Michael Howard casts off the shades of night

Well, almost.

His conversation with Peter Hennessy this morning revealed that he had been one of Iain Macleod's followers, a one-nation Tory, when at university. He was also proud of the fact that he had virtually single-handedly persuaded President Bush snr. to attend the Rio climate-change conference which resulted in the USA acceding to the terms of the first international climate-change agreement. Mr Howard remains a believer in humanity's making a major contribution to global warming.

He had also been a supporter, along with other members of the "Cambridge Mafia", of Britain's membership of the European Community. He asserted that he would still be a supporter of a reformed European Union, but what changed him into a Leaver was David Cameron's dramatic failure to achieve any changes just before the referendum. To my mind, this was evidence of Mr Cameron's weakness - and previous UK ministers' failure to engage in Europe - rather than an immutability on the part of the EU.

He also claimed to have reduced crime in England & Wales. This is somewhat disingenuous. Some of his reforms at the Home Office may have been worthwhile, but statistics show that crime rates throughout the western world showed a similar decline in the same period.

His long-standing support of Liverpool FC was already well-known, and that he had tried to organise a soccer team at Llanelli Grammar School. However, in a much earlier interview he had revealed that he had also been a vice-president of Swansea Town. It would have been good to know if he had continued that interest.

I remember where I was ....

... when Richard Nixon said on live television that he had never been a quitter. In August 1974 I was on a course in the residential training centre of ICL* in Old Windsor. Probably after a late-night snooker session I was prowling the lounges in search of a coffee pot which was still warm, when I noticed that a TV was still on, and Nixon's face was on it. He was delivering his famous "I am not a crook" speech and it was being relayed live by BBC.

Mrs May has not so far confirmed our worst fears by declaring that her administration is not criminal, but she has echoed his line about not being a quitter. She is tempting fate, as Nixon did.

* In those far-off days when the UK still had a major computer manufacturer, before Mrs T came along to declare that it was not necessary for Britain to make computers, in a foretaste of Patrick Minford's assessment that UK would thrive outside the EU without industry.

Regional cheeses back at our local Tesco

I do not suppose that Dave Lewis reads my blog - more likely there was a wave of protest by dissatisfied customers - but a month after I posted about Cheshire disappearing from the Neath Abbey store, it is back on the shelves along with Wensleydale and Lancashire.

Reporting the floods

One can understand the extensive coverage of the effects of hurricane Harvey: a dozen people have died, 30,000 families have been displaced from Texas' most populous city and inundation records have been broken. Clearly global warming played its part in the disaster which has struck in the back yard of the world's most significant climate-change denier, Donald J Trump. Besides all this, video footage from multiple sources is available.

But spare a thought for India, Nepal and Bangladesh where extreme monsoon rains have led to the deaths of 1,200 people, destroyed agriculture and removed over 100,000 homes. The relatively rich India has set up a £78m disaster fund, but Nepal and Bangladesh will almost certainly need outside help. A bit more publicity by the BBC would help the aid agencies provide this.

Conservative son of Southwark

John Leech, who seems to have been the man who popularised the change of the original meaning of the word "cartoon" , was born off Stamford Street in Southwark 200 years ago today. He is probably best known today for his illustrations of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but he was also a major contributor to Punch magazine. His archive shows a conservative bent, inveighing against free entry of foreigners, bans on smoking and free trade among other things. To his credit, he also attacked the exploitation of poor workers (though he seems to have been against trade unions) and the pollution of the Thames, with its attendant diseases.

Golden power

For the last three years, Glastonbury (and a few other) festival-goers have contributed to renewable electricity generation via their excreta. Bristol BioEnergy Centre's Microbial Fuel Cells were installed under urinals and provided electrical power for lighting. An article by BBiC's Jonathan Winfield and Ioannis Ieropoulos in the CAT magazine Clean Slate earlier this year looks forward to how the technology may develop. It concludes:

It is our hope that it won't be too long before microbial fuel cells are a part of our lives. Perhaps we'll have charging ports in our toilets? So back to you, the reader's bladder movements. Perhaps you're ready to go now? When you do, just remember that what you're flushing down the pan could one day be a means for lighting your yard or charging your phone.

Labour's timid approach to the elimination of poverty

Caron Lindsay points up a discrepancy between Labour's image of wishing to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and Corbyn's actual commitment. She reports that, ahead of a speech in Cambridge, the Labour spin machine briefed reporters that Corbyn would promise to end the freeze in already meagre benefits which, as prices go up, makes it even harder for people to survive. Instead, Mr Corbyn rolled up and said only: “We are confident that we will be able to end the benefits freeze.”

Anyone would think that Corbyn and McDonnell want to keep the poor that way.

No such equivocation on the part of Liberal Democrats. Caron quotes the 2017 manifesto:

"The Liberal Democrats are clear – balancing the books on the backs of the poor and disabled, and demonising people who claim benefits, is neither acceptable nor responsible. Although all government budgets must be scrutinised to minimise waste and ensure value for money, this must not be used as an excuse to attack the poor and vulnerable. In any case it is more effective to tackle the causes of the benefits bill – low pay, high rents, unemployment and ill-health.

"That’s why we will reverse unfair Conservative policies like reducing support for younger people and cutting the benefits of people not fit for work. We will reinstate the legally binding poverty targets of the Child Poverty Act. We will:

"Uprate working-age benefits at least in line with inflation."

It has become clear that the Liberal Democrats held the Tories back from doing all sorts of horrible things with benefits. Osborne wanted to implement the benefits freeze during the Coalition but Nick Clegg wouldn’t let him. We stopped them taking Housing Benefits from young people and set the benefit cap, which many of us vehemently disagree with, at a much more humane level. Since we’ve been off the scene, the Tories have shown their usual disdain for those who need the vital safety net that social security provides.

While I would be the first to admit that our record in coalition was far from perfect, there is simply no excuse for the Labour Party to carry the benefits freeze on.

State of public libraries

I am grateful to 4imprint's Public Sector News for a review of the state of public libraries in England (and presumably Wales, since the same legal and financial imperatives apply, even though the administration is separate). The writer points out that:

According to recent figures from the Carnegie UK Trust, 1 in 2 of us still visit our local library. Interestingly, 15 to 24-year-olds are the most likely group to use a library, with over-55s being least likely to do so. That's perhaps the opposite of what many might have initially assumed, and a good example of why library operators must understand the specific needs of the people they can serve.

However:

The library service has come under huge pressure in recent years, with many being closed as councils aim to absorb public sector spending cuts. In fact, a recent study by the BBC found that between 2010 and 2016, more than 300 have closed. But all has not been lost, as the number of volunteers helping to keep libraries operational has nearly doubled from 15,861 to 31,403 over these six years. It's an indication of how library services are seeking to adapt to changing times.

One appreciates the public spirit of those volunteers, in spite of the perception that local authorities are exploiting cheap labour, but there must be a concern that the experience and knowledge of trained librarians is being lost. A key finding of the Carnegie UK Trust study was that most people believe providing better information on the services that libraries offer would encourage greater use. Clearly, having expert advice on-hand must be part of that provision.

The writer is on the whole optimistic:

In a sense, the traditional role of the library has been diminished. But that doesn't mean they've outlived their usefulness. Instead, they can look to see where they might be able to add genuine value to the local community in other ways. For instance, is there a large proportion of unconnected people in the area who could benefit from having affordable computer access?
[...]
Many libraries are starting to position themselves as a community hub and place where local people can gather and interact. For instance, some offer cafe facilities alongside their traditional books and computers, giving people the chance to come in for a slice of cake and a mug of tea as well as a read! This can be an effective revenue generator, raising funds that help to subsidise every aspect of managing a library, and an appealing USP that gets people inside and learning about the services available. Alternatively, libraries could reach out to local schools and businesses, offering themselves as a venue for events. Again, this could get people who might not otherwise visit to come inside and learn what else a modern library can offer.

Some local libraries in Neath Port Talbot indeed offer additional facilities - for instance, the family history sessions at Taibach Community Library. However, the continued downgrading of the borough's libraries with the aim of saving money in the short term must be resisted.

Those Home Office letters

Theresa May and officials have dismissed them as a mistake, but I believe the reactionary Home Office civil servants knew exactly what they were doing. The letters* were akin to the "red frighteners" sent by unscrupulous debt collecting agencies. The agencies knew that their threats have no legal standing, but just enough recipients were cowed into paying up, often for money they do not owe. So it is with this Home Office exercise, adding just a few more emigrants to the total needed to meet the Conservatives' arbitrary migration target, and never mind the consequences for the economy or the quality of academic life of the UK.

* 100 letters were sent to EU nationals living in the UK; informing them that they have one month to leave the country, or they will be detained

Racial prejudice in football

It is sad that Mark Sampson, who hails from the happily racially diverse city of Cardiff, should have turned the clock back with the otherwise improving England women's football team. One sensed that something was up after the change from Hope Powell. Women of colour were disproportionately retired early and Sampson's teams were distinctly paler than his predecessor's. Now comes confirmation from Eniola Aluko of Sampson's prejudice, or ignorance, or both.

I suppose it betrays my own prejudice in saying that one should not mess with a Nigerian-born practising sports lawyer.

Lib Dems need to be given credit for what they did right

"Austerity – in which the Lib Dems colluded" -  so says Chris Dillow, a socialist economist. Leaving aside that few people born in the UK after the end of rationing know what real austerity is, we should be given credit for preventing tougher 2010/11 budgets than George Osborne actually delivered. If the Conservatives had won an absolute majority in 2010, they would have attempted to wipe out the budget deficit (created by Labour, it should be recalled) over a single parliament. Ironically, major sufferers would have been state pensioners who flocked to the Conservatives in droves in  the 2015 general election and to the hard-line Tories in the 2016 referendum. It was the gentler plan drawn up by David Laws (largely) and Vince Cable which was adopted by Osborne - incidentally, £1bn gentler than that proposed by Labour in their 2010 manifesto.

The Conservatives also proposed to stop all pay rises in the public sector. Low though it is, the fact that public servants get any increase is down to Liberal Democrats in government. For a reminder of some other achievements, see Mark Pack's infographic - and count how many of them the Cameron/May governments have been steadily unwinding.

Afghanistan: President Trump's simplistic approach

One appreciates that the United States is the last nation to "tell Afghanistan what to do", and that his predecessors' abandonment of military support was too swift, but the change of policy announced in Mr Trump's latest address to the nation puts too much emphasis on "killing terrorists" and not enough on support for the emerging nation. Probably more serious is his setting India against Pakistan. This is going to give succour to those violent elements in Pakistan who already trade on the impression that the nation is unfairly treated by the international community. The US would do more for Afghanistan by encouraging trade links and joint commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, the EU continues to work to improve civil society in the country.

And now, Don Shepherd

It has been a bad weekend. I thought it was fake news at first, so soon after seeming to be in fine fettle for his 90th birthday celebrations, but it is all too true. One of the greatest county players of all time has passed, and one who contributed wit and wisdom until the last.

Janice Dudley

The general public has difficulty getting its head round the fact that political opponents can get along and even be friends. Janice Dudley was one of those people I was happy to cooperate with at a community council level and even occasionally on the county borough council, even though I could not subscribe to Plaid Cymru's ideology. We might even have been friends but a frostiness developed after I stood in Bryncoch South in this year's local elections, although I was never after her place on the council which was clearly impregnable, but the second place previously held by a Labour man.

Her sudden death which came in what should have been the year crowning her political career is a tragedy. My heart goes out to her family and her many friends and colleagues.

Paid repatriation

The notion of paying people from the Commonwealth - and even their descendants - to leave the UK has raised its head again. John Rees-Evans, a candidate for the leadership of UKIP, has proposed paid repatriation of Indians. It is all very reminiscent of the 1960s, when Enoch Powell suggested a similar scheme for all immigrants from the Commonwealth. Ironically (or cynically?) he had been responsible for encouraging immigration of specialists, as a 2011 briefing paper recounts:

In 1963 the Conservative Health Minister, Enoch Powell, who later led the call for stricter controls on immigration, launched a campaign to recruit trained doctors from overseas to fill the manpower shortages caused by NHS expansion. Some 18,000 of them were recruited from India and Pakistan. Powell praised these doctors, who he said, 'provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of our hospitals and who are an advertisement to the world of British medicine and British hospitals.' Many of those recruited had several years of experience in their home countries and arrived to gain further medical experience, training, or qualification.

Powell was not alone. A considerable body of fellow-Conservatives, the Monday Club, had a policy on immigration which called for:

1. Scrapping of the Commission for Racial Equality and Community Relations Councils. 
2. Repeal of the race relations laws. 
3. An end to the use of race or colour as criteria for the distribution of state benefits and loans. 
4. An end to positive discrimination and all special treatment based upon race or colour. 
5. An end to all further large-scale permanent immigration from the New Commonwealth. 
6. An improved repatriation scheme with generous resettlement grants for all those from New Commonwealth countries who wish to take advantage of them. 
7. The redesignation of the Ministry of Overseas Aid as a Ministry for Overseas Resettlement.

Though the Monday Club was eventually disowned by the Conservative party, it included at its peak at least thirty Conservative MPs and more than a dozen peers. several of whom are still active. Few have publicly renounced their Monday Club views as one-time secretary to the group John Bercow has done.

It seems that Mr Rees-Evans's ideas are too extreme even for UKIP. One hopes so. If Mr Rees-Evans or Anne-Marie Waters should win the prize of UKIP leadership, and thus a guaranteed platform on BBC as well as other media, then the immediate prospects of race and foreign relations in the UK are dire.

We will probably not return to being the welcoming, state of the 19th century as described by veteran socialist Ruth Brown in an often-cited paper of 1995. However, we have survived "swamped by immigrants" scares before and will do so again.

In keeping with its role as the 'workshop of the world', Britain long enjoyed a reputation as a liberal provider of refuge and political asylum. The British ruling class had little use for immigration controls for most of the 19th century. The 'free' approach to immigration flourished in the heyday of free trade, as British capitalism expanded to the four corners of the globe. During the boom years of the industrial revolution British capitalism lapped up labour with an insatiable thirst, if only to throw workers back into unemployment in times of slump. Britain's bosses showed little interest in the national or ethnic 'character' of the labour power which they sucked into the expanding British economy.

However, by the turn of the century Britain clearly no longer 'ruled the waves', its industry increasingly undermined by cheaper imports from abroad. The end of the 19th century was marked by deep economic depression and political crises, as huge price rises led to massive cuts in virtually all workers' standards of living, and rising unemployment forced millions into abject poverty. The working class responded with the explosion of 'new unionism', embodied in the strike wave which swept Britain in 1889, involving thousands of women and immigrant workers.

Sadly, the heroic struggles which characterised this period of 'new unionism' proved to be shortlived. The ruling class fought back, and against the background of working class defeat the first law aimed at controlling immigration into Britain was introduced. The 1905 Aliens Act introduced by Balfour's Tory government had an overriding advantage for the government and the ruling class as a whole. It institutionalised the idea that immigrants alone were responsible for the rapidly deteriorating conditions which most workers were suffering.

The introduction of the act was accompanied by a rise of anti-Semitism, led by the gutter press, against the growing numbers of impoverished Jewish refugees arriving in London's East End. In parliament Tory MPs whipped up an anti-Semitic frenzy. One even likened Jewish immigration to the entry of diseased cattle from Canada. Jewish refugees were simultaneously accused of taking British workers' jobs and of living on welfare, in the same racist--and self contradictory--mythology which opponents of immigration continue to employ against migrant workers today.

Paki-bashing

https://order-order.com/2017/08/17/corbyn-wrong-to-say-there-is-british-pakistani-grooming-problem/ refers.

One wonders why men of Muslim sub-continental origin have become associated with organised sex-trafficking of young vulnerable girls. These associations seem to come in waves. There was a spate of "Irish tinkers" being implicated in various scams, and long before that, prostitution in central London was said to be controlled by Maltese families.

In cases like Oxford, Rochdale, Rotherham and Newcastle I suspect that what has happened has been something like a dam bursting. Police and social workers have long known that grooming for sex has gone on, but have been unduly afraid of seeking prosecution because of fears of being labelled racist - or of the sheer amount of evidence which needed to be handled. Once one crown prosecutor had taken the plunge, the rest felt free to follow. The result is that the involvement of Muslim men in this shameful business has been highlighted.

Why did men of Pakistani and Bengali descent get involved? It has been suggested that it is because Islam is more protective of its young women than nominally Christian Britain, and that the Old Adam seeks an outlet. However, the same could be said of orthodox Judaism and there have been no reports of sex-rings in Childs Hill or Cheetham. Besides, it seems to me that Muslims here are regressing to the secular mean. I believe the truth is more prosaic and down to opportunism. In the big towns and cities in England outside London, the mini-cab trade has come to be dominated by men from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. This gives plenty of scope for the criminally-inclined to pick up and transport their victims. Not having been stopped by the authorities at an early stage, the information about easy pickings no doubt spread to other area by word of mouth through clans and extended families.

If social workers and those in charge of children's homes had been more vigilant, and those who had gone the extra mile, reporting abuse to the police, had been listened to, we would not have reached this dire state.

Unilever cut the mustard

The news that regulatory approval had been given to the conglomerate Reckitt Benckiser (of which Reckitt & Colman was once a major component) selling its remaining food businesses to McCormick caused me to check whether Colman's Mustard was part of the sale. McCormick is the US firm best known over here for its ownership of Schwartz herbs & spices. Fortunately the long-established British brand stayed in (part) British hands because Unilever had bought all the Colman's side of the business in 1995.

Imperial symbols more important than health and safety?

When I learned of the Daily Mail's (and, it appears, Theresa May's) diatribe against the very sensible measures to protect the hearing of those working on the renewal of the Elizabeth tower, my mind turned to the needless deaths resulting from the gilding of Petersburg's St Isaac's Cathedral.

Discrimination in IT

An American academic contributed to the Google misogyny debate on The World This Weekend last Sunday. She blamed the decline in the UK IT industry on our failing to recognise that women could program.

I feel that was too simplistic. As I wrote in a comment on Peter Black's blog in response to another suggestion for our loss of a lead in various aspects of computing:

We were still pioneering computer developments into the mid-1960s - and US was never far behind anyway. After the war, Turing had continued to work on computing at NPL and others from Bletchley Park took their expertise into industry and academia. So while they may not have been able to publish, nothing was lost - apart from the electronic valves from Colossus!

Three things did for us in my opinion: a) the Americans were better at marketing their machinery (sales to the big retail banks were key); b) they used the embargo on sales to iron curtain countries to their advantage; c) they maintained indirect government support for their industry while Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine abandoned ours.

I am glad that she placed on the broadcast record that the civil service agreed on equal pay for general service grades in the 1950s (though she did not realise that it would take about five years to achieve!) well ahead of other institutions*. However, she seemed to believe that machine grades, which were excluded from the 1954 equal pay agreement, incorporated computer programmers. In fact, the definition covered typists and, later, the people who pushed buttons and loaded paper tape and punched cards into computers. Programmers were drawn from executive grades, where equal pay certainly did apply. Now, here, I believe, is the insidious sexual discrimination which the American advocate missed. In order to be considered for direct entry as an executive officer, at least two GCE 'A' levels were necessary. It is now public knowledge that examination boards applied a fudge factor to girls' GCE results to pull them down to the same level or below those of the boys. In turn, this would have reduced the field for recruitment into data processing, where there was already a bias towards men. This was a shame, because I can vouch from personal experience that the women could at least hold their own with the men in civil service IT. One imagines the situation was similar in commercial computing.

On the subject of discrimination, Britain's ICT had a policy of excluding Jews from visible positions, because they had some lucrative contacts with Middle Eastern nations most of which had even stricter anti-Jewish policies than obtain now. I recall that it was a sore point with the IBM people we met in the 1960s.

*According to research by an academic Liberal Democrat, this advantage has been lost after the Thatcher/Heseltine reforms, which outsourced most traditional functions as well as allowing individual departments more freedom in setting pay rates.

Electrification follow-up

If you agree with me that Chris Grayling's decision to stunt rail electrification is a step backwards, there is a petition at http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/electric-trains-not-diesel-trains which has at the time of writing attracted three-quarters of the signatures needed to elicit a response from government. (If there were a further 90,000 we could even achieve a parliamentary debate!)

Some wit, but no humour

John Galsworthy, who was born 150 years ago as of yesterday, has fallen out of favour of late. He dealt with social problems in novels and particularly in his plays, which were a critical and occasionally commercial success in Edwardian times. He had a sense of irony, but his lack of humour probably militates against revivals of Strife (1909), and Justice (1910), which would otherwise strike chords today. (Winston Churchill, then a Liberal minister, admired Justice.)

The novels making up The Forsyte Saga have never been out of print and perhaps we may yet see a dramatisation which combines the best and eliminates the drawbacks of the centenary BBC production and the 2002 ITV version.

Rail transport: Tory government contempt for Wales deepens

You would think that Wales, which voted Leave, would be rewarded by the Brexitories at the expense of London, which voted Remain. Instead, we see that Crossrail 2, currently costed at £31bn, will go ahead while progressive plans for rail in Wales are again thwarted.

"Delusion" and "sound Conservative feeling" were absolutely convertible terms.

Last Sunday's post came about because Theresa Reviss was rumoured to be the daughter of Charles Buller, whose birthday was on 6th August 1806. (I am on a mailing list of ODNB which sends out a biography of the day, extracted from its database.) Reviss seems to be a Cornish name, and Buller had Cornish connections - he was in turn MP for West Looe, succeeding his father, and, after a break, for Liskeard - so the allegation is plausible. Buller settled money on the infant Theresa and his parents took responsibility for her after his death in 1848, but it could also have been that Buller's brother Arthur was the father.

Buller was an early parliamentary liberal, though in those pre-Gladstonian days he would have been classed as a radical Whig. Indeed, he was one of the first members to use the term "liberal" approvingly in the House of Commons in a speech from which my heading is taken.

"In their hour of victory the Whigs had no motive for changing their name, but a new name had come into existence to denote those members of the party who favoured more radical reforms than the general body. As early as 1816 Southey had written, 'These are the personages for whose sake the continuance of the Alien bill has been opposed by the British Liberales', and in 1826 Scott's Journal referred to 'Canning, Huskisson and a mitigated party of Liberaux'. The Spanish Liberales were a group of reformers at the beginning of the nineteenth century who were in power from 1820 to 1823 and roused general abhorrence by the violence of their opinions and actions. There was a group of French Libéraux with similar aims held in like detestation by men of traditional views. In the second decade of the century the term Liberal cameto be applied by opponents to the advanced section of the Whigs, often in the Spanish or French form, and no doubt with the implication that their views and conduct were un-English; but as the name  was already used in a good sense, those advanced Whigs were not averse from accepting the designation. Like Whig and Tory, the word Liberal* was a term of abuse derived from outside England and intended to be offensive, and like Whig and Tory it was accepted with pride; but unlike Whig and Tory, it had the advantage for those designated by it of bearing a good natural meaning [...]" (Bulmer-Thomas, The Growth of the British Party System)

I was disappointed to find only one name-check for Charles Buller in Bulmer-Thomas's 1965 work, but as the ODNB biographer points out, Buller's ready wit cast him as a lightweight, a reputation which persisted. (One can think of several modern politicians whose work has been undervalued for the same reason.) He had deliberately honed a thespian style in the Commons, one of the first to do so. In addition to his far-sighted liberal views, not all of which were popular in his lifetime, Buller made many contributions as chair and/or report-writer of committees dealing with significant matters such as the storage of public records (eventually leading to the establishment of the Public Record Office), the development of Canada and also of the colonies and the drafting of a constitution for New South Wales (he was of course opposed to transportation). He drafted the charter of the New Zealand Company and acted as their agent and representative in the difficult negotiations with the Colonial Office after 1840. A river and gorge were named after him in the South Island of New Zealand, and his memory was also perpetuated in Australia at Mount Buller in Victoria.

Charles Buller was someone I would have liked to have known, and not just as a fellow-asthmatic. I shall probably be mining his speeches and publications for bons mots from now on.

* Perhaps the fact that the term still is used abusively by conservatives in the USA is because there was never a serious Liberal party in that country.

Don Shepherd, great but grounded

It was good to hear Don Shepherd still in good voice on Radio Wales this morning in a trailer for the celebration of his 90th birthday. He must be in the top ten of cricketers who should have played test cricket but were not selected. He says on the subject of missing England honours:

It never worried me. I played for MCC against the West Indians at Lord's in 1957, and I played for a Commonwealth team under Australian captain Richie Benaud.

If I'd been an Australian, he told me I would have played quite a lot of times.

But there were so many terrific off-spinners around towards the end - Fred Titmus, David Allen, John Mortimore, Ray Illingworth - and they could bat, while I was a bit of a slogger.

I was happy enough doing what I did and what happened to me through my life.

There is more in his biography, including his growing up and the family business in Gower. I am glad that my move to Swansea coincided with the final years of his career, including the 1969 championship win.

Indian listings

According to the current Private Eye, these exciting jobs writing listings for various broadcast media are to be outsourced by Ericsson to India.

Mind you, the guys and gals in Gurugram, Chennai and Bengaluru may be more scrupulous than those in England who failed to check which version of Casino Royale went out on ITV4 this week. So those people who were led by the EPG to expect to see Daniel Craig's first outing as Bond were instead treated to the spoof starring David Niven.

Bizarre programming languages

A casual reference to INTERCAL (number one on the list to which this is a link) intrigued me. There was a period towards the end of the last century when every man and his dog (especially if the man and his dog had just graduated in computer science) produced a new computer language or operating system. I should have realised a long time ago that, considering the obscure syntax and/or special application of these languages, it was inevitable that some spoof languages would be devised. Moreover, some established languages were ripe for spoofing: consider a sample of APL:

[6]    L←(Lι':')↓L←,L       ⍝ drop To:
 [7]    L←LJUST VTOM',',L    ⍝ mat with one entry per row
 [8]    S←¯1++/∧\L≠'('       ⍝ length of address
 [9]    X←0⌈⌈/S
 [10]   L←S⌽(−(⍴L)+0,X)↑L    ⍝ align the (names)
 [11]   A←((1↑⍴L),X)↑L       ⍝ address
 [12]   N←0 1↓DLTB(0,X)↓L    ⍝ names)
 [13]   N←,'⍺',N
 [14]   N[(N='_')/ι⍴N]←' '   ⍝ change _ to blank
 [15]   N←0 ¯1↓RJUST VTOM N  ⍝ names
 [16]   S←+/∧\' '≠⌽N         ⍝ length of last word in name

- which is difficult to understand even with the comments to the right of each line of code.

On the other hand, there are descriptive languages like COBOL, which was designed to read like English, presumably so that managers of any intelligence or accountants could gain at least a superficial understanding of what a program did. My favourite on the Listverse list is therefore Shakespeare, which is surely inspired by COBOL:

The first line in a Shakespeare program is called the “title” and acts as a comment. The “Dramatis Personae” is the section
where variables are declared. Each variable name must be the name of a character from a Shakespeare play.

A piece of code in Shakespeare is broken into “Acts”, which contain “Scenes”, in which characters (variables) interact.
Each Act and Scene is numbered with a roman numeral and serves as a GOTO label. They are written in the form:

Act I: Hamlet’s insults and flattery.
Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.

Before “characters” (variables) can “act” (be acted upon) they must first be “on stage”.
To call a variable to the stage the “Enter” command is used. To tell characters to leave the stage, use the “Exit” command.
“Exeunt” calls more than one character to leave, or in the case that no characters are listed all the characters
will leave the stage.

I look forward to the movie (cinema, TV or Netflix) where the technical consultant manages to insinuate a screenful of INTERCAL at a critical point in the plot.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Fifty-three years on, Martin Thomas (Baron Thomas of Gresford) has been reminded of his first parliamentary campaign. What struck me about the newspaper report included in the Liberal Voice piece (apart from the fact that his lordship was even more handsome then than in later life), was how little had changed politically.

We need Lords reform as much as ever. The hereditary element may only be a faint echo of its former domination, but the upper House is now swamped with political appointees as a result of successive prime ministers seeking to redress the political imbalance left by the previous incumbent. It is a matter of shame that Conservative and Labour front benches conspired against the will of the people in 2010 by preventing the Liberal Democrat-inspired Lords Reform Bill from proceeding.

The rating system was very unfair. Fifteen years later, Margaret Thatcher was to replace it with something even more regressive, the community charge. Now we are back to "rating plus" in the form of council tax, which is only marginally fairer than rating. We still need a progressive system, like local income tax, or the site-value rating proposed by the Liberal party in 1964, or a combination of the two.

The politics of fear is still with us. The Conservatives continue to have nothing to offer but the assertion that they are more stable and sound than the main opposition, which admittedly is in an even worse state than it was in 1964. George Brown may have been over-susceptible to alcohol, but at least he did want Labour to take the country forward* rather than back to a discredited state socialism espoused by Corbyn and McDonnell.

Substitute "Premier League footballer" for "the Beatles" and multiply the weekly take-home figure by six or more, and the statement about pay disparity holds. The Conservatives may claim that the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid has narrowed, but only by comparison with the Blair-Brown years when it reached historic proportions.

We still lack a fair voting system. Worker participation in commercial and industrial enterprises has barely progressed. We have yet to see a British post-world-war government with a truly international outlook - post-Thatcher, we have become even more insular.

The one very clear change is one for the worse. Lord Thomas reminds my generation:

When I harangued the voters in Rhuddlan, lengthy speeches were acceptable. Every sentence had a real live verb in it, and, more significantly, the press reported every word. 

But he concludes his piece on an optimistic note:

But remember how Vince and Nick and Ed, Jo and Lynne and Jenny, and others of our Party fought within the coalition for the values and aims which had inspired us on the long march. Of course there were mistakes, but whatever the backlash, let us be proud of what we achieved and proud that the vision has remained intact.

What strikes me when I re-read this speech, is the consistency with which we have maintained our goals and the continuing relevance of our policies in a much changed world.

* Brown might have succeeded in those hopeful days of the late 1960s if prime minister Wilson had not trimmed under pressure from trade union barons and the Treasury.

Fixed-odds betting terminals: Hammond rebuts rumours of government backtrack

Chancellor Hammond has been forced to dismiss claims that he wants to scrap the planned crackdown on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), after reports in the Daily Mail at the weekend alleged that he planned to block attempts to restrict use of these controversial gambling machines.

The report claimed that Hammond had said that such plans would be ‘financially crippling’ for the UK as FOBTs generate almost £400m annually in tax revenue and plans to reduce the maximum stake allowed to just £2 would almost halve this income figure. Another government spokesperson, Tracey Crouch of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, called the report "fake news".

Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture Secretary Christine Jardine had earlier reacted to the rumours by asserting that the Government should not put cash before responsibility. She added: "This review is well overdue and there is an abundance of evidence showing the damage these machines do. Liberal Democrats have been calling for a £2 maximum stake on FOBTs for nearly a decade and there is immense support for that."

Venezuela and Turkey

Vince Cable is right to condemn Jeremy Corbyn's tacit acceptance of Venezuela's slide towards dictatorship. We should also condemn those conservative politicians from David Cameron on (not to mention ex-communists) who want a closer relationship with a Turkey which is on a similar path.

Last month, the EU issued a statement:

On 15 July 2016, the people of Turkey witnessed a coup attempt that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians and left more than 2,000 people injured. One year later, the EU reiterates its condemnation of the attempted coup, as it did during the very first hours of that dramatic night of 15 July 2016, and recalls its full support to the democratically elected institutions of the country. The EU stands in solidarity with Turkey and all the Turkish people. Respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law are essential principles of the European Union. They embody both the foundations of our relationship and the aspirations of the people of Turkey and the European Union. As a key partner and a candidate country and as a member of the Council of Europe, Turkey has subscribed to these principles. Turkey has the right to bring the individual perpetrators of this coup attempt to justice in strict compliance with the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. The EU stands ready and willing to continue to work with a stable, economically vibrant and democratic Turkey. To this end, and in the framework of the EU's engagement with Turkey, a High Level Political Dialogue will be held in Brussels on 25 July at which representatives of the EU and of Turkey will discuss areas of shared interest and common challenges.

I believe access to cheap fridges and Transit vans is too high a price for continuing to deal with an increasingly fascistic régime. The mass arrests sweeping up virtually all public defenders of individual freedom concern UN's spokesman on human rights even if they do not bother the EU's representative on foreign affairs. Surely not only should talks about joining the EU be suspended, but also Turkey's associate member status should be looked at until total democracy has been restored.

Neath Guardian, a symbol of our times

In an article for the i newspaper last month, Simon Kelner revealed that it was the printed Neath Guardian which gave him the start on a distinguished journalistic career. Kelner was the editor of the Independent between 1998 and 2011 which included, in my opinion, the peak years of the newspaper. He writes:

I started my career on a local paper in the South Wales town of Neath, a vibrant, industrious community. The Neath Guardian was a respected chronicler of the town’s activities, and was a brilliant training ground for young journalists. But, over the years, as advertising revenues declined, costs were cut, quality suffered, and inevitably circulation dwindled. The paper became a freesheet and then, in 2009, ceased publication.

The title had a brief revival online, courtesy of the people behind the Neath Ferret (see side-bar) and unconnected with the Western Mail who own the print title, but the site has not been updated for the last three years.

Kelner's article was triggered by the retirement of Sir Ray Tindle ("something of a hero to most journalists"), chairman of Tindle Newspapers Limited.

In his empire are Journals, Beacons, Tribunes, Echos*, and the like, and they are all united by a common purpose: to serve their respective communities. “I see a greater need for our local press than I have ever seen in my 80 years or so connected with this business,” Sir Ray said in his valedictory statement. “Local news in depth is what people need.” [...] Unfortunately, there are very few people like Ray Tindle around, who, in this era of fake news, are prepared to support these increasingly essential instruments of local democracy.

* including the Glamorgan Gem group which includes the Bridgend and Porthcawl Gem.

The Victorian cat lady

As the Countess de la Torre, Theresa Reviss was up before the Victorian beaks on several occasions for keeping too many animals in her London apartments. Typically,

THE COUNTESS DE LA TORRE AND HER CATS - St James's Gazette, 18 August 1884
The Countess De La Torre, of 38, Pembroke-square, was summoned at Kensington Saturday for disobeying a prohibitory order of the justices do away with number of cats and dogs which she kept in her dwelling-house. In defence the Countess said that seven of her cats had been destroyed and she bad given seven away. She had three cats still, and stray ones came to the house. By direction of the chairman, two officers of the vestry proceeded to the house of the Countess to ascertain the number of the cats and dogs. They found thirteen cats and seven dogs, and the smell in the house was most offensive. The chairman made an order for the Countess to pay 10 shillings a day from the 2nd August, on which day the decision of the justices was confirmed, to the present time. An order was also granted giving permission to enter the house and abolish the nuisance.

If only there had been a 19th century Facebook!

Reviss, allegedly the illegitimate daughter of an actress also named Theresa, had been brought up by the Bullers, an old East India Company family. Charles Buller, a radical Whig politician, who died unmarried in 1848, settled money on her with the "testamentary injunction" to be good. It seems she was anything but. Thackeray, who knew the family, is said to have based the character of Becky Sharp, the anti-heroine of Vanity Fair, on her.

Bercow on TMS

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow was the tea-time guest of BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special today. Aggers had clearly not done much research, or he would surely have quizzed Bercow about his fanatical love of tennis. What I found as surprising was that Bercow professed to no knowledge of cricket.

What Aggers concentrated on was PMQs. I would like to have asked the Speaker why he does not remove persistent chunterers from the chamber. Perhaps they are among his supporters.

Taggart

I have been catching up on the earliest episodes of STV's police procedural, thanks to the Drama channel. Last night's (or rather, this early morning's!) drama had a parliamentary by-election as background, so I naturally made a point of watching it. Writer Glenn Chandler used the episode to deploy a wide range of reasons why returning to capital punishment would be a bad idea (the first murder victims were a policeman's widow standing as a candidate on that platform, and her agent). It was clear on what side of the argument Chandler stands, though he surely should have given the candidate some stronger arguments, without weakening the overall case against. It was significant that the university-educated DS Jardine was overtly opposed to hanging, while the rough, tough, DCI Taggart was non-committal.

Taggart broke new ground for UK TV in several ways. The DCI was authentically working-class, as was Mark McManus, the man who played him. Jim Taggart was quite prepared to play away from home (though we were not shown an instance of his achieving his end!) while maintaining a prickly relationship with his disabled wife. The series anticipated Midsomer Murders with the gruesomeness of some of its homicides.

Sadly, the series lost three of the leads over no more than seven years: Mark McManus himself in 1994, Iain Anders (Superintendent "Biscuit" McVitie) in 1997 and Robert Robertson (pathologist Dr Andrews) in 2001.

It also ran through the roster of Scottish screen acting talent, including Sean Connery's cousin and niece, having to import a few people from south of the border to fill in. Many appeared more than once in different rôles; the best example is Alex Norton who played a ne'er-do-well in an early episode only to return as DCI Burke in 2002. There were some notable early appearances, like Siobhan Redmond as an investigative reporter and Alan Cumming playing a young (heterosexual) lover.

There were progressive moves later on. The series had already featured strong women on the other side of the law and even among the victims, but season 6 saw the introduction of Blythe Duff as Jackie Reid, initially as a WPC but eventually a key member of the detective team. What could have been a first came in 1995 with an "out" homosexual DC.

It seems that no Taggarts were made after 2010 because ITV decided not to network the show any more. In any case, it did seem to have lost its way, differing only from a dozen other cop shows in its setting.  I would like to have seen STV revive the hard edge of the early shows, perhaps reversing the contrast between the tough senior officer and the middle-class detective sergeant by introducing a young DC with a chip on his shoulder, having grown up during successive periods of austerity, counteracting a comfortable university-educated senior staff. I proffer it as a free suggestion to Glenn Chandler if he ever wants to pitch another Taggart to ITV bosses.

Shenley Fields

I have been following a lead from the inquiry into the Jersey child abuse business and come across pages on a Birmingham history web site. It seems from reading these that there was a fairly abrupt change from pre-war years and a decade or so after the war, about which people cared for in the Shenley Fields Home as children have warm feelings, to a darker period which seems to coincide with links with Haut de la Garenne on Jersey. I am interested to know more, and Cathy Fox probably even more so. If you do not want to comment publicly via the link below, you can find my email address fairly easily.

Trump's USA is anti-Christian

It was established some time ago that conservatives in government on both sides of the Atlantic were indifferent to the sufferings of Christians in other countries. Now comes news, courtesy of France24, that the US authorities want to deport a US resident of long-standing, a Christian Iraqi, back to a country where he will clearly be attacked and possibly killed because of his religion. So the Trump régime is not just unchristian, it is antichristian.

When our prime minister, a vicar's daughter, returns from her continental walking holiday, will she remonstrate with the President? If that fails, will she offer asylum to this man and other Iraqi Christians?

US checks and balances working

There are things wrong with electoral systems in the US, like being wedded to first-past-the-post ballots which most progressive nations have dropped and being dominated by big money. However, the checks and balances built in to the system by the founding fathers, who recognised that both dictatorship by one man and rule of the mob were detrimental to the common weal, have served the nation well and continue to do so. There was an example earlier this week when President Trump was compelled to sign a renewal of sanctions against Russia among others.

President Donald Trump signed a sweeping sanctions bill Wednesday that is intended to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. [...] The new law limits Trump’s autonomy with respect to Russia policy in a provision that requires congressional approval for any revisions. Bipartisan support in Congress ensured a veto-proof majority, effectively forcing Trump to abandon his conciliatory approach toward Russia by signing the legislation. The law, which also levies sanctions against North Korea and Iran, targets Russia’s energy sector by granting Congress the authority to sanction individual investors in Russia’s oil export pipelines. This measure has drawn significant criticism from European investors in a pipeline project, known as Nord Stream 2, that would transport Russian oil to Germany. The legislation also brings new sanctions against Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors in an effort to obstruct weapons exports.

Imagine the danger to Europe if the US president had complete executive power unchecked, and was happy to let his partner in crime eat his way westward. This is the sort of power which Erdogan in Turkey and Maduro in Venezuela seek - dictatorship with a servile, nominally-elected parliament rubber-stamping their oppressive measures.

Macron's displaced persons solution has merit

It seems logical - and humane, considering the number of migrants who have lost their lives or those of their relatives in the Mediterranean - to deal with the movement of people from Africa to Europe nearer the source. Sorting out the genuine refugees from economic migrants in Libya or next-door in Egypt would not only be more efficient but also cut out some of the exploitation.

So when President Macron came up with something along the same lines, I was surprised at the hostility it engendered.

"The idea is to create hotspots in Libya to avoid people taking crazy risks when they are not all eligible for asylum. We'll go to them," he said during a visit to a refugee shelter in central France on Thursday, adding the plan would be put in place "this summer".

Libya is the main launchpad for African migrants trying to reach Europe in rickety boats operated by smugglers that frequently sink.

He later slightly amended the proposal.

However, while giving an official speech later the same day, Macron said there was no question of "hotspots" in Libya. France will instead have OFPRA (Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) "missions … on African soil, in safe countries"


Of course, what we really need is a joint EU approach. France, Italy, Greece and even Hungary should not have to struggle alone.

Would this heroine be successful today?

Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I now know about Esther (Tess) Simpson, born as Esther Sinovitch on 31 July 1903. She became a sought-after secretary-cum-translator-cum-interpreter after the 1914-18 war, but took a drop in pay in order to work for what became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. Simpson, a Quaker, had been appalled by Hitler's wholesale dismissal of Jewish lecturers and professors from German universities. She had asked Leo Szilard if she could be of use to the Academic Assistance Council recently founded in London by William Beveridge, Maynard Keynes, Gilbert Murray, Ernest Rutherford, and others, to help these persecuted scholars.

Tess Simpson was to persevere in that endeavour for the next sixty years. When challenged, late in life, about the council's exclusive focus on intellectuals, she replied: 'What was happening [in Germany] ... was anti-human and I wanted to do something to mitigate against that ... Each [refugee organization] could only do so much but of course I felt terrible about the plight of others' (The Times, 1 July 1992).

At first almost all the refugees were Jews. But after the Nuremberg laws of 1935 German academics could be expelled if they had just one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish wife. Between 1933 and 1940 Tess Simpson became a one-woman reception centre for nearly 2600 refugee intellectuals. They arrived in Britain rejected, nearly destitute, and traumatized by the humiliation and hatred meted out to them by Nazis, and found themselves in a country still suffering massive unemployment, whose popular newspapers were as hostile to Britain's being 'flooded' by foreign asylum seekers as at any other time, before or since. Tess Simpson was almost always the first person to meet each new arrival and she greeted him or her with warm sympathy, high intelligence, and immense practicality, setting them 'on the stairway to survival and success' (Hampstead and Highgate Express, November 1996). Many of these desperate people were eventually to become among the most eminent thinkers in their fields in the world, but they all started in Britain as Tess Simpson's 'children' for whom she found a new life, often locating work for them in small colleges in the United States or in university colleges in the British Commonwealth, if not at first in Britain.

After the fall of Norway in 1940, the British government, headed by Churchill, panicked about these and other 'enemy aliens' in Britain and decided to intern them all. To her horror Tess Simpson learned that over 500 of 'her' refugee scholars, many of them now doing work of national importance and of course anti-Nazis to a man, were about to be arrested, sent to camps surrounded by barbed wire, and possibly even deported. She made vain protests to the Home Office and had to spend the next year accumulating the most meticulous documentation attesting to the integrity of every single individual case in order to give Professor Archibald Vivian Hill, MP for Cambridge University and vice-president of the executive committee of the society, and Eleanor Rathbone, MP for the Northern Universities, the evidence they required before they could succeed in their joint effort, helped by Bishop George Bell of Chichester, to have all these interned intellectuals released. 'Do you know the story of Bruce and the spider? I am that spider', she later remarked (Cooper, Refugee Scholars, 134).

The public denigration of refugees was probably more flagrant in Tess Simpson's day than now, but fortunately the Establishment was - eventually - ready to yield to rational arguments rather than pander to ignorant prejudice.