Liberal England

The habitués of the Westminster village live in a world where it takes only one Nimby with a petition to stop a housing estate.

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Let's see how Oldham Conservatives are getting on. Here's a report on BBC News:

The leader of Oldham Council's Conservative group has resigned after police were called following a heated council meeting.

The meeting on 18 December had to be adjourned after members of the public and councillors hurled abuse at each other following a debate about housing and planning.

Councillor Graham Sheldon, who has stepped down both as leader and as a member of the Conservative group, said he believed "the actions of two members of my group caused the mayhem and deterioration of the meeting".

Further down the page, we read that:

After the meeting was adjourned, a riot van and police cars were pictured outside the council building.

Greater Manchester Police said an investigation into what happened was "still ongoing".

And:

Sheldon said that while he supported debate and discussion during council meetings, "this should never accelerate into aggression aimed at individuals".

In his resignation letter to the Conservative group, he wrote: "The aggressive bawling and shouting at officials and the foolish name calling is behaviour I cannot accept.

"At the request of the mayor, I asked the two members to apologise for their actions and this was declined.

"I feel my position has been undermined and will be unable to gain the respect I deserve."

All of which reinforces my impression that Conservative councillors aren't what they used to be and that the party is close to ungovernable.

Clare Coffey watches It's a Wonderful Life: "It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral."

"A target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation." Philip Murphy believes the British establishment offers a "target-rich environment" to spies.

Timothy Garton Ash asks what will happen if Russia wins in Ukraine: "Ukraine would be defeated, divided, demoralised and depopulated. The money would not come in to reconstruct the country; instead, another wave of people would leave it ... Europe as a whole would see an escalation of the hybrid war that Russia is already waging against it, still largely unnoticed by most blithely Christmas-shopping west Europeans."

Chris Dillow on the rise of managerialism and fall of British business management: "Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities."

The inter-war council estates that George Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier are visited by Municipal Dreams.

"Thirkell makes quite a few stealth jokes about sexuality that have a camp insouciance, in strong contrast to her otherwise default tone of extreme social conservatism." Kate Macdonald considers the contrasting treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism in the novels of Angela Thirkell.

I had started to receive reports of a Liberator Drive on the new Farndon Fields estate here in Market Harborough. Google Street View wasn't much help: the road was on the map, but the houses were too reccent for Google's van to have been there. So I went to look for it.

And here it is, though any road that's called 'Drive' and points at open fields is unlikely to remain a dead end for long.

Here, while we're at it, is the website for Liberator magazine too.

The Farndon Fields estate is the sort of place you don't go to unless you know someone who lives there or you're delivering in a by-election. But I was impressed with it. The architecture is pleasant and the housing types varied, including some terraced houses.

I suppose the traditional architecture of the town is brick with a leavening of ironstone. You won't find that at Farndon Fields, but the houses don't feel out of place.

There are no shops there, and certainly no ghosts signs or repurposed tin tabernacles. But I did find an electricity substation.

I don't know how Liberator Drive got its name, but then the names of the new roads here seem a bit of a lucky dip: Charley Close, Summerhill Place, Bridgeroom Street. [Later. Mystery solved: the streets here, including Liberator Drive, are named after racehorses because of the race I mention below.]

One name does have an obvious derivation: Steeplechase Way. That's because in 1860 Farndon Field saw the first running of the National Hunt Chase Challenge Cup, a race that is still run each year as part of the Cheltenham Festival.

No doubt the ditch in my last photo is the result of drainage work carried out before the new houses were built, but I like to imagine that it predates them and is where a Victorian gentleman took a purler while leading the race.

"The adversarial trial system has been shown inadequate to deal with complex, and indeed developing, scientific data in Lucy Letby's trials. Procedure has triumphed over the serious search for the truth. Yet there is also the question as to whether existing legal procedures were followed over testing expert witnesses." Timothy Bradshaw claims that Lucy Letby has been betrayed by a legal system that can’t handle scientific evidence.

Ian Martin is not impressed by Boris Johnson's Unleashed: "On the basis of this magnum opus, satirists who’d pointed their lances at some imaginary political giant were in fact tilting at a windbag."

Jamie Stone, who has served at both Holyrood and Westminster, compares the two parliaments: "Having been a Member since its inception in 1999, I happen to know that when they were being trained, the staff were instructed to address the newly elected MSP’s as Mr, Mrs, Ms and so forth… but never by their first name. I also happen to know that this training fell on deaf ears from the very start. I was Jamie on day one, and still am today. I must admit that’s how I’ve always preferred it."

The organisation that became the RSPB was started by Victorian women protesting against the use of feather in millinery, shows Tessa Boase.

"The Lansbury Exhibition of Architecture would show how town planning and scientific building principles would provide a better environment in which to live and work, and how this would be applied to the redevelopment of London and the new towns planned across the country." A London Inheritance finds much of this 1951 event still standing in the East End.

Xan Brooks gives his choice of the best fiction set in the American South.

Roz Savage explains why she has tabled her Climate and Nature Bill: "While I was out there, alone in the middle of the ocean, I witnessed the beauty and strength of the natural world first hand. I realised how utterly reliant we are on the health of our planet, and how vulnerable we are to the Earth’s changing climate." 

"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.

Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.

Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.

"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.

"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.

Anthony Broxton looks back to Neil Kinnock's speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference - and gives us a sense of the leadership the Conservatives now need but won't get: "In just one passage of speech, Kinnock flipped the trajectory of the party and, most importantly, the dynamics of party conference on its head. The left - for so long used to a monopoly on the righteous anger of leadership betrayal - was now being told to wear their own failures of the working class."

"A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbours." Anne Applebaum says Russia must be defeated.

"It is now indisputable that companies rigged safety tests with the complicity of the testing authorities, that politicians refused to act on safety concerns because to do so might have obstructed deregulation, that a social landlord which loathed its tenants ignored and concealed fire safety notices." James Butler reads the report of the Grenfell Inquiry.

Marlow Bushman reports that red squirrels are repopulating Aberdeen city centre.

"Few authors manage to publish bestsellers in one decade, let alone six. Agatha Christie managed to accomplish that feat, selling enormous quantities of her books throughout her career. Christie’s popularity kept growing throughout her life, but the settings of her novels changed with the times. When many people think of Christie’s books, they think of the interwar period, country estates, and quaint English villages; but during the 1960s Christie’s stories don’t fit these templates at all." Christie in the 1960s looks at her novels from that decade.

Books on the Line on the Crumlin Viaduct and the filming there of the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren film Arabesque.

To listen to some, you would think that the only thing holding back a boom in house building is our planning laws. Reform those, we are told, and there will be millions of new houses built and tumbling prices.

A story on Professional Builder suggests things are not so simple:

The inaugural Planning Portal Market Index has found that more than a million homes granted planning permission since 2015 have not yet been built.

This equates to around a third of the total given the green light over the period. The figures cast doubt on the near-exclusive focus of the major parties on boosting housebuilding numbers by tweaking the planning system.

The Index suggests the causes of this lack of building include high interest rates, skills shortages in the construction industry and materials shortages.

Me? I remember what the late Ian Jack wrote in the London Review of Books five years ago:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

In an article stuffed with quotes from unnamed 'senior' Lib Dems, Harriet Symonds looks for possible future fault lines in our larger parliamentary party. Nimby vs Yimby? Tuition fees? Gender? Maybe we should stop using terms like Nimby and Yimby (and Terf and Gammon) - giving your opponents nicknames does nothing for the clarity of your thinking or your ability to win over uncommitted voters.

Sienna Rogers talks to Shockat Adam, the pro-Gaza Independent candidate who defeated Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South.

"The Government’s approach relies heavily on the private sector to deliver against its ambitions. But historically, direct public investment has been key: at the post-war housebuilding peak in 1968, nearly two-in-five homes were built through the public sector, compared to just under one-quarter of homes in 2023." The Resolution Foundation considers whether Labour will achieve its housing ambitions.

Anthony Burgess hated the Beatles but had more in common with them than he realised, argues Michael Shallcross.

Judy Stroud on the reintroduction of dormice to Rockingham Forest: "During the clearance of over 600 acres of the Purlieus between 1862 and 1868 dormice were sometimes found when men were grubbing up the tree roots.  No evidence of dormice was found there during the late 20th century but the wood met the criteria for a successful reintroduction. This took place in 2001 and monitoring by the Forestry Commission has shown a long-term success, with dispersal within the wood from the initial release site."

Bob Lynn introduces us to Mary Webb, the Shropshire novelist and poet whose work, steeped in nature and mysticism, found fame only after her untimely death.

It's clear that Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives again after nine years, has little time for the idea that if only developers weren't encumbered by the planning laws they would flood the market with so many new houses that prices would come down.

He writes for the Cornish Voice newspaper:

Having tracked the way the housing market works in places like Cornwall over recent decades, it seems clear that development tracks house price inflation and slows when the market stagnates. 

Higher housebuilding targets are reflected in higher hope values land adjoining every community around Cornwall; land value speculators sit on those sites until planning permission granted enables a maximisation of development value and undermines the viability of affordable developments suitable to meet local need.

Cornwall doesn’t have a major problem with NIMBYs resisting development. Cornwall has been the one of the fastest growing places in the United Kingdom – nearly trebling its housing stock in the last 60 years – and yet the housing problems of local people have got worse. 

Housebuilding targets are a means to an end. The intended purpose is to meet housing need. Yet, in Cornwall, this is one of the best examples of how that policy completely fails.

The late Ian Jack explained why it fails in the London Review of Books five years ago, with a little help from Oliver Letwin:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

All of which means that the Lib Dems' emphasis on building social housing - seen in the motion passed at last year's autumn conference but less evident in this year's manifesto - must be taken on by the government if they are to fulfil their ambitions.

I should add that everyone I talk to who knows about housing says there is an endemic shortage of the relevant skilled labour in Britain. This too must be tackled by government if its housing policies are to succeed.

It's remarkable how many people have the wrong idea about Ladybird Books, dismissing them as nostalgic, conservative and twee. 

Tom Forth examines the prospects for HS2 now: "Building a new railway from Birmingham to not-quite-London at Old Oak Common would be ridiculous. It is good that Labour seem likely to continue the railway to the city centre. But it is also painful that a huge national investment sold for more than a decade on the promise to benefit North England is now likely to barely benefit it at all. What little gains remain from the plan will fall overwhelmingly to London."

"Duncan came back to his foster home from college one day and found all his bags were packed. It hadn’t even been a week since he turned 18, and his foster carers were happy for him to stay. He’d been living with them since he was 11. But social services said it wasn’t an option. The police would be called if he didn’t go calmly." Greg Barradale reports on the Staying Put scheme, which is helping reduce homelessness among care leavers.

A year ago, the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket published a bombshell report that exposed many of the game’s ills. Alan White asks why the sport decided to rip the shroud away from itself, and finds out what comes next.

Jeni Rizio on the many good reasons for learning Welsh.

Melina Spanoudi visits Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop: "The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney."

"The sight of glow-worms lighting our way along the hedgerows of a country lane at the height of summer, with all the smells of hay and flowers, is delightful and often unexpected. They are a source of amazement, like seeing a shooting star." Steven Morris meets the glow-worm survey volunteers of Dorset.

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The last Conservative government, as it's increasingly being called, promised to get rid of no-fault evictions of private tenants, but never got round to doing so.

Which was a shame for Olly Glover, who received an eviction notice the day after he was elected as the Liberal Democrat MP for Didcot and Wantage.

BBC News has reported his experience:

Mr Glover, who has been renting his current home in Milton for four years, said "no fault evictions" create a "huge pressure" for renters.

He said he believed there was a cultural problem in the UK where housing is seen primarily as an asset and secondarily as an affordable necessity.

Mr Glover said he supported government plans to strengthen tenant rights.

"It was completely unexpected," he said, reflecting on the morning that he received the letter.

The MP said he had no issue with his landlords, but would like to see a process whereby homeowners have a discussion with renters, to work out a timescale, before they issue a no-fault eviction notice.

I'm sure Olly will be all right, but these evictions do contribute to homelessness. A Lib Dem press release from February of this year set out the figures:

The party has warned that thousands more families risk being left without a home if the government continues to delay its plans to ban no-fault evictions after 6,580 households were threatened with homelessness due to a no fault eviction notice, a 3.1 per cent increase on the previous year. 

Harborough District Council, which is run by a Lib Dem, Green and Labour coalition, is planning to turn a derelict site in Market Harborough town centre into a friendship park.

Pragna Patel argues that the establishment of Britain's first Sikh court threatens women's rights: "The use of religious laws to regulate minority women’s lives is not only discriminatory, it is immensely harmful in a context where domestic abuse and related femicides of South Asian and other minority women remain persistently high."

"People didn’t really care about the immorality. Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown discovered this when news of his adulterous affair was published under the headline "Paddy Pantsdown" ("dreadful, but brilliant," he acknowledged), and he enjoyed an opinion-poll bounce." Alwyn Turner looks back to the Nineties - "Britain's golden age of sleaze" - which seem strangely innocent today.

David Ward says it's time to regulate NHS Trust managers, because they act as "judge, jury and executioner" when whistleblowers raise patient safety issues.

"It suited almost everyone after Mussolini’s fall from power in 1943 to blame him personally for the disasters of the war, and to argue that most Italians had always been anti-fascist. The ‘bad Germans’ had forced the ‘good Italians’ into the war. They had been responsible for the massacres of civilians, not the Italians. They had persecuted and killed Jews, while the Italians had tried to save them." John Foot questions the 'bad Germans/good Italians' narrative that grew up around Italy's involvement in the second world war.

"After clearing the rubbish away, Natalie started with a few potted plants before turning her attention to the rest of the ginnel. With the help of another neighbour, Emily, they were able to secure a £1500 Neighbourhood Investment Fund from Manchester City Council. Most of the money went towards getting hanging baskets and hiring a joiner to make the planters. Natalie tells me that the ginnel had helped sell a house last year, over in the next street. An estate agent took a photograph and included it with the property." Dani Cole explores the beautiful, ingenious ginnels of Levenshulme.

Bob Fischer and Vic Pratt review the latest DVD collection of Children's Film Foundation treasures: "I watched Circus Friends, from 1956, and I knew I’d seen the young girl lead somewhere before, but I just couldn’t place her. It was only when the end credits rolled that I realised it was Carol White, from Poor Cow!"

They dress it up in concerns about immigration and academic quality, but I suspect there's a more fundamental reason for the Conservatives' current war on the universities.

You can find it in a research paper published by the Social Market Foundation:

The education divide has played a decisive role in recent votes in the UK. Education is one of the strongest predictors of Brexit preferences, with school leavers and graduates overwhelmingly backing Leave and Remain respectively. The Conservatives’ increased vote share in 2017 and 2019 was also driven by a near doubling of support among school leavers between 2015 and 2019.

This is a new development - before 2016, school leavers were more likely to vote Labour in every election since 1979, while graduates have tended to vote Conservative.

Education is the strongest predictor of voters’ social values - graduates tend to hold more liberal values while school leavers tend to have more authoritarian views. It also predicts social identities, as graduates are more likely to identify as middle class and European, whereas school leavers tend to identify as working class and with local and national identities.

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.

"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."

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