Liberal England

In 2012 Miranda's Island listed the ingredients of the classic children's adventure story:

I mean the kind of rural holiday location where children get to sleep in barns, camp out on islands and cycle, walk or even hitch-hike long miles through country lanes, relieved by picnics packed up by friendly adults who know when to back off and when to interfere. 

Optional but highly desirable elements are caves, horses, dogs (actually, I’m not sure the dog is optional, I think it’s essential) and the frisson of danger provided by a treasure hunt or an odd character lurking around, clearly up to something fishy.

And then came to the right conclusion:

The Famous Five come to mind, and still have their following. But I think a strong contender for that place in the collective juvenile consciousness would be the Lone Pine novels by Malcolm Saville. The Lone Pine Club is a group of around eight children, the bonds between them forged on exactly the kind of holidays described above. 

Similar to the Arthur Ransome novels, the precise line-up of characters varies according to location, but the heart of their adventures might truly be said to be the remote Shropshire countryside between Shrewsbury in the north and Ludlow in the south, and specifically the country around the mountains of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones.

"The Neglected Mountain" is what Jenny calls the Stiperstones in the story to give the book its title.

Miranda of Miranda's Island had reread the book before writing her post:

My husband claimed it was "throbbing with UST [unresolved sexual tension]"  and certainly Saville doesn’t ignore the - ahem - emotional development of fifteen and sixteen year olds. 

There are two boy/girl pairings - David, very much the leader of the group, and Petronella (known as Peter), an independent local girl who loves to ride her pony around the country lanes when she’s not away "at boarding school in Shrewsbury", a statement that neatly conveys the all-important 1950s identifier of social class.

Jenny, from a village post office/general store and Tom, who works on a farm, make up the second couple. It is implicit, though never openly stated, that Jenny has something of a crush on David, but he’s out of her league, and she pairs off comfortably with Tom.

Peter's school fees are paid by her Uncle Micah, though how he has derived such wealth from farming the unpromising country around the Stiperstones is never made clear, but I shall look for signs of Jenny's crush on David next time I read one of the early Lone Pine stories.

Miranda goes on:

Why do these adventures continue to be appealing? I think it’s because the issues that tend to worry adults now – premature sexualisation, social diversity and the degree of freedom it is appropriate to offer older children – are addressed quite differently. That is not to say they are ignored. Far from it. Here is Saville on the subject of gypsies:

The gypsies and Mr Cantor respected each other. The detective knew how honest and trustworthy they were. Gypsies are often accused of many things unjustly, but in their wanderings they pick up a lot of information: and when Miranda handed the detective a cup of tea she knew at once that there were questions he wanted to ask them.

Laid on with a trowel perhaps, but you would never, I think, find such a passage in an Enid Blyton adventure.

The Miranda's Island post makes equally interesting observations on adventures and the development of character, and on children and the adult world.

It ends by praising the Girls Gone By reprints of the Lone Pine stories. These paperbacks are now becoming collectable in their own right, by they do have the full text of the original hardbacks. The Armada paperbacks that many young readers relied upon in the Sixties and Seventies were quite heavily edited - and not well edited, in Saville's own judgement.

Saville hardbacks with their dust wrappers fetch silly prices, and I don't suppose it's as easy to find battered hardbacks without them at reasonable prices as it was when I acquired most of my collection of his work. So a second-hand Girls Gone By edition may be your best bet if you want to read the books as Saville wrote them.

Finally, I hope Miranda is still with us and well. The last post on her blog was written in 2022 when she was obviously seriously ill. I am reminded of my post on disappearances from the net.

"In recent years, the United Kingdom has seen a troubling increase in Holocaust denialism, fuelled by disinformation, a lack of historical education, and the actions of influential public figures." Jack Wilkin on a growing assault on truth.

Patrick McGuinness remembers the hounding of Christopher Jefferies: "The day after his arrest, one of my former classmates spoke to the Telegraph. The article was headlined 'Joanna Yeates Murder: Suspect Christopher Jefferies was eccentric with love of poetry' and my classmate was quoted as saying: 'He was particularly keen on French films.' If innocence can look this bad, who needs guilt? Jefferies became the nation’s High-Culture Hermit-Ogre.

Phil Edwards asks why the New Statesman keeps hyping up the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

No, the HS2 'bat tunnel' has not cost £300,000 per bat, and it will protect a lot of other mammals, birds and insects. Holy heritage, Jeff Ollerton.

"That's what made him such an ideal partner for Kenneth Williams: always unselfish and understated, he complemented rather than competed. While Williams concentrated on the broad brushstrokes, he was content to add the fine details. It was why Williams, who so often came to clash with his fellow performers, never had a bad word to say about Hugh Paddick." Graham McCann pays tribute to a skilled and understated performer.

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It may be unintentional, but as it stands the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill allows the creation of a new generation of church schools that are not bound by the existing 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions.

So I'm pleased that the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson is to move an amendment that would make new schools subject to this cap too.

Pleased? Back in 2017, I blogged about a Sunday Times report that Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools.

I said I regarded this as good news and quoted Timothy Garton Ash, in his book Free World, on the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness:

Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah. 

So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.

As to whether we should have faith schools at all, I remembered tackling this question long ago in an article for the Guardian website.

Reading it today, I find it better than I remembered - I'd still be happy to defend the views in it.

What I had forgotten completely is that it was written as a reply to the mighty James Graham. 

Those were the days. When the Guardian would invite one Lib Dem blogger to reply to another Lib Dem blogger and they both got paid for the privilege.

Zoe Crowther asks what the Westminster social media landscape will look like in 2025.

"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.

Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.

Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."

"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.

Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."

"Liberal democracy depends upon a sense of shared citizenship, a relatively stable society and an inclusive economy without too great a gap between rich and poor." William Wallace puts his finger on an important truth: economic inequality is a barrier to liberal politics.

Robert Saunderson on what the Conservatives must do if they are to recover from July's rout: "The party must resist three fantasies that have loomed too large since the election: that defeat was less severe than at first believed; that its failures in office were the fault of traitors or non-believers; and that there are easy solutions to the dilemmas that now confront it."

Meg Gain listened to Sayeeda Warsi speak about the tendency to a growing acceptance of racism and Islamophobia at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival.

"Seeking to silence him once and for all, Jersey’s government also slapped Syvret with a superinjunction in 2012 – an action undertaken via a secret court proceeding, which took place without his knowledge, and forbade him from speaking about the four individuals he had named." Stuart Syvret describes how he was forced out of Jersey for doing his job as a senator.

"In one of the Rolling Stones’ most crucial songs, Sympathy for the Devil, it’s not Keith Richards’ guitar that defines the melody or propels the piece. It’s a series of stark piano chords, struck by a studio musician, that give the piece its earth-shaking power." Jim Farber on the genius of the pianist Nicky Hopkins.

Shane McCorristine asks why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude.

Ben Quinn explains how the National Trust fought back against the culture warriors: "When it comes to disinformation, [Celia] Richardson speaks of taking 'a broken windows approach' - borrowing from the criminology theory that addressing low-level problems creates an atmosphere that discourages larger ones."

"From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices." Rosalyn R. LaPier says Joe Biden's apology for the horrors of Native American boarding schools doesn’t go far enough.

Dominic Grieve has some good advice, which the Conservative Party will ignore, concerning the severe problems that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would cause.

It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow. In a reversal of decades of local progress, argues Colin Speakman, West Yorkshire’s once-thriving commuter rail now struggles under bureaucracy and neglect.

"Arlott was a superlative cricket commentator, a failed Liberal politician (was there any other kind in the post-war era?), and a major catalyst in the D'Oliveira Affair. Were it not for John Arlott we may never have heard of Basil D’Oliveira and the controversy sparked by D'Oliveira’s selection for England’s tour to South Africa, turning South Africa into even more of a pariah state may never have happened." Matthew Pennell wrote a post for Black History Month on British Liberals and the D'Oliveira Affair.

Andy Lear searches for the ghost woods of Rutland's Leighfield Forest.

"As just one of a handful of MPs known to have grown up in care, I am hugely conscious of just how fortunate I have been on my journey. Fortunate because I had fantastic foster parents who then adopted me, and who always encouraged me in education and supported my aspirations. And fortunate because my experience has been so different from that of so many other care-experienced children and young people." Darren Paffey says that care-experienced children and young people are too often written off before they even take their first steps into adulthood.

Edward Henry KC talks to Legal Business: "I've been very fortunate to have two of the most remarkable cases that any barrister could hope for: the Andrew Malkinson appeal and representing the subpostmasters who were destroyed by the Post Office in the Post Office Horizon inquiry. Those clients, Andrew and the subpostmasters, are remarkably wonderful people. It’s a huge privilege and honour to represent them. I don’t think I can put into words how important their interests are to me, particularly given the monstrous injustices they suffered."

Alan Lester sets out the top five manoeuvres used to avoid discussion of reparations for slavery.

"I recently came across two rather depressing reflections on the present and future of the Internet. One contemplated the apparent death of the hyperlink, the original glue that held the World Wide Web together. The second predicted that within just two or three years, 80 per ent or more of all the text on the Internet would be machine generated." Kate Watson asks if we can make an internet fit for people again.

Laura D'Olimpio argues that encountering philosophy at school gives young people the tools to discuss difficult topics like the Israel-Gaza war.

"Some described Spring-heeled Jack as a ghost, some as a bear, an armoured man, a devil; others suspected he might be a dissolute aristocrat. As well as his flaming breath and burning red eyes, many claimed he had the astounding ability to spring or leap great distances, bounding over walls and hedges and even onto house roofs." David Castleton wonders who or what a figure that terrorised Victorian London was.

"There is a strand of conservatism that is protectionist and isolationist but for any admirer of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher to go along with these policies is extraordinary. Trump represents a repudiation of their values on free trade and internationalism." David Gauke explains why Conservatives should have no truck with Trump.

Where do all those young right-wing media commentators spring from? Olly Haynes exposes the talent agencies funded by American fossil fuel billionaires.

Joe Ware on the campaign by Chris Packham and other celebrities who have challenged the Church Commissioners to rewild 30 per cent of their estate to "give British wildlife the salvation that it desperately needs".

Rebecca Jennings says that whether you want to be a published author or professional artist, you have to market yourself of social media: "Self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to 'build a platform'; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream - working for yourself and making money doing what you love."

"Although the judge has no sympathy for Black Power, he can’t help to some extent at least to be won over by Darcus. The courtroom just erupts in laughter when Darcus and the judge are trading quips." The Mangrove Nine were black Londoners tried for protesting against police harassment in 1970. They were acquitted, marking the first acknowledgment of racial bias in the police. Now, reports Richard Sudan, a recording of Darcus Howe's closing remarks in his own defence has been found.

Pat Nevin remembers his hero Pele: "Then there was the lay-off for the fourth goal in the final, scored by the captain Carlos Alberto. The build-up is phenomenal, and then it comes to Pele. He doesn’t just pass it, it’s the languid way in which he knows exactly where his team-mate is and he just strokes the ball so comfortably."

"Fiction discourse is a wreck, and we can't look away." Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi offer a glossary of bullshit writing terms.

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.

"The Labour government appears to think that improving the delivery of public services will be sufficient to resolve the embittered alienation of so many voters from British politics. Do we dare as liberals to argue that democracy requires a much more active engagement with our citizens, at national and at local levels?" William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats should be setting the agenda, not following it.

Christian Wolmar claims he has the ideal road plan for Britain: take the 16 major highway schemes worth £15bn and bin them.

"White privately-educated British male cricketers were 34 times more likely to play professionally than state-educated British South Asians." Taha Hashim on the work of the South Asian Cricket Academy.

Red Flag Walks looks back to the feminist protest against the 1970 Miss World contest: "Sarah Wilson was chosen to start the protest. 'When Bob Hope was going on and on with terrible, grotesque stuff, I got up and swung my football rattle. It seemed ages before anybody responded – people were lighting their cigarettes to ignite the smoke bombs – but then I saw stuff beginning to cascade down.'"

"He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the driving force behind Rising Damp." The late Eric Chappell, creator of the series, tells the story of Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp, the show he created and wrote 50 years ago.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the power station on what is now St Pancras Way: "The first phase of the power station faced the Regents Canal and the large area of railway coal depots, and this was one of the reasons why the power station was located here – the easy access to supplies of coal, whether delivered to the power station via train to the depot opposite, or along the canal from Regents Canal Dock (now Limehouse Dock), brought in from the north east of the country using colliers."

The Secret Barrister takes apart the online myths about Britain having two-tier justice.

"Disinformation is easily and automatically spread on social media using bots, fake stories, fake bits of information and video clips. Anything digitised can be manipulated. Governments have known this for a long time. But 2024 has been, thus far, a ‘super-year’ of elections across the globe ... All have faced an onslaught of online disinformation and this threatens to increase in intensity in the run-up to the forthcoming US election." Juliet Lodge asks what can be done to stop thugs and bots gaming democracy.

"As local jails have morphed into some of the largest mental health treatment facilities in the US, many counties have outsourced medical care to private companies that promise to contain rising costs." Cary Aspinwall, Brianna Bailey and Sachi McClendo look at the dark side of this move.

Nicola Davis reports on research that suggests that arts and crafts give greater life satisfaction than work: "The results revealed that people who engaged with creating arts and crafting had greater ratings for happiness, life satisfaction and feeling that life was worthwhile than those who did not, even after taking into account other factors known to have an impact."

Adam Pickering reminds us that Nottingham was the first place in Britain to hold such a Caribbean carnival, beating even Notting Hill.

"As ever county cricket will find a way to jump the hurdles. Until, that is, it doesn’t. And then it will be too late." The contempt with which the One-Day Cup is being treated by the game's authorities is a cricketing disgrace, argues Sam Dalling.

"There is virtually no social, cultural or legal protection for Muslims. Organisations that ought to protect them - think of the refusal of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to launch an enquiry into Tory Islamophobia - wash their hands. No wonder we’ve seen this horrific street violence. It’s surprising it’s not happened before." Peter Oborne says the UK's media and politicians are almost wholly to blame for this week's riots.

Sara Wilford asks why are so many of the rioters are in their forties and fifties.

Hugo Daniel hears the voices of the forgotten child victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "Within a space of two years we lost all the money Mum and Dad had, we lost our home, our friends and then we lost Mum. The sheer stress and panic she faced, there was no way she could fight both cancer and the Post Office, and ultimately she lost both battles."

"Few people ever thought that the Leader of North East Lincolnshire Council might be a Liberal Democrat, that he would be of Caribbean descent, and that his tenure as Leader would see great achievements for the Borough." Ed Fordham and Ian Barfield remember Andrew De Freitas.

"Like technology companies, stakeholders in science must realize that making error detection and correction part of the scientific landscape is a sound investment." Malte Elson makes the case for paying researchers to spot errors in published science papers.

John Check reviews a biography of Mama Cass Elliot by the singer's daughter: "After her last show, she attended a birthday party for Mick Jagger, then returned to the flat she had rented. She went to bed and never woke up, dying of a heart attack. An urban legend that bizarrely became almost universally accepted - that she choked to death on a ham sandwich - was concocted ... by her ... manager, who feared for the reputation of his client. The story seemed more innocent than association with the dangers of 'the rock-and-roll lifestyle."

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.

"The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network's activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation." Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen reveal the Australian broadcaster's research into Russian interference in the general election and how - suddenly - the Tories are concerned about it.

"Starmer has picked his battles well and, for the most part, won them. For instance, the Labour leader has pledged to restore the UK’s net zero targets to their more ambitious former selves - prior to Sunak’s tinkering. Meanwhile, he continues to rubbish the government’s Rwanda deportation plan as an expensive, overly elaborate gimmick." Josh Self argues that Keir Starmer's part in the collapse of the Conservative Party should be not be overlooked.

Gary Hutchison discusses his research into violence in Victorian elections.

Hazel Marsh, Esbjörn Wettermark and Tiffany Hore on the way Romani Gypsy and Traveller people have shaped Britain’s musical heritage: "In 1907, after hearing Romani Gypsy Betsy Holland sing in Devon, Cecil Sharp (a key figure in the first English folk revival) wrote: 'Talk of folk-singing! It was the finest and most characteristic bit of singing I had ever heard.'"

"Knife is a clear and unsurprising departure. We have a defiant Rushdie, still, but also a vulnerable one. It’s a vulnerability he didn’t allow in his 2012 autobiography Joseph Anton, a highly readable book but whose third-person narration sounds as affected on the page as he would in person." Shehryar Fazli reviews Salman Rushdie new memoir.

Amy Lim says that, for all the nostalgic prettiness of her watercolors, Helen Allingham was a highly professional, pioneering woman artist: "In her lifetime, through a combination of talent, hard work and shrewd marketing, Allingham enjoyed immense critical and commercial success. She was also, for many years, a single mother, supporting her children through her art."

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. I've slightly lost the thread of which issue which column has appeared in, but this one has certainly been published. In fact, I don't remember writing parts of it.

The progress of the working-class grammar school boy and the estrangement from his background it brought about were once such a theme of English letters that it was honoured with a Monty Python sketch inverting it. 

A coal miner returns home to his playwright father and receives a cold welcome:

“Hampstead wasn't good enough for you, was it? You had to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and your coal-mining friends.”

The grandfather of this school of writing was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level when David Storey’s Saville won the Booker Prize. Our teacher talked of Storey’s debt to Lawrence and suggested we considered reading his novel.

Saville introduced me to David Storey, whose early life encompassed elements no novelist would dare combine. At one time, Storey’s posthumous memoir A Stinging Life reminds us, he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and supporting himself by taking the train north at the weekend to play rugby league for Leeds.

Fashions change, and a few years ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

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Writing for the online publication Too Little / Too Hard, Rachael Allen recalls being the first in her family to receive any kind of schooling after the age of 14:

At Goldsmiths, I did not meet the children of cleaners or shop workers. I met the children of landlords, the children of airline pilots, and actual princesses, the children of executives at mega pharmaceutical companies, people so wealthy they owned their own charities. I met the children of TV personalities and doctors, barons and writers.

And she goes on to record a revelation that many of us have experienced:

One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working-class person moving into educated and middle-class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.

The English are indeed likely to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence – a failing that more than one contemporary comedian has exploited to land a more serious column. But Allen says her working-class father reads more than anyone she knows, giving himself a summer to read War and Peace and then everything around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. She grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees in the Latin that he had taught himself over the years as an amateur naturalist.

My own class background is complicated – my mother once claimed to have “gone from rags to rags in one generation” – but when I was a poor teenager, I was still able to pass as middle class. The disadvantage of this was that, in an instance of the same fallacy, it did not occur to any teacher that I might be having problems. 

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Class, which once held a central place in our political discourse, now competes with other sources of injustice. The Conservative MP David Johnston once wrote about his time running social mobility. recalling a firm which, while it thought itself fully signed up to the concept, nevertheless raised queries like: 

“Our clients need us to have worldliness and you get that by travelling the world. So how will the young people you work with be able to demonstrate it?"

and

“They’ll be alongside the children of high net-worth individuals who we’re teaching how to invest the assets their parents gave them, so you’ll have to send us someone suitable.”

Johnston would watch banks professional service firms fall over each other to hire black graduates if they were privately educated and from professional families:

These young people were deemed to have the requisite social capital they claimed their “clients expect from us”. If, however, you were the sort of black young person my organisations typically helped – poor and from a council estate – enthusiasm waned.

All these companies, said Johnston, would talk on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background was not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white, but you had to be middle class.

Without the right social connections you will never break into the circles where the best jobs are on offer. Andy Burnham was mocked when he spoke of the problems in this he had still faced with a Cambridge degree – hadn’t been in the cabinet before he was 40? – but then he had found an alternative network in the shape of the Labour Party.

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I saw a tweet from another female academic, Professor Amanda Vickery, the other day:

Found Saltburn unpleasant. Brought back memories of being working class at uni. Am decades from that & obvs privileged now, but still recall that any time I said "no my father was a bricklayer & no we never went skiing", boys would launch into the Monty Python sketch.

There’s little doubt which sketch that was, though the Four Yorkshiremen were originally seen in an earlier television programme, At Last the 1948 Show, and the sketch was written and performed by Marty Feldman, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, as well as John Cleese. You know, I think we’ve found a hill I will die on.

A radical reading of the Four Yorkshiremen is possible – we are laughing at the self-aggrandisement of the rich as they tell increasingly incredible stories of their own childhoods – but Vickery’s fellow students found the very idea of poverty amusing and old fashioned. It’s become just one more of those odd notions that private school pupils tease one another out of holding so they can be sure of fitting in.

Which may be why, if British novelists wrote of nothing but the experiences of the bright poor boy in the Fifties and early Sixties, they now seldom mention the working class at all.

"The UK and EU cannot help but matter to each other. Regardless of the formal terms of the relationship, developments on one side of the Channel do affect what happens on the other." Brexit boredom is one thing, but there’s a real problem when Britain’s leaders won’t even talk about Europe any more, says Simon Usherwood.

Anusha Singh profiles Hina Bokhari, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats in the London Assembly. Hina is the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group at City Hall since its establishment in 2000, and also the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group in any of the UK’s devolved institutions.

"The idea that Labour’s electoral success depends on its ability to win back imagined hordes of socially conservative voters in the distant north and Midlands remains central to the party’s self-image." Alex Niven on the myth of the 'red wall'.

Hannah White argues that whether a government’s majority is enormous or merely substantial the more significant factor for democracy is the attitude a government takes to the role of parliament and the value of scrutiny.

Ben Highmore discusses the postwar adventure playground movement: "What if you gave children and young people their own space? A third space that wasn’t school and wasn’t home. Somewhere not orchestrated by obedience ... . A place where young people might have a great deal of autonomy in how they occupied the space and what they did with their time."

"Bringing psychoanalysis into the conversation explains so much, not only about Mitchell’s 1970s preoccupations, but about the looping, overflowing structure of her songs as the decade progressed. I wasn’t surprised to discover that Mitchell's own experiences with therapy were at best mixed." Ann Powers finds that the preoccupations of Joni Mitchell's work mirror those of American society throughout her career.

"But the personal consequences for Rafiq have been just as severe. Since the moment he stepped before the digital, culture, media and sport ... committee, he has faced relentless abuse, attacks and death threats. 'My life changed over that hour and 45 minutes,' he says in his soft Barnsley accent. His new memoir, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism, recounts some of the worst moments: the human excrement left on his parents' lawn, the chain-wielding man who stalked his house in the middle of the night." Azeem Rafiq talks to Emma John about racism, cricket and why he had to leave Britain.

Simon James welcomes the way the Liberal Democrat manifesto puts arts education at the centre of the party's plans for culture.

Liam O'Farrell went to a talk by John Rogers on his new book about London: "Rogers delves into the city’s ancient history following a chance conversation with a Pearly Punk King on the rooftop of the old Foyles building. This encounter takes him through Epping Forest to the prehistory of London in the Upper Lea Valley, unearthing Bronze Age burial mounds and their significance in understanding London’s historical roots and its enduring connection to its past."

"Putting Peter Grimes on stage was not as straightforward as it might have been. Initially, the story, scenario and the characters underwent substantial changes in the early stages of drafting. At first, Britten had Grimes murdering his apprentices rather than being at worst negligent, and Grimes originally goes mad in the marshes and dies there." Georg Predota looks back to 1945 and the Saddler's Wells premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera.

Ian Vince goes in search of ley lines. " What [Alfred] Watkins saw convinced him that there was a grid of secret lines in the Herefordshire countryside; a network of mounds, hummocks and tumps, moats, megaliths and camps that coalesced to form the nodes of a prehistoric track system."

"Hamer’s use of locations throughout the film is distinctive and surprisingly gothic at times. From seemingly innocuous suburbia and Edwardian retreats to country seats, castles and villages, the breadth of locations gives the film a visual strength above its more studio-bound peers." Adam Scovell revisits the locations use in the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.

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!"

Janan Ganesh argues that the Tories' greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US: "A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with the US, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries."

"This week’s official government report into the atrocities of Alderney suggests more than 1000 might have perished as a result of over-work, starvation, disease, beatings and being executed. The story of the brutal sadism of the Nazis on Alderney is not just a Jewish story. The clear majority of those who died were from the Soviet Union." Antony Barnett and Martin Bright on Lord Pickles's Alderney Expert Review.

Elisabeth Braw says countries mulling wider national service plans should learn from the Norwegian model. It's voluntary, selective and places on the scheme are highly prized.