The announcement of the discovery of Richard III

Yesterday I said I would post the University of Leicester's videos about the Richard III dig last summer.

So I shall. But here first is Monday's press conference where the identity of the skeleton was confirmed.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Call Nick Clegg

The latest issue of Liberator was waiting for me when I got home this evening, so it is time for us to spend a few days in the company of Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.

Call Nick Clegg

My less far-flung readers will be familiar with Bonkers Hour on Radio Rutland. Each week members of the public telephone me with their questions on matters of current interest and I give my candid views. We encourage hard-hitting questions – though I, of course, reserve the right to evict tenants who get above themselves.

I have been telling Clegg for some time that the wireless is here to stay and that he should do something similar. So I am glad to learn that he is taking part in a programme of his own on a London radio station this very morning. I climb one of my follies with a receiver and a field telephone to join the fun.

Some fellow from Woking claims to have torn up his Liberal Democrat membership card. The fellow must be Mr Apollo himself as the things are printed on some form of laminated plastic these days and I can never tear it however sorely I am provoked. Then there is a question about some Spanish fellow called Juan Si that causes general hilarity. Should I know him?

Time to take part myself. I call the radio station and demand to be put on air at once. The conversation goes like this:

PRESENTER: Our next call is, er, Lord from Rutland.

ME: What this I hear about you supporting secret courts, man? Have you taken leave of your senses? What the devil is behind this ridiculous idea?

CLEGG: I can’t tell you that.

ME: Why not?

CLEGG: It’s a secret.

PRESENTER. Our next caller is Ron from Walthamstow…

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West, 1906-10.

Mike Hancock MP wins Quote of the Day

Here is the Liberal Democrat MP for Portsmouth South, as quoted in the current issue of Private Eye:

"Why this obsession with political prisoners in Azerbaijan?"

Richard III: The King in the Car Park

Last night's Channel 4 documentary Richard III: The King in the Car Park was a bit of a mess, though an enjoyable one. Part of me suspects the programme was originally intended to poke gentle fun at the proceedings and had to change direction suddenly when they found the old boy.

Perhaps Philippa Langley from the Richard III Society was a bit much, but without her drive and obsession the dig would not have taken place.

There are some more conventional videos about the dig on the University of Leicester website and I shall post these over the next few days.

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The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill has just received its second reading in the Commons. Andrew Hickey celebrates the role of political activists in bringing about this landmark: "MPs will be taking the credit for this Bill, and the Act it will, with luck, become. They will be going on TV, doing interviews, and so on. But this would not be happening without the efforts of a fairly small number of people, most not in Parliament, who spent years of their life doing the groundwork that made this possible."

Bristling Badger on an appalling scandal: "Undercover police officers infiltrating protest groups stole the identities of dead children to create their fake identity. They would comb registries looking for someone with the same first name. They would visit the dead child's house and locality to get the details for the backstory. On the dead child's birthday, as the family would have been in sombre reflection on their tragedy, they would take activist comrades out to celebrate."

Jonathan Taylor on York Mix thinks HS2 is a colossal error.

Tavish Scott explains Up-Helly-Aa to The Scotsman.

io9 on why people in the United States are still dying from the bubonic plague.

The Last Places takes us underneath Whitehall: "Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more exciting subterranean realm of secret tunnels, bunkers, and - at least in the MoD’s case - a perfectly preserved Tudor wine cellar."

How they found Richard III under a Leicester car park

In June I came across the story that the bones of Richard III might still be lying under the streets of Leicester. I wrote about it as it seemed  the sort of local curiosity this blog enjoys and thought no more about it.

A month later I came across the suggestion that there was to be a dig to look for the king. I blogged about that too, but was at pains to point out that I did not know who was behind the plan - or the appeal for funds.

A month after that, the dig began. The photograph above is one I took on Saturday 25 August having peered through the gates at the rear of the site. This was just about the first day of the dig.

Incredibly, Richard's bones were found a couple of days later more or less on the sport where the excavator was working.

Below is a video of the extraordinary moment that the identity of Richard III was announced.

This is a day that has left me proud to work in the city I do and proud to be a graduate of the University of Leicester. Read more about the search for Richard III on the university website.

My sadness at the fall of Chris Huhne

My chief feeling at the fall of Chris Huhne is sadness. Sadness at the waste of his talents.

I twice voted for him in Liberal Democrat leadership elections. I still maintain that he was by some way the strongest candidate in 2006.

Whenever I met Chris he has been friendly and without pomposity, which is not something you can say for every politician.

As my mother has just said on the phone, a man of his wealth could easily have coped with a driving ban. Indeed he was banned from driving a couple of years after the evening that has led to today's guilty plea.

It appears that it was the failure of his marriage that led to the court case, and the court case has certainly torn his family apart. Sadness is the right emotion to feel.

Roger Helmer finds another new home

Regular readers will recall that when Roger Helmer left the Conservatives and joined UKIP he had to leave the Tory MEPs' office in Market Harborough.

He then set himself up at the new Harborough Innovation Centre, which was built with public money to  nurture new businesses.

Once word got around he was asked to leave it on the grounds that he is not a new businesses.

Strolling through Market Harborough this afternoon I noted that he is now to be found above a coffee shop in Manor Court.

More on the politics of railway preservation

Last week Joseph Boughey wrote a guest post for Liberal England on the politics of the railway preservation movement.

Now Out in the Shires has written a post of his own debating the issues that Joseph raised:

What I don't think is up for debate is the "small is beautiful" element of the movement, in as much as the preserved railways are often most successful when they can present as the underdog. An interesting observation of the preserved railway scene is that the more successful a particular railway gets, the more divergence there is between the aims of the company and that of its volunteer workforce. 

You can see this with the way people leave the premier lines after decades as a volunteer, because it no longer feels like they're all in it together. There's now a "commercial manager" where once there was the vicar's wife, and money is spent on websites and e-commerce, when they spent half of 1984 restoring an Edmondson ticket press....

This gives me a chance to say what a good blog Out in the Shires is.

How could I fail to like someone who finds it natural to frame his argument in references to The Titfield Thunderbolt and A Canterbury Tale?

The Divine Comedy: Lucy

I am a bit too busy with real life at the moment to discover groovy new sounds that the young people enjoy, so here is Neil Hannon's take on William Wordsworth.

"Lucy", a setting of lines from three of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, was The Divine Comedy's first single. It did not make the charts (I blame the lyricist.)

I understand that at concerts it is customary for the audience to provide the animal noises halfway through.

Church Langton and the Princes in the Tower

If it was the skeleton of Richard III they dug up from under the car park of Leicester's child protection team, then the fate of the Princes in the Tower will probably return to public attention.

One of the key sources for the case against Richard is the work of the Tudor court historian Polydore Vergil. Originally from Italy, he settled and spent most of his life in England.

According to Wikipedia, he held a number of sinecures from the Church, including the living of Church Langton in Leicestershire.

Turn to the Victoria County History entry for the village and the story is confirmed:

There were several celebrated rectors in the 16th century. The historian, Polydore Vergil (d. c. 1555), who was presented to the living in 1503, was apparently non-resident.

But that entry goes on to tell another remarkable story:

His successor, Lawrence Saunders (d. 1555), appears to have spent some time in Church Langton, although he had another living in London. Both he and his curate at Langton, George Marsh (d. 1555), (fn. 73) were executed for heresy during Mary's reign and became well-known Protestant 'martyrs'.

Another piece of local history to investigate.

Time for Sandi Toksvig to give up The News Quiz

I don't listen to Radio 4's The News Quiz much these days. In its day it was something of a trailblazer, but today panel shows with comedians commenting on the week's news have gone very stale. In fact it can be hard to avoid them on the higher-numbered television channels.

Besides when I do catch the programme, it has lost its charm. The reason is its host, Sandi Toksvig.

I was never her greatest fan: she seemed to think that putting on a funny voice was they key to comedy. In fact she was one of those people (think Dick Stawbridge or Sue Perkins) who popped up so often as celebrities that you had rather forgotten what they were famous for in the first place.

But these days there is a bigger problem with Toksvig: her partiality.

There was a time when Sandi Toksvig was a very public Liberal Democrat. There was talk of her being shortlisted for Cambridge when David Howarth announced he was standing down.

And at our Autumn Conference in 2004, as the warm up act for Ming Campbell's big speech, she thanked us all for coming to the event. I do not know in what capacity she was doing this, but she clearly thought herself qualified.

She is not so keen on us now. Every time I hear her present The News Quiz her script is full of barbed comments aimed at the Liberal Democrats in general and Nick Clegg in particular. No other political party is subject to a tenth of this animosity

I think I know what has happened. Sandi Toksvig moves in circles where showbiz left views are pretty much obligatory. (Jeremy Hardy is even a member of the SWP. How cool is that?)

When Toksvig announced her support for the Lib Dems I imagined all her friends laughed at her. And now the Lib Dems have turned out not to be the improved Labour Party they sometimes presented themselves as in those days (a sort of Roy Hattersley on roller skates), she feels betrayed.

Well, a lot of us our finding some of the policies the Lib Dems have signed up to hard to take, but we manage to act professionally in our day jobs.

If Sandi Toksvig cannot chair The News Quiz in a way that displays equal contempt for all parties then she give the job up in favour of someone who can.

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Liberal Democrats against Secret Courts has Jo Shaw's reply to Nick Clegg's latest Letter from the Leader: "The government amendments were a test of the good faith of those who support this Bill. That test has been failed. The government amendments make this Bill worse, not better."

The Conservatives should stop obsessing about constituency boundaries and try to broaden their appeal, argues David Skelton on Platform 10.

D.J. Taylor, the author of Orwell: The Life, talks about George Orwell’s attitude to free speech and his encounters with censorship in a podcast on the Index on Censorship site.

"The SWP are not socialist. Their only powerbase, in the redbrick universities, suggests the term ‘workers’ is a little suspect too. They are dangerously wrong about everything, from the Middle East to gay rights. They could be easily dismissed, like people who think they’re white witches, if not for their capacity to hoodwink young people who genuinely want to change the world, and instead send them out to sell papers outside Tescos." So says Paul Richards on Progress.

"Wanna tell the whole Wagner/Verdi 2013 bicentennial onslaught to suck it?" asks Opera Chic before advising us to head to the Suffolk Coast this summer for the 66th edition of Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh Festival."

Floydsworld photographs the magnificent ruins of Kirklinton Hall.

Human Rights Watch: Russia at Its worst since Soviet days

Do Liberal Democrats campaign against grammar schools?

When I asked this question on Twitter a few days ago I received only one reply - a slightly plaintive observation from someone that, where he lived, the Liberal Democrats don't seem to campaign countywide on anything. So let me try again here.

Liberal Democrats are pretty solidly against selection in education. That has been borne out this week in the Lib Dem blogosphere. While everyone agrees it is the Cleggs' business and no one else's whether they educate their children privately, a piece in the Financial Times by Chris Cook citing research that questions whether grammar schools make any contribution to social mobility has been widely welcomed.

Despite this near universal opposition in the party, I cannot recall hearing of any Liberal Democrat campaigns against grammar schools in the counties where they still exist, let alone Lib Dems taking action to end selection where they have power.

Do such campaigns exist? It would be interesting to know.

Back in the 1970s when selection in education was still a major issue, the old Liberal Party had a clear view. It believed that the matter should be settled locally.

Perhaps that was an example of the Liberals' instinctive preference for local decision making. Or perhaps it allowed them to say the right thing nationally without upsetting local voters who were rather keen on selection.

HS2: The man in Whitehall knows best again

Last night's This Week on BBC1 discussed the plans for HS2. The guests (sort of) representing the three main parties - Michael Portillo for the Conservatives, Alastair Campbell for Labour and Miranda Green for the Liberal Democrats - were in agreement. Not only must HS2 go ahead, but any local environmental objections to it are inherently ridiculous and must be ignored.

If politics goes in cycles then this is pretty much where I came in. We are once again living in an age where the man in Whitehall knows best and environmental concerns are seen as the enthusiasms of an eccentric fringe.

Maybe I am prejudiced by my East Midlands perspective, but the HS2 scheme seems a great irrelevance. The benefits claimed for it are not based on much research and if you want to boost the economy of the region there are many better ways of spending billions than building a station halfway between Nottingham and Derby. Incremental improvements to existing services are less glamorous but farm more useful.

Indeed, I suspect many travellers will prefer to use the existing line to St Pancras, particularly when it has been electrified, because it has stations close to the centres of those cities.

Race equality: a new Liberal Democrat approach, Saturday 16 February

Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats and the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) have organised a one-day conference on race equality.

'Race equality: a new Liberal Democrat approach' will take place on Saturday 16 February at Hughes-Parry Hall, 19-26 Cartwright Gardens, London WC1H 9EF from 10 a.m.

The headline speakers will be

• Simon Hughes MP
• Tom Brake MP
• Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece

Other people taking part include Kavya Kaushik, Kelly‐Marie Blundell, Gareth Epps, Naomi Smith, Issan  Ghazni, Rob Berkely, Professor Gus John and Wilf Sullivan.

The conference will launch the first report of the Lib Dem Task Force on Race Equality. Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece, chair of the Task Force, who will be introducing the report at the conference, says:

"This conference could not have come at a more important time. Inequalities in our society are widening particularly for ethnic minorities and especially for young black men. The current assault on the Equalities Act disguised as cutting red tape will weaken the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. It will also make it harder for ethnic minorities to obtain justice when they are discriminated against. This conference aims to put race equality back on the party's agenda."

Gareth Epps, co-chair of the SLF and a member of the party’s Federal Policy Committee, says:

"It is very timely that the Task Force has looked at what needs to be done to back up the Government's commitment to increasing social mobility.  That cannot happen without action to tackle inequality, as Liberal Democrats acknowledge.  This conference is a very important step in progressing the Liberal Democrat debate."

Send an email to the organisers for further information.

In praise of Dora Bryan

One of my more recherché favourite blogs is The Downstairs Lounge, which celebrates British comedy records. A new post there looks at Dora Bryan and her 1964 album Dora.

On the one hand:

Dora Bryan has a singing voice that is far from subtle. It is hard to know how precisely to describe it for the uninitiated. It’s sort of… part someone trying to grind diamonds in a domestic food blender, part someone else attempting to cut through Italian marble with an blunt electric kitchen knife.

But on the other:

Dora is a record of a star of stage, screen, cinema and TV at the very height of her powers. An acquired taste her voice may be, but the sheer variety of musical styles and sketches on the record are a reward worth exploring.

I have always had a soft spot for Dora Bryan because of her film appearances - both as Rita Tushingham's mother in A Taste of Honey and this cameo as Rose, the tart with a heart of gold, in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol from 1948.

Dora Bryan is on screen for just over four minutes but you do not forget her.

A couple of stories about this scene...

Dora Bryan turned up for the audition in her best coat and Carol Reed's reaction was: "Very good. That is just right for the part."

And when Reed had to defend the film against cuts the American censors, he said Rose's "I know your Daddy, dear" was explained by the fact that this was a small, villagey part of London and all the inhabitants would know one another.

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Keynesian Liberal thinks he knows what Leeds needs - and it is not HS2.

Professor Louis Appleby, the National Director of Mental Health and Criminal Justice, has written a guest post for the excellent MentalHealthCop blog: "any police officers I have met are clear that dealing with mental illness is a natural part of their modern role.  Others believe the opposite, that it gets in the way of “real” policing.  But that cannot be right.  Mental illness is common, as is substance misuse and personality disorder.  Society is finally facing up to how common mental ill-health is.  People whose work is with the public – teachers, housing staff, prison officers, politicians – need to see mental illness as within their remit.  Anything else is discrimination."

Robert Reich explains how Obama is unravelling the Reagan Republicanism: "Republican libertarians have never got along with social conservatives, who want to impose their own morality on everyone else. Shrink-the-government fanatics in the GOP have never seen eye-to-eye with deficit hawks, who don’t mind raising taxes as long as the extra revenues help reduce the size of the deficit. The GOP’s big business and Wall Street wing has never been comfortable with the nativists and racists in the Party who want to exclude immigrants and prevent minorities from getting ahead. And right-wing populists have never got along with big business and Wall Street, which love government as long as it gives them subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts."

Did the Chernobyl disaster cause the downfall of the Soviet Union? Mark Joseph Stern investigates on Slate.

M.J. Wayland writes on the Horseman's Word - a secret society once said to operate among farmers and ploughmen in Aberdeenshire, Banff, Elgin "and certain parts of Angus".

Winston Churchill's lack of interest in cricket is dissected by Go Litel Blog, Go... (aka the blogger across the road).

GUEST POST The uncertain politics of railway preservation

A week before Christmas I blogged about the BBC programme The Golden Age of Railways. Joseph Boughey, who appeared in that programme, left a comment on that post.

Now Joseph has written a guest post on the uncertain politics of railway preservation and the relation of the 'small is beautiful' theme to wider political aspirations and economic arrangements.

During the film The Golden Age of Steam: Small is Beautiful I explained some of my impressions of those who, in 1950, founded the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society (not its present members, or members of similar societies).

Of course, much was said that did not appear in the film. The outlook of the Talyllyn founders was conservative rather than Conservative, and indeed only one founder – William Trinder – had a clear party identification, and he was a Liberal. This facilitated his dealings with the line’s owner, Sir Henry Haydn Jones, who was Liberal MP for Merioneth.

On the whole, support for small railway preservation has never been linked to direct party advantage. It could appeal to figures on the Left like Bob Cryer MP, supporter of the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway Company, who saw it as a form of common ownership under workers control; or Sir Gerald Nabarro, maverick Conservative MP, who sought to take over the Severn Valley Railway and demonstrate the virtues of private enterprise. As Raphael Samuel asserted in Theatres of Memory, 'heritage' (itself a much-contested concept) has proved unusually capable of attracting wide-ranging support quite separately from party interest.

Quite apart from party involvement, many who are involved in railway preservation would see this as quite separate from politics, and would repudiate any political connections. There are, however, distinct political dimensions to preservation, conservation and heritage, albeit ones that cannot be reduced to conventional party stances. Preserved railways correspond to a stress on the small-scale, the personal and intimate, in contrast to the large-scale impersonal bureaucracies represented by corporate capital.

By a modest leap, the 'small is beautiful' approach to organisation can be extended to forms of politics, notably a Green emphasis on local control and the small-scale, and some aspects of 'community politics' fostered by the 1970s Liberal revival. The Green movement has also encouraged many to eschew formal party involvement for attempts to develop small-scale alternatives, experiments that might spread to counter and replace the mainstream. The Centre for Alternative Technology, founded in 1975 to foster and generalise ecological alternatives, represents one such smaller-scale institution.

In the 1970s, community politics, seen as “a system of ideas for social transformation”, seemed to offer an alternative to unfettered corporate capitalism or bureaucratic monocultural social democracy. I recall a Radical Bulletin activist asserting that “participation is an end in itself” in 1975 (Guardian, 20 September), spreading the idea of popular involvement well beyond parties into the wider economy. Somehow, given wide participation, better decisions, better policies, indeed a better world, would emerge. If this now seems a bizarre idea for the party of Nick Clegg and David Laws, this remains an ideal that seems to lie behind some initiatives and some organisations of economic or political purpose.

It is tempting to view the Talyllyn and other enthusiast-run railways in this light, as a more appropriate way to proceed than the large-scale nationalised railway or the corporate state-regulated system represented by the privatised railway. And yet, organisationally, while small-scale may be good for a local leisure attraction supported by enthusiasts, it is hardly the way to run a railroad, let alone to develop new infrastructure.

Those who founded the Talyllyn seemed to hark back to an era before the Big Four companies produced by Grouping, which, apparently, featured a more human scale. The hierarchical nature of such companies, often run by autocrats, was not stressed. Trinder had initially hoped that a former railway director, expropriated through nationalisation, could be persuaded to take over the line, and the model of small-scale local management, which would be followed later by many preserved lines, only emerged when such railway 'enthusiasts' proved uninterested.

If the Talyllyn founders regarded nationalisation as a threat to the human-scale, there was also an attempt to turn back the clock to a somewhat romanticised vision of a countryside that was yet to be marred by industrialisation, in a post-war world in which the modernisation associated with social democracy seemed to threaten landscapes and “traditional” ways of life.

L.T.C Rolt’s writings, in particular, were later claimed by parts of the Green movement, although his views were closer to the interwar organic movement (of “blood and soil”) than the politics of Caroline Lucas. He saw the Talyllyn as somehow accessing surviving remnants of a pre-industrial natural order, in which contradictions between people and environment were not manifest; he had earlier made a similar case for Britain’s smaller canals. Rolt made the leap of imagination to praise both a settled mediaeval order and the apparent esprit de corps of pre-Grouping railway companies.

This comes close to the derided 'hobbit socialism', advocating a settled order that had eschewed industrialism, something that The Shire was threatened by in Tolkien’s book, until his heroes returned and restored an agrarian society. This romanticised vision had resonances with the right-wing nationalism espoused by Saunders Lewis, the co-founder of Plaid Cymru, who wanted to deindustrialise the South Wales valleys (something with which Plaid’s current leader, who is decidedly left wing and comes from the Rhondda, might take issue!). Some movements that seek to promote the local in opposition to the global or large-scale can be distinctly ultra-reactionary – orcs rather than hobbits.

The appeal of the small scale can be seductive. I fully agree with the assertion that “The ultimate obscenity is to reduce people to the status of objects: to be led, manipulated, directed, discarded.” (ALC Campaign Booklet, The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, 1980). However, the problem is how to secure a political environment in which all people count.

What is crucial is the broader polity and economic system, in which the small-scale are embedded. Small organisations, whether self-managed enterprises, consumer co-operatives, social enterprises or co-owned organisations or property might well prove to feature in the good society. However, on their own they do not provide more than a miniature bulwark against the impersonal forces of capitalist economies and corresponding states; and without challenges to established ownership of capital, community involvement, participation and (frankly) control must remain marginal or utopian.