St Augustine's, Fosse Road North, Leicester

When I went to Fosse Road North to find The Empire, I was surprised to see a ruined church next door to it.

St Augustine's was closed in 2000 and badly damaged in an arson attack in 2004. Not that Pevsner is particularly polite, describing it as a "Typical late C19 church of brick." It was built between 1900 and 1912.

Today the ruins are overgrown and, like The Empire, threatened with demolition.

One former resident of the area remembers it like this:

Although we lived in the parish of St. Leonards, my father prefered St Augustines and it was the 'family'church. We all went to Sunday school there and I eventually sang in the choir. At 16 I rejected religion totally. Most family wedding,christenings,funerals etc took place at this church. It was never a beautiful place being built of red brick and with wild overgrown gardens could be a bit spooky.

Sadly, it is the garage next door that is open on Easter Sunday.

"The Global Race": Bad politics, bad economics

Jeremy Browne, reports Liberal Democrat Voice, has published his book. Race Plan: An authentic liberal plan to get Britain fit for 'The Global Race'. It has been issued by the free-market think thank Reform.

I am pleased to see a prominent Lib Dem producing a book - there should be more of them - and the party's ideology is so nebulous that it is hard to accuse any of us of heresy.

But there are two things that make we worry.

The first is the publisher. I did subscribe to Reform's e-bulletin for a while, but did not get on with it. Its answer to every question was the same: cut taxes, cut spending, privatise.

It was not so much that the bulletin was wrong: it was that it was not interesting.

Still, Jeremy's book may be an exception to Reform's usual output.

But I am not hopeful. "The Global Race"?

I wrote a post back in September of last year quoting a couple of commentators who thought the concept was pretty worthless.

In particular, I quoted Philip Booth from the equally free-market Institute of Economic Affairs and the more left-leaning American economist Robert Reich, via a Guardian article by Andy Beckett:

"Economists don't think of trade as a race in any way," says Booth. "The world economy is not a zero-sum game. Countries get richer together. If China carries on reforming and growing, there will be more opportunities there for Britain." Reich agrees: "The race needn't [mean that] every country's citizens lose ground, but some lose more than others … or [that] some can gain only at the expense of others … We can all grow, and at the same time spread prosperity to more people."

Nor is "The Global Race" a novel concept. Back in February 2013 Isabel Hardman told us:

The Cabinet met this morning to discuss the content of the next Queen’s Speech. The ministers present were told that legislation for the next session would focus on supporting the government’s priorities of ‘economic competitiveness’ and Britain’s position in the ‘global race’ (there we go), and ‘aspirations and fairness’. 

CCHQ staffers have already told me they’re sick of the phrase, which probably means it’s only just percolated as far as Portcullis House, so expect to hear it coming out too far and too fast from ministers’ mouths over the next few months.

The problem is not even that "The Global Race" is a Conservative concept. It is redolent of the sort of reborn public-school values that have dominated British public life since Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party 20 years ago.

I shall buy Race Plan - I may even read it - but I do not expect to be inspired by it. Still, I may have a pleasant surprise.

Carnivorous piranhas found blocking sewers in Shropshire

The Independent walks away with our Headline of the Day Award.

Having visited Ditton Priors ("a strange place") myself, I am not wholly surprised by the final paragraph of the story.

The Co-operative Society stables, Leicester

Down a side street just across the road from The Union you will find this terrific ghost sign.

A letter to a family genealogy website tells the story of these stables:

If I remember correctly the horses from the Glenfield Road Co op Dairy were stabled in Battenberg Road or a neighbouring road. The milkmen walked the unharnessed horses from the Glenfield Road Dairy along Henley Road across Fosse Road North and into Battenberg Road. They could be seen walking the horses back to the stables shortly after lunch when their shift ended. Perhaps some of your other contributors may recall these men and their horses taking this route. The Co op Dairy kept horses for milk deliveries long after Kirby and West had changed to electric milk floats.

And, as you can see below, the stables are still there, though rather altered and now housing small business units.

The name Battenberg Road is interesting too. More than one street off the London Road had its name changed in 1914 because it was thought too Germanic. Perhaps anti-German feeling ran less high in the West End of the city?

The problems with Cinderella's Law

In recent days I have seen Liberal Democrat MPs tweeting in favour of Cinderella's Law - a proposed new law that would make the 'emotional abuse' of children a criminal offence.

Frank Furedi spelt out some of the problems with such a law in the Independent:

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children offers a definition of emotional abuse that includes some very real and unambiguous acts of harm, such as "conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate", but it also includes forms of behaviour that, depending on the context, may or may not be harmful to a child. 

For example, the NSPCC includes in its definition of emotional abuse the "making of fun" of what a child says or how they communicate. I am not sure what universe the NSPCC inhabits, but in the real world, the making fun of one another is the stuff of family life. When parents and children interact, they are likely to make jokes at each others' expense. 

Where does good-natured banter end and destructive verbal joking begin? Whatever the answer is to this question, it will not be found in the law courts.

I would like to add two questions of my own.

The supporters of Cinderella's Law envision parents who break it being sent to prison. What arrangements will be made for the children in such circumstances and how confident are the law's supporters that they will be any better for the child?

Because there are plenty of accounts of children in the care system suffering just this sort of abuse. So my second question is to ask whether local authorities will be subject to Cinderella's Law too?

The EU and the UK: Where is the vision?

Asked, in his second debate with Nigel Farage, what the European Union would look like in 10 years' time, Nick Clegg's instinctive response was to say it would look "quite similar to what it is now".

The next morning, bowled a juicy half volley on his LBC phone-in by Caron Lindsay, he named the three things he most wanted to change about the European Union as:

• More trade;
• Scrap the expensive monthly trek to Strasbourg;
• Less red tape for small businesses.

Those are all sensible reforms, but isn't there a bit of vision lacking in the answer to these two questions? They were asking different things, but in at least one of the answers there should have been room for a bit of vision.

Could not Nick have talked about further expanding the EU or further entrenching European values? About greater co-operation or understanding between nations. About anything a little less technocratic?

This is not just a criticism of Nick. It is typical of the debate on British membership of the EU that those in favour of our continued membership should unable to offer moving arguments in favour of it. The same is true of those who defend the United Kingdom in the debate over Scottish independence.

In both the debates the chief tactic of the status quo has been to co-opt the heads of big companies to say they are opposed to change.

Prosperity matters, but this comes dangerously close to the argument: "A lot of very important people believe we should not change, who are you to disagree?" And that is not an argument any Liberal should entertain, nor one likely to prove persuasive in an age when so many are disaffected with their leaders.

Besides, it is obvious that an independent Scotland would be able to survive quite comfortably outside the United Kingdom, as would the UK outside the EU.

Arguing in favour of the status quo may inevitably make it harder to arouse the passions, but we badly need more positive arguments than we are hearing at the moment.

The spire of St Mary de Castro, Leicester, has been taken down

In September 2012 I visited and photographed St Mary de Castro in Leicester. What I didn't know then was that I was taking my life in my hands.

A year later the church was closed because it was in a dangerous condition. The spire has now been dismantled and repairs are being carried out on the tower beneath. Access to the whole of the Leicester Castle site has been closed off.

You can follow the progress of the project on the church's Save Our Spire Facebook page.

How will the Liberal Democrats bridge the health funding gap?

The King's Fund interim report A new settlement for health and social care has key findings typical of all those that have looked at the funding of health and social care:

• The problems of the current settlement for health and social care are systemic, in the commission's view. They stem from a lack of alignment in entitlements to care, between funding streams, and in organisation/commissioning of care. 

• There is a problem of adequacy, with too little public money spent on social care and too much demanded of at a time of rising needs. 

• The public has a poor understanding of the present system of social care. The current system is heavily dependent on unpaid carers and is inequitable, with shifting boundaries on entitlements. 

• Greater life expectancy, an altered disease burden, and medical advances have all resulted in more people requiring health and social care. 

• Economic growth means that better health and social care are not unaffordable. But intense short-term pressures and long-term changes mean hard choices will need to be made on funding.

When Lord Warner proposed a £10 monthly membership fee for the NHS, Liberal Democrats were quick to condemn him.

That was my instinct too, but if we rule such measures out, how are we going to meet these demands for better funding for health and social care?

The most important tenet of the government of which we form part is the need for austerity, and these days the call for more tax cuts seems to be the most important Lib Dem policy.

Quite how these two fit together is an interesting question for debate, but however you reconcile them it is clear the Lib Dems will have trouble finding extra money for health and social care. Economic growth would ease the pressure, but relying solely upon it sounds a rather Labour way of dodging the question.

So how will we do it? Or have we given up trying.

David Laws breaks his elbow in a bizarre canvassing accident

Yesterday Zoe O'Connell tweeted a newspaper cutting about an accident to David Laws. I have now found the story in the Western Gazette:

Yeovil MP David Laws has broken his elbow after falling while on the election trail in Somerset. 

On Friday he was leafleting in Horton and Broadway, near Ilminster, in the pouring rain when he slipped over in a driveway and subsequently spent the day in Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton. 

He said: “Unfortunately I had only called on five houses when I managed to slip over and fell down backwards on my left elbow. 

“The owner of the house was kind enough to come out to help me.”

I wish him a swift recovery - the report goes on to reveal that David's favourite food is red liquorice.

Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Yesterday morning I gently admonished Paul Walter for calling The Strawbs "one hit wonders".

It wasn't so much because they had a couple of other hits besides Part of the Union: it was because the band has a long and interesting history. At various times both Sandy Denny and Rick Wakeman have been members.

So here is an early Sandy Denny recording of her great song Who Knows Where the Time Goes? made in 1967 when she was briefly a member of The Strawbs. It was intended for an LP by the band, but this did not emerge until 1973, when it was titled All Our Own Work.

 In 1969 Denny recorded the best known version of her song as part of Fairport Convention.

Anyway, thanks to Paul for helping me choose this week's music video.

The Empire Hotel and hydropathic institution, Newfoundpool, Leicester

This is the Empire Hotel on Fosse Road North in Newfoundpool, Leicester. It is currently empty and in its later years seems to have been no more than a pub.

Lidl want to demolish it and the ruined church next door (more of that another day) to build a supermarket.

No great loss, you may think. But the Empire Hotel has a long and interesting history and holds the key to the development of this corner of Leicester.

The Victoria County History tells the story:

By about 1830 Newfoundpool belonged to Isaac Harrison, a member of a Leicester firm of market gardeners, who discovered and decided to exploit a spring of medicinal water on the land. He built a large house as a hydropathic institution, with houses for the doctor and his attendants, and for a time the institution seems to have flourished. It failed, however, probably before 1835.

This illustration shows the hydropathic institution.

After that the building was lived in by various members of the Harrison family until 1885, when it became the Empire Hotel.

The building had once stood in fields outside the city, but by then terraced housing had been built on the land behind it (more of that another day too). So this entrance, which makes it look like the railway hotel in a prosperous town, was added to what had been the rear of the building.

Let's hope a new use can be found for it so it can be saved.

When the Liberals won Basingstoke

Though I wouldn't put much money on her remaining in the cabinet for long, I don't suppose Maria Miller will stand down as MP for Basingstoke. And if she does, the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to win the by-election.

Because, since its creation in 1885, the Basingstoke constituency as been won by the Conservatives at every general election but one. And when they lost it, they managed to win it back the following year.

It is not accurate to say they have held the constituency since 1885 except for one year, because of the strange career of Andrew Hunter who was Basingstoke's MP between 1983 and 2005:

In 2002, he withdrew from the Conservative Party, in order to fight elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly as a candidate of the Democratic Unionist Party. He had family and Orange Order connections with Northern Ireland and opposed the Good Friday Agreement. The elections were held in November 2003, when he stood in Lagan Valley, and he failed to gain a seat, coming seventh in a six-seat constituency. 

On 10 December 2004, he announced that he had joined the DUP Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons, the first Member of Parliament for a seat in Great Britain to represent a party based in Ireland since T.P. O'Connor represented Liverpool Scotland from 1885 to 1929.

The one general election at which the Conservatives lost Basinstoke was that of 1923, when Reginald Fletcher won the seat for the Liberals.

And who was the Liberal agent who produced this unexpected victory?

In that great book Arlott in Conversation with Mike Brearley, John Arlott recalls:

"The doctor, I believe, recommended my mother to have another child and she said, 'Yes, Doctor, I would if only I could afford it,' and it really was like that. But she was a most capable woman. She was the local Liberal agent and did succeed. She was the only one who ever did, the only agent who ever got a Liberal in for Basingstoke.

Reginald Fletcher was defeated in the 1924 general election. He later joined Labour and won Nuneaton in 1935. Raised to the peerage as Baron Winster in 1942, he briefly served as minster of civil aviation in Clement Attlee's government.

Trains are running along the seawall at Dawlish again

Passenger workings west of Exeter resumed today. This engineers' train, filmed on 29 March, was one of the first to use the rebuilt line through Dawlish.

Six of the Best 430

"Clegg was quite right when he said that, as a nation, we are better when we are open-minded and work with other countries and peoples. That had resonance but it isn’t enough to win." David Boyle on the Nick vs Nigel debates.

Alex's Archives looks at the politics of the bedroom tax: "If the party leadership has never been persuaded of the wisdom of the bedroom tax then it gives us yet another indication of the price it was willing for others to pay to hold the Coalition together. Or it indicates the limited amount of leverage the party was able to exert over the welfare reform agenda."

Cutting beer duty won’t save a single pub, says Gareth Epps.

Jonathan Rowson (a chess grandmaster in his spare time) argues on the RSA Social Brain blog that Ukip needs to get serious, but will suffer when it does.

Thousands have signed a petition to bring back Time Team in honour of archaeologist Mick Aston, reports Ben Miller on Culture24.

The England and Wales Cricket Board's recently announced plans to revive old cricket grounds in urban areas was greeted with suspicion. Jon Culley on Cricinfo asks if the cynicism is justified.

David Dimbleby’s bladder revisited

Continuing the trawl through the archives of this blog following its 10th birthday, we come to June 2005 and this assault on David Dimbleby. Much good did it do.

David Dimbleby’s bladder

Some broadcasters are so bland and inoffensive that it’s offensive. Nick Ross is one such. I remember a magazine article that featured photographs of celebrities as children and invited you to guess who they grew up to become. It was somehow inevitable that the young Nick Ross should look exactly like the older Nick Ross.

Two more such creatures are the Dimblebys. The first part of David Dimbleby’s new series A Picture of Britain, which looks at British landscape and its effect on British painting and other arts, was shown on BBC1 this evening.

Inevitably the pictures were beautiful, though when you see clouds racing over an otherwise still landscape for the tenth time it ceases to impress. And there was someone with a terribly literal mind at work too. When Dimbleby mentioned Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush swelled up on the soundtrack at once. Yorkshire as a whole was introduced by a brass band. Playing “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At”. On Ilkley Moor.

What was most striking, though, was an extract from David Dimbleby’s first television film. He made it with his younger brother Jonathan. At the age of 17.

No doubt it does your career little harm if your father is the most famous broadcaster in the land,* but this film crystallised what is objectionable about David Dimbleby. He is a public school boy of no great imagination or ability, projected on to the national stage by television fame and family connections.

Though his performance on election night this year was not his worst, his occasional misunderstanding of the statistics or miscalling of results reveal someone with no great passion for psephology. You feel he would be just as happy covering ballroom dancing or show jumping.

It has been suggested to me that Dimbleby has made election night his own because he possesses a bladder of iron and has no need to nip away from the camera in the small hours. If so, this lucky heredity may be the real reason the Dimbleby family has made our state occasions its own.

It’s not talent. It’s not nepotism. It’s urology.

* In his latest diary Lord Bonkers suggests that Richard Dimbleby “commentated upon every state occasion from the launch of the Queen Mary to the conception of Princess Anne”.

Later I was to discover this video. It shows David Dimbleby, down from Oxford and the Bullingdon Club for the summer vacation, working for the infant Anglia Television.

Enjoy Coate Water while you still can

A depressing story from the Swindon Advertiser:

A Roman villa, a landing strip for pre-World War One biplanes, a Bronze Age barrow, half-a-dozen Neolithic stone circles, the birthplace of an acclaimed poet and an old Victorian brick yard. 

The countryside in and around Coate Water has all of these and more but conservationists who have lost a 30-year battle to keep developers at bay are urging people to enjoy the area before it changes forever. 

A two-day celebration of the old hamlet of Coate and its adjoining rural landscape on the eastern edge of Swindon takes place this weekend. 

It has been organised by the Swindon Civic Voice which is urging people to get out in the open air and “soak it all up” before work on a 900-home development begins.

I am biased about Coate, because I wrote my Masters dissertation about Richard Jefferies. He is the writer the Advertiser has in mind, but he was not a poet. He was a nature essayist and novelist who played an important part in the development of British science fiction and children's literature.

But, biased as I am, I am astounded that the land around Coate is being developed. Swindon has grown at an extraordinary rate, and settlements of this size need their green spaces. It should have been preserved and cherished.

Its development, along with my experience more locally, suggests that developers can currently build pretty much where they choose.

Anyway, Swindon Civic Voice has produced  this poster above to advertise this weekend's event.

Owen Paterson confirms there will be no extension of the badger cull

Good news from the Commons today. As the Guardian reports:

Plans to roll out the controversial badger cull pilots nationwide across England have been dropped by Owen Paterson, after a damning independent report found the shoots had not been sufficiently effective or humane. 

The two pilot culls, in Gloucestershire and Somerset, will continue with improvements recommended by the independent expert panel (IEP), including more and better trained marksmen. But plans to start new badger culls in 10 other areas have been cancelled, the environment secretary announced on Thursday, telling MPs he was taking the "responsible approach".

The Liberal Democrats website has a quote from the party's environment spokesperson Kate Parminter:

“The IEP report was clear, last summer’s culls were ineffective and in some rare cases, possibly inhumane. 

“Liberal Democrats have argued consistently that further roll out, in light of these criticisms, would be unwise, until we have addressed the issues in the report. Today’s decision not to roll the culls out further is a victory for the Liberal Democrats and for good sense. 

“Abandoning the current culls at this point would actually lead to an increase of the disease in the wildlife reservoir which is why it is important that the culls have not been abandoned altogether, but will continue with an adjusted methodology aimed to ensure that as they progress these two culls will be both humane and effective. 

“It’s also great news that more money has been made available for vaccination projects, culling is only one element in the fight to control TB and Lib Dems have always strongly supported greater use of vaccination.”

That Maria Miller apology in full

Note: it is safe to hold your breath.

Rutland and Stamford by-election, 1933

This photograph shows Arnold Gray, the Labour candidate in the 1933 Rutland and Stamford by-election, talking to shoppers.

The by-election took place on 21 November and Gray did surprisingly. The victorious Conservative Lord Willoughby de Eresby polled 14,605 votes to his 12,818 and became the youngest MP in the Commons.

I cannot find anything about Arnold Gray on the net, but there was an account of a speech on rural poverty by his wife in the Catholic Herald in 1937 (scroll down). It suggests that Gray was a farmer from the constituency.

Later. Labour History Group has sent me a link to some notes about Arnold Gray on a family history site. See also the comment from David Boothroyd below.

What's wrong with W1A?

When I eventually became weary of writing about Westminster for Liberal Democrat News - goodness only knows how my readers felt - I briefly wrote a television column for the party newspaper.

One of the programmes I reviewed in March 2011 was Twenty Twelve - or 2012, as I called it:

2012 (Channel 4) is another attempt at satire, this time dealing with the London Olympics, and it ought to have been celebrating. Its first episode was concerned with a ridiculously complex clock that was designed to count down the hours until the Games begin. A few days later the real Olympic clock that had just been set up in Trafalgar Square broke down. 

A victory for satire? Not quite. While fun, 2012 is far too polite to bite anybody. So much so that Sebastian Coe was willing to appear in it. In allowing this it made itself the Official Satirist of the London Games. The viewer was reminded of the toe-curling occasion when Mrs Thatcher insisted upon starring in a specially written Yes Minister sketch.

As it turned out, Twenty Twelve did grow on me, but not because it offered biting satire of the London Olympics. I liked it because of the strength of the characters and because I even began to care about them. I really wanted to know how they would get on when Hugh Bonneville was in hospital.

Maybe I will grow to love W1A too, but I feel it is inviting us to laugh with the BBC and not at it. If a second series is commissioned, I suspect that the corporation's bigwigs will be queuing up to appear.