Observer: Nick Clegg refuses to back Jeremy Hunt

Last night I wrote a post saying that the Liberal Democrats should vote with Labour if there is a Commons division on the conduct of Jeremy Hunt.

An article in tomorrow's Observer suggests that this may happen.

Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey write:

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has refused to give unequivocal backing to Jeremy Hunt over his handling of the BSkyB takeover controversy as senior Liberal Democrats broke ranks to demand a new investigation into whether the culture secretary has broken the ministerial code. ...

Labour will call a Commons vote on whether Hunt should be investigated, claiming he misled parliament about his role in News Corp's bid for BSkyB and failed to keep his adviser Adam Smith, who quit over his contacts with Murdoch executives, under control. 

A Lib Dem spokesman refused to say whether Clegg would order his MPs to back Cameron. "No decision has been taken," he said.

They go on to name three Liberal Democrat parliamentarians who have publicly criticised Hunt: Adrian Sanders, Lorely Burt and Matthew Oakeshott.

Kilby Bridge quarry

Today Kilby Bridge is little more than a pub and a few houses sited between the canal and railway and beside the old A50, and some of those houses appear to be derelict. There are also a couple of car lots and a boatyard.

But at the end of the 19th century it was the site of considerable industrial activity. There is an outcrop of limestone nearby and lime kilns were built and linked to both railway and canal.

According to an article in a Greater Wigston Historical Society newsletter from 1986, those kilns were disused by 1914. The quarry is still there, but it is flooded and separated from the canal by the narrowest possible strip of land. The structure in the background is a signal gantry on the railway line.

The quarry is now a nature reserve with many waterfowl. When I was there today, the canal bridge that would take you to it from the towpath side turned out to be both ruined and barricaded.

The Lib Dems should vote with Labour on Jeremy Hunt

Labour, says BBC News, is to force a Commons division on whether Jeremy Hunt broke the ministerial code.

The Liberal Democrats, of course, should vote with Labour on this.

If you want to know why, read Martin Bright on the Spectator Coffee House blog:

Has there ever been such a woeful performance at a public inquiry as Jeremy Hunt’s yesterday? There has rarely been a frontline politician as vain and primping as the Culture Secretary and it is hard to imagine one with so little self-knowledge.

And:

It is now beyond question that Jeremy Hunt was batting for the Murdochs. The sight of an elected politician fawning to the hereditary heir to a billionaire media mogul is repellent enough

And:

In keeping Jeremy Hunt in post, the Prime Minister has decided to back a man who used his young special adviser as a human shield, ratted on a Cabinet colleague when he was the victim of a newspaper sting and then has the audacity to represent himself as a man of principle.

When smoke stood up from Ludlow

Much as I love Shropshire, sometimes it is safer to live in Leicestershire.

Today, for instance, a small earthquake was felt around Ludlow and Church Stretton. It didn't compete with the Bishop's Castle earthquake of 1990, which I felt at work in Leicester, but it still Makes You Think.

And then there is this, which Castle News broke today:

Tankers have been transporting water into Bishop’s Castle by road for the past two weeks after a contamination scare. 

Water has been tankered into town from Ludlow since a borehole was closed by Severn Trent water company two weeks ago. The Clungunford borehole was closed because spilt oil had contaminated the ground near the bore hole.

Which, given that Lydbury North is a couple of miles south of the town, is probably connected with this story from Monday's Shropshire Star:

A 45-year-old man had an amazing escape after his tanker plunged down an embankment in Shropshire, trapping him inside for nearly two hours. 

The water tanker left the road and rolled through a hedge becoming coming to rest on its side in a field near Lydbury North.

Still, some people thrive on the danger. This morning the BBC Shropshire pages reported that a lady called Mary Wolfe has just retired from providing teas at Bishop's Castle Community Hospital at the age of 100.

Russell Crowe goes into Market Harborough cycle shop

The Harborough Mail tells us that "A-lister Crowe" paid a low-key visit to George Halls Cycle Centre in Northampton Road last Friday afternoon:

Neil Holman, owner of George Halls, told the Mail: “We repaired his bike. 

“He had just got a puncture. 

“His minder dropped it in during the morning and then in the afternoon Russell Crowe came in himself.” 

While in the shop, the Australian actor spoke to a shop assistant and asked him for directions to the Brampton Valley Way and asked if there was a ‘number six’ that marked the route.

Crowe is currently filming Les Miserables at Boughton House near Kettering.

The decline of Western civilisation as evidenced in rallway advertising

1925

.
2012

St Luke's, Newton Harcourt

Newton Harcourt church (like the Manor House opposite - once the home of the Leicestershire architect Joseph Goddard) is separated from the rest of the village by the railway and canal.

The attractive tower and west end stand right beside the lane, though the rest of the church was rebuilt in undistinguished 19th-century red-brick Gothic. It is easy to mourn this, but the Victoria County History makes it clear that if the Victorians had not taken radical action the church would not be here for us to enjoy today. And I suspect that is true of thousands of churches across the country.

An odd monument in the churchyard was shining white in the sun. It looked like something a child would make out of building bricks. And then I saw why:

TO THE

FRAGRANT MEMORY

OF

CHRISTOPHER V. GARDNER

BORN 26 AUG 1916

DIED 20 SEP 1924

AGED 8 YEARS

Later. There is more about 'the little church' here

Tax relief on charitable donations: A welcome U-turn?

George Osborne's decision in his recent Budget to limit the tax relief available on charitable giving appears to have been inspired by Nick Clegg's idea of a 'tycoon tax'.

And that idea was strictly back-of-an-envelope and helped take the idea of a mansion tax off the political agenda just as the some of the more thoughtful Tories were becoming willing to consider it. So in many ways I am happy to see the limit scrapped in the latest U-turn.

But I cannot quite share the enthusiasm for it of our own Stephen Tall:

Kudos to the Coalition for unequivocally defusing this row, rather than (as I’d feared would happen) attempting to finesse a compromise that would have been messy and satisfied no-one. 

The simple principle which I’ve consistently argued - that in a liberal ‘Big Society‘ individuals shouldn’t pay tax on money they voluntarily forego (sic) for charitable causes - is the one that’s been upheld.

Trouble is, we only apply that principle to the wealthy. As I wrote in an earlier post on the subject:

the row over the reduction of tax relief on charitable donations also reveals that the wealthy inhabit a different tax world from the rest of us. There is a scheme whereby people under the PAYE system can use it to make charitable donations. But if you or I announced to the authorities that we had decided to reduce what we pay in income tax and give it to charity instead, I think we would receive pretty short shrift from the authorities.

A world in which we don't pay tax but all give to our favourite charitable causes has its attractions, but I don't suppose it would prove workable. There would be plenty of money for donkey sanctuaries and Well-Behaved Orphans, but less for learning disabilities or the criminal justice system.

So we have to pay our taxes. And if we have to pay our taxes, shouldn't we all be obliged to pay them before donating to our favourite causes?

I am the last person to support the state over Stephen's 'liberal Big Society', but justice matters too. If philanthropy is a good thing - and it is - shouldn't we all have the chance to enjoy it?

At present, as I suggested in the title of that earlier post, it is a case of tax avoidance for the rich and PAYE for the rest of us.

Harriett Baldwin keeps her head down

Never take a Shropshire newspaper too lightly. Here is the Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser making a cool appraisal of the Conservative member for West Worcestershire, whose constituency includes Tenbury:

It is notable that the town’s MP Harriett Baldwin kept her head down over Tesco. 

Her silence on the biggest issue to affect the town for many years was as shrewd as it was deafening.

Rafael Behr dissects the Conservatives' discontent

Rafael Behr hits a whole row of ducks in his latest New Statesman article.

Tory attitudes to Labour:

The Tories are perplexed. Most were convinced that Miliband’s leadership was a re-enactment of their experience under Iain Duncan Smith – a decent fellow, promoted beyond his powers. Conservative MPs watched with surprise and relief as Labour ignored the script and failed to mount a coup. Some were scornful of the opposition’s apparent lack of gumption. It has taken a while for the Tories to recognise that they even have an adversary.

The puncturing of George Osborne:

George Osborne’s reputation as a political mastermind has been shredded. He is defended by a phalanx of protégé MPs from the 2010 intake but older hands complain about his dual role as Chancellor and party election strategist, muttering that neither can be done well on a part-time basis.

Pleasingly (if a little surpisingly) the efficiency of Nick Clegg's office:

the Deputy Prime Minister’s office at 70 Whitehall has emerged as an effective power base for Nick Clegg. Even some Tories grudgingly concede that the Lib Dem leader has the more functional team. An on­going source of irritation for Conservatives is that advisers who report to Clegg sit in N0 10, while Cameron has no equivalent agents at the heart of the Lib Dem wing at Whitehall. The imbalance feeds the Tories’ suspicion that their coalition partners feign unity, then sneak around corners to plot subterfuge.

The ungovernability of the Tory backbenches:

Clegg’s influence over policy is resented all the more because it seems so disproportionate to his party’s popularity ratings. Every opinion poll putting the Lib Dems in single-digit parity with the UK Independence Party reinforces the backbench Tory conviction that their coalition partners are weaklings and saboteurs who keep kicking the Prime Minister’s shins in a desperate bid to be noticed. Cameron’s compromises are therefore despised as capitulations. It is a dynamic that breeds a virulent strain of rebellion in a small but noisy minority of MPs. “Their anger with Nick is really a proxy for anger with Cameron,” warns one Lib Dem minister. “They are fuelled by the certainty that, far from being disloyal in making trouble for the Prime Minister, they are being loyal to the ideal of Conservatism.”

And the need for Lib Dem discipline:

The original idea was to share kudos with Osborne for having fixed the nation’s finances in time for an election in 2015. That could quickly become a rush to exchange blame for making things worse. Labour is praying for just such a collapse in its opponents’ discipline.

The only thing wrong with it is the attempt at an extended tennis metaphor. Ducks are better.

Final Sentence of the Day

The winner is our own Harborough Mail for this end to a news report:

Coincidentally, a fire engine was also seen rushing through the town at the same time – it was attending some burnt toast at a Harborough residential home.

Engelbert Humperdinck and Charles William Packe

On Saturday morning I visited Great Glen, the home of Engelbert Humperdinck. He was not there, being busy in Baku at the time.

I have seen the end of the village's old High Street from the bus many times, but had never got off to explore it before. It is the sort of street that ought to have a little pub and it was pleased to find that it did: The Royal Oak.

At the far end of the street I came across the house pictured above. Having come across the Liberal MP Thomas Tertius Paget at Laughton the other week, I wondered if CWP would turn out to be Charles William Packe, the Conservative MP for South Leicestershire.

This guess turned out to be right. There were Packe graves in the village churchyard and the Victoria Country History confirms that he built the cottages.

I wonder if there was a 19th-century trend of politicians displaying their initials in this way. Perhaps it served as a superior sort of garden poster, reminding people of your importance or beneficence, even between elections.

Packe and his wife lie in a family mausoleum in Poole. Something to visit the next time the Lib Dems are in Bournemouth?

Six of the Best 251

Congratulations to Lib Dem blogger Mark Cole on becoming Chairman of Ceredigion County Council.

Alex's Archives prepares to fight Iain Duncan Smith's reported intention to expand the government's mandatory work programme: "At the moment long-term unemployed people are likely to be out-competed for jobs by those who are recently unemployed and therefore job-ready. In a period of high unemployment beating unemployed people around the head with a stick may give some form of sadistic pleasure, but it is unlikely to do a great deal for either their self-worth or the unemployment statistics."

Ceasefire is rightly outraged that Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer and other UK citizens are facing the real prospect of extradition to the US for alleged crimes committed in the UK for which most have been detained for years without charge or evidence.

"Beleaguered Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt is in the midst of another 'omnishambles' which threatens to open David Cameron’s Government up to further accusations of cronyism and dodgy backstairs deals with lobbyists and Tory insiders," writes archaeology blogger Mortimer of the 'HMS Victory scandal'.

Whirled Peas sat through the Eurovision Song Contest so you didn't have to.

"So now I’m off to search eBay for some old editions of Enid Blyton tales — Dicks and Fannies and all." Free-Range Kids is against the bowdlerising of old children's books.

Percy Pilcher, Leicestershire aviation pioneer

The Shropshire Star, with commendable objectivity, rubbishes the idea that Ernest Maund of Craven Arms was one of the pioneers of British aviation.

But this story reminds me that we really did have such a pioneer here in Leicestershire: Percy Pilcher.

Oliver Burkeman told his story in the Guardian some years ago:

Percy Pilcher's life ended on September 30 1899, when he was 32, as the result of a rapid and unforeseen reduction in the distance between his homemade wooden glider, the Hawk, and the well-kept lawns of Stanford Hall in Leicestershire. Until that moment, the atmosphere among the moneyed gentlemen gathered to watch him must have been one of high anticipation: Pilcher's display, in what he called a "soaring machine", was the final fundraiser for a project so revolutionary that it promised to make him one of the most famous men of the coming century. 

For years, the race to design a motor-powered aeroplane had obsessed professionals and eccentrics across Europe and America; now Pilcher announced that he was days from completing one - all he needed was a bit of cash to fix its broken engine. But then, on his third flight at Stanford Hall, the Hawk "came down heavily", in the words of one aristocrat in the audience, the Honourable Adrian Verney-Cave, "with a crash that could be heard some hundreds of yards". Two days later, Pilcher died. Four years later, on December 17 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright coaxed their own biplane jerkily upwards from a North Carolina field and into history.

Sir Alan Beith interviewed by the Northumberland Gazette

Sir Alan Beith has been north Northumberland’s MP for nearly 40 years, but the last two have seen him involved in the hustle and bustle of the Coalition Government

the Northumberland Gazette points out, before interviewing him about the current political situation:

“I never had any illusions that there wouldn’t be a negative effect at least for the first couple of years, because the people who vote for us, if they didn’t vote for us, would vote for Labour, as they have a deep distrust of the Tories,” said Sir Alan. 

“Our job is to make sure the Government is a coalition and therefore that their fears don’t happen. 

“The other factor we have to contend with in the elections is that any Government in the situation that the country’s now in would be making very unpopular decisions. 

“If Labour had won a majority they would either be doing things similarly to what this Government is doing or the country would be heading for disaster, and I think it would be the first one.”

Sir Alan was also keen to talk about the dualling of the A1 - an issue which appears to be the Northumbrian equivalent of the Cornish pasty.

Newton Harcourt Village Hall

Nowadays there is a rather sad game you can play when visiting a village for the first time: guess where the post office used to be.

Newton Harcourt made it easy, having an Old Post Office in a Post Office Lane. Down that lane there was also a fine mid 19th century school perched above a railway cutting. In fact I have seen this building on my commute every day without realising what it was.

And Newton Harcourt Village Hall is one of those prefabricated corrugated-iron buildings I like so much. It has a brick extension at one end, but its essential nature is not in doubt.

If the chapel from Mowsley Hospital can be dismantled and then re-erected miles away, maybe this hall was first used as a church somewhere else?

Whitstable protesters see off Network Rail

Congratulations to the protesters who have persuaded Network Rail to suspend work on clearing trees from an embankment near Whitstable in Kent.

As I discovered in 2003 when I researched and wrote an article for the Guardian about the clearance of the Wigston Triangle near Leicester, there is a good deal of local disquiet about the company's stewardship of the natural environment of railway land.

Nature is very forgiving: in the years since I wrote that article the Wigston Triangle has largely regenerated. But as this video from N21.net shows, Network Rail's approach can be brutal.

The Liberal Democrats' relations with Rupert Murdoch

Sunday's Observer had an article purporting to show that the Liberal Democrats had been "sucked deeper into the controversy over News Corp's planned takeover of BSkyB".

My first reaction was that I wan not aware we were involved in the controversy in the first place, so how could we been sucked in deeper? And Liberal Democrat Voice hurried to assure us that it was "desperately thin stuff".

Certainly, the article failed to show that the two Lib Dem cabinet ministers it mentions - Vince Cable and Danny Alexander - had behaved with anything other than the utmost propriety over BSkyB. Nevertheless, the article does have a number of points of interest to party members.

For instance, the emails submitted to the Leveson Inquiry by Frederic Michel (Murdoch's lobbyist) show that he attended what sounds very like a fundraising event for Nick  Clegg's Lib Dem leadership campaign that we held while Menzies Campbell was still leader.

And those same emails show, says the Observer, that:

Tim Colbourne, a Clegg aide, advised the News Corp lobbyist that he should try to get Labour to support the bid as this would convince Cable to back it.

Quite why someone working for Nick Clegg thought it part of his role to advise News Corp on its tactics for winning over Vince Cable and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is nowhere explained.

Michel was doing his job as a lobbyist, but it hard not to contrast the ease of access that such lobbyists have to government circles with the growing demands made of average citizens, Liberal Democrat members included, before they can have any access to them.

Headline of the Day

The South Shropshire Journal makes a welcome return to form:

Founder of good news paper dies

Harry J & The All Stars: The Liquidator

The Liquidator is chosen as a tribute to the winners of the UEFA Champions League. It is a popular tune to play as football teams run out, and Wikipedia says that Chelsea, Wycombe Wanderers, Northampton Town West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers and St. Johnstone all have claims to have been the first club to use it.

But that same entry suggests that Chelsea's is the strongest claim, quoting the liner notes for Liquidator: The Best of the Harry J & The All Stars:

"Way back in 1969, supporters of the Chelsea football team revered players such as Bonetti, Osgood and Hollins. The boys performed under the watchful eye of manager Dave Sexton to the tune of Harry J & All Stars chartbuster, 'The Liquidator'".

Harry J was Harry Zephaniah Johnson, who later enjoyed success as a record producer, familiarising Britain with reggae through the gentle hands of artists like Johnny Nash and Ken Boothe,

More on that Edward Garnier roof collapse drama

Deborah Orr has a column in today's Guardian that reveals that she too was affected by the roof collapse in Stockwell. So that is a row of half a dozen houses that is home to Edward Garnier (MP for Harborough and Solicitor General), Will Self and Orr herself - a useful reminder of how our national life is dominated by London and the South East.

So far so unsurprising.

Nor should we be surprised that the first Orr "knew of anything unusual was when my teenage son appeared, barefoot, in the local pub where I'd just met some friends".

The fashionable parts of London are full of the barefoot children on Guardian columnists attempting to get their parents to come home.

But the piece gets more useful after that:

Unfortunately, this meant that six sets of residents were banned from entering their homes, even through the back, where there had never been danger of a stray half-brick coming down. Further, police officers were stationed on the street for 36 hours, protecting the houses from being entered by looters, or indeed us, to pick up a few essentials. Our children didn't have shoes. My neighbour's son sat his chemistry A-level the next day in his mother's slippers. 

I tried to explain to the police that the detachment of a single feature with no structural purpose was highly unlikely to have had much impact on the rest of the building's integrity, and that if only they'd let us back into our houses, they could go. But no. If something happened, the police said, they'd get the blame.

And Orr goes on:

The least helpful people of all, even less helpful than the media or the panicky, procedure-bound public services, have been the loss adjusters acting for our buildings insurers. Between us, we have paid 95 years' of premiums to protect against just such an unlikely occurrence as this one. But they have hired a forensic structural engineer, and evidence of blame against any or all of us is being diligently sought. It is clear from the excellent condition of all our homes that we cosset them. None of us noticed damp or cracks presaging this event because there were none to see. 

However, because our insurers wouldn't sign us off (and still haven't), we were unable to get scaffolding up when we would have liked to, so that we could stop the dangerous structure order, start using our homes again and free the police get on with more pressing duties. Further, if it rains before tarpaulin has been put over the open attic spaces, then the inside of the properties, and their contents, will become damaged, all because these men seek to manufacture some piece of sophistry that will let our insurers off the hook.

So the incident painted an informative portrait of Britain in every way then.

St Wistan's, Wistow

Two years ago I was at Wistanstow in Shropshire, one of the candidate sites for the martyrdom of St Wystan and the subsequent miraculous growth of golden hair from his first resting place (his remains were later taken to Repton in Derbyshire).

But Wistow in Leicestershire has the strongest claim to be the site - when the Church appointed a commission to investigate the claimed miracle, its members all came from the East Midlands - and that is where I was today.

St Wistan's, Wistow, has Norman fabric but a pleasing Georgian interior, complete with box pews and plain glass. No burials have taken place in the churchyard since 1873 because of the risk of flooding from the neighbouring River Sence. And the grass had just been mown, so the lad would have got a short back and sides if he had tried any recent miracles.

Sister Mary Ward at Stoke Bruerne

This British Pathe film from 1949 (click on the picture to view it) shows Sister Mary Ward who lived by the Grand Union at Stoke Bruerne and looked after the families who operated the commercial boats on the canal.

One point of complaint: those boats were not barges, as the commentary repeatedly says, but narrow boats.

London shows what is wrong with the mayoral system too

When pointing out the shortcomings of the mayoral system of local government as implemented in Leicester - a Labour mayor and 52 Labour councillors out of 54 with those councillors being told how to vote by the mayor - I have been known to point to London as a better model.

After all, at least the Greater London Authority is elected by proportional representation, ensuring that its assembly cannot be dominated by one party.

But Sonia Purnell's Just Boris - an excellent biography I hope to review here one day makes it clear that London has a far from ideal system too:

There is ... no shadow mayor - and virtually no open press conferences .... And just as Boris had earned a reputation for treating committees in the House of Commons with contempt so did he frequently trade insults rather than information with the 25 London Assembly members elected to hold him to account. 

Anyone attending Mayor's Question Time at City Hall would not be wholly surprised to learn that Boris's favourite film is Dodgeball, with its running motto of "dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge". Knowing that each member is limited to a six-minute slot in which to ask him questions, he filibusters, goes off on tangents, asks for the question to be repeated, answers a totally different question, constantly shouts over question, and employs each and every tactic to avoid answering, to the continual annoyance of successive assembly chairmen. 

And when that it not enough, he does what they do in Dodgeball and throws the ball right back at his opponents in the form of personal insults such as accusing Opposition members of needing "care in the community" of "suffering from Tourette's Syndrome" and patronising female members by addressing them as "my dear".

You can blame Boris Johnson's personality and the fact that there are only 25 assembly members to represent a city the size of London. But at the heart of what is wrong here is the mayoral system itself.

As I wrote earlier this month:

Enthusiasm for that system is a hangover from Blairite heyday, when supporters of debate and discussion just did not get it and Richard Branson was expected to become the first elected mayor of London.

Headline of the Day

The Shropshire Star wins with:

Shropshire warned over slug epidemic

Engelbert Humperdinck and the Harborough Song Contest

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England:

I am confident that, as so often, I speak for the nation when I wish Engelbert Humperdinck the best of good fortune in tomorrow's Eurovision Song Contest. 

Mr Humperdinck, of course, is a long-term resident of Great Glen in the Harborough District. Indeed, he cut his musical teeth in our own Harborough Song Contest, which he has won many times. 

I know this event has its problems - the Langtons always vote for one another, Fleckney never fails to award nul points to Market Harborough - but I, for one, shall be glued to the screen when next it takes place.

The roof falls in on Edward Garnier

The Evening Standard reports the collapse of the roofs of four "£1million Victorian townhouses" in Stockwell:

The Solicitor General Edward Garnier was among those evacuated after masonry, bricks and other debris fell into the properties and sent rubble flying onto the Stockwell street. MP Mr Garnier said his wife was inside at the time and feared a bomb had gone off.

Thankfully Mr Garnier and his family escaped unhurt, but I do not know what surprises me more about this story: the news that the MP for Harborough lives in Stockwell or the discovery that he is a neighbour of Will Self.

Mowsley: Death of a village primary school

In 2007 the Ofsted inspectors visited Mowsley St Nicholas C of E Primary School in Leicestershire:

Pupils' personal development and well-being are good. They behave well and have excellent relationships with each other and with adults. Pupils feel very happy and safe because, as they say, 'the school's really nice and small and we're well looked after.' 

The pastoral care of pupils is very good. Parents really value this because they believe it really benefits their children's academic and personal development. The comment made by one that 'Mowsley is a small school with a big heart' was supported by many others in writing to the inspector.

Three years later the school made the national press for what must surely be the only time in its history. The Independent wrote:

While most schools are bustling with children back after the summer break, one has had to close its doors after no pupils turned up on the first day of term. 

Governors at Mowsley St Nicholas CE Primary School in Mowsley, near Lutterworth, Leicestershire, are now consulting on its future after watching its roll drop to nothing. 

Last year 38 pupils were on the roll, but this year education bosses were unsure how many would turn up and today Leicestershire County Council confirmed it is now temporarily closed ... 

Chair of Governors Kim Hall said: "At the moment it's still officially open but it's not got any pupils in so it's not actually open." 

She said a dropping roll had a "snowball" effect as more parents moved their children away from the dwindling numbers. 

"I think a lot of parents decided one child was moving on so they would move their other child," she said. "Once numbers dip below a certain point, and children's friends leave, their parents think they'll move them to be with their friends.

I have heard of this sort of effect elsewhere in the country. Many middle-class parents are happy to sure the state system while their children are of primary age, even if they have ambitions to educate them privately when they are older. But once a few families decide to take children out of a village primary and send them to private school in the nearest town or city, then the writing can be on the wall. More families will follow suit and a school can soon find itself left with the poor and immobile.

And when a school is as small as Mowsley, it can close altogether.

Mowsley still has a pub, even if it is now devoted more to food than beer. But there are no shops and the two chapels have long since become private houses, leaving the church, as in so many other villages, as almost the only public building.

The school used to be housed in a tiny red-brick building near the church, with the older children enjoying the doubtful privilege of being taught in the village hall. But somehow this gate into what used to be the school playing field, some way from the school building, was more moving.

When I am out with my mother she always comments on how quiet village are these days. And Mowsley's experiene reminds me of this passage from Byron Rogers' The Green Road to Nowhere:

Mr Reggie Chapman, eighty-seven, said it was the quiet, which in his old age had settled on the village like snow. 

Poets burble about a lost peace, but not countrymen. Mr Chapman, a silvery, whispering gentleman, very bent ("like Nebuchadnezzar, I am almost down to the grass"), remembers the hullabaloo of his youth in Abthorpe, near Towcester: the church bells, the school bell, the sound of children playing and cows being driven back into the village at night. He has seen them all go. 

The last vicar went in in 1943 (on the advice of the diocesan lawyer, who thought a new vicarage roof would be too expensive). The school closed in 1959; the main employer, a shoe factory, had closed in 1936; and one by one, the farmhouses slipped into the excited prose of estate agents ("genuine period, scope for conversion...")

Be Outraged: Austerity isn't working

Austerity and growth, of course, are not opposites. We need a good dose of both. But, with European opinion moving against the former and in favour of the latter, Oxfam has chosen a good moment to publish this short book written by eleven eminent economists and social scientists. You can download Be Outraged: Austerity isn't working as a PDF from the Oxfam website.

So, before we forget altogether, let's pause a moment to remember some of the good things about austerity and  bad things about growth.

In the early days of the environmental movement it was widely believed that there were environmental limits to economic growth - that belief was practically what defined the environmental movement in the face of post-war social democracy. The idea that we would one day run out of vital resources was always a little fanciful, but we have seen in oil that the need for new discoveries has led to more hazardous operations - think of the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, Canadian oil sands - and more environmental damage. I know that both sides have agreed to call for 'green growth', but the lack of argument here feels more like wishful thinking than a conceptual breakthrough.

Those who oppose austerity want to see more public spending and want to see it financed, not by higher taxation, but by borrowing. But it has always seemed odd to me that the left are so set upon a policy that puts the country in thrall to the people they despise most: international financiers. I suppose it flows from putting ever-growing levels of public services at the centre of your politics and then lacking the courage to raise the taxes to pay for them.

And, of course, borrowing has a cost. Be Outraged is quick to remind us that the analogy between household and national borrowing can be misleading:

John Maynard Keynes famously pointed out the dangers of treating national debt like household debt. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes biographer, has summarised the reasons why this is so: governments, unlike private individuals, do not have to “repay” their debt: they have their own Central Bank and their own currency and they can continue to borrow.

But national debt still has to be serviced: we have to pay interest on it. So with the current UK national debt being somewhere in the region of £1.046 - I make that a 13-digit number - there are good arguments for trying to keep that interest down. And the rate is determined by the markets set by our old friends the international financiers.

So that is the case against growth - or at least in favour of austerity. And perhaps it is because of it that I find the best two chapters in Be Outraged to be those that have least to do with the austerity vs growth debate.

Chapter 6 makes a powerful case for decreasing inequalities in calling for "a recovery for all, not just the few":

The richest 1% (61 million individuals) had the same amount of income as the poorest 3.5 billion (56% of the world’s population). At the bottom end, two in five of the world’s population, live below the international poverty line of US$2 a day; of those, one billion people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1.25 a day.

And chapter 7 discusses "Transforming the financial sector from bad master to good servant":

When the financial sector has been well regulated and controlled, and when well-run public banks have played an important role, the financial sector has played a positive role to support and not undermine the real economy. Examples are post WWII USA and Europe, and many developing countries (like Brazil and India) then and today. The positive experience is clear for public institutions in Europe, such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) at a regional level, and German KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) at a national level, and in developing countries, such as the BNDES (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social) in Brazil.

All good stuff, but it was just as valid five years ago when the economy was booming. But then one of the weaknesses of Keynesian economics is that people love the idea of stimulus when things are going badly but are deaf to calls for restraint when the economy is booming.

But Be Outraged, which was inspired by Indignez-vous, a multi-million best-seller written by Stephane Hessel, former member of the French resistance, will interest anyone looking for ways out of our current morass. So why not download a copy for yourself?

The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny

On Sunday I blogged about The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny - a tour currently crossing the country.

Out in the Shires went along to The Barbican to experience it last night:

Inevitably, some of the performances were stronger than others – Lavinia Blackwall stands out as perhaps the most Sandy-like of the cast, and her interpretation of A Sailor’s Life (accompanied by Swarb) was a great intro. She then moved on to a perfect rendition of the eerily bleak Late November, a song whose lyrics sound traumatic enough before you know what the subject being obliquely treated is… 

I did feel though that the evening was weirdly stop-start, and a lot of the enjoyment depended on sympathy or otherwise with the person who happened to be singing at the time. I thought Green Gartside’s highly distinctive voice just about got through The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, but he murdered Nothing More. I don’t think there’s anything he could have done differently, and it’s a shame because between songs he came across as possibly the most genuine fan, but it just wasn’t for me.

All that and he calls me "estimable"  too.

If you want to know more about Sandy Denny you could try these posts:

• Solo
• Bushes and Briars
• Fotheringay