The Joy of Six 1409

Dominic Bryan, who has researched the politics of flags in Northern Ireland for decades, sets out what England needs to understand: "We’ve heard predictable claims that the flags are just a display of pride in a British or English identity. This is an easy claim to make as it clearly is, in part, to do with nationalistic pride. The point is that they are being hung in particular places, by particular groups of people and in a particular way that clearly links them to the ongoing debates and hostility to migration."

"Not only have reports of McSweeney’s political genius become as rare as hen’s teeth, but many Labour MPs are coming to the realisation that any recovery for this Government is now wholly dependent on his removal from Number 10." Adam Bienkov on Morgan McSweeney's reverse Midas touch.

Natalie Bennett makes the case for a national play strategy for England: "The sell-off of playing fields and closure of swimming pools is well-documented, but less noticed is the way in which informal play spaces and child-friendly public spaces are often overlooked or treated as expendable; many communities just don’t have accessible, safe places for play." 

"In 1995, after a local school had been destroyed in an arson attack, the MP Roy Hattersley (a former chair of Sheffield’s Housing Committee in the sixties) dubbed the Manor Estate 'the worst estate in Britain' – quite a comedown for an estate which had once been one of Sheffield’s showpieces. The truth, as ever, was more complex but the reality of decline on the now troubled estate was undeniable." Some fascinating social history from Municipal Dreams.

"Sid isn’t simply passable in these films from the 40s – he’s already very, very good. Critic Barry Norman summed up what made him so convincing. 'He never appeared to be acting,’ he noted. ‘And to act without appearing to be acting is an enormous skill.'" Hammer reminds us that Sid James was a tremendous actor long before the Carry On films claimed him.

Bobby Seal remembers Ron Chesterman, an original member of The Strawbs who later became county archivist for Cheshire.

Forty years is a long time in politics

There is a story about the Soviet official who came on a visit to Britain and expressed his wish to meet the person responsible for seeing that enough bread was baked and delivered to London each day. He was astounded when he was informed that there was no such person.

But looking back four decades to the time when I was becoming interested in politics, it has to be admitted that the Britain of the era looks remarkably collectivist to modern eyes.

The press cutting above was tweeted by the Thatcherise account, which is replaying - 40 years on tot he day - the events surrounding Margaret Thatcher's election as Conservative leader in February 1975.

Because in November 1974 the prices of goods in British shops were controlled by the Department of Prices and Consumer Protection. This short-lived government department that had two secretaries of state: Shirley Williams (1974-6) and Roy Hattersley (1976-9).

Consumer protection was on the up in 1970s - does anyone remember Richard Stilgoe and Nationwide's consumer unit - and it now seems a forward-looking movement.

By contrast, the idea of price control now seems extraordinary. And the National Archives sites spells out just this department's work in the area:

The Prices Policy Divisions were developed from the prices interests of the DTI's Prices and Incomes Division. One Division was concerned with general prices and counter inflation policy, especially in connection with the Price Code and the Price Commission; the other with price regulation and information, the administration of food subsidies, and the relationship between price control and industrial policy.

This is the sort of Labourism I grew up with. And, despite coming from a poor family, I never found it enticing.

And, as it turned out, Margaret Thatcher was right. Competition between supermarkets proved a far more effective way of keeping prices down than government control.

But the Thatcher era is now long gone too, and her views now sound almost as old fashioned. The travails of Tesco suggest that the supermarket era is over too. Certainly, here in Britain, dirigiste Labourism is far from our biggest worry - despite what some commentators would have us believe.

I guess the moral is that 40 years is a long time in politics - and 30 years is just as long.

Roy Hattersley wrote possibly the worst book review ever

I greatly enjoyed Paddy Ashdown's autobiography A Fortunate Life, and it is no criticism of the book to say that the middle part dealing with his time as an MP and then Liberal Democrat leader is the least interesting.

This is because the early chapters on his childhood and service in the Marines, and the later chapters on Bosnia, are riveting.

But how did Roy Hattersley open his New Statesman review of the book in 2009?

Readers who are interested in politics ought to begin Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography on page 155.

That's how.

Roy Hattersley vs John Stuart Mill

How lucky we are to be living in the 21st century and not the 19th! The poor Victorians had to make do with John Stuart Mill as a philoshoper, but we have Roy Hattersley.

Today's Guardian bills an article as follows:

Roy Hattersley: Much has changed since John Stuart Mill's time, and his views on freedom are no longer valid.

And what is Hattersley's argument when you turn to the article?

The first principle asserts that "all errors which (a man) is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good". Only cranks believe that now.

Well, that about wraps it up for Mill. I hope Hattersley will go on to tackle Kant or Wittgenstein next week.

And to think that I had him down as a lard-arsed, failed politician who wrote embarrassingly unfunny books about his dog.

Roy Hattersley talks nonsense

Will there be a sillier column published in the Guardian this year than the one Roy Hattersley contributed today?

Here is his take on whether to ban smoking in private members' clubs:

But the notion that liberty demands that members of gentlemen's clubs be allowed to expose the waiters who serve them to the risk of lung and throat cancer is a sophistication of Mill's theories that can justly be described as original. The claim that the exceptions to the smoking rule have something to do with freedom is absurd.

Since passive smoking is a cause of cancer, allowing continued contamination in privileged circumstances is about as defensible as arguing that little boys should be sent up chimneys, so acquiring scrotal carcinomas - but only in big houses.

As everyone except Hattersley knows, the debate over whether to give some premises exemption from does not concern gentlemen's clubs but working men's clubs. John Reid, uniquely in this cabinet, recalls that the Labour Party was formed to defend the liberties and advance the interests of the working class. This puts him in conflict with the likes of Tessa Jowell for whom socialism has always been something done to the working class.

Hattersley way of resolving this dilemma is to pretend that it does not exist and to witter on about gentlemen's clubs in a way that would have sounded dated 50 years ago.

As the mention of Mill reminds us, Hattersley has pretentions to being a philosopher. But he does not convince in this article. Take the sentence that comes before the passage I quoted above:

It has often been argued - quite wrongly, in my view - that a truly free society would not prohibit self-styled guardians of the countryside killing small furry animals in the process of what they call sport.

I am not sure what "a truly free society" means, but it can hardly be denied that a ban on hunting is an infringement on liberty. You may well think that infringement a price worth paying to further animal welfare, but an infringement upon liberty it remains.

To some extent we are all in favour of curbing individual liberty for the common good - even a wacky libertarian like me. That is inevitable. It only becomes dangerous when we seek to fool ourselves about what we are doing - when we start saying that "true liberty" or "real liberty" consists in doing what the government tells us. Or that liberty consists in doing things of which Lord Hattersley approves.