Tempering expectations

 The media, prompted by the party's PR team, are talking up Lib Dems chances of making big gains in next month's English council elections. Sir Keir Starmer's Labour is confident that their attacks on the Conservative leadership are working. Opinion surveys show support for Conservatives at a very low point. 

However, people should remember that there was a big swing against the Conservatives the last time these council elections came round, and that the big winners were the Liberal Democrats. So there may not be many more votes left to squeeze. The pent-up increases in state pensions and other benefits are beginning to trickle out, which may help voters to feel better, though admittedly this will be offset by the nurses' strike over the weekend before the poll, unless the government can pull off a last-minute settlement. There will surely be more confidence in a government which is seen to be in control, as against the faltering Theresa May of 2019.

There is another factor: the coronation of Charles III. Publicity surrounding this event is already building up and will surely increase before the postal ballots are issued. This is sure to bring out the conservatism of the majority of English voters and may well work against Labour and Lib Dems. Moreover, there seems to be a concerted effort by election candidates to emphasise local issues, distracting the voters from the national background, even to the extent of rebranding themselves "Local Conservative".

Conservative Campaign Headquarters is no doubt already briefing that they expect large losses of seats and councils. So, when the carnage turns out on 5th May not to have taken place, CCH will claim this as almost a victory. One trusts that Vincent Square will either make no predictions as to gains, or at least pitch these on the low side.

I would like to be proved wrong, if only because a disastrous Tory campaign will split the party, with Johnson supporters calling for Sunak's head. There could be a Commons vote of no confidence leading to a general election. There would be a short-term deterioration in the economy resulting from international loss of confidence, but in the long run a country more at ease with itself.

Nuclear power developments

 Germany has finally shut down its nuclear generation capability. One appreciates the desire to move to an all-renewable strategy for electricity supply, but the premature closures of atomic power stations has increased the use of fossil fuels. An earlier stop to nuclear development led to the prolonged use of lignite a particularly dirty fuel. More recently, Germany turned to natural gas, cleaner, but still a fossil fuel and one which contributes to global warming. Moreover, Germany became dependent on Russia for the supply of gas; trying to reverse that situation as a result of international politics has brought lignite back into the picture.

At the same time, Finland's Chinese-designed nuclear power station (of the same type planned for Sizewell) at Oikiluoto has gone into full production after 7 months of trials. One would like to think that ministers Graham Stuart and Jeremy Hunt will keep an eye on performance at Oikiluoto with a view to learning lessons for Sizewell C (if it ever gets built).

Birdy top ten: it's as you were

 RSPB has published the results of the Big Garden Birdwatch 2023. Sparrows once again top the count. No surprise here, as they dominate the soundscape  - once they wake up, the lazy so-and-sos. What continues to puzzle me is why jackdaws, also numerous wherever I have been in south Wales, still do not figure in the top ten, which is much the same as last year.

Labour dipping a toe in electoral sewage

 It is not an exact parallel, but the tone of Sir Keir Starmer's current campaign ads. is strongly reminiscent of that of the Republicans' personalised attack on Michael Dukakis in the 1988 US presidential contest. There is the same resort to an emotive issue (murder and race in the American case, child sex abuse in the British), and the same strongly personal nature of the attack. One would like to think that there was a backlash against the anti-Dukakis ads., but glimpses over the years of TV promotions of candidates for Congress or for party selection as presidential candidacy suggest that ad hominem attacks are still a normal part of the political campaigner's armoury. This became clear to a wide audience from day one of Donald Trump's race to the White House - and Trump has not stopped to this day.

It is fair enough to attack Sunak and his supporters for their actions in government, even their political ideology. What is wrong is the negative, innuendo-ridden personal attack in such a sensitive area. 

Even if Sir Keir does not see the wisdom of returning to the moral high ground, he should consider this: anything Labour can do, the Tories can do nastier. In a race to the bottom, they can get there faster and with fewer scruples. Tighter election spending rules in the UK than in the US should prevent the voter being swamped by the tide, but he or she could still suffer the backwash of a very dirty campaign.

Are renters or owner-occupiers the prime electioneering target?

 Cameron and Osborne were in no doubt, according to Nick Clegg quoted in the i yesterday. They were against building social housing because it would "create more Labour voters".

So what should one make of the headline of that article: "71% of Tory voters want more social housing"? There has to be caution about any opinion survey, even one conducted by a leading polling company like YouGov. What sort of answer you get depends very much on the way a question is put. Even so, there seems to be a recognition even by Daily Mail readers that owner-occupation is not the be-all and end-all.

Some 71 per cent of people who voted Conservative in the 2019 general election said they agreed that there needed to be more social housing [...] An overwhelming majority of Britons - 82 per cent - also agreed that it was "difficult" for young people in the UK to access adequate housing.

So it was good strategy for Sir Ed and his English local authority election team to backtrack from last winter's naked appeal to mortgage-payers and to concentrate on issues which concern everybody, such as the failure of crime prevention and environmental degradation as a result of weak regulation.

Lawson: an economist's evaluation

 It is good to see a reasoned counter to the general media (including the BBC) summing-up of Nigel Lawson as "a great reforming chancellor". It struck me at the time that these views came from people in the tax bracket who most benefit in the short term from Lawson and Thatcher's philosophy of cutting direct taxation. Simon Wren-Lewis writes from a democratic socialist perspective, but he does season his criticisms with mention of the few things which Lawson got right.

This paragraph struck a chord:

Monetarism didn’t make sense either in theory or practice. In terms of theory it made little sense to set interest rates to hit an intermediate target (some measure of money) rather than the final objective (inflation and output). It was a bad policy in practice because it caused a recession that decimated UK manufacturing, resulting in a prolonged period of very high unemployment. This was never the intention of the policy, because those putting it forward thought it would cause little disruption.

I was on a contract in Coventry in the 1990s. Coventry had been hit particularly hard by the deliberate raising of the base rate by the government. Practically the whole of the machine-tool industry, in debt to the banks, had been wiped out. A co-contractor, a local, opined that those companies had been too complacent, not realising the need to modernise. He saw the period as one of clearing out of dead wood. The net result, however, was handing over the industry to the Americans, Germans and, predominantly, the Japanese. One wonders whether the outcome would have been better if government had worked constructively on modernisation with industry and the banks instead of hitting them with measures derived from an untried intellectual theory.

The Tennant Park gates

 I had just been reading about the relationship of Winifred Coombe Tennant with her sons Alexander and Henry (in "Wales' Unknown Hero" by Bernard Lewis) when the first two names came up in correspondence. 

"In 1935, Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant and Mr Alexander Coombe-Tennant gifted a plot of land to Coedffranc Parish Council for the purposes of sport and recreation.  The land to be known as Tennant Park and gifted in response to the Prince of Wales Appeal at the Silver Jubilee for land to be made available for young people to take part in physical activities. Mr Coombe-Tennant was presented with a fountain pen by the Parish Council and a silver cigarette box by Skewen Rugby Club (Western Mail 9th May 1935 and Neath Guardian 10th May 1935) " 

In 1951 ceremonial gates to a new access to the park were erected and in 1952 a plaque commemorating the Festival of Britain was placed on them.

The Coombe Tennants were extensive land-owners (and the Coombe Tennant Estate still has holdings) hereabouts as a result of George Tennant's entrepreneurship in the early 19th century. (There is no connection with the great Liberal family of the same name as far as I am aware.) 

The gates and the access path are now in a sorry state and there is agitation to attend to them. The matter is now in the hands of the community council and I hope there will be more news after next week's town council meeting.

 

Véronique Ryke

 She appeared in the episode of Maigret shown on Talking Pictures TV last week. She played the small but important part of a governess to the child of an American family visiting Paris. Her mid-Atlantic accent was authentic, but it appears she was born Veronike Rijke in the Netherlands round about 1963. She married, or was partner to, the director Eric Magnan and was probably the mother of Alec and Alexandre Magnan who assisted on a couple of the older Magnan's pictures. She also released an electro-pop album in 1988. Sadly for such a talented lady, it appears she died in Paris in the early 2000s. 

All that is second-hand information, which I cannot back up with official publications. I would dearly love to fill out the skeletal IMDb entry, so if anyone can give me a link to an authentic document, I would be glad.