Jonathan Meades on Robert Clayton's 'Estate'

An excerpt from a forthcoming film short about Robert Clayton's photo book Estate - colour documentary photographs shot a generation ago.

Later. I have posted the film on this blog.

How Thatcherites and Blairites buggered up Britain between them

I have a soft spot for The Age of Insecurity, a 1998 book by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson.

In part this is because, having bought a copy and sat down to read it, I found that I was quoted in it.

Since you ask, that quote runs:

In a letter to the Guardian on 15 September 1997, Jonathan Calder wrote: "Labour is effectively recasting unemployment as a form of individual delinquency."

So I can claim to have identified early on a trend that has continued right up to Iain Duncan Smith and his Work Capability Assessments.

The other reason I like the books is that it central analysis still seems spot on.

Elliott and Atkinson argue that the supposed rise of freedom in the two decades before they wrote was only for freedom of a particular sort.

Money had certainly been set free by measures such as the abolition of exchange controls, but people actually enjoyed less freedom. That freedom had been eroded both by the Thatcherite war on unions and job security and by New Labour's enthusiasm for policing private life.

As they wrote:

The citizen now fears not only the P45 and the UB40, but the knock on the door from the child welfare inspector.

Again, that analysis seems prophetic today in a world where money travels the globe in microseconds and refugees die in the attempt to cross national borders.

I thought of The Age of Insecurity today when I read a post on the always excellent Stumbling and Mumbling blog: Workplace Coercion.

In it Chris Dillow ("Rutland's leading economic thinker"), who writes the blog, quotes the Guardian report of working conditions at Sports Direct:

All warehouse workers are kept onsite at the end of each shift in order to undergo a compulsory search by Sports Direct security staff, with the experience of the Guardian reporters suggesting this typically adds another hour and 15 minutes to the working week – which is unpaid.

He then asks why right-wing lovers of freedom are never heard criticising such arrangements.

Is it that they believe the labour markets function as the economic textbooks say they should? Is it that they fear any intervention in those markets will make things worse?

Or is it - and my money's on this one - that they care only about freedom for bosses, and not freedom for all.

The way that New Labour has contribute to the insecurity of the average Briton was also discussed in a Guardian article today by Tom Clark.

Clark argues that successful prime ministers - and he gives Attlee and Thatcher as examples - first argue against the conventional wisdom, then establish a new consensus and finally frame laws and institutions that cement it for years after they have stood down.

He goes on:

Now think of the apologetic nervousness with which New Labour did great things. Within a few years of passing the Human Rights Act, Jack Straw found it expedient to begin rubbishing it – so today Conservatives can now sound respectable in proposing to rip it up. 

Gordon Brown goaded the Tories into voting for the abolition of child poverty, but because nobody outside of Westminster was engaged in that argument, the Tories can today move the goalposts by redefining a poverty measure just before the poverty rate surges. 

New Labour’s tax credits dressed redistribution up as a tax cut. At the same time, the party indulged suspicions about welfare cheats with endless headlines about dedicated hotlines to dob in neighbours for swinging the lead, or lie detectors in jobcentres.

He concludes:

as Labour in parliament looks on in bewilderment at a voluntary party that appears to have lost all appetite for office, it should give some thought to the doctrine of power at any price, and the transient nature of its legacy.

That is unfair to Labour activists, most of who very much want power even if they have opted for a wrongheaded strategy of winning it.

But Clark is right that New Labour ducked arguments and tried to do good while sounding as though it was being nasty to people.

I think New Labour saw this as a way of keeping the middle classes happy, but its effect has been to bolster just those strands in working-class and lower middle-class thinking that make people unwilling to vote Labour.

But then me and Larry and Dan could have told you that almost 20 years ago.

Liberal Democrats hold Market Harborough Logan ward

Many congratulations to Barbara Johnson and everyone who helped her for a great result in today's by-election.

Market Harborough Logan Ward

Lib Dems          402    45.2%  (+9.0)

Conservative     303    34.0%  (-1.3)

Labour                82     9.2%  (-5.9)

Green                 56     6.3%  (-7.1)

Ukip                   47     5.3%  (+5.3)

Lib Dem Hold

Eastleigh Works open day

View image | gettyimages.com

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Six of the Best 556

Mark Park shows how Stop the War airbrushed a conspiracy theory from its website.

"The long term trend of the decline of membership and support for political parties has, if anything, accelerated, and long standing loyalties to right or left have given way to a far more complicated political reality in which populist or even anti democratic voices are now being increasingly heard." Cicero's Songs on the crisis of conventional political parties.

"What to do with a broken ship full of explosives? That question has been debated off and on for the past seven decades, and the consensus has been to leave it alone, safer right where it is. So there the ship sits at the bottom of the estuary, the area around it cordoned off by buoys." Robkam on the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, which lies in the Thames Estuary.

California's third-largest city is a desert ghost town - Laura Bliss explains.

Martyn Barber and Edward Carpenter present some striking aerial photographs that reveal previously unsuspected archaeological sites.

Tiffany Imogen celebrates gifts from the hedgerow.

Restoring Oakham Castle

If you are visiting Bonkers Hall and its famous maze (entry free, exit negotiable) next summer, why not take in Oakham Castle too?

Alistair Darling: From Black Dwarf to Morgan Stanley

Photo: Scottish Republican Socialist Movement

From BBC News:

Morgan Stanley has said former Chancellor Alistair Darling will join the bank's board of directors. 

Mr Darling, who served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010, will take up the role in January ... 

Morgan Stanley's chief executive James Gorman said the US bank would "greatly benefit from his experience." 

"He brings strong leadership experience, as well as insight into both the global economy and the global financial system," said Mr Gorman. 

In 2014 members of Morgan Stanley's board of directors received $75,000 (£49,960) a year plus an additional $10,000 to $30,000 for leading or joining a committee within the board. Each board member also received $250,000 in stock awards.

All of which gives me an excuse to wheel out this blog's favourite quote from George Galloway.

Here he is reminiscing in the Daily Record in March 2008:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf. 

Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze. 

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy. 

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. 

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time. 

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been. 

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

Vanished Leicester: Palace Theatre, Belgrave Gate

Here it is being demolished in 1959.

A website devoted to music hall and theatre history - www.arthurlloyd.co.uk - describes the theatre in happier days:

The Palace Theatre of Varieties as it was named in 1901 was built on the site of the former Floral Hall in Belgrave Gate, Leicester, for Oswald Stoll and was designed by the renowned Theatre architect Frank Matcham in an elaborate Moresque style. 

The Theatre opened on Monday 17th June 1901 being a three tier Theatre consisting of the Fauteils, stalls and pit on the ground floor, above which were the Grand circle, Upper circle and Gallery. There were three stage boxes each side of the proscenium arch, one at stalls level and two in the dress circle, plus 7 rear circle boxes. The opening capacity was 3,500 people, it being, in 1901, the largest Theatre outside London ... 

In the centre of the stage was a large wrought iron animal cage which could be raised and lowered from underneath the stage by hydraulics for wild animal shows. 

A remarkable feature of the Theatre however, was the crush room (waiting area) being a semi circular area with a glass and iron domed roof being a Winter Garden with rockeries, fountains and dripping wells, all overlooked by a rustic smoking balcony. The rockeries representing Derbyshire and Peak district rock formations designed by Clapham and West of Didsbury.

Jersey is "heading towards bankruptcy"

View image | gettyimages.com

Oliver Bullough writes in the Guardian today:

Jersey looks rich – but it is heading towards bankruptcy. 

In April, officials announced that the budget would be short £125m a year by 2019. “What went wrong?” asked the Jersey Evening Post. And that was just the start of it. By June, the annual deficit – now known on the island as the “black hole” – had been revised upwards to £145m, more than £1 in every five that the government spends. 

“The black hole is so big,” according to Connect, a Jersey business magazine, that “filling it will take the equivalent of shutting down every school in the island, laying off every teacher, letting the parks turn into overgrown jungles and having our roads literally fall apart.” 

That is quite a hole, and the question is, how can Jersey fill it? The solutions are not pretty: voluntary redundancies, compulsory redundancies, new taxes, fewer public services. 

Jersey bet its future on finance, allowing its other industries to shrivel, in the belief that it could live well in perpetuity from moving other people’s money around. If that belief was false, then does its fate await another island off the coast of France – one that has also pledged its future to finance? 

In short, is Jersey’s worrying present Britain’s bleak future?

It is also worth quoting a Telegraph article by Gordon Rayner that appeared during the abortive investigation of child abuse on the island:

One more disturbing question presents itself in the light of the child abuse scandal: just why, on a such a small and supposedly idyllic island, did so many hundreds of children end up in care homes? 

The answer lies in another little-publicised fact about Jersey - its unexpectedly high level of poverty, which brings with it the sort of social problems that lead to children being taken into care. 

Although Jersey, with its £250 billion financial industry, has the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe, the island's wealth is largely held by the privileged few. Some 13,000 people - more than one in seven - live in social rental properties, Jersey's equivalent of council houses, and half of all households suffer from one or more of the internationally recognised measures for relative poverty. 

The crumbling 1960s council estates of St Helier are testament to the years of neglect. Rusting cars rot on rubbish-strewn drives, windows have bedsheets for curtains and the paint is peeling off walls and doorframes. "This place is run by the finance industry for the finance industry," says one resident. "Anyone else just doesn't count."

And if the finance industry fails, what will become of the islanders then?

The Free Speech Bites podcasts

The other day I tweeted about Danny Alexander's endorsement of the Philosophy Bites podcasts.

Today I learnt that Nigel Warburton, the host of that series, has created Free Speech Bites. This is a spin-off series of podcasts dedicated to freedom of expression.

Among them you will find Irshad Manji on religion and free speech, Ma Jian on political and artistic freedom in China, and D.J. Taylor on George Orwell,

Six of the Best 555

"The key to reducing the risk of more floods like those in Carlisle is to realise that conventional 'flood defence' can never provide security against the ever more extreme weather events that global warming will bring. We must embrace natural solutions to holding back flood waters: more trees; and bring back the beavers!" Oliver Tickell is right.

Dawud Islam looks at the lessons of Oldham West: "All of us from Tim downwards need to hasten the roll out of our new direction and messages. Only when we finally give people something to vote for will the strains of the ‘lost deposits’ songs start to fade into the distance."

Ben Schiller explains how Finland's basic income scheme will work.

"To understand the complexities of the ongoing eurozone crisis, we need to analyze culture, since culture and history shape how policies are accepted, rejected, or modified," says Séamus Power looking at Ireland.

The inventor of Blue Peter has been forgotten because of the glorious, if tyrannical reign of Biddy Baxter. Andrew Martin introduces us to John Hunter Blair.

A London Inheritance goes in search of Park Row - a lost Knightsbridge street.

Keith Vaz eyes the speaker's chair

View image | gettyimages.com

"Keith Vaz has two ambitions. He is hoping that he will get a knighthood, and he would like to be the next speaker. 

"You can tell this by the way he is slavishly applauding the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, at Parliamentary Labour party meetings. He also seems to be tempering his criticism of the Tories."

So says an unnamed Labour MP in a new story on Exaro.

A similarly unnamed Conservative MP adds there:

"There is no question that Keith Vaz fancies the job of speaker as he is very ambitious. He is very well connected and very friendly with the current speaker."

The idea of Vaz as speaker comes straight from a Trollope novel, but this is not the first time it has been floated.

In December 2013 the Telegraph told us:

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, has emerged as a surprise contender to be the next Speaker of the House of Commons. MPs confirmed that the Labour MP's name has been doing the rounds as a possible replacement for John Bercow, who is due to stand down in the middle of the next Parliament.

We can only pray for the preservation of Lindsay Hoyle.

But be warned. The Commons can do strange things when it comes to choosing a speaker,

In 2000 the two front benches wanted Sir George Young to succeed Betty Boothroyd, but the swollen ranks of Labour backbenchers decided that a Labour house required a Labour speaker.

So Michael Martin was hoisted into the chair and sat there, red faced and scowling, until the expenses scandal meant his inadequacies could no longer be tolerated.

Paying tribute to the emergency services

Politicians have been paying tribute to the emergency services today for their work in the floods in Cumbria.

It's what politicians do in such circumstances, but don't let cynicism creep in.

I am reminded of the aftermath of the derailment I was involved in at Chilham this summer.

After the train had come to a halt we all sat there and waited for something to happen.

For several minutes nothing did, then a convoy of flashing blue lights appeared in the darkness a couple of fields away.

Suddenly there was a wonderfully reassuring sense that other people knew about our predicament and someone was in charge.

Fire services in particular are being cut across the country, yet any one of us could need them tomorrow.

Greviile Janner is unfit to stand trial

From the Guardian website this morning:

Lord Janner has been formally found unfit to stand trial regarding a string of historical sexual offences at a hearing at the Old Bailey. 

The peer and former Labour MP is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, which is incurable, severe and has left him unable to participate in a trial, four experts who have examined him have agreed. 

The decision on Monday means that there will not be a full criminal trial to hear the claims against Janner, which span three decades. 

Instead, he is expected to face a “trial of the facts”, where the jury is asked to decide – on the basis of evidence adduced by prosecution lawyers and by lawyers who put the case for the defence – whether or not the accused did the acts he or she was charged with.

Such a trial of facts may sound an unusual procedure to the layperson but, as I pointed out in April, it is not that rare.

And a trial of the facts in the case of an MP who is unfit to plead too place as recently as 2012.

Later. Read Mr Justice Openshaw's full judgment (PDF).

Cliff Richard discovers Gas Street Basin in 1974

An extract from the film Take Me High.

Reel Streets, which has lots of photographs of the film's locations then and now, describes it thus:

Tim (Cliff Richard) is a successful ambitious young financier working for a London Merchant bank, but even his happy-go-lucky attitude is severely jolted when he is sent to Birmingham instead of the promised New York for his posting! 

But comedy reigns when the enterprising bank manager helps an unsuccessful Birmingham restaurant compete with its rivals by introducing a new fast food - the Brumburger!

Man charged over 'malicious' Facebook messages sent to MP

From BBC News:

A man has been charged with malicious communications following an investigation into Facebook messages sent to an MP, Scotland Yard says. 

Craig Wallace, 23, who is also known as Muhammad Mujahid Islam, was arrested at an address in north London. 

He remains in custody and will appear at Hendon Magistrates' Court on Monday. 

It comes after Labour MPs Simon Danczuk and Neil Coyle reported to police alleged death threats after voting in favour of Syria air strikes.

The report goes on to say that the police have not named the MP in question, but he or she does not represent a London constituency.

Small Faces: My Mind's Eye

This reached number 4 in the singles chart in 1966, though it was released by the Small Faces' manager Don Arden (Sharon Osborne's father) without their knowledge.

Alex Petridis wrote well about the song in the Guardian:

It is the Small Faces’ equivalent of the Beatles’ Rain, the acid initiate staring back at the “straight” world, but while John Lennon sneers from a position of enlightened superiority – “they might as well be dead” – Lane sounds warm and open-hearted, forgiving the people sniggering at his new-found spiritual leanings. The music on Rain sets out to disorientate, but My Mind’s Eye sounds oddly comforting and familiar, as if inviting the listener to join in ... 

Acid seemed to immediately strip the Small Faces of the preening machismo you can hear on their debut album. In its place came a brand of psychedelia that was charming and wry, devoid of self-importance, a veritable advert for the benefits of doing your crust in with LSD.

The real enemy of the Corbynistas

Nick Cohen gets it right in the Observer tomorrow:

The Corbynites’ real enemies are not Tories, whom they rather respect for standing up for the interests of their class, but Labour MPs who fail to show the required radical virtue and betray the leftwing cause. 

They don’t mutter darkly that there will be “no hiding place” for Tory MPs who voted in favour of bombing Isis. They don’t scream that Conservative women are “witches” and “cows”. They don’t deliver death threats to David Cameron. 

Their virtuous hatred is righteously reserved for their own side and its ugliness will destroy the myth of leftwing decency more thoroughly than the right ever could.

Disused railway stations in Gloucestershire

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

It would also be possible to write poems about stations in Devon, Bedfordshire, North Lincolnshire, East Sussex, Leicestershire, Herefordshire, Hampshire, Cumbria, Cambridgeshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Cornwall, Rutland. Northumberland, Shropshire, Suffolk, East Riding of Yorkshire, Norfolk, Wiltshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Durham, Glasgow, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Edinburgh and Buckinghamshire.

Sarah Teather joins the Jesuits

From the Jesuits in Britain website:

Sarah Teather has been appointed as the Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in the UK (JRS UK). Formerly the Member of Parliament for the London constituency of Brent Central, Sarah joined the International Advocacy team of JRS in June 2015. 

As an advocacy advisor, she has visited JRS projects all over the world, including Lebanon, South Sudan, Uganda, Macedonia and the southern coast of Italy where so many attempt dangerous crossings to Europe over the Mediterranean Sea

Congratulations to Sarah on her new job. I blogged about her religion and likely future career last year.

Ignatius of Loyola is 524.