Lydd on Sea and Dungeness station - with a note on the origins of the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School

Atmospheric photographs and atmospheric music. The blurb on YouTube explains what we are looking at:

Although the trackbed from Romney Junction towards New Romney is easily traceable, nothing remains of Lydd-on-Sea Halt today except for a gated concrete approach road from Kerton Road. 

Promoted  by holiday camp development in the area, the Southern Railway decided in 1937 to realign its branch line to New Romney (which had been opened in 1884) closer to the sea and to open two intermediate stations - Lydd-on-Sea and Greatstone-on-Sea. 

The opening of Lydd-on-Sea on 4 July 1937 coincided with the closure of Dungeness station to passengers; it was intended that Lydd-on-Sea, ½-mile from Dungeness, would serve both locations and its running in board read "Lydd-on-Sea (for Dungeness)".

To handle the expected flow of holiday traffic, the station was equipped with a long curved island platform with a passing loop on which was perched a small wooden shed. The traffic never materialised and the station was downgraded to an unstaffed halt on 20 September 1954 when its passing loop was also lifted. 

As passenger traffic dwindled and freight became insignificant, the New Romney branch fell into decline and was listed for closure in the Beeching Report. In 1966 the Minister of Transport Barbara Castle announced her intention of closing the Appledore to New Romney Branch and passenger services ceased on 6 March 1967.

Trains still run from Appledore to Dungeness to collect nuclear waster for reprocessing at Sellafield. There's more about that and the history of the line on Kent Rail, and Derek Hayward has photographs of the old Dungeness station and its site today.

Dungeness still has a station on the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, and Jon and David get off a train there in The Elusive Grasshopper, the sixth of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories:

When they got out at the station the wind was so strong that for a moment they held on to each other. It howled and roared over the flat wastes and round the lighthouse towering above them. It whipped the smoke and steam from the engine's little smoke-stack into nothing and flattened the sea poppies growing in the shingle at the side of the track, and as they stumbled up the old full-gauge railway lines towards the school it whistled and sang strange songs among the telegraph wires.

It was not very pleasant exploring the school because the wind played odd tricks in those empty rooms and corridors and the house was full of mysterious groans and whisperings and thuds. But there was nobody there and no sign that anybody had been there since they had found Wilson stunned on the floor. Jon showed David the loose floorboard with a sketch of the grasshopper and they even searched for cigarette ends or pipe ash, without success.

I assume there really was a ruined school beside the old standard-gauge branch at Dungeness when Saville knew it. And it's also the inspiration for the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, which Lord Bonkers mentions from time to time.

No, Nimbys can't stop all housing development with just a petition

Listeners to the latest Private Eye podcast risk coming away from it believing it's possible to stop new houses being built on a local open space simply by getting up a petition.

I suppose it's London's domination of political media that leads to such odd beliefs being held by intelligent people,

The left is convinced that Nimbys stop all development. The right believes it's the planning laws that have that effect. Both are mistaken.

Come away from the capital to Middle England and you will find small towns surrounded by successive rings of new development and local council that are wary of turning down planning applications because of the costs they will pay if the developers win an appeal.

But holding simplistic beliefs means you needn't get to grips with deeper, harder questions. One example: is the security that people need when it comes to their home compatible with private landlordism?

And there are more such questions to be answered if you want to go in for a new building spree.

First, where will the skilled labour come from? The British building industry has long been complaining about shortages.

Second, how will you force developers to bring houses on to the market at a rate that reduces prices and thus their profits? Oliver Letwin is good on this.

These questions do sound difficult, so let's just mock Nimbys instead.

The Joy of Six 1229

"Over the past decade the Conservative Party has taken millions of pounds from individuals and businesses with ties to Russia. Just this week it was revealed that JCB, which is owned by a major Conservative donor, continued to send equipment to Russia for months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, despite publicly saying that they wouldn’t. This is not a one off. Over the past decade, Russia-linked donors have repeatedly been given access to senior Conservative ministers after donating to the party. This culminated in the absurd spectacle of former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson." Adam Bienkov reminds us how the Tories emboldened Vladimir Putin.

Giorgia Tolfo on Chiswick Women's Aid, who opened the world’s first safe house for women and children in 1971: "In the first month of opening the centre, a woman suffering violence at home arrived asking for shelter. Erin Pizzey, CWA's coordinator and spokesperson, didn't think twice. She quickly made arrangements to host the woman at the centre until her situation improved. Word spread and soon more women arrived seeking shelter."

Amid rising rents and closing businesses and venues, locals in South London are increasingly forming cooperatives to take charge of spaces and reinvigorate their communities, reports Kemi Alemoru.

"He discovered ... the fine perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish of PRs and journalists who pump them up to this day." Jonathan Meades reviews Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 by Gavin Stamp.

John Boughton has been to Thamesmead, where tenants are trying to fight off unwanted redevelopment.

Jonathan Denby discusses the importance of gardening to Victorian politicians: "Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet."

Tony Greig: England's greatest allrounder of my lifetime?

Who's been England's greatest allrounder in the years I have been following test cricket?

They say a true allrounder has a batting average higher than his bowling average. So here are the four obvious candidates ranked with that in mind. The second column is batting average, the third is bowling average and the fourth is the former minus the latter.

Tony Greig           40.43    32.20   +8.23

Ian Botham          33.54    28.40   +5.14

Ben Stokes          35.48    31.99   +3.49

Andrew Flintoff     31.77    32.78   -1.01

I'm not that surprised by this outcome, because we seem to have forgotten just how good Greig was. As the video above shows, he was afraid of no one and could take the attack to the very best bowlers, yet he also once spent seven hours in India scoring a century that set up a test win.

Greig could swing the ball and, though his pace wasn't express, his height meant he could get awkward bounce. He could also bowl off spin, once taking 13 wickets to win a test and draw a series in the West Indies.

He was a fine fielder anywhere and formed part of what I think is the best England slip cordon I've seen - Brearley, Greig, Hendrick - in the 1977 Ashes series.

And he was an inspirational captain - I've heard Mike Brearley say that he made you want to play well for him.

I saw the first day of England last game before Greig took over the captaincy from Mike Denness. This was the Edgbaston test of 1975, which was Graham Gooch's first. My memory is that Gooch spent all day at long leg and no one spoke to him.

Contrast that with the video of Phil Edmonds's debut later in the same series that I posted recently. Encouraging and celebrating, Greig is everywhere.

England's greatest allrounder of my lifetime? Quite possibly.

How the Lib Dems will stand in the Commons after the election is not in our hands

It would mean a lot to the Liberal Democrats to be the third party in the Commons. again. Our leader would get two questions at every PMQs: our spokespeople would get called more and earlier in debates. And all that would mean more media coverage and more clips on social media.

But there's no likely Lib Dem performance at the next election which would leave the reclaiming of this status entirely in our hands.

Have a look at this opinion poll and the resultant forecast of how many seats each party will win by Stats for Lefties.

🗳️ Labour lead by 23pts (356-seat majority)

🔴 LAB 47% (+3)
🔵 CON 24% (=)
🟣 REF 10% (-3)
🟠 LD 9% (+1)
🟢 GRN 6% (=)
🟡 SNP 2% (=)

Via @wethinkpolling, 9-10 May (+/- vs 2-3 May)

I enjoy these forecasts of a Tory wipe out, but I don't take them too seriously. Besides, what interests me here are the Lib Dem and SNP totals.

A total of 38 Lib Dem MPs feels like a realistic idea of what a good election will look like for the Lib Dems. But note that we would only be the third party in the Commons because Labour had taken seats of the SNP in Scotland.

So just how things will stand for us at Westminster after the election is, to a significant degree, our of our comtrol.

Right-wing Tories want to see fewer British students too

Conservatives who want to see fewer foreign students won't be put off by telling them this could put some universities out of business, because they want to see fewer British students too.

Robert Jenrick has been making the running on the Tory right's agitation against foreign students, and his new sidekick is my own MP, Neil O'Brien.

So let's turn to an article O'Brien wrote for Conservative Home in 2020:

The most recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis found that, viewed from the point of view of the student, their degree isn’t worth it for around 10 per cent of women, and a quarter of men. This is extraordinary, given they are receiving big taxpayer subsidies. 

Viewed from the point of view of the taxpayer, the taxpayer makes “a loss on the degrees of around 40 per cent of men and half of women.” Summing together the effect for society as a whole (the gains to students and taxpayers) “total returns will be negative for around 30 per cent of both men and women.”  In other words, nearly a third of students degrees are not worth it economically. 

The variation by degree and institution is even more dramatic. The taxpayer makes huge losses subsidising creative arts courses – only four and a half percent represent a positive investment. 

Only 30 per cent of English students earn enough to justify taxpayers’ investment. The taxpayer makes a loss on the majority of students in sociology, psychology, communications, and languages. Many would be better off doing something else.

And there's more:

For a country like Britain, deep in debt, lofty thoughts are not enough to justify such huge numbers of students doing things that don’t help them economically, given that’s what many themselves want. 

O'Brien goes on to call for more money for technical education. Tories have been doing this for as long as I can remember - it's an excellent idea for other people's children.

So bear this in mind when you hear right-wing Tories shrugging off the threat their ideas pose to British universities: it's an added attraction for them.

All-party group calls for better understanding of the social and economic causes of poor mental health

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A new report from the Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group says:

We have reached a crisis point in the nation’s mental health. Nearly a quarter of the adult population is prescribed a psychiatric drug in any given year,1 and a similar proportion of young people now meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis. 

Waiting lists for NHS treatment are up to three years, NHS provision for psychotherapy is patchy and often of low quality, and interventions directed at the social and psychological causes of distress have been under prioritised.

According to the NHS Independent Mental Health Taskforce, mental health outcomes have worsened in recent years, coinciding with an increase in rates of suicide. Indeed, taking a longer view and looking at trends in mental health outcomes, they have at best flatlined over the past four decades and according to some measures have deteriorated.

Shifting the Balance Towards Social Interventions: A Call for an Overhaul of the Mental Health System endorses the proposals put forward by World Health Organization and the United Nations in their calls for fundamental reforms. It includes specific recommendations to bring about a radical overhaul in mental health care:

• boost provision for social interventions, including social prescribing and community-based resources;
• reforming the MHRA, the regulator of medicines in the UK and implementing a UK Sunshine Act for financial transparency;
• funding drug deprescribing services as well as a national withdrawal support helpline#
• reverse rates of unnecessary antidepressant prescribing, particularly among young people; over four million under 25s were prescribed antidepressants in 2022/3.

It concludes by calling for:

a paradigm shift away from the traditional biomedical model that has presided over poor clinical outcomes and the overmedicating of distress, towards a more holistic, person-centred approach that more fully recognises and addresses the social, economic and psychological determinants of mental health. 

It's encouraging to see politicians thinking about the social and economic causes of poor mental health. As the report says, the current mental health system is marked by an overreliance on psychiatric drugs, with nearly a quarter of all adults prescribed a psychiatric drug in any given year, and soaring rates of prescription for children and young people. 

There is also a failure to provide effective social, community and relational approaches, which has led to persistently poor outcomes despite substantial research and investment over four decades.

The Beyond Pills APPG has its own website.

Are there Liberal thinkers for good times and Liberal thinkers for hard times?

Politicians can be divided between those suited to good times and those suited to hard times, or so I suggested in a post I wrote here back in 2008.

Looking at some leading politicians of the day and of past days, I divided them like this:

Good times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, David Miliband.

Hard times: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, Vince Cable, Denis Healey, Alistair Darling

We have lived in hard times for so long now that it's hard to know who among today's politicians would be more suited to good times, so I'm not sure this categorisation is useful today.

But I have been wondering if, among Liberal thinkers, there are some suited to good times and some suited to hard times.

The growing threat of Russian aggression in Europe makes Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin look more relevant than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It's unfair to dismiss them as 'Cold War Liberals', as many on the left do, but their views were formed as a reaction to tyranny and the threat of tyranny.

By contrast, I am an admirer of the postmodern Liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, yet when I came to write about him for Liberator in 2017, I found I had growing doubts about him. I did question Rorty's account of George Orwell, but there was a more fundamental doubt that I steered away from.

It was whether postmodernism's relaxed view of truth was so appealing in a word where Trump was US President and the internet was choked with lies and conspiracy theories.

Rorty, it seemed, was a Liberal thinkers for good times, not hard times.

You might think of Mill as a believer in progress, and thus a good times man. But I remember writing a seminar paper about On Liberty in which I commented on its pessimistic tone. One reason Mill wanted freedom of thought and speech was that he was dissatisfied with the intellectual climate of the day.

There is definitely an element of "All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself", in Mark Twain's words, about On Liberty.

So if I put Mill in the hard times column, it's more about his temperament than the fine details of his philosophy. 

And, for the same reason, he is joined there by Charles Masterman. Though Masterman was a practical politician - he was the minister who spent countless hours taking Lloyd George's health insurance act through the Commons in the face of implacable opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession - there is an air of melancholy about his writings - notably The Condition of England.

Jo Grimond, by contrast, has a sunny temperament and that gets him into the good times club.

What do you think? Is this distinction useful?

The Joy of Six 1228

"AI skeptics - who are legion, and not necessarily part of the fringe tin foil hat crowd - are begging Silicon Valley to take a beat before unleashing AI to the world. But tech companies, faced with the most powerful computing innovation in a generation, are running around like kids who just found their dad’s gun." Allison Morrow reveals Silicon Valley's determination to produce an AI dystopia that no one has asked for.

Matthew Pennell reviews the Liberal Democrat performance in the London mayoral election: "A few activists have asked the Lib Dem leadership to be bolder in the context of Conservative implosion and Labour timidity. We saw exactly that in the London Lib Dem campaign - a manifesto focused on reforming the blue light services - the Met Police and London Fire Brigade. It was unprecedented to see a politician from a mainstream party run on a platform of police reform and it set us apart from the other parties."

Justin Garson looks to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to help him understand the nature of depression.

"When Germany began to reconstruct its modern history after 1945, angels were needed to replace the recent legions of devils. The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by it." Charles Darwent finds the truth is less comforting.

"One of the most startling things about the enigmatic man who became the architect of the new Houses of Parliament was that he was born and brought up in Westminster itself and knew the area inside out even before the competition which changed his life." Caroline Shenton on Charles Barry.

Francesca Wade says George Eliot made her life, as well as her fiction and art, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.

Rishi Sunak's speech today: "Do you think that's wise, sir?"

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In his speech today, Rishi Sunak said the next five years will be some of the most difficult and dangerous in the UK's history.

If Sergeant Wilson were here to advise him, I feel sure he would have said: "Do you think that's wise, sir?"

Because the British people seem to have decided that, not only do they not much like Sunak, but that he's not much good at his job either.

I base this, not just on his individual poll ratings, but on the fact that you never here anyone expressing enthusiasm for him. His own party members chose Liz Truss when allowed a choice between them.

So why should the voters turn to Sunak if they agree we are approaching dangerous times? That belief is more likely to make them turn so someone else to govern them.

And a final point on today's speech: a party that is serious about the nation's defence does not put Grant Shapps in charge of it.

The Tories' Angela Rayner obsession has come back to bite them

It was predictable - indeed, I remember retweeting someone who predicted it - that the Mail's pursuit of Angela Rayner over her supposed failure to pay capital gains tax would rebound on the Conservatives.

That's because Conservative MPs own more houses than Labour MPs and may be fonder of baroque ways of avoiding tax.

And, sure enough, here is a report from today's Mirror:

Tories making a lot of noise about Angela Rayner and capital gains tax are less vocal when it comes to the profits their own MPs have made from selling second homes.

Four who have raked in £5.4million between them ­from flogging houses funded by the public have repeatedly declined to reveal if they paid any tax on the profits they made. The Tories were accused of ­hypocrisy after pushing for police to probe deputy Labour leader Ms Rayner over a £48,000 profit she made selling a former council house before she became an MP and an alleged capital gains tax bill of a mere £1,500.

The party did not respond to Mirror requests to comment on our ­investigation into whether David Tredinnick, Eleanor Laing, Shailesh Vara and Maria Miller paid capital gains tax on second homes they sold.

No doubt the Labour Party looks forward to this being an issue at the coming general election

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

Martin Scorcese's tribute to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Made in England, received its premiere in London yesterday and is now being shown at the British Film Institute and at screens around the country.

It's on at the Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre in Leicester from Friday, for instance.

The BFI website says of it:

Martin Scorsese presents an impassioned and highly personal tribute to Powell and Pressburger’s work, richly illustrated with clips and rare archive material. It’s been said that had Martin Scorsese not become one of the world’s great filmmakers, he would still have been one of its greatest teachers of film history. 

This impassioned exploration of the films of two of his formative and most treasured inspirations follows the US filmmaker’s film essays on American and Italian cinema, delivering deeply personal reflections on what Powell and Pressburger’s work has meant to his life, alongside wonderfully illuminating analyses of the films themselves. 

Drawing richly from the BFI National Archive, as well as private material from Scorsese and the film’s editor (and Powell’s widow) Thelma Schoonmaker, David Hinton’s film is ... an ideal introduction to Powell and Pressburger’s work.

The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists exhibition comes to St Albans

On Friday the exhibition The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists opened at St Albans Museum and Gallery. It runs until 8 September.

The venue's billing says:

Uncover the story of the talented artists who illustrated Ladybird books for more than 30 years. This colourful, family-friendly exhibition includes rare books, original artwork and artefacts, and reveals how illustrators played such an enormous role in Ladybird’s extraordinary success. 

Tracing the interconnected work of these artists, the company’s story is recounted over Ladybird’s ‘golden years’ – 1940 to 1975. Visually rich and varied, the exhibition will evoke many memories of childhood.

This exhibition has been touring the country for a few years now, and I saw it when it came to Leicester. I can thoroughly recommend it. I came away impressed by the sheer quality of the illustrations that Ladybird Books laid before children by commissioning leading commercial artists.

Those who dismiss Ladybird as purveyors of nostalgia are mistaken. Many of their books were about technology, social progress and the future. In fact Ladybird has a good claim to to be the most progressive children's publisher in those post-war decades.

Their history books were written by a Liberal, L, du Garde Peach, whom some at the BBC (he was a pioneer of radio drama) suspected of Bolshevism.

And I learnt to read with Ladybird's Key Words reading scheme ('Peter and Jane') in a new town in the 1960s. The world of those books was the world I saw around me.

By welcoming Natalie Elphicke, Keir Starmer risks making Labour look desperate or devoid of principle

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When Natalie Elphicke crossed the floor last week, there were plenty of us who had doubts about Keir Starmer's wisdom in allowing her to take the Labour whip.

But there were also worldly commentators who criticised us as political obsessives. The average voter, we were reminded, knows very little about politics. All they will notice is that a Conservative MP has joined Labour, and they will conclude that Starmer and Labour must be doing well.

But it's now beginning to look as though the average voter will come away from this episode with the conclusion that Labour will take anyone and must be desperate or devoid of principle.

Longstanding readers of this blog will not be surprised. For Calder's Third Law of politics holds that:

When politicians do something which they think is very clever, it will eventually turn out to have been very stupid.

Kwasi Kwarteng's only budget exemplified this. Boy, did it exemplify it!

Incidentally, you can find all seven of my Laws of Politics in an earlier post on here.

The Beatles: I'll Follow the Sun

Time to circle uneasily around the Beatles again, as I heard this in a coffee shop the other day.

Paul McCartney wrote I'll Follow the Sun when he was 16. I can't decide whether the mismatch between the sweet tune and the selfish lyric is a sign of that immaturity or what makes the song interesting.

Hunting for locations from The Fallen Idol in Belgravia

The Fallen Idol was the film Carol Reed made before The Third Man and it's nearly as good.  If you've not seen it, there's a good introduction in this interview with Richard Ayoade.

It was filmed in and around Belgravia, so I went to look for it on Friday before a Liberator meet up.

The external shots of the embassy were of 1 Grosvenor Crescent, just off Belgrave Square. You can see it in the photograph above.

I you know the film you will recognise the curving terrace below - it's Grosvenor Crescent.

And you will also recognise Belgrave Mews West and The Star public house. The Star has another claim to fame: it's where the Great Train Robbery was planned.

Government's proposed legal duty to report suspicion of child sexual abuse is a fudge, says inquiry chair

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Alexis Jay, chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse,  has said she is deeply disappointed by the weakness of the government's proposed law making it a legal duty to report suspicions of such abuse.

The Guardian reports:

Alexis Jay said she was “deeply disappointed” by the new legislation.

“The victims are upset and angry and I’m not surprised. It’s a fudge and an opportunity missed,” she told the BBC.

“I am deeply disappointed in it and very much more so for the victims and survivors who had such high expectations that what the inquiry had recommended was going to be implemented,” she said.

“They are upset. They are angry at this and it’s not surprising.”

The long-awaited “duty to report” legislation, set out in an amendment to the criminal justice bill, was described as falling far below recommendations of the seven-year independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and has triggered outrage from campaigners and lawyers.

The new law is needed to put an end to the current situation where teachers in private schools or staff in care homes who have come under suspicion tend to leave the organisation in which they work for jobs elsewhere, aided by glowing references.

But the government's proposed version is seen as too restrictive in its application and too easy to avoid.

The reaction of Alex Renton, a campaigner on child sexual abuse, is reported by BBC News:

Mr Renton welcomed the new offence for deterring or blocking reporting, but said in his experience of many thousands of cases, it was rare that someone tried to block the reporting of child abuse.

It was far more frequent that the person who suspected or was told of abuse did not report it.

He described the amendment as a “kick in the teeth” for victims who have been campaigning for decades.

Leading Brexiters remind us of the project's closeness to Putin

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The past week has reminded us of the friendly relations between Putin's Russia and some prominent supporters to Brexit.

The i held an interview with Dominic Cummings, not in the basement of his parents's castle or the Tapestry Room of his Islington town house, but in a North London pub.

That interview is behind a paywall, but the Politico report has plenty of detail:

In an interview with the i newspaper, Cummings — who led Britain’s Vote Leave Brexit campaign and spectacularly fell out with Johnson in 2020 — declared that the West “should have never got into the whole stupid situation” and claimed sanctions against Russia have had a greater impact on European politics than in Moscow.

The former adviser was scathing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and comparisons with World War II.

“This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said.

“This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”

Isn't he butch?

Meanwhile, Lord Frost appeared on - and was taken far too seriously by - the One Decision podcast. In the course of his interview he suggested that Russia should be allowed to keep some of its conquests in Ukraine.

Walking the Regent's Canal from Limehouse to Paddington

On the day of the London Marathon, we walk with John Rogers along the entire length of the Regent's Canal from Limehouse Basin in East London to Paddington Basin in the west. 

We pass through Mile End, Bethnal Green, Hackney, Haggerston, Shoreditch, Islington, Camden, Regent's Park, Marylebone, Maida Vale and Little Venice.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Oliver's Crossing: A disused level crossing in the centre of Coalville

Snibston Colliery was developed by George Stephenson and opened in 1832. Coal from it reached the outside world via his Leicester and Swannington Railway, one of the first of the steam age.

Oliver's Crossing lies on the line that led from the colliery to the Leicester and Swannington, running through what became the centre of the town of Coalville - a name that could have come from Hard Times.

The crossing was named after Oliver Robinson, who became crossing keeper here in the 1880s after suffering a mining accident. The hut that sheltered him can still be seen.

Oliver's Crossing remained in use until the colliery closed in 1983.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

The local elections have gone and the general election is not yet upon us. So this could be a good time to write a guest post for Liberal England.

Please drop me a line if you've got ideas or opinions you'd like to share with the readers of this blog.

As you can see from the list below, I accept posts on subjects far beyond the Liberal Democrats and British politics.

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I wouldn't want to publish. So do please get in touch first.

These are the last ten guest posts on Liberal England:

• Councillor defections: The scores on the doors at the end of 2023 - Augustus Carp
• Snailbeach and the music of abandonment - Eric Loveland Heath
• Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair - Alex Grant
• Jon Pertwee's Doctor tackled many of the problems we face today - Peter Chambers
• Martyn’s Law and its unintended ecclesiastical consequences - Augustus Carp
• The Lib Dems approach the general election in a far weaker position than in 1997 - Anselm Anon
• A book that explains why Britain voted for Brexit - Peter Chambers
• No smoke without political economy - Anselm Anon
• In old age a shared past is rich and comforting - The Secret Support Worker
• So far this year, 49 councillors have left the Tories and 42 have left Labour - Augustus Carp

Politicians aren't gaslighting the public: we're being lied to

We should all be more like Jason Beer KC, the lead counsel to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

Because you don't hear politicians accused of lying any more. Instead, they're accused of gaslighting us.

The concept comes from Gas Light, a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton set in the London of the 1880s. In it, a man tries to convince his wife that she is going mad.

The story is so well known because, under the title Gaslight, it was twice filmed. First in England in 1940 and then in Hollywood in 1944. It was the latter production that gave the 17-year-old Angela Lansbury her big break in movies.

I suppose the concept of 'gaslighting' appeals to modern sensibilities because it paints the voters as victims. We faint alternately on the sofa like ineffectual Victorian heroines.

And for a certain sort of left-winger, the masses do now exist to be counselled, policed and therapised.

I prefer a radical politics that wants the workers to take control of their own lives - even to run the industries in which they labour.

So let's give up 'gaslighting' and be more like Jason Beer KC. If we hear a lie we should say so.

The Joy of Six 1227

Jan Dehn outlines the many questions being considered by the government inquiry into what happened on Alderney under Nazi occupation: "It is known that the camp held Russian and Ukrainian prisoners as well as Spanish Republicans, captured French resistance fighters, and jews, but precisely how many people were there, who they were, and where exactly they came from remains clouded in mystery. There are also suggestions in some quarters that there are mass graves on Alderney, but where they are located and who is buried in the pits is unknown."

Carlos Moreno, the father of the '15-minute city' has a new book out, reports Feargus O'Sullivan.

"'It’s become increasingly mundane to see intrusive and inappropriate surveillance technologies, once reserved for the police and prison estate, deployed in our schools,' says Caitlin Bishop, senior campaigns officer at Privacy International." Adele Walton on the dangerous rise of surveillance in UK classrooms.

Paul Powlesland tells the tragic story of Hoad’s Wood, used as a landfill and ignored by authorities, and suggests it shows we need Rights of Nature and guardianship.

"A parade in Rogation Week around the old borders of one parish ended in 1751 with an incursion into Richmond Park, which had been built a century before by king Charles I by buying, acquiring and enclosing land from several parishes - an act that had caused decades of anger and friction, as people not only lost access to common land for subsistence, collecting firewood, grazing livestock etc, but were also denied access along traditional footpaths." London Radical Histories unpacks the many meanings of the ceremony of Beating the Bounds.

Huw Turbervill ranks the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

How Bermondsey got its tube station

Jago Hazzard presents a short but complicated history.

Note one of the comments:

It seems to have been forgotten that the initial pressure to build Bermondsey (and Southwark) Jubilee line stations came from the then local MP Simon Hughes, whose aims came to fruition, meaning that the line didn’t run direct from London Bridge to Canada Water without stopping.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Sunak's chess tables in the park are a victim of the Twitter approach to politics

'Levelling up' chess tables costing £50k installed https://t.co/z6t9A7Nhi7

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) May 7, 2024

This BBC News story has been generating outrage and ridicule all day, not least because it has been written to make it sound as though each table has cost £50,000. In fact that's the total cost of all 20 tables.

And let me extend a particular hello to the gentleman from Buckinghamshire who asked if people in the North can play chess.

I will admit these tables are another of the strange ragbag of policies that Rishi Sunak has come up with as prime minister. But they seem to me a benign and inexpensive idea compared when set against most things the Conservatives have offered recently.

Somewhere in the opposition to them are currents of both snobbery and inverse snobbery. Would anyone have made a fuss if the government has put 20 sets of goalposts in these parks?

Mostly, though, the chess tables are a victim of the accepted approach to politics on Twitter. Everything your party does is right, and everything the other parties do is not just wrong, but wicked and ridiculous too.

I realise I can be as guilty of this as anyone, but it's not an approach that has done British politics any favours.

The Conservative Party will eat itself

📮🗳️ Postal voting - it’s time to scrap it.

— Brendan Clarke-Smith MP (@Bren4Bassetlaw) May 7, 2024

Why would a right-wing Conservative MP want to scrap postal voting? 

I smell a conspiracy theory. The Tories really won the mayoral election in London or the West Midlands but were somehow cheated out of it by all those postal votes. 

It's nonsense, of course, but we should encourage Tories to believe in this conspiracy theory. That's because scrapping postal votes would harm them, not help them.

Her's another tweet that explains why - I assume BES is the British Electoral Study.

Party breakdown for 2019 from the BES probability sample (all modes, postal n=689) pic.twitter.com/WespXB9n7o

— Matt Singh (@MattSingh_) May 7, 2024

If I am reading this correctly, at the last election the Conservative Party won 43.7 per cent of the votes cast at polling stations and 49.3 per cent of votes cast by post.

As the Conservatives won 42.3 of all votes cast in 2019, I may have missed a subtlety or two. Perhaps it's that these figures rely on how respondents said they voted rather than how they actually voted or  that the sample is on the small side.

Still, Clarke-Smith's comments a good example of how the increasing influence of conspiracist thinking on the Tories is driving them mad.

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Movie

Not many books about philosophers become bestsellers, but one that did was David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker, which came out in 2002. Now there are plans to produce a short animated film inspired by it.

The book tells the story of a famous encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper:

On 25 October 1946, Sir Karl Popper (at the London School of Economics), was invited to present a paper entitled "Are There Philosophical Problems?" at a meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, which was chaired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein. In Popper's, and the popular account, Wittgenstein used a fireplace poker to emphasize his points, gesturing with it as the argument grew more heated. 

Eventually, Wittgenstein claimed that philosophical problems were non-existent, in response, Popper claimed there were many issues in philosophy, such as setting a basis for moral guidelines. Wittgenstein then thrust the poker at Popper, challenging him to give any example of a moral rule, Popper (later) claimed to have said:

Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers

upon which (according to Popper) Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out. 

Wittgenstein's Poker collects and characterizes the accounts of the argument, as well as establishing the context of the careers of Popper, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. This meeting was the only time the three were in the same room together.

The story grew with its telling over the years, particularly when Popper told it, and I don't suppose it was as violent as the video above suggests.

Nevertheless, I am delighted by news of the plan to make an animated film of the encounter. You can read all about it and support it on the film's Kickstarter page.

If you want to know more about the background to the encounter between Popper and Wittgenstein, which the book uses to open up the history of philosophy in the 20th century, then I recommend a video of David Edmonds speaking at a book event in the US.

At the start, he talks about tracking down the other people who were present at that meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club.

One of them was the philosopher Margaret Masterman, who was one of Wittgenstein's inner circle of students. I must have come across a paper of hers when I was at York, because I can remember reading the book in which it was included: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave.

Later Masterman worked on the problem of teaching computers to understand everyday human language. Her work here has been influential and she deserves to be better known than she is.

And, wonderfully, she was the daughter of my favourite Edwardian Liberal, Charles Masterman.

Otters playing in the Welland at Market Harborough

The Welland, which only a few weeks ago was threatening to flood the town, is becoming overgrown for the summer.

And here, posted yesterday, are an otter and her pups playing in the narrowing channel.

Thanks to The hedge finding missile for the video.