Would you like to write a guest post for Liberal England?

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England.

As you can see from this list of the 10 most recent ones, I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects.

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

• "You're all the same" - Katie Barron
• The trouble with Seamus Milne - Tim Hall
• Save the University of Leicester's Vaughan Centre for Lifelong Learning - Sally Birch
• The peculiar contradictions of Scotland’s Named Person scheme - Simon Calvert
• The straight line of racist politics from 19th century South Carolina to Donald Trump - Phil Noble
• How can a Liberal talk to a hate addict? - Katie Barron
• The Second World War families who took evacuees into their homes - Gillian Mawson
• What happened to the 8th Lincolns at the battle of Loos? - Nigel Atter
• The importance of respectful relationships between teachers and pupils - Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger
• The Lib Dems and Brexit: How a shot in the arm became a shot in the foot - Neville Farmer

The Left Banke: Just Walk Away Renée

In Britain we know Just Walk Away Renée from the great Four Tops version.

But theirs was not the original recording of the song and nor did they have the original or biggest hit with it across most of the world.

Just Walk Away Renée was written by Michael Brown, Bob Calilli, and Tony Sansone for the band The Left Banke. Brown, then aged 16, was a member of the band and played harpsichord on this recording.

Released in July 1966, the band's version reached number 5 in the US singles chart but was not a hit in Britain.

Alexei Sayle explains why Blair and Brown were like a comedy double act

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Today's Guardian has an article by Simon Parkin about comedy double acts and how they break up.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Lee and Herring. Newman and Baddiel. They are all there.

I was reminded of an old column by Alexei Sayle, where he discussed the same subject.

It dates from 2005, and it contains an observation on the politics of the day so penetrating that I remember it today.

For Sayle wrote:

In trying to fathom the personal dynamic that exists between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it occurs to me that the closest show business equivalent is that funny business version of the abusive marriage - the comedy double act.

Over the years I have studied double acts. Although I have always been a lone-wolf solo act, the original Comic Strip Club touring line-up was me, and three pairs of comedians. So I have always been well placed to witness the internal affinities and tensions that power these co-dependent comedy relationships. 

In the early days, they start out in hope and a deep and profound friendship. After all, the members of a double act will spend a lot more time with each other than they'll spend with their partners and families. In the early days there is also an equality between the two performers, but then, as they start to become successful, things almost always begin to go wrong. 

From my experience, one member of the double act inevitably begins to get more attention than the other. The neglected one may indeed be less talented, or they may just be less fashionable, or less adept at smooching journalists. 

Whatever the reason, they begin to sink into bitterness and rancour, while the performer who's regarded as the talented one starts to believe that they are truly better than their partner and begins to adopt a "I can't help it if I'm more talented" attitude. They start to waste a great deal of time fighting with each other, to gain tiny crumbs of status over their sidekick. 

But there is also poison contained within the unhappy realisation that maybe the two of them still need each other, they both fear and suspect that there is some gestalt that exists, that what they do together is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The result is that they are locked into working night and day with somebody they now hate.

As his short stories have shown, Sayle is a remarkably good writer.

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"On the 19th of January a group of men described as being of a certain calibre and dressed up like Penguins filed into one of the most expensive hotels in the country feeling mightily pleased with themselves." Jane Chelliah argues that the President's Club members' sense of entitlement was class based.

It isn't public versus private, it is small versus big, says David Boyle.

Nick Wates on the Battle of Tolmers Square - with the help of some remarkable photographs. In the 1970s these Camden properties were occupied after the council attempted to evict local residents and sell the land off to property developers.

Amanda Ripley discovers that it is not easy being a child prodigy.

"Le Guin never stopped insisting on the beauty and subversive power of the imagination. Fantasy and speculation weren’t only about invention; they were about challenging the established order." Julie Phillips celebrates the subversive imagination of Ursula Le Guin.

"The circumstances of productive boredom and limited horizons that gave him his vocation have gone, and will not return."  Andrew Harrison pays tribute to Mark E. Smith.

The railway from Hastings to Ashford: Part 1

In 1967 my family had a caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in Sussex. And I do remember the summer of love: All You Need is Love by the Beatles and (rather less cool) Up, Up and Away by the Johnny Mann Singers were always playing.

What I also remember, on the journey there, is that people were on the train at Ashford collecting signatures on a petition to save the line across Romney Marsh to Hastings.

It worked. The line is still open today.

This is the first part of a film made in 1987 that will tell you all about it and also about the branch to Dungeness.

Two prominent Lib Dems join the Labour Party (and a third is rejected)

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In the past few days I have seen reports of two prominent Liberal Democrats leaving us for the Labour Party.

• Stephen Knight, a long-serving councillor in Richmond upon Thames who has also been a member of the London Authority in his time.
• Chris Foote Wood, a veteran councillor and parliamentary and Euro candidate perhaps best known for being Victoria Wood's brother.

Like local by-elections, these defections are close to meaningless individually but can form a significant pattern over time.

And if good people are giving up on the Liberal Democrats then we should be worried at the pattern we currently see.

Mind you, changing parties is not as easy as it sounds.

Darren Fower, a Lib Dem councillor in Peterborough who thought he had joined Labour, has been told by its constituency party that he is not welcome.

Norman Lamb on the NHS in crisis

Read more about the Liberal Democrat campaign to save our NHS.

Naked man arrested in Adam and Eve Street

Only in Market Harborough:

Police arrested a naked man in a town centre street at lunchtime today. 

Officers were called after members of the public saw the man walking about in Adam and Eve Street, in Market Harborough.

The Leicester Mercury has the bare essentials.

Fresh light on the siege of Weston-under-Redcastle

Many thanks to a reader for sending me the image below and alerting me to this video.

I blogged about the siege of Weston of Weston-under-Redcastle a few years ago and attracted some interesting comments from people with family connections to the events of 1968 in the Shropshire village.

The newsreel commentary here makes it sound more serious than the article I quoted in that first post as it tells us the gunman had his wife and four children with him for the 17 days of the siege.

We used to think that not rushing into such situations with guns blazing was the British way of doing things and thus superior.

In 1975 the authorities spent a week persuading a Provisional IRA gang holed up in a London flat to give themselves up and release their hostages.

Then in 1980 the BBC interrupted the snooker to show us the SAS storming the Iranian embassy and the modern world was born.

Why Enid Blyton is responsible for Brexit

When someone tried to blame Ladybird Books for the rise of Daniel Hannan, I waded in to defend them. Because Ladybird were probably the most progressive publishers of children's book of their era.

I ended that post with:

There are other children's books you can blame for the Brexit cast of mind - see my own exposé of Enid Blyton's proto fascism on the Guardian website - but Ladybird Books are innocent (in more than one sense of the word).

But Ella Risbridger had already pinned the blame for Brexit in an article for Prospect:

The Famous Five rarely face any kind of consequences. For anything. The Famous Five do what they want. The Famous Five go where they like. Footpath signs are nothing to them. They just turn up; sometimes pay the farmer a courtesy visit to inform him they’ll be building fires and trampling his heather into beds; ask the farmer’s wife (always the wife!) for a bag of buns and a bottle of ginger beer; and on they go. Sometimes they pay for the buns. More often the farmer’s wife is so happy to see such cheerfully-entitled little prodigies that she hands the buns over free of charge. 

In exchange, the Five will chase any other trespassers off the farmer’s land, or out of the mysterious mines, or wherever they happen to be. “Trespassers”? I mean: “gypsies,” “tinkers,” swarthy-looking strangers, people who work for the circus, people with non-RP accents, people who don’t speak English, foreigners in general. That sort of thing. 

We can go anywhere, you see, but we’ve got to keep the foreigners out. The political parallel is so glaringly obvious, when you look at it, that you can’t stop looking at it.

And she concludes:

White, middle-class English people in their fifties grew up on Blyton’s portrayal of a world built exclusively for them, and grew into a world far more diverse, difficult, and interesting. You see where the disconnect comes from: a sense of unfulfilled entitlement, subsequent resentment, and dangerously flawed leaps in logic. If the diverse world lacks this kind of childhood, then the diverse world is to blame; if we made the world less diverse, we would be enabling that kind of childhood.

I grew up on the books of Malcolm Saville, who offered a more benign, one-nation Tory version of that world.

He did not, for instance, share Enid Blyton's racist take on gypsies. As I once blogged:

It is not just that the Gypsies Reuben and Miranda are good characters in the early Lone Pine stories: it is that you can tell other characters worth by their attitudes towards them. Good characters like the Gypsies, but the baddies hate them.

So thanks a bunch, Enid.

Lib Dem peers swear the most

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Something from the i newspaper to make us all proud:

Lib Dems are the most foul-mouthed peers in the House of Lords on Twitter, according to new research revealed exclusively to i. 

Six of the top 10 “sweary peers” are Lib Dems, with Baroness Sarah Ludford leading the pack with 51 profanities in 2017. 

It’s a pretty admirable feat given that peers only managed to score 287 swears between them across the whole year.

Cutting access to Latin affects social mobility

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Sad news from the Yorkshire Post:

A North Yorkshire school where Latin has been on the curriculum for more than 600 years is to stop teaching the classical language for the first time in its history due to funding restrictions. 

Latin will be notably absent when Richmond School – which was founded as Richmond Grammar School in the 14th century – announces its new GCSE programme on Tuesday.

Sad,, because as I once wrote:

It happens that I went to a comprehensive in Hertfordshire where everyone did Latin in the second year (or Year 8, as I think the young people say these days). It had recently ceased being a grammar school - and a very traditional grammar school at that, because we were still wearing school caps in the early 1970s - but it was a comprehensive ... 

And I am grateful that I did study Latin there, because when I got the chance to take Latin O level up here in Leicestershire a few I jumped at it. And studying it taught me the grammar I was not learning in English and awakened an interest in the Classical world, two factors that led to my studying Philosophy at university.

English grammar is taught formally these days, but I suspect there is something in the words of the school's former lead teacher for Latin and classics, as quoted by the Post:

"Cutting access to Latin affects social mobility. It is very hard to get access to Latin and the classics anywhere outside of London and the south east of England. That has a knock-on effect on access to university degrees, especially at the leading universities."

Northamptonshire woman launches new wedding venue where guests can have pictures taken with llamas

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Northampton Chronicle & Echo.

Sorry about the illustration. It was the best I could do.

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Rob Marchant says the Labour Party needs to talk about Momentum and antisemitism: "Moderates everywhere should be concerned, not least because they are now at the start of a long process of being gradually squeezed out, constituency by constituency."

In America the far right is using cyberharassment against academics. Joshua Cuevas will tell you all about it.

"Within six years Salford had 200 play streets. The pilot was so successful that they were passed into English law and 700 were created across England and Wales by the 1950s. But by the 1980s they were all but forgotten."  Neal Keeling rediscovers the play streets of Salford.

Andy Boddington, in an extraordinary post, writes about his stroke and stay in hospital.

"When I was growing up in a little terraced house in Leicester, there would be beamed into our living room telly a glimpse of an impossible glamorous world filled with fast cars, frightening gangsters and one unimaginably stylish and exotic central character – Jason King." Sean O'Grady pays tribute to Peter Wyngarde.

Simon Brackenborough explores the music and troubled life of Malcolm Arnold.

Middlesbrough fan arrested for allegedly urinating in QPR keeper's water bottle

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ESPN wins our coveted Headline of the Day Award.

Doop: Doop

Back in the 1990s there was an ITV rival to Top of the Pops in the shape of The Chart Show.

It was screened on Saturday mornings and - for better or worse - I associate it with this record, which reached number one in the UK in 1994..

Doop were a Dutch techno group and I remember an interview at the time where they said the record grew out of their noticing how close mellow house music was getting to 1920s dance music.

The Quiraing, Skye

Taken on a holiday in 1999.

Wikipedia explains:

The Quiraing (in Gaelic: A' Chuith-Raing) is a landslip on the eastern face of Meall na Suiramach, the northernmost summit of the Trotternish on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. 

The whole of the Trotternish Ridge escarpment was formed by a great series of landslips; the Quiraing is the only part of the slip still moving - the road at its base, near Flodigarry, requires repairs each year.

The bass player Jim Rodford has died

Jim Rodford, a founder member of Argent, a member of The Kinks for many years and a member of The Zombies in recent years, has died.

Rod Argent writes on The Zombies facebook page:

It is with deep sadness that I learned this morning that my dear cousin and lifelong friend, Jim Rodford, died this morning after a fall on the stairs. More details are not yet known about the exact cause of death. 

Jim was not only a magnificent bass player, but also from the first inextricably bound to the story of The Zombies. An enormous enabler for us. He was actually the first person ever to be asked to join the band, way back in 1961. 

Because he was in the top St.Albans band of the time (The Bluetones), he turned us down at first, but from day one helped us chart our course. He loaned us The Bluestones' state of the art gear for our very first rehearsal, arranged the rehearsal space, and even showed Hugh the first kick and snare drum pattern our original drummer ever learned. 

He was responsible for the first song I ever wrote (for The Bluetones - which they recorded); the person who organised most of our early gigs, and the very first person outside the group ever to hear - and pass judgement on - our first record, "She's Not There"(he loved it). 

Years later, he became founder member, with me, of Argent; and then, for eighteen years, throughout a hugely successful American period for them, was bass player for The Kinks. ... 

Jim was a wonderful person, loved by everybody. When Colin and I, shocked and hardly able to talk, shared the news this morning, Colin said " I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him..." 

He will be unbelievably missed. Goodnight and God Bless dear friend. - Rod x

I heard Jim Rodford play when the Zombies came to Market Harborough in 2011. He is in the centre of the rather indistinct photograph above.

Listen to Hold Your Head Up by Argent.

Jeremy Clarkson, Mitch Mitchell and Jennings

You may know the radio quiz The Unbelievable Truth, in which the panelists try to smuggle facts past their fellow contestants in the middle of an apparently comic or nonsensical talk.

It's enjoyable enough, though those taking part are generally drawn from the Radio 4 blokey comedians list. The chair, inevitably, is David Mitchell.

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The other day I spotted one of the facts: Jeremy Clarkson had taken part in radio adaptations of the Jennings books when he was a boy.

I was sure that I had featured it here as a piece of trivia, but it seems it has not.

A BBC News profile of Clarkson tells the story (and also has a photo of him with Anthony Buckeridge from this time):

Clarkson first worked for the BBC aged 12, playing the role of Atkinson in the radio adaptation of the Jennings novels, Anthony Buckeridge's tales of life at the fictional Linbury Court preparatory school. The role did not last long. 

"Why did it come to an end?" Top Gear co-host Richard Hammond once asked in an interview on LBC Radio. "He will have done something stupid, obviously." The truth was actually more prosaic. Clarkson's voice broke. Uttering schoolboy slang like "wizard" and "blinko" did not work in baritone.

The photograph above is taken from an earlier television adaptation of the books. Jennings (on the left) is played by John Mitchell.

As we have seen before, he grew up to be Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

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"What do those of us who support Remain offer the Left Behind?  Remember that the highest votes for the Leave campaign came in England’s declining industrial towns, and in the county and seaside towns that have also lost out from economic and social transformation." William Wallace asks an important question.

Lucy Johnson pays tribute to her grandfather Gruff Evans (Lord Evans of Claughton).

"It is hard now to imagine any circumstances under which Trump, who reportedly hoped to ride with Queen Elizabeth II in a gold-plated carriage, could travel to London without inciting massive protests." Isobel Thompson on the American President's feud with Britain.

"Gather round and pay attention my Millennial friends while Grandad takes you on a trip into the past. Yes you’ve seen Friends and decided it’s shit, but back then Central Perk wasn’t at…. well.. the centre of the known universe – Britain was.  Even the Americans admitted it." Otto English writes in praise of the 1990s.

Andrew Hickey argues that "if we want social media to be fun again, there needs to be a concerted effort to rebuild the web, and to make it once again a collection of independent sites producing idiosyncratic, individual, pieces of writing or images that can be linked to and discussed".

The case for landscape punk is made by Gary Budden.