House Points: Shivering on the wing

Today's column from Liberal Democrat News. Incidentally, Kurmanbek Bakiyev sounds a nasty piece of work when you learn more about him.

Fit for office

House Points has spent years complaining about culture, media and sport questions. All those MPs getting up to demand more school sport when the real reason children are less fit is that they don’t play out any more. Blame a noxious combination of panic about strangers and the dominance of the car. With ASBOs, curfews and now Kelly hours, it’s a wonder they can walk at all.

But we have a new hero. On Monday Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the acting president of Kyrgyzstan, single-handedly stopped MPs mentioning school sport. How did he manage it?

Easy. Bakiyev recently announced a policy of “mass cultivation of sports and healthy living”. Just what a British politician might come out with.

But then he said: “From now on all the regional leaders and MPs are going to have to do running, jumping and weight lifting tests before they take office. We will only appoint those who pass successfully.”

What?! That isn’t what our MPs have in mind at all.

With a few notable exceptions like Ming Campbell and Derek Wyatt, politicians believe sport is good for other people. And even Wyatt played his rugby in the days when being in the England back division rarely involved receiving a pass.

Most MPs spent their schooldays shivering on the wing, praying the ball did not come near them. As they did so, they promised themselves that one day they would be powerful and get back at all the people who mocked them for being no good at games.

So on Monday, scared of a Kyrgyzstani policy being enacted here, they steered clear of school sports. Only Madeleine Moon from Bridgend risked the wrath of Bakiyev. She must have been a whiz at netball.

She claimed a London Olympics would be an inspiration to young people. Then she suggested they would “give us a future generation of capable athletics and sports students who will be able to take us forward into the next century”.

Unless sport is even better for you than politicians think, that generation won’t be doing anything in the next century.

If Moon going to compete at the top level, she will need better clichés than that. If Kurmanbek Bakiyev were in charge here, she would be for the high jump. Literally.

Out of Africa

Fifteen years ago there was a panic in Britain about the "ritual abuse" of children. An idea which began on the wackier fringes of American Evangelical Christianity found its way to the heart of our social work establishment. As a result there were many raids on families and children were taken into care, most famously in Rochdale and the Orkneys.

There were no successful prosecutions and it was generally accepted afterwards that the whole episode was an example of mass hysteria amongst people one hoped would know better. There seemed to be a process at work whereby our society's darkest fears and fantasies were projected upon marginal groups. For a brief account of the period read this article from 1998 by Donald Rooum.

Yet the idea of ritual abuse never went away. It has been smouldering within the caring professions ever since and can still burst into life from time to time.

It has happened again this week. The BBC website reports:

Children are being trafficked into the UK from Africa and used for human sacrifices, a confidential report for the Metropolitan Police suggests.

This report goes on to say:

It said that people who are desperate seek out churches to cast spells for them.

"Members of the workshop said for spells to be powerful it required a sacrifice of a male child unblemished by circumcision," the report said.

Blimey. I suspect that tells us little about Africa but a great deal about the Western psyche.

And is there any evidence for this claim, which sounds remarkably like the charges that were made against Jews in Medieval Britain?

Contributors said boys were being trafficked into the UK for this purpose, but did not give details because they said they feared they would be "dead meat" if they told any more.

That will be why then.

The BBC report does quote a sceptical voice. Unfortunately it is that of a sociology lecturer who confirms all our prejudices about the breed by coming out with something incomprehensible:

"The model that they're based on, they always seem to base their models on the fact that Africans are less civilized, less rational, so their whole systems of rationality are irrational."

Er, right.

Fortunately there is a well-written discussion of the lunacy of this view of African culture from Josie Appleton on the Spiked website. It was written in the light of the recent "witchcraft" court case and before the Metropolitan Police report was leaked, but its conclusions hold good:

there is little hard evidence to justify these wild claims. It seems to be the accusers who are possessed with ideas of mass, ritualised child abuse - not London's immigrant communities.

Paul Holmes 36 Matthew Taylor 23

Paul Holmes, the East Midlands' only Lib Dem MP, has been elected as the new chairman of the Parliamentary party, reports The Scotsman. He beat the previous chair Matthew Taylor by 36 votes to 23.

Holmes was one of the founders of the Beveridge Group within the party, which was set up to "promote Beveridge's message of civic responsibility and public accountability in public services". In practice this means that they want more spending on public services but are not so keen on structural reforms. Which makes the group rather conservative, though its members probably see themselves as radicals.

The Beveridge Group has a website but has not otherwise not been noticeably active. Nevertheless, there are some Liberal Democrat Kremlinologists who will see Holmes' victory as a snub to the Orange Book tendency, even though Matthew Taylor was not one of the contributors to the book.

Matthew Taylor's response was to say:

"The Parliamentary party had a clear choice to make. They have decided to follow the route of the Conservative and Labour parties in choosing a backbench representative to chair their meetings."

I am sure it was kindly meant, as an Alan Bennett character might say, but that quotation becomes a little more patronising and self-aggrandising every time you read them.

Thanks to Will Howells for the tip.

Alastair Sim

The Inveresk Street Ingrate points us towards a Sight & Sound article on the incomparable Alastair Sim.

On Wednesdays he goes shopping and has buttered scones for tea

I have been slowly overhauling my blogroll (as the young people call it). One link I have added recently is to The Reaction, written by Michael Stickings. It bills itself as:

An independent, non-partisan, and mostly liberal-to-moderate blog on politics, philosophy, and culture -- sustained by Socratic pretentions, Straussian undertones, and an Arnoldian dedication to human excellence.

All that and it comes from Canada too.

Freedom of expression goes down the tubes

Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of Melanie Phillips. But she's got the right idea when it comes to the government's bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred.

On her blog she has been reporting the case of a journalist who is being prosecuted in Italy after writing a book critical of Islam. Now the man who prompted that action has himself been convicted of defaming the Catholic church.

She writes:

This is precisely what happens when a country introduces laws banning debate about religion - every religious believer becomes a potential criminal, faith group is set against faith group, group hatred does not diminish but grows, and freedom of expression goes down the tubes.

You might as well call them "Herod hours"

An editorial in the Guardian yesterday on the government's plan for a 10-hour school day finished by saying:

Ms Kelly's spin doctor believes the scheme should be known as "Kelly hours". If it has to have a label, let it be "Hodge hours" after Margaret Hodge, the minister who fought tooth and nail for it last year.

Anyone familiar with Hodge's abysmal record on education and social services when she was running Islington council will know what bad taste this is in. You might as well call them "Herod hours".

Whoever you vote for, the Dimblebys still get in

Paul Robinson at Iconoplex has been watching the Parliament Channel's rerun of the BBC's coverage of the night of the 1955 general election.

From his account it sounds rather like reading an old newspaper. You are struck partly by how similar things are and partly by how different they are.

In the former category, there was a Dimbleby in charge of proceedings even then. Robinson writes:

Through the grainy black and white, a rather fat Richard Dimbleby can be made out delivering his patter and fighting his analysts in much the same way as his sons do today.

In the latter category, Manchester Withington - the Lib Dems' shock gain from Labour in this year's election - was held by the Tories with a majority of 10,000.

Incidentally:

Iconoplex is built on one premise: political parties and cliques are destroying democracy around the World. Iconoplex is a site that champions independent representation and for democratic power being genuinely placed into the electorate's hands. The long-term goal is to remove political parties from power, particularly in the UK.

Open all hours

The news of the day is that Ruth Kelly has announced plans for schools to open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

They are being sold as a way of increasing the freedom of women to choose whether or not they want to work full time. But I wonder if this really describes what is going on.

One of the great changes in British society in the past 30 years, though it is rarely commented upon, is that it now takes two full-time incomes to maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. This explains, amongst other things, why divorce is now financially ruinous for all concerned.

Where once women fought for the right to work, they now have to work. So this policy is not about extending women's choice so much as a recognition that - single, married or divorced - they no longer have any.

Another powerful motive for this policy is Labour's belief that parental care is inferior to professional care. Socialists have generally seen progress as consisting in more and more of the functions of parents being taken over by agents of the state.

So it is that Ruth Kelly (as quoted in the Guardian) can write in the document which announces the scheme:

From my visits to schools, I know that the best are delivering extended services already. They know that children will be better placed to achieve their full potential if they are in childcare that allows them to complete their homework, keep fit and healthy and have fun.

The implication here seems to be that parental care does none of these things and denies children the possibility of reaching their full potential.

And it was hard to be enthused by the response of Ed Davey, the new Lib Dem shadow education secretary. The useful summary on the ePolitix site quotes him as follows:

After eight years in government, Labour has finally woken up to the needs of pupils and parents.

These plans sound promising but Ruth Kelly will need to answer questions on whether this is real new money or whether schools will be forced to find these resources from other areas of their budgets.

The extended school opening hours must not result in additional paperwork for head teachers.

In other words, there is nothing in terms of philosophy or policy to differentiate us from New Labour here, and if the party speaks for anyone it is not children or parents but the teaching profession.

Davey was one of the contributors to The Orange Book, which leads some regard him as part of a sinister libertarian conspiracy within the party. If only.

David Steel says what we are all thinking

It doesn't often happen, but...

The former Liberal leader, reports the BBC, has described Bob Geldof's call for one million people to gather in Edinburgh as "slightly crackers" and his call for a Sail 8 flotilla of boats to cross the English Channel as "odd".

However, Lord Steel sounds rather too old fogeyish in a letter in this morning's edition of The Times:

He is something of an icon to the younger generation and as such should take greater care over not just what he says, but how he says it. Deliberately peppering his utterances with swear words and appearing in public carefully dishevelled is not setting a good example of behaviour.

Lord Bonkers writes: I once wrote to The Times about those awful coloured shirts with white collars that little Steel wears, but they declined to publish.

Great name, shame about the porn

I have just received an e-mail from one Infallibility G. Pinion headed "Young Rumanian Girls!"

The name reminds me of the song from Lil' Abner:

When it seemed like our brave boys would keep on fighting for months,
Who took pity on them and ca-pit-u-lated at once?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Unshaven and shorn - pone.
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he weren't nobody's dunce!

The impact of the new Parliamentary boundaries

There is some interesting discussion of this over at UK Polling Report.

Altogether this means that the notional House of Commons on the new boundaries will look like this:

Conservative - 212 (plus 14)
Labour - 345 (minus 11)
Liberal Democrat - 64 (plus 2)
Others - 29 (minus 1)
Labour Majority - 40

The two forecast gains for the Lib Dems are both in Yorkshire: Sheffield Central and the bizarrely drawn and named York Outer seat.

Cherie ripe

The Guardian reports that Cherie Blair is to defy "sexist" criticism and continue with her public appearances. The paper says she has

defended her appearances, telling her Washington audience last week that the attacks on her were sexist. Denis Thatcher, she said, had never received such criticism.

Well, it may be that Denis Thatcher escaped criticism because he was a man. But I think it is more likely to be because he never, in an extraordinary blend of greed and crass judgement, accepted £30,000 to appear in a question and answer session about life in Downing Street, as Cherie Blair did last week in Washington.

Mind you, I bet Denis would have provided better value than Cherie if he had ever done that.

Why aren't you wearing your cap, Tompkins?

There is an ironic aspect of the current panic about youths wearing hoodies and caps that I have not seen noted anywhere else.

I am just old enough to be able to say that in my day you got into trouble if you didn't wear a cap.

Jonathan Calder (Hemel Hempstead School 1971-3)

Frank Furedi on the new populism

There is a characteristically stimulating new essay by Furedi on the Spiked website:

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the populist rejection of the EU treaty, the manner in which the 'No' campaign is disparaged by professional politicians betrays a powerful anti-democratic temper. It appears that professional politicians attempt to account for their isolation from the electorate by pointing their finger at the incompetence of the public.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the political class has drawn the conclusion that the problem with the people is that they do not know what's in their best interest. This sentiment is particularly widespread among liberal and left-wing activists and thinkers.

Read more here.

Britblog Round up

Tim Worstall has posted his latest selection of the best things in the British blogosphere here.

This year’s educational panacea

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. Although it covers the teaching of reading I managed to avoid mentioning Ladybird Books, but it can only be a matter of time before Lassie appears.

Later note: As the blogosphere has higher ethical standards than print journalism, I should thank Tim Hicks and Tim Worstall for postings that helped inspire this column.

Home Counties voice: Come on Tim!


Not so phonic

The Tories have decided what it is they object to most about Tony Blair’s government. There’s not enough micromanagement. The trouble with New Labour, they believe, is that it does not centralise things enough.

You don’t believe me? Look at the way they’ve taken up this year’s educational panacea: synthetic phonics. Here is Tim Collins (whatever happened to him?) during the election campaign: “We won’t waste time commissioning more reports and pilot projects – the evidence is there and we will act upon it.”

Now Nick Gibb is inveighing against “the education establishment, who have known about this research for some time, have not adapted the national literacy strategy to put synthetic phonics at its core."

Yes, something about phonics appeals to the Tory mind. The Daily Mail thinks “Phonics is taught through discipline and repetition.” Which fits with its belief that education is impossible without “discipline, authority, order, tradition, learning by heart, rigorous examinations, selection”. (If space had permitted it would undoubtedly have added cold showers and swishy canes to the list.)

Maybe synthetic phonics is a better way of teaching reading, even though many of those pushing it have a commercial interest in doing so. And it has its unattractive side. There are stories of children being denied books and its proponents are no keener on illustrations than your average Puritan clergymen was.

But if synthetic phonics is best, how have we found that out? Will someone help Collins please? Thank you, Widdecombe. It’s because of an experiment. And how will we make the next breakthrough in teaching reading if the government imposes synthetic phonics everywhere and allow no more experiments? No, Gibb, I don’t know either.

Excuse me for coming over all headmasterly. Think of it as a tribute to Phil Willis. During the election campaign he said: “We need to free teachers from endless central government diktats, testing and targets and allow them to practise the methods that are best for their pupils.”

He was right, but we need to go further. A maintained education sector with a wider variety of providers and more freedom to choose between them would not be kind to schools which didn’t teach children to read. And the best methods, be they synthetic phonics or anything else, would flourish.

More thoughts on Nick Cohen and Amnesty International

Nick Cohen, in a column I have already discussed here and here, complained about Amnesty International's use of the term "gulag" to describe Guananamo Bay and the USA's other facilities for detaining suspected terrorists around the world.

He wrote:

ever since [Irene] Khan took over, I've had an uneasy feeling that it is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others. That feeling transformed into a certainty last week when Amnesty described Guantanamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times'.

By all means, Amnesty and everyone else should loudly deplore America's failure to treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But when they've finished, they should check the figures. If they exclude the millions who died of starvation, disease and exhaustion, they will find that 776,098 prisoners were murdered in summary executions in the gulag between 1930 and 1953. At Guantanamo Bay, no one has died of starvation, disease or exhaustion and no prisoners have been executed. Not one. If Amnesty's American obsession prevents it from seeing the worst crimes of the 20th century for what they are, how will it sound the alarm about the worst of the 21st?

It is hard to disagree with any of this, but two points are worth making in reply.

The first is made by Ted Barlow in his open letter to New Republic magazine on the Crooked Timber blog. In the PS he writes:

You can imagine a world in which the term “gulag” had not been used in that speech. In that world, do you imagine that the Amnesty report would have set off a serious effort on the part of the Bush Administration to correct its abuses? Or do you think that they would find another excuse- any excuse- to belittle and ignore the report? The question answers itself, doesn’t it?

The second was made by Cohen himself. In a posting made in January this year I quoted him as saying:

A few months ago, I shared a platform with Sion Simon, a new Labour cheerleader. I had a go at the government's assault on trial by jury, and his instant response was: "Nick Cohen thinks Blair's Hitler." I pointed out that I thought nothing of the sort, and asked if all criticism of new Labour's record would be illegitimate until the day the Cabinet dressed in black leather and invaded Poland.

Equally, Bush's America does not have to be as bad as Stalin's USSR for criticism of it to be legitimate.

The real idiocy in Irene Khan's comments (quoted by Cohen and included in my first posting on the subject) was her failure to understand that extending liberty is key to fighting poverty and ignorance, not a destraction from it.

Which brings us back to my favourite quotation about Karl Popper from Bryan Magee.

Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Goggins (silly name, silly man) has announced that his new incitement to religious hatred bill will protect Satanists.

I wonder how an outburst like this would fare under his new law?

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

Our caller, of course, is Jesus from Nazareth (John 8 :34), addressing the scribes and Pharisees. Which raises the intriguing prospect that, should Christ return to Earth, he will be prosecuted by New Labour.

No wonder the Evangelical Alliance has come out against Mr Goggins' bill.

Meanwhile in Melton Mowbray

It's not just Shropshire that produces great news stories. Here in Leicestershire the BBC reports that:

Engineers are trying to find out what has caused a giant hole that opened up in a Melton Mowbray car park.

The 10ft wide gap appeared outside the town's railway station last week and the area remains cordoned off, while investigations continue.

The story goes on to say:

Station staff are intrigued by what is below and ask for people who know about the area's history to come forward and see if they can provide answers.

Lord Bonkers writes: For centuries the Bonkers family fortunes were boosted by our ownership of a number of Stilton mines in the north of Leicestershire. Unfortunately their location has been quite lost, and I have spent many fruitless hours searching my Library for a map.

Peter O'Toole's socks

It had to happen. News of the remake of Lassie Come Home has reached the Shropshire Star:

Costumes made at a south Shropshire wool shop will be making an appearance on the silver screen later this year in the remake of the classic film Lassie.

The Wool Shop, in Ludlow's Broad Street, has been commissioned to produce a number of costumes for the film, including a pair of Argyle socks to be worn by legendary actor Peter O'Toole.

Read more here if you can stand the excitement.

Amnesty, liberty and poverty

I have been thinking some more about the column by Nick Cohen which I recommended here a couple of days ago.

Cohen was, quite rightly, taking issue with Irene Khan, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, and her claim that:

"If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues."

I realised that I have already posted the best answer to this sort of argument to my other blog Serendib - an anthology of favourite bits and pieces from my reading.

In November 2003 I added an extract from Brian Magee's autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher where he discusses the importance of Karl Popper's work. It ran:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.

It is not - as, again, had been believed by most people before - because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

That is all that needs to be said. You can read more about Popper's work here.

Making and Breaking Children's Lives

The fact that many children were sent from British institutions to live in Australia and other far-flung parts of the Empire is often referred to as a shameful "secret".

As I argued in a paper I on the history of child abuse that I gave at the Tavistock last year, it was nothing of the sort. It was public policy and widely discussed.

As a follower of Karl Popper I know that I should look for facts that refute my theories rather than ones that confirm them, but I was pleased to see this report in the Guardian the other day:

The files show Whitehall officials as early as 1955 had particular concerns over the St John Bosco Boys' Town in Glenorchy, Tasmania, run by the Salesian Brotherhood. A Home Office inspector who visited the home in 1951 was concerned there were no women involved, and recommended it should not be approved without a matron.

It is a little odd to say "as early as 1955" because the fate of children sent to Canada had been controversial decades before that.

Incidentally, a revised version of my Tavistock Clinic paper is included as a chapter in the book Making and Breaking Children's Lives, which is about to be published by PCCS Books. Full details here.

How We Fell for Europe

Don't despair if you missed Michael Cockerell's excellent film on Saturday. The BBC has a page devoted to it here.

David Dimbleby’s bladder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Cohen on Amnesty International

Nick Cohen is controversial and right in today's Observer:

"If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues.'

This clunking and faintly sinister statement did not come from a colonial administrator explaining that liberty was all well and good for freeborn Englishmen but the half-savage natives needed order. Nor was it a communist apparatchik saying that there was no need for bourgeois freedoms in the proletarian paradise of the Soviet Union. Nor was it Edward Heath or Henry Kissinger announcing that the Chinese liked autocracy or Abu Musab Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden denouncing democracy as a Greek heresy.

Rather, it fell from the lips of Irene Khan, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, an organisation which used to believe that human rights meant everything.

Read the full article here.

Lassie: Latest news

Following my posting the other day I have made some more discoveries.

First, Lassie Comes Home is being remade at the moment, starring Peter O'Toole. (He is not playing the title role but the Duke of Rudling.) It is being shot in Ireland and the Isle of Man, and other cast members include Steve Pemberton from the League of Gentlemen, John Lynch, Jemma Redgrave and Gregor Fisher. The press coverage suggests the script is true to Eric Knight's original story.

Second, I have come across a substantial academic analysis of the meaning of the Lassie films and the later American TV series. It is Henry Jenkins' essay: "Her suffering aristocratic majesty": The sentimental value of Lassie.

Here is just a taste:

Neither the Duke nor Joe, neither Jeff nor Timmy, nor any of the others who were blessed to own Lassie through the years, needed a microchip to identify her. I recognize that the microchip is an act of love, a response to a changed society, a harsh reality we have to live with. But reality falls far short of our cherished myths. Lassie was unique, priceless, without possible imitation or counterfeit. Her spiritual qualities, her moral authority, her "suffering aristocratic majesty" was possessed by no other dog, and only those who understand that distinction were allowed to possess a dog like Lassie. And, even if her human owners were confused, Lassie would have known and would have made her wishes known.

Something has broken down in the relations between dogs and their masters. The myth of the faithful dog no longer offer us condolences in the face of a feckless world. If the myths of canine fidelity and childhood innocence were central tropes through which our culture dealt with the threats of modernity, such myths of authenticity and of natural social relations have no place in a postmodern world.

Finally, let us not forget the pioneer of the canine heroics mocked in the Guardian article which started me off on this Lassie kick. In my review of Matthew Sweet's book Shepperton Babylon here I wrote:

Mention should also be made of the eponymous hero of Rescued by Rover who, in a later film

pounds off in hot pursuit, jumps into the driving seat of the abductor's car and, paws on the steering wheel, chugs his charge back to safety along the road from Shepperton to Walton.

No wonder Sweet calls The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper "a minor masterpiece of British surrealism".

South Staffordshire election

From the latest LDYS mailing:

Jo Crotty's Liberal Democrat campaign team have now set up their HQ at Unit 9 on the Wombourne Enterprise Park, Bridgnorth Road, Wombourne, Wolverhampton WV5 0AL. They are now open and ready for action! We need your help now, the first sets of leaflets are ready and waiting for you!

Come by car if you can - other than about 5000 homes in Wombourne itself, the rest of the seat can only be easily got at by car as buses and trains need lengthy trips into and out of Wolverhampton. Wombourne is a large village typical of the South Staffordshire constituency. Pubs are plentiful and stocks of Black Country-sourced real ales easy to find, as are restaurants of every hue.

If you are looking for accommodation please contact us in the first instance at info@southstaffslibdems.org.uk.

Comments added to Liberal England

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. I am not entirely clear how they work - or what "trackback" is, to be honest - but let's see how we get on with them.

To be given the option of leaving a comment it seems you need to have an individual posting open, rather than the blog as whole. To get an individual posting open, click on the orange # sign at the bottom lefthand corner of each of them. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't you can leave me a comment - or maybe you can't.

I don't intend to reply to every comment, and will delete any that are obscene or too tedious to live.

----

Later: Thanks to advice in a comment left by one of those nice people at Haloscan, comments now appear on the main page and the archive pages. So you can ignore the text I have greyed out.

Even more exciting, they had proportional representation

Attentive readers may spot some similarities between today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News and an earlier posting on this blog.

Different tunes

Parliament is in recess, so we begin with a quiz. Which is the only constituency where the sitting member has been defeated at each of the last three general elections?

While you are thinking about that, we will discuss what the Eurovision Song Contest says about the difficulties facing the European project. You may remember that Britain’s representative was Javine. She sang “Touch my Fire” but got her fingers burnt.

For Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Germany – the largest contributors to the European Broadcasting Union – occupied the bottom four places in the voting.

In our case it’s tempting to blame Blair’s foreign policy. As Terry Wogan put it: ''We've invaded too many countries and nobody likes us anymore.” But something more profound was at work. Something not even the ruthless block voting of the Baltic and Balkan states can explain.

It is that the heart of Europe has moved east. You could tell that from the Eurovision entries. When Britain’s was chosen we probably thought we were daring to pick a song with a Bollywood sound. There turned out to be nothing daring about it. Poor Javine was lost in a crowd of eastern sounds, led by that Moldovan granny and her drum.

Which means we are going to have to reconsider what Europe means to us. For a couple of generations it represented a more civilised way of life. They had subsidised public transport, sane labour relations and adventurous sex lives. Even more exciting, they had proportional representation.

This Europe to which Liberals owed allegiance, which convinced them that, despite appearances, they were the party of the future, was the Europe of the six original Common Market members. That Europe no longer exists.

What we see instead is a more diverse and interesting Europe. Yet it scares some, as the prominence of Turkey in the French referendum campaign shows. You also wonder how long Western voters will be happy to go on funding it – or the song contest, for that matter.

And the quiz? The answer is Taunton, where David Nicholson lost in 1997, Jackie Ballard in 2001 and Adrian Flook in 2005. The new MP for Taunton is our own Jeremy Browne, and House Points has every confidence that history will not repeat itself.

Lord Bonkers' Diary

I have posted his lordship's latest diary to his website:

Speaking in a purely personal capacity, I view the prospect of house arrest with equanimity – particularly if no one spills the beans about the secret passage that comes out in the cellar of the Bonkers Arms.

To Scotland to enjoy that blissful period after it stops raining for the winter and before the midgies appear for the summer. Why, in a good year it can last as long as three days!

When such dirty business is afoot, we would all do well to remember the sage counsel of my agent in ’06: “If it votes Liberal, offer it a poster. If it doesn’t, hit it with your orchard doughty.”

You can also find an archive of the old brute's thoughts and adventures on his site.

In defence of Lassie

The trouble with the Guardian is that nothing - with the possible exceptions of Tony Benn and comprehensive education - is sacred to it. Take today's parody of Lassie Come Home by David Ward:

Scene 1

Enter friendly collie dog, barking.

Well-scrubbed child: "What Lassie? Granny has fallen down the mine shaft again? We'd better get help!"

Scene 2

Lassie in phone box dials 999.

Well-scrubbed police officer: Hi Lassie. Granny in the mine shaft? We'll be right there.

Scene 3

Enter Lassie with Granny in mouth. All pat Lassie.

We are not talking about Flipper or Skippy here, but Lassie Come Home - one of the greatest family films ever made.

It was shot in 1943, based on the book by Eric Knight. Knight was born in England but settled in the United States as a teenager. By the time the film had made him famous he was already dead. A Major in the US Army, he perished in a wartime aircrash.

Lassie Comes Home is one of those films, like Mrs Miniver and Suspicion, that was set in Britain but made in Hollywood. The result is that every detail is slightly wrong but the whole is immensely interesting. The cast is also terrific: Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty and Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor as children.

There is nothing sugary about the film: poverty is at its heart. Lassie is sold because a rich man coverts her and the poor family that owns her cannot turn his offer down. If Roddy McDowall is "well scrubbed", it is his mother's attempt to retain her family's dignity in the face of that poverty.

After that the film becomes a hymn to unfashionable virtues like loyalty and steadfastness. You can see why the Guardian hates it, but I love it.

The new Liberator is out

Issue 302 of Liberator is being mailed to subscribers tonight, and the magazine's website has been updated to include some articles from it.

See also this story in today's Guardian, which quotes extensively from the issue.

A new Liberal blog

Welcome to Jane Leaper's Mira, which comes to you from the beautiful Churnet valley in Staffordshire.

I shall be having a revamp of my links shortly, and will also allow people to add comments. (The worry when you launch a new blog is that no one will bother to leave any.)

The Week's Good Cause

Spare a thought for the MPs defeated at the recent general election. Joe Ashton does, reports the Guardian.

The former MP for Bassetlaw, latterly famous for discovering the hitherto overlooked Thai quarter of Northampton, was:

especially struck by the plight of some of the Tories defeated in 1997, when 160 lost their seats in the New Labour landslide. "One drank himself to death, two or three more suffered from alcohol problems and depression, another was so broke he had to take his kids out of school," he says. His response was to form an association of ex-MPs, a support group that aims to help members once their 15 minutes of fame - or perhaps their eight and a half years of infamy - is over.

Ashton paints a grim picture for those who have been defeated at the polls. "The shock of losing is traumatic," he says. "You learn that you've lost at midnight, your opponents are singing and chortling, it's a cruel, ruthless arena."

Rolling vegans down a hill

This morning's Guardian reports Monday's events at Cooper's Hill near Brockworth in Gloucestershire, where the locals traditionally hurl themselves down a 1 in 2 hill in pursuit of a Double Gloucester cheese.

Just the sort of eccentricity we English are known for, you might think. Though not in the class of Hallaton in Leicestershire, where Bottle Kicking and Hare Pie Scrambling take place every Easter Monday. (Yes, really. And you thought I made Lord Bonkers' Diary up.)

But not everyone is happy. The Grauniad quotes Yvonne Taylor, chair of the animal rights campaign group Peta, as saying: "It's just not fair that vegans cannot enjoy the fun of the cheese rolling contest."

Why can't vegans take part? They don't have to eat the cheese if they catch it. They can always release it into the wild.

Another solution would be to role the vegans down Cooper's Hill.

Rant of the Week

From Recess Monkey's column in the free newspaper The London Line:

Has Britain finally become a franchise of the USA? This week, Home Secretary Charles Clarke agreed to extradite to the States three City whizz-kids, who are implicated in the Enron accounts-fiddling affair. That is three British people accused of a crime carried out in Britain being sent to face a 35-year jail term in the US if convicted. Perhaps if Condoleezza Rice asks him nicely, Charles Clarke will roll over to have his tummy tickled, too.

Patsy Calton

Michael White's Guardian obituary of the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheadle, who died on Sunday, can be found here.

This is not the news either

Last month I wrote about news stories that you do not read any more. I was thinking of plane crashes, Formula One drivers dying and ever younger children swimming the English Channel. Thinking about it, I might have included strikes too.

For a while this week it looked as if another of them was making a come back: Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle not knowing that the Second World War was over. On Friday the BBC reported:

Japanese officials are investigating claims that two men living in jungle in the Philippines are Japanese soldiers left behind after World War II.

However, this morning's Australian Daily Telegraph (a paper whose readers presumably believe the country is going to the dingoes) says:

Security forces on the insurgency-wracked Philippine island of Mindanao are increasingly sceptical of reports that two elderly Japanese men have been hiding in the jungle since World War II.

While Japanese diplomats tried for a fourth day to establish the veracity of the reports, suspicion grew today that kidnapping gangs on the island might have invented the rumours as a scam to lure foreigners into the region.

Oh well, maybe someone will sight the Loch Ness Monster this summer.

The Best of British

Tim Worstall's latest round up of the best in British blogs can be found here.

Less a constituency than an incantation

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News:

Feigned praise

Sammy Wilson, the new MP for East Antrim, gave the best guide to maiden speeches. His leader Ian Paisley had told him to say nice things about his constituency, pay tribute to his predecessor and not be controversial.

Wilson hymned the beauties of Ulster, but found it hard to be too kind about the previous member. He had spent years trying to get rid of him. Worse, they are neighbours: “In fact, he is only a stone’s throw away – I pick them out of the garden every morning.”

And controversy? He was doing fine till he got on to King Billy and the Boyne. But then he is a Democratic Unionist.

Let’s see how some of the Liberal Democrats’ maiden speeches measured up last week. Danny Alexander had an advantage: his is less a constituency than an incantation. Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey – there are coach tours with less ambitious itineraries. Dan Rogerson struck a nationalist note: North Cornwall “stretches from the border with England…”

Elsewhere it was local history time. Chris Huhne said Eastleigh was created when the London & South Western Railway’s works arrived there in 1891, and William Cobbett once lived down the road.

Julia Goldsworthy had to mention two previous MPs for Falmouth & Camborne. Not just Candy Atherton, but also David Mudd. He won it for the Tories back in 1970 and took it into his head to stand as an independent this time. David Howarth said Cambridge often changed hands in the nineteenth century, usually after the unseating of MPs for corruption, but did not name names.

That was tending to the controversial. Chris Huhne went all the way, questioning Labour’s mandate with the lowest vote share of any governing party since 1832. Dan Rogerson called for the law to ensure only pasties made in the Duchy can be sold as Cornish pasties. That is controversial to some, but if they stop claiming to make Melton Mowbray pork pies down there he may even win support from us in Leicestershire.

Sammy Wilson also said a maiden speech is like a first night out with a girl: “One wants to do enough to impress but not too much and get in trouble with her father.” I wonder what Dr Paisley thought of that?

Headline of the Day

Thank you to the Guardian:

Kitchen knife ban sought

A marriage of convenience?

A couple of weeks ago I reported that a Lib Dem/Tory administration had ousted Labour and taken control of Leicester City Council.

Political passions continue to run high in the city, as this BBC report shows:

A Leicester man who gathered a 2,000 name petition calling for free toilets in the city is worried a new council administration could reintroduce fees.

Nonsensical Quote of the Week

It comes from Graham Eccles, the chairman and managing director of South West Trains. Speaking of the slam-door rolling stock his company is in the process of withdrawing, he says:

"Although they have passed their sell-by date, they don't owe anybody a living."

Can any reader make sense of it?

Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: It's sure as hell got me beat.

The Shropshire Star returns to form

It is hard to resist a story that begins:

Shropshire fish and chip shop magnate Balwinder Singh Chatha...

Did you have help with this, Tompkins?

There is an article on the BBC website questioning the value of schools giving children homework. Your task is to guess which of these quotations comes from the head of a state primary school and which from the head of a private prep school.

Quotation 1

"Children should be allowed to experience the joy of childhood and have time for play and activity, to develop human qualities, and develop talents and interests that will last them a lifetime."

Quotation 2

"[Homework is] a basis for parents and pupils to work together and to understand the curriculum, reinforcing knowledge for both students and parents. It's a handy assessment tool for teachers in order for them to understand their pupils. In addition, it's a very good home-school link.

The answer is that Quotation 1 come from the prep school head.

I have always argued that professional left's enthusiasm for homework springs from a wish to discipline parents quite as much as a wish to discipline children. Even so, it is a surprise to see this confirmed so blatantly in Quotation 2.

Many Liberal Democrats believe as an article of faith that the state should be the monopoly provider of education, and that there should be no parental choice allowed within that system.

Perhaps it is time for them to think again?

ID card bill ignores recommended safeguards

Analysis from Privacy International shows that the reintroduced identity cards bill ignores all but 9 of the 105 recommendations for reform made by the home affairs select committee after the original proposals were published.

Read more here.

Amani, T-Jay and Lita

I am not one to worry about the tabloid hate figure of the week, but it's hard to resist Julie Atkins. She is the mother whose three daughters gave birth aged 12, 14 and 16.

Her grandchildren's names are Amani, T-Jay and Lita, but it's a free country.

She was on the regional TV news here in the East Midlands last night, complaining that she has been unfairly treated and misquoted by the press.

I am quite prepared to believe it, but I could not help laughing when she said:

"I never said I blamed the school. It's the government's fault."

The Orange Book

This one is strictly for those with an interest in the internal policy debates of the Liberal Democrats. (If you are going to fall asleep in here, do please try not to snore.)

The Westminster Bookshop says it has got hold of new stocks of last year's The Orange Book, the oddly timed collection of essays from some of the brighter Lib Dem MPs.

Some regarded it as the work of the Devil, but see my more measured review here.

In praise of the BBC strike

It was wonderful not to listen to the Radio 4 Today programme this morning. Though the selection of repeats broadcast in its place was not inspiring, there was something very restful about not hearing politicians, John Humphrys or reports of the latest disaster.

It may sound naive to say that if there were fewer newspapers and broadcasting outlets to report it then less would happen. But so much news now consists of events staged for the media or commentary on other media reports that I suspect there is some truth in that argument.

Legend persists (and this website dates it to Good Friday 1930) that one evening the BBC announced: "There is no news [or it may have been "are no news" in those days] this evening, so instead here is some light orchestral music." After this morning's experience I see the sense of that approach.

The major reason I listen to Today is that I am used to timing my morning routine by it. (If it is the review of the papers then I should be brushing my teeth - that kind of thing.)

Yet they are not even very good at timekeeping any more. The sports desk used to be on at exactly 25 minutes past the hour, now it often starts five minutes after that. And they have stopped bothering to announce that Long Wave listeners are about to leave the programme for Yesterday in Parliament. They just fade it out.

The answer is to buy a clock for the bathroom so I can listen to Radio 3 in the mornings instead.

The Best of British

Let me see. There's Javine and Bucks Fizz and the Brotherhood of Man.

Oh yes, and there's Tim Worstall's latest Britblog roundup.

The heart of Europe (boom bang-a boom)

Last night's Eurovision Song Contest was fascinating. I don't mean the songs - it is always a mistake to watch the songs - but the voting.

As Terry Wogan pointed out, the bottom four places were occupied by Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, who just happen to be the four largest financial contributors to the European Broadcasting Union. As a picture of how Europe now operates, it could not be bettered.

Progressive Britons used to imagine that if they joined the original six members of the EEC then they would have arrived at the heart of Europe. It now seems that the heart has moved elsewhere.

It's not just that there are the power blocs of Balkan and Baltic states which vote for one another with ruthless discipline. As well as there being this geographic shift there has been a cultural one.

When the UK chose Javine's "Touch my Fire" we probably thought we were being rather daring choosing a song with such a Bollywood sound. As it happened there was nothing daring about it at all. Europe's heart has moved a long way to the east, and now everyone sounds something like that. If anything, her song was lost in the crowd.

This suggests that the old arguments about a shared Western European culture will no longer wash. The European Union is going to be a far more diverse and interesting place than we had once imagined, though for how much longer Western European voters will want to go on funding it remains to be seen.

So where does the UK go from here in Eurovision? That Moldovan grandmother with her drum put me in mind of the British group Lieutenant Pigeon from the early 1970s and their classic "Mouldy Old Dough". That had the leader's mother playing second piano.

Their oompah sound may be just what we need to gain some Central European votes next time. I wonder if they are still playing?

Bolsover and D. H. Lawrence

Just as it was more or less obligatory for someone of my generation to study Lord of the Flies at O level, so D. H. Lawrence was hard to avoid if you took English Literature at A level.

Perhaps for that reason, I always think of Lawrence as a writer who appeals most to adolescents. No doubt this is unfair, but I have seldom been tempted to spend much time on Lawrence since leaving school.

One thing I disliked about him even as a teenager was his exaggerated rhetoric about industrialisation. Again and again, industrialism and the way of life it leads to are compared unfavourably with rural, "organic" alternative. It seemed reactionary, and at worst to point the way towards something like Nazism.

I could not have put it half so neatly, but Edward Mendelson expresses this distrust of Lawrence and the other early twentieth century Modernists perfectly.

One of the unexpected side-effects of my visit to Bolsover Castle yesterday is that I now understand Lawrence better.

Let me explain. Even to those of us who live elsewhere in the East Midlands, the area to the north of Nottingham and the east of Chesterfield is a non-descript one that we imagine to have always been industrialised. We think of it as all Dennis Skinner and slagheaps.

Yet a little study shows that this is a travesty. Mining came much later to the area than you might imagine. So much so that the first coal mine did not open at Bolsover until 1891.

For centuries this was an area of great landed estates - so much so that there is an area of Nottinghamshire still known "the Dukeries" because of the number of leading aristocrats who had houses there. We should imagine instead a rural landscape dotted with great houses, the whole devoted to sport or, in the case of Bolsover, more amorous pleasures.

In Eastwood, where Lawrence grew up, the mines opened a decade or two earlier. But it remains true that, in his own boyhood, Lawrence saw the rural, aristocratic landscape summoned up by Bolsover Castle transformed into one of exceptional industrial desolation

This should not lead you to a Tory love of aristocrats - it was, after all, they who sold the land or the mineral rights to allow this spoilation to take place - but it does explain Lawrence's extreme reaction to industrialisation. It was something he had lived through in his own lifetime.

Bolsover Castle

Look where I have been today. The castle remains date from the early part of the sixteenth century, and show a building dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. Ironically, this mock castle went on to be garrisoned by the Royalists in the Civil War.

There is no truth in Lord Bonkers' suggestion that is the ancestral home of the Skinner family.

Slap a Norman innit?

Here is today's Election Points from Liberal Democrat News. Eagle-eyed readers may spot an amusing name that appeared on this blog earlier in the week.

Hood-lums

They make me uneasy. In part it’s what they wear – on their heads in particular. In part it’s the strange words they use. It’s almost a different language.

Yes, there’s something about seeing the aristocracy out in force at the State Opening that makes my hackles rise. I remember the English civil war radical who asked who his betters were but the descendants of William the Conqueror’s generals. Slap a Norman innit?

The theme of the Queen’s Speech, of course, was respect. Ali G has not stopped New Labour using the word any more than the League of Gentlemen stopped Liberal Democrats demanding everything should be local.

For ministers have returned from the election campaign convinced the public is talking of nothing but antisocial behaviour. To an extent this is a sign of the sheltered lives they lead. People have always been convinced things were used to be better. And if you ask them what they mean by “antisocial behaviour”, it usually turns out to be criminality – often serious criminality.

As far as it is a new problem, the question is whether government will make things better or worse. I am not just thinking of the scaremongering by some politicians that encourages voters to see every timid 14-year-old in a hoodie as a potential mugger, though there is a lot of it about.

The Labour Party’s own website talks of “tackling the linked problems of crime, terrorism, illegal immigration, drugs and anti-social behaviour”. Whatever you think of groups of youths hanging around, it’s a bit much to link them to terrorism.

I also mean that encouraging people to call in the state to solve every problem could increase their feeling of powerlessness. Watching the parenting advice programmes that now dominate the airwaves – badly behaved children are the new gardening – you get the impression many adults feel they are not allowed to do anything off their own bats.

But there is hope. The Daily Express has been running a campaign in favour of bringing back National Service. Being the Express it is also against baseball caps and hoodies – and quite possibly against blue jeans too.

Tuesday’s paper carried a supportive article by the executive director of Community Service Volunteers. (It’s an odd interpretation of ‘volunteer’, but let that pass.)

Her name? Dame Elisabeth Hoodless.

Politicians and crime

There is an interesting article by Craig O'Malley on the Spiked website:

The rise of crime and antisocial behaviour to the top of the political agenda is a relatively recent phenomenon. For much of the twentieth century crime had a minor place in political life.

Take the manifestos of the big three political parties - Conservative/ Unionist, Labour and Liberal - during the first half of the twentieth century. Of the 35 manifestos issued during the 11 elections between 1900 and 1935, there is only one brief reference to law and order. Despite acute political discord and, in the later interwar period, reports of rising crime rates, the topic failed to register as a party political issue. Similarly, after 1945 there was a rise in recorded crime, but the issue remained at the periphery of party political debate.

Asking why it is that crime has risen to such prominence, O'Malley argues:

For the political class, the issues of crime and antisocial behaviour seem to offer the prospect of bridging the chasm with a cynical and disengaged public.

The West in white hats

There was an odd article on Uzbekistan in today's Guardian. John Laughland wrote:

Take the source of Friday's atrocity reports from Andijan: one "opposition journalist" from the website ferghana.ru, which seems to be a shop window for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. IWPR, which has since provided the bulk of reports in the western press, is overwhelmingly funded by western governments and private foundations close to them: the US state department, USAid, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Institute for Peace, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the British Foreign Office, the European commission, the OSCE, Unesco, and other European governments, among others.

I am not sure what he is arguing here. Is he saying that any news reports from Western-financed sources are inherently unreliable, or that it is illegitimate for the West to support democratic movements at all?

Either way, it looks like a classic example of Western liberal self-hatred to me. Sometimes we are the good guys and we should not be embarrassed by it.

Democracy is better than tyranny, and the more money we spend on saying so the better.

Not a clean enough sheet

In the aftermath of the Liberal Democrats' disappointing election result, Charles Kennedy declared:

We must also, I believe, adopt a 'clean sheet' approach to policy, so that, at the start of every new parliament, we are forced to look afresh at all our policy to ensure that it is relevant.

Unfortunately the sheet still has a few stains, judging by Kennedy's response to the Queen's Speech yesterday:

We are all for diversity in the provision of quality public services. However, what most of us realised during the campaign is that real choice means people knowing that they can receive for themselves and their families at the point of need - and based on need, not ability to pay - quality local provision, whether it be at the school, the hospital or whatever. That is preferable to the false idea of having massive choice, which really involves travel, complexity and all the rest of it, and it is certainly the approach that we shall continue to advocate.

No, choice is one thing and quality is a different thing. You do not turn quality into choice by calling it "real choice".

The question is whether you will even get quality if you force people to accept whatever is provided locally, no matter how bad it is. I do not think you will, which is why I am a Liberal and not a Socialist. I also believe that people have very different beliefs, needs and wishes, and that public services have to recognise this if they are to remain politically and economically viable.

The anti-choice position is rooted in an outdated view of a passive, homogeneous populace which will accept whatever is put before it with a shrug and a "mustn't grumble". For better or worse - and readers of this blog will know that I am more susceptible to nostalgia than most - that world has gone.

Still, Michael Meacher would agree with Charles:

What people want locally is consistent high quality, not choice that leads some hospitals and schools to be oversubscribed while others sink for lack of demand.

If schools and hospitals lack demand, could it be that they are not very good? And if they are not very good, why should people be forced to use them? And if they are forced to use them, why should they vote for you?

Sympathy for the devil

It's not often someone makes me see Tony Blair's good points, but Michael Meacher in the Guardian today managed to do just that.

In his article Meacher spells out what he believes Blair must do to "reconnect with Labour core voters".

Yes, it's the same Michael Meacher who spent the 1980s as Tony Benn's representative on Earth, and thus did more than almost anyone to ensure that the Tories stayed in power for 18 years.

Benn may have greeted the party's 1983 defeat as "eight million votes for socialism", but most of his colleagues drew the lesson that connecting with Labour core voters is not enough.

Siôn Simon Syndrome

Back in March, discussing a Commons speech by Siôn Simon, the Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington, I suggested:

there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.

I wrote this because Simon accused Conservative Members of being "childish and ridiculous" while himself speaking in the most bizarre sing-song voice. So let's call the affliction Siôn Simon Syndrome - or SSS for short.

I think I have found another sufferer.

Last year I complained about Simon Hoggart turning his fire on soft targets like trainspotters. Now I think I know why I did it. It's SSS.

In his memoirs Give Me Ten Seconds, John Sergeant writes of his time as a reporter in Northern Ireland. As he says, "Belfast proved to be the real training ground for some of the best journalists of our generation." Among them were Simon Winchester, Martin Bell, Max Hastings, Robert Fisk and Hoggart.

They dealt with the inevitable tension in different ways. And Hoggart's method was to "build model aircraft in his room at the Europa Hotel".

An obvious case of SSS. Hoggart is sensitive about his model aircraft - aren't they a bit nerdy? - so he seeks to extirpate these feelings by attacking trainspotters.

Don't get me wrong. I think building model aircraft is a splendid hobby, and the world would be a better place if more people - and more children in particular - had hobbies. Nowadays we are all too cool to be enthusiastic about anything. But the diagnosis is clear.

Talking of Give Me Ten Seconds, its chief interest is not Sergeant's career in journalism but his brief stint as an actor. He appeared in Alan Bennett's 1966 comedy series On the Margin. (It was widely expected that Bennett would cast Sergeant's Oxford contemporary Michael Palin, but he thought him "too showbiz".) The tapes of it have long been wiped, but it contains some of Bennett's most famous sketches - his NORWICH monologue, for instance.

So does Siôn Simon Syndrome have a wider political application? I shall look out for more examples, but I have already found one area where it occurs.

Self-styled "radical Liberals" in the Liberal Democrats who complain about the Social Democrats in the party often support Social Democrat policies themselves without realising it. I suppose that counts as subconscious SSS.

Did more postal voting lower the turnout?

Now that really would be funny.

The excellent blog politicalbetting.com looks at the evidence.

And finally Esther...

This morning's Daily Express has an article in support of its "Bring back National Service and get rid of the yobs" campaign by the Executive Director of Community Service Volunteers.

Her name?

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless.

Politics Online relaunches

Politics Online have revamped their website. They claim:

• Integrated blog by ePolitics experts and practitioners;
• RSS feed on the latest buzz;
• Weekly poll on current news;
• Enhanced website search function;
• Preople (sic.) political candidate challenge;
• Internet and politics book reviews;
• And much more.

See for yourself here.

Fighting like Socialists

The Weekly Worker has an article on the tensions within Respect. It's hard to see how this lot can hang together for long, as the SWP and Galloway are essentially on opposite ends of the ice pick.

I found this via A Councillor Writes.

More on fox hunting

I was sitting on a train in the rush hour at Leicester station this evening when a fox came trotting down the length of platform 4.

The next thing you know they will be sitting on the train and giving you a dirty look when you ask them to take their brush off the seat next to them.

The dog that didn't bark

We were talking in the committee room in Harborough on polling day. Someone remarked how little of an issue fox hunting had been in the campaign. It was not mentioned at the hustings: it was hardly mentioned on the doorstep.

This was in Harborough, the constituency which, along with Rutland and Melton, can claim to be the spiritual home of the sport. (Melton Mowbray was the social centre for hunting in the nineteenth century, but it became too expensive and too scandal ridden. So in Edwardian days the best people came to Market Harborough instead.)

A lot of people writing before the election seemed convinced that hunting would be the most important issue in every rural seat. This was never going to happen, and if it did not happen in Harborough, I doubt it happened anywhere.

Adrian Flook, the sitting Tory MP who was defeated when we won back Taunton, rather gave the game away. He told the Guardian he:

believed the key reason he will hold the seat is the influx of 4,000 new voters from the suburbs of London and Birmingham.

So most rural voters don't worry much about hunting at all, and certainly not enough for it to affect the way they vote.

I did not support the hunting ban. It seemed to me a late skirmish in the class war and I was not convinced that foxes would be any better off as a result. But we should not get the question out of proportion.

Heretical thoughts on education

We have been promised a policy review. And Ming the Merciless says:

"What Charles Kennedy wants is a policy review which begins without any precondition or presupposition."

You can take that as a sign that the Liberal Democrat leadership was disappointed with the election result. If they had been pleased with it they would be boasting that our policies had been vindicated rather than seeking to bury them.

Anyway, let's have some new thinking on education. Our policy in the election, if I understood it right, was that by some modest reordering of government spending we could guarantee that every school would be of a high standard and that parents would be willing to give up any right to choose which school their children attended as a result.

My old friend Lord Bonkers satirised this policy as follows:

Tuesday. Still at Westminster, I attend a meeting of the parliamentary party and demonstrate the Bonkers Patent Abdominal Protector for Canvassers. It is based upon the box worn by batsmen, but has been adapted to include both a jute bag that will carry an entire Focus round and a flask that takes a couple of generous measures of Auld Johnston (that most prized of Highland malts). Asked why I am promoting it at this juncture, I reply that, if we seriously intend sending our chaps out on to the streets of such towns as Guildford, Richmond and Cheltenham to tell the voters we shall allow them no choice in which school their children attend, they will need all the protection they can get. The chairman hurries us on to next business, but I am gratified by the number of MPs who come up afterwards to place firm orders.

I do not think the mention of Guildford was prophetic, as the policy was hardly mentioned in the campaign. But it is clear that the Liberal Democrats badly need to so some new thinking on education.

As a starting point, let me suggest this piece by Madsen Pirie on the Adam Smith Institute's blog:

Quality state schools, including grammar and selective schools, are heavily over-subscribed. Determined middle class parents move into their catchment areas, and some lie about their child's address. Many private schools are over-subscribed, too, with their high price indicating an excess of demand over supply. The only places over-supplied are in low quality comprehensive schools with dismal educational records.

We need more good quality schools. Successful policy should allow and encourage new schools to start up, minimizing the regulatory obstacles and ending local authority obstruction. Groups of parents, teachers and businessmen should be able to start new schools rapidly, concentrating on good teaching and correct attitudes. Instead of attending in minute detail to the inputs, there should be a presumption in favour of new schools, with emphasis on their output.

It took a civil servant to think up the 'surplus places' rule. It prevented new schools in areas where there were unfilled places in existing schools, which is roughly equivalent to banning a new restaurant when there are empty tables at worthless ones in the same area.

This sort of thinking is miles from where the party is at the moment. But these are the sort of ideas we need to explore if we are to offer something more than a variety of state socialism or be more than the political mouthpiece for the adolescent nihilism of the teachers' unions.

Patricia Hewitt and principle

Patricia Hewitt on Jonathan Dimbleby's programme today:

"We were elected on a manifesto. It includes identity cards and yes we will go ahead with that."

Fact: Patricia Hewitt was General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties between 1974 and 1983.

Leicestershire consolation

We may have lost Leicester South and failed to take Harborough, but at least the Liberal Democrats are in charge of Leicester City Council again.

We have ousted the minority Labour administration and are having another go at running things with the Tories. More details here.

The last Election Points

Next week my Liberal Democrat News column will spontaneously regenerate to become House Points again.

Lessons to learn

It’s post mortem time. To begin with Labour, a lot of people have got overexcited. A majority of 67 is more than comfortable by historic standards and Tony Blair is not going anywhere in a hurry. He will be around to thwart Gordon Brown a few times yet. And if Brown ever does become prime minister, many will find the experience less enjoyable than they expected.

Across the Commons, the Tories cannot agree on a strategy. Should they skip a generation? They tried that and got William Hague. Should they ask their members? They tried that and got Iain Duncan Smith. Should they go for a safe pair of hands? They tried that and got Michael Howard.

It seems to be coming down to a contest between David Davis and Liam Fox, with the sensible people left in the party searching desperately for a candidate who might have wider appeal. And the bookies report a surge of support for William Hague. Watch this space.

The Tory crisis is as much about strategy as leadership, and the Liberal Democrats have a lot of strategic thinking to do too. We are promised a review of policy, but it is important that we first understand what is wrong with the current system.

The problem is not that Conference asserts itself and passes policies the leadership does not want. It is that Conference will support almost anything that is put in front of it. We do sometimes seem to take our policies as a job lot from pressure groups. That is why we find ourselves supporting bans on fairground goldfish or wanting to criminalise a single parental smack. But this does not happen at Conference. It happens long before on the working parties that Federal Policy Committee appoints.

And when we get good policy, we don’t use it. The report on public services by Chris Huhne’s group was the best work the party has done for years. Yet its emphasis on local decision making hardly featured in the campaign.

We need to think about what it is that Liberal Democrats believe and who we speak for. The months after a general election are the one time a party gets to do this. When we have done it will be easier to make good policy.

The Power of Nightmares

Still on the Guardian's website, however, is today's article about Adam Curtis showing his documentary series at Cannes:

"What happens on US TV now is that you have a theatre of confrontation so that people avoid having to seriously analyse what the modern world is like - perhaps because of the emotional shock of September 11," says Curtis. "People take so-called left or right positions and shout at each other. It's almost like the court of Louis XIV - people taking elaborate positions and not thinking very much."

The case of the disappearing ricin

It seems that the Guardian has pulled Duncan Campbell's article on the ricin plot that never was. I discussed it in this post.

The Register has the details and will also point you to sites where you can still read it.

Double carpet (whatever that means)

The site poiticalbetting.com reports that the market has already opened on the next general election:

The opening spreads from Spreadfair are LAB 325-335: CON 226-232: LD 54-60 . The best prices on the conventional markets are LAB 4/7: CON 7/4: LD 80/1.

Job of the Week

It's time for some more gentle fun at the expense of the recruitment advertisments in the Guardian's Society supplement.

Nottingham City Council is seeking a "Head of Anti-social Behaviour" (£40,440 - £42,945).

Inventing the Victorians - and the 1950s

I have just posted part of Matthew Sweet's conclusion to his Inventing the Victorians to my anthology blog Serendib.

Sweet argues that we have invested a great deal in defining ourselves as not being like the Victorians, and that we therefore have a vested interest in maintaining a false picture of them. The more "cruel, hypocritical, repressive, intolerant, prudish and cheerless" they appear, the more modern and creditable we seem by contrast. (It also shows just how well Sweet can write.)

The other evening I wrote that the past - in particular the 1940s and 1950s - took place in colour. An obvious point, though one that was lost on the makers of the film Pleasantville, who were convinced that the fifties happened in black and white.

Another reason we are so down on the fifties is our reverence for the sixties. Just as we define ourselves by not being like the Victorians, so we think the important thing about the sixties is that they were not the fifties. Yet as both decades recede into the past, the similarities between them become more apparent.

Central to the iconography of the sixties were symbols of authority like traditional bobbies, London buses and red pillar boxes. The grown ups were in charge and the flower children free to play as a result. It all looks rather innocent now, and evokes the Planet Ladybird that was mentioned in a quotation in another recent post.

See how all this stuff hangs together?

Forgotten Yorkshire disasters

From Channel Four yesterday evening I learned of a dam failure that flooded Sheffield and the loss of an airship over the Humber.

It's amazing what you learn watching the right programmes.

The past took place in colour

I am writing this (thanks to the extra power points I had installed on election day) while watching Victory in Europe in Colour on ITV.

It is worth asking how much our view of the 1940s and 1950s as dull, colourless decades owes to the fact that we generally see them only in black and white.

Least said Souness mended

A couple of weeks ago the Newcastle United players Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer were sent off for fighting one another. At the press conference after the game their manager Graeme Souness broke off from discussing the affair to complain about the referee's performance.

On yesterday's Match of the Day Souness went one better. He blamed the referee for the fact that his players had been fighting.

I blame David Mellor.

President Bush is right

There's a sentence you don't write every day. But it would be churlish not to praise his speech in Lativa. The BBC reports:

President Bush has branded the former Soviet domination of eastern Europe one of "the greatest wrongs of history"...

Speaking in Riga, Latvia's capital, Mr Bush praised the Baltic nations of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania - now members of the EU and Nato - for keeping "a long vigil of suffering and hope" during almost 50 years of Soviet occupation.

While the end of World War II brought peace to these countries, it also brought "occupation and communist oppression", Mr Bush said after talks with the presidents of the three countries.

Are you a Party member, comrade?

A letter in yesterday's Guardian shows that the spirit of Brezhnev's Soviet Union is alive and well in the British Labour Party:

I cannot help but feel a little bit peeved with my left-leaning friends and acquaintances who voted tactically, or not all, to give Tony Blair the bloody nose he probably deserved. They will benefit from all of the future education, health and social benefits that those of us who worked so hard for the Labour government's return, and voted the same way, will enjoy. Is there not any way in which the benefits could be distributed according to electoral merit?

Lib Dem targets for 2009 or 2010

Nick Barlow has done us all a service by analysing the general election results and drawing up lists of our new target seats. Below I list our top 12 targets against both Labour and the Tories.

There are some hardy perennials here and it is hard to escape the impression that we are still desperately short of winnable seats, but here are the lists. The percentage given is the size of the Labour or Tory majority over the Liberal Democrats.

Labour held seats
1. Edinburgh South - 0.95%
2. Islington South and Finsbury - 1.56%
3. Aberdeen South - 2.24%
4. Oxford East - 2.30%
5. Watford - 2.33%
6. Edinburgh North - 5.05%
7. Durham City - 7.38%
8. Oldham East and Saddleworth - 8.28%
9. Norwich South - 8.66%
10. Leicester South - 8.77%
11. Bradford North - 10.21%
12. Newcastle Central - 11.08%

Conservative held seats
1. Guildford - 0.67%
2. Eastbourne - 2.32%
3. Totnes - 3.85%
4. Weston-Super-Mare - 4.24%
5. Dorset North - 4.25%
6. Ludlow - 4.36%
7. Dorset West - 4.63%
8. Worcestershire West - 5.36%
9. Devon West and Torridge - 5.53%
10. Wells - 5.74%
11. Newbury - 6.33%
12. Harborough - 8.12%

The long march

We did not win Harborough, but we did reduce the Tory majority from 5252 last time to 3892 this time. The full result is here.

Meanwhile, here is a quotation from the American journalist I. F. Stone:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.

In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.

I hope it won't take us a hundred years to take Harborough, but you get the point.

The general election on the Net

On Wednesday Robert MacMillan of the Washington Post published an article looking at the parties' online campaigning in the British general election:

Great Britain's three main political parties made a big effort to revamp their Internet operations in time for the 2005 campaign ... not that it will make a single bit of difference in how the elections turn out.

The Steve Brookstein of politics

Nick Barlow reminds us of how fleeting fame can be by asking if anyone remembers Rodney Hylton-Potts, the winner of ITV's Vote For Me.

I am going to make an example of you, Tompkins

While I was out delivering, it seems the heads were at it again. The BBC reports:

A head teachers' leader has warned of the danger of giving "irresponsible parents" power in schools.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, was referring to the government's strategy of reinforcing parents' roles.

That could send the wrong message to irresponsible parents, he said.

"Giving more power to those parents who lack responsibility is like putting an alcoholic in charge of a bar," he told his annual conference.

Let's leave aside the point that anyone using the argument that something might "send the wrong message" reveals how weak their case is. Let's not even point out that these parents pay the taxes which go to pay the salaries of Mr Hart's members.

No, what worries me is the depth of the contempt that the professional left has for the public at large.

Such an attitude is ultimately incompatible with democracy. If you do not think people are capable of taking an intelligent interest in their own children's education, why should you consult them over the management of the economy or foreign policy?

It doesn't impress me and it won't impress the examiners

On Friday the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers heard calls for compulsory parenting classes for all. As the Scotsman reported:

Delegates also condemned Kelly’s promises to give parents more “power” over their children’s education, demanding that the focus should be on parental responsibility instead.

David Gray, head teacher at Babbacombe Primary School in Torbay, Devon, called for compulsory parenting classes for new mothers.

He said local authorities should set up “weekly sessions which mothers and babies from all social levels would be expected to attend”.

“The parents could be taught the importance of a regular routine for their baby, the importance of teaching the child the difference between ’yes’ and ’no’ and the necessity of playing with and talking to one’s baby.”

Then yesterday, says the Guardian:

An education minister was booed and jeered by headteachers yesterday after insisting that no new money would be offered to help fund a government plan to give teachers guaranteed time out of the classroom for marking and preparation.

And:

Baroness Margaret Sharp, of the Liberal Democrats, was also booed after she urged headteachers to "think creatively" to help stretch their budgets.

Teachers are at the sharp end of our society's difficulties with authority, but can these heads not see how ludicrous this sort of behaviour makes them look?

For years the conferences of the teachers' unions have kept us entertained at Easter. Then we can listen to figures who have been in cryogenic suspension since the 1970s. Beyond persuading a few more parents that it is worth the sacrifices to educate their children privately, they probably do little harm.

The teachers' problem is that, while other professions choose experienced and impressive figures to speak on their behalf, they insist upon choosing the callow and irresponsible. The result is that they sound like permanent adolescents.

They demand authority over parents, while sounding outraged if anyone tries to exert authority over them. Many would support a state monopoly of education, yet they hate it when the state tries to reform the system.

It is tempting to see teachers' current disaffection as the fault of the Blair government. Certainly, the Liberal Democrats have been courting them assiduously. But the truth is that teachers have always been like that.

They were permanently disaffected under the Thatcher and Major, before that the saintly Shirley Williams was widely hated by teachers, and back in the 1960s I regularly got days off primary school as the young men with beards who taught us went on strike.

Now heads seem to be going the same way. If their behaviour does not cause bad behaviour in their pupils, then it is at least a symptom of the same disease.

More on Brian Sedgemore

Adrian Slade (the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the Cambridge Footlights) has a letter in Friday's Liberal Democrat News:

Not many people know it, and as a Labour MP he was reluctant to admit it, but Brian Sedgemore was a signed up member of the Liberal Party for two years between 1965 and 1967.

So welcome back, Brian! I wonder if he remembers how he helped me when I was candidate for Putney in the 1966 general election. We both felt much the same about the conservatism of Harold Wilson's Labour Party in those days and we campaigned strongly together against the environmentally disastrous motorway box that Labour was attempting to impose on London.

Goldfish sent polling card

At every general election there is a spate of stories along the lines of "CHILD OF 2 IS SENT POLLING CARD". These are reported in a lighthearted way, with an undercurrent that they are a sign of how inefficient the local council is at running the electoral process.

Bollocks.

The only possible reason for a child of 2 being sent a polling card is that his parents have filled in the registration form wrongly. And the only reason for the news reaching the national media is that the parents have tipped off their local newspaper or radio station and the story has been picked up from there.

But then "PARENTS SO STUPID THEY DON'T REALISE HOW STUPID THEY HAVE BEEN" does not make such a good headline.

Thank you, I feel better for getting that off my chest.