Tony Robinson on Mick Aston and Time Team

Time Team, like Go With Noakes, was a programme that made you happy.

Good people doing interesting things in the British countryside. What more can you ask for?

Here Tony Robinson celebrates the long glory years of Time Team.

Note the mention for W.G. Hoskins and his The Making of the English Landscape.

No plans for a paperback edition of David Cameron's memoirs

Tim Walker writes about David Cameron's memoirs in his Mandrake diary column for The New European:

Booksellers tell me that there appear to be no immediate plans to publish For the Record in paperback. When I inquire, the former PM's factotum Laurence Mann confirms no publication date has been set. 

And who would want to read the paperback if they did read it?

The mess Britain finds it in is down to Cameron's strange mixture of cowardice and overconfidence.

As Tim writes:

Cameron appears to have withdrawn in terror to his garden shed and has not seen fit to emit a single Tweet since December 13, when his long-time rival Boris Johnson secured his Commons majority.

It's like I blogged back in October, the public schools' weakness is now the character of its old boys.

Jane Weaver: The Electric Mountain

BBC Manchester profiled Jane Weaver back in 2008:

Forget Jane Birkin, Nico and Julie Driscoll, singer-songwriter Jane Weaver is a unique and talented vocalist with her own distinctive style and her own dazzling collection of songs. 

Born in the same hospital as John Lennon, she had a strict catholic upbringing. Luckily for us, fate intervened and Weaver became seduced by the sight and sounds of Kate Bush bellowing Wuthering Heights on TOTP. 

"It was like a visitation" she recalls fondly. "She had this other worldly quality that was very emotive and very fairytale like. I immediately wanted to become a singer."

And in a 2014 review of her album 'The Silver Globe' on The Quietus told us that "The Electric Mountain' is cleverly based on a loop of Hawksind's 'Star Cannibal'."

Six of the Best 904

Christine Jardine argues that the Liberal Democrats should not hurry to elect a new leader.

"I have long argued that Labour members should ban the words 'Tory voters' from their vocabulary. If you start from the premise that someone a Tory voter is who someone is, rather than voting Tory being something they have done, you write them off as a potential vote for Labour." Emma Burnell makes a simple suggestion.

Stephen Parsons analyses why the Church of England is unable to respond adequately to revelations of abuse by its clergy.

Sarah Manavis examines the strange case of Paul Zimmer, the social media star who came back as a different person

"The ECB has a history of chasing golden geese. Remember how they courted Allen Stanford before the Texan billionaire was behind bars for fraud and the Indian Premier League had stolen a march on creating a T20 league that still dominates the domestic calendar. That disappointment still haunts a number of people at ECB HQ and hopefully The Hundred is not a delayed reaction built on jealousy rather than solid strategy." James Buttler believes The Hundred is a gamble that cricket does not have to take.

Jonathan Rowson says the challenge of chess - learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions - is also the challenge of life.

Walking a lost Roman road

John Rogers takes us from Theydon Bois on the Central Line out to Hobbs Cross to find a forgotten stretch of the Roman Road that once ran from London to Great Dunmow in Essex.

He also takes in part of the Essex Way long-distance path to get to Epping station.

Harry and Meghan have made the right decision

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Even if you support the monarchy - its powerlessness to resist Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament last September has made me less inclined to do so - you have to admit that Prince Harry has already outlived his function.

One of the American heiresses who married into and rescued the British aristocracy in the late 19th century is supposed to have referred to her two sons as "the heir and the spare".

Harry was always the spare, and now his brother has three children there is no need for one. His Uncle Andrew hardly offers an encouraging model of what becomes of members of his family who no longer have a function.

So there is every reason for Harry and Meghan to look for a new life. And the unrelenting racism of sections of the British press means that it was always likely to be in America.

One of the strongest arguments against the monarchy is that life is impossible for anyone who has to live under such a spotlight.

Few who have married into the royal family in recent decades have managed to stay there. Antony Armstrong-Jones, Mark Phillips, Diana Spencer and Sarah Ferguson have all come and gone.

And we should not forget that Harry himself was the victim of an act of extraordinary cruelty by 'the firm'.

As a 12-year-old he was made to walk behind his mother's coffin in a public funeral because it was thought that protocol demanded it or that it would make an affecting spectacle.

There is no doubt that Harry and Meghan have made the right decision.

Nick Harvey on Jo Swinson's "catastrophic mistake"

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Nick Harvey, former Liberal Democrat chief executive and for MP for North Devon, has a letter in the new Private Eye.

It concludes:

Though I had departed by then, the Lib Dem pivot on 28 October to back an election appears to have been taken that weekend under SNP pressure, and Labour left Labour no choice but to follow suit.

It was a catastrophic mistake, gift-wrapping everything wanted and handing it to him for Christmas... majority government, Brexit, and given the state of the Labour Party, potentially ten years in office. 

Defeated Lib Dem MPs, Jo Swinson among them, paid a heavy price for her disastrous miscalculation.

Drunk farmer who drove off on three wheels after crash was ‘traced in bush’ by police

Aberdeen's The Press and Journal wins our Headline of the Day Award, thanks to a nomination from that excellent firm HE Translations.

Norman Baker: Shipping Forecast

Thanks to Paul Walter on Liberal Democrat Voice for posting this track from Norman Baker's solo LP Staying Blue.

Paul also has news of an album involving another former Lib Dem MP - Greg Mulholland.

Layla Moran on being outed by the Mail on Sunday

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Last week Layla Moran came out as a pansexual, but the decision and its timing were made under duress.

Writing for the Independent she explains:

For the last few months, I had been hearing second hand that a few journalists had been attempting to make our relationship salacious or sensational. My understanding was that they had been calling around asking questions from as early as mid-October. 

Then, last Saturday the Mail on Sunday contacted me directly to tell me they were publishing something with less than 24 hours notice. I pleaded with them to wait. I hadn’t yet told my 92-year-old Grandma who reads their paper “just for the crossword” and I couldn’t bear the idea she would see it before anything else. 

After a series of phone calls over the course of the day, they agreed to not write it last week, but I still believed they would publish this Sunday with or without me. So I told my grandmother and decided to take back the control that I feared would be stolen from me. 

In the past few days, I have learnt that reporters have been offering money and doorstepping houses of an ex-boyfriend and former neighbours looking for information about either of us. All because I had the prerogative and confidence to tell our story myself. 

Today a follow-up story in the Mail on Sunday accuses me of trying to "weaponise" my sexuality. They have barely quoted anyone who met me, and many of the people quoted seem confused about what pansexuality actually is. 

The story frames my actions, my telling of my story, as a calculated plan. 

This couldn't be further from the truth. While I am proud of who I am, it was the media who I felt intimidated me into doing it at a time, not of my choosing.

Reading this you wonder why anyone would go into politics.

The Byrds: Eight Miles High

Released in 1966 and, says Wikipedia, influenced by Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane,Eight Miles High was influential in developing psychedelic rock, raga rock and psychedelic pop.

Critics - and this is still Wikipedia talking - often cite it as the first psychedelic rock song.

I would only add that, while this single version lasts just three and a half minutes, there are any number of live performances online that last several days.

GCSE in natural history being developed

Will Hazell claims an exclusive in the i:

A GCSE in natural history is being planned to help teenagers reconnect with wildlife by learning the names and characteristics of British plants and animals, i can reveal. 

i understands that a major UK exam board is actively working up proposals for the new qualification, which is the brainchild of broadcaster and nature writer Mary Colwell and backed by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. 

Ms Colwell said she was hopeful it could be taught in schools in England as early as September 2021.

Mary Colwell explained why she has been promoting this idea in a guest post for this blog last year:

It arose from a realisation that the world is unfamiliar to so many. Although we live here, breathe the air, eat what is grown in the earth and watch programmes that celebrate the natural world, many people know little about their surroundings. 

This was not the case 50 years ago. There has been a steady erosion of the rock that kept us stable on the planet - our understanding of nature and our place in it. 

A similar idea lay behind the publication of The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris and the subsequent campaign to get it into schools.

The Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert in the Stiperstones 4

So here is the last of these videos from the Orthodox monastery beneath the Stiperstones in Shropshire.

"It's jolly mysterious," said Dickie.

T.H. White vs the Oxford School of children's fantasy literature

Being a contrary child, I often took against writers I was meant to enjoy.

Arthur Ransome, for instance, was dispatched with a pincer movement involving Malcolm Saville and Richard Jefferies.

And once I discovered T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone I had no more time for C.S. Lewis.

I have just come across an article that suggests there may have been more behind this latter judgement than sheer cussedness.

In it, Rebecca Onion interviews Maria Sachiko Cecire about her book Re-Enchanted: The rise of children’s fantasy literature in the twentieth century.

In it she identifies an 'Oxford School' of children's fantasy literature led by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - led not just through their own writing but also through their influence on the development of the university's English Literature curriculum.

Sachiko Cecire says:

This curriculum at Oxford was really heavy on medieval literature, just at the moment when most other universities were going in the direction of modernism and the kinds of writing that we now associate with literary fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

At Oxford they were doubling down on medieval literature and also looking at it not just as examples for linguistic analysis - which was how it had been primarily studied in the 19th century under philology - but really looking at it as literature. Really seriously asking students to meditate on both the English medieval past and also this idea of magic and enchantment.

And she points out that Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman all studied this curriculum between 1956 and 1968.

Cambridge doesn't have the same legacy of children’s fantasy writers, but it did have T.H. White:

T.H. White was at Cambridge at a really interesting time, when there was still a medieval requirement, but right as they were ending it. If you compare his The Once and Future King to, say, The Lord of the Rings, they’re so different in the way they talk about the Middle Ages, with a different level of reverence. 

There’s anachronism in White’s writing, and pretty profound critiques of the warlike nature of the Middle Ages and of a lot of the nostalgia for that period. Whereas Tolkien and his students tend to be a lot more reverent of that material.

This may explain why White's writing is so much warmer than that of the Oxford School.

The Sword in the the Stone is funny and sad, wise and silly, steeped in history and turns anachronism into an art form.

Free school meals and Russell Group universities

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One of the statistics that those interested in equality of access to the best of higher education look at is the number of pupils receiving free school meals who gain a place at a Russell Group university.

The other day I realised that I had done exactly that in 1978. Yes, I was once a poster boy for social mobility.

Though the Russell Group was not formed until 1994, and the University of York did not join it until 2012, a place at York was certainly sought after when I was taking my A levels.

One of the problems poorer teenagers like me face is a lack of knowledge.

I realised when I applied to go to university that we were going to have to spend serious money on train fares when I went for interview.

The arrangement I came to with my Mum was that I would put the pound-a-week pocket money she gave me towards the fares and rely on my Saturday job (a whopping £3.50) for spending money.

It would be hard to check now, but I seem to remember that I later found out that the county council would have paid my fares to go to interviews because I got free school meals.

But no one at school knew this or thought to tell me if they did.

When I tweeted about this the other day, a much more recent student who had also achieved the same feat told me that every bursary he received came because he heard about it by chance. There was no communication about them from the university.

From which I conclude if you want to see social mobility in education then poor students need more information and schools and universities need to care about it more.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. So if you have views on what the Liberal Democrats should do next, why not share them here?

As you can see from this list of the 10 most recent guests posts, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects beyond the Lib Dems

If you would like to write a guest post yourself, please drop me an email so we can discuss your idea.

• Social Liberal Forum conference promotes big ideas - Helen Flynn
• For Liberalism to succeed we must embrace all of its creed - Patrick Maxwell
• Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove - Francis Young
• Joseph Merrick in the cigar factory - Joanne Vigor-Mungovin
• Why we need a GCSE in Natural History - Mary Colwell
• Three unlikely heroes from Grantham suggest a future for smaller towns - Brynley Heaven
• Political parties must be rooted in their communities once again - Mike Gayler
• Why am I a Liberal Democrat - Simon Beard
• How the Revoke policy harmed Lib Dem chances - Michael Mullaney
• Unionism is making the Scottish Lib Dems irrelevant - Mark Stephens

Six of the Best 903

"Take the train that derailed at Hatfield on 17 October 2000, a tragedy in which four people died. That led to huge media interest, massive upheaval on the railways, and, ultimately, as the renationalisation of Railtrack, whose failings had caused the crash. Yet more than twice as many people will have died on the roads that day. Nothing was written about those deaths." Chris Sharp asks why the government has accepted that it’s OK to kill or be killed on our roads.

Patrick Kidd experiences Christmas.in prison and meets the Revd Jonathan Aitken's in his new career as a chaplain.

"The reason some people got their collective knickers in a twist about Stormzy, and the BBC’s A Christmas Carol and Worzel Gummidge is because they are either ignorant or prejudiced, or both." Drew Gray on race and Christmas TV.

"Perhaps, for you, it was way back on the first day of the Premier League season that the doubts set in, when Raheem Sterling’s armpit was deemed offside in Manchester City’s game against West Ham." Rory Smith dissects the VAR system.

Bob Fischer celebrates the reissue of Usborne's book on ghosts.

Nicholas Whyte reminds us that the mother of Captain von Trapp's children was English. (Lord Bonkers adds: If she had lived they would have gone to boarding school and not been cavortin' round the Alps dressed in old curtains.)

Neal Ascherson remembers Jonathan Miller

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In the current London Review of Books Neal Ascherson remembers his friend Jonathan Miller:

I first met Jonathan’s knees. This was because Cambridge sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess. Now, as we trudged across the great Gromboolian plain of the 1950s, they had given up the struggle. 

Modish undergraduates perched on the arms. Jonathan, new to the place, tried to sit down and slid backwards into the depths. All I could see was these twin gatepost knees towering up. And then, peering over them, I saw the head of red curls and two urgent eyes searching – as they always did – for information.

Liberal England in 2019: Part 4

October

There were calls for the reopening of the Market Harborough to Northampton railway line and I shared my photos of the last train on it from 1981.

I photographed a striking shop window display in Nottingham.

We laughed at Ann Widdecombe in the 1990s, but her cartoon image pointed the way for future Conservative politicians:

Since then we have had Boris Johnson as a minor P.G. Wodehouse character, Jacob Rees-Mogg as Lord Snooty's grandfather and Geoffrey Cox as the famous actor you can't remember seeing in anything. 

These personae are a calculated armour designed to disguise their wearers' politics and shield them from conventional criticism.

I don't want to worry you about the hard left, but they grew up regarding concerns about race, gender or sexuality as a distraction from the class struggle and learnt nothing from Michael Foot's defeat in 1983.

Public schools used to pride themselves on the character of their former pupils. Today it is their greatest weakness.

Did you know that Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone was dramatised by the BBC in 1969? With some help from David Wood, I rediscovered this production.

November

I celebrated Auberon Waugh - not something your average Liberal Democrat blogger would do - and Beeston Weir on the River Trent.

Kenneth Clarke had his say on David Cameron:

"He had the style and presentational skills, but he could never answer the question - what does he believe in? What is he doing it for? The real answer was he was doing it because it was fun and he had risen effortlessly to the top."

Wandering around Leicester I came across the lock and weir at Freeman's Meadow and a tram shelter that never saw a tram.

Albert and Squeaky, the (separteley) abandoned puppy and kitten who are friends gave us some solace in dark times.

And a bus ride took me to South Kilworth and a ravishing derelict house.

December

The Methodist church at Higham Ferrers was fun and I mourned the death of Bob Willis.

Tickencote church was protected and Ironbridge power station was demolished.

A radio programme hailed John Arlott as "One of the great English radical Liberals of the 20th century" and I discovered an article by Peter Sloman on the Liberalism on the left behind:

If the party’s sociological heartland is middle-class and cosmopolitan, its geographical heartland lies in the windswept constituencies of the Celtic fringe. It was here that Nonconformist farmers and shopkeepers stuck with the party through the 1940s and 50s, and that the party found it easiest to turn votes into seats during the 1970s and 80s. 

The Lib Dem showing led to a spate of great guests posts, including one from Leicestershire's own Michael Mullaney:

Seats where campaigners and candidates had worked for years, winning councils were ignored in favour of seats where we often had no or very few councillors.

The year ended with everyone attacking Iain Duncan Smith, but I said George Osborne was the real villain.

Goodbye to Neil Innes

Another hero of mine who has always been there is gone. Neil Innes died at his home in France yesterday.

As the New York Times says:

Mr. Innes, a multi-instrumentalist, was a particular type of songwriter: one who excelled at satirical songs and parodies of other people’s music but who could also write a pretty good straight song. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. 

In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote its biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968. 

In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but made films, including the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.

His "I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn" here has entered the language.

Responsible Child and moves to raise the age of criminal responsibility

If the test of a good drama is that you find yourself thinking about it days later then Responsible Child passes that test.

It is quite the saddest play I can remember seeing - like a version of Oliver Twist with no Mr Brownlow.

And I really think that Billy Barratt's depiction of Ray is the best performance by a child actor I have ever seen.

In an interview the director of Responsible Child, Nick Holt, said he wants to highlight Britain's low age of criminal responsibility and start a discussion: :

I think it’s interesting that very few people know that the criminal age is 10. I think that even fewer know that this is from a piece of law since 1963. If you or I had a mental age of a 10-year-old, we’d be deemed unfit to try. It’s an extraordinary, extraordinary hangover from a very old piece of law.

Twenty-five years ago everyone knew the age of criminal responsibility was 10 because of the murder of James Bulger and demanded that it should remain so.

In any new debate the images from that trial may prove stronger than those of poor, wronged Ray, but there are signs of movement on the issue.

A report in The Times (£) last Friday said a paper from the Youth Justice Board is calling for a review of the age of criminal responsibility in the hope that it will be raised from 10 to at least 12.

It also wants responsibility for children who get into trouble with the police to be passed from the Ministry of Justice to the Department for Education.

The same issue of the paper carried a letter (£) from two consultant psychiatrists, a professor of psychology of cognitive neuroscience, and the crossbench peer the Earl of Listowel.

It says of a child of 10 charged in an adult court:

his extreme youth, continued brain and cognitive development and likely adverse childhood experiences mean that he is unlikely to be truly fit to plead to the charges and to conduct his own defence in line with his human right to a fair trial. 

It goes on to say that such a child defendant may show the 'blanked out' traumatised presentation depicted in Responsible Child.

The writers of the letter ground their case for change in neuroscience and how the brain development of a 10- or 12-year-old differs from that of an adult.

Will England and Wales be able to have a civilised debate and raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 12?

I hope so, though what happens to young offenders under any new regime will need to be scrutinised.

Liberal England in 2019: Part 3

July

Exploring the University of Northampton's new Waterside campus, I came across a restored railway engine shed.

I found another tin tabernacle in Leicester. You can imagine how excited I was.

No, the Victorians did not photograph corpses as part of family groups.

I was there when England beat Pakistan at Headingley in the 1979 cricket world cup.

You know who are to blame for the rise of Boris Johnson? Have I Got News for You and Ian Hislop, that's who.

Bryan Magee, who popularised Karl Popper's thought in Britain, died:

When I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack and Ed Randall's Dictionary of Liberal Thought, I had no idea that Magee had been evacuated from Hoxton to Market Harborough during the war and  lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

August

Ian Hislop's tribute to Christopher Booker revealed the problem with Private Eye's view of the world - or so I argued.

As Whaley Bridge cowered beneath a dam that threatened to collapse, I remember meeting the former Lancashire captain Jack Bond there:

Ray Illingworth, who was born in the same year as Bond, had just come out of retirement to captain Yorkshire at the age of 50. 

I asked Bond if he had plans to do the same thing with Lancasthire. 

"No, he replied. "I've got more sense."

I mourned the disappearance of the bookshops on Nottingham's Mansfield Road.

The row over Leicestershire's Bradgate Park rumbled on.

Plans for anti-sex toilets in a Welsh seaside town turned out to have been submitted in error - or so the council claimed.

September

Someone suggested that the song that was number one on your 14th birthday defines your life. In my case the top three UK singles that day were all about death.

Why does no one listen to me?:

There is no reason for the Liberal Democrats to hurry to allow a general election. 

And there is a very good reason why we should put if off for a good while: Boris Johnson is desperate for it to take place soon.

John Major gave the eulogy at Paddy Ashdown's memorial service.

There was a battle to keep McDonald's out of Rutland.

I visited 78 Derngate in Northampton - the only house Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed in England.

Visiting the Nottinghamshire village of Farnsfield, I photographed the grave of a deeply obscure writer called Vaughan Wilkins.

The commuter cats who became fur-mous

Over on BBC News you will find an article under this title on cats that frequent public transport.

Scroll down and you will find they have used (with permission and a credit) a cropped version of the photo above, which I took on Oakham station 10 years ago.

The House Of Love: Shine On

This was the first single from The House of Love.

It failed to trouble the top 100 on its release in 1987, yet somehow became well known and still sounds good today.

Blame George Osborne for Universal Credit not Iain Duncan Smith

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My Twitter feed is exploding with outrage at Iain Duncan Smith's knighthood. Why should the architect of the hated Universal Credit be honoured?

But that outrage has been turned on the wrong target.

Universal Credit, which takes six benefits to which working-age people may be eligible and merges them into one payment, has long been advocated by welfare experts.

The problem lies not with the system but on the government's unwillingness to provide enough funds to make it work humanely.

Remember that IDS resigned from the cabinet over this issue in 2016.

Here is part of his resignation letter:

Throughout these years, because of the perilous public finances we inherited from the last Labour administration, difficult cuts have been necessary. I have found some of these cuts easier to justify than others but aware of the economic situation and determined to be a team player I have accepted their necessity. 

You are aware that I believe the cuts would have been even fairer to younger families and people of working age if we had been willing to reduce some of the benefits given to better-off pensioners but I have attempted to work within the constraints that you and the chancellor set. 

I have for some time and rather reluctantly come to believe that the latest changes to benefits to the disabled and the context in which they've been made are a compromise too far. While they are defensible in narrow terms, given the continuing deficit, they are not defensible in the way they were placed within a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers. They should have instead been part of a wider process to engage others in finding the best way to better focus resources on those most in need. 

I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest. 

Too often my team and I have been pressured in the immediate run up to a budget or fiscal event to deliver yet more reductions to the working age benefit bill. There has been too much emphasis on money saving exercises and not enough awareness from the Treasury, in particular, that the government's vision of a new welfare-to-work system could not be repeatedly salami-sliced. 

It is therefore with enormous regret that I have decided to resign. 

It is George Osborne who should be the target of Twitter's outrage tonight.

Liberal England in 2019: Part 2

April

"I am a Liberal. I want to be able to get on a train at St Pancras and take a pork pie anywhere I damn well please." I had a go at those elitist Remoaners you here about.

And I got all philosophical on my readers' assess: "Things are transient: we are more permanent."

I found the site of Stamford's medicinal spring beside the Welland.

Donald Trump was invited to pay a state visit to Britain and I pointed out that we used to know how to deal with such unsavoury visitors. Read how the people of London dealt with General von Haynau.

The Independent Group or Change UK or... was already in trouble:

The overwhelming impression the Tiggers give is one of amateurism. Everything had been done in a hurry and nothing has been done very well. 

But then I suppose if you are parachuted into a safe seat, as so many Tigger MPs were, you are likely to acquire an exaggerated sense of your own skill as a politician.

The Edwardian Liberal John Hobson was in the news as commentators rushed to condemn Jeremy Corbyn for contributing a foreword to a reprint of his book Imperialism because of its antisemitism. But there is more to Hobson than that.

May

I continued my exploration of the place of bombsites in post-war British cinema by looking at The Heart Within - an early treatment of race featuring a teenage David Hemmings.

Three more efforts by my own person Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold came to light.

The residents of Bishop's Castle turned to civil disobedience to protect their bus service.

I worked out that our continued poor performance in Eurovision is not down to Brexit but to Simon Cowell:

Back in the day, the international stars who did Eurovision for the UK had their own shows on Saturday evening television. 

Today those slots are filled by reality shows, so it is their competitors and winners who are known to the British public and who get chosen for the contest. 

As they are unknown across the rest of Europe and often not great singers, it is little surprise that they do so badly.

Richard Beckinsale is remembered with a mural in his home town of Beeston.

June

I posted a video from the New Economics Foundation that explains why house prices are so high. Clue: It's not the fault of the planning laws.

Did you know Boy George's uncle was the Catholic priest in Market Harborough. I got it from a taxi driver who got it from two nuns.

William Simons, the first actor I ever saw on stage, died.

I visited an exhibition on the Mod scene in Leicester and Nottingham.

The Park is a Victorian housing estate close to the centre of Nottingham:

It feels like the sort of place Soviet spies would be sent to live after capture to wait until an exchange to be arranged. Their lives would be pleasant, but if they tried to escape they would be shot. 

It feels like Patrick McGoohan’s Village transferred to central Nottingham.

My post went on to prove it is actually in the hands of a foreign power.

The Lib Dems have not been tribalist enough, I argued in contrarian fashion. And I still think I was right.

Then it was back to my memories with a post on the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985 - and Nigel Tufnell.

The Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert in the Stiperstones 3

Time for a third video from the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert in the Stiperstones, what with it being Christmas and all - though not in the Orthodox calendar.

Liberal England in 2019: Part 1

January

I began the year blogging about a 1993 council by-election on the Isle of Dogs. I said it was an Awful Warning to the mainstream parties about what can happen when they talk up the chances of the far right.

Mike Brearley's new book offered some entertaining consecutive entries in its index: Barrington, Ken and Bartók, Béla; Hogg, Quintin and Hogg, Rodney; Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Woakes, Chris.

"One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries."

So Karl Marx once said. I took it as a criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's position on such matters.

I took Charles I back to the well at Tur Langton that he last visited when fleeing Naseby in 1645.

Karl Popper, particularly his Paradox of Toleration, was suddenly popular with the left.

The Liberal Democrats kept calling no Corbyn to show some backbone on Brexit. But I argued that he had always been in favour of it and that it was Labour MPs who needed stiffening.


February

I posted a couple of photos of the remains of Stourpaine and Durweston Halt on the Somerset & Dorset that I took in 1982. The sign has since been moved to a local park.

Lady Bay Bridge is a little way downstream of Trent Bridge cricket ground. In 1982, I discovered, it served as the bridge over which Karla entered West Berlin in the BBC adaptation of John le Carré's Smiley's People.

I reviewed Jonathan Coe's Middle England for Liberator.

The launch of The Independent Group - later to become Change UK and several other things - struck me as being more sad than hopeful:

Rather than the launch of a new movement, I see seven individuals who have succumbed to the hard left's perennial tactic of making life so unpleasant for those who oppose them that they eventually walk away from the fight.

March

Now firmly in my anecdotage, I blogged about the Birmingham Northfield by-election of October 1982.

Buying a new cooker in South Wigston, I came across a striking old shop.

In Liberator I reviewed the BBC series A Very English Scandal:

So while Whishaw was wholly convincing as Scott the fashion model in Sixties Dublin and touching in the scenes that showed the failure of his marriage, we never heard the tones in the real Scott’s voice that told us he had spent time among the horse-riding classes and desperately wanted to pass as one of them.

I formally proposed Calder's Sixth Law of Politics:

All Liberal Democrat leadership elections are reruns of Steel vs Pardoe.

and Scott Walker died.

I found myself becoming intrigued by the treatment of children and bombsites in British films.

On a similar note, it turned out that the authorities planning the restoration of the Palace of Westminster do not have to worry about finding the bodies of climbing boys in its chimneys.

Six of the Best 902

"Modern medicine is increasingly called upon to address a spiritual, perhaps even economic and political, malaise." Sophie McBain looks at how loneliness became an epidemic.

Too many of our town centres have become hollowed-out, windswept deserts, argues Nicholas Boys Smith, but if we make them fit for people they will return

Lenore Skenazy on the worst and best Let Grow parenting moments of 2019: "Hard-boiled lawyers made sure no kids could participate in the University of California-Berkeley's campus Easter egg hunt without parents first signing a waiver acknowledging the potential risk of 'catastrophic injuries including paralysis and death'."

Johannes E. Riutta reviews books about the British government's extraordinary war on badgers.

"This is the best Christmas single of the 1970s, and that’s an objective fact," says Alwyn Turner of Wombling Merry Christmas as he concludes his month-by-month survey of the charts in 1974. Read how the Wombles brand was damaged that winter by a plethora of inferior stage shows.

Richard Williams pays tribute to Martin Peters.

Steam at Derby in the summer of 1958

From the blurb on YouTube:

Here we see three very different types, starting with something of a surprise - an ex-GCR LNER class A15 Pacific tank (no. 69816 of Lincoln shed) passing through with a pair of six-wheeled vans and three non-corridor coaches. 

It's followed - to the great excitement of the Locospotters at the lineside - by BR class 7 "Britannia" class Pacific no. 70021 "Morning Star" on an express and, finally, a true "Derby" machine in the form of LMS 2P class 4-4-0 no 40416 shunting a solitary coach.

Prominent lawyer Jolyon Maugham clubs fox to death while wearing kimono

It's not very Christmassy, but the Guardian supplies our Headline of the Day.

On a happier note...

A year of decision: Lord Bonkers in 2019

It is customary, or so he assures me, for Lord Bonkers to spend those lazy days between Christmas and the new year looking back on his adventures over the past year.

So here goes...


January

When you've had a hard day wandering around a library in a suit, you need refreshment. pic.twitter.com/Ayt7ro4ET5

— CFB Clips (@CFBClips) January 11, 2019

A reader alerted me to this Double Diamond television commercial from the 1960s, which was shot in the library of the National Liberal Club.

He suggested, surely correctly, that Lord Bonkers had arranged the filming to alleviate one of the club's regular financial crises.


February

His lordship paid tribute to Paddy Ashdown:

The obituaries will tell you how Sir Paddy Ashplant fused the community politics promoted by the Association of Liberal Councillors with his expertise in jungle warfare to win a string of by-elections and raise the Liberal Democrats from the ruins of Steel’s grand strategy. 

What they will not tell you is how my domestic staff loved his visits (Cook would frequently announced that he made her “come over all unnecessary”); how he stood his round in the Bonkers’ Arms and entertained the locals with his favourite joke; how he allowed the Well-Behaved Orphans to question him for hours about his time in the Special Boat Service (they were always particularly interested in the escape techniques he had been taught lest he be captured by the enemy).

He also met Nick Clegg:

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested." 

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons."

April

The old boy, who is far more trenchant than I would ever be, was not taken with our new recruit Chuka Umunna:

I curled up with a pamphlet he has just published. It soon transpired that he is one of these hearty public school types who want to send the nation’s youth off to camp. Sleeping under canvass; washing up in a bucket of cold water; doing PT with your shirt off… You know the type. 

By the time I had finished reading, it I was clear that the man is worse than that. He wants to haul in the country every teenager off to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness. Why in Gladstone’s name are our people delivering for him?

May

What is the reason for Lord Bonkers' longevity?

He always talks about his annual bathe the spring of eternal life that bursts from the hillside above the former HQ of the Association of Liberal Councillors and the cordial sold (at a steep price) by the Elves of Rockingham Forest.

But a reader suggested another explanation.


June

Milkshaking was the talk of the summer. As so often, Lord Bonkers was there first:

A journalist rings to ask what I think of this modern tactic of pouring milkshakes over far-right politicians. I reply that the milkshake is an American import we could well do without and that if one is going to dispose of it then tipping it over a passing Fascist seems as good a way as any. 

Warming to my theme, I recall that I was once obliged to sit next to Oswald Mosley at dinner. Things were distinctly frosty between us from the get-go and when he made a disobliging remark about Herbert Samuel I tipped my knickerbocker glory over his head.

September

Lord Bonkers played a prominent part in our victory in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election:

What a splendid night! It was touch and go at the start of the count, but when the boxes from Ystradgynlais were opened it became clear we had triumphed. We toasted our victory in the finest Welsh champagne and sang our Liberal anthems: ‘The Land’, ‘Woad’ and ‘Cwm Off It’. 

One pleasure of this contest has been rediscovering the delightful countryside of Mid Wales. More than once by memory has been jogged by places I saw in the last campaign I fought here – I went through Three Cocks in the 1985 by-election.

He also contributed his customary foreword to the Liberator Songbook:

Welcome to all our new members! I hope you enjoy your first Glee Club and, a word of reassurance, please don’t worry: It’s Meant To Be Like This. 

I have already met many of you when you attended one of my basic training camps on the shores of Rutland Water. The party has signed up so many new recruits recently that I had to send out for extra tents. 

After a week of training in committee room theory and practice, Focus delivery and guerrilla warfare – all conducted under the beady eye of Sergeant Major Carmichael – new members need fear nothing they will encounter as a Liberal Democrat activist.

November

Defections to the Liberal Democrats were all the rage, so the old monster did his best to encourage them:

When Jo ‘Gloria’ Swanson tipped me the wink that we would be parading newly converted Conservative MPs to the Liberal Democrat Conference, I naturally decided to join the fun. I hired a van from Oakham’s leading Chinese laundry and bade a brace of gamekeepers join me; we motored up to Town and lay in wait outside the Carlton Club. 

In the middle of the afternoon a red-faced character sporting an Eton tie stumbled down the steps. I thumbed through Jane’s Conservative MPs and identified him as fair quarry. The gamekeepers moved in, and when he proved resistant to their orders a tap on the napper with an orchard doughty rendered him more pliable. He was bundled into the van and buckled inside the large wicker hamper with which it had come equipped.

Merry Christmas to all our readers

From Pleasley Colliery to Bolsover

Two days ago we went on a walk from Sutton-in-Ashfield to Pleasley Colliery.

Today, with the same guides, we carry on from Pleasley to Bolsover.

Lindsay Hoyle calls for John Bercow to be given peerage

Embed from Getty Images

There is something very shabby about Boris Johnson's act. His refusal to follow precedent and grant John Bercow the customary peerage given to retiring Speakers is just one more example.

So I am pleased to see that Bercow's successor Lindsay Hoyle has called for the precedent top be followed.

The Evening Standard quotes Hoyle as saying:

"My view is every speaker has been offered a peerage, so custom and practice says that's what's always happened. 

"It doesn't have to be taken but, personally, I think if that has always happened then we should continue with that. 

"I think it should be offered to him. He has served the House, he served for 10 years, he did some great things. And that's what makes the difference."

Good on Sir Lindsay. I was afraid that he would be one of those speakers who comes over as a character but is in reality a bit of a pussy cat towards the government. But maybe there is more to him than that.

For he has played down reports that he will ensure Big Ben will ring the UK out of the European Union on 31 January:

"What I'm willing to do is allow the House to make that decision. 

"But the story suddenly was, 'Lindsay Hoyle was going to bong Big Ben himself', by the sounds of it."

Steeleye Span: Gaudete

I was in Sainsbury's this time last year when Gaudete came on. I groaned.

Then I realised:

1. I really like it;
2. It was then 45 years since it had been in the charts;
3. A lot of the people around me weren't even born then so it will be a novelty to some readers.

Wikipedia explains that Gaudete dates from the 16th century and is doubly rare in being a UK hit single (it reached no. 14 at Christmas 1973, trailing behind Slade and Wizzard) that was a capella and sung in Latin.

Responsible Child and moral philosophy

Lord Bonkers' Well-Behaved Orphans were originally a bit of a joke against myself.

Because of an unhappy period in my own childhood, I used to be overfond of Oliver Twist and other tales of wronged children.

I have largely cured myself of that taste, but still watched Responsible Child this week.

There is no doubt where the play's sympathies lay, but as Jasper Rees said in the Telegraph:

there was no one making the case for trying children in adult courts. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t a good one to make.

Another Telegraph article, this one behind its paywall, reveals:

Lord Navnit Dholakia, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Lords, has campaigned for a Private Members’ Bill that would see 11 and 12-year-olds tried in a new court “specially designated for young people” to help them understand what is going on. 

“Psychologists and others have found that [children below 12] are not capable of understanding the seriousness of what they’ve done, it passes beyond them,” he says. “I’m very keen that there is a rehabilitative process.”

The play was inspired in part by the case of 14-year-old Jerome Ellis, who was sentenced to six years in detention for his part in the killing of his stepfather.

The writers do not seem to have strayed far from the facts of that case. A report this week in the Sun said the boy's teachers:

gave witness statements which revealed Jerome was often hungry and that he was a young carer for his mother and his siblings.

By making Raphael - or Ray - only 12 in Responsible Child they tipped the scales a little, but that change may have been made because they found such an extraordinary actor of that age - Billy Barratt - to cast.

You could also mention that, like Oliver Twist himself, Ray sometimes appeared to be from a higher social class than those around him.

One thing that interested me is that the play raised an issue in moral philosophy that has always troubled me.

Altruism is sometimes presented as the greatest good, but to me it is not necessarily a good thing. In the play, Ray took part in the killing of his stepfather out of love and concern for his older brother.

It turns out that one can do wrong out of love for others just as much as one can do wrong out of self-love.

I usually attribute that insight to Joseph Butler, though I have no idea where he said it.

Finally, a Trivial Fact of the Day. As has been widely reported, Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens.

Six of the Best 901

You know Britain's problems? Chris Cook argues that they are all David Cameron's fault.

Stian Westlake says the Conservatives' new concern for declining towns has not been thought through: "The problem is not the politics: it’s the economics. Many of the political pundits seeking to Make Towns Great Again have got themselves into a terrible confusion both about the economic problem they’re trying to solve, and about what policies will work to fix it."

"Italy has closed down its psychiatric hospitals, unlocked the doors of secure units, stopped restraining patients and recently became the world’s first nation to end use of forensic psychiatric hospitals." Ian Birrell looks at an alternative approach to mental illness.

Nicholas Whyte celebrates the fourth and final series of Blake's 7.

"Other than his striking leonine hair, the other defining characteristic possessed by Miles was an inveterate disregard for authority, which he displayed on and off the board." Paul Lam remembers Tony Miles, Britain's first chess grandmaster, who died in 2001 aged only 46.

Tim Worthingon loves Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish.

From Sutton-in-Ashfield to Pleasley Colliery

A drop of East Midlands disused railway goodness.

We are taken on a walk along the track bed of the disused line from Sutton-in-Ashfield to Pleasley Colliery.

Where do the Lib Dems go from here? Give your views in a guest post for Liberal England

In the week since the election I have posted four excellent guest posts - the last four in the list below.

If you would like to write a guest post yourself, please drop me an email first so we can discuss your idea.

Here are the 10 most recent guests post on Liberal England:

• Social Liberal Forum conference promotes big ideas - Helen Flynn
• For Liberalism to succeed we must embrace all of its creed - Patrick Maxwell
• Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove - Francis Young
• Joseph Merrick in the cigar factory - Joanne Vigor-Mungovin
• Why we need a GCSE in Natural History - Mary Colwell
• Three unlikely heroes from Grantham suggest a future for smaller towns - Brynley Heaven
• Political parties must be rooted in their communities once again - Mike Gayler
• Why am I a Liberal Democrat - Simon Beard
• How the Revoke policy harmed Lib Dem chances - Michael Mullaney
• Unionism is making the Scottish Lib Dems irrelevant - Mark Stephens

A walk from St.Paul's through Islington to Highgate

John Rogers takes us from St. Paul's tube station to a haunted pub at Highgate.

Six of the Best 900

"This is a time to proclaim centre-left values, and to try to unite the anti-Tory vote in key seats for a Liberal Democrat surge in 2024." Will Barter says the Liberal Democrats should forget about equidistance.

Paul Pettinger argues that concentrating on trying to win soft Conservative votes will always lead the Liberal Democrats to failure.

Dan Jackson explains why the Labour voters of North East England are different: "What made the unions of the Great Northern Coalfield so distinctive was how cautious and non-confrontational they were – in sharp contrast to other areas, notably South Wales and Yorkshire."

"South Africa’s extraordinary scrum-half, the bottle-blonde Faf de Klerk - out of Miss Piggy by former teen idol David van Day - may be only 5ft 6ins but he weighs 14 stone and isn’t scared to kick the sand back in the bigger boys’ faces." Team spirit leaves Jonathan Meades cold.

Adam Scovell visits W.G. Sebald's grave.

"Diana Dors simply excels as the horrific Mrs Wickens, in just one of many demonstrations of how Swindon’s first sex symbol embraced unflattering character roles once she shed her blonde bombshell status." James Gent introduces The Amazing Mr Blunden, which Talking Pictures TV is showing at Christmas.