Reds under the bed

Over at No Geek is an Island, Lib Dem blogger Will Howells has revealed that he is a distant cousin of Tony Benn and Margaret Rutherford.

This seems a good opportunity to repeat one of my favourite trivial facts: Margaret Rutherford's father murdered his own father (who was Benn's great-grandfather) by banging him repeatedly on the head with a chamber-pot. More details here.

Wood of the Week

By a unanimous decision, the award goes to the delightfully named Lurkenhope Wood near Knighton.

Dissing Respect

Respect Watch keeps an eye on the strange Trot 'n' Taliban coalition that George Galloway has put together.

Remember the wise words of Nick Cohen: "Like a minor public school, the SWP is a home for dim, middle-class children."

New blog on postal voting

In the author's own words:

Postal Voting is a blog about postal voting in the UK. It aims to increase awareness of the risks and security problems associated with such voting, especially with the upcoming 2005 General Election ...

At the moment I prefer to remain anonymous. I am not a member of, nor connected to any UK political party, nor am I connected to the Electoral Commission or any other authority. I'm just an ordinary and concerned voter. If it really matters to you, my own political leanings are left-liberal, but this blog is intended to be as non-partisan as possible.

Kick All Agricultural Subsidies

I have added a link to the KickAAS blog, which campaigns for the abolition of agricultural subsidies.

KickAAS emphasises the concerns of the developing world, but I have been convinced that this policy is in Britain's interests too ever since I read Graham Harvey's The Killing of the Countryside.

Politicians and hitmen

Jeffrey Archer says he is to appeal against his conviction for perjury and we must, of course, believe him.

The BBC reports that the basis of his appeal is that allegations made against him before his trial were not disclosed to the defence. Chief among them was the claim that he had ordered a prosecution witness, his ex-employee Angela Peppiatt, to be killed and the television presenter Jill Dando was murdered by mistake. She lived close to Ms Peppiatt and drove a similar car.

No doubt this claim is nonsense, but misunderstandings can occur with hitmen. The last case in which there were allegations of a British politician hiring one was that involving Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott.

Then it was alleged in court that Andrew Newton (who shot Scott's dog Rinka) had been told he could find Scott in Barnstaple but had misheard and originally gone to Dunstable instead.

Lawyer's note: Mr Thorpe was acquitted without a stain on his character.

The Scottish Job

While in Scotland I visited Banff. The town has many fine buildings, some of which bear plaques recording their restoration by the Banff Preservation Society.

One of our party made the happy discovery that it is possible to sing "This is the Banff Preservation Society" to the tune of the song "This is the Self-Preservation Society" from The Italian Job.

Perhaps you had to be there.

Environment questions

I have been away in Aberdeenshire over Easter - hence the lack of posts over the holiday. Here is Good Friday's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Do crows vote Labour?

Last Thursday Margaret Beckett was holed up in Breadsall Priory near Derby with the other G8 environment ministers. She was surrounded by a thousand police officers from 23 different forces, an eight-foot double fence and an exclusion zone for the public and protestors. All this at a cost of £2m.

Meanwhile at Westminster, Ben Bradshaw had taken her place. This former BBC radio reporter and hyperloyal Blairite has been making a splash as the minister for fish. Today, as a reward, he was in charge of the fowls of the air, the beasts of the earth and everything that crawls upon its belly too. He is such a toady they had put him in charge of the toads.

Our own Alistair Carmichael was one of his first questioners, referring to a headline about “Monks Scandal”. Dark doings in a Shetland monastery? Sadly, it turned out to come from Fishing News and refer to the depredations of Spanish trawlers.

According to Bradshaw, it was all the Tories’ fault and the thinking monkfish should vote Labour. But then for Bradshaw it will always be 1997. He still lives in that sunny world where everyone adores Tony Blair and is grateful for the removal of the Conservatives. Next on his list of people of who should love New Labour were the nephrops fishermen of the West of Scotland.

Then came Henry Bellingham who, a true Tory, was interested in killing animals. He asked about recent government guidelines on controlling pigeons and corvids. (Nephrops? Corvids? You learn a lot of new words at environment, food and rural affairs questions.)

These guidelines said that no one should shoot crows without first giving them 14 days’ written notice and the offer of counselling. (I paraphrase.) They were quickly withdrawn when everyone said they were unworkable. An embarrassment for Bradshaw? Not at all. It was merely a case of unfortunate wording and every crow should vote Labour too.

Even the import of bush meat turned out to be a reason for the animal kingdom to stay on message. There are now nine more sniffer dogs employed at airports than there were under the Tories. Soon there will be ten.

And Margaret Beckett? Despite all those precautions she eventually got out.

Biting at the BBC

The story of the morning is the claim that Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, once bit a colleague when working as editor of the Nine O'Clock News.

Lord Bonkers writes: I knew Lord Reith well and never saw him bite anybody, but there were persistent reports in the 1960s that Hugh Carleton Greene had eaten a junior researcher.

Our unhealthy obsession with sickness

Frank Furedi has a new essay on the Spiked website. He argues that:

The distinguishing feature of the twenty-first century is that health has become a dominant issue, both in our personal lives and in public life.

He suggests four reasons for this dominance:

• medicalisation - problems we encounter in everyday life are reinterpreted as medical ones;
• being ill is seen as a normal state, possibly even more normal than being healthy;
• moral uncertainty - the more ambiguous we feel about what is right and wrong, then the more comfortable we feel using the language of health to make sense of our lives;
• politicisation (and the collapse of ideology) - politicians who have little by way of beliefs or passions, and don't know what to say to the public, are guaranteed a response if they say something health-related.

Furedi concludes:

Western societies are not going to overcome the crisis of healthcare; it is beyond the realms of possibility. No matter what policies government pursue, or how much money they throw at the problem, even if they increase health expenditure fourfold, the problem will not go away. As long as the normalisation of illness remains culturally affirmed, more and more of us are likely to identify ourselves as sick, and will identify ourselves as sick for a growing period of time. The solution to this problem lies not in the area of policymaking, or even medicine, but in the cultural sphere.

Well worth reading, as ever with Furedi.

Norman Baker gets it right

The BBC reports:

Environmental campaigners have come under fire from the Liberal Democrats for failing to make enough protests in the run up to the general election.

"Green groups have become too muted and the government has got away with more than it should have got away with," Lib Dem spokesman Norman Baker said.

There aren't many politicians who can attack and flatter pressure groups at the same time. I think this will play well with the Green movement, and the more we can do to wean single-issue activists away from an unthinking allegiance to Labour, the better.

Polly Toynbee, New Labour and eugenics

Yesterday I suggested that there were some parallels between the eugenics movement in the early part of the last century and New Labour's enthusiasm for state intervention in the family. This morning Polly Toynbee provided more evidence for this view.

Her article is another call for the state to take over the socialisation of children. In effect, she wants them all nationalised. If this sounds extreme, here are a few quotations:

A neighbourhood children's centre for all, means families' childcare crisis will soon be over. Everything children need will be there - health visitors, speech therapy, child psychology, parenting classes, cookery, mother and toddler groups and skills training.

And

For over-5s, the promise is for every school to stretch from breakfast to tea, so every child gets food, care, entertainment and homework help all day long.

And

Youth clubs are no use if they are not state-of-the art with highly trained mentors.

There is something almost Soviet in her enthusiasm for public provision. When she speaks of "a young people's palace offering music, drama, arts, sport, computers and emotional and practical support," she sounds exactly like a Brezhnev era apparachik extolling the Pioneers movement.

Toynbee is convinced that promising to implement these policies is the surest way for Labour to win the forthcoming election. I doubt this.

Most voters do not share her lack of concern for family relationships or contempt for parents or voluntary effort. And they will certainly wonder why these establishments should be "palaces" when our schools, our hospitals and - God knows - our children's homes are nothing of the sort.

But what interests me most is the point that Toynbee uses to clinch her argument:

The one true target on all this children's policy should be a rise in the birth rate, as in Nordic countries

I rest my case.

The Right to be Offensive

The Institute of Ideas and the Soho Theatre are holding a "round table rumble" on "The Right To Be Offensive: Does anything go in the arts?" at the theatre on 30 March. The panel includes the wonderful Nick Cohen and the considerably less wonderful Johann Hari.

Full details here.

New Labour's divorce from liberal England

Martin Kettle writes movingly in today's Guardian about the memorial service for Anthony Sampson:

This was unmistakably a gathering of English men and women of a particular kind. They seemed to me to be the stubbornly principled, occasionally self-righteous bearers of the English imagination of which Peter Ackroyd writes so movingly - people haunted by the landscape and above all by the language, people permanently aware of the past, but people adaptive and comfortable in diversity, practical and pragmatic carriers of a mixed culture. Call them the recusant establishment of literate and liberal England.

I find this a good description of the kinds of liberalism and Englishness that I find particularly congenial. I had these ideas somewhere in mind when I chose the title of this blog, which probably explains why it has been consistently been more interested in rural Shropshire than, say, the reform of social services.

Kettle continues:

On the steps of the church afterwards, I looked for the politicians and saw only a few of any stripe. Shirley Williams and David Owen were there; Margaret Jay and Helena Kennedy too. But none of the thinking ministers you might expect to want to mark the passing of the anatomist of Britain. No Peter Hain, no Tessa Jowell, no David Blunkett - and no Gordon Brown or Tony Blair.

In fact, he notes, "there was not a single Labour minister or MP there".

Kettle sees this absence as evidence of a recent divorce between the New Labour project and liberal England, contrasting it with the efforts senior ministers made to pay tribute to Paul Dacre on the tenth anniversary of his becoming editor of the Daily Mail. David Blunkett, for instance, turned up to propose a toast to a man who "reflects the best of journalism". For there was a time, says Kettle, when Blair felt comfortable with liberalism, and cites his 1995 Fabian lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Attlee government as an example.

I wonder. I sensed the fundamentally illiberal nature of New Labour early. In the winter of 1996-7, a few months before Blair became prime minister, I attended a lecture given by Gordon Brown in the heart of the City of London. His theme was the rediscovery of a sense of shared national purpose through work.

This sounded at once cheerless - stemming from what Andrew Roth has called Brown's "mixture of Presbyterian doom and self-satisfied righteousness" - and sinister. Can a free nation have one purpose? Surely free citizens have many different purposes and a good society enables them to pursue these in some degree of harmony?

It happens that I spent some time this weekend researching the eugenics movement in Britain for an article I am writing. I knew that this movement had enjoyed a wide following, particularly in the Edwardian era, but what struck me most was how familiar the views of its advocates sounded.

Like New Labour, they believed that we are faced by a vast underclass that is frequently criminal and is such a drag on the national economy that it threatens our future survival in an increasingly competitive world

In 1905 the answer was to sterilise the unfit and to encourage the right sort of people to have more children. In 2005 it is to have childcare professionals train parents and to make the socialisation of children the business of the state. What these two approaches share is a fundamental fear and contempt of the poor.

So while Kettle is right to say that New Labour is fundamentally divorced from Liberal England, I suspect that this divorce was inherent from its inception and is not a recent development.

Whittington's Diary

Thanks to Wayback Machine, the web's equivalent of the Tardis, I can give a shameless plug for the column I wrote for Susan Kramer's website during the first London Mayoral campaign.

Click here for the thoughts of her cat Whittington on Maurice Norris, Dobbo and the Übernewt.

A two-tier service

One day last week teams from the two universities in Leicester met in many different sports. I am told that at the basketball game the supporters of Leicester University could be heard chanting "You'll always be a poly" at their rivals from De Montfort University.

There is absolutely nothing amusing about this. Such attitudes have no place in modern Britain.

Jonathan Calder
BA (York) MA (Leicester)

I'm a pinko lily-livered liberal

Thank you to Peter Cuthbertson at Conservative Commentary for adding me to his blogroll under the heading "The Enemy Within". And an even bigger thank you to him for calling me "a pinko lily-livered liberal".

It's a great relief. In July of last year a Mr Broadbent from Sutton in Surrey wrote to Liberal Democrat News saying of me:

Surely he is not a Lib Dem - he seems to be a fairly extreme libertarian more at home in the Conservative Party or perhaps New Labour.

I'm not sure political philosophy is Mr Broadbent's strong suit. Even so, it's nice to have my pinko credentials confirmed.

School dinners

Ruth Kelly may be assuring everyone that she though of it first, but Jamie Oliver's campaign on school meals has been a remarkable success. His Feed Me Better website is worth a visit.

Chris Pond and antisocial behaviour

The funniest story of the weekend has to be the police cautioning of Chris Pond, the Work and Pensions Minister, over an incident of criminal damage. The BBC has the full details here.

Mr Pond told the Mail on Sunday: "I decided to bring the nightmare to an end by accepting a police caution." I am sure we all feel his pain.

In the past he has taken a different line on the subject (note to Labour Party press officers: it is a good idea to put a date on your media releases):

Anti Social behavior causes untold misery, corrodes communal life, undermines public services and forces people to live in fear in their own homes.

As Minister in the Department of Work and Pensions, I am looking at the possibility of using housing benefit sanctions against those who commit anti social behavior (sic).

The best comment on the whole affair comes from Peter Black:

The question is that when Ministers like Chris Pond supported all those measures to deal with anti-social behaviour did they envisage them applying to people living in refurbished Grade 2 listed 18th-century houses, thought to be worth £750,000?

Best of British blogs

Tim Worstall has posted his latest BritBlog round up here.