Somehow this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter Russell Brand's political acolytes

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Twitter yesterday was full of people arguing that, because Russell Brand - who denies all the allegations made against him on Saturday's Dispatches programme - was being defended by right-wing conspiracy loons, there were no lessons for the left to learn from his rise and fall.

If you pointed out, as I did a couple of times, that Brand had written a Guardian column for years and edited a special issue of the New Statesman, some were outraged.

So I was pleased by Marina Hyde's article in the Guardian this morning, which looks at the role of the press - the Guardian and herself included - in boosting Brand over the year.

Here are a few quotations from it:

Back in the day, though, a lot of people were thrilled to be on what they thought was Russell’s side of the line. For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school. 

And:

The apogee of this particular stage of Brand’s inevitable journey toward alt-right-frotting wingnut was surely the ludicrously feverish speculation over whether he’d endorse Labour in the 2015 general election. 

Keen to be awarded his royal warrant, the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, traipsed to Brand’s London flat during the final stages of the campaign, for a filmed interview where committed non-voter Russell inquired rhetorically: “Since suffrage, since the right to vote, what has meaningfully occurred?” Nothing much, he reckoned. Somehow, this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter his political acolytes.

And:

What is completely bizarre, with the benefit of 2023 hindsight, is how the Sachsgate story was framed, both by those who were reflexive defenders of the BBC and “comedy” and free speech (then a somewhat lefty preoccupation, funnily enough), AND by those who wished their destruction. Fleet Street quickly settled into tribes and covered it as a story where each assumed the other was acting out of vested interests. This was back when our only culture wars were about things that happened on the BBC. (My how we’ve grown.) Mail vox pops were incandescent; some Guardian ones found it an “overreaction”.

Hyde also reminds us that the Liberal Democrat contribution to this climate was Nick Clegg telling GQ he had slept with 30 women.

I have sometimes resisted the cult of Marina Hyde in the past, but this is a brave and important column.

Later. Sadly, the column isn't as brave as I first thought. Here is a Lost in Showbiz column by Hyde from January 2009 - thanks to Gerry Lynch for tweeting it:

Today in Jesus Wept we must turn to Sachsgate breakout star Georgina Baillie, who has thus far managed to parlay Russell Brand's insult to her dignity into an excruciatingly candid red-top buy-up and a number of semi-mucky photoshoots.

But can we please draw the line at the trenchant newspaper comment pieces? It seems not. Breaking another ten second silence, Manuel's estranged granddaughter takes to the pages of today's Sun with an opinion column unlikely to give PJ O'Rourke any sleepless nights.

Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially.

If Russell Brand was the school bully who was briefly your friend, then in these columns Marina Hyde was the most popular girl in the school, and she was being mean to someone else.

It's a shame she didn't acknowledge that in today's article. What appeared to be an admission of guilt now looks more like an attempt to hide it with fake candour.

Rory Stewart and Le Cercle

Here's an interesting clip from Ash Sarkar's interview with Rory Stewart for Novara Media.

Stewart's membership of this shadowy foreign policy forum Le Cercle, or rather his failure to declare it as a minister, was briefly the subject of controversy in 2019.

PoliticsHome reported then:

Two senior Conservatives are facing questions over their links to a secretive foreign affairs group.

Rory Stewart and Nadhim Zahawi did not declare their chairmanship of transatlantic body 'Le Cercle' despite also sitting on several related Commons select committees, PoliticsHome can reveal.

The group organises gatherings of powerful figures from politics, business and the intelligence services to discuss foreign affairs.

But despite the nature of the meetings, neither Mr Stewart or Mr Zahawi declared their involvement with the group during their time as members of the powerful Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Both senior Tory MPs confirmed to PoliticsHome they had held the chairmanship of Le Cercle, with Mr Stewart's tenure as chair lasting from 2013 until 2014, while Mr Zahawi held the top post from 2015 until his appointment as Children's Minister in early 2018.

And the report went on to say:

Sir Alistair Graham, the former Chair of the Commission for Standards in Public Life, said he was concerned by the apparent omission.

“It is disturbing that two experienced members of Parliament did not see fit to declare their active membership of Le Cercle at the time they were a member of a key select committee, the functions of which clearly overlapped with the discussions of Le Cercle, which is a shadowy body which concerns itself with foreign affairs.

“Transparency is a central issue in British politics and I would have expected these two MPs to have shown greater leadership in letting the public and their constituents know their important links with Le Cercle.”

The article also quoted the responses from Stewart and Zahawi. There is more about Le Cercle in a disapproving piece on the Declassified UK site.

Rory Stewart's interview with Ash Sarkar is a notably interesting one and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The new political season is here, so if there's something you want to say, remember that I enjoy publishing guest posts on Liberal England. So if you've got an idea for a post you could write for this blog, please drop me a line. 

As you can see from the list below, I accept guest posts on subjects far beyond the Liberal Democrats and British politics.

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish. So do please get in touch first.

These are the last 10 guest posts on Liberal England:

• LadBaby number one for Christmas again: what does it say about Britain? - Stuart Whomsley
• 100 signs that Conservative morale is low - Augustus Carp
• How Blackpool won the Second World War - Ruth Bright
• Defections, ratting and re-ratting: a final scorecard - Augustus Carp
• Will compulsory ID at polling stations break our model of canvassing and knocking up? - Augustus Carp
• A tour of some top political podcasts - Ruth Bright
• Liberalism, transport and the climate crisis - Peter Doveston
• Abandoning the War on Drugs would bring Britain so many benefits - Lee Dargue
• Why is the UK failing so badly at infrastructure? - James Oates
• 61 councillors have changed their allegiance since May's local elections - Augustus Carp

The Joy of Six 1163

"Liz Truss almost wrecked the British economy in her 49 days as prime minister, and is now working on a book, Ten Years to Save the West, to be published in April next year. Margaret Thatcher was initially reluctant to join the international speaker circuit following her 10 revolutionary years in power. But the shortest-serving politician in British history recently pocketed some £90,000 for a five-day trip to Taiwan during which she delivered a speech about the importance of standing up to Chinese aggression." Adrian Wooldridge says we are living in an age of political shamelessness.

Ruth Bright argues that the NHS "must address misogyny and listen to women. In the obstetric context, at minimum women’s dignity, continence and future birth chances are at stake. At most their very lives and even the lives of their babies are on the line."

"Good Ofsted scores are not fairly spread but are far more likely for suburban, girls-only, selective schools with no long-term poor pupils, for example. Perhaps 70 per cent of the variation in Ofsted grades can be explained by these factors." Stephen Gorard is sceptical about the value of these grades.

Roy Eidelson is interviewed by Democracy Now! about the American Psychological Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programmes and the struggle to reform the psychology. 

"Videotaped drama is a form of television that (soaps apart) we don’t see anymore. Once, of course, it was the dominant way of programme-making and remained so for decades." Archive Television Musings on what technical change meant for actors and viewers.

Now! Then! A Yorkshire Almanac for 2023 looks at the invention of the legend of John Bartendale, the York man who survived hanging.

Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there. 

Calexico: Black Heart

Calexico are a band from Tucson, Arizona, whose music is infused with the desert and the Mexican border. And Black Heart is a track from their 2003 breakthrough album Feast of Wire.

The music website Pitchfork was euphoric about that album:

Calexico have always been restless experimenters, juxtaposers and journeymen, crafting a unique fusion of bluesy Mariachi, desert-rock and jazz, and injecting healthy doses of experimentation into the otherwise straightforward records on which they've made guest appearances.  

Yet, for their innovation and distinctive sound, their albums have always had their weak spots - moments in which their ideas seemed to be running away with the band's ability to execute them. 

That time has passed. All of Calexico's previous strengths come home to roost on Feast of Wire, the band pushing their experiments further than ever before and pulling each of them off unfalteringly. In short, Calexico have created their first genuinely masterful full-length, crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration.

Or to put it another way:

It is the album we always knew they had in them but feared they would never make.

I fell in love with this track because of the sinister strings. Calexico's music has been described as 'desert noir', but this is gothic. Something terrible is about to happen.

GUEST POST: 61 councillors have changed their allegiance since May's local elections

Augustus Carp look at the latest figures on councillors who change their political allegiance.

It’s been just over four months since the last round of local elections in England, so it’s probably time to have a quick look at the list of defections, expulsions, ratting and re-ratting going on amongst our elected councillors.  

My thesis is a simple one: local government by elections tell us a lot about real votes cast by real voters, and are the subject of considerable (over?) analysis.  However, councillors changing their political allegiances might be able to tell us a lot more about morale and local realpolitik, which can have a significant effect on local campaigning.  

Councillors provide the bulk of canvassing, leafletting and polling day manpower at General Elections, as well as being the political antennae for parliamentary candidates.  If they leave - for reasons of political principle, ego, or perceived personal slights they might have suffered - then as a consequence their old political party will lose their campaigning abilities in their ward.  

Since May this year it’s been comparatively quiet – there has been a net loss of 28 Conservative councillors, including three from the group in Peterborough.  Fifteen have left the Labour Party, including at least two arising from the Jamie Driscoll affair in North Tyneside.  

The Lib Dems are down nine (thirteen left, four joined) with three having gone in Sunderland, citing the pressures put on them by the local party.  

The Scottish Nationalists have lost 10, almost all in North Lanarkshire.  So, 61 active politicians have, for one reason or another, left the political party they were members of when they were elected.  

Only six have moved directly from one political party to another – the rest have moved to some form of notional independence.  Let’s see if the Defection Rate increases the closer we get to a General Election.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Read Augustus Carp's earlier guest posts on councillors who change allegiance:

• 100 signs that Conservative morale is low
• Defections, ratting and re-ratting: a final scorecard

The Tories will finish third in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election

I wrote this about Mid Bedfordshire back in July:

Labour has won vanishingly few seats like this one in recent decades, and Lib Dems will grumble about a strong Labour campaign being the Tories' best chance of holding on or ask how Labour are different from the Tories now. But Labour are allowed to fight Southern by-elections if they are want to.

Besides, it's not unknown for by-elections in Tory held seats to turn into two-horse races between Labour and the Liberals.

This is what happened in Brecon and Radnor in 1985 and Littleborough and Saddleworth in 1995. And we won both.

So a Labour intervention in Mid Bedfordshire does not mean the Tories are safe.

I won't tempt the gods by claiming that the Liberal Democrats are going to win the by-election, but I am happy to say that the Tories will finish third.

Terence O'Neill (1934-2023), Agatha Christie and The Mousetrap

Today is the anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth on 15 September 1890. That has made me think about her play The Mousetrap and its roots in the notorious killing of a child, Dennis O'Neill, in Shropshire in 1945.

And that has led me to the news that Dennis's brother Terry died on Sunday at the age of 88. (I hope I have got his birth year and age right.) May he rest in peace.

If you are interested in The Mousetrap and its connection with the death of Dennis O'Neill, I recommend The Mousetrap and Me, an award-winning radio documentary that Terry O'Neill took part in - I had better add a content warning for child abuse here.

Terry served his brother Dennis wonderfully well. It wasn't just that this documentary and Terry's book Someone to Love Us help write Dennis's case back into the history of childcare in Britain. As a 10-year old Terry gave evidence in court against the couple who had abused the brothers and secured their conviction and imprisonment.

Further reading

Wikipedia: Dennis O'Neill case
Liberal England: Malcolm Saville and the death of Dennis O'Neill

If we really are seeing a Lib Dem revival, what would a good general election result look like?

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Writing for The House, Sean Kemp gives an amusing account of recent Liberal Democrat history:

At one point as a party spinner I found myself trudging round the lobby explaining our performance in the South Shields by-election (seventh place, behind the BNP and edging out the Monster Raving Loonies by 150 votes) and was reduced to gags like “we always said it was a seven horse race” to preserve some dignity.

before daring to hope that we are seeing a secure revival in the party's fortunes.

If we are really are, what would be a good result for the Lib Dems at next year's general election?

Sean writes:

Ed Davey isn’t about to be making up all the ground lost in the 2015 wipeout, but one of the many indignities of that result was the SNP becoming the third largest party in Westminster, taking over all the advantages that position gives you. 

It may be too much of a reach for the Lib Dems to turn it around at the next election, but if they come out of it having narrowed the gap and with a block of MPs that hold some legislative influence then the party can feel it is finally on an upward trajectory.

That is a realistic take, and it also emphasises that the Lib Dems' future will be strongly influenced by
something - the battle between the SNP and Labour in Scotland - that is wholly outside our control.

Tibshelf Sidings: Remains of a railway yard hidden in the woods

Tibshelf Sidings was once a busy spot on the railway and part of Britain's coal distribution network. Numerous sidings and a junction were sprawled out alongside the Erewash Valley line in Derbyshire. The complex closed in the late 1980s as the collieries in the area began to decline.

Find out how to support this Trekking Exploration channel,

Work begins in Kibworth to stabilise mud wall

This just in from Kibworth Beauchamp Parish Council:

An emergency footway closure and prohibition of waiting and loading is required on High Street, Kibworth Beauchamp for approx. 15m either side of no.70 on the 15th September 2023 for however long it takes to stabilise the mud wall (The TTRO lasts for 6 months)

The Temporary Traffic Regulation Order will be implemented for public safety for Leicestershire County Council and associated contractors to facilitate safety zone around unstable boundary wall whilst works are undertaken.

As you can see from the photograph above, this wall used to form part of a cottage. There are photos of that cottage, and an account of previous work to conserve the wall, on the Kibworth Village website.

Looking at this photo again. it reminds of the Hebrides, where it is common to see an old house, perhaps now used as a store, decaying next to the new one that has replaced it.

Goodbye to Wilko - a company founded in Leicester

This is the Wilko branch in Market Harborough, which will close on Sunday. I feel sorry for the people here and around the country who are losing their jobs. 

You can be sure the top management that brought the company to this pass will have a more comfortable landing. 

Wilkinson's was originally a Leicester company. In 1930 when James Kemsey Wilkinson and his fiancée Mary Cooper opened a small ironmongers at 151 Charnwood Street in the city.

The opened a second shop in Wigston Magna in 1932 and then a third on the Narborough Road.

Charnwood Street is a lost working-class shopping street in Leicester. A website devoted to it explains where it ran:

Charnwood Street in Leicester - popularly known as 'Charny' - was built in the early 1870s and demolished in 1970 when the area was redeveloped. It ran from Kent Street to Spinney Hill Road to the east of the city centre, parallel with Humberstone Road.

If you browse the website you will see that it was mourned by many.

When Charnwood Street was razed, Wilkinson's had 28 stores across the country. At some point their original shop had moved a few doors to no. 159.

The photo below shows shops in Charnwood Street empty and awaiting demolition. It comes from the University of Leicester's Vanished Leicester collection.

Copyright © Dennis Calow

Elizabeth II and the design of her stamps

In his Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises, A.N. Wilson remembers a conversation with the Queen Mother:

Katherine and I had just been to an exhibition of portraits of the Queen, and I asked her mother why it was that, since Annigoni's masterpiece, now hanging in the Fishmongers' Hall, there was not a single picture of any merit.

"It's because she has no interest in the visual," said the Queen Mother. "She was born without any aesthetic sense whatever. Princess Margaret and I look at all the designs for postage stamps, for example. They are sent to the Queen by the Postmaster General for approval. She admits, she can't tell the difference between a good and a bad design,"

Sure enough, since the death of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, the quality of British stamps has steadily declined.

Now read my review of Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown.

Electoral Commission: Hundreds of thousands face exclusion over voter ID laws

It may have lost our data, but the Electoral Commission has found some balls.

Here's the Guardian on the commission's new Report on the May 2023 local elections in England:

Hundreds of thousands of people could be excluded from voting in a UK general election because of voter ID laws, the government’s election watchdog has said.

The laws could have a disproportionate effect on poorer people, those with disabilities and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, the Electoral Commission warned.

It said ministers should take urgent action to alleviate these impacts, including drawing up a wider list of documents that people can show to vote and allowing people without ID to have someone else vouch for their identity.

Ministers won't, of course, because the whole point of bringing in these laws was to suppress the anti-Conservative vote. Even Lord Snooty Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted as much.

Children's literature: Holiday adventure stories vs school stories

The latest The Rest is History podcast deals with the school story. I could have done with a little less about the presenters' own private schools, but they are right to say these stories were immensely important culturally and appealed across the classes.

And just as I was thinking they ought to bring the Trinidadian Marxist historian and cricket writer C.L.R. James into the discussion, they did just that. You'll find James's views on the importance of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and of W.G. Grace in his Beyond a Boundary.

Incidentally I blogged about Rugby, Tennessee, back in 2009 - see the interesting comment from David Heath.

The programme got me thinking about an alternative school of children's school of children's literature that I prefer: the holiday adventure story.

The ur-text for this is school is Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies, though it was first published as a three-volume novel for adults and only later tricked out with the apparatus (a map on the endpapers; illustrations by E.H. Shepard) of a children's classic.

Then come Arthur Ransome, Malcolm Saville and Denys Watkins-Pitchfod ('BB'). I suppose we'll have to let Enid Blyton in too.

This is already a pretty disparate group, but I think you can claim that if school stories are in part about winning battles against adult authority, then both that authority and adults tend to disappear altogether in adventure stories.

And I'd also suggest that, while school stories are generally of necessity about children of one class, adventure stories are more likely to see a mixing of the classes.

As to the material base of adventure stories, I shall quote again the observation of Victor Watson, in his Reading Series Fiction. They grew out of the agricultural depression at the end of the 19th century, which made the countryside a playground for middle-class children, and were killed off by EEC farming subsidies and Dr Beeching's cuts.

Now read my post on the 1971 BBC adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays.

The Joy of Six 1162

Floella Benjamin asks why young people are hung out to dry after they leave the care system: "Increasing the number of care leavers in higher education is something we should all get behind: it would save the taxpayer money, increase the number of bright young people being trained for the jobs we’ll need to build a stronger future, and increase opportunities for many who deserve them."

"Laura Kuenssberg’s tenure as the BBC’s political editor, beginning in July 2015 and ending in the coming weeks, was a catastrophe. On her watch, lies were not just permitted, they were amplified and given credibility by Britain’s state broadcaster. At least partly as a result of this, the UK Government now routinely lies with impunity." Patrick Howse on the consequences of the BBC's political editor.

Josh Self sees signs of a revival of one-nation Conservatism.

Brian Domitrovic reviews a new book on the 19th-century political economist Henry George: "George sold millions of copies of his books and pamphlets, spawned scores of activist reading groups among marginally literate groups of working people, inspired the building of model communities on the basis of the single tax, motivated innumerable “Georgists” successfully to seek elected office, influenced world-historical leaders such as the Mexican Revolution’s Venustiano Carranza and modern China’s founder Sun Yat-Sen, and all but reoriented the agenda of taxation and public works globally as the twentieth century dawned."

"Equally as important as the music in this case was that distinctive and much-discussed You Can All Join In sleeve.  Snapped from above on a stepladder by the Hipgnosis photographer, the front cover shows a rag tag collection of 29 musicians.  Fashionably unsmiling with collars turned up against the wind and hands thrust deep into the pockets of army greatcoats, leather jackets and (real) fur coats on a cold winter’s morning, no one looked too happy to be there at that hour of the day." Stuart Penney looks back at Island Records' first UK sampler disc.

Which pub is the oldest in Nottingham? James Wright weighs up the contenders for this hotly disputed title.

The Mid Bedfordshire by-election of 1960

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Thanks to a reader for pointing out that the current Mid Bedfordshire by-election is not the first in the constituency. One was held there in 1960.

The Conservative Alan Lennox-Boyd, who had sat for Mid Bedfordshire since 1931, held the seat at the 1959 general election. But there was no place for him in the new cabinet and he accepted a hereditary peerage.

His Labour opponent at the general election had been this blog's hero Bryan Magee, while the Liberal candidate had been Wilfred Matthews. 

The result in 1959 (with percentages of the vote in brackets) was:

Conservative  21,301 (46.79)

Labour            16,127 (35.42)

Liberal              8,099 (17.79)

The by-election was held on 16 November 1960. The new Conservative candidate was Stephen Hastings, while Magee and Matthews again stood for their parties. There was a fourth candidate, C.F.H. Gilliard, who stood for the New Conservative Party, which had a British nationalist platform.

And the result in the by-election was not so different from that at the general election the year before. This time the votes were:

Conservative          17,503 (45.38)

Labour                    11,281 (29.25)

Liberal                      9,550 (24.76)

New Conservative      235   (0.61)

That's just the sort of result people are afraid of this time, but the past is a foreign country. 

In 1960 the Conservatives were still in the ascendancy and Harold Macmillan was SuperMac. If there had been no Liberal candidate, it's likely that the majority of the party's voters who still turned out would have opted for the Conservative.

And I imagine that Alan Lennox-Boyd had a higher reputation in Mid Bedfordshire than the one Nadine Dorries enjoys today.

Stephen Hastings was to represent Mid Bedfordshire until 1983, but his right-wing views kept him on the backbenches throughout his career.

Bryan Magee was elected MP for Leyton at the February 1974 election. He became one of the last Labour MPs to jump ship to the SDP, and lost there under as an SDP Alliance candidate in 1983.

Wilfred Matthew, who had first stood for parliament in Luton in 1950, fought Mid Bedfordshire for the last time at the 1964 general election.

The New Conservative Party renamed itself the True Conservative Party, but did not survive to see the end of 1962. It's founder John Dayton was a Labour candidate at the 1966 general election.

Photo-identity for voters, racism and the Electoral Commission

Forcing people to show photographic identity before they could vote in May's local elections led to racial and disability discrimination. That's the conclusion of a report published today by the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution.

I can't find the report online, but the Guardian says:

The report, which has been seen by the Guardian, says: “The current voter-ID system is, as it stands, a ‘poisoned cure’ in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.”

The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.

They highlighted the case of Andrea Barrett, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling station after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.

The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barrett the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”

The point that demanding photo ID from voters disenfranchises more electors than it protects will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on the issue.

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the local elections:

A 2014 report by the Electoral Commission arguing in favour of voter ID – which the organisation continues to back – conceded that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud.’

But he said much more about what turns out to have been a worrying document:

The 2014 Electoral Commission report, signed off on by its then chair, Jenny Watson, is written in an odd key. Rather than enumerating, in bureaucratic, quantitative terms, the scale of the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. 

It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s happening – where, in the report’s words, there appears to be ‘a greater risk of cases of alleged fraud being reported’.

Who are the people who suspect foul play, and whom do they suspect, and why? The commission hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. 

‘We have heard some strongly held views,’ the report states, ‘based in particular on reported first-hand experience by some campaigners and elected representatives, that electoral fraud is more likely to be committed by or in support of candidates standing for election in areas which are largely or predominately populated by some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh.’

The Electoral Commission isn't racist, you understand, but it believes we have to humour voters who are by changing the law to put a burden on all of us and deny some people their votes.

I tried to download the report from the commission website, but was met with notices saying 'The requested page could not be found' and 'We have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack. Find out about the data affected, the potential impact, and the measures we’ve taken.'

In view of the sensitivity of some of the date the commission holds, it's worrying to come across this story on BBC News:

The Electoral Commission has confirmed it failed a basic cyber-security test around the same time hackers gained entry to the organisation.

A whistleblower told the BBC that the Commission was given an automatic fail during a Cyber Essentials audit.

Last month the Commission revealed that "hostile actors" accessed its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.

A spokeswoman said the Commission had still not passed the basic test.

This makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be safer to allow councils to look after their own electoral data.

And, though the idea of a body independent of government to supervise elections is appealing, the Electoral Commission does not come across as being that body.

John Stevenson, Coronation Street and Brass

The television scriptwriter John Stevenson died last week. He was the leading scriptwriter for Coronation Street in the days when, because it was driven by character rather than issues, it was funnier than most situation comedies.

Stevenson also co-wrote the comedy series Brass from the 1980s, which made fun of the A.J. Cronin and Catherine Cookson school of fiction.

An old Guardian article recommending the box set, tells you all you need to know:

Self-made man and owner of the village mine, mill and munitions factory, Bradley is the head of the Hardacre clan, which comprises his three sons, Bentley (deceased), Austin and Morris; as well as two daughters, Charlotte (passionate about doing good works and, says her father, "innocent to the point of simplicity") and Isabel, whose bedpost is more notch than wood. Then there's his wife, Lady Patience, a wheelchair-user ever since her terrible tambourine accident.

On the other side of the colliery tracks is the Fairchild family. George, its nominal head, worships the ground his employer Bradley treads him into, while his magnificently-cleavaged wife Agnes, so poor-but-proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, rails with fury at all life throws at her. 

They have two sons. One is hardworking Jack, who has inherited his mother's socialist leanings, but is periodically diverted from bringing down capitalism by his secret and exhausting life as Isabel's sex-monkey. ("I love him hopelessly! Passionately! Recklessly! Frequently.") 

The other is poetry-writing Matt, who is determined, once he has made the final payments on the family pencil, to go to Cambridge despite his love for Charlotte H ("Thou are more lovely and more interesting/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May but that's quite another thing") and his good job – "a job wi' a stool!" - at the mine works.

In the clip I have chosen above, Bradley Hardacre calls on Agnes Farichild.