Northampton Labour councillor joins the Liberal Democrats

A Labour member of West Northamptonshire Council has crossed to the Liberal Democrats after becoming increasingly concerned”= with the party's national leadership, reports NLive Radio ("The station that loves Northampton):

West Northamptonshire Cllr Farzana Aldridge said she left Labour after feeling the party was moving away from "community-focused and forward-looking politics", adding that she is committed to serving the residents of her Kingsley and Semilong ward.

Her defection means the Lib Dem group now hold seven seats on West Northants Council (WNC), just one behind the Labour group, which now has eight elected members. Reform UK is still in charge of the council with 41 seats.

The radio station goes on to quote the Lib Dem group leader Jonathan Harris:

"Farzana is a very capable and hard-working councillor who cares deeply about her community. Her skills, experience and enthusiasm, along with her strong commitment to represent residents in her ward, will make her a great addition to our team. It is clear that Farzana shares our core values of liberty, equality, human rights, internationalism, environmentalism, democracy and community."

The Joy of Six 1436

"One minister described the chaos as 'probably fatal'. It was, said another source, a 'tipping point' and 'the week that No 10 lost control'." Catherine Neilan and Rachel Sylvester listen to the insider voices suggesting Keir Starmer is on the way out.

Michelle Pace says Britain should think twice before copying Denmark's asylum policies: "Refugees I’ve spoken with have told me how they often feel that integration is pointless if they might still be deported. Social isolation and limited rights for asylum seekers are the norm. Families face long waiting times for reunification despite few cases and refugees face temporary permits that hinder long-term planning."

Stephen Cushion finds that Michael Prescott's memorandum on the BBC falls well short of the standards of impartiality he demands of others.

"People burned what they could afford: cheap, sulphur-heavy coal. The cleaner Welsh anthracite was being exported to pay off Britain’s debts. Home fires, factory stacks, and power stations belched black smoke into the unmoving air. The fog – that familiar London damp – merged with soot and sulphur dioxide to create a deadly, acid-laden smog." Londonopia remembers the city's Great Smog of 1952.

JacquiWine went to the Tirzah Garwood exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery earlier this year.

"James Cubitt specialised in Nonconformist chapels during the 19th century, and the Islington Union Chapel was one of his first, and probably one of his most important works. Many of his other chapels across the country have since been demolished, but Union Chapel remains." A London Inheritance appreciates the famous Islington concert venue as a building.

The Standells: Try It

The first time I featured Patience and Prudence here they led me to a record about Prudence's other half – Signed D.C. by Love.

Patience also married a former member of Love, Johnny Fleck. He left Love after a fist fight with Albert Lee and later joined The Standells.

Fleck is playing bass on Try It, which for a few seconds sounds like it's going to be like something by Lou Reed, but quickly settles into a tone that reminds us that the permissive society came some years before women's liberation.

The song was banned from his stations by the American radio mogul Gordon McLendon. As an archived page about McLendon and his radio station KLIF says:

It could never be proven what The Standells were referring to when they encouraged their fans to "Try It". Was it sex, drugs, or something else? Whatever the case, the content was too much for McLendon and KLIF.

Johnny Fleck's full name was John Fleckenstein, and under that name he later became a Hollywood cinematographer. He has an impressive list of credits on IMDb. He died in 2017.

Pollution from Shropshire lead mines still reaches the Severn

This information from an Environment Agency page will come as no surprise to regular readers:

There is evidence of lead mining in the Minsterley area of the Shropshire Hills since pre-Roman times. The importance of lead mining grew during the medieval period and had become a major part of the economy of Snailbeach and Minsterley by the late 16th and 18th centuries, respectively. 

This continued to grow throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, until the 19th century, when the mining activity was at its peak. During the 1870s the Stiperstones area was one of Britain’s main sources of lead.

But the page goes on to say that these long-abandoned mines still present a significant pollution problem:

Minsterley Brook is polluted in its headwaters by cadmium, however after the input of a mine water discharge known as Wood Adit at Gravels, the watercourse is polluted along its length for cadmium, lead and zinc down to the confluence with Rea Brook. 

Hogstow Brook is polluted along its length by cadmium, lead and zinc from its source at the outflow of the Boat Level mine drainage tunnel. Further metal polluted inputs enter the watercourse from Snailbeach. 

After the confluence of Rea Brook and Minsterley Brook, Rea Brook is still polluted at the sampling point at Hook-a-Gate Bridge near Bayston Hill. However, Rea Brook is not polluted, when assessed as an annual average, approximately 8km downstream of Hook-a-Gate Bridge at Coleham in the centre of Shrewsbury. 

Rea Brook flows for 25 miles from Marton Pool near the Welsh border to the Severn at Shrewsbury, passing Minsterley, Pontesbury, Hanwood, Hook-a-Gate and Bayston Hill on the way. 

It is joined at Minsterley by the Minsterley Brook, which rises on Stapeley Hill and runs through the wooded Hope Valley. The Hogstow Brook is a smaller stream that joins the Minsterley Brook shortly before its confluence with the Rea Brook.

There is another page on the pollution of these rivers on Restoring Europe's Rivers, but it's 10 years old and I don't know its provenance.

But, for what its worth, it says:

The mines were worked for mainly lead ores, but also zinc ore and latterly barites until closure in the 1940s, leaving spoil deposits and drainage adits which discharge to Minsterley Brook at various points. The mines are a significant source of heavy metal pollution in the catchment, and the discharges from them represent one of the longest continuous sources of pollution in the whole Severn River Basin.

Environment Agency routine monitoring found there were high levels of zinc in Minsterley Brook over most of its length, exceeding the Environmental Quality Standards (EQS) for the brook (75ug/l). As a result, the watercourse isn't achieving the 'Good status' for water quality as set out in our Severn River Basin Plan. 

The Boat Level adit discharge is the main source of the zinc (around 3000kg per annum) and other heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead, and discharges these pollutants into the Hogstow Brook. Immediately downstream of the Boat Level adit the zinc concentrations are up to 47x the EQS. 

At Minsterley, the zinc concentrations are 8x the EQS. Downstream of the mines, concentrations exceed the EQS for over 15km, until the Rea Brook reaches Hanwood and dilution from other rivers lowers the concentration to below the EQS.

Ecological surveys of the brooks have found aquatic insects were suffering as a result of these heavy metals, which can settle in river sediments. There is also a lower than expected population of small fish species.

To end on a happier note, the pretty little bridge in the photograph above crosses the Minsterley Brook in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Hope.

Chris Dillow explains our incompetent political culture

When the centenary of Margaret Thatcher's birth was marked last month, the consensus view on Bluesky was that she had made everything in Britain worse. Not only that: it was all down to her personal wickedness.

Whatever happened to the left having a knowledge of the tides of history that is denied to the rest of us?

One writer who offers a more sophisticated analysis is Rutland's own Chris Dillow. In his latest post he looks at the travails of the government and the BBC asks why so much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

Here's the crux of his argument:

Good politics recognises that public opinion is not a fixed entity but is malleable, not necessarily by rational debate alone. Labour likes to present itself as businesslike. But decent businesses advertise their products, respect their customers, and don’t shout about the merits of their rivals. ...

Good politics also requires something else - a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out. Which is what we don’t have. Instead, we have a system which often selects for rather than against charlatans and incompetents. And, worse still, neither politicians nor the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it.

You can read the whole article on Chris's Substack. 

Asquith: The Movie

This television play, screened in 1983 as part of the ITV series Number 10, deals with Asquith's battle with the House of Lords to secure the passage of the budget in 1910.

That measure has gone down in history as Lloyd George's budget, but Asquith himself had done much of the work on it while he was still chancellor.

One thing that must have confused viewers at the time is that Asquith is played by David Langton, who had become well known a few years before for playing a Tory MP, Richard Bellamy in the wildly popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. Think of it as a superior version of Downton Abbey.

As to young Puffin Asquith, I have a book signed by him.

Thames Water tries to force Lib Dem MP to pay ruinous legal costs

The supreme court this week rejected Thames Water’s arguments that Charlie Maynard, the Liberal Democrat MP for Witney, should pay its legal costs after representing the interests of the British public in court.

The Guardian reports:

Maynard was granted unusual permission to represent the public interest in a court battle over an investor bailout for Thames Water. The bailout was approved, but Maynard appealed, arguing that the company, which serves 16 million customers in London and south-east England, should be taken into temporary government control. 

Thames Water’s barristers argued that he should be made personally liable for its expensive legal fees to "deter" future appeals to the supreme court.

It would be interesting to know what the supreme court and parliament think of this argument.

Maynard, says the Guardian, described Thames Water's actions as "retaliation" for pushing for government control of the crisis-hit utility

"I find it completely extraordinary,” he said. "What is the largest water company in the country doing trying to run an MP off the road, and saying they want to deter me and others from taking such actions?

"What is the government doing letting a bunch of people run the largest water utility in the country and behave this way?"

A good question. Labour's refusal to life a finger against Thames Water is starting to invite discreditable explanations.

The Joy of Six 1435

"The real scandal here is the behaviour of the board. As Patrick Barwise and Peter York detailed in their 2020 book The War on the BBC, the British right has been trying to cow and weaken the BBC for decades, for both political and commercial reasons. But this time is different because the chief saboteurs were board members, chiefly Sir Robbie Gibb. On the Today programme, former Sun editor David Yelland justifiably described this week’s events as 'nothing short of a coup'. The call is coming from inside the house." Dorian Lynskey says the BBC is the biggest prize in the information war and the right may be about to destroy it.

Stacy Patton shows that Donald Trump is not the first US president to be accused of paedophilia.

"In 2024, Pershore and Thrapston became the first towns in the UK to twin their rivers, the Avon and the Nene, creating the Sister Rivers partnership. The idea is simple and scalable. Each town takes guardianship of its stretch of river, monitors it, and shares results, data, and strategies with its twin. Two councils, two communities, one purpose: to restore what regulation has failed to defend." Michael Chapman Pincher on a new initiative to protect our rivers.

Gordon McKelvie finds that historians must be alert to the dangers of AI and its potential to simplify, and ultimately impoverish, the study of the past.

"At one point the White Lady apparently benevolently watches over the father’s daughters as they sleep but she is revealed to be a form of predatory grim reaper when suddenly the silhouetted arc of a scythe she holds appears over their heads." Stephen Prince revisits White Lady, a lesser-known television play by David Rudkin that was broadcast in 1987

The Crow Inn has a guide to some of the best pubs in Derby.

Trivia dump: Woman wakes to find she's bought an emu egg

A BBC News story was shortlisted for Headline of the Day – Woman fulfils childhood dream of rearing an emu – but lost out to a demonic jumper.

The story beneath it does deserve some sort of award though:

A late night shopping spree turned into a dream come true for one animal lover after she successfully hatched an emu egg. 

Rhi Evans, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, has no memory of buying the egg but woke one morning in 2022 to an email confirmation from eBay saying it was on its way.

We've all been there.

This item gives me an excuse to repost my favourite clip of Rod Hull and Emu. As someone said, "I've watched it dozens of times, but still all I can see is an emu throwing a man into a chest freezer."

Rod Hull began his career on a children's television show in Australia. As it the way with such shows, the presenters sat in front of some shelves with interesting things on them. And among them was an emu's egg.

Someone wrote in to ask if it was ever going to hatch, and shortly after that Hull saw an emu puppet in a shop. The rest is history.

Like the Bee Gees, Rod Hull was given his break into television by an executive called Desmond Tester. Tester had begun his career as a child actor in Britain before the war – he is the boy with the bomb on the bus in Hitchock's Sabotage.

I'm also reminded of a story about someone at Liberal Democrat News finding they needed an illustration for an article on European Monetary Union. Without much hope, they turned to the paper's artwork files, only to find an envelope labelled 'EMU'.

They opened it and found a photograph of an emu. And that complete's today's trivia dump.

"Demonic" Wind in the Willows jumper banned from Westminster Abbey

Today's Headline of the Day Award, which is sponsored by the Great God Pan, goes to the Guardian.

Photo by Linsey Teggert, whose jumper it is.

A conspiracy theory from Neal Lawson: Keir Starmer was never meant to be prime minister

Embed from Getty Images

Their influence on the far right means I don't enjoy conspiracy theories as much as I used to, but let's give a hearing to Neal Lawson in the Guardian:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured.

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn't going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. 

Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour's accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

This theory is firmly unsourced, but I have always been puzzled at Labour commentators confidence that Starmer would make a good prime minister when he had such a slight political record to be judged on.

A refusal to mourn the demise of police and crime commissioners

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood announced today that police and crime commissioners will be abolished in 2028 when their current terms expire.

A home office press release says:

Since 2012, PCCs have been elected to hold forces to account, but turnout at the polls and public knowledge of who their local PCC is has been incredibly low.  

Public understanding of, and engagement with, PCCs remains low despite efforts to raise their profile. Two in five people are unaware PCCs even exist. 

Their roles will be absorbed by regional mayors wherever possible, meaning measures to cut crime will be considered as part of wider public services such as education and healthcare.  

In areas not covered by a mayor, this role will be taken on by elected council leaders.

I'm pleased to see this move, having called for it 18 months ago.

I wrote then:

Yesterday saw the third round of PCC elections, and I believe we can now say that the experiment has failed. It has not delivered any of what Cameron and the Home Office promised.

Not only that, it has proved an expensive experiment. PCCs have discovered the need to appoint a deputy on a generous public salary as well as the need to employ researchers.

Here in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, there was no visible campaign - on the doorstep or online - for the PCC election. And the Labour and Conservative candidates were both party hacks who have never made it to Westminster.

Though to be fair to Labour's Rory Palmer, he has, unlike his Conservative opponent Rupert Matthews, never been a lecturer on the paranormal for the International Metaphysical University or expressed the view that "the evidence for UFOs and for the humanoid creatures linked to them is pretty compelling".

You can still see a short clip of Rupert Matthews, who recently joined Reform UK, introducing his university course online.

As to the turnout for PCC elections, here in Leicestershire, at least, that was a function of the other elections being held at the same time. I said of the contest here:

In 2016 it took place at the same time as Leicester City Council elections, so the Labour vote came out there and we got a Labour PCC. Five years later it coincided with county council elections, so the Tory vote came out and we got a Tory PCC. 

The Guardian report on this story claims:

The abolition is a victory for chief constables and a sign of how influential they are in the Labour government’s thinking about policing.

It also makes the merger and abolition of local forces, which chiefs want and government is considering, potentially easier.

This doesn't cheer me, as something of a centralisation sceptic, but the PCC experiment has certainly failed.

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

In the report of his inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945, Sir Walter Monckton wrote:

It is first necessary to explain the basis of the policy of committing children to a local authority which may board them out. The "fit person," local authority or individual, must care for the children as his own: the relation is a personal one. The duty must neither be evaded nor scamped.

That does not appear to be the view taken by the Reform UK member of Cambridgeshire County Council Andy Osborn. He told a meeting of its children and young people committee that some children in care can be "downright evil".

In an article on East Anglia Bylines, Kerrie Portman explains how damaging such language can be:

Words, especially when spoken by those in positions of power, normalise assumptions and prejudices. They embolden others to think, speak and act in this way, which translates directly to the harms inflicted on Care Experienced people, leading to many of our ongoing vulnerabilities and even shortened life expectancies.

When researching my recent Central Bylines article on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, I came across an article by Josie Pearce. In it she notes that writers of television drama treat the fact that someone was orphaned or adopted as enough in itself to explain why they have grown up to commit murder.

As she says:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries orphans were most often heroes. ... But since the twentieth century and TV, our most common plotline is that because our parents were dead, dysfunctional, unable... we must be serial killers. I started counting eventually and by my reckoning 90 per cent of TV serial killers were orphans. 

Sir Walter Monckton's report followed the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire, where he had been fostered with his younger brother Terry. The case caused a national outcry – more against the council that had sent them there than against the farmer Reginald Gough and his wife, who had actually killed the boy – and gave Christie the inspiration for The Mousetrap. 

In my article on the play for Central Bylines, I quoted Phil O'Neill, who is the son of an older brother of Dennis and Terry: 

"My gentle Uncle Terry always said he wouldn’t seek revenge because that would make him no better than the Goughs. It was a shock seeing him portrayed on stage as a psychotic killer."

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters. We should give it more thought.

V.S. Pritchett reviews the Sword in the Stone in 1938

V.S. Pritchett (1900-97) was still reviewing for the New Statesman in his late seventies when I started buying it in the sixth form.

Here he is back in 1938, welcoming the publication of T.H. White's The Sword of the Stone in his review for The Bystander:

The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (Collins 8s. 6 d.), is mixed, but, on the whole successful, fantasy about anachronisms and it contains two chapters at least which are the funniest things I have read for a long time. Mr. White's game is to tell the adventures of a boy called the Wart, at his father's mediaeval castle, in terms which lie somewhere between the language of Grimm, Wodehouse, and the College of Heralds. 

This kind of thing may produce the vulgar comedy of the schoolboy howler or passages of wicked genius Mr. White has both here is an example of the latter. A possible origin of fox-hunting is suggested—

Sir Ector said: "Had a good quest to-day?"

Sir Grummore said: "Oh, not so bad. Rattlin' good day in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pite choppin' off a maiden's head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good 25 miles as he ran." 

The two high spots are the witches' duel—run strictly on what I take to be Camelot rules—with Merlyn; and a wonderful joust between two knights who lumber along towards each other at a mild drayhorse canter and meet with stupefaction in a dull crash of ironmongery. These are both Disney scenes. 

Mr. White has a pleasant learning which gives the whole a comically critical and instructive air. I never recommend humour, because it makes enemies, and many awful people will read this book aloud; but I suggest a prolonged and surreptitious glance at it.

And Disney did buy the rights to the book in the following year, though his film of it did not appear until 1963.

Trivia fans will be interested to know that Pritchett is the grandfather of the cartoonist Matt, who is famous for nailing it.

The Joy of Six 1434

GB News's new show broadcast live from the US features non-stop praise for Donald Trump and the channel’s co-owner Paul Marshall begging MAGA politicians to "save the UK", reports Josiah Mortimer.

Mills Dyer, who spent several years working in the Liberal Democrats' membership department, gives three reasons why they membership surges like the one the Greens are currently experiencing matter – and three why they're completely irrelevant.

Tayo Bero is worried by the explosion in online content promoting the use of antidepressants: "Antidepressant use can be messy, stressful, confusing and seemingly interminable (don’t even get me started on my experience with withdrawal symptoms). It is not the kind of experience that vulnerable young people should be socially coerced into, especially via the machinations of capitalist vultures. Young people need way more than a two-minute TikTok to figure out what they should do to get better."

"Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s 'dark Satanic mills' harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism." Jonathan Agin argues that William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation.

"When Pebble Mill opened in 1971 ... it was the most sophisticated in the country, the largest outside London, and the first to combine TV and radio operations under one roof. It was conceived as the regional counterpart to the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush." Jon Neale remembers Pebble Mill Studios and the golden age of Birmingham television.

Andy Murray explores the Manx folklore that inspired Nigel Kneale, including his Halloween III script that never saw the light of day.

Eurythmics: When the Day Goes Down

When the Day Goes Down, performed live here on the David Letterman Show, is my favourite Eurythmics song. 

As the recent evening devoted to her on BBC4 confirmed, Annie Lennox is an amazing talent.

Reform-run Leicestershire could pay £30m to consultancy firm

Last week I wrote that Leicestershire County Council, which is run by a Reform UK minority administration, is to pay £1.3m to consultants.

That's peanuts!

The Leicester Mercury reports:

Documents published last week revealed that the "estimated contract value" has actually been set at "up to £30 million" as a whole, with the £1.4 million audit just phase one of that contract. A spokeswoman for the authority has stressed that no further work beyond phase one has yet been agreed.

The county council currently needs to plug an expected £90 million gap in its day-to-day spending by 2029 in order to balance its books – something it is legally bound to do. It also has an £80 million shortfall in money set aside for projects and an £118 million deficit in its special needs budget.

In other words, Reform came to power in Leicestershire with no policies that didn't involve flags and has found itself overwhelmed by the task it faces. So it's paying someone to tell it what to do and how to do it.

Time for the opposition parties at County Hall to work together and rein Reform in.

Hilary Mantel on the finding of Richard III

Here's Hilary Mantel, writing in the London Review of Books, 21 February 2013:

Royal bodies do change after death, and not just as a consequence of the universal post-mortem changes. Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth. 

Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.

For myself I found the archaeology and the cutting-edge science involved in proving Richard's identity fascinating, and was unexpectedly moved by the day of his reburial in Leicester Cathedral:

When the plans for taking Richard's bones around the Bosworth battlefield and the villages associated with it were announced, I wondered if it was a good idea. But it turned out to be an act of genius and I found myself ridiculously moved.

This, I think, had less to do with Richard III and more to do with the community involvement. Councillors, ex-servicemen, Scouts and Brownies... 

What we saw on BBC News and heard on BBC Radio Leicester was the sort of civic England you fear had been lost to modernisation and the turbo-capitalism.

Because the day was not about celebrating Richard III or the monarchy: it was about celebrating our pride in Leicester and Leicestershire. In the end, the day was about ourselves.

And then Richard's return to Leicester in triumph, rather than naked over the back of a horse.

Let no one tell you that history cannot be rewritten.

Ed Davey speaks up for the BBC: Why won't Keir Starmer?

The BBC is under attack as never before. Donald Trump and his cronies have it squarely in their sights – and there are no prizes for guessing why. The BBC is the world’s number one source of trusted news, so of course snake-oil salesmen such as Trump see it as their enemy. 

If your power is built on conspiracy theories and distortions of the truth, the last thing you want is respected, independent journalists exposing that and holding you to account.

Ed Davey speaks up for the BBC in a Guardian article today. Later on he says that Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May who was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson, must have no role in the appointment of the new director general.

Well said, Ed.

Meanwhile, the silence from Keir Starmer is deafening.

Jago Hazzard celebrates the gothic history of St Pancras

Jago Hazzard posted this, his thousandth video, a couple of weeks ago. And he found a fitting subject for it.

Iain Sinclair once referred to "the bat-chewed pinnacles" of St Pancras, which struck me as exactly right. Old St Pancras church and its churchyard are well worth visiting if you have time to kill at the station. The Beatles went there on their Mad Day Out.

Jago is right to sound a little sceptical about the myth of the Hardy Tree though.