Norman Baker talks to Andrew Lownie about the royals' finances

Back in the day, Norman Baker was my favourite Liberal Democrat MP. So it's good to see he's alive and kicking, even if his lens could do with a clean.

There's a lot to be said for a constitutional monarchy, but Norman makes a good case that there's a need for ours to be funded with less secrecy and a clearer sense of what belongs to the royal family and what belongs to the nation.

The title of his new book – Royal Mint, National Debt -– is drawn from an observation of William Cobbett's:

You can tell a lot about a country which refers to the Royal Mint and the National Debt.

Andrew Lownie is the author of a recent book on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (as he now is). Before he turned his attention to the royal family, Lownie wrote about Britain's intelligence services. He says he found them much more cooperative than he has the royals.

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"Who's going to campaign for him in October? Who's going to stuff leaflets, who's going to give old ladies a lift to the polling station, who's going to stand in rainy high streets saying "vote Tory"? Not a single Conservative councillor, who will either have lost their seats five months previous or have scraped through by pretending not to have anything to do with That Lot In Westminster." Fleet Street Fox argues that Sunak has no choice but to go to the country in May.

David Gilbert says a Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis.

John Lewis-Stempel hails William Cobbett as the grandfathers of self-sufficiency: "Self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own."

"One young reader wrote to him of Tess, 'I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.' Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, 'He understands only the women he invents - the others not at all.'" Norma Clarke reviews Paula Byrne's new book on Thomas Hardy and women.

You think we're hard on our politicians now? In 1672, reports Vlad Moca-Grama, the Dutch ate their prime minister's liver.

The Smell of Water on a remarkable survival: "York Minster ... possesses a remarkable treasure, a carved stone in a quiet corner of the crypt, a remnant from the lost Romanesque church that once existed on the site. The carving depicts the descent of souls into hell via a cauldron, it also has the best name for a stone ever, it’s called The Doomstone."

The railways turn out not to be privatised when things go wrong

William Cobbett once pointed out that Britain has the Crown Jewels and the National Debt.

Something similar is true of our railways today, judging by this story from the Daily Mirror:

A transport giant took £35million out of one rail franchise just months before abandoning another. 

The massive dividend was paid from the East Midlands Trains franchise to owners Stagecoach, company accounts reveal.

It represented a £20million increase on the previous year’s payment and came less than a year before the company abandoned the London-to-Edinburgh East Coast Main Line franchise last year.

When a rail franchise does well, the private company takes the profits. When it does badly, that company walks away and the losses fall on the taxpayer.

I commute with East Midlands Trains every day, and they provide a good service. But the baroque system that was set up when the railways were privatised has little to recommend it.

Those who oppose nationalisation have to recognise that what we have now is far from free enterprise. The Department for Transport now has much more say in the running of the system than it ever did under British Rail.

Besides the most important question is not ownership but the separation of track and trains. The people who operate trains should also be responsible for the lines on which they run.

Happy birthday William Cobbett

A short video to mark the 250th anniversary of the great man's birth.

Book Review: A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club

You can find this review in today's Liberal Democrat News.


A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club, London (second edition)
Michael Meadowcroft
National Liberal Club, 2011

Designed by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1887, the National Liberal Club is a work of art in itself. Gothic towers and pinnacles pierce the Whitehall sky: its wine cellar is formed from the remains of an attempt to build a railway under the Thames to Waterloo.

Between them are to be found portraits, busts and engravings that tell the story of the Club, of the Liberal Party and of British political radicalism in general. This elegant illustrated booklet by Michael Meadowcroft, the Club’s honorary librarian and a former MP for Leeds West, makes a fitting celebration of this collection. It is an expanded edition of one written by Veronica Herrington in 1997, and its indexes of artists and sitters make it easy to use. My only criticism is that the illustrations are not captioned.

Meadowcroft tells us that the art collection dates from the Club’s earliest days, when it was regularly offered busts and portraits (“more often than not of Mr Gladstone”). The result is a collection that is home to the Grand Old Man and to almost every prominent Liberal since. They range from wing-collared grandees of the party’s heyday to Paddy Ashdown, whose portrait is the only one to depict its subject in informal dress. (Among other recent Liberal leaders, Jo Grimond wears an academic gown over a suit and Sir David Steel appears to have chosen to be painted in the uniform of a Peruvian admiral.)

But the collection is not confined to Liberal leaders or even to Liberal members. There are portraits of radicals, such as William Cobbett and George Holyoake, who were never part of mainstream Liberalism but with whom the Club and its members were clearly in sympathy.

Perhaps high portraiture is less to modern taste, and in many ways the best painting in the book is a less formal study of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist MP for Northampton, by Walter Sickert. Paul Temple’s recent painting of Sir Cyril Smith gets beyond its subject’s bulk to find his character and there is a stunning portrait of the young Violet Bonham-Carter by Sir William Orpen, though this turns out to be a modern copy.

Meadowcroft does not record what became of Orpen’s original, but a significant number of works have been lost since the collection’s apogeé in 1940. One reason is the 1941 air raid that destroyed the Club’s famous staircase, though fortunately the finest paintings had been sent for safekeeping to the home of the Cornish Liberal Isaac Foot. (A portrait of Asquith was less fortunate in 1910: suffragettes scrawled ‘Votes for Women’ across it in purple ink.)

Through all these vicissitudes the National Liberal Club remained more than an art gallery: it functioned as an important hub for Liberalism when the party was at its lowest ebb. In 1948 Sir John Simon, an eminent National Liberal and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to resign after speaking for the Conservative candidate in a by-election.

A further reminder of those days comes in the form of an illuminated address presented by the Club to Harry Willcock. Willcock, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, had refused to produce his identity card when stopped by the police in 1950. His actions led to abolition of identity cards two years later.

This address may be the least important item in the collection from an artistic point of view, but it is priceless from a political one.

I am fed up with being preached at by atheists

My religious position is clear enough: I am a High Church atheist. I like church music and church architecture, but that doesn’t mean God exists. You could say I was Anglican by temperament but not by belief.

I had many good friends when I was doing my first degree, but in those days I was something of a professional atheist. I saw it as part of my job as a Philosophy student. In particular, I found the arguments of the Christian Union (CU) simplistic and its habit of appealing to the emotions of lonely or immature young people unattractive. Interestingly, in view of what follows, my impression is that the majority of keen CU types were studying science subjects.

Over the years, though I find the Evangelical style of Christianity that the CU represented distasteful to this day, I have lost my enthusiasm for arguing with religious people. As you get older you come to realise that we all live by beliefs that we cannot possibly prove – in politics quite as much as religion.

And even when I was at university and sending for humanist publications, I resented the idea that if you were an atheist then you automatically embraced a whole range of predetermined positions on social issues – what you might call today ‘the full Evan Harris’. Then and now I had more doubts about the morality of abortion than are fashionable amongst Liberal atheists, though today I am a stronger support of assisted dying than I used to be.

Times moves on and I find the modern proselytising atheist movement unattractive – unattractive in the way that I used to find the CU unattractive, and often for the same reasons.

The version of atheism that attracted me as a student had Bertrand Russell and David Hume as its leading figure and it shared its best qualities: it was wise, witty and sceptical. This philosophical atheism gently but firmly pointed out that Christians were making claims about the universe that they could not begin to prove.
Russell was certainly an atheist, whereas Hume probably believed that there was a deity of some sort, but that there was little we could sensibly say about him. This philosophical form of atheism, you will see, was a broad church.

Today’s atheism is different. It does not deal in scepticism but in certainties.

I do not underestimate the brilliance of Darwin: everyone should read The Origin of Species, if only for the quality of the prose. Why isn’t scientific writing like that now? I suggest it is because of the emphasis on ‘publication’: papers are written to be published, not read.

And Darwin was a wonderful liberator of human thinking. If you read William Cobbett, an intelligent but not conventionally academic writer from the early 19th century, you will see that he cannot make sense of nature without God. (I remember using a quotation from Rural Rides in an essay on miracles to make just this point. Some linguistic philosophers would see the cry “it’s a miracle”” as an expression of joy but to Cobbett – I was rather proud of this phrase – it was an explanation, not an exclamation.) But after Darwin we could explain nature without God. The world looked different.

Yet somewhere this modern scientific atheism has hardened into a dogma. Just take a look at Twitter, where the stars of the movement spend their time mocking those who do not share their views and their acolytes send them links giving new names to laugh at. It does feel remarkably like a religious movement.
Such an approach does not accord with the view of science I learnt from the works of Karl Popper, where what characterises it is precisely a willingness to see its hypotheses refuted. The modern atheist does not entertain the possibility that he or she may be wrong.

Take the recent court case involving prayers before meetings of Bideford town council. Our modern atheists have rejoiced over this: to me it looks like an unreasonable demand that everyone else must share their views.

The strongest argument against prayers at such meetings is that they may discourage people from standing for the council in the first place. But I am not convinced.

I became a member of Harborough District Council at the age of 26 and a year later found myself part of a sizeable Liberal Alliance group with two member who were younger than I was.

Not surprisingly, we found many of the council’s ways of doing things stuffy and old fashioned. Some we tried to change (successfully or not), some we put up with, some we ignored and some we came to see the wisdom of.

In all of this, the existence of prayers at the start of full council meetings was the least of our concerns. But if they had worried us we would have sought to change things in Harborough, not looked for outside help to fight a court case in London.

And that is at the heart of my distaste for modern atheism. My Liberalism is sceptical and thus is happy to tolerate local difference: philosophical atheism could live with that, but I am not sure this new scientific atheism can.

Six of the Best 204

"The one thing missing from today's housing strategy will be an outright acknowledgment that lower house prices would be a good thing. It's still too much of a political taboo. But ministers know that it's exactly what the younger generation need." Good sense from Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent.

Index on Censorship examines government plans to ban demonstrations during the 2012 London Olympics.

A Dutch MEP claims European politicians have been gagged over the sharing of passenger information with the USA, reports Computer World UK.

"Tea drinking fills the public house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel… the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea kettle, and assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her." Ms B-d's School of Venus reminds us that William Cobbett had no high opinion of tea as a beverage.

The Daily draws together some of the tributes paid to Shelagh Delaney, who died on Sunday.

"Two archaeologists ... collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: 'Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads'." BLDGBLOG speculates on the uses of plants in archaeology.

Six of the Best 190

Terrific stuff from David Boyle on the New Economics Foundation site as he points to the relevance of William Cobbett's opinions to modern Britain: "He believed that Britain was run not so much by a government, but by a financial system which had 'drawn the real property of the nation into fewer hands … made land and agriculture objects of speculation … in every part of the kingdom, moulded many farms into one … almost entirely extinguished the race of small farmers … we are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependants.'"

Caron's Musings has the video of Ewan Hoyle's impressive speech moving the successful motion on drugs policy at the recent Lib Dem Conference.

"Any objective observer would agree that Mr Putin has a controversial record - it is a record that deserves significant scrutiny and challenge. Yet this scrutiny and challenge is precisely what the Russian people will not be allowed to undertake." Cicero's Songs writes on Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin's ambitions and style of government.

Meat Trade News Daily exposes the deadly consequences of the overuse of antibiotics in American agribusiness.

Children in care have failed to make the agenda of any of this year's major party conferences, notes Roy Williamson on the CommunityCare Children Services blog.

A Walk in the Garden explores Dungeness: "One of the largest expanses of shingle in the world and home to many species of plant and bird."

John Pugh, public debt and the nature of the state

At the start of the month I asked why political radicalism has become synonymous with a desire to see a permanent and massive public debt. Stumbling and Mumbling went further, pointing out that there are several reasons why the left should be suspicious of a large public debt.*

So I was pleased to see John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, writing an article for Liberal Democrat Voice in which he argues that "Liberal Democrats can act to reduce the deficit and be positive about the role of the democratic state".

That is quite right and I am pleased to see John saying it. However, I am less happy about something else he says:

The trouble starts when those on the right start to regard the democratic state itself as some sort of alien monster that has sprung into existence on its own, independently of its citizens. Then ‘rolling back the state’ is identified as freeing and empowering citizens – as though we can always achieve the same individually as we can collectively.
It is precisely because of poor accountability – a distorted voting system, limited devolution and huge swathes of public services run by quangos – that people disassociate their aspirations from those of their state.

I do not regard that state as an "alien monster" and our Liberal Democrat concern with democratic reform - the thing that unites all shades of opinion within the party - suggests that we all accept that it is not about to wither away.
However, even in some future Lib Dem utopia with PR and proper local control of public services, I would be wary of talking about the state having aspirations. People have aspirations - often widely differing aspirations - and it is the role of the modern state to allow them to live in harmony while seeking to fulfill those aspirations.
To attribute aspirations to the state or to argue that it can meet all human ambitions strikes me a sort of Hegelian state worship. Rather than encourage reform, it tends to mystify the nature of government, which is a tendency that will appeal to traditional Conservatives but should not appeal to us.
The debate on the state that Liberal Democrats should be having is that outlined by Ronald Dworkin:

The practical problem is this: there are certain things we all want government to do. We want government, for instance, to select methods of education, to sponsor culture, and to do much else that looks, on the surface, like endorsing one set of personal values against another and therefore contradicting liberalism.
It is very important for liberals to develop a theory that would make a distinction here between enriching the choices available to people and enforcing a choice upon people.
The crucial idea, it seems to me, is the idea of imagination. The liberal is concerned to expand imagination without imposing any particular choice upon imagination.
But I've simply named a problem. I haven't met it. It does seem to me that liberalism is rather weak at this point and needs a theory of education and a theory of culture-support that it does not have.

* It was William Cobbett who pointed out that we have the Crown Jewels but a National Debt.

The Long Affray and The Towers of Trebizond

Over the past couple of days Liberal Democrat Voice has posted (part 1 and part 2) several bloggers' summer reading recommendations. My own choices are in part 2 and I thought I would tell you a little more about them here.

My first choice - The Long Affray by Harry Hopkins - was one of a number of rural history books reviewed by John Patrick in the November 1987 issue of History Today. He wrote:

Rider Haggard hated poachers, describing them as 'cowardly villains recruited from among the worst characters in the neighbourhood'. He would have had little time for Harry Hopkins's The Long Affray (PaperMac).
This book, based largely on original sources, tells the story of the long-drawn-out war between landowners and poachers, and the efforts of such men as Cobbett and Bright to reform the game laws.
It is a lively, stimulating, committed book. The author is clearly outraged by the plight of the rural poor and the lengths to which landowners would go to pre- serve their game.
The evidence inevitably gives a biased picture. Prosecuted poachers figure in the records. Landowners – if there were any – who allowed labourers to take their game do not. Sometimes, too, Mr Hopkins lays indignation on with a trowel, and he perhaps overstates the wider importance of the conflict between the poachers and the preservers of game. But it is a worthwhile account of an otherwise neglected topic.

By one of those coincidences, the next book Patrick discusses in the article is by Keith Snell, who supervised my Masters dissertation on Richard Jefferies.

My second choice was The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. The introduction Jan Morris (PDF file) wrote for a recent American edition of the book captures its appeal and explains its background well:

For although this is a very funny novel, witty, satirical, and sometimes downright farcical—a book to be read throughout for sheer pleasure—nevertheless it is a sad book too. It rides above its own comedy. It is a novel, a travel book, an entertainment, but it is also, I think, covertly confessional.

High-spirited, sociable, well off, Rose Macaulay lived and died a spinster, but not because she wanted to. The highly educated and extremely clever daughter of a schoolmaster, she had for many years been the lover of a married man, and this had led to her estrangement from the Anglican Church. Her lover had died in 1942, but if there is some trace of bitterness to her portrait of the Reverend the Honourable bigot, even a touch of cruelty, it is perhaps because she had felt betrayed or abandoned by such men of God.
By the time she published The Towers of Trebizond, in her seventy-seventh year, she had in fact been rescued from disillusionment, and returned to Anglicanism, by another clergyman, the Reverend J. H. C. Johnson—their correspondence was posthumously published in the 1960s. It seems unkind to say so, but without her lapse in faith this subtle and paradoxical novel would have been a far lesser work.

The sadness and loneliness that now and then informs its bubbly humor, the suggestions of quest that become ever stronger as the story proceeds, undoubtedly spring from her own spiritual and romantic unease, and give the book its profounder stature.

Hilaire Belloc was a Liberal MP

Madelaine Bunting had an article in the Guardian today arguing that David Cameron should embrace the "neglected tradition of English radical conservatism" if he wants to attract voters back to the Conservative Party.

I think that Cameron senses this intellectually, even though he is by nature a narrow economic Tory in the Thatcherite mould.

The thinkers Bunting elects to this "red Tory" tradition are William Cobbett, John Ruskin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Cobbett and Ruskin are fascinating figures who could - and should - be claimed by both left and right. Chesterton was a Liberal of sorts, as is seen in his widely quoted:

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.

But Belloc was no Tory: he was even a Liberal MP. Though he became disaffected with the party afterwards, he sat for South Salford between 1906 and the second general election of 1910.

Belloc's most important political book was The Servile State. As Bunting says, in it he argues that both capitalism and socialism enslave the masses to their dictates. We modern Liberal Democrats should read it and reclaim Belloc for ourselves.

Later. Read David Boyle on red Toryism too.

Forget "Life After People", read Richard Jefferies

This evening Channel Four is showing a programme called Life After People. It asks:

What would happen to planet Earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialised world would survive? What would crumble fastest?
From the ruins of ancient civilisations to present-day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us some clues to these questions.

All very interesting even if it does reflect the anti-human strain you sometimes find in Green thinking. In Women in Love D. H. Lawrence was happy for his alter ego to imagine "a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up".

My reason for writing this post is to put in a word for Richard Jefferies, the nineteenth-century writer I wrote my Masters dissertation about. In his After London from 1885 - which has some claim to be the first English science fiction novel - he imagined the collapse of civilisation after some unnamed cataclysmic event:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.
The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.
In the autumn, as the meadows were not mown, the grass withered as it stood, falling this way and that, as the wind had blown it; the seeds dropped, and the bennets became a greyish-white, or, where the docks and sorrel were thick, a brownish-red. The wheat, after it had ripened, there being no one to reap it, also remained standing, and was eaten by clouds of sparrows, rooks, and pigeons, which flocked to it and were undisturbed, feasting at their pleasure.

Note the extraordinary attention to detail from a writer who really understood nature and agriculture.

In all honesty this is the best writing in the book, apart perhaps from an extraordinary visionary section where the hero visits the site of the long abandoned London - it is as though Cobbett's Great Wen has burst.

But I have to plug my man Jefferies now and then.

House Points: Vince Cable and Northern Rock

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Fairy tales

The great nineteenth-century radical journalist William Cobbett wrote that it was typical of Britain to have the National Debt but the Crown Jewels.

As Vince Cable pointed out in his question to the Alistair Darling on Monday, something similar is now the case with Northern Rock. Under the his plans the risk stays with the taxpayer but any profits will go to private investors.

Vince said the BBC’s political correspondent had described Richard Branson as looking like the "cat what got the cream". Which is hardly surprising. He appears to be the government’s preferred bidder and, according to Vince, is proposing to put in £250 million to acquire a bank worth £100 billion.

"He has never run a bank," Vince went on, "and I believe that the profits will be routed through a Caribbean tax haven. So what benefit does the taxpayer derive from his participation?"

All in all, it is hardly surprising Mr Branson is unwilling to let the prime minister out of his sight.

Vince’s Indian summer shows no sign of drawing to a close. He retains his talent for using humour to puncture Gordon Brown. Everyone remembers "Stalin to Mr Bean", but on Monday he was nearly as good.

He recalled the "great Danish economist Hans Christian Andersen" and his story of the two conmen who visited a credulous king to sell him an imaginary suit of gold. "We have a naked King Gordon, desperately trying to cover his embarrassment over the ‘n’ word ‘nationalisation’."

Beyond that, he has Ming Campbell’s ability to come over as being above the political fray. And he has been seen on television dancing with Alesha Dixon.

Craig Revill-Horwood adds: Very good he was too. But where are the Tories in all this?

Good question, Craig. It is hard to know what the Tories believe on Northern Rock. George Osborne’s approach was to sound apocalyptic without advancing any firm proposals at all.

They can hardly favour temporary nationalisation, as Vince consistently has. But do they really want to let the market decide? That would mean shutting down the business and abolishing 6000 jobs in the North East.

The truth is that the Tories agree with the government but lack the courage to say so.

Less a constituency than an incantation

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News:

Feigned praise

Sammy Wilson, the new MP for East Antrim, gave the best guide to maiden speeches. His leader Ian Paisley had told him to say nice things about his constituency, pay tribute to his predecessor and not be controversial.

Wilson hymned the beauties of Ulster, but found it hard to be too kind about the previous member. He had spent years trying to get rid of him. Worse, they are neighbours: “In fact, he is only a stone’s throw away – I pick them out of the garden every morning.”

And controversy? He was doing fine till he got on to King Billy and the Boyne. But then he is a Democratic Unionist.

Let’s see how some of the Liberal Democrats’ maiden speeches measured up last week. Danny Alexander had an advantage: his is less a constituency than an incantation. Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey – there are coach tours with less ambitious itineraries. Dan Rogerson struck a nationalist note: North Cornwall “stretches from the border with England…”

Elsewhere it was local history time. Chris Huhne said Eastleigh was created when the London & South Western Railway’s works arrived there in 1891, and William Cobbett once lived down the road.

Julia Goldsworthy had to mention two previous MPs for Falmouth & Camborne. Not just Candy Atherton, but also David Mudd. He won it for the Tories back in 1970 and took it into his head to stand as an independent this time. David Howarth said Cambridge often changed hands in the nineteenth century, usually after the unseating of MPs for corruption, but did not name names.

That was tending to the controversial. Chris Huhne went all the way, questioning Labour’s mandate with the lowest vote share of any governing party since 1832. Dan Rogerson called for the law to ensure only pasties made in the Duchy can be sold as Cornish pasties. That is controversial to some, but if they stop claiming to make Melton Mowbray pork pies down there he may even win support from us in Leicestershire.

Sammy Wilson also said a maiden speech is like a first night out with a girl: “One wants to do enough to impress but not too much and get in trouble with her father.” I wonder what Dr Paisley thought of that?