to our current crisis, he looks back to the Seventies. Then, as a response to the evils of private landlordism highlighted by the case of Peter Rachman, Labour and the Conservatives agreed that private rented dwellings should be taken over by local authorities.

So successful was the move that the private rented sector declined from nearly 60 per cent of dwellings in England and Wales in 1939 to just 9 per cent in 1988.

It was when the Conservatives then began to argue again that being a private landlord should show an attractive economic return that the seeds of our current crisis were sown.

I did know a fair bit about housing in the Eighties when I chaired Harborough's housing management subcommittee, but I don't know enough now to judge how accurate this historical account in Nick Bano's article is.

But he has encouraged me to think that the conventional wisdom on housing is wrong. I suppose though, in the current climate, it is easier to blame local authorities for our problems than promote them as the solution to them. But maybe that's what needs to be done.

Compensation to victims of the Jesus Army may total £10m

The disbanded, Northampton-based cult The Jesus Army is back in the news today. The Northampton Chronicle & Echo reports that the compensation to be paid to survivors of abuse within the cult may reach £10m.

I blogged about the Jesus Army a few years ago, and the Chronicle & Echo gives a brief history of it today:

Originally set up by founder Noel Stanton in Bugbrooke in 1969, the Jesus Army was a cult-like religious movement, which attracted thousands of members who lived together in close-knit, rural communes. Mr Stanton remained at the helm of the organisation until 2009 when he died.

In 2017 the new leader Mick Haines said, in a speech, he had become aware of “serious allegations” about Mr Stanton.

More allegations of financial, emotional, physical and sexual abuse from both children and adults have surfaced. In 2019 Chronicle & Echo reported some 200 claims had been made.

A number of people have been convicted of carrying out abuse at the Jesus Fellowship Church, which has since issued an apology.

My reason for blogging about this today is that I recently came across a comprehensive online archive on the Jesus Army.

Studying it you find t hat some people had serious doubts about the Jesus Army from the start. Here is a reader's letter to the Chronicle & Echo dated 28 October 1986:

Probe this group

While not always accepting the political views of Mr Michael Morris MP, I agree with his recent call for a government inquiry into The Jesus People at Bugbrooke.

Having heard and listened to many frightening experiences concerning their very obscure methods of the teachings of Christ, and having recently heard through the papers, that a second cousin of mine who did join this group has killed himself I hope that Government sees the seriousness of such a group operating here in the United Kingdom and acts fast.

One of the skills the traditional Conservative MP was expected to possess was the ability to spot a wrongun when he saw one, and Michael Morris certainly possessed it.

And then there was an article by William Dalrymple in the Independent Magazine for 8 April 1989. William Dalrymple the historian would have been only 24 at the time this was published, but I do think he was the author. This blog's hero Ian Jack was the editor of the Independent Magazine in those days and was known for identifying and encouraging young talent.

Dalrymple catalogues some of the allegations against the Jesus Army, including their involvement in a number of deaths. Then he goes to have dinner at the group's community house in Bugbrooke, finds them to be charming people and wonders what all the fuss has been about.

This is a legitimate article to write - if a controversial group is in the news, go and meet them and see what they're like. But if the Jesus Army were a sinister cult - and that's exactly what it turned out to be - it was hardly going to reveal this to him over dinner. Dalrymple does not come across as sufficiently aware of this.

And then he takes a wrong turn:

England is now, at root, a deeply secular society where extreme expressions of fundamentalist belief are frowned upon. The hostility that the Jesus People have aroused in many quarters reflects the fact that most people now find strong religious convictions utterly incomprehensible. 

According to Dr Eileen Barker, a sociologist of religion at the London School of Economics, the term brainwashing used against sects like the Jesus People is now nothing more than a metaphor to explain strong religious convictions by people who find them inexplicable: 

'Today people find it very difficult to accept that someone could be prepared to sacrifice everything that is normally regarded as important for an idea. There is a fundamental problem of communication. Neither side can understand the other; they have a totally different world vision.'

Everything Dalrymple and Barker say here may be correct, but it has no relevance to the truth or falsity of the allegations against the Jesus People.

As Karl Popper says somewhere, how we come up with a scientific hypothesis is a question of human psychology: it has no bearing on that hypothesis's truth or falsity. 

Similarly, an investigator may be driven by a hatred of religion, but you still have to examine the evidence he puts forward. You can't dismiss allegations of abuse just by psychoanalysing the person who makes them.

"An adored celebrity": Flora MacDonald after the Young Pretender had flown

Embed from Getty Images

Lately, I've been given to naming Ian Jack and Neal Acherson as my favourite journalists. But Ian Jack died in October, which leaves just Ascherson - the man who originated that quotation about the government and refugees usually attributed to Tony Benn.

In the latest London Review of Books, Ascherson reviews a book on the life of Flora MacDonald, the woman who kept Charles Edward Stuart from the British Redcoats after his defeat at Culloden.

Here he is on what happened to Flora after the prince had fled and the British caught up with her:

Flora was certainly brave and resolute. Had she been caught with the prince, she might easily have died in prison, or ended up as an indentured, enslaved servant in the Caribbean. But these were capricious, aristocratic times. 

Strictly, what she had done was treasonous. She had preserved the kingdom’s most dangerous enemy, helping him to escape and probably organise another Jacobite invasion. If it had succeeded, the Hanoverian dynasty would have been overthrown, the liberties of the 1688 revolution cancelled, the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 reversed, Ireland liberated and Britain’s elites colonised by Catholic appointees. And yet Flora emerged as an adored celebrity. 

During the Second World War, hundreds of young women who sheltered partisans or Allied airmen died in concentration camps. But in Georgian Britain, brutal enough to the lower orders, a good-looking girl with presentable manners touched a sporting reflex in upper-class officers, especially if they were Scottish. If the prince had been caught clambering into a boat with a barefooted lass who spoke only Gaelic, it would have been a different story.

A tribute to Ian Jack

One of my favourite journalists died on Friday. Ian Jack was 77 and writing as well as ever up to the day he died.

The Guardian has an obituary of him and also an article in which six people pay tribute to him and choose their favourites among his articles.

My own is his piece from June 2021 on the decline of Rothesay, which left me with a strong desire to visit the resort:

Lack of demand ended the hotel’s cold-bath and wet-blanket therapies in the 1930s, but its superior atmosphere survived into the last decades of the last century, when Scottish trade unions still held their conferences in Rothesay's Winter Gardens and the leaders of the mineworkers, the boilermakers and the amalgamated engineers put up at the Glenburn and drank late whiskies in the bar. It was known - and still is by older Rothesay people - as "the Hydro". 

I saw it first as a child from the deck of a steamer, and by the time I reached 30 had enough confidence to sit on its veranda one late afternoon in June and ask for a Campari and soda. The bay stretched blue and unruffled towards the green hills. Only the rattle of a yacht’s anchor chain broke the quiet. I wondered - as many others have done - how such a lovely place could be so unvisited.

The Joy of Six 1018

"Emmett Till was killed early on the morning of August 28, 1955, one month and three days after his 14th birthday. His mother’s decision to show his body in an open casket, to allow Jet magazine to publish photos - "Let the world see what I’ve seen," she said - became a call to action." Wright Thompson visits the barn where Emmett Till was killed. It is now used to store the owner's Christmas decorations 

"Britain’s postwar economy created so many white collar jobs in the public and service sectors that it required no unusual ability or hard work or overwhelming ambition to fill one of them: they sucked us in like a sponge." Ian Jack on his experience of education and social mobility.

Ian Forth was asked 20 years ago to look at ways of widening cricket's appeal. Based on his research then, he says The Hundred is not the answer.

Katie Marshall shines a spotlight on the witches of Belvoir Castle.

"In line with other children’s drama of this era, this adaptation tackles, head-on, themes of death, bereavement, isolation and displacement alongside physical and mental child abuse with strong undercurrents of the supernatural and creeping threat." Robert Taylor looks at the BBC's 1988 adaptation of Helen Creswell's Moondial.

Flickering Lamps finds the graves of Alexander Kerensky on the edge of Wimbledon Common.

Six of the Best 988

Bruno Maçães says the attempted coup in Washington this week is further proof that we live in an age that is collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality.

"Any story which depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossibly dangerous. No British journalists would dare to handle it, let alone publish it." Writing before the unexpected verdict, Peter Oborne and Millie Cooke considered what the extradition of Julian Assange would have meant for journalism.

William Yang asks if the mass arrest of pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong signals the beginning of the end for the territory's civil liberties.

Gillian Darley mourns Coventry's failure to cherish its modernist architecture.

"The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name." Ian Jack on the history of trainspotting.

"In St Mary’s Church, in the village of Frensham, Surrey, the strangest object can be found. Propped up on a tripod, near the pews, beneath the arched windows, in among all the other fittings you’d expect in an English country church, stands what appears to be a witch’s cauldron." David Castleton tells a strange story.

Why you can't afford a home in the UK

This video from the New Economics Foundation gets it about right.

It shares the analysis of Ian Jack, which I quoted a couple of weeks ago:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. 

According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. 

What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

In other words, the popular argument that it is all the fault of Nimbys and we need to weaken councils' planning powers is a load of nonsense.

Why granting more planning permissions doesn't cut house prices

If you want to know why I admire Ian Jack so much as a writer, try his London Review of Books piece on The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers.

He begins, characteristically, with a little bit of autobiography, remembering his childhood in Fife:

A single-track road ran across it, looping downhill through the gorse and wild raspberries to a beach where many of us learned to swim. Elsewhere, mysterious holes in the ground and abandoned military architecture proved ideal for games that involved imaginary rifles and the great thrill of hiding, and of hunting those who hid. 

Then one day the local paper carried a small item reporting the sale of this extensive territory to someone who was never named and therefore became ‘a mystery buyer’. Our families wondered who it might be, and why they would want to buy such a ruin-filled and unkempt acreage. 

The newspaper didn’t enlighten us, and for several years nothing at all happened to what we called ‘the barracks’, until in 1964 the first of the road bridges opened and our part of Fife became commutable by car from Edinburgh. Over the next decade crescents and avenues of showy villas with built-in garages and first-floor sitting rooms transformed the army’s old patch, spilling down to the beach and erasing many of our paths and hideouts.

Jack then sets out Christophers' argument at length, without making it sound as though the ideas in it are entirely his own. Some other LRB reviewers should take note of his technique.

But what struck me most in this piece was this passage, which explains why the unaffordability of housing in Britain has little to do with the Nimbys that haunt the opinions of many young activists:

In Christophers's words, "The private sector does not lack land; and nor, more significantly, does it lack land that is suitable for commercial development, or for which planning permission has been granted."

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

Letwin later published his review of housing development, which made limited suggestions for improving the 'absorption rate', but fell some way short of offering a comprehensive solution to the problem.

What more can you ask of a favourite writer than that they provide you with the facts to defend views that you already hold?

Six of the Best 817

Jane Chelliah fears we are about to see the hollowing out of the Liberal Democrats.

"Devolution must be democratic, and all authorities must have a democratically-elected assembly.  Devolution should be downwards from Central Government, not taking decisions or responsibilities away from local government." On a happier note, Tim Pickstone introduces the policy paper on Power for People and Communities that will be debated at Conference.

Eric Klinenberg says public libraries are being neglected just when we need them most.

"Popper emphasized that he had known all the titans of twentieth-century science: Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg." John Horgan remembers a challenging meeting with the philosopher Karl Popper.

"There can be few better books about fighting men in all their bravery, terror and shame." Ian Jack reviews Our Boys by Helen Parr.

Graham Gouldman is interviewed by the Ace Records Podcast.

Ian Jack goes to a county game at Scarborough

Embed from Getty Images

Ian Jack (whom I have praised before as one of my favourite columnists) has been to a county game at Scarborough:

I’ve been to a few cricket matches, and yet I know very little about cricket. What strikes me is the skill that’s required of the people who watch it, who know the instant they have to stop talking to their neighbour and look across the field just in time to see the ball leave the bowler’s hand in the direction of the batsman, and then to stay focused on the result – hits, misses, runs, catches and so on – until this vital little sequence comes to an end and the conversation can be resumed. 

For instance: “You see, after his wife died, they were very helpful. They got him that house … [pause, click of bat on ball, unrewarded cry of “Catch it!”] … somewhere up Shipley way, and he’s been living there with the lady from Wetherspoon’s ever since.”

It's Alan Bennett meets Murray Bennett.

Reader's voice: Who is Murray Bennett?

Liberal England replies: An obscure Australian spinner Les Taylor caught and bowled in 1985 to regain the Ashes.

Persistent reader: Who is Les Taylor?

Liberal England replies tetchily: Really, if you are not prepared to do the reading there's no point in your coming to these seminars.

Anyway, this gives me another chance to recommend the cricket blogging of Backwatersman, who lives across the road from me.

And for a glimpse of outground cricket in the 1950s, watch the video in my post Frank Tyson in his pomp:

It provides a pleasing portrait of country cricket at an outground in that era. Marquees; adults on deckchairs, children sitting cross-legged on the grass.

Ian Jack on The Causes of Brexit

Embed from Getty Images

England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. 

Charles Dickens skewered a certain school of political journalism in Bleak House, but that school is pre-eminent today.

It's all about who's up and who' down among a small cast of players. Hot takes are filed on the hour. And, though I have always had a weakness for gossip myself, it's almost all instantly forgettable.

At my more thoughtful I prefer commentators like Neal Ascherson and Ian Jack who can bring a historical perspective to bear on contemporary events.

In today's Guardian Ian Jack sets out The Causes of Brexit (as he had to The Causes of the First World War as a schoolboy) and identifies eight of them:

• Deindustrialisation
• Immigration
• Cultural dementia
• The Dam Busters
• English exceptionalism
• The playing fields of Eton
• The newspapers
• Complacency

He writes under this last head:

During the Scottish referendum campaign in the summer of 2014 I met a painter and decorator on the island of Bute who said he was voting for Scottish independence. “You have to.” Why? He knew people in Sunderland, “and every one of them wants to leave Europe”. Sunderland, with its big car factory that exported cars to the continent? Surely not. “Yes, they want to leave.” He laughed at the daftness of it. I didn’t believe him.

And there was a lot of complacency about.

David Cameron and George Osborne had convinced themselves they were political geniuses. So what if the right wanted to limit who could vote in the referendum to skew the electorate in favour of Leave? They were bound to win it anyway.

Who was put in charge of the Remain campaign? Jack Straw's son, whose life had hardly been one of political struggle, and the mastermind of the Liberal Democrats' 2015 general election campaign.

And if half the passion that has been put into Remain since the referendum had been evident during the actual campaign the result might have been different. That said, much of that passion has been devoted to laughing at or demonising the people who voted Leave, which is hardly likely to win them over.

Anyway, read Ian Jack's piece for yourself and read him in the Guardian every Saturday - there is an archive of his columns on the paper's website.

Neal Ascherson on Heligoland

Ian Jack and Neal Ascherson are two of my favourite journalists. This is because they are able to bring a historical perspective to the day's events.

Many other celebrated commentators just offer hot takes on those events centered on the interests of the metropolitan professional class.

Ascherson has a piece in the current London Review of Books on Heligoland, a tiny island off the North Sea coast of Germany that was a British colony for almost the whole of the 19th century.

As he says:

Few Britons now know where the place is. Still fewer know that it was once a British colony.

Yet Heligoland's history is fascinating, as is what Ascherson concludes from his review of a book about it:

Jan Rüger argues persistently that there was no real contradiction between the possession of these offshore fragments of Europe and the development of an enormous colonial empire elsewhere. "We are used to thinking of Europe and the British Empire as opposite poles," he writes: 

historians and politicians alike have fostered a narrative in which the empire allowed Britain to disengage from Europe, as if the two were clear-cut opposites … This is very much a 20th-century idea, reflecting, more than anything, Britain’s changed global position after the Second World War. The imperial project was never isolated from Europe, nor did it allow Britons to isolate themselves from Europe. 

Wise and relevant words, to be set against shameless Brexiter distortions of history.

Six of the Best 694

"There can’t be many people who realise their dad has Alzheimer’s from listening to the BBC’s Today programme. But six years ago, hearing my brilliant and erudite father, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Goodhart, stumbling and pausing through his interview with John Humphrys, I knew something was very wrong." A moving article and a suitable tribute to his father by Benjie Goodhart.

Amelia Tate asks if 'dark ads' on Facebook will really swing the general election.

The peerless Ian Jack discusses the derided British Rail sandwich and its part in the privatisation of our trains.

Nicholas Barber on 'universe-shrinking': "What happens is that the characters in a science-fiction or thriller franchise are initially sent off on adventures in the wider world. James Bond goes after Goldfinger, Doctor Who defends the Earth against the Daleks, and so on. But after a while that world grows smaller and smaller until there is nothing in it which isn’t connected to the protagonists."

"He thinks you were before your time. Personally, I don’t think we’re ever going to reach the time that you’re in." Andy Murray introduces to Anthony Newley, an important but largely forgotten figure in post-war culture, and in particular his 1960 television series The Strange World of Gurney Slade.

"As any football manager will tell you, 'A win is a win'. Or even, as Gertrude Stein liked to say during her brief spell in the hot seat at Turf Moor 'A win is a win is a win'." Backwatersman follows the progress of the 2017 cricket season.