Deep joy

I have a fully functioning home computer again. There is quite a bit of catching up to do on Lord Bonkers' website, and postings here and on Serendib should be less sporadic in future.

Lord Gnome on standards

The Rotten Boroughs column in this week's Private Eye contains more examples of the work of the Standards Board for England (SBE).

In July Independent councillor Nadene Burton was suspended for five months by the adjudication panel for England, the sentencing arm of the SBE. Her crime was to have been "disrespectful" to officers by claiming in an election newsletter that Hull's housing department could do better in tackling anti-social behaviour on its estates.

The Eye mentions two other cases in Hull where councillors have been threatened with action over remarks they made during council meetings.

It is clear that Labour, as the party that represents the interests of public sector workers, has turned the proper relationship between elected councillors and the staff they employ on its head.

Unholy alliance

There is an interesting aside in Andrew Marr's BBC website piece summing up this year's party conference season. Looking at the Liberal Democrats, he remarks:

There is a potential political divide in the party, between the market-orientated, anti-statist Lib Dems clustered around a volume of essays called The Orange Book, and those you might call conventional social democrats.

When I first joined the Liberal Party my radical friends were convinced that the SDP was the work of the devil. Twenty years later they are making common cause with social democrats to oppose the Orange Book tendency.

I wrote a rather hurried review of the book in the last Liberator, which I will post with my other articles on Lord Bonkers' website if I ever get my computer working properly again. My feeling was not so much that the Orange Book people are right as that those who call themselves radical Liberals are in trouble if they think their role is to be the last defenders of the 1945 settlement.

We can now see that the SDP was less an attempt to break the mould of post-war British politics than a late try at keeping it together. If today radical Liberals find themselves on the same side as the SDP, they should think more deeply.

Good news from Scotland

The Scotsman reports that Liberal Democrat backbenchers at Holyrood have defeated an attempt by the leadership to impose stricter discipline on them:

It is understood the party leadership was unhappy about Aberdeenshire MSP Mike Rumbles’ opposition to the Executive’s antisocial behaviour legislation, when he argued strongly against new powers of dispersal for the police.

The question is why the leadership was supporting this legislation in the first place. Yes, sharing power always involves compromise. But, viewed from a distance, it is hard to see that the Liberal Democrats have acted as a brake on Labour's more repressive policies at Holyrood. If anything, the Scottish Executive seems to have pursued this agenda even more enthusiastically than its counterpart at Westminster.

Paul Foot

Most of the obituaries of Paul Foot emphasised his near saintliness. Even Auberon Waugh saw him in that light.

So I am grateful for the drop of acid in this article by Oliver Kamm, which appeared in The Times on Saturday. And not only because his views mirror some Lord Bonkers once expressed (see the entry for Thursday here).

Kamm writes:

Foot's Marxism was strikingly uncritical. In Why You Should be a Socialist (1977) he declared: "Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite." In The Case for Socialism (1990), this preposterous judgement became: "The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a 'tyrant' and a 'dictator' cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible. " 

This is like citing the 1936 Soviet constitution as proof of Stalin's libertarianism. The State and Revolution depicts a democratic post-revolutionary order, all right, but that was not what Lenin created. It never could have been, because Lenin envisaged a social unity in which "all take part in the administration of the state". He had no concept of opposition; when popular opposition did arise, he annihilated it.

No Liberal should believe for a moment that the Soviet Union was doing fine until Lenin died. It was a tyranny from the start.

But I am less convinced by:

In 1999, Foot claimed in Private Eye that DNA evidence in the Hanratty case was unreliable owing to possible contamination. Yet he later conceded in a BBC interview: "I'm a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from " a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say, well, that clashes with my belief that he didn't commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science." 

This is the credo of the biblical creationist confronted with geological evidence of the age of the Earth. Whatever it was initially, Foot's campaign became an idée fixe, impervious to reason and indifferent to the sensibilities of Hanratty's surviving victim.

Of course, there comes a point after which it is irrational to deny the findings of science. But it is common for new technologies to be oversold, and it is only over time that we discover the true picture of their strengths and weaknesses. And the most reliable technologies can yield false results through human error. So we cannot do without gut feelings altogether.

No doubt Foot would have claimed victory if tests had shown no traces of Hanratty's DNA on the evidence. But the idea that he should have abandoned his campaign because of "the sensibilities of Hanratty's surviving victim" is to commit much the same sin that Kamm accuses Foot of: putting sentiment above the search for truth.

All friends round the Wrekin

You may have noticed the little Statcounter box further down this site. It tells me how many people have visited it, where they come from, which link they have clicked to get here and all sorts of other useful things. This service is free and I strongly recommend it.

Thanks to it, I came across a link to one of my posts on Shropshire from All Friends Round the Wrekin.

The Wrekin is a hill in Shropshire and also a symbol of the county. The site aims:

• To raise funds and demonstrate wide public support for the Shropshire Wildlife Trust-led bid to bring The Wrekin into public ownership;
• To give everyone who cares a voice in the future of The Wrekin and a way of representing their views to its owners and managers;
• To keep as many people as possible as informed about the present value and future management of The Wrekin;
• To provide a way for people to become actively involved in the preservation of The Wrekin.

Peter Black AM

Peter Black AM (I think that means he is a member of the Welsh Assembly, not that he is at his best first thing) has moved his entertaining blog to a new address. I have updated my link.

The dangers of safety

I have written enough of conkers already. So I just report the good news - the world championships took place near Oundle yesterday - and the bad - as I suspected, children are too cool play with them these days.

But the problems caused by our obsession with safety affect far more serious matters than conkers. As the Guardian reported last Thursday:

Police were castigated yesterday for delaying more than an hour before attending an incident where a man shot dead his estranged wife and her sister and seriously injured their mother. All three lay wounded while frantic neighbours tried to give them first aid...

But despite numerous 999 calls from neighbours, one of whom demanding police and ambulance response more than 50 times while giving a 70-minute running commentary on the horrific scene, armed officers did not arrive for 64 minutes after the first 999 call. It was 87 minutes before paramedics, awaiting police assurance it was safe, attended the wounded.

There was a good analysis of this case by Mick Hume in The Times on Saturday:

There seems no reason to suppose that officers are personally any more cowardly today. But they are now working within what looks like a culture of moral cowardice.

Conkers, goggles and safety

Perhaps goggles are not the answer to the menace of conkers after all.

In today's Times Simon Jenkins writes:

Hertfordshire County Council tried goggles as a way of helping nervous children get used to swimming. Its health and safety advisers were appalled. They pointed out that goggles, when being removed, can “spring back and hit children in the face” — and banned them altogether.

When a story is this good, it is churlish to ask whether it is true. But it appears that this one is.

Revolting Customs

Well done to Hoverspeed for taking Customs and Excise to court over its heavy-handed treatment of passengers.

Liberal Democrats - notably Nick Clegg, Ed Davey and David Laws - have been prominent in the campaign against the harassment of cross-Channel shoppers. Click here for some examples.

Do the Tories have a death wish?

Michael Howard has told the Liverpool Daily Post that:

I would love to win seats in Liverpool and other big cities in the north, but we
can win the General Election without doing that.

Any sensible strategy for Conservative recovery must involve an attempt to expand the party's appeal beyond the older residents of the Home Counties. Yet here Howard seems to be envisaging, not just gaining seats, but winning the next election without making significant advances in the North.

The obvious explanation is that the Tories have lost their collective marbles. But there are two other possibilities.

One is that they are gambling on an even lower next time and reason that in such circumstances mobilising their core vote will be enough to bring them victory. While it might win back some seats for them in the South-East, it is hard to see this strategy gaining them enough seats to overturn Labour's huge majority.

The second possibility is that this concentration on the core vote is a defensive strategy aimed at stemming the further advance of the Liberal Democrats.

The question then is whether the Lib Dem analysis is right. We believe that society is becoming more liberal and that the Tories' core vote is shrinking. And if that core vote is shrinking then there are fewer and fewer seats where a reliance upon it will be enough.

The irony is that, if only the Conservatives could find it in them to reach out to, say, ethnic minority communities, they would find many people whose values are instinctively conservative.

Yet the more the leadership flatters the core vote and its dislike of foreigners, the less they are likely to attract new supporters.

Welcome to another Lib Dem blog

I have added a new blog to the list on the right.

The Liberal Dissenter is written by Simon Titley, whose observations on my posting about poshness I published the other day.

Conkers and safety

It seems that conkers are more dangerous than we thought. It is not enough for children wear safety goggles before they play with them: they have to be banned altogether.

All this concern about conkers may just be nostalgia. Do children today want to play with them? Certainly, I am convinced you see more lying ungathered on the ground than you did a few years ago.

But our mania for safety does deserve further study. First another plug for Frank Furedi's book Culture of Fear; then some ideas of my own.

Although this analysis does not apply to the conker examples, it seems that when people talk about safety they are often using it as a cover for other concerns.

Take another of today's news stories: "A head teacher has banned flared trousers from his school, claiming they are a safety hazard."

Maybe they are, but I suspect that the real reason for this decision is a sense that the latest fashions are not suitable schoolwear. The trouble is that it is hard to articulate that view in a world where progressive opinion holds that children should be accorded the same rights as adults.

Take the smacking debate. Those who want to ban it point out that it would be illegal to hit an adult, so it should be illegal to hit a child too. They produce this argument as though it is utterly clinching. The idea that we might accord a different moral status to adults and to children, they believe, is self-evidently absurd.

So it is not surprising that people prefer to talk about safety than to argue that schoolchildren should not be allowed to wear what they like.

The same process is at work in the debate on children and mobile phones. (If you are interested in the science, The official view is here and a more sceptical one, inevitably from Spiked, is here.)

However, the reason that we worry about children having mobile phones is not safety at all. It is because we feel that it is somehow not fitting that they should have them. They are too young. But to say so sounds so hopelessly old-fashioned that we treat it as a question of safety instead.

Incidentally, there is another line you can take on children and mobiles. At the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth David Butler, the chief executive of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, argued that the radiation from phones is good for them:

From a perspective of pupil performance it can enhance things, because that heating effect actually improves the neuron transfers between neural pathways, and therefore your thinking ability goes up.

It sounds unlikely, but it is probably no more absurd than the idea that way to improve the behaviour of millions of schoolchildren is to prescribe them amphetamines.

National Poetry Day

Today, it seems, is National Poetry Day, so here is my contribution.

No, I didn't write it. It is one of my favourites.


September Song

born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Geoffrey Hill

Tory freedom

An editorial in the Guardian this morning complains that:

In the video shown to delegates before Mr Howard's entrance, freedom was a central theme (to the stirring accompaniment of Elgar's Nimrod); in his speech, he had almost nothing to say about it.

David Davis has now fleshed out Tory proposals to increase our freedom. They include:

• "20,000 extra prison places."
• "We will support, encourage and accelerate the implementation of random drug-testing of pupils."

The sort of people who attend Conservative Party conferences certainly want freedom for themselves. But even more, they want the state do nasty things to people of whom they disapprove.
Unless leading Tories stop indulging this absurd view of the world - a mirror image of the class war tendency in the Labour Party - they will have no chance of forming a government again.

More on standards

I am not alone in my concerns. Someone has kindly told me about the website Double Standards!

It even quotes my first post on the subject.

Standards in Shropshire

The birthday boy reports that:

A councillor has been found guilty of bringing Telford & Wrekin Council into
disrepute after accusing its leader Phil Davis of "double standards" over the
way in which Labour and Conservative members were disciplined for wrongdoing.

As I argued the other day, this dispute sounds like the normal rough and tumble of local politics. If every spat is going to be treated as a disciplinary matter then councils will soon be very grey places. Besides, the people who should discipline councillors are the voters, through the ballot box

The Shropshire Star also says that the decision was taken at" a marathon 13-hour session" of Telford & Wrekin's standards committee. You can't help thinking that the council has many better things to do.

Disgusted of Wrockwardine writes: What about my drains?

Conkers

As every newspaper has reported, a Carlisle primary school has bought six pairs of industrial safety goggles so that its pupils can go on playing conkers.

The saddest thing about the BBC's report is the approving quotes from two of the children:

"It doesn't stop you from having fun because you still play the game. It's
just protecting your eyes at the same time."

and

"I think it's a very sensible idea and it doesn't change the experience. It
doesn't hurt to be safe."

Clearly, they have learned that expressing such trite sentiments is the way to win adult approval. You don't have to read the Daily Mail to worry what this means for the future.

For a convincing explanation of our current obsession with safety, see Frank Furedi's book Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation.

Happy birthday

First things first. Today is the 40th birthday of the Shropshire Star and we send our best wishes. Full details here.

Snuggery in the Stiperstones

Thank again to the Shropshire Star for a story which brings together two of the larger bees in my bonnet.

• Earlier this year, in one of my House Points columns in Liberal Democrat News, I coined the term "snuggery" to describe the exaggerated concern for safety that afflicts us these days.
• I love Shropshire and often go there to walk in the hills and enjoy the food and drink - hence my regular reading of the county's leading newspaper.

To expand the latter point, one reason for my Shropshire fixation are the books of Malcolm Saville, which I read when I was young. In them nicely behaved, bare-limbed children rounded up German spies and foiled criminals in the English countryside. And the setting to which Saville returned most often was the Shropshire hills. (Quite why so many villains chose to base their operations in rural south Shropshire was never explained, but for more on the social background to such stories see an early posting of mine on Serendib.)

The most striking of the Shropshire hills is the range known as the Stiperstones. Saville writes in his preface to The Neglected Mountain (1953):

The scene of this story is in the wild and lonely border country between Wales and Shropshire, hard by a mountain known as the Stiperstones. It is said that the curious outcrop of black quartzite rocks on the summit, known as the Devil's Chair, is one of the oldest parts of England - older even than the ice age - and it is little wonder that this desolate, neglected country is rich in folklore and legend.

So to the Shropshire Star story. The paper reports that:

A Shropshire school was forced to cancel a sponsored walk it had planned after the education authority raised fears over the safety of pupils and staff.

About 500 youngsters from the Mary Webb School in Pontesbury had planned to take part in the 13-mile walk yesterday, which it was hoped would raise more than £5,000 towards the school's minibus fund.

But education officials warned that because the route would take in the Stiperstones hills, described as a "high risk environment", they would need a minimum of 10 people with the basic expedition leader's qualification supervising the walkers.

Granted, the Stiperstones are serious hills. But the children and teachers taking part, as someone quoted in the article says, are familiar with them. These hills are their backyard. Yet they are being told they should not venture on to them unless accompanied by someone with the relevant qualification. And, as the article says, the school has been staging an annual walk for the last 17 years.

If these hills are so dangerous, the answer is clear. They must be levelled and the spoil carted away. I know it will be expensive, but [sniff] if it saves one child's life [sniff] it will be worth it [breaks down in tears].

Vote in Florida

Here it is: your chance to vote in the key state in this year's American Presdential election.

Tribunes of the people?

My old friend the Shropshire Star provides something a little more serious today.

For some time I have been worried about the rise of "standards" in local government. I take the view that if someone is elected by the people then, short of outright corruption or criminality, he is responsible to them for his behaviour in office and to no one else.

Yet here is a case from a Shropshire authority where a Conservative councillor is charged with "failing to treat others with respect" and "bringing his office or authority into disrepute".

The Star reports the facts as follows:

The situation dates back to 2001 when a Labour councillor was found to have been making fraudulent expense claims worth about £1,000. He was not reported to police after it was agreed the matter could be dealt with internally. He later resigned.

A Conservative councillor was then found, after voting on the annual rate, to have unwittingly been £37 in arrears with his council tax. Police were called in to investigate but the Crown Prosecution Service said there was no case.

Councillor Allen then wrote a letter, published in the Shropshire Star, saying the cases showed the council had "double standards".

If the facts of the case are as reported, then it seems to me that the councillor's view is a reasonable one to express. He may be wrong; we may not agree with him. But it seems bizarre that he should be haled in front of a panel for expressing it.

What is happening stems partly from an exaggerated concerns for others' feelings. Politics, local politics included, thrive on conflict and strong argument, but both are thoroughly our of fashion at the moment.

And partly it arises from a desire to reduce local politics to a form of community management. If councillors are seen as part of a "team" involving council officials, rather than as the representatives of the people charged with holding those officials to account, then it is not surprising if they come to be judged by the same standards as those officials.

I do not know anything about the councillor in question, but I shall be alarmed if any action is taken against him.

Save the panther

Some months ago, I was worrying about the webmaster of one of my favourite sites: Rutland and Leicestershire Panther Watch. It had not been updated for a while and I was afraid that he had been eaten.

Looking at the site more closely, I find the explanation:

To prevent poachers, 2004 sightings will not be added until the new year.

It's a sad thought that, if there are panthers living wild in the Leicestershire countryside, they are more at risk from us than we are from them.

Reforms and s(c)andals

I have just added a new posting to Serendib, my other blog.

An adaptation of its opening sentence would look good on a placard: “The reforms of one generation become the scandals of the next.”

I originally typed that as “The reforms of one generation become the sandals of the next.” Come to think of it, that contains a truth too. Reforms are soon taken for granted and those who continue to stress their importance are mocked as weirdos.

Bad news/Good news

The blog British Spin is no longer being updated, so I have removed my link to it.

The good news is that it is being reincarnated as a weekly e-mail. Write here to get on the mailing list.

More on poshness

Simon Titley, another member of the Liberator editorial collective, writes in response to my last posting...

Interested to read your posting about the use of the word "posh". I think we're witnessing a convergence of a number of factors.

First is traditional working class deference. Older relatives of mine in Lincolnshire still use the word "posh" regularly to denote anything of any quality, the implication being that "it's too good for the likes of us" or, alternatively, is a sign of pretension in someone else. A related word in this context is "special". Incidentally, a major characteristic of the culture of Lincolnshire (and other backwaters) is the firmly held belief that one's particular locality is a unique repository of common sense, and that anything from outside is fanciful nonsense that should be brought down to earth.

The second factor is inverted snobbery, the awful middle class posturing that became widespread in the 1980s, such as mockney accents, demotic language ("the kids") and pretensions to "street culture" (whatever that is). There is a vague groping for some bogus sense of authenticity, a belief that a pale imitation of American black urban culture is somehow more "real" than anything genuinely English. This in turn relates to the fact that many English people are uncomfortable in their own skins.

The third factor is the establishment of the culture of "cool" in the mainstream, once a statement of rebellion, now a banality. The key thing is to affect an air of ironic detachment. Terms such as "trainspotter", "sad"and "get a life" are used indiscriminately to stigmatise any form of erudition, hobby or intellectual pursuit. The main reason why boys underperform in the state school system is the huge peer group pressure not to be seen as a swot.

I'm not sure I agree with your analysis that "people who talk like this think they are being left wing". Inverted snobbery was an integral part of Old Labour culture, but only because it represented the authentic (pre-1979) prejudices of the British working class. Rather, I think it is part of a culture best summed up by the public persona of TV chef Jamie Oliver - how to enjoy the good things in life while remaining "one of us" and not feeling guilty. I suspect, lurking in the background somewhere, is our old friend Protestant/Puritan guilt.

Ooh, sounds a bit posh

One of the more depressing aspect of British life at the moment is the way that many people use the word "posh" to denigrate any activity that shows the slightest signs of education or a civilised attitude to life.

Perhaps people who talk like this think they are being left wing, but the idea that the good things in life should be confined to the wealthy is the most reactionary attitude there is.

And it has now reached its fullest development. The other day Ananova reported that a couple had decided to hold their wedding reception in a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken because:

"We don't like all that poshness, so thought we'd have a KFC bucket. It was lovely."

So now it is posh to eat with a knife and fork.

As I frequently observe these days, the country is going to the dogs. (Or in this case, the chickens.)

Twenty years on

My first Liberal Assembly - that is what the old Liberal Party called its annual conferences - was here in Bournemouth 20 years ago.

In those days Cruise missiles (ask your parents) were the hot topic. Those of us who were against their being stationed in Britain under American control thought it important that the TV cameras should see people in suits voting our way when the vote was called. So I spent some time saving a place on the platform for a new MP from the Borders by the name of Archy Kirkwood.

Now he is Sir Archy, a good House of Commons man. And, as it turned out, he was rather short and because he was not in the front row the cameras did not see much of him.

Happy days.

Liberal Democrat Conference

Hello from Bournemouth.

I know that some people write lengthy entries about political conferences every day. I shall not be doing so. Mostly its laziness, but when you have been coming to these things for as long as I have you tend to spend most of the time meeting old friends and going for a drink or a meal. Therefore it is doubtful whether you experience of the week is of much relevance to anyone else.

The major talking point has been the rapid rise and fall of The Orange Book. As I said in a review in the current Liberator, it was a strangely timed publication. Surely things like that should come out shortly after a general election, not shortly before one?

The danger is that the row means that in future MPs will be scared to publish anything that breaks new ground. What the party really needs is lots more ideas, not even fewer.

Commons security

The House Points column below was written on Tuesday evening. The following day Otis Ferry & Co. staged their protest on the floor of the Commons. I stand by every word, though. What do people want to see? Batman gunned down as soon as he starts to climb the wall?

David Blunkett says:

I'm in charge of security for the nation as a whole and what's happened here undermines confidence in the security service and counter-terrorism branch who, like me, have absolutely no control over the decisions of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

What's that? A country where the security services have no control over the decisions that parliament makes? Outrageous!

I have now added Big Blunkett to my links. It seems a wise precaution.

House Points

Today sees the first House Points (my column in Liberal Democrat News) of the new season...

Holy platitudes, Batman!

In some American States they still send convicts out in chain-gangs so the public can see they are being punished. Sending MPs back to Westminster before the party conferences serves much the same purpose.

Never mind that most work absurdly long hours: it looks bad if the press says they have generous holidays.

If there is a case for a brief September session, it is that government should not be left to its own devices for too long. But the Commons is not good at holding it to account for the rest of the year. Why should it be any better now?

On Monday we saw how things really work. After a Batmobile had been driven through security at Buckingham Palace, David Blunkett came to the House to make a statement.

All the right questions were asked: all the right replies were given. Holy platitudes, Batman! And Tom Levitt said the demonstrators had only harmed their cause. Maybe MPs have to say that, but it is not clear it is true.

Jon Agnone, an American sociologist, has looked at the effect of protests on legislation. He finds a clear relation between demonstrations and the number of environmental bills passed. As he says: “Politicians are responsive, but this happens by going to the streets, not by schmoozing elected officials.”

While he was on the back-benches, David Davis was the Conservatives' great hope. As shadow home secretary, he is less impressive. It reminds you of the way Kieron Dyer became an indispensable part of England's last World Cup team by not being fit for any of the warm up games.

Davis is a member of the Territorial SAS. Which means, as Simon Hoggart never tires of telling us, he strangles people with his bare hands (but only at weekends). If he wants to erect concrete barriers around the palace against the Queen's wishes, he will find he has taken on the fight of his life.

Strangely, no one congratulated the police – normally MPs miss no opportunity. Yet the most admirable thing about Monday was the cool of the officers on duty. They quickly realised they were not dealing with terrorists.

Some found it scandalous that Robin was allowed to give a television interview before he was taken away. House Points found it reassuring.

Serendib awakes

More signs of life: a new posting to my other blog.

Fresh air is good for you

I have recently published a couple of articles in OpenMind, the magazine published by the mental health charity Mind.

One (to be found on Lord Bonkers' website) is on ADHD. This is the supposed mental disorder which leads to millions of children around the world being prescribed Ritalin, a drug with all sorts of dangerous side-effects. The other (which I shall put on the Web when my computer is quite well again) is on the idea that experience of the natural world is good for our mental well-being.

Here is a new piece of research I have just found, which neatly ties these two concerns together. It is tempting to say that it is obviously the exercise that is doing the children good, but there does seem to be more to it than that.

News from Shropshire

One of the features of this blog before the summer break was bizarre stories from the Shropshire Star. Here is the first of the new season.

Stephen Riley, 48, barricaded himself in his flat for 23 days with two wallabies and 14 tortoises when he was dismissed from his job as animal manager at Tropiquaria tourist attraction, Watchet, Somerset.

New link

Yesterday's appeal has borne fruit already. Neil Fawcett has a new blog and I have added it to my Lib Dem links.

So far it seems to be mostly about Fairport Convention. If you ask me, they have never been half so good since Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson left.

Links

I have culled some links to blogs which appear to have expired over the summer. Disappointingly, they were mostly Lib Dem blogs. Is the species particularly prone to early demise?

If you have a political blog - Lib Dem or otherwise - and would like to swap links, please e-mail me.

Children in custody

It does make life easier when you agree with every word of an article. Read Libby Purves's piece in today's Times here. (You may need to register, but it's free.)

And there is more about the Howard League inquiry, to be chaired by Lord Carlile (the former Liberal MP for Montgomery), here.

Full of wind

On Friday evening I listened to Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4. There was a question about wind farms.

For what it is worth I think they can look rather wonderful, though if someone wanted to build one on hills I really love - say, the Stiperstones in Shropshire - I would be unhappy.

What struck me was that whenever Jonathon (sic.) Porritt referred to people who disagree with him he called them the "anti wind farm lobby".

This is a cheap rhetorical device which implies that all those who disagree with him are part of an organised conspiracy rather than individuals who, in good faith, have come to a different conclusion.

I must remember to use it myself one day.

Liberal Democrat News

Sometimes reading Liberal Democrat News depresses me. Even the bits I write.

Come to think of it, especially the bits I write.

Three examples from Friday's issue (10 September).

First, in his back page column Jim Wallace tells us that in our negotiations with the labour Party and during the passage of the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill at Hollyrood we were concerned to "strike a proper balance with the rights of the individual".

It happens (for various philosophical reasons that I ought to go into one day) I am not the greatest believer in the usefulness of talk about human rights. But surely, if you do believe in such rights, the essence of them is that they are not something you strike a balance with but absolute?

Second, in an article about The Orange Book Paul Holmes complains that some of the ideas it contains were looked at by Chris Huhne's commission on public services. "It is this careful, deliberative process that makes Liberal Democrat policy - not the private thoughts of any individual."

Yes, it the party has a formal process for making its policy, and I am assure that David Laws is just as aware of this as Paul is. Nowhere do the writers of The Orange Book claim that there ideas are party policy - though it is hard to see how their thoughts can be called "private" when they have just written a book about them.

But I do hope that Paul Holmes is not implying that people should not advance ideas unless they are in accord with existing party policy. If that were the case, we would still be banging on about Chinese Labour.

Finally, a letter from Gerald Vernon-Jackson, who is now the leader of Portsmouth City Council. He suggests that, rather than being the party of choice, we should be the party of high quality services.

It sounds appealing, but none of those who put forward views like this ever stop to wonder what incentive public authorities will have to provide high quality services if people have no choice but to use them?

Gerald also reports meeting a lady who was "one of the 37 per cent of Britons who want to emigrate":

"She told me that she wanted to go somewhere where things were simple. One gas company, one electricity company, one phone company. She just wanted not to have to think or worry about choice."

Now the Berlin Wall has come down she is a bit limited in where she can move to. Off the top of my head I can suggest Cuba or North Korea.

Mann's inhumanity

I once heard a Francis Wheen story that tells all you need know about Mark Thatcher. One day he rang Carol Thatcher for a quote, and she replied: "What dreadful thing are you writing about Mummy now?" When Wheen said it was not her mother but her brother he was researching, Carol said: "Good, it's time someone had a go at him."

It is not fitting to be too gleeful about the unravelling of the apparent Equatorial Guinea coup. One German defendant has already died in prison there after what Amnesty International suspects was torture. Nevertheless, this story, with its rumours of involvement by Jeffrey Archer, adds to the impression that the set surrounding Margaret Thatcher were not the most pleasant people.

Today a court in Zimbabwe has sentenced Simon Mann to seven years in prison for attempting to buy arms for use in Equatorial Guinea. This seems a good time to record that Mann is the son of the former England cricket captain F G Mann and a member of the brewing family. (Think Watney Mann.)

Back in the 1950s, John Arlott (twice a Liberal parliamentary candidate) was commentating on a match in which F G was being bamboozled by the South African leg spinner "Tufty" Mann.

Arlott remarked: "What we are watching here is a clear case of Mann's inhumanity to Mann."

Trivial fact

A question on the "young people's" quiz show Head Jam a couple of weeks ago suggested that the man who provided the voice for Dick Dastardly also invented the artificial heart. Incredibly, it appears to be true.

If Paul Winchell did not invent the artificial heart, he certainly patented an artificial heart.

Ofcom

A good article on the Spiked website concludes:

"It is difficult to see what an advertiser hoping to stay on the right side of Ofcom can usefully learn from these rulings, other than that you now need a PhD in gender studies before you can make an acceptable ad."

Big Blunkett

This is the first recommended link of the new season. It shows promise.

The strange rebirth of Liberal England

A summer break for a political blog is probably a good idea, but this one has gone on too long. Never mind the gremlins, we are back.

Radio silence

Apologies for the continued radio silence. I am still having computer problems. The latest theory is that my anti-virus program has a virus.

It's alive!

Major computer problems and a holiday in Scotland mean that this blog and this one and Lord Bonkers' website have not been updated for over a month.

Normal service is about to be resumed.

American satire

Visit a favourite site of mine: Pesky the Rat.

Darker news from Shropshire

Life is not all duck ponds there, you know.

House Points

Another column added. The particularly silly speech by Tessa Jowell it mentions can be found here.

Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson

Take a close look at this slow-loading class photograph.

Tributes to Jim Marshall

From the Leicester Mercury.

And more on Leicester South

A report from The Scotsman bigging up Liberal Democrat prospects.

More from Shropshire

One of the great headlines of our time: Controversial duck pond wins approval.

"A great parliamentarian and a close personal friend"

So it was not to be Birmingham Hodge Hill or Reading East. Jim Marshall, the Labour MP for Leicester South, died unexpectedly today. There is a report with tributes here.

Meanwhile, David Boothroyd has posted last year's local election results in the constituency to the uk.politics.electoral news group:

"South consists of the whole of Aylestone, Eyres Monsell, Freemen, Knighton, Spinney Hills and Stoneygate, most of Castle and part of Latimer wards.

Including Castle but excluding Latimer the vote totals were:

L Dem 10,838 42.2
Lab 6,996 27.2
C 5,205 20.2
GP 1,925 7.5
BNP 462 1.8
Ind 278 1.1"

News from Shropshire

Regular readers will know that this blog often relies on the Shropshire Star for its news. This can have its advantages as recent reports give unique insights into the flour bomb attack on the prime minister and Lembit Opik's engagement.

Lord Bonkers' Diary

I have updated his lordship's website. It now includes his latest diary from Liberator magazine and my May House Points columns from Liberal Democrat News.

More by-election rumours

It is not just Birmingham Hodge Hill, reports the Guardian, it is Reading East too.

Mistaken identity

A public meeting on the government’s proposed national identity card will be held on Wednesday afternoon at the London School of Economics. Full details here or here.

More doubts

It seems that the 14-year-old was advised by a 21-year-old who has been variously described as a "counsellor" or an "outreach worker". I often moan about professionals, but a 21-year-old cannot possibly have the level of education or supervised practice to be called a professional.

It is never a good idea to make too much of one case reported in the newspapers. And there are hard questions here. Why didn't the daughter feel able to confide in her mother? Was the mother right to go to the newspapers?

Yet it worries me that most liberals and left-wingers will unhesitatingly side with the authorities here. Think of their attitude towards Victoria Gillick, who tried to uphold parental rights a few years ago. They did not just disagree with her - which is a perfectly defensible position - they ridiculed her.

But if we have such a low opinion of the average citizen that we doubt her ability to give sensible advice to her own daughter, where does that leave liberalism or even democracy?

Meanwhile, here are two good article from the Telegraph. (You will need to register, but it is worth it if only for the obituaries.) The first disagrees with everything I have just said rather convincingly, and the second shows how the authorities have been passing the buck:

"The next call was to Irene Kakoullis, the teenage pregnancy strategy manager for Nottingham city council. But a woman answering the telephone said we had to speak to a marketing and brand development company, Diva Creative, in Sheffield."

Iraq Body Count

An important resource.

The site currently estimates the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the invasion at somewhere between 9,148 and 11,005.

Security news

Thameslink train services were at the centre of a major terrorist alert this week.

A driver spotted a passenger about to fire what he thought was a deadly grenade launcher.

In fact, he was playing a Rolf Harris-style didgeridoo.

Read on.

Important political analysis

In these difficult times, this website is a great comfort.

"Welcome to the 'George W. Bush or Chimpanzee' webpage. This is a little project I decided to start once I realized how much George W. Bush looks like a chimpanzee. I'm not a member of any political party, and I have nothing in particular against the man. I just think he kind of looks like a chimpanzee" - Bill Feldspar.

Doubts

Perhaps it comes from reading the Daily Mail the other day, but I find myself disturbed by this report.

"A woman whose 14-year-old daughter had an abortion on the advice of a school health worker but without her knowledge launched a furious attack on the system after being left out of the decision-making process."

What disturbs me is the thoroughly modern assumption behind this that parents cannot be trusted to have their children's best interests at heart, but that professionals - any professionals - are always right.

We are told that:

"A spokesman for the school said that they had issued a letter to all parents in September to make them aware that community child health workers could be speaking to children."

Do you know what a "community child health worker" is? What training he or she will have? How you become one? What research there is to show whether or not they do a good job?

Me neither. But they must know best because they are professionals. Mustn't they?

By-election rumour

Courtesy of Anthony Wells' elegant blog:

"Rumours are afoot that Terry Davis, the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, will next month be elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe, causing a by-election."

Read the full story here. And the result last time in Hodge Hill here.

Melanie Phillips and torture

When you write a letter complaining about a reference to you in a newspaper you never admit to having bought a copy. You always it has been "drawn to my attention".

Similarly, no Liberal Democrat ever admits to having bought the Daily Mail. You always say you picked up a discarded copy on the train.

So it was that I read Melanie Phillips' column in the Mail this morning. (The newspaper does not have much of a site itself, but she has a comprehensive one of her own.)

Melanie Phillips is a hate figure for many on the left, but I rather admire her. I like her rather Victorian sensibility (and that is a compliment in my book) and her willingness to talk about heavy moral concepts.

As David Goodhart is quoted as saying in this Guardian profile:

"'I do admire her.' In her work, he sees 'debates we should be having' about the social and cultural loosenings since the 60s, about 'the bad side-effects of the freedom we want'."

But her effort this morning was dreadful.

Torture is not a good subject for a columnist. You can do more than say it is wrong. Or, in Phillips' words: "Torture is always wrong, and corrupts those who employ it."

Trouble is, editors expect you to write to length, so you have to say more than that. Which is why Phillips found herself writing: "Torture is always wrong, and corrupts those who employ it. But..."

The "But" turned out to be: "But the moral squeamishness of the west is also the hole in its defences. The digital camera on the belt of the western soldier is a devastating weapon against his own side."

So opposition to torture is moral squeamishness and a hole in our defences? I prefer to think of it as what distinguishes a civilised country from someone like Saddam Hussein.

On Phillips' analysis the problem at Abu Ghraib is not the dogs or the nakedness or the beatings. It is the digital cameras.

A sign of the times

Three Albanian men found in the back of a lorry in Dover have been arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle themselves out of the UK.

Thanks again, BBC.

Great headlines of our time

Ex-KGB man backs new MI6 chief

Thanks BBC.

Not saintly enough

I know there is stiff competition to get into church schools - chiefly because they have discipline, uniforms, high academic standards and all the things the left spent decades campaigning against, but this is ridiculous.

"A five-year-old boy has been barred from his local Roman Catholic school for being baptised "late" - despite being a descendant of a martyred saint.

Alexander Payne can boast an impeccable Catholic ancestry stretching back almost 1,000 years - his family tree includes Saint John Almond, who was hung, drawn and quartered in 1612 at the hands of Protestant persecutors.

His parents, Chris and Judith Payne, said St Bernadette's RC primary school in Brighton, six doors from their home, had refused him a place because he was baptised after the age of two."

Consignia

The good news is that Liberal Democrat News arrived today. The bad news is that it was delivered to the house next door. I am not surprised.

Shooting trainspotters in a barrel

This is why I have doubts about Simon Hoggart:

"On my way into work yesterday I passed some train spotters at Waterloo station. They were photographing the train I'd just arrived on, specifically the driver's cab and the number on the side.

'But they're all the same!' I wanted to yell. 'Only the numbers are different. You might as well photograph a range of Tesco loyalty cards!'

Nothing, I thought, could be more boring than that."

Attacking trainspotters, Simon? A brave and controversial view.

For a more balanced account of the subject, see Nicholas Whittaker's book Platform Souls.

House Points

The combined efforts of whatever Consignia calls itself these days and the Bank Holiday mean that I have not seen the latest Liberal Democrat News yet. But here is the new House Points. It can also be found here.

The parliamentary cycle

We need new legislation on cycling. Something that lays down stiff penalties for grown men who buy expensive bikes and funky Lycra gear, then ride on the pavement.

Unfortunately this is not what Eric Martlew put forward last Friday. Instead the MP for Carlisle gave us the Protective Headgear for Young Cyclists Bill. This would make it an offence to allow a child under 16 to ride a cycle without a helmet on the road or “in any park, garden or recreation ground to which the public have access without payment”.

You can imagine how well this plays on daytime television. “Well, Esther (sob), if it saves one child from injury I think it will be worth it.” “Wonderful, Eric. And in part two: ‘My grandmother stole my fiancé’.”

Martlew, certainly, was convinced of his own righteousness. Anyone who opposed him had base motives. “The Association of Cycle Traders seems more interested in selling bicycles than in the safety of children.” Yet the debate reinforced the impression that no one is sure how great the safety benefits of helmets are.

The bill foundered when Eric Forth moved that the House should sit in private. He lost by 25 votes to nil but proved there were fewer than 40 MPs present. So the Commons moved on to next business.

People who oppose Martlew point out that where helmets have been made compulsory fewer children cycle to school. This is an odd thing to be advocating when childhood obesity in this year’s hot political issue.

They are right, but Martlew’s bill goes deeper into contemporary neuroses than that. It reinforces the idea that the outside world is a dangerous place. Better to stay at home, to watch it on television. And if you have to go out, then wear protection.

It also reflects our lack of confidence in ourselves as adults. No doubt children who cycle on busy roads should wear helmets. Equally, it is hard to believe that a child riding a fairy cycle in the park needs to wear one.

Who is to make this judgement? You might say parents, but they could get it wrong or think differently from the majority. Better to leave it to the likes of Eric Martlew and pass a law.

Crimewatch

From the Shropshire Star: "The owner of a south Shropshire cafe has today made a fresh appeal to a 12-strong stag party who made off with a stone fish from his restaurant on their way to Blackpool on Friday."

More on Leicester council housing

In House Points a couple of weeks ago - see the entry below for 24 April - I mentioned the sinister camera towers that have sprung up in streets of council houses in Leicester.

They are not the half of it: "Former SAS soldiers are going undercover in city housing estates to spy on nuisance neighbours."

The party of Gladstone and Morley

Home from a work meeting in Edinburgh, and what do I find? My 9 April House Points column in Liberal Democrat News has upset Bob Russell MP.

"I trust there will be no more offensive and insulting references about Essex and those of us who hail from the county," he writes in the letters page for last Friday (23 April). Click here for the full letter.

Trivial fact: my mother's mother's family all came from Tollesbury and owned the Hope Inn at one time.

Tony Martin and spring guns

Edis Bevan's blog MKNE Political Information makes a telling comparison between the supporters of Tony Martin and those who defended the use of spring guns by landowners in the nineteenth century.

A couple of explanatory notes: Tony Martin was a British farmer gaoled for murder after shooting a burglar; spring guns were automatic guns intended to hit poachers and anyone else wandering on their owners' land.

Edis refers to one of my favourite books Roads to Ruin by E S Turner. It is a study of the people who opposed various social reforms like banning the use of little boys to sweep chimneys. I am rather alarmed to learn that it is one of Tony Benn's favourite books too.

E S Turner, by the way, is still alive, in his nineties and writing regularly for the London Review of Books.

One of the best parts of Roads to Ruin is the introduction, where Turner says that he had originally intended to include the people who campaigned against the abolition of the requirement for motor cars to be preceded by someone carrying a red flag. However, on studying the matter, he found that their chief argument was that if the flagmen went then many people would be killed by cars.

As he says, history has proved them right.

House Points

I have just added my latest (23 April) House Points column from Liberal Democrat News to Lord Bonkers' website. But I am feeling generous, so I am going to post the whole thing here too. My copy of Lib Dem News did not arrive this morning, so the headline may differ from that published...

The writing’s on the wall

Charles Kennedy was missing on Monday. Not from the Commons – he was there to hear Tony Blair describe how well things are going in Iraq – but from Blaby Road Park, South Wigston.

He had been due to visit the Harborough constituency until events at Westminster got interesting and forced him to cancel. But we still had a television crew, Bill Newton Dunn and several local councillors.

They were there to mark the success of the district council (Liberal Democrat-run Oadby and Wigston) in reclaiming the park from underage drinkers. It is a thoroughly modern initiative involving anti-social behaviour policies, alcohol bans and community support officers.

In essence, councils are reinventing park-keepers. They were got rid of 20 years ago because the right wanted to cut taxes and the left believed they were crypto-fascists.

The South Wigston project also involved the building of a skateboard park. What a photo opportunity that would have been for Charles!

Skateboard parks mean bare concrete. And bare concrete means graffiti, which poses a dilemma for officialdom. These days it is too self-doubting to say graffiti is a bad thing but not relaxed enough to let events take their course.

The solution? Official graffiti. The council employed professionals to write on the concrete before anyone else got at it. You need a Masters in Graffiti Studies before you are allowed near a spray can these days. (“Who painted you this then? Bloody cowboys.”)

I had expected to have naughty libertarian doubts about the Blaby Road scheme. But it seemed a sensible idea and I liked the municipal flowerbeds.

After leaving the park I walked into Leicester down streets of council housing. You could tell they were council houses because of the tall metal columns topped with CCTV cameras. The scene was a cross between the old East Germany and a work of science fiction.

And at Westminster there is now a screen across the public gallery, supposedly to protect MPs from gas attack. You could call them cowards, but they seem to have had little to do with it. It was an initiative from the security services. Conspiracy theorists will believe they put it up to keep MPs in a state of fear.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Bin Laden laughing.

Passport to Weston Rhyn

The Shropshire Star reports one of the more ingenious defences to a speeding charge.

Bad moves

Studying philosophy is supposed to make you more rational. But I lean to the view of the likes of J L Austin, Michael Oakeshott and the later Wittgenstein. They held that studying the subject makes you more likely to talk nonsense.

That said, I like these columns by Julian Baggini which point out some common logical fallacies which crop up in political discussion.

Tracking parents

"In the Children Bill itself, for instance, the word 'parent' appears only once."

There is a good article by Eileen Munro, reader in social policy at the London School of Economics, on the Spiked website. She discusses the assumptions behind the Children Bill and the planned database recording all 11 million children in the country.

This seems a suitable point to plug my own essay Defending Families.

Political trivia

Norris McWhirter's obituary in the Daily Telegraph tells us that he was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate for Orpington at the two general elections following Eric Lubbock's by-election victory in 1962.

You have to register to access the Telegraph site, but if you like obituaries it is the only paper to read.

Sad News

Geraint Howells - Lord Geraint of Ponterwyd - has died, aged 79.

He was MP for Cardigan from 1974 to 1983 and for Ceredigion and Pembroke North from 1983 to 1992, and was known to Lord Bonkers as the Big Friendly Geraint.

Thanks to Peter Black's excellent blog for the story.

Home Again

I have been in London at a psychology conference for the past few days, helping to get stories into the papers. Here is my favourite example.

My latest House Points column has been posted, and I have also added a passage from A Tale of Two Cities to Serendib.

If you look at the psychology story, you will see why I was reading the novel. I got quite excited when I read the passage I quote on Serendib, thinking it was an anticipation of the themes of Bleak House. Then I discovered that Bleak House was published in 1852-3 and A Tale of Two Cities in 1859.

More railways

I have just added a nice piece of descriptive writing - "Rails in High Leicestershire" - to Serendib.

Sacrilege at St Pancras

From the BBC website:

"Eurostar is also considering the idea of changing the station's name to increase understanding of its location among continental travellers.

Names like 'London Central', 'London International', 'London Grand Central' and 'Union Station' have been suggested."

Disgusted of Market Harborough writes: Harrumph!

Meanwhile, here is a tour of the old station hotel and here is more on the unfortunate Pancras himself.

Lord Bonkers writes: Some historians believe him to have been the first Well-Behaved Orphan.

House Points

The latest column has just been uploaded.

"But Essex Man is keener on some laws than others, and Amess complained about the speed cameras in his constituency. What Essex Man really likes are laws that control other people."

An e-mail from ARCH

I received this mailing today from ARCH - Action on Rights for Children.

Children Bill - Urgent

A new Children Bill is currently before Parliament and the Government anticipates that it will be passed by the end of July.

The Bill will allow the Government to establish one or more databases containing information about all children and their parents, including low-level 'concerns' from every agency involved with each family. Agencies - including GPs - will share the information. From birth, every child in England and Wales will have a file on the system.

An example of the kind of 'concerns' that will be flagged on a child's file include children's and parents' physical and mental health issues, 'frequently moving house', 'non-constructive spare time/easily bored', 'criminal area of residence', 'negative home influence on education', 'poor general parenting skills' - and many others besides.

As the Bill will overturn the Common Law duty of confidentiality, information will be shared without the knowledge or consent of children and their parents.

More information is available on the following websites:

http://tracking-children.lse.ac.uk

http://www.arch-ed.org/chldrnbill.htm

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000254.html

More on multiculturalism

There was an article in the Guardian yesterday by Andrew Anthony which made some of the points that I did, though I am not clear what his conclusion is. I also have some sympathy for Jennie Bristow's view that "multiculturalism is one of those phrases that is more meaningless the more ubiquitous it becomes".

The real difference here is between liberals, who are happy for many different ways of life to flourish, and socialists, who want to impose their values on everyone.

Three favourite bookshops

London, Cromford and Bishop's Castle.

Bent Soup: Welcome back

One of my favourites among the satirical site I link to from Lord Bonkers' website used to be Bent Soup.

It disappeared a while ago, but now it is back and I am about to restore the link.

Multiculturalism, Trevor Phillips and Polly Toynbee

In February David Goodhart published an interesting essay suggesting that there may be a tension between diversity and solidarity. It appeared in Prospect magazine and the Guardian.

The essence of his argument was conveyed in a quotation from the Conservative shadow minister David Willetts.

"The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face.

If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn't do?'

This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens.

Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."

I hope this is overly pessimistic, but it is surely worth thinking seriously about the implications of multiculturalism.

Not it you believed Trevor Phillips back in February.

The Guardian printed a lot of reactions to Goodhart's article, and Phillips' was extraordinarily mean-spirited.

"Is this the wit and wisdom of Enoch Powell? Jottings from the BNP leader's weblog? Actually they are extracts from an article in the Observer, penned by the liberal intellectual David Goodhart, who I have always suspected is too brainy for his own good."

It is customary for anyone from outside the left-wing establishment who seeks to discuss race to be branded a racist. (If you believe in conspiracy theories, this serves to keep most well-meaning people in a state of permanent nervousness about the whole topic and so creates plenty of job opportunities for those who claim expertise in the area.) Even so, Phillips' charge that Goodhart is "too brainy for his own good" adds a thuggish note all his own.

But a few weeks is a long time in politics, and the Observer for 4 April reported:

In a newspaper interview the head of the Commission for Racial Equality said that "multiculturalism suggests separateness" and added that the UK should strive towards a more homogeneous culture with "common values ... the common currency of the English language, honouring the culture of these islands, like Shakespeare and Dickens".

I am all in favour of Shakespeare and Dickens - shouldn't Phillips be concerned that they will appeal to the "brainy"? - but this is an extraordinary about face.

I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that Phillips is a creature of the New Labour leadership, and that leadership is panicking about immigration and is afraid that multiculturalism plays badly with swing voters.

Polly Toynbee is very keen on the new Phillips in today's Guardian. In a nasty piece she appears to view immigrant communities which retain their own values as intrinsically threatening. "Phillips says it was an error to let alien communities stay in their silos." Alien? Silos?

Toynbee loves the most toe-curlingly embarrassing of Phillips ideas: "Phillips proposes a universal coming-of-age ceremony to give meaning to adult citizenship, along with the right to vote and eventually receipt of the matured baby bond."

So people will set aside the religion of their ancestors in order to have their adults lives given meaning by the cheesiest aspects of New Labour?

Even for Polly Toynbee, that is a pretty silly thing to believe.

Fishy story

There is nothing funny about this at all.

More on moving the goalposts

The news story I mentioned yesterday is worth reading more closely.

Take the comment by the parent who supports the idea of cancelling the score at half time if one side is winning easily:

"It gives them the opportunity to participate on a level playing field, so I think it is a fairly good idea."

Note firstly that this awful political cliche is invading real life.

Note secondly that it is a silly metaphor to use when you are talking about football.

Note thirdly that the man means the exact opposite of what he says. He wants to handicap teams that are too good, when the metaphor conveys the idea of a fair contest in conditions that are the same for both sides.

In fact if you did want to handicap the better team one way of doing it would be to have a sloping pitch like Yeovil Town used to have and make them play uphill for the whole game.

The defenders of competitive sport are no better. Here is the one quoted:

"We have to foster a competitive spirit, the will to win and the desire for success. If you are taking that away you are actually disempowering children with the necessary life skills to overcome adversity."

The competitive spirit is no doubt a good thing to acquire, but can't children play football because they enjoy it? Does it have to be defended with words like "disempowering" and "life skills"?

And this seems a very Labour conception. Liberal recognise that people are all individuals and are happy for them to let their very different talents flower.

Labour, however, feels uneasy with this. It wants everyone to play sport because it is good for them, and no doubt sports other than football are "posh" or "elitist".

But not everyone is good at football, and the professional left sees people as endlessly vulnerable. So the game has to be made ridiculous to accommodate everyone without traumatising them.

2-1!

On tonight of all nights, here is a good cause to support.

Moving the goalposts

Disgusted of Market Harborough writes: Harrumph!

Thoughts from York Minster

At the end of last Friday's House Points I mentioned going to Evensong in York Minster. I have never felt holy enough to do something like that before; I now realise that the point is that you feel holy afterwards.

It reminded me in a way of cricket's county championship. Here were people who devote their lives to the activity and a few enthusiasts to watch them. Meanwhile the rest of the city went on with its business, quite indifferent.

The experience did not seem quintessentially English, as I expected. Instead it was exotic, even Eastern. Incense, resonant language, beautiful music, incomparable architecture, grave children in long robes.

The Church of England is obsessed with relevance to the modern world. Only today there is a story on the BBC about plans to rename Southwell diocese and move the bishop from its incomparable Minster.

Maybe the Church is right, but we live in a world with an enormous hunger for spirituality. And ten minutes of Evensong in York Minster is worth a lifetime of crystals, feng shui and Carol Caplin.

And if you remove all the emotive elements from Christianity and attempt to make a wholly rational case for it, you have to admit it sounds pretty unlikely.

It was Gregory Bateson who pointed out in the 1960s that the Catholic Church abandoned holding services in Latin just at the point that young people took up chanting in Sanskrit.

House Points

The latest column has just been uploaded.

"I was in York the other day. I have been back before, but this time I was struck by how much it has changed. It’s not so surprising, as Jim Callaghan was prime minister when I first went there. (Or it may have been Mr Gladstone: at my age you forget.)"

Splendid rant on the rails

Nick Cohen is in mid-season form in today's Observer:

"The trance-inducing quality of the privatised rail system comes from the randomness of the enterprise. It is so capricious it appears beyond the control of human agency and all but beyond the comprehension of the human mind. All you can do is look on with mouth agape. Dadaists, surrealists and others in the twentieth-century avant-garde tried to achieve the same effect, but nothing they did matched what the Major administration created and the Blair administration perpetuated."

More on anti-revolutionary liberals

The other day I mentioned Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. There are links to sites about them on Lord Bonkers' links page.

Beverley Hughes and Tony Blair: Those letters in full

Dear Tony

I have done nothing wrong, so I am resigning.

Beverley


Dear Beverley

I agree that you have done nothing wrong, so I am accepting your resignation.

Tony

Edmund Burke

I have added a quotation from my new hero Edmund Burke to Serendib.

I make the same point against Rousseau in Defending Families. Such ad hominem arguments often sound cheap - Paul Johnson filled a book with them in his Intellectuals - but Burke's identification of Rousseau's hypocrisy as a form of vanity lifts him above all that.

Besides I love the phrases "the tribute which opulence owes to genius" and "Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish."

The Conservatives claim Burke as their spiritual father, but I doubt if many of them read him. For most of his career he was the intellectual leader of the Whigs, only breaking from them over his opposition to the French Revolution.

Burke was right in that he foresaw the Terror that was to follow it, much as anarchists thinkers identified the totalitarianism inherent in Marx. He wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, not as a reaction to the Terror, but in 1790 when the consequences of the Revolution still seemed benign to many British observers.

It is time that we reclaimed Burke. After all, the most important 20th century Liberals are also anti-revolutionaries; think of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Only those with ideology envy - those who really wish they were socialists - will feel uneasy at welcoming Burke home.