The Joy of Six 1542

"Multiple sources inside the children’s home division said that, as they prepared for sale, they were pressed to rapidly open more homes and take on more children, even when they didn’t have the staff to keep up. They claim they were told this was so the company could be sold for the maximum amount of money." Jessica Murray says that when private equity takes over a UK care home it can mean the children are treated like cattle.

Ben Worthy argues that, if he is to succeed as a prime minister who takes over in mid-parliament, Andy Burnham will need to create a clear sense of change and offer new policy quickly.

"Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey." John Oxley mourns the Conservatives' loss of the Margot Leadbetter vote.

Danielle Williams on how the US lost its public swimming pools to racism: "When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the US."

Sintija Brence salutes the Queen Of Southern Gothic, Bobbie Gentry.

"About most of the rescues Gregory is brisk but particular. An elderly couple in a broken-down yacht press biscuits on the crew; a woman makes eyes at the coxswain ('the problem was an open seacock, swamping their bilge'); in failing light a small boy – 'my mum said I should stay with the boat' – is scooped from a flimsy inflatable dinghy just in time." Susannah Clapp meets a literary lifeboatman at Dungeness.

The pine martens of Shropshire

Here's Quentin Shaw writing in the London Review of Books in November 2022:

In September a camera trap monitoring hedgehogs in Kingston upon Thames caught an astonishing snap of a pine marten, the most elusive of English mammals. 

There had been no confirmed sightings in England for a century until July 2015 when a naturalist in Shropshire took a photo. There, gambolling in broad daylight, was an animal from the wishful world of cryptozoology, a fantastic beast, previously no more substantial than a plesiosaur in Loch Ness or a big cat in Surrey.

There had been fleeting hints: a strange animal in the headlights on the A49, something scampering in the trees while a forester ate their sandwiches, but hard evidence was always lacking. Volunteers had cycled around country lanes scraping up roadkill and deep-freezing the flat carcasses for later identification, only to find that they were all polecats or mink. People had sniffed and handled strange scat, which turned out to be from foxes and badgers. 

But now we knew there was at least one marten out there in Shropshire. A massive ongoing programme of camera traps has since revealed about a dozen more. Once in a thousand video clips there is a fleeting glimpse, usually of a marten already half out of shot before the camera triggered.

You can see a Shropshire pine marten in the video above, which is from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust site.

There you will also find discussion of the county's population of these rate animals:

Pine martens are a native species to England, but over-hunting saw them disappear in the country and the British population became restricted to the Highlands of Scotland. The last confirmed record of a pine marten in Shropshire was verified in 1894 (The Flora and Fauna of Shropshire). Anecdotal evidence suggested that a few may have clung on and other martens may occasionally have passed into Shropshire from a small relict population in Wales.

It is possible that escaped martens from private collections and illegally translocated animals could have also settled in Shropshire. Being a species that likes to roam over large distances, there is also potential for marten populations to spread from official release sites in Wales into Shropshire and surrounding counties too.

With work to provide pine martens good quality woodland, with improved connectivity, the future is looking bright for the species in Shropshire and it appears that now are now firmly established in the remotest corners of the county. But that is only possible if we work hard to protect them and create more space for nature overall.

Another site mentions Clunton and Lurkenhope, near Knighton, as places where pine martens have been seen. But how did one get to Kingston upon Thames?

Frank reaction today to the Lib Dem election performance

"Am I alone in thinking our response to the local election results is a little too self-congratulatory?" asked David Vigar on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning. We can safely say he is not alone, judging by comment on that blog and further afield.

Next up on Lib Dem Voice was Shaun Ennis:

No one has ever asked me to devise an idea for Ed Davey’s next stunt. But if I was approached from on high, I might suggest having him wade through a river of treacle.

That’s how it feels trying to spread the Liberal Democrat message in the North of England these days.

It’s been an underwhelming set of elections in our part of the country. Despite some notable and very important exceptions such as Stockport, Preston and Sefton, the Liberal Democrats have failed to cut through with what has been a predominantly nationally motivated electorate.

And Johan Prinsloo saw a similar pattern in London:

We saw major success stories in Brent and Ealing, with the local parties there making significant gains on Labour. Our ground game all across London was a marvel to watch, and the establishment of a 100 per cent majority in Richmond, as well as maintaining/improving large majorities in Kingston and Sutton is something to champion going forward. 

These are emblematic of our strong ground game resonating well, when there was a record of results behind them. 

However, it is also important to accept the reality of the situation that we have underperformed in many areas, even just in London. Our major target of Merton has fallen flat with only two councillors gained. 

Also, in Lambeth, Southwark, Islington and my home borough of Croydon, expected gains have somehow evaporated and in some areas, paper candidate Greens in areas like Newham, Barking and Enfield have won without ever campaigning!

While Tara Foster detected a malaise than goes beyond disappointing election results:

In my view, from 2024, we've been electorally and politically stagnant, and the Party has forgotten how to be an effective campaigning machine. Many MPs are well-educated, but their expertise is being wasted. 

For example, we don’t have the tax experts working on treasury matters, and as a result we had Daisy Cooper come out with the politically-weightless idea of a Trumpian "Department of Growth" with a tagline of "Get Britain Growing Again."

James Graham, a fellow survivor of the golden age of Lib Dem blogging, has also gone deeper on his own Quaequam Blog!:

The party continues to do well in places where it has been doing well in recent years, and continues to decline in areas where it took a knock during the coalition years. The areas it does well tend to be rural, formerly Conservative dominated areas and it continues to decline in areas that historically were dominated by Labour. In the latter areas, the Greens have completely eclipsed the party.

Even in places where the party was doing well in recent history, such as Hornsey and Friern Barnet (most of which represented by Lynne Featherstone until 2015) and Manchester Withington (most of which was represented by John Leech), the Greens have replaced the Lib Dems as the main challengers to Labour. Wales, with the exception of a single MS in the form of Jane Dodds and a smattering of councillors, is now a no-go area for the party. ...

As some have pointed out, the extent to which the Lib Dems now represent the richest parts of the UK is quite striking; at the top end, Lib Dem MPs represent even wealthier areas than the Conservatives. No wonder Ed Davey has been quite as hostile to any suggestion of redistributing wealth as he has been over the last couple of years.

And this is my worry too. If we are increasingly drawn to campaigning on the grievances of these comfortably off constituents, then our policies are going to seem at best irrelevant to much of the country.

Let me end with an observation on Keir Starmer and Ed Davey from the Commentary in the current issue of Liberator:

There are worrying similarities in the predicaments of the leaders of what are traditionally the two main centre-left parties as they try to contend with both the Greens and Reform.

Both became leader by replacing an extremely unsuccessful predecessor, both conveyed an “adults are back in charge” air of calm competence and both won bigger than they can have dared hope in 2024.

Since then they have both shown little sign of knowing what to do with that success, both have struggled to manage a larger than expected parliamentary party and both have been unable to clearly articulate in public any narrative about what their party is for and what it wants to do.

While Starmer has made a series of u-turns Davey has made a series of diversion side turnings while not really getting anywhere. British missiles? A new Magna Carta? Splitting the Treasury? Defence bonds? Some of these ideas may have merits but nothing links them and they get the public no nearer to knowing what sort of country they would be living in were the Lib Dems in power.

That issue is no. 434 and you can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. You can also sign up to a mailing list there so you are informed each time a new issue appears.

To Chessington South and beyond

Geoff Marshall takes us to the Chessington Branch, visiting each station and then exploring beyond Chessington South to see where the railway would have continued. 

No one seems to know how much of this further extension, which would have reached Leatherhead, was built.

Like and subscribe, my children. Like and subscribe.

Jago Hazzard goes in search of the oldest bridge in London

London Bridge was first bridge over the Thames in London, but it's been rebuilt several times.

The oldest surviving bridge on the Thames is now Richmond Bridge, which dates from 1777.

But it's not the oldest bridge in London. To find one that's centuries older, head for Kingston and the Hogsmill River.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

How the Lib Dems lost a council seat in Ed Davey's constituency

Last week the Liberal Democrats lost a seat on Kingston Council in a by-election. I've not seen much discussion of this in Lib Dem circles, but then with the closure of the party newspaper, the instinctive loyalty of Lib Dem Voice and the decline of blogging generally, it's hard to find much Lib Dem discussion at all.

But an article from the On London site tells us much of what went on in the contest in Green Lane and St James ward, though it omits the fact that this corner of the borough was safe territory for us until a former Lib Dem leader of the council was convicted of possessing indecent images of children.

Anyway, this is what On London says about the contest - KIRG stands for Kingston Independent Residents' Group:

The Green Lane & St James contest was easily distinguished from a ray of sunshine. On 30 October the Labour and Lib Dem campaigns issued a statement criticising what they called divisive campaign tactics, referring to a leaflet circulated by KIRG’s councillor Giles making allegations about Rafiq in his capacity as external affairs officer of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The Conservative and local Green parties associated themselves with this denunciation.

The Ahmadiyya are a minority strand of Islam, who are targets both of Islamophobia from non-Muslims and denunciation from some Muslim bodies as not being properly Islamic. They are a familiar presence in south west London, being active in promoting the Quran to people in the streets.

On London, no doubt fairly, says the impact of this leaflet is hard to judge and that during the campaign there were also concerns about such local issues as cycle paths and green spaces, and a lingering ill-will about the council’s closure of the Kingfisher Leisure Centre.

It was also difficult for Lib Dems to make the argument that Kingston needed a 44th councillor from our ranks, when we so dominate the council already. (That's first past the post for you.)

But beware of getting the wrong impression of KIRG, As On London says:

In some ways KIRG is a classic localist party, trading on the rhetoric of being the authentic voice of the a community against the Westminster parties and picking up anti-Town Hall issues from every direction. But it is a bit different from others nearby, such as the long-established Merton Park residents or the Residents’ Association that runs Epsom & Ewell across the border in Surrey, which has a rather cuddly, even staid public image.

During May’s elections the KIRG attracted criticism for an aggressive populist approach to campaigning. Giles, a journalist, was manager of George Galloway’s rumbustious parliamentary by-election campaign in Batley & Spen in summer 2021 and has appeared on Galloway’s Sputnik programme on Russia Today (although he stressed to the Kingston Courier that he does not agree with Galloway’s anti-NATO views on Ukraine).

The Joy of Six 1074

"These ‘final’ train journeys are part of a long tradition for major public figures such as King George V and Winston Churchill, and everything possible should have been done to maintain this rather special way of enabling people to make their farewells without travelling to London." Christian Wolmar says the Queen’s final journey should have been by train.

David Boyle considers the causes of inflation: "So much of our economy in the UK now panders to the ultra-rich that it has worn grooves where the money flows towards them. It gathers around them like great fatbergs and the inflation gathers there too. Then, hey presto! It spreads around."

Anne Perkins reviews a new biography of Harold Wilson.

"Socially, North-East Scots is of the soil. Its distinctiveness derives from the traditional work and lives of its inhabitants, in particular, farming and fishing. This means that much which made it so distinctive has faded as the world has changed." Robert McColl Millar on Doric - once the language of the Scottish court, it is now a dialect of English.

Conrad Brunstrom watches the John Lennon film How I Won the War: "The film is certainly a satire on war movies, and on how a certain kind of British war movie is constructed for propaganda purposes. But it’s clearly more ambitious than a mere genre satire effort."

South West London once had a network of trolleybuses. Roger French joins a group retracing its routes 60 years after they closed.

Former Labour MP is Lib Dem council by-election candidate

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One of the more principled Labour MPs in the Blair and Brown years was Andrew Mackinlay, who sat for Thurrock between 1992 and 2010.

Time moves on and in 2019 he joined the Liberal Democrats.

Now he is the Lib Dem candidate in a Kingston by-election on 6 May. He is hoping to be the new councillor for the Chessington South & Malden Rushett ward, which the party won the last time it was contested.

It turns out that Andrews has lived in Chessington for many years and that his children attended local schools.

Chessington is some way from Thurrock, but then I remember from my canvassing days in Richmond that a predecessor of his as Labour MP for that constituency had a house on Kew Green.