Lord Bonkers' Diary: Bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper

Another of those forgotten passages of Liberal Party history that the old boy so enjoys recalling. 

I am beholden to regular guest poster Stuart Whomsley for including Ed Davey, a Spacehopper and custard in a message to me, though they appear here in a slightly different arrangement.

Thursday

The other day I told Ed Davey the story of Norman Wisdom’s brief leadership of the Liberal Party in the 1950s. At our lowest point, we hit upon the idea of inviting a star of stage and screen to take the reins and, though there was strong support for Anna Neagle from local associations in Sussex, the choice fell upon Wisdom. 

At first the newsreels and newspapers loved his antics, as he tripped over his own feet, slid down ladders and fell into the water. But public taste is fickle, and it wasn’t too long before one heard complaint about Wisdom’s lack of seriousness – his, if you will, lack of wisdom. Even so, he might have held on as leader for longer were it not for an unfortunate incident involving Princess Marina and a whoopee cushion. 

After that, I was asked to lead a deputation to Clement Davies to ask him to resume the leadership. I won’t pretend that Clem wasn’t Rather Put Out by recent events, but as all good Liberals will, he put the party first. 

For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn’t threatening Davey with the return of Gloria Swinson: I was suggesting that a man can be seen bouncing through custard on a Spacehopper once too often. Did he take the moral I intended? Time will tell.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• A cloud passes over the sun
• In return for a chunky donation
• Drinking gin with Matron

GUEST POST To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it

Stuart Whomsley reminds us that, though we evolved as a species surrounded by the blue and green stuff, we also have the power to destroy it.

Let me start by stating what should be obvious, but it is something that can be lost in the way the discourse on this topic is constructed, humans are part of nature. We are not an entity separate from the rest of nature. 

We need to break the demarcation of humans as separate from nature, humans vs nature. This includes where the aims are positive, such as nature as a treatment that can be applied to humanity or to a human to restore wellbeing. It is by addressing humanity as being part of nature we get the deepest appreciation of why it is beneficial.

The dichotomy of humanity as separate from nature has a deep cultural heritage. The Abrahamic tradition had God create man, and give him, and maybe her, the rest of nature to rule over and use. It was separate. 

The theme was further developed in the Enlightenment, with God perhaps taken out of the equation. Nature was now a resource, often represented as feminine Mother Nature, for man to plunder and use her resources at his pleasure. 

this  masculine approach has led to the destruction of the rain forests and the plundering of the earth for fossil fuels and now rare metals.  I find myself wondering what is it about the burning of marine microorganisms, whose remains have been heated and compressed for millions of years, that seems to make some men feel so potent – call it "petro-masculinity". 

When we compare the effects on health and wellbeing of being in man-made environments and of being in nature, those man-made environments are made by humans who are part of nature. However, man-made environments have tended to have forms that do not fit with the rest of creation in the natural world. 

There is an interesting question: why have human environments have been developed in ways that go against the structures elsewhere in nature? Anthropogenic environments have been created to meet short-term needs rather than following the patterns of slower ecological adaptation to a place. 

When people talk about being in nature they are thinking about the green and blue stuff which has different properties to what humans have tended to create.

So let's consider the health benefits, both for physical and mental health. from being in nature of the blue and green kind. Put simply, there is good evidence for this, which is hardly surprising given that we are part of nature. There is a natural fit between human beings and certain environments.

In our species history we have evolved to be surrounded by the green and blue stuff, we have evolved to be surrounded by the soft and curvy, under the light of the sun. We have evolved to cease activity when the sun has move around the other side of the globe. We have evolved in these environments to function best in these conditions.  

So it is predictable that mental and physical health face challenges when people are living and working in boxes, away from the green and blue, with artificial lights taking them into continuing activity beyond natural daylight.

The key messages from research into the health benefits of being in nature are predictable and reassuring. The benefits can be seen through a biopsychosocial and spiritual framework: cortisol levels go down, anxiety reduces, self-esteem increases, cognitive abilities go up, mood is improved, a sense of connection to something greater than the self and awe experiences occur.

Little and often is a key message, which for me was both predictable, but also a bit of a surprise.  This makes it something that is more possible for more people.  You do not have to be planning a weekend in the Lake District.

However, to get the benefits you must give yourself to the experience. It is no good standing before a view of herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain if you are busy engaging with your mobile phone. 

In contrast, if you fully engage with experiencing being part of nature, you can gain the benefits through a dandelion growing through the cracks in the pavement – though it probably comes easier if you are in a verdant park and engaging with nature there than if you are on your knees looking at cracks in pavements. But verdant parks are closer to some people than others.

Research suggests there are social inequities in being able to access green and blue spaces. Those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have further to go to get to a recognised green space than their financially and socially more advantaged fellow citizens. 

A case could be made that one layer in the damage to mental and physical health came at a population level when people were forced to move from the countryside to cities for work. The effects of that could be transgenerational and interacting with other factors across the years. 

That is not to say living and working in the countryside is free from stress or health risks, but research continues to demonstrate that mental health problems occur more frequently in cities than in rural areas.

There needs to be equity and a democratic approach in citizen participation in nature. Such an approach will not be accepted by all. It will be seen as wokery and left wing by the fossil fuel, anti-Net Zero advocates. However, the science and most of the population cross culturally around the world would be in line with it. 

People have more hope and are more resilient if they can feel connected to the thing that they are already connected to, nature.  But need to feel it in a real and engaged way. That is a message people can connect to.

It is not only necessary for the health and wellbeing of humans, but also for the vast bulk of nature that is not human. As a species we have the capacity to destroy most, if not all, of the other species on the planet, something no other species can do. A specific virus might wipe out all humans, but it would not touch most of the other species, and a virus that would destroy humans would not harm plants at all. So, humans have that special, unpleasant privilege. 

Yet they are still part of nature. A part of nature of high risk to the rest.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Bluesky.

The Joy of Six 1269

"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Harold Wilson's estate owes Roy Wood a fortune

It was the first record to be played on Radio One and reached number 2 in the UK singles charts, but the Move's single Flowers in the Rain didn't earn its writer Roy Wood a penny.

Because, in one of the stunts for which he was famous, the band's manager Tony Secunda issued a postcard promoting the song that showed a naked Harold Wilson, the prime minister of the day, in bed with his political secretary Marcia Williams.

Wilson sued, won his case and the High Court ordered that all royalties from the song be donated to a charity of Wilson's choice. They are still being donated today to a range of good causes chosen by the Harold Wilson Charitable Trust.

While yesterday's revelation of Wilson's affair involved another lady and took place some years after the Flowers in the Rain affair - stay with me - it still paints his character in a different light to that which must have been deployed in the High Court.

I'm not calling for the good causes to repay the money, but shouldn't the meagre royalties on Wilson's books be made over to Roy Wood until he has received his due from Flowers in the Rain?

With thanks to Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

GUEST POST Can trade unions make a big comeback?

This could be the time for a resurgence of trade unionism, argues Stuart Whomsley.

The arrival of Arthur Scargill on the RMT picket lines made me reflect on the decline and possible resurgence of the union movement.

Margaret Thatcher wanted to destroy the miners and get revenge for the Miners' strike of 1974 and what it did to Ted Heath's government. Slightly ironic, as without the strike, she would have been unlikely to have taken over as leader of the Conservative Party. 

She also wanted to break the trade union movement. The unions were the powerhouse of the working people of Britain. Break the miners, and you break the workers. So she plotted and planned and set a trap for Scargill, and sadly he walked into it. Not so much King Arthur, more King Harold, charging down the hill.

An analogy for a union leader would be a guide taking their members through a dangerous jungle where there are tigers that want to kill them. Thatcher was such a tiger. Instead of getting his members through the jungle, Scargill went trophy hunting, trying to overthrow the government. In the process, he got all his party killed by the tiger.

The economic climate in the early 1980s meant there would be a reduction in coal mines. But the miners were still in a strong position, on top of the hill. The rest of the workers could have been brought behind them in solidarity with the right strategy. Emotionally Neil Kinnock wanted to support them with his dad being a miner. 

What should have happened was the miners used their strength to make sure that as some pits closed, the local communities were kept intact and enabled to transition into new forms of work.

Instead, the strike and its aftermath broke communities and damaged the union movement. Thatcher had won. The right-wing press blamed Scargill and deflected attention from Thatcher's ruthless plan. However, he did make mistakes. His focus was not solely on defending his members; he had political aspirations for what the strike would lead to.

Now could be the time for a resurgence of unionism. If the RMT led by Mick Lynch is successful,  working people may unite in a common cause to protect their terms and conditions against their erosion by the bosses and companies that seek to exploit their staff to increase profit.

Suppose the RMT shows the power and strength of collectivism and solidarity. In that case, other people will join unions as a source of collectivism that can defend their rights. It needs to be kept free from any ideological utopian dreams of how society overall should be structured and organised. Micky Lynch seems to get this.

Unionism began with the primary aim of workers getting together to stop their exploitation collectively. We need unions for that. The conditions now are not as challenging as when unions began in the nineteenth century, to state the obvious. Still, the last forty years have seen the erosion of workers' rights. The time to rebalance could have arrived.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

GUEST POST The Bielsa dream is over

Stuart Whomsley mourns the sacking of Leeds United's manager and what it means for the club's future

Leeds is a smaller place today. The big metropolitan sprawl of the city will be shrinking in on itself; the dark brooding moors looking down upon it in contempt; the dark satanic mills, more satanic than ever. The armour in the Royal Armouries will be tarnished. Leeds faced a test, and Leeds failed that test. Marcelo Bielsa is gone. 

Leeds should have shown more respect for Bielsa and what he did for them. Not only did he get Leeds up, but he brought joy in the way his teams play. Leeds should have shown more loyalty; not blind loyalty, but loyalty with an evidence base. 

Evidence base, part one: just look at the March fixtures that Leeds will face; they include Aston Villa and Norwich at home, and Leicester away. On 10 March Garth Bamford and Kalvin Philips return from injury, and just look at the form of Norwich, Watford, Everton and Brentford. Leeds were likely to stay up. 

Evidence base, part two: if you look through the Leeds results of the season so far, only the losses to Everton and Newcastle were bad results in terms of points. If you lose 10-0 or 1-0 against Liverpool and Man City it is the same in points. The very best sides would always hammer a Bielsa Leeds, particularly one with key players injured. Those were not the games that mattered. 

So heart and head should have said stay with Bielsa. But he is gone and Leeds are no longer special. They are sort of a Southampton, a Crystal Palace.

Being brought up as a Nottingham Forest supporter it may seem odd that I was showing an interest in another club, and in Leeds of all clubs. Leeds, The Damned United. But it was always a Marcelo Bielsa, not a Leeds thing. Now I return to my natural state of hating Leeds. Dirty Leeds. I hope they go down.

However, as someone whose introduction to football was Brian Clough it is perhaps not hard to see the appeal of Bielsa to me: both men who as a football manager had a vision for the game which went beyond results. Both football managers who had an ethos for life that went beyond the game. Both men are legendary for their many, usually unseen, charitable acts. Both men who could make you smile, could make you laugh. 

I once found my wife in bed laughing hysterically. It turned out that she was reading some of the things that Bielsa had done and said in the past: how after a loss he had asked another coach if at such times he did not think of suicide, how he challenged some angry fans outside his home with what looked like a hand grenade, his retreat to a monastery.

So the painting of Marcelo Bielsa is still above the mantlepiece and the statue of Bielsa is still on it. I guess we too shall show some adjustment and they will move elsewhere in the house. 

Last Saturday I was bouncing up and down in the Trent End at Nottingham Forest as the new Nottingham Forest manager, Steve Cooper, gave us his now famous fist pump after a win. Yes, thank goodness for Steve Cooper.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

GUEST POST Carry On up the Brexit

Stuart Whomsley on the psychodrama that was Brexit.

Ten years ago, Europe was not an issue for the vast majority of the people of the UK. The right wing created this psychodrama, created this problem, this crisis that was never there and now see themselves as the ones who have heroically solved it.  This represents a fine piece of manipulation.

However, we can start to consider this issue with the role of New Labour. I remember when Blair was still PM, my saying that though I thought it was the case that the UK needed migrants and they add to our society, the way Blair had overseen such a rapid arrival rate of migrants would stir up racism, as the UK was still a racist society. 

I was told at the time that the UK was not a racist society any more and there was nothing to worry about. Probably by the same people who were saying we were now a meritocracy, class conflict was over and everyone was becoming middle class.   

But migration was the impetuous to turn a fringe issue, our relationship with Europe into what it became.  It allowed Farage to sculpt UKIP into the cloaked racist anti migrant party that it became. And to turn it into the threat that it became to the Conservative party leading to Cameron putting the offer of a referendum in their manifesto, never thinking that he would win so well. 

Unfortunately the Sun did more than blow the bloody doors off Milliband's chances of winning in 2015 with its sandwich eating shot, so that Cameron won outright. Without the restraint of being in Coalition, no Clegg to hold him back, he was forced to hold the referendum as promised.  Well complacent Cameron feeling he was Mr Lucky messed up at that referendum, as we all know.

Johnson actually a pro-European saw that his only route to the job he so craved was to support Leave and to make sure Leave won. His charisma and affable clown persona helped push Leave over the line. Cameron at this point instead of showing character and fulfilling his responsibility and getting a deal and taking it through parliament instead went off in a huff to Chillax. 

May as the new PM immediately showed one of her flaws of character, that of not being able to work well with others, and decided to go it alone instead of taking a cross party approach to build a consensus Brexit. In a failure of self-confidence and judgement, thinking she did not have enough of a majority to get what she wanted through, when it would have turned out that she did, went to the polls.

At the polls she did so badly that now she was in the position where she did indeed not have the majority needed to get what she wanted through. She lost her majority by rather than playing safe and having a neutral manifesto that would focus on getting Brexit done instead put forward a reckless radical vote losing manifesto. Yet May still managed to put together a very shaky Brexit deal to put to a vote.

The sensible thing for pro-European MPs to have done at that time would have been to have cashed out on the May deal. But they did not.  For some it was the hope that kills you, the hope of a People’s vote that stopped them taking the option of the May deal. On the Labour side who knows what machinations were going on with the objective of bringing down Corbyn being prioritised over the European issue.

So in came the Johnson premiership on the mantra that he would get Brexit done and that as this was now the democratic will of the people, to do anything else would be an attack on democracy, an attack on The People.  How far we have come in ten years from our relationship with Europe being a marginal issue to it having been such a central and divisive one.

Brexit is now done, well sort of.  With vast amounts of money spent, with our national political life having been directed towards this issue above all others for four years, until the pandemic arrived, and with the union of the four nations put at risk, with a deal that does in fact look worse than the one we were in whilst part of the EU, the questions we now ask are:

• Was it worth it?
• What psychodrama will the UK head into next?

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

GUEST POST The Brexit hustle

A hustle, a medieval conflict... Stuart Whomsley offers new ways of understanding the powers behind Brexit.

Brexit was always a hustle: it was always about a powerful rich elite in the UK wanting to take back control from the community of European countries in order to better exploit the ordinary person.  And in order to do so they conned many ordinary people to vote for it.

You could think of it in medieval terms. The leaders are a subgroup of the rich and powerful who wanted to claim the throne with the support of foreign powers. The foot soldiers are varied but they have an army that contains a lot of the lower educated disenfranchised ordinary folk who feel a new king will treat them better.

Hence the fuss over fish and fishing rights which is only about 0.1 per cent of the economy and employing only 24,000 people. Fishing is symbolic of us being an island nation, of the Royal Navy and fishermen ruling the waves. This whole thing has been about ruthless chaos capitalists manipulating a section of the population at a deep emotional, identity and attachment level to get what they wanted.

We were nestled into a lovely position on the chessboard of the world, better than we deserved after the dark side of the Empire. This special place was the linchpin between Europe and The USA, able to influence both; sixth biggest economy in the world, a major player, not anymore.

Germany carried the guilt of being on the bad side in the war, French the shame for falling so easily. Britain held its head high. Not any more. Now we are the fools, sold out by treasonous disaster capitalists like Rees-Mogg and the narcissist Johnson for their personal gain.

And will people wake up or react to this? Unlikely, we seem to be a passive lethargic nation who sit on our sofa and accept anything. Not the same people who protested and put fear into Thatcher and her government, but a nation of child-like emotional pygmies glued to our devices playing computer games and watching Ant and Dec.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.

Stephen Fry Syndrome: If Remain gets a second referendum will it have any idea how to win it?

We now go over live to Remain HQ. 

Will Straw CBE: The next item on the agenda is to choose the narrator for our new video. Remember the focus groups everybody: Leave voters see us as elitist and condescending. So who's the right person to dispel that view and win them over? 

Freddie and Fiona [together]: Stephen Fry!

I have real problems with this video. It seems more calculated to make Remainers feel good about themselves than win over people who voted Leave last time.

And if you are going to try to puncture Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg's absurd claim to be anti-elitists, don't choose as your narrator someone who sounds as though he has swallowed Brian Sewell.

Stephen Fry was surely chosen because he is popular with people who already support Remain. They will not be our problem if there is a second referendum.

It makes you wonder, as I worried back in May, if we Remainers have learnt anything from our defeat two years ago.

As to who should have narrated the video instead, the best suggestion I have heard is Ray Winstone:

I like a gamble, the same as any man, or lady, but don't mug yourself off by gambling on Brexit...you slags.

— Stuart Whomsley (@Bossloper) December 1, 2018