Corby railway station

Corby station closed in 1966, reopened between 1987 and 1990 for a shuttle service to Kettering and was rebuilt on an adjacent site in 2009. It now enjoys an hourly service to St Pancras, with occasional trains venturing north to Oakham and Melton Mowbray.

If it had been reopened a few years earlier (or today), Corby might have got no more than a couple of bus shelters. But it had the good fortune to have its station built at a time when there was money to throw at such projects, so it got a substantial building complete with coffee bar.

Because there is no longer a bus from Market Harborough to Corby on a Saturday I had to go to the by-election by train. The connection at Kettering was so good that it was quicker than the bus journey, though I missed the tour of villages along the Leicestershire-Northamptonshire border.

Tories to make cash-for-seats offer to Lib Dems?

So George Parker reckons on the Financial Times site:

Senior Conservatives are plotting an audacious “cash-for-seats” offer to Nick Clegg, where the Liberal Democrat leader would back a Conservative-friendly Commons boundary review in exchange for millions in state funding for his party. 

Grant Shapps, Tory chairman, said on Sunday he had not “given up hope” of winning Mr Clegg’s support for the boundary review, which could give David Cameron 15-20 extra seats at the next election. 

Although Mr Shapps denied on the BBC’s Sunday Politics that talks were under way, senior Tory figures have told the Financial Times that they believe the cash-strapped Lib Dems would be susceptible to the offer.

I think it is better to be a party with MPs and no money than one with money and fewer MPs. And wouldn't such a deal make us look a little shabby?

Still, watch this space.

Later. Olly Grender has expressed deep scepticism about this story on Twitter.

Henry Scott Tuke and Lawrence Street Working Men's Club, York

How about this for a working men's club?

This is - or rather was - Lawrence Street WMC in York, just outside Walmgate Bar. The club occupied these rather grand premises until it moved to a modest new building next door in 2005 or thereabouts. York Stories has a picture of the club in its original home in 2004 and says the building is now on Save Britain's Heritage's 'at risk' register.

This house originally belonged to the Tukes, an important family of York Quakers involved with Rowntree's cocoa works, three Quaker schools (Ackworth, Bootham and The Mount) and the nearby Retreat Mental Hospital.

The Retreat, founded by William Tuke, was opened in 1796 and pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. It is still open as a mental hospital and you can read more about it on Wikipedia.

William's great great grandson Henry Scott Tuke was born in the Lawrence Street house in 1858. He was best know for painting This Sort of Thing...

The reshuffle made the Lib Dems feel less like a party of government

We know Nick Clegg's ambition is for the Liberal Democrats to become "not ... the third party, but ... one of three parties of government".

Yet one of the reasons I was depressed by the summer's reshuffle (as I blogged when discussing John Kampfner's more optimistic take on it) is that we now seem further from fulfilling this ambition.

I share Nick Harvey's disappointment that we no longer have ministers at Defence or the Foreign Office. And I am not convinced by the posts we have taken instead.

Lynne Featherstone will do a good job at Overseas Development if she is allowed. But it may well be that moving Andrew Mitchell away from the department was a prelude to a Cameron decision to drop his pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas aid. There are no signs of it so far, but it would be in line with his strategy of moving right to please his back-benches and core voters.

And, much as I like David Heath, I fear that becoming the public face of the badger cull will do him or his party no favours.

But then Nick came out in favour of a cull as long ago as June 2008. As I blogged at the time, I was puzzled by the politics of this:

I do not know if culling badgers to prevent bovine TB is good science, but I am sure that it is bad politics. It may play well go down well in a few rural constituencies, but it will go down very badly in many more urban and suburban seats. Like Sheffield Hallam, for instance. 

This feels very much like a return to the 1970s, when the old Liberal Party's fortunes depended on clinging on to a handful of seats where the farming interest was strong. I thought we had all moved on since then.

Given that the Liberal Party I joined in the late seventies combined that pragmatic defence of local farming interests with high-minded statements about poverty, the changes in the reshuffle feel very much like a case of back to the future.

Harry Chapin: WOLD

With the revelations about Jimmy Savile and John Peel, life as a 1970s' DJ seems a lot less poptastic than it did even a couple of weeks ago. But Harry Chapin knew that at the time, as he proved in this 1973 song.

WOLD (not "Wold"- that would be a song about Lincolnshire) made no. 36 in the US singles chart that year, but does not seem to have been a hit over here even though I remember it being played at the time by some of Radio One's cooler DJs.

Harry Chapin, who was also an activist for social causes, died in car crash in 1981, aged 38. According to Wikipedia:

One report quotes his widow saying soon after his death - "only with slight exaggeration" - that "Harry was supporting 17 relatives, 14 associations, seven foundations and 82 charities. Harry wasn't interested in saving money. He always said, 'Money is for people,' so he gave it away." 

Despite his success as a musician, he left little money and it was difficult to maintain the causes for which he raised more than $3 million in the last six years of his life. The Harry Chapin Foundation was the result.

The Harry Chapin Foundation is still going, and you can learn more about his career on Harry Chapin Music.

Liberal Democrat workers needed in Corby

I spent today helping at the Corby by-election. Jill Hope's campaign office is on an industrial estate in the south of the town - you can find a map of how to reach it in an earlier post here.

But the town of Corby accounts for only about half the constituency's electorate and I was sent off to Thrapston where I delivered a labyrinthine new estate.

Talking to the insiders, the consensus was that the Conservative vote is unusually soft - an impression confirmed by political journalists who have visited the constituency. It's not just that they have been demoralised by the resignation of Louise Mensch, it is that they have doubts about the direction of their party.

And what is interesting is that these Tory voters are not thinking of voting for UKIP. The people the Conservatives are struggling to hold on to are moderate, decent voters - the sort of people who may have voted for Tony Blair but were attracted by David Cameron last time.

Labour voters are not reported as being that enthused either, all of which points to a low turnout.

And a local issue has emerged that is also working against Labour: the Cube complex, which houses council offices, a library, theatre and register office. This was millions of pounds over budget and built to a wholly unsuitable design.

It was good to meet Jill Hope again. She is a hard-working candidate, as I know from her two general elections campaigns in Harborough, so please do go to Corby to help her.

This is the first by-election in a marginal seat in this parliament, and the Liberal Democrats could do with a reasonable result.

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"This by election came about most unexpectedly and the local party needed someone to stand here. The party were aware that although I didn't live in Corby, I had spent six years in the area working with unemployed people, and helping pre-release prisoners to get into self-employment." The Backbencher talks to Jill Hope, Liberal Democrat candidate in the Corby by-election.

Gareth Epps looks at Jo Grimond's approach to employee ownership.

"We have got to get out of this ludicrous role we have been in for the past 20 years, where charities love to be called professional because they think somehow volunteers are amateur, are second-rate. In doing that, we have actually removed the lifeblood and energy that meant those generations of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s wanted to give and get involved." Rory Stewart questioned the professionalisation of the charity sector during a fringe meeting at the Conservative Conference, reports Third Sector.

Could Eton run a state school? Dan Wilson thinks not.

The Week presents 13 punctuation marks that failed to catch on.

"“I was 13 and they needn't have bothered. It was obviously very, very heavily stage managed to impress a schoolgirl. But as I say I’d had it drummed into me by my father so it was really a bit of a rain dance." Wyn Hymer is interviewed by the Milton Keynes Citizen about growing up at Bletchley Park and being made to sign the Official Secrets Act.

St Denys, York

Here's a mystery: a fine Norman doorway set in what is obviously a later window arch.

The solution is that St Denys in York was once a much larger church. Its website explains:

The church was founded before 1154, on the site of a late Saxon church and an earlier Roman building. A Roman altar and an Anglo-Danish ‘hogsback’ tombstone were found on the site in 1846. Traces of these earlier buildings came to light during trial excavations in 2001 to investigate the church’s foundations (which proved extremely stable). 

The present building dates mainly from the 14th and 15th centuries, but has been much reduced from its original size, due to a series of a historical mishaps – the former spire was damaged by Civil War cannon fire and then struck by lightning, and the transepts and long nave were demolished in 1797. 

So what survives now is only the east end with its flanking chapels, making an unusually square-shaped church entered through a fine Norman doorway (from the demolished nave), set in what was originally the site of a window.

The result of this troubled history is that, unusually, the church is wider than it is long. I couldn't help thinking how good it would be for a political meeting. Even a few people would make it look respectably full, but you could cram many more in if you had to.

Legend has it that Henry Percy, Third Earl of Northumberland, who fell in the Battle of Towton - the "largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil" - in 1461 was buried here.

Jimmy Savile and why senior managers are ignorant

At the start of this week I suggested that the BBC may have a recruitment strategy that manages to select the only people in the country too dense to have heard the rumours about Jimmy Savile and underage girls.

Sure enough, Mark Thompson announced shortly afterwards from his lucrative American exile that:

"I never heard of any rumours nor received any complaints or allegations [about Jimmy Savile] while I was director general at the BBC."

But "dense" people don't get to the top of big organisations like the BBC and it is often more useful to look at what is wrong with systems rather than blame individuals.

Because Mark Thompson is not alone. You can see the same pattern in this Daily Mail report:

Stoke Mandeville – a spinal injuries specialist centre in aid of which Savile frequently ran marathons – insisted it had ‘no record’ of complaints about him. 

But a retired NHS worker poured scorn on this claim, telling the Daily Mail: ‘To my knowledge, the juniors and new staff were advised to be careful in their contact with him. 

'That was not said officially, maybe because he brought in such a lot of publicity and funds. There was no control over his comings and goings, he would just turn up. He had free run of the place.

Once again, low-paid staff knew what was going on while highly paid executives were in ignorance.

And really, this should not surprise us. I wrote a post back in February 2009 under the title "Macho management is irrational and inefficient" and I can do no better than quote much of it here:

Chris Dillow, author of Stumbling and Mumbling, asks:

if centrally planned economies are a bad idea, how come centrally planed companies are a good one?

It's a good question.

Much of my political philosophy comes from Karl Popper - or at least from Bryan Magee's explication of his work. And, in his Fontana Modern Masters monograph, Magee writes of Popper:

Because he regards living as first and foremost a process of problem-solving he wants societies that are conducive to problem-solving. And because problem-solving calls for the bold propounding of trial solutions which are then subject to criticism, he wants forms of society which permit of the untrammelled assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism. 

Regardless of any moral considerations (and it is of the highest importance to grasp this) he believes that a society organised on such lines will be more efficient at solving its problems, and therefore more successful at achieving the aims of its members, than if it were organised on other lines. The common notion that the most efficient form of society, in theory at least, would be some form of dictatorship, is on this view utterly mistaken.

Chris argues that the Royal Bank of Scotland was organised like one of these inefficient dictatorships "complete with the suppression of dissent and cult of personality. And look what happened".

An article in The Times from last month shows just how RBS operated:

Prime suspect among the bankers behind the meltdown is Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland. Goodwin, nicknamed “Fred the Shred” for his brutal cost-cutting, was an autocratic and fearsomely controlling boss. He even set dress rules for fellow executives that included wearing ties with RBS logos. 

At Goodwin’s “morning prayers”, where he delivered decisions and rarely accepted dissent, he pursued an ambitious expansion strategy.

Or you could try Adam Applegarth at Northern Rock. In his The Crunch (a book I reviewed for Liberal Democrat News) Alex Brummer wrote of Adam Applegarth:

He had a reputation as a martinet who was difficult to challenge. 

An insider said: 'He had an iron grip on the company. Any alternative plan or idea was rejected by those close to him on the basis that "Adam wouldn't like it".' There was no feedback. He surrounded himself with 'yes men' and Northern Rock ended up with people in senior positions who were not fit for purpose. 

The company raced on, brushing aside worries about rising interest rates (which might leave its customers unable to pay their monthly mortgage) and a faltering housing market (which could drop them into negative equity). Applegarth rode roughshod over the bank's board of directors, who lacked the confidence or ability to call a halt to this imprudent expansion.

It follows that the macho view of business propagated in popular television programmes like The Apprentice and Dragons' Den is harmful. Liberals should support the establishment of more cooperative forms of organisation - as indeed we used to do.

And maybe this is true of all centralised organisations, not just "macho management". Simon Carr, the Independent's sketchwriter, once said:

It's not that politicians lie, it's that they don't know if they are telling the truth. They perceive the world through statistics that have been processed by collaborators who are more or less "subconsciously influenced" to manufacture the required facts. Everything from the inflation index to waiting lists is derived from data ontologically perverted by the political process.

And that is equally true of top executives in the BBC and the NHS.

Headline of the Day

A victory for the South East in the shape of kentnews.co.uk:

Medway Council benefits officer guilty of benefit fraud

Preposterous Erections

On the way home from work I called in at Quinns bookshop in Market Harborough for a reception to launch Preposterous Erections, the new book by Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England.

I met a Conservative councillor who enjoys this blog and someone who had known the late Barry Summers, who taught me and was later a Liberal and then Lib Dem councillor alongside me, when they were both in the Labour Party in the 1970s.

Preposterous Erections, says the blurb:

brings together sixty uniquely fascinating towers from all corners of England. From the parkland Brizlee Tower in Northumberland to the coastal Doyden Castle in Cornwall, Peter Ashley tells us their stories through his own very individual photographs and his witty and irreverent commentary. 

Although there is an obvious core of eighteenth and nineteenth-century landowner's eccentricities, the more recent past is not forgotten, including the instantly recognisable Post Office tower in London's Fitzrovia and the more retiring Lewis's department store art deco tower in Leicester.

I shall review the book here one day soon. Incidentally, its title was suggested by Wartime Housewife.

Obama, Romney and Big Bird

Thanks to Living on Words Alone and the Radio 4 Today programme this morning.

Traffic in the Magical Mystery Tour

I have always had a slight problem with the Beatles. I can see they are good, but I can't see why they are better than quite a few other groups that were around at the time. It is very like the problem I have with Mozart in the classical world.

Saturday's screening of Magical Mystery Tour was never going to solve my Beatles problem. I wanted to like it, and in many ways it was likeable (helped by the presence of the Bonzos), but it was also a mess. It wasn't helpful that the preceding documentary chose to mirror the film's chaotic structure in a tricksy way rather than explain it.

Even so, I think I shall be buying the DVD, if only for the extras. As reported by the Sacramento Bee, they include a commentary by Paul McCartney. Better than that, they include this among several outtakes:

Traffic – "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" [1:53] - The filming of Traffic acting out their 1967 hit single "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" was commissioned by The Beatles for possible inclusion in Magical Mystery Tour, but was not included in the final edit.

"Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" was the theme song to the coming-of-age film comedy of the same age. You can read about the film and listen to the song elsewhere on this blog.

Ian Fleming interviews Raymond Chandler

This BBC interview by the creator of James Bond of the creator of Philip Marlowe took place in London in 1958. The introduction claims that it is the only known recording of Chandler's voice.

The interview proper does not start until towards the end of part 1 (embedded here), but there are three more parts to enjoy. Namely:

• part 2
• part 3
• part 4

We should not send people to prison for being offensive

From the Guardian yesterday:

A teenager who posted explicit comments and jokes about April Jones on his Facebook page has been jailed for 12 weeks. 

Matthew Woods, 19, from Chorley, Lancashire, made comments about April and Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who went missing during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007. 

Woods was arrested for his own safety after about 50 people descended on his home. He pleaded guilty at Chorley magistrates court to sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive. The chairman of the bench, Bill Hudson, said Woods's comments were so "abhorrent" he deserved the longest sentence the court could hand down.

As John Kampfner says in the same newspaper today:

Direct incitement to violence is one thing. But we cannot and should not sentence people for bad jokes, poor taste and terrible manners. That is an issue for parents, teachers and, most importantly, peer groups.

And peer pressure is something that social media is very good at. Woods' actions were cruel and silly, but I am sure there are plenty of people who would have told him that. Perhaps the courts should have been more worried by the mob that pursued him?

As UK Human Rights Blog explains, Woods was convicted under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. (Thanks, Labour.) This prohibits a person sending ”by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character“.

In part this law reflects our masters' unease about social media. The first Guardian article I quoted above goes on to repeat some of Woods' jokes. As far as I know, neither of its authors has been arrested. Nor would you be arrested if you told those jokes to a friend in the pub. Online communication is different, it seems.

But there is something more fundamentally wrong with this law. It is that you can never know whether you have broken it or not.

We all tell black jokes from time to time. They appear after every tragedy or disaster - you could even argue they are part of our way of coping with such events. Certainly, the Forces and the emergency services, who have to deal with this sort of thing far more often than the rest of us, are noted for the dark shade of their humour.

When does it become acceptable to repeat such jokes online? I have no idea and no idea of how to find out.

The result is likely to be a cowing of British society. As Heresy Corner said when Paul Chambers was initially convicted in the Twitter joke trial:

What has been on trial is the possibility of humour itself, the right of a freeborn Englishman to be facetious as and when he feels like it, about any subject whatsoever. 

Against that age-old national instinct to make light of adverse circumstances - the spirit that got us through the Blitz - we now find a new and alien notion that there are some things that are beyond joking, that even an obvious joke must be treated seriously. Because it's no laughing matter. Because you can't be too careful. Because any imagined threat, however patently absurd, must be ritually investigated. 

And the person making the joke must bear the responsibility for the time-consuming and costly process of investigation, even though the possibility of such an investigation never crossed his mind, just to drive the message home that You Cannot Make Jokes About Terrorism.

It seems the list of things about which You Cannot Make Jokes is far wider than that.

But, of course, most people who repeat black jokes on Twitter or Facebook will not be prosecuted and imprisoned. It's just that you will never know that you definitely will not be.

It is an example of Calder's Second Law of Politics. And it also reminds me of a passage in Nick Cohen's You Can't Read This Book.

In that passage Cohen imagines a dictator talking to the chief of his secret police:

"You mean I should kill the leaders of the opposition?" 

"I will happily do so, Excellency, if you command it. But that's not the idea. You need to pick on slights and humiliations that are so small that they seem not to be humiliations at all, and punish them with unreasonable ferocity. Random violence creates the necessary conditions for order. A leader of the opposition expects us to arrest him from time to time, but a writer making a veiled criticism of your rule, or a man who grumbles about you in a shop queue, does not. By randomly attacking a few people who speak sedition, we tell many people that the only safe option is to avoid all talk about politics. The aim is to create a state where everyone knows it is best to say nothing, and the bastards shut up."

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Stephen's Liberal Journal has some advice for Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who made a fool of himself on the fringes of the Conservative Party Conference today.

"All of this sound familiar? - a well funded group of free market believers taking over a party" Birkdale Focus draws parallels between the Liberal Party history of the 1950s and the Liberal Democrats today. Note the name check Edward Rushworth - William Wallace's father-in law and three times Liberal candidate for Harborough.

Stephen Williams MP (Lib Dem, Bristol West) pays tribute to the Chartists.

Writing on the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, looks at the disjunction between Tory preoccupations in Birmingham and the more fundamental challenges the party actually faces.

Female genital mutilation is child abuse and nothing less, says Alan Wardle from the NSPCC on Huffington Post UK.

Learning from my mistakes: an English teacher's blog does not believe learning can always be fun: "I am not sponsoring a Pepsi Zero approach. A sugarless experience. We need lessons to be ‘fun’ at times to hook students in, but it is the spoon of medicine after the fun that is the most important thing as it is challenging, thought-provoking, demanding, effective and occasionally boring."

The Merchant Adventurers' Hall, York

I must stop beating up my younger self, but I passed the sign for this extraordinary building every time I walked from the university campus into York and never thought to look in.

Read more about The Merchant Adventurers' Hall.

Arguments against ending housing benefit for under 25s

After David Cameron floated the idea of ending housing benefit for people aged under 25 this summer, an article on the Guardian website left it more full of holes than a good Swiss cheese.

That article is worth quoting at length:

David Cameron has announced that he wants to abolish housing benefit for 380,000 people under 25. The prime minister's view is simple: if you can't afford the rent, you must live with your parents. The only exception will be for children who are victims of domestic abuse. 

Let us stop and think about this for a moment. An obligation on "children" to live with their parents is an obligation on parents to house their children until they are 25. What penalty does Cameron propose for parents who refuse to take in their 24-year-old child? If a couple separate when their children are in their 20s, which parent is liable to accommodate the children if necessary? 

Cameron needs to explain what will happen to people whose parents refuse to house them. If a parent refuses to house a 15-year-old child, the child is taken into care. They may be placed in a children's home, fostered or put up for adoption. Is Cameron proposing that the state tries to arrange foster care for 23-year-olds? Place them in children's homes? The mind boggles at the thought of social services interviewing people about their application to adopt a 24-year-old. The cost to the state would be immense. 

Cameron also needs to tell us what happens to married people aged under 25. Is he proposing a legal obligation on parents to house their sons-in-law and daughters-in-law as well as their own children? Or is he proposing that any young married couple should be forced to split up if they can't afford the rent, and return to their own parents? It is hard to imagine that the Tory party really wants to destroy marriages in this way. What happens if the young couple have children? Do parents now have an obligation to house not only their children and their children-in-law, but their grandchildren as well?

It's author? Tim Leunig, recently appointed as an adviser to Michael Gove.

Thanks to @patrickjbutler for reminding me of this.

I am worried about Evan Harris

You may recall that Dr Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, recently took part in the Channel Four programme Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial. As part of the programme he took ecstasy in what was presented as a piece of research into the drug's effects.

In today's Daily Telegraph there was a letter from the psychologist Professor Andy Parrott saying that he had taken part in the programme with the proviso that he would be given time to summarise the scientific evidence on the damaging effects of the drug on the human brain. In the event, this time was not given.

Professor Parrott went on to list some of the evidence he would have quoted:

Professor Leslie Iversen ... was correct in noting more than 60 previous studies on the effects of MDMA on brain activity. At Swansea University we have found reduced brain activity in MDMA users now free from drugs. Memory continues to be impaired for months and years afterwards. In very heavy users, “word recall” can be reduced to 50 per cent of normal levels. 

Researchers at Northumbria University have found reduced social intelligence, along with other mental or cognitive deficits. Other groups have found reduced “problem solving” abilities. 

At the University of East London and Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, its recreational use during pregnancy has been found to impair the development of the emergent babies. 

The mood gains of MDMA are short-lived, and followed by a longer period of negative moods – such as irritability, paranoia and depression. Hence the average weekly moods of MDMA users are significantly worse than non-users. 

At Swansea University we have been researching the damaging effects of recreational MDMA on the stress hormone cortisol. This neurohormone is increased by 800 per cent in dance clubbers, and is also markedly raised in abstinent users, helping to explain why recreational users suffer from impaired sleep and can develop clinical sleep apnoea. 

Finally, MDMA has weak hallucinogenic properties and can cause mental confusion. Hence it is unlikely that it could help resolve complex mental health problems.

I find all this interesting, because ecstasy is often presented as a benign drug. The evidence suggests that this is not so, though that does not prove that prohibition is necessarily the right way to go. Certainly, people had no difficulty of getting hold of ecstasy when it was in vogue, even though it was illegal to possess it.

I wrote a news story about this letter at work today. I wanted to use the headline "Parrott: I wish to register a complaint". However, as the good professor is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, I was dissuaded.

Meanwhile, if you see Evan Harris do make sure he is OK.

Free public lectures on psychology in London and Oxford

In recent days I have come across a couple of free public psychology events that may be of interest to a wider audience.


26 October 2012 (1-2 p.m.) - The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

Spooks and spoofs: psychologists and psychical research in the inter-war years
Professor Elizabeth Valentine

Several physicist fellows of the Royal Society were interested in psychical research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the wars, William McDougall FRS and other senior academic psychologists became involved with amateur psychical researcher and author Harry Price. They attended séances at his laboratory and were members of his University of London Council for Psychical Investigation.

Why did reputable psychologists and the University of London cooperate with someone of dubious integrity who lacked scientific credentials? One reason for their mutual attraction may have been their common engagement in a delicate balancing act between courting popular appeal and asserting scientific expertise and authority.

Elizabeth Valentine is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This event is free to attend and open to all. No tickets are required. Doors open at 12:30 p.m. and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.


5 December 2012 (6-8 p.m.) - The Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford

The Case Against Neuroleptics: What history and science reveal about the long-term efficacy of antipsychotics for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders
Robert Whitaker

Robert Whitaker is a journalist and author who specialises in medicine and science. In America his articles on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have won a George Polk Award for Medical Writing, and a National Association of Science Writers' Award for best magazine article. In 1998 he co-wrote a series on abuses in psychiatric research that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

He is the author of four books. His most recent, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, was described in the New Scientist as an “enthralling and frighteningly persuasive book … one whose astonishing intellectual punch is delivered with the gripping vitality of a novel.”

You can read more about Robert Whitaker on his blog for Psychology Today.

This lecture forms part of the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology. It is open to anyone, whether they have registered for the conference of not. You can just turn up on the day, but it would be a great help if you could register your intention to attend in advance.