Northampton Borough used to run its own buses and their jewel box like offices survive next to the First bus garagewrites Jones the Planner in the course of a post on the town.
Today saw the first conference of the Social Liberal Forum. Gareth Epps was there and made a valiant attempt to live blog Vince Cable's speech.is speaking about the health reforms to 250 Liberal Democrat activists at the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) conference "Liberalism, Equality and the State" – a group that represents social democrats within the Lib Dems that have increasingly been concerned at the direction the coalition is taking.I wish the SLF conference well today, but if the group is to have a worthwhile future they will have to provide an answer to the question I pose in the headline here.
In Braybrooke the other day I came across the appealing theory that the River Jordan, which flows through both that village and my own of Little Bowden, got its name because the Baptists in the former village used it to baptise people.I once spoke to Norman Foster who, since 1965, had been lay Pastor of Braybrooke Baptist Church. He was eager to give me all the details.Incidentally, the stones around the base of the village sign are said to have been salvaged from the site of Braybrooke castle.
He had been told by older members of his flock that their parents remembered being baptised in the Braybrooke River Jordan.
So in one bound, the coalition has leapt triumphantly into embracing a wholly different series of NHS reforms. Instead of GPs driving forward the commissioning process, there will be appointees representing hospital doctors, nurses and others.It is not so much that I was an enthusiast for Andrew Lansley's plans. It's more that I believe a party that has been out of powers for 90 years ought to arrive in government some ambition beyond maintaining the status quo.
The brave new compromise looks a great deal more like the old PCTs, which are still twitching away prior to being dead and buried.
The classic image of the fireman rescuing a cat from up a tree may be a cliché - but that’s exactly what Harborough firefighters found themselves doing yesterday morning (Thursday).
A crew from the town were called to the park off Scotland Road in Little Bowden at 11am.I do think they could have tried harder with the headline though.
Firefighters used a ladder to rescue the stricken moggy.
What interests and worries me is the idea that an appeal to human rights can be used to settle a case like this.You can read the whole post - School uniform and human rights. I stand by it today.
There are good arguments for school uniform in terms of corporate spirit and the avoidance of bullying over fashionable labels. There are good arguments against in terms of individualism. When I was a primary school governor in the 1980s the school did not have a uniform and I was happy to defend this because I had been to such a primary school myself. Today I might well take the opposite view.
For this is just the sort of question which does not have a single right answer as it involves reconciling two desirable but conflicting ideals. Different people of good will, different families and different communities will strike the balance in a different place. It seems odd to believe that any position can be shown to be irrational or morally wrong.
Trust chief executive Catherine Griffiths admitted the contract had been signed without a bank guarantee in place and without financial diligence checks being carried out.The councillors were not impressed. Liberal Democrat Phil Knowles said: "I am astonished at the catalogue of mistakes." And Conservative Kevin Feltham said: "It is worse than we thought. There is serial failure here."
Finance director Sue Bishop admitted the bank bond put in place after the mistake had been noticed ran out on March 31 and that the trust would have to foot the bill to complete the building. She would not say how much it would cost.
at a meeting of the Leicester Tory Party executive this week they tried to pass a motion to expel former tory Aylestone Council candidate, Peter Bedford who dared to challenge the current leadership in its failed electoral campaign. I have learnt from someone present at the meeting that a motion to expel Peter was narrowly defeated by 10-9.
"If elected officials resort to using superinjunctions - how can the public, who elect them, actually know whether it is a legitimate move to protect family privacy or something more sinister to hide the sort of activities that would make the the MP or candidate unsuitable for public office?" Living on Words Alone considers the issues raised by the news that Zac Goldsmith was granted a super injunction to prevent his private life being discussed before the last election.
To his credit, and in spite of his instinctive pragmatism, Cameron is surrounded by a surprisingly large number of Tory romantics. They include his senior advisers, Steve Hilton and Rohan Silva, and influential ministers such as Oliver Letwin.And at one time those romantics promised to have a strong influence on the new government:
I have notes from an address from Letwin in which he said explicitly: "If a service fails, an interview at ten past eight on the Today programme should be with the direct local provider of the service and not the Cabinet minister in Whitehall." He acknowledged, as did other aspiring ministers, how tough this would be in a centralised media culture. Cameron was in the audience modestly taking notes but ended the meetings by insisting that this was part of the Conservatives' big idea.But as Richards argues, this approach has been hard to sustain in politics given the relentless political and media pressure demanding the centralisation and standardisation of services.
I do not describe them as romantic to be disparaging. On the contrary politics desperately need more like them on the left and the right, original thinkers driven by ideas, vision and with the courageous guile to follow through with policy implementation. Several senior Labour figures tell me they lack the equivalent now.And I fear that British politics and British society as a whole lacks romanticism. The idea that anything other than the provision standardised services run by the state represents a return to the law of a jungle is deeply ingrained. It lies behind everything from the Children's Laureate's distrust of parents who teach their children to read to Archbishop Williams' bizarre intervention last week.
Councillor Anne Glover, who represents Braunstone at Leicester City Council, said she was "staggered" by the documentary, arguing the depiction of the estate undermined the work of volunteers to improve the estate's reputation.Fortunately, the programme's viewers reacted differently:
"[Mr Arnold] must walk around with his eyes shut or isn't prepared to accept or ask for any help," she said.
One viewer travelled from Lancashire to give money and a holiday, while Mr Arnold has had a potential job offer.
"It's been absolutely outstanding. The kids are going to be absolutely amazed," Mr Arnold said.
Chas, played by James Fox, is a violent gangster living in a rough part of East London. Though he takes great pleasure from his work, he is often not given the respect that he deserves from his boss. After carrying out a hit that was not supposed to happen, Chas leaves town to lay low for a while. This is where he meets the eccentric retired rock star, Turner ...But Fox is brilliant too. Originally a child star who had his own Ealing Comedy (The Magnet), Fox was best known before this for playing effete aristocrats (The Servant) or preppy song-and-dance men (Thoroughly Modern Millie), he is utterly convincing as an East End gangster.
Played by Mick Jagger, Turner is a drug and sex addicted former rock star who has disappeared into retirement in order to write a memoir. Jagger is nothing short of brilliant in this role. He oozes with dirty and bi-gender sexuality that is actually a little confusing.
Mark Cole attended Andrew Reeves's funeral in Edinburgh on Wednesday: "It was a desperately sad occasion but one which was made easier by the wonderful support that Andrew and in his absence his partner Roger, received from their extended Liberal Democrat family from across the country.""A chain-smoker in an ill-fitting suit, who carried his voluminous notes around in supermarket carrier bags, the 5th Earl Russell defied most conventional stereotypes of the aristocrat."It is hard to believe that it is seven years since Conrad died, yet already a world in which a student could wander into the Palace of Westminster for a tutorial seems like a lost Eden.
"He was never one to stand his ground in the face of persuasive evidence, even when presented by the most junior colleagues or postgraduates, and was constantly redefining his position in the light of the work of other historians."
"Russell’s arrival in the House of Lords after the death of his half-brother in 1987 changed the focus of his commitments. Henceforth, he combined teaching at King’s College London, to which he moved in 1990, with his duties in the Lords, and students were happy to make the detour to the Palace of Westminster for tutorials when parliamentary business was pressing. As the Liberal Democrat spokesman on social security, he brought historical depth to his portfolio, tracing the English commitment to welfare back beyond Beveridge to the Elizabethan Poor Law."
"The book confirms that Russell, who had more regard to historical accuracy than to his own reputation, remained to the end open-minded, daring and imaginative. He was never restricted to revisionism as doctrine, and throughout the latter half of his career he changed his mind in significant ways while still conserving the broad message of his earlier anti-Whig interpretation of history."
"Seventeenth-century Englishmen, indebted to a unitary conception of the state, could not find a way to accommodate the ‘inconvenient fact of Scottish sovereignty’. The second Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707 provided a workable compromise. Nevertheless, the English remained oblivious – some of them wilfully so – of the fact that post-1707 Britain was a new state born of an international treaty between sovereign kingdoms. The blinkers were still on when Russell was writing in the late 1990s, and, devolution notwithstanding, it still seems fair to conclude, as he did then, that ‘Britain has not yet risen to the intellectual challenge of 1603'."
It’s an astonishment, maybe even an outrage, that Jonathan Meades’ writing and thinking about the hundreds of places he’s visited have never been edited into a book before.Unbound is the brainchild of three writers (QI’s John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard and Crap Towns author and former Deputy Editor of The Idler, Dan Kieran), Unbound allows authors to write the books that they want and readers to choose what gets published.
Over the coming months you will watch it come together as he sifts through the scripts to sixty films, and the hundreds of pieces and he has written and delivered over the past twenty years. The plan is to produce a handsome volume (heavy on the handfeel) containing five full scripts of his most important TV films (illustrated with stills) and about forty pieces, including ten longer essays. Very little of this material will have been read by a general audience; the scripts, in particular, have never appeared in print before and offer an extraordinary insight into Meades meticulous working methods and his subversive visual style.
An excerpt from one of the longer pieces – called appropriately 'Place' – is available below. Pledging to support the book now will get you access to other pieces and a longer exclusive interview about the planned book. More Meadesian goodness will follow at regular intervals, including in June, your first sight of that rare wonder, a complete Meades’ film script.
The finished book will be released to Unbound patrons in early December.
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at the age of 96.Once described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” Mr. Leigh Fermor was as renowned for his feats of derring-do as for his opulent prose.Latterly Leigh Fermor was best known as a travel writer, particularly for the two volumes - A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - describing his journey as an 18-year-old across a Europe on the verge of war. The good news is that he did complete the final part of the trilogy and it will be published.
After joining the Irish Guards during World War II, he was judged to be promising officer material for the Special Operations Executive, the unit created by Winston Churchill to wage war by unconventional means. Mr. Leigh Fermor’s superiors deemed his fluency in modern Greek useful in leading resistance to German occupation in the Aegean.
For 18 months he lived disguised as a shepherd in Crete, emerging from the mountains with a team that in 1944 kidnapped Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, the island’s German commander. The operation provoked brutal reprisals toward the local population. It earned Mr. Leigh Fermor the Distinguished Service Order and later became the basis for the 1957 English film “Ill Met by Moonlight,” directed by Michael Powell and starring Dirk Bogarde.
Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone today called for Jane Collins, Chief Executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), to resign after the BBC published evidence that key criticisms of the hospital were withheld from an inquiry into the death of Baby Peter. In a further twist today, claims by the hospital that they subsequently did provide all the evidence to a second investigation were denied by the person who ran that investigation.Lynne Featherstone added on her own blog:
Haringey was rightly in the spotlight as the lead agency in the wake of the Baby P tragedy – but perhaps that spotlight detracted from the terribly dangerous conditions in which vulnerable children were being left by the management failures by GOSH.For the full background to Great Ormond Street's involvement in this case, Lynne commended a report on the BBC London pages.
The fact that these failings – this vital information – never reached the Serious Case Review because it was removed from the addendum submitted to the Serious Case Review is a scandal. Dr Collins is the author of the addendum.
I have called for an investigation into the withholding of this vital information and wait to see whether real justice will be done.
Union members at the Shropshire Star newspaper are to be balloted over strike action.This is a disaster! What will I find to blog about?
Union members met on Wednesday over plans for compulsory redundancies at the newspaper
"I am the only Stamford man living who can remember the bull-running in the streets of the town. I can remember my mother showing me the bull and the horses and men and dogs who chased it. She kept the St Peter's Street - the building that was formerly the Chequers Inn at that time and she showed me the bull-running sport from a bedroom window. I was only four years old then, but I can clearly remember it all. The end of St Peter's Street (where it was joined by Rutland Terrace) was blocked by two farm wagons, and I saw the bull come to the end of the street and return again."So James Fuller Scholes told a newspaper in 1928, just before he died at the age of 94.
Julia Donaldson has been appointed the new Children's Laureate and celebrated her achievement with a spectacularly silly statement.the most successful recent children's books, marked her appointment as Children's Laureate yesterday with a call to arms against "pushy parents", describing them as "a pain" who take the enjoyment out of reading.My mother taught me to read before I went to school and it was only ever teachers who threatened the pleasure I got from it.
"I don't believe you should push your children too hard. They are so sensitive," the author said. "If they are not ready to read it can be detrimental and it is more likely they will be worse off. I really find pushy parents a pain. I have met a lot in my time and while it is important to read, it should be enjoyable. It should be done for pleasure."
"It is never too early to start enchanting children with books. It is hard to believe Julia Donaldson would discourage parents from reading with their children from the earliest possible age. The trouble is, we can become so paranoid about them being able to read, that we sometimes forget they have to want to in the first place.
We regularly find children who, at age five, have given up on themselves as readers, usually because they have not been exposed to books. My advice to parents is to read to your child from as early as possible and don't stop when they have learnt to read for themselves."
Business Secretary Vince Cable has said the government is willing to take "further action with tax on banks" if they do not increase lending to small and medium-sized enterprises.It has been fashionable to say that Vince looks unhappy being in government. My theory is that he always looks like that and thoroughly enjoys wielding a bit of power.
Towards the end of the Second World War Brenda Rawnsley and her husband Derek had the idea of bringing contemporary art to young children who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to see ‘good’ work. Within a few years Brenda had set up School Prints Ltd to sell original lithographs to schools and had commissioned several of the most important living artists for her scheme.Searching the web when I came home I came across the video above. It is by Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England fame, who seems to have had much the same reaction as me.
Brenda Rawnsley sought the advice and assistance of the art historian Herbert Read and between them they chose the artists. The printing was undertaken by the Baynard Press from stones or zinc plates drawn by the artists, who were asked to use no more than six colours. The prints, being original lithographs, were often the first real art seen by young people of that period and are typical of their time.
BBC News reports:An NHS trust in Leicestershire has said a contract to build part of a new hospital has been terminated.Local Lib Dem councillor Phil Knowles tells this blog:
NHS Leicestershire County and Rutland had been using construction firm Modcon UK Ltd for the Day Case Unit at St Luke's Hospital in Market Harborough.
Work had faced a number of delays and health bosses issued an ultimatum last month.
The trust said it was now taking legal advice over the possibility of recouping costs from Modcon.
"The platitudes and I'm sorry's in the trust press release will have been sincerely made but they count for nothing in the midst of yet more problems and broken promises.
This scheme it seems now won't happen till early 2012, what assurances can be given of that new deadline being met? If the costs of third party contractors to make this facility usable are over and above the allocated funds for this section of the build, will the cost impact on the overall £9.5 million for the total scheme?
There are so many more questions. Someone at the very top of the Trust needs to accept responsibility and to get hold of this whole situation as it rapidly descends into a circus and bring the scheme to provide Harborough with its new hospital facility to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion."
"My Papers Are Not In Order, and so I'm not going to the party conference." The Bringer of Tea explains why the row over Cowley Street and the police claiming a veto over who attend the Liberal Democrat Conference really matters.We are undoubtedly entering into a difficult period. Cool heads will be required all round. Despite occasional blips, I know that strike levels remain historically low, especially in the private sector. In fact, until March this year the number of days lost through strikes was lower than at any time since 1931. And of course the right to strike is a fundamental principle. On that basis, and assuming this pattern continues, the case for changing strike law is not a compelling one.But it is hard to see what is so alarming here. If strikes were to impose serious damage to our economic fabric, the pressure on the government to bring in new legislation would ratchet up.
However, should the position change, and should strikes impose serious damage to our economic and social fabric, the pressure on us to act will ratchet up. That is something which both you, and certainly I, would wish to avoid.
I last occupied my present office a third of a century ago when I worked for John Smith when he was Secretary of State in the Callaghan government. We tried to put through legislation on worker participation, following the Bullock report on the German model.
That is long forgotten. But the underlying philosophy is carried forward on employee owned companies, like John Lewis and Arup, in social enterprises, coops and mutuals. I want to encourage these developments and we are looking at legislation to strengthen the ‘third sector’ of employers.The moral is that you should take the time to read original sources and not rely on the headlines.
For Stamford was erst a university town of renown whose splendid colleges rivalled both those of Oxford and Cambridge and even at one period threatened to supersede them, and probably would have done so but for powerful and interested political intrigues.And in Memorials of Stamford (1867) Mackenzie Walcott commented on the town's resemblance to Oxford:
The likeness must have been most striking when the halls of the Monastic Houses of Peterborough, Crowland, Sempringham, and Vaudey, and Brazenose College, were thronged with students, and an academical look was given to the streets by the flowing gowns various hoods.Sadly, this story has grown greatly in the telling over the centuries. The truth, as explained by Martin Smith in Stamford Myths and Legends (where the quotations above can be found) is that a group of Pelagians broke away from Oxford between 1333 and 1335, establishing themselves first in Northampton and then in Stamford.
the group of teachers and students was never sufficiently large, or established, to be considered a proper university. Many students returned to Oxford prior to 1335, and only seventeen masters, six parish priests and fourteen students were found in the last inquisition.I suspect the legend has grown because Stamford looks so much as though it ought to be a university town. There were hopes that one could be established there in the expansion of the 1960s and again more recently when a university was planned for the county, but that went to Lincoln instead. There is even an earlier and less well founded legend that there was a university in Stamford long before the birth of Christ.
Another week with Lord Bonkers, who was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10, comes to a close."It's very peculiar. If Alfie Boe thinks opera is boring then it's very odd that he's in it at all. I've only worked with him once and he sings rather well but I know he comes from something other than opera. He was a car mechanic, I believe."
From the BBC Sport website:Jockey Kieren Fallon did not ride in Saturday's Epsom Derby after the owners of Native Khan obtained an injunction to prevent him from racing.Lord Bonkers reminisces exclusively for Liberal England:
Owner Ibrahim Araci said three-time Derby winner Fallon had reneged on a deal to ride for him, but Fallon called it an "innocent misunderstanding".
On Friday a judge refused an injunction but on the morning of the race the appeal court reversed the ruling.
There has been much disquiet in Liberal Democrat circles at the news that the people constituency parties send to the party's Conference now have to be approved both by Cowley Street. Disgruntled Radical makes a substantial contribution to the debate.A commentary by John Reid ... omitted to make clear that the former home secretary is a paid director of the security company G4S Regional Management (UK & Ireland) Ltd. Guardian guidelines put the onus on editors to ensure that, in the case of external contributions to the newspaper, a writer's personal, philosophical or financial connections are spelled out at the end of the piece when these relate to the subject matter.I think it would be best if the old brute could have this financial interest tattooed on his forehead, so no one could possibly be unaware of it.
Another visit to Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer...I have been alarmed to see some comments which seem to suggest that we should not have to take security considerations into account at alland candour:
Our insurers want to know that we act on police advice and if we do not we run the risk of invalidating our insurance. Without the necessary insurance no conference venue will accept our booking.in the course of one paragraph.
Research was not merely not commissioned; it was ignored. Our initial focus group work clearly showed that people were contemptuous of the idea that electoral reform would prevent corruption; people only approved of notions such as AV “making MPs work harder” in the context of them having to reach out beyond their core party support during elections. Despite this advice, the campaign repeatedly sought to conflate the two. Similarly, the advice we got from veterans of the 2004 North East referendum was that celebrities were of limited value. Despite this, we ran a campaign that was obsessed not merely with celebrities but with ones who appealed only to the educated middle classes.
This is the only office I’ve ever worked in where the female staff felt it necessary to hold regular ‘ladies lunches’ in the interests of mutual support. The initial attempt to get the campaign to entrench the principles of “respect, empower, include” into the way it treated staff and volunteers was openly mocked and disparaged by members of the senior team. In the commercial sector, this would be seen as evidence of highly aberrant behaviour, yet the situation was left to fester.
A lot of Liberal Democrats have been calling loudly for John Sharkey to be held accountable in some way for the campaign’s numerous failures, and it has to be said that the buck did stop with him – at his insistence. He certainly does need to address his critics’ points.
Another day at Bonkers Hall...Today I received a message from Liberal Democrat HQ telling me that I must supply my passport (or other ID) details if I want to attend party conference. Guidelines on the website make it clear that the information will be passed to the police. They also make it clear that I may be refused "accreditation" presumably on police advice.
There is nothing in our party constitution about accreditation. Local parties elect representatives and there is no power for the party nationally to choose which of these may attend. We must fight this illiberal procedure which is against what we stand for and our constitution.
"I am genuinely unable to comprehend how any reasonable person can oppose the simple principle that the people should elect those who govern them, and those who govern them should either have a limited period of time in office or should be required regularly to present themselves before the electorate for re-endorsement." Stuart Bonar, writing on Liberal Democrat Voice, has no time for the Lib Dem peers who oppose reform of the House of Lords.
A second day with Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.Richard Jefferies, author of Village Churches, wrote in 1875 that "in so busy a land as ours there is no place where the mind can, as it were, turn in on itself so fully as in the silence and solitude of a village church".Jefferies was a working journalist with a family to support, so he was quite willing to produce articles that mourned the passing of the old ways or ones that welcomed the latest developments in agriculture. And he generally had a clearer-eyed view of country life than the one Palmer takes.
During the preparation for a BBC4 documentary to be shown this summer, I was asked a question which was implicitly far more insulting than anything Rattigan's enemies ever flung at him. The researcher wanted to know if it had not been for the emergence of the angry young men whether Rattigan would have gone on to write many more great plays. I tried to explain that most writers, at most times, are doing their best. Their success or failure in mining their imagination depends principally on the limits of that imagination.But this will not do. A work of art is not just the result of individual talent: it also a result of the artistic climate and wider social climate in which the artist finds himself. There is something nonsensical about asking why Shakespeare did not write a novel.
