The child of an American Civil War soldier is still living

The American Civil War ended in 1865, but the US Department of Veteran Affairs is still paying a pension to the child of a soldier who fought in it, says the Daily Mail. She was born as late as 1930 and is living in a nursing home in North Carolina.

It had been widely reported, not least by the Mail itself, that there were two children of Civil War veterans still alive, but the second, a 93-year-old man living in Tennessee, died last August.

Even more remarkably, the last widow of a Civil War veteran died as recently as 2003.

But then, as I blogged a year ago, two grandsons of John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States of American are still alive.

Lib Dem blogger wins Trivial Fact of the Day

Well done David Boyle, who wins by revealing that he is the great great grandson of Sir John Lubbock.

Sir John Lubbock?

Yes, Sir John Lubbock. Do try to keep up.

Unwitting Humorist of the Day

The winner is Julie Sherry of the SWP for this effort in today's Guardian:

It is true that a leading party member was accused of rape. However, far from "convening its own court, comprised chiefly of the alleged attacker's friends, to decide whether rape had occurred", the party engaged a committee, elected by its annual conference, to deal with the issue.

So funny is she, that you wish you could hear more from her.

Well, the good news is that Julie, as an SWP member, will almost certainly be given her own series on Radio 4 before the year is out.

More on Molly Drake

A few weeks ago I chose a song by Molly Drake, mother of the once neglected and now ubiquitous Nick Drake, as my Sunday music video.

In today's Guardian there is an article about her by Peter Paphides:

If the idea of someone writing and performing songs without seeking a public outlet for them seems strange to us, perhaps that says something about the times in which we live. "It was a more private era," concurs Gabrielle. "You look at people broadcasting what they had for breakfast on Twitter and the desire for friendship seems to have been supplanted by a need for saying what you are. That simply wasn't around in my mother's day." Perhaps that's why, to borrow her son's words, Molly Drake's songbook feels like a fascinating "remnant of something that's passed".

Gabrielle is the actress Gabrielle Drake, Nick's sister and Molly's daughter. She is best known for her appearances in Crossroads.

Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin

Lord Bonkers on the early history of Twitter

Caron's Musings claims that today is Twitter's seventh birthday.

However, Lord Bonkers wrote as follows in June 2011:

For some inexplicable reason, the belief that Twitter is a recent invention is now widely entertained. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though of late it has made use of the latest technology, the service was in widespread use as early as the 1920s. 

Several times a day, the Twitter boy would bicycle up the drive here at the hall in his buttoned suit and peaked cap, bringing a short message from one of my friends: "OMG Winston Churchill has rejoined the Tories", "WTF is the Commonwealth Party??? LOL", that sort of thing. Then there was the role of the notorious “Zinoviev Tweet” in Labour’s defeat in the 1924 general election. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. 

There is, however, one important difference between Twitter now and then. Back in the twenties, someone like your diarist, who had many followers and a great deal to say for himself, kept simply dozens of Twitter Boys in useful employment, crisscrossing the country on their bicycles. Today those self-same messages go by electric interweb while the youths sit in bus shelters drinking white cider.

I shall draw this to my fellow ministers’ attention at the next Cabinet meeting.

Ward of the Week visits Telford & Wrekin

A Shropshire Star report on plans to reopen Jiggers Bank in Ironbridge (which wins our Road of the Day, incidentally) reveals that Telford & Wrekin Council has a Cuckoo Oak ward.

It wins our coveted Ward of the Week award.

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Today George Osborne crossed fingers and hoped ‘steady as she goes’ will come good by 2015, says Stephen Tall on Liberal Democrat Voice. With graphs.

Paul Nettleton is impressed by Cumbria Day, in which the county’s six MPs put party difference to one side to support a showcase for local businesses.

"I really believe Guantanamo has created more true terrorists around the world then we've gotten rid of." Brandon Neeley - a former guard at Guantanamo Bay - is interviewed by RT.

"The attorney general of the United States has now admitted that the biggest American financial corporations have created such a labyrinth of their structures and practices that the Justice Department has given up trying to police them in matters of corruption or criminal malfeasance, saying that bringing down any of these mega-banks or businesses could cause crash the economy." Too big to fail? American corporations are too big to jail, says Dan Dewalt on Counterpunch.

Smashing Tops has photographs of the 10 most amazing abandoned railways in the world.

"For much of their lifetimes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger never got the due they deserved. Powell was as English as you could get, had worked his way up through the film industry before coming to the attention of British film magnate Alexander Korda. Pressburger, meanwhile, was Hungarian Jewish by birth, who'd come to Germany in the 1920s to work as a screenwriter, moving to Paris, and then England when the Nazis came to power, and again was working for Korda. When the two met in 1939, there was an instant kinship. They shared a similarly uncompromising and original take on filmmaking, and were soon working hand in hand, sharing credit as writers, directors and producers under the banner of their The Archers production company." The Playlist takes us through the work of these remarkable filmmakers.

Stop the Insanity petition on DSM-5

An article in the Canadian magazine Maclean's looks at the controversy over the publication of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-5):

Every parent of a preteen has been there: on the receiving end of sullen responses, bursts of frustration or anger, even public tantrums that summon the fear that Children’s Aid is on its way. Come late May, with the publication of ... DSM-5, however, such sustained cranky behaviour could put your child at risk of a diagnosis of “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.” This newly minted condition will afflict children between 6 and 12 who exhibit persistent irritability and “frequent” outbursts, defined as three or more times a week for more than a year. Its original name, “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” was nixed after it garnered criticism it pathologized “temper tantrums,” a normal childhood occurrence. Others argue that even with the name change the new definition and diagnosis could do just that. 

“Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” isn’t the only new condition under scrutiny in the reference manual owned and produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) - and lauded as psychiatry’s bible. Even though the final version of DSM-5 remains under embargo, its message is being decried in some quarters as blasphemous. Its various public drafts, the third published last year, have stoked international outrage - and a flurry of op-ed columns, studies, blogs and petitions.

Today came news that a group of British mental health professionals has joined this throng by issued a statement of concern about the reliability, validity, and safety of DSM-5.

The concerns they list are that DSM-5:

• includes many diagnostic categories with questionable reliability, which may lead to misleading assumptions about their scientific validity;
• did not receive a much-needed and widely requested external scientific review; 
• may compromise patient safety through the implementation of lowered diagnostic thresholds and the introduction of new diagnostic categories that do not have sufficient empirical backing; 
• may result in the mislabelling of mental illness in people who would fare better without a psychiatric diagnosis; may result in unnecessary and potentially harmful treatment, particularly with psychiatric medication; 
• may divert precious mental health resources away from those who most need them.

The Stop the Insanity website also has a petition calling on clinicians, researchers, journal editors, healthcare planners, managers and commissioners, the pharmaceutical industry and the media to avoid use of DSM-5 wherever possible until these concerns have been resolved.

This new campaign was reported in The Times (paywall) this morning under the headline "Psychiatrists to fight new list of mental illnesses", even though most of the signatories appear to be psychologists.

Later. They have now changed the headline on the website to reflect this.

New research into the benefits of chess in schools

A year ago I wrote and article for the Guardian website making the case for encouraging chess in schools. In it I interviewed Malcolm Pein from the charity Chess in School and Communities.

Today comes news that the Education Endowment Foundation (whose development director is a certain Stephen Tall) has made a grant of £689,150 to the charity to test the impact of teaching chess to primary aged children:

The programme will see chess being taught within normal class time for one hour a week by accredited chess coaches. A 30-week curriculum is used to teach chess, this starts by teaching children how to play chess, before developing thinking skills through the use of chess problems. Each class teacher will also be trained in how to teach chess and will be encouraged to start a chess club in their school. 

The majority of studies that link chess to academic attainment have been carried out abroad and included self-selecting intervention groups.  However a randomised controlled trial was carried out in Italy and this showed that chess had an impact on maths attainment. The EEF will be testing the programme as a randomised controlled trial, with 50 schools receiving the intervention in one year and 50 acting as a control group. Those in the control group will receive the intervention in the following academic year. Pupils’ mathematical abilities will be tested before and after the intervention. 

The independent evaluation will be conducted by the Institute of Education.

You can read more about this project in the Daily Telegraph.

Is this blog covered by the new press regulator?

I asked this question on Twitter yesterday and received answers varying from obviously yes to obviously no.

My suspicion is that nobody knows. The Leveson Report barely considered the internet and the new law arose from a deal done in the small hours by party leaders and pressure group representatives after a process resembling the change of prime minister in The Thick of It.

I suspect we shall have to wait for some case law to find out what the new legislation means. And recent experience suggests that the judges may not take the side of bloggers.

"An area the size of Rutland"

A book review by Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the current Spectator introduces a welcome new measurement. Writing of A Green and Pleasant Land: How England's Gardeners Fought the Second World War by Ursula Buchan, she says:

In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland.

She also suggests that the slogan "Dig for Victory" was invented by Michael Foot in an unsigned Evening Standard leader in September 1939.

Worker-owned co-operatives: The Next American Revolution

From the founder of the World Economic Forum to the protesters of the Occupy movement, everyone seems to agree that something’s wrong with capitalism as we know it. But what is it, exactly and what can people do about it?

Political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz discusses a potential solution in his new film The Next American Revolution, in which he advocates for community-based and co-operative businesses.

UKIP to fight every Leicestershire County Council seat

Not content with their two recent, er, colourful recruits by defection, UKIP says it is to fight every county seat here in Leicestershire in May.

The party's 'East Midlands constituency manager' Paul Oakden told the Leicester Mercury:

"In 2009, UKIP did not stand a single candidate in Leicestershire. 

"We don't want a situation this time where people come to us after May 2 and say "I would have voted for you but you didn't have a candidate. 

"Every day, we are gaining fresh people so it is an achievable goal to have a candidate in every seat. 

"Will we take control at County Hall? Probably not, but we will take votes from the other three parties and that will play a major part in the results."

Anything that will put the wind up the Tories has to be welcomed, but I share the puzzlement of my old friend, Simon Galton, the leader of the Lib Dem group at County Hall:

"I don't understand what their appeal is for councils. 

"They want to take us out of Europe but they can't do that by winning seats at Leicestershire County Council."

And I am not convinced by the response to this:

Mr Oakden said UKIP had policies relevant to local politics, such as opposition to raising council tax and holding county-wide referenda (sic) on issues such as the hunting ban.

But what is the point of a Leicestershire referendum on hunting? It couldn't repeal the law.

I suppose you might vote to allow or ban hunting on council-owned land, but I doubt if that is what Mr Oakden has in mind.

The impression that UKIP's policy platform was drawn up by listening to a lot of angry men in pubs grows ever stronger.

Norman Baker rocks - the video

Forget the Stones - here is "Piccadilly Circus" by the Reform Club. Think of it as The Kinks go to Penny Lane.

More about Norman Baker's band in yesterday's post. Thanks to @abjtal for sending me the link to the video.

Rolling Stones: She's a Rainbow

The Stones recorded this in the summer of love and released it as a single in December 1967. Incredibly, it did not chart.

The song was written by Jagger and Richard, the strings were arranged by John Paul Jones and it features a mellotron played by Brian Jones.

The piano was played by Nicky Hopkins, who began his career with Screaming Lord Sutch (whom I remember applauding around the hall when he came to the count at Littleborough and Saddleworth in 1995). He later became one of the great session musicians of his era.

When Hopkins died in 1994 Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote of him:

The Kinks had always used a piano to help build the wall of sound associated with our early hits "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Now we were making our third album and our producer, Shel Talmy, thought we should hire someone who could contribute more than just background chords. 

Nicky, unlike lesser musicians, didn't try to show off; he would only play when necessary. But he had the ability to turn an ordinary track into a gem - slotting in the right chord at the right time or dropping a set of triplets around the back beat, just enough to make you want to dance. On a ballad, he could sense which notes to wrap around the song without being obtrusive. He managed to give "Days," for instance, a mysterious religious quality without being sentimental or pious.

Norman Baker rocks

From the Daily Telegraph:

Norman Baker, MP for Lewes, will next week be releasing an album called Always Tomorrow with his band the Reform Club, it was revealed in the Sunday Times. 

The 55-year-old junior minister for transport is the band's lead singer and chief lyricist, with most of the music being written by the guitarist, Mike Phipps.

As the report goes on to say, Norman was once a regional director of the music chain Our Price.

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"What badly needs debate is precisely how to regulate cross-media ownership better, and how to prevent semi-monopolies of influence from building up that subverts proper media balance - and prevents prime ministers paying court to one press baron and his acolytes in particular." David Boyle says the debate over Leveson is ignoring the most important question.

Simon Titley on Liberator's blog gives an account of the rise and fall of economic liberalism in the Liberal Democrats.

The Conservatives' A list did bring them more women candidates but made little difference in the areas of race and class, finds Michael Hill on British Politics and Policy at LSE.

"Viva Belarus!", a groundbreaking feature film from Polish director Krzysztof Lukaszewicz portraying the harsh life of nonconformist youth living under the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus, premiered at Prague’s Febiofest on March 19. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty interviews one of the screenwriters, Franak Viačorka.

Homes & Property examines the history of Camden's Mornington Crescent.

Parts of Paris are built on a dense network of underground tunnels, canals, reservoirs and vaults, reports Infra Net Lab.

Headline of the Day goes royal

The ITV website wins with:

Duchess of Cambridge gets heel stuck in a drain

David Boyle on post-postmodernism

David Boyle, the nearest thing the Liberal Democrats have to an intellectual guru, has a new book out: The Age to Come: Authenticity, Post-Modernism and How To Survive What Comes Next.

David writes on his blog:

The next age, the coming age, will try to challenge our contemporary conviction that nothing is true and everything is relative. 

It will not reach back hopelessly to previous ages of certainty, though people may accuse it of that: we have lost our innocence about social reality. It will not pretend it is somehow possible to work out unambiguously what is true in this world. It will not turn its back on the understanding and tolerance we have generated with the social construction of knowledge. But it will not be limited by that any more. 

We are moving into an age that will try to satisfy our need for what we have lost, looking around for something we can be sure of – something we can use to measure everything else against – and it is beginning to find it in ourselves and our humanity, and will use that to seek a way out of the paralysis of post-modernism.

I always enjoy David's books, but I suspect I have more time for postmodernism than he does (nor do I believe the concept needs a hyphen).

Certainly, I recommend that anyone with an interest in Liberal philosophy reads Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity before postmodernism goes too far out of fashion.

Nick Clegg doesn't mention the war

Yesterday I called on the Liberal Democrat high command to come clean and tell us the real reason they are in favour of secret courts.

Today Nick Clegg's weekly email arrived. Eagerly I opened it. But nothing. Not a mention of secret courts.

It was worse than that.

The email was mostly about the Leveson proposals and the battle over whether and how we should legislate to implement them. It was quite long but, even so, we were referred to an article by Nick in The Times for a more detailed exposition of his views.

That was a big problem for me.

I am not concerned about referring people to a Murdoch paper. Increasingly these days, I find myself buying The Times rather than the Guardian.

The problem is that in order to read articles on the Times site you have to have paid a subscription first. So Nick's email is telling most of its recipients that there is more information available on this, but they cannot read it. That is only going to put people's back up.

You would hope that the team around the party leader would have grasped this simple point, but apparently not.

Liberal Burblings did not like Nick's email either, but made his point more succinctly than me.

City Bound (1941)

Taken from the British Council Film Collection, 'City Bound' is an exploration of the daily commute into London from the suburbs in 1941.

Others in that decade took a less celebratory view of the process:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in it own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels. 

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better. 

Patrick Hamilton The Slaves of Solitude (1947)

New insight into the Cyril Smith affair

The last scandal but three to engulf the Liberal Democrats involved allegations of sexual and physical abuse of boys by Cyril Smith. In recent days more information about them has appeared on the web.

Yesterday the Manchester Evening News published the transcript of a police interview of Smith from 1970. It does tend to suggest that he was using his local power and celebrity to interfere with the investigation of the allegations:

OFFICER: If my information is right, you spoke to one of the boys, who has been interviewed. 

CYRIL: Yes. 

OFFICER: What was that about? 

CYRIL: He told me what you had been asking him. He told me he had made a statement to you. I’ve seen two of them and the third came to see me. I’ve asked them if they have made statements. 

OFFICER: I must warn you about interfering with witnesses. The only reason I am here this morning is because you wanted to see me. I did not want to see you. You must have some suspicion about you and them, about what’s in the statements or you would not be here, would you?

A few days before that The Needle published what it claims is an eyewitness account of Smith's behaviour during the Manchester Central by-election of 1979. The account is anonymous, but it has the ring of truth and someone who was around in the party in those days might well be able to work out who it comes from if it is genuine.

Part of the account runs:

Cyril Smith sat next to a 14 year old boy (I deliberately kept him away from the young girls after his lewd comments). He bantered with anyone – old, middle aged or young… and then his left hand moved onto the groin area of the 14 year old boy. The boy jumped sky-high! My late hubby saw it and moved in very quickly (he sent me a signal to get the 14 year old boy into a safe space next to me). Hubby placed a firm hand on Cyril Smith’s shoulder whilst he ‘whispered’ in Smith’s ear. I believe that my late hubby told Cyril Smith to either remove himself immediately (without bother) or my hubby would remove him without ceremony. 

How my 12 stone hubby would have removed a 30 stone MP I don’t know! Maybe we are sometimes empowered by the sense of indignity, right and safeguarding of those in our care. Cyril Smith did leave my flat without a fuss. My hubby reported this incident to the local police, Liberal Headquarters and the Region.

It may be that his is an invention, but if it is not one would have to wonder if the Liberal Party knew more about Cyril Smith's behaviour than it ever admitted.

Time for the Lib Dem leadership to come clean on secret courts

At the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference Nick Clegg's advisers decided the best way to win party members over on the question of secret courts was to send Tom McNally out to insult them.

It did not give you a great deal of confidence in Nick Clegg's advisers.

Fortunately, they soon changed their approach and first Ming Campbell and then Tom McNally wrote reasoned articles for Lib Dem Voice putting the leadership's case.

Today David Howarth, MP for Cambridge before the last election, replied to Tom McNally. If it were a boxing contest the referee would have stopped it long before David got to the end.

I do urge you to read David Howarth's article yourself as it makes the case against secret courts so forcefully. Academia's gain is certainly Westminster's loss.

The arguments the leadership has deployed in favour of secret courts are so weak - not just Tom McNally's speech in Brighton but also Nick Clegg's treatment of the subject at his question-and-answer session there - that one suspects we are not being told the real reason.

Is it that Nick does not feel confident enough to turn down the advice of the intelligence establishment? Is it that the American government is threatening not to share intelligence with us unless we change our legal procedures?

Whatever the reason, I think it would be much better for the atmosphere within the Liberal Democrats if our leaders came clean and told us their real reason for supporting secret courts.

"The camping coaches" from Railway Roundabout (1958)

Beyond the end of the platform the line curved round sharply to the right between the steep banks of a cutting. On the top of the embankment on their left was a wood, and between that and the main line a single track of rails, rusty with disuse. The track ran into a siding under the embankment, and on it were standing two old railway coaches, brightly painted, with curtains in the windows. 

Malcolm Saville, Susan, Bill and the Vanishing Boy (1955)

Paul Burstow: It's time to end the NHS bias against mental health

Paul Burstow, who has been notably and valuably outspoken since being sacked as a health minister last year, had an article in the Daily Telegraph this morning calling for mental health to be as much a spending priority as physical health is.

He wrote:

Mental health has traditionally been vulnerable in the NHS – the last to benefit in times of plenty and the first to suffer when things get tough. 

And depressingly, in 2011/12 spending fell by 1%. Crisis resolution and assertive outreach both saw reduction, and while half the country protected spending, the other half made deep cuts. This is short sighted penny pinching that is condemning people to a lifetime of mental ill health.

However, Paul did welcome the anti-stigma Time to Change campaign, the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme and the new recovery colleges that are being piloted.

In the article Paul announced that he will be chairing a commission set up by Centre Forum to examine the state of mental health care provision in England.

Modest memorial planned for Richard III in Leicester Cathedral

Back in October I asked how Richard III should be remembered. My answer:

As a graduate of both York and Leicester Universities I have some claim to objectivity here, and I agree that Richard (if it is Richard) should be reburied in Leicester Cathedral. 

But a state funeral? So far the dig has been handled with good taste - there have been no pictures of the skeleton issued, for instance - but this idea is danger of taking things over the top. 

Richard would have had a funeral when he was buried at Greyfriars. A dignified short service and interment at the Cathedral is all that is required. Let's not turn the thing into a circus.

In that spirit, I am pleased by today's news that Richard will not have a chest tomb but a flat stone tablet - rather like the memorial to him that has been in Leicester Cathedral since 1982.

Headline of the Day

Today's winner is the Huffington Post:

MP Slams 'Incompetent' Police Over Abusive 'Racist Arsehead' Man

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Mark Thompson exposes Nick Clegg's faulty logic in supporting secret courts.

One recent episode of Moscow’s see-through machinations involved a London-based lobby group Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR). Launched in August 2012 - in the garden of the Russian ambassador to Britain, no less - and shut down in December." World Affairs dissects Vladimir Putin's strategy of influencing and infiltrating European political establishments.

Despite the urging of Laurie Penny, Normblog refuses to care that the SWP is on the verge of collapse.

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA - in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys". Watch his video on TED.

Movement for Liveable London has a guest post by Mark Stanley making the case for a traffic-free Soho.

"The film is more subversive perhaps than it initially seems. Though I’m a sucker for a romantic ending I also think that, in the real world, most of us can buy that not everyone gets a silver lining. It does seem though, that in the face of emotional distress, we can all get a psychiatric diagnosis." John McGowan on Discursive of Tunbridge Wells goes to see Silver Linings Playbook.

East Midland MEPs at Work: 1. Roger Helmer

The first in an occasional series.

Thanks to a reader and La Treizième Étoile.

Braunstone Gate, Leicester, in 1975

Footage of some of the lost houses and shops from this part of the city.

Right at the end you see a poster from the European referendum campaign to prove it really is 1975 and then a glimpse of the recently demolished Bowstring Bridge.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary behaves better than the BBC over Savile

Sir Peter Fahy's report for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on how much police knew about Savile before he was exposed as a sex offender in 2012 was published at midnight.

But embargoes copies were sent out to journalists before that, allowing them to write stories for this morning's papers. Some even tweeted the findings in the small hours of this morning.

That, you might think, is pretty remarkable. It is what you do with any report likely to be of wide interest.

But it is certainly not what the BBC did when it published the Pollard Review into its own decision to drop a Newsnight investigation of Savile's crimes.

As Niall Paterson complained on the Sky News site at the time:

The Savile scandal has been a low point, perhaps its lowest ever, but it is not, despite what some BBC critics will say, representative of the whole. 

Which is why the Beeb's handling of the release of the Pollard Review evidence has been so utterly, utterly infuriating. 

First, they chose to dump it on their website this morning, rather than giving it to everyone under what's known as an embargo. 

An embargo means that journalists get sight of a document but promise not to use the information, either in print or on TV, before a certain date or time. 

It allows reporters to spend time digesting and analysing the data, before putting pen to paper - or head in front of the camera. 

Frankly, the BBC would be the first to complain if a public inquiry released its findings without using an embargo, or at the very least a "lock-in" - where journalists are "locked" in a room with the report for a few hours. 

Second, rather than releasing the evidence in plain text or searchable PDF as is usual, they scanned thousands of A4 sheets of paper and uploaded it to their website. 

This perhaps sounds like a petty complaint, but it makes a reporter's life so much more difficult to search for key phrases, to cross reference quotes or details. 

You essentially have to read the entire document - which, when it's more than 3,000 pages, is easier said than done. 

The more cynical person would say this a tactic most commonly used when an organisation wants to make a journalist's life as difficult as possible, or where they hope a few damaging facts get lost in an overwhelming wave of information. 

Third, they released the information on a Friday. 

If you were to ask any member of the BBC's political unit on which weekday a government department would most likely release a critical report in an attempt to bury the bad news, I'm sure you can guess what they'd say. 

MPs have usually left London, as have many other commentators. Newsrooms tend to be moving on to their weekend cover, more than likely utilising fewer staff. And news output on a Saturday, particularly on terrestrial TV, is much less substantial than during the week. 

And fourth, not a single member of BBC staff, including Tim Davie the acting director-general, has been made available for interview.

You can still read all the documents from the Pollard Review on the BBC site. But it is hard not to recall the corporation's original reaction when the Savile story broke:

Whilst the BBC condemns any behaviour of the type alleged in the strongest terms, in the absence of evidence of any kind found at the BBC that corroborates the allegations that have been made, it is simply not possible for the corporation to take any further action.

Name of the Day

Well done to Polycarp Pengo, one of the Cardinals currently picking the new Pope.

Lord Bonkers adds: Pengo could be a good outside bet if the favourite falls at the Canal Turn.

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A Scottish Liberal reminds us that the leadership of the Scottish Liberal Democrats will be defending secret courts at the party's conference next week: "Will they, like Nick Clegg, avoid the real issues and reinforce the members' anger? Will it become increasingly obvious that a chasm is opening between grassroots activists and parliamentarians that is both destructive and unnecessary? Or will they succeed in convincing the members that they are listening, respectful and receptive - even if they take a different view on the policy detail?"

Eastleigh signals the beginning of the end for Nick Clegg not the end of the beginning, says Living on Words Alone.

There is not much left of Liam Fox by the time Alex Massie has finished with him.

"It is hard to see how journalists will ever again earn an enviable wage," says Tom Streithorst on Prospect Blog.

Helen O'Neil writes of John Stuart Mill's involvement with the London Library its blog.

"Liverpool St Station was opened in 1874 and survived largely unchanged into the nineteen seventies. So, in 1977, when proposals to redevelop the station were suggested, I decided to spend some time there, documenting the life of the station with its astonishing brick and iron architecture. I loved the cleaners, taking a break, and the young lad taking it upon himself to reschedule the next train." Tony Bock introduces his photographs on Spitalfields Life.

Now Philippe Sands leaves the Liberal Democrats

Nick Clegg's strategy of cultivating and then abandoning civil libertarians continues to have unwelcome consequences for the party.

Philippe Sands has an article on the Guardian website this evening:

Secrecy begets secrecy. I have listened to all the arguments, and concluded this is a compromise too far, neither necessary nor fair at this time. The point has been made eloquently in recent days by Dinah Rose QC and Jo Shaw. Their principled arguments have long had my full support and so I have joined them in resigning from the Liberal Democrats.

1945 and all that

Ken Loach's new film The Spirit of '45, said the Guardian on Saturday, "revisits the year that Britons turned to socialism".

Today I came across two blog posts that questioned this interpretation of the 1945 general election.

Steve Fielding on Ballots & Bullets argues:

The vast majority certainly supported the implementation of the 1942 Beveridge report and its promise of cradle-to-the-grave social security. Yet those that liked his suggestion of a National Health Service did so largely because they hoped to personally benefit, far fewer looked on it as an act of redistribution. In any case, the Liberal William Beveridge's scheme was a continuation of progressive Edwardian reforms and it entailed welfare payments only just above subsistence. His was not a socialist measure, but one designed to make capitalism work more effectively.

And he goes on to say:

The society most people wanted from the 1945 election was a 1930s with jobs, that is, not socialism but reformed capitalism. This would be a private world. As a Labour candidate told his party’s conference in 1945, “two years ago, when I was in Africa, we fell to talking one day about what we hoped to see in the post-war world, and the fellow who put the point best was the one who said that he wanted to settle down with his wife in a cottage, with the kiddies, and to enjoy chocolates and looking after the chickens”.

While David Boyle, who was on Start the Week with Loach this morning, arrives at a characteristically penetrating critique:

The idea that somehow the Labour creation was betrayed or destroyed by Mrs Thatcher, and we must look back to 1945 and do it all over again, is really nonsense. The truth is that these huge institutions carried the seeds of their own destruction. They carried the Thatcherite revolution within them, because they did not work - they disempowered, undermined communities, poured scorn on self-help, worshipped professionals, and never asked for anything back - which meant they failed to build community around them.

As he says, whatever public services now need, it does not involve going back to 1945.

Angela Lansbury says men's sex obsession can make women gay

Headline of the Day was a walkover for the Daily Mail.

The ironstone lines of the East Midlands

Almost an hour of footage from these lost industrial railways.

Too much of a good thing?

Not to me.

Secret courts: Tom McNally in Wonderland

The Liberal Democrat leadership does not seem to have made much of an attempt to defend secret courts. Alex's Archives covers Nick Clegg's performance at his question and answer session in Brighton:

we saw pretty much every tool deployed from the box marked “evasion tactics for politicians who don’t wish to engage”.

In the secret courts vote itself, Tom McNally seems to have acted as the voice of the party establishment.

According to the Guardian:

McNally, a justice minister, indicated he was unlikely to lead a rebellion but would instead seek further concessions. He said it was to the credit of the party that it was so troubled by the issue of secret courts, but said the bill's critics lived in an Alice in Wonderland world.

This argument that party leaders and ministers have a unique connection with reality, while activists are by nature unworldly, has always seemed strange to me. Surely it is activists, with their jobs, mortgages and journeys to work who understand how most voters live?

And I don't recall any Lib Dem grandees insulting party members when they were asking them to go to Eastleigh or donate money a fortnight ago.

But the parallel with Alice in Wonderland is useful here:

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. 

"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first - verdict afterwards." 

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!" 

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple. 

"I won't!" said Alice. 

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

"Sentence first - verdict afterwards" may well be what we get from secret courts. Take this BBC News report from 2006 (thanks to Love and Garbage on Twitter for the link):

A judge has criticised the Home Office over contradictory MI5 intelligence in secret hearings involving two terrorism suspects, it has emerged. 

The error came to light only because one barrister acted in both Special Immigration Appeals Commission cases. 

Mr Justice Newman said the "administration of justice" had been put at risk in the cases of Algerian Abu Doha and a suspect known as MK.

If anyone has been taking tea with the Mad Hatter, it is Tom McNally himself.

Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen: Midnight in Moscow

Kenny Ball, one of the big names in the trad jazz revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, died this week.

As his Daily Telegraph obituary explained:

The Trad Boom ended suddenly, with the triumph of the Beatles and Merseybeat, in 1963, but Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen were scarcely affected. The band had by then become firmly established in the world of popular entertainment. 

They appeared in every episode of the first six series of the Morecambe and Wise Show, beginning in 1968, and were the resident band on Saturday Night at the Mill (BBC One) from 1975 to 1983. They toured in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Russia they gave 28 shows in 31 days, finishing by playing Midnight in Moscow in Red Square. They played at the wedding celebration of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, at the Prince’s request. 

The jazz world, never entirely comfortable with this kind of popular success, tended either to ignore or to patronise Ball; but no one could deny that he was a highly accomplished musician, an engaging singer and a meticulous bandleader.

Here they are on Morecambe and Wise in 1970. It's as though the sixties never happened but still enjoyable.

When I was four I used to play with a little girl down the road who had an impressive collection of Kenny Ball EPs. (We were more of an Acker Bilk family.) His music reminds me of those days and our innocent and not so innocent games.

Paddy Ashdown to visit Uppingham on Tuesday

Paddy Ashdown will be at Uppingham School Memorial Hall on Tuesday 12 March (7:30 p.m.) to talk about his new book A Brilliant Little Operation, and his career, and answer questions from the audience.

More details on the East Midlands Liberal Democrats site. Booking information on upp.the.arts.

Six of the Best 330

"Whatever we think about Leveson, the libel reform bill has nothing to do with it: it’s a separate argument ... The NUJ and left media reformers should not be cheering on Labour opportunism from the sidelines but telling Putnam and his cronies where to stick it. End of story." Gauche has no time for Lord Putnam and his allies, who are putting the badly needed reform of our libel laws at risk.

Pride's Purge says the email exchanges between Vicky Pryce and the Sunday Times reveal a breathtakingly cold-hearted, manipulative woman who would do anything to get her own way. And he's not talking about Vicky Pryce.

Andrew Hickey wonders why Sebastian Faulks thinks he can step into the shoes of the greatest writer of English prose who ever lived.

"It's beautifully shot up on the Stiperstones, and around Much Wenlock. There are some marvellous trademark Powell and Pressburger set pieces - the full immersion baptism in the river, and the slow procession of the traction engine to the village show are as good as anything you will see in any of their other pictures." Out in the Shires watches Gone to Earth.

The 1950s' child star Jon Whiteley is now curator of the Ashmolean Museum, reports the Oxford Mail.

The Silly Point asks if Joe Root is bound for greatness.

Nick Clegg's lack of leadership on secret courts

The Daily Express enjoys being able to report a difficult time for Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference this afternoon:

The atmosphere became more heated when activists began to challenge Mr Clegg over the Justice and Security Bill, which would allow courts to sit in secret in some civil cases. The legislation was comfortably given its third reading in the Commons last week, despite a rebellion from some Tories and Lib Dem MPs and continuing opposition from civil rights campaigners. 

One Lib Dem member questioned why Mr Clegg had "abandoned the high ground" by engaging with the proposals. And another said: "How can we call ourselves a Liberal Democratic party any more if we vote for this legislation?" 

However, the party leader said the intelligence services were currently unable to defend themselves in some civil court cases because they could not disclose sensitive material. He stressed that many changes had already been made to the original proposals, and said he was unable to do what activists wanted and block the measures because only 8% of MPs were Lib Dems.

Well, we'd like Nick to block this measure, but I think we would settle for him and the other Lib Dem MPs voting against it.

But the point of this post is to argue that Nick's discomfort is largely his own fault, even if you think he is right to support this measure.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that in the past Nick has gone out of his way to cultivate the support of civil libertarians. As Stephen Tall reminded us, Nick Clegg said in 2011:

"I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good."

A bit like a teenage libertarian blogger perhaps, but that is what Nick said. You cannot blame civil libertarians for believing he really meant it.

Nor can you blame blame Dinah Rose QC for resigning her membership of the party now it appears he has changed his mind.

The second reason Nick is the author of his own misfortune is the lack of communication on the issue. The vote on secret courts took place on Monday, but - as far as I am aware - we had to wait until Thursday and a briefing from the party chief executive for any explanation.

Then, the next day, we had an article on Liberal Democrat Voice by Ming Campbell. Though Lord Bonkers had some fun this, Ming did make an attempt to  convince us. Though it is hard to see how the new measures can be at once less restrictive than the present arrangements and needed to keep matters private that would be public under those arrangements.

But where was Nick Clegg in all this? He may be right on secret courts or, as I believe, he may be wrong. What is not in doubt is that he should have done more to explain his thinking to the party.

Happy birthday William Cobbett

A short video to mark the 250th anniversary of the great man's birth.

Isabel Oakeshott wins Email of the Week

Here is Isabel Oakeshott of the Sunday Times writing to Vicky Pryce on 8 March 2011:

In theory, it's likely there is a minor risk of you being prosecuted, but we think in practise (sic) it is highly unlikely, especially if we handle it right.

Nice one, Is!

A cat sees the rotating snake illusion

Originally (I think) from Tumbling Banana. More about the rotating snake illusion.

States of Independence, Leicester, 16 March

From the States of Independence website:

States of Independence 2013 - our fourth such event - will take place on Saturday 16 March at Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester. 

This year there is a strong emphasis on fiction – with three fantastic women writers – Leicester's Kerry Young, Booker-shortlisted Alison Moore and, returning to her old haunts, Sarah Butler. We have sessions on short fiction and poetry – from the Chartists to modern times. There is weird stuff on offer (literally...) and the announcement of the East Midlands Book Award shortlist. 

Reflecting the support of Creative Leicestershire, we have asked each and every session to include something on marketing – we want all our writers, presses and organisations to be artistic and financial successes! Or at least, in these hard times, to survive. 

States also includes a free bookfair representing dozens of publishers from the region and beyond.

My fourth Whipped column for Ad Lib

Here is my latest column from the new Liberal Democrat magazine Ad Lib.

It seems I never got round to posting the third Whipped here, but the interesting question is whether I shall manage a fifth one when there is nothing to laugh about in our MPs being whipped to vote for secret courts.

Whipped: From the desk of the Junior Whip

“Do you want to find out how politics really works?” asked the Chief Whip.

“Oh yes,” I replied. “That’s just what I hoped for when I got this job.”

“There’s a train to Eastleigh leaving Waterloo in 30 minutes. Be on it.”

I am writing this under the end of a hedge near Hedge End. My shoes are holed, my hands are black with ink and a Jack Russell has eaten my last canvass card.

Yet I was happy to get away. A resignation and a censuring: it was too much for me. (And if you haven’t been censured by a Scotsman, you never been censured.)

It got worse. The Chief Whip was determined the Tories would lose their vote on constituency boundaries. He even called in Jenny Willott, who was four days from giving birth. He had me standing by with plenty of hot water and Wikipedia. “You’ve seen Call the Midwife, laddie. How hard can it be?”

Now I wish I had stayed in Westminster. The only mercy is that we went for a short campaign – the Chief Whip did not want the Tories to have months to throw money at the seat. Having met their candidate, I wonder if he was right. The more the public see of her, the better we shall do.

So I know how politics really works – and I don’t like it. I never want to see another by-election, and if I become an MP I shall apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. And keep them.

Because I like the idea of being Crown Steward and Bailiff of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. I fancy a life pottering around collecting the rents from trim brick and flint farmhouses set among beech woods, rolling chalk hills and steep- valleys.

But I must stop now. That Jack Russell has just sniffed me out.

What united Hugo Chavez and the Conservative right?

The answer, it seems, is admiration for Belarus.

Here is a BBC News report from 2006:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised Belarus, calling it "a model social state like the one we are beginning to create". 

During a visit to Minsk, he called for a strategic alliance with Belarus to counter "hegemonic" capitalism. 

Mr Chavez later met President Alexander Lukashenko, accused in the West of crushing fundamental rights.

And here is a Daily Telegraph report from October of last year:

The Attorney General today indicated that he may block any Conservative plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights warning that Britain would become a "pariah state" comparable to Belarus. 

Dominic Grieve intervened after Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, refused to rule out leaving the convention following a radical review of Britain's human rights laws. 

Mr Grayling told the Daily Telegraph yesterday that "the current human rights framework under which we are operating has gone badly wrong” and said he "ruled nothing in and nothing out" in regards to leaving the ECHR.

Dominic Grieve may not be attracted to Belarus, but it seems that a substantial element of his party is.

Tim Farron: Lib Dems are nutters and cockroaches

Story from Huffington Post. Picture from Fancy Dress Ball.

Headline of the Day comes live from Leicester

Well done to the BBC News Leicester pages:

Leicester's Phoenix Square cinema to host dental school

Liberal England asks: Is it safe?

Dissident blogger Emin Milli on the hopes for change in Azerbaijan

Emin Milli is a blogger from Azerbaijan who was imprisoned in 2009 for two and a half years for his critical views about the government. He was conditionally released in November 2010, after serving 16 months of his sentence.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty he speaks about the current situation in Azerbaijan:

Aliyev has always presented himself as a guarantor of stability in Azerbaijan. Now, he is becoming a guarantor of increasing instability. His father kept some space open for the opposition -- there were always five or six members of the opposition in parliament and he would meet opposition newspaper editors. He pretended there was a dialogue. 

Things are very different now. There has not been a single opposition member in parliament since 2010, new laws have been adopted to fine people for participating in peaceful but unsanctioned rallies, the financing of nongovernmental organizations has been made almost impossible.

the hopes for change:

Many things are changing in Azerbaijan, and the pace of change is so fast that I cannot even keep track. What changed in Azerbaijan is that the old and the new oppositions are uniting with a single candidate. Even more importantly, they will sign a document outlining their whole strategy, how they share their resources, what their common goals are, who will assume which responsibility in bringing a democratic revolution to Azerbaijan, and how the country will be run once the single candidate comes to power. This has never happened in Azerbaijan. It’s a change in narrative.

and the role of social media in the struggle for it:

A new-media revolution is taking place in Azerbaijan. Out of 9 million people in Azerbaijan, more than 1 million are now on Facebook. Research showed that 7 per cent had daily access to the Internet two years ago. This year, the same research - done by U.S. professor Katy Pearce - shows this figure has gone up to 11 per cent ... Things that would never have been public before are now read and shared by hundreds of thousands of people.

His concluding remarks are rather shaming:

Everything Azerbaijan’s democratic movement is doing now and all the changes that will happen this year will take place not thanks to Western support, but despite Western support to Aliyev’s regime. 

All we want from the international community at this stage is for the international media to pay more attention to what is happening in Azerbaijan and for the U.S. and British governments to realize that they are threatening their own military and economic interests in Azerbaijan by supporting Aliyev.

There Go the Boats (1951)

Rutland aristocrat employs disgraced former Tory MP who caned rent boys

Lord Bonkers writes: That's what comes of employin' chaps without a reference. Which one is it?

Calm down Lord B: this isn't about you.

But go to the website for Belvoir Castle and you will find that the private secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland is one Harvey Proctor.

Could it be? Yes, It is that Harvey Proctor - younger readers click here.

But that is no reason why he should not be a very good private secretary. Think of him as a modern version of The Efficient Baxter in Wodehouse's Blandings series.

Six of the Best 329

John Hemming MP explains why he voted against the government on secret courts (among other things) on Monday.

Remember those shameful "Keep Calm and Rape On" T-shirts on Amazon? They never existed. I Am Pete Ashton explains.

Craig Murray warms to Palmerston.

"The British continue to suspect that they lost something special, even moral, when their society graduated from an aristocratic empire to a modern democracy. Like all nostalgics, we take comfort in a past that only seems so good because so few are alive to remember it well." Tim Stanley on History Today is unimpressed by Downton Abbey.

"A growing number of pilgrims ... are lacing up boots and sneakers to walk across America. While their treks may not have the religious underpinnings of pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, Jerusalem or the current Kumbh Mela gathering in India ... they are nevertheless acts of faith and quests for existential meaning," says Kate Murphy in the New York Times.

Aqeela's House visits... well, Market Harborough actually. She took some nice photographs and I shall go and look at the town's old post office again myself.

That secret courts vote - Nick Clegg explains

Market Harborough floods of 1958

I posted a link to this on the British Pathe site a couple of years ago, but I have now found an embeddable version on Youtube.

And if you are wondering what happened to the cinema...

Has anyone heard from Nick Clegg?

I got home about an hour ago expecting to find an email from Nick Clegg explaining why the parliamentary party voted in favour of secret courts.

Nothing.

There was an email from Sal Brinton urging me to come to Brighton for the Spring Conference, but nothing from Nick Clegg.

Like Paul Walter I am puzzled by his decision and want an explanation.

I am puzzled by the politics of this. What has been gained by adding civil libertarians to the list of people who feel that Nick Clegg has courted them and then let them down, I cannot imagine.

There is some suggestion that a deal has been done, trading Lib Dem support for secret courts for the Conservatives cutting back on the plans for competition in the NHS.

But that is puzzling too. If we Lib Dems were the kind of people who were relaxed about secret courts and determined to defend the status quo in the public sector we would have joined Labour long ago.

Unlike Paul, I am angry too. Not angry that the MPs went against a Conference decision - Conference does not always get it right and MPs must be free to exercise their judgement in the light of events.

But I am angry that they voted for secret courts at all. Opposition to such proposals should be hard-wired into every Liberal Democrat. Clearly, it is not.

Two Leicestershire Conservative county councillors join UKIP

We last saw David Sprason when he was in the soup for leaving a porn DVD in his council laptop. It could happen to anybody.

Today comes news that he has left the Conservatives and joined UKIP and will be defending his Markfield, Desford and Thornton seat under their colours in May.

Not only that.

Rob Fraser, who was elected as a Conservative but has been sitting as an Independent since September of last year, has joined UKIP too.

He is best known for his alleged remarks at a meeting held to discuss plans for a travellers' site in 2009. According to the Leicester Mercury at the time:

Robert Fraser, county councillor for Groby and Ratby, said Romanians would "stick a knife in you as soon as look at you", and that some Europeans "make the Irish look like complete amateurs".

I am sure Messrs Sprason and Fraser will feel very much at home in UKIP.

Anthony Clare interviews Paddy Ashdown

According to the BFI website this interview was broadcast by ITV on 17 September 1995.

David Cameron adopts George W. Bush's tactics

I can't find a source for this theory - can you help? - but I recall that George W. Bush's campaign tactics revolved around his remain the "aw gee shucks" nice guy while everyone else on his team poured vitriol over the opposition.

David Cameron seems to be trying something similar.

In the aftermath of his party's defeat at Eastleigh, Cameron announced there would be no "lurch to the right". Yet ever since we have seen his ministers doing just that.

Withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. An identity card before you can use the National Health Service. Further cuts in the welfare budget.

I suspect that Cameron's reasoning is that he will play the moderate to keep more liberal voters board - after all, we have an increasingly presidential system at general elections - while the rest of the Conservatives ensure the faithful that really there is nothing he enjoys more than kicking foreigners.

Why we should not trust governments with secret courts

Last month Ian Cobain won the Debut Political Book of the Year category in the Political Book Awards for his Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.

When Stephen Howe reviewed it in the Independent last year he began:

Legal bans on torture in England, then Britain, go almost as far back as written law itself. It was supposedly forbidden even in medieval times, while modern prohibition can be traced to a law of 1640. But for just as long, governments have in reality allowed it, practised it, and lied about it.

Was it a coincidence the news Nick Clegg's eldest child will attend a state school leaked out on the day of the secret courts vote?

I do hope so.

A Sutton Coldfield by-election?

Today's newspapers are full of stories that Andrew Mitchell is to be compensated for being traduced over plebgate (or "gategate", as I prefer to think of it) by being appointed as Britain's next European commissioner.

Our current commissioner, you will instantly recall, is Baroness Ashton. By my calculations, her term of office ends in December 2014. As the next general election will probably not take place until May 2015, that implies there will be a by-election in Mitchell's Sutton Coldfield constituency.

Sutton Coldfield, which contains some of Birmingham's most select suburbs, has always been a safe Tory seat. At one time it was a Liberal second place and there were a fair number of Liberal councillors too.

All that was lost, however, when the 'Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield' was amalgamated into Birmingham in 1974 - something that still rankled when I lived there in the early 1980s -  and in recent elections it has been Labour that has come second.

Labour was the big loser in Eastleigh

The Eastleigh by-election leaves things much where they were.

By this I mean that the frontier between Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters remains much where it has been since 1997. Some seats did change hands between the two parties in both directions, but that may have had more to do with the expenses scandal than anything else.

This suggests that the claim from Tim Farron that the Liberal Democrats could gain 30 seats from the Conservatives is overly optimistic, but it is certainly no more ridiculous than the widespread idea that the Liberal Democrats will be wiped out at the next election.

The Conservatives will have to ask themselves how they ended up with a candidate they had first to hide from the press and eventually ban from speaking to them at all. One explanation is that the wider Conservative organisation, for so long the party's strength, is now its weakness. Conservative members no longer represent prosperous society but are a strange subset of the angry and obsessed. These, after all, are the people who chose Iain Duncan Smith as party leader.

Whatever the truth of that, Maria Hutchings did confirm the observation that people described as "no nonsense" are usually full of it.

UKIP did well, but I suspect Nigel Farage's boast that they drew their support from across the other parties is a problem for them. Yes, they probably did attract the protest vote element of Liberal Democrat support, the anti-immigrant working class from Labour and the fruitcake wing of the Conservative Party, but that coalition may be hard to put together in other seats.

I would not go so far as John Rentoul who talks about "the paradox of Eastleigh":

It looked like a stunning success for Ukip but it was a grand failure. If Ukip had won the seat, Cameron might have had a terminal problem. But, despite Farage cheeking his establishment rivals, his party attracted just 28 per cent of the vote. If Ukip cannot win a protest by-election in Hampshire, with the coalition parties splitting their vote, and the economy becalmed, it is unlikely that it can win anywhere.

because I think the party might do better in a longer campaign in a safe Conservative seat where it could emerge as the main challenger - Alun Wyburn-Powell may not agree with me.

But the clearest message from Eastleigh is that it was a bad result for Labour. In the 1994 by-election the party came second: this time it came fourth with no increase in its vote over the 2012 general election.

Don't take my word for it: read George Eaton in the New Statesman on 13 February. He began by saying:

Labour's decision to select John O'Farrell as its candidate in the Eastleigh by-election is being hailed by many commentators as a game-changer.

he concluded:

having declared itself to be the party of "one nation" and having vowed to win over voters in the south, Labour has no choice but to campaign hard. Were it to finish in fourth place behind UKIP, as one poll suggested was possible, it would be a disastrous result for Ed Miliband.

"Disastrous" may be too strong, but the Eastleigh result does suggest Labour has won back no ground in the South of England since the last general election.

The Housemartins: Build

Reader's voice: As you are running out of inspiration for these Sunday music videos, may I suggest we have some more Housemartins?

Liberal England replies: By all means. You may also enjoy the Old Grey Whistle Test documentary about the band (part 1 and part 2).

And yes, young person, that is Fatboy Slim on bass.

Six of the Best 328

"The Justice and Security Bill was, is and will always remain a bad Bill. No amount of amendment will make it anything other than a full assault on fair trials in this country. It must be defeated, and we are watching Liberal Democrat parliamentarians, including Mike Thornton, to see they do everything they can to defeat it at every opportunity." Jo Shaw keeps up the fight against secret courts.

Simon Jenkins, rightly, defends Michael Gove's plan to reintroduce narrative to school history.

A Song of Liberty leaves the Liberal Democrats, making an interesting observation on the way: "Here’s a theory I’ve been working on: political parties are cults. They should be clubs for the like-minded, but instead become repulsive repositories that make the people inside more similar, not less, and farther away from the general public, not closer. They encourage closed minds, adoration of party leaders, disbelief of crimes committed, putting the good of the cult above the good of other people – in this case the country!"

Chris "Stumbling and Mumbling" Dillow makes the case against negative interest rates for Investors Chronicle.

Vice interviews Leah McGrath Goodman, the investigative journalist the British and Jersey authorities tried to ban from the island.

"May 1861, and the newly created state of Italy was in turmoil. The country remained a loose coalition of territories. Rome had been declared as the capital a few months before, but not everyone was playing ball. In particular, Pope Pius IX remained strongly opposed to Italian nationalism. A French garrison was stationed in Rome, protecting the Pope and impeding the new government from taking its seat. The situation was tense. No one knew which way the wind would blow." One solution proposed was that the Pope should move his court to London. Read more on Londonist.

Benjamin Britten and his Festival

This documentary from 1967 was directed by Tony Palmer, who also made many films about the pop world - I suspect this clip of Fairport Convention comes from one of them - and directed Michael Palin and Terry Jones in one of the precursors to Monty Python.

2012 is Benjamin Britten's centenary year.

On being a prominent Liberal Democrat blogger

This morning at 8:10 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme quoted a "prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" as saying "now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad".

That blogger was me. Having gone against my better judgement and stayed up for the Eastleigh result I tweeted this:

Congratulations to @mike4eastleigh - now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad #libdemandproud
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) March 1, 2013

Being awake at that hour, I was also able to spot a certain Mr G. Mulholland of Leeds becoming my 3000th follower on Twitter.

Which means I must now beware the onset of a syndrome first identified by Grace Dent:

50. I believe 3,000 followers is the point at which lots of tweeters start behaving like utter maniacs. "3,000 follower syndrome" is a worrying medical condition. 

51. The first sign of "3,000 follower syndrome" is apologising for not checking in on Twitter until later than usual, believing that Twitter must have felt so empty without you. 

52. The second sign is placing tweets in your timeline answering the question you say "everyone" is asking you. If you check this person's @ column it almost invariably turns out no one is speaking to them. 

53. It gets even worse after that.

Thinking about it, this post may be the first symptom.

Trivial Fact of the Day: Bruce Reynolds worked for the Daily Mail

The Guardian report of the death of Bruce Reynolds, the brains behind the Great Train Robbery, reveals a striking piece of information:

In 1995, Reynolds wrote his memoirs which recounted, without sentimentality or self-pity, how he had embarked on a life of crime after initially seeking a job as a journalist but ended up working in the accounts department of the Daily Mail.

Liberal England Comment

It backed the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley. It employed the mastermind of Britain's most notorious theft.

Today we ask:

Are there no depths to which the Daily Mail will not sink?