Six of the Best 603

RIA Novosti archive

"If Brexit wins, it will be because a majority of British voters have simply lost confidence in the way they are governed and the people they are governed by. That loss of confidence is part bloody-mindedness, part frivolity, part panic, part bad temper, part prejudice. But it is occurring – if it is – in a nation that has always prided itself, perhaps too complacently, on having very different qualities: good sense, practicality, balanced judgment, and a sure instinct for not lurching to the right or left." Martin Kettle analyses why we have been brought to the verge of Brexit.

Bernard Aris says the Leave campaign has not thought about the implications for Ireland - north and south.

Mikhail Gorbachev still has lots to say finds Neil MacFarquhar.

The good news is that expensive libel cases are in decline, says David Hencke. The bad news is that the rich are using the 'right to be forgotten' to effectively silence their critics instead.

Daniel Ralston tells the story of the fake Zombies - the strangest con in rock history.

York Stories visits the threatened buildings of Ordnance Lane.

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Ian Jack on having belonged to a lost world

50 fabulous photos of Walmgate in years gone by https://t.co/9NKBRAqJ88 pic.twitter.com/MSBF32jZMM

— The Press (@yorkpress) February 26, 2016

If I had to choose a favourite newspaper columnist I think it would be Ian Jack, who writes for the Guardian every Saturday.

His most recent column, occasioned by an exhibition of old photographs of Glasgow, is a meditation on the strangeness of having lived a long time.

He writes:

This week, at the opening of a[n] ... exhibition at the Barbican in London, I looked at many pictures that might easily have included me in their monochrome scenes: as a baby in a pram, a boy in a school cap on a smoky station platform, a young reporter in a crowd at a royal wedding. 

It was unsettling and faintly unbelievable to think that I once belonged to that world of white prefabs, Senior Service adverts and steam locomotives, and yet I’d fitted in snugly, without a thought.

There is a piece of film the BBC shows whenever the idea of year-round British Summer Time is floated and makes the news. It dates from the late 1960s, when the experiment was briefly tried then discarded, and shows children trudging to school in the dark.

Fifty years on, and bundled up against the cold, they look rather quaint. And then I reflect that I must have looked like that too.

And in a post from 2012 I wrote about rediscovering York 30 years after I had been a student there:

Take a look at this 1980 photograph of Fossgate, a street that formed part of my walk from the university campus into the city. It seemed perfectly modern to me then, but now looks remarkably old fashioned.

York's newspaper The Press recently published a gallery of old photographs of Walmgate, which runs from Fossgate to the city walls at Walmgate Bar.

As the photograph above shows, when I was a student it was in the process of redevelopment. The new buildings that puzzled me in 2012 occupied the site of the boarded-up shops and vacant lots I knew in 1979.

The moral is one you grasp as you get older. Few things are as permanent as they seemed when you were a child.

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The Liberal Democrats are still a long way from OMOV

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Harry Hayfield has an article on Liberal Democrat Voice about the motion before the Liberal Democrat Conference this weekend that would legalise the use of cannabis.

I don't agree with the line he takes on that, but I was struck by something he wrote:

I have lived with my grandparents all my life and as a result, especially since 2005 as I have been their registered carer, I have moved wherever and whenever they have moved and this means that since I became a Liberal Democrat in 1992, I have been all over the place. 

However, there is one small downside to this and that is being able to get to big Lib Dem events. In those 24 years I have only managed to attend one regional conference, three Welsh conferences and no federal conferences or special conferences.

In recent years I have found myself steadily falling into a similar situation. My mother has become increasingly frail, with the result that I have to spend more and more time helping her over at her house. I now found it hard to be away from Leicestershire for more than a couple of days.

The result of this is that is a while since I have attended Lib Dem Conference and it is unlikely to get any easier for me to do so in the future.

There must be many members in this position and many more who cannot attend Conference for other personal reasons.

Yet this is a perspective that we have rarely heard in the debate over one member one vote (OMOV) in the party.

That debate has largely involved young members who have the time and funds to attend conference but lacked the contacts in the party to get themselves elected by their constituency as a representative under the old rules.

They have won their case, but if OMOV is to be a reality then the party will have to reach out to people beyond this group.

The only thing I can see helping me participate at present is some form of online voting. But will the pressure for that be kept up now the people who were pushing for OMOV have had their own grievances met?

Anyway, enjoy York. I wish I could be with you.

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Six of the Best 575

Photo: Andreas Trepte

"This government is a bullying government. It preaches localism and practices centralism. As a localist I defend local decision making and local accountability." Richard Kemp on the government's intention to ban local councils from having ethical investment policies.

Labour MP Jonathan Reynolds explains how he learnt to stop worrying and love Basic Income.

John Field visits Osea Island, home to a government work camp and a retreat for wealthy addicts.

"I’ve tried to imagine how the view towards the Minster might look from the A59 end of Water End, where the road crosses the railway. Somewhat blighted, I suspect." York Stories examines plans for a major redevelopment in the city.

"Curlews are long-lived birds, they can reach the grand old age of 30. It seems that our British population is ageing and not reproducing, making the future look dire. As the UK holds 25% of the breeding population of the Eurasian curlew, this is an alarming state of affairs." Mary Colwell-Hector on the threat to this wonderful bird.

SlideShare introduces us to Mike, the cat who guarded the British Museum between 1909 and 1929.

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Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 6

And so we reach the last video from Uncertain Truth.

This was a series of three programmes featuring interviews with Sir Karl Popper in 1988.

The first programme, where the other participant was Ernst Gombrich, looks at the understanding of history. It takes up two videos:

Watch part 1
Watch part 2

The second programme, where the other participant is Sir John Eccles, looks at language.

Watch part 3
Watch part 4

And this third programme where the other participant is Anthony Quinton, looks at human knowledge.

Watch part 5

As I said when introducing the first of these videos, Popper was one of the most important liberal thinkers of the 20th century.

This was as much for his development of an evolutionary understanding of human knowledge as for his more overtly political books.

He died in 1994 at the age of 92. I heard him speak in York round about 1981 when he gave an inaugural lecture for some good cause connected with the Rowntree family.

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The drought of 1976

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When I visited Pitsford Water last summer it looked like the picture below. But the picture above shows how it looked in the summer of 1976.

A BBC News page remembers the drought of 1976. My own strongest memory of that summer is of a coach trip to York.

The fields we passed were burnt up and there was fodder put out for the animals. And there were posters all across South Yorkshire trying to recruit men to the coal mining industry. (It was a long time ago.)

And on Sunday we shall see that at least one pop song was inspired by the drought.

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York man banned from having sex unless he gives police 24 hours' notice

Not for the first time, The Press wins Headline of the Day.

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When the Jorvik Centre was a hole in the ground

This evening York Mix posted 12 vintage films of the city.

One caught my eye straight away, because it comes from August 1979 and so falls during my time as a student in the city.

Watching it today does confirm one memory of mine - and I don't mean the gruesomely distorted sound, which reminds me of film shows at primary school.

No, that memory is of a time before the Jorvik Centre opened. In my student days there was a large archaeological dig on the site. You can see it on the film from 2:27.

As I recall, there was no charge for going round and you were given a Viking oyster shell when you left.

The latest news from the Jorvik Centre is rather grim. It was badly affected by the recent floods and the government has rejected a plea for extra funds to allow a swift reopening.

A report in the Yorkshire Post quotes the former North Yorkshire councillor and Liberal Democrat peer Angie Harris:

"When I visited the Jorvik Viking Centre in York last week it was a scene of utter devastation. 

"It's a world renowned tourist attraction and educational centre, provided by the excellent York Archaeological Trust, of which I am a member, and which depends largely on its funding from the viking centre. The Trust could be destroyed by this enormous loss of revenue."

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Disused railway stations in North Yorkshire

Recent videos in this series have covered Aberdeenshire and Lancashire.

You can find the earlier ones listed in the Lancashire post.

One day soon I will give them their own label.

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Six of the Best 565

Peter Kelner, interviewed in a podcast, looks at how Labour MPs might depose Jeremy Corbyn - something they will have to do if the party is to stand any chance at the next election.

Suddenly Basic Income is fashionable. Tom Streithorst asks if it could work.

April Peavey remembers when Pierre Boulez met Frank Zappa.

"Replacing the aggressive Irishmen in pubs and stoned out drug dealers, the countryside instead provides aggressive farmers and 'country folk' who have no wish to deal with 'London types'." Adam Scovell points out the importance of landscape in Withnail and I.

The Cottonopolis has some amazing pictures of Manchester's abandoned buildings.

"When I saw the rusted redundant railing on a forgotten walkway above the Ouse I thought about how you can live in a place for so long and still have new things to find, when forced from the usual ways and the beaten track." York Stories encounters a flooded river.

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Reindeer on the loose causes chaos in Nottingham after escaping from Tesco

The Independent wins Headline of the Day.

The judges particularly liked the comment from "local resident Amanda Walker, 35":

"It was an incredible sight. You get the odd squirrel around here, but never a reindeer."

BREAKING...

This just in from The Press:

Jesus kidnapped in York

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Six of the Best 558

Labour moderates don't need a new party, they need new ideas and new purpose, argues Jonathan Todd.

Mike Smithson says that if you want the opinion polls to tell you who will win the next election you should look at the ratings of the leaders not the parties.

"Gideon Haigh summed it up in The Australian. 'The West Indies used to be baaaaaaad. Now they’re simply bad'." Peter Miller on the decline of a great test power.

Steve Galloway celebrates the restoration of Walmgate Bar and the east end of York Minster.

Inside the Box has an audio interview with Jonathan Stephens, who played Chubby Joe ("Going home for the holidays, ha ha what?") in the TV adaptation of A Box of Delights.

"Malcolm ... travelled the length and breadth of the country knocking them for six with his comedic performances as 'The Woman Who Knows', Nell Gwyn, Boudica, and the epitome of femininity the fabled 'Gibson Girl'. Flashbak on the unexpected career of the brother of Scott of the Antartic.

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My defence of underage drinking in the Leicester Mercury

I have another First Person column in the Leicester Mercury today.

Pub culture destroyed in a generation

The other day a woman in front of me in the supermarket queue was asked to prove her age because she was buying a bottle of wine and looked under 25.

She did so without fuss – maybe she felt flattered? – but the incident made me think about how much our attitude to young people and alcohol has changed.

Back in the old days – in the Seventies – I was able to drink in pubs from the age of 16.

I did not do it often, but when I did it was always as part of a group of friends of the same age. We drank beer and we knew we had to behave ourselves because we weren’t really meant to be there.

But if we did behave then our presence was tolerated by the bar staff and other customers alike. I even remember playing snooker in a working men’s club on the shaky pretext that one of our number’s father was a member.

That would be unthinkable today. Any pub that let unaccompanied 16-year-olds through its doors to drink alcohol would lose its licence.

The result is that those teenagers who are determined to drink do so alone and unsupervised. They don’t drink beer but spirits and white cider.

Figures say that fewer young people drink alcohol today than did in the Seventies. I guess they are all at home in their bedrooms mixing music and being stalked on Facebook.

But those who do drink are surely getting a more harmful introduction to alcohol than my generation did.

Many things have changed since the old days – since the Seventies – and pubs are among them.

I have to admit that, much as we wanted to get into them, pubs were pretty unexciting places when you did. They turned out to be full of old men in flat caps drinking beer.

Everything changed in the Eighties. Suddenly pubs seemed positively designed to attract underage drinkers. They became fun palaces crammed with Space Invaders machines and Malibu.

Before that happened I had gone off to university to do my student drinking in York. In those days Yorkshire pubs really were ruled by fierce landladies who terrified all their customers.

Last time I was in York those landladies had gone and there was a security man on every pub door.

Traditional pub culture, including the tolerance for underage drinking I benefited from, was easy to destroy. Now it has largely gone and it would be next to impossible to re-establish it.

So the lady in her late twenties in front of me in the queue had to prove her age and teenagers are drinking vodka in bus shelters tonight.

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Colour film of York in 1963

Click on the still above to go this short silent film from the BFI's Britain on Film collection:

This is a lovely portrait of York in the, much less busy, early sixties, illustrating well the city’s great history and many cultural attractions. Among the highlights is footage of the 1963 production of the York Mystery Plays and the York Regatta. 

This film was made by York photographer and filmmaker May Webb, who, with her husband Frank, ran a photography business in York, as well running the York cine club, the Apollo Film Unit.

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