2’s COMPANY

Despite the opportunistic rebranding of tat as ‘vintage’, charity shops still occasionally unearth little gems that sneak under the eBay radar and are picked-up by grateful punters bereft of an ulterior motive; a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon an entry in the long-running and collectable ‘Observer’s Book of…’ series, a 1980 reprint of 1973’s ‘London’, complete with a suitably avuncular Yeoman Gaoler on the cover. These nifty little pocket book guides were published on a variety of subjects between 1937 and 1982, with a one-off revival as recent as 2003; this particular copy cost me a quid. It reminded me that, even now, it remains possible to locate such items for next-to-nothing, regardless of the change in approach that came via the negative impact of Mary Portas and her reality TV assault on the charity shop ethos around 15 years ago. When I first began to frequent high-street bargain-bins in the 80s, it seemed everything on sale was a giveaway because nobody really wanted anything in there (bar amateur antiquarians such as myself), and one fascinating fossil I found back then cost me 70p, an item that had originally retailed at 6/- when published in 1963. It was the BBC Handbook 1964, looking ahead to an especially eventful year as the Corporation prepared to launch its second television channel.

The early 60s had been tough for the BBC. Not only had the arrival of ITV in 1955 broken the Beeb’s 20-year monopoly of British television, but the populist manner of commercial TV’s instant connection with a viewing public eager for choice had seen a mass defection to the other side; there was also a blow dealt to the BBC’s three radio networks with the arrival of pirate radio, playing non-stop contemporary pop rather than serving listeners tantalising rations of it sandwiched between hours of archaic Light music aimed at middle-aged housewives. The BBC’s first response to this attack on its dominance was to shake-up its TV output by calling time on the 50s with adventurous new programmes like ‘Z Cars’, ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘That Was The Week That Was’; its next move was to launch a second television service, albeit one that wasn’t intended to compete with the huge viewing figures of ITV. The aim of BBC2 was to offer a highbrow option compared to what was largely perceived as the downmarket ‘Americanisation’ of British television by the Beeb’s rivals. The 1964 BBC Handbook says, ‘BBC2 will be complimentary to BBC1 (as the existing service will come to be known) in the sense of providing an alternative and different programme for the viewer at any time when both services are on the air. Its scope will be as wide as BBC1 and will cover the whole range of what the public has come to expect from a comprehensive and national television service.’

One of the main difficulties the BBC faced with the advent of BBC2 was their intention for the second channel to transmit on the superior 625-line system as opposed to the standard 405-line system both BBC1 and ITV used (and the system the majority of the nation’s sets were produced to receive). 625-line TV was already fairly standard in Europe, but in the UK it meant transmitters would have to be altered to accommodate the UHF band that 625-lines were broadcast on, as opposed to the VHF band that handled 405-line TV. The BBC were looking to the future, primarily of colour television; but in 1964 625-line TV was an expensive luxury requiring the kind of investment on the viewers’ behalf that needed enticing programming, something that BBC2 didn’t appear to have as far as the average TV audience was concerned. The eccentric schedule for the station’s intended opening night on 20 April 1964 included a production of ‘Kiss Me Kate’ starring Howard Keel; 45 minutes of a fellow called Arkady Raikin – who was billed as ‘the Soviet Union’s leading comedian’ – accompanied by The Leningrad Miniature Theatre Company; there was a live fireworks display from Southend Pier; and there was also ‘The Alberts’ – a surreal comedy/musical ensemble who were associates of both Spike Milligan and Ivor Cutler and who were fresh from a West End show titled ‘An Evening of British Rubbish’.

An additional hurdle hampering the launch of BBC2 was the fact its initial transmissions were restricted to the Crystal Palace transmitter in South London. As the 1964 Handbook admits, ‘It will be some years before complete national coverage of BBC2 can be achieved, but it will be extended from London and the South-East to the Midlands in 1965 and it is hoped to cover some 75 percent of the country’s population by 1966/67.’ A map in that week’s issue of the Radio Times shows the signal from Crystal Palace radiating as far north as Saffron Walden in Essex, but no further. So, not a lot there that promised to challenge the BBC’s reputation as an elitist, middle-class service catering for the Home Counties; I doubt ITV’s franchise holders felt threatened by its arrival. Then, come the opening night, the final disaster struck. About half-an-hour before BBC2 was scheduled to begin broadcasting at 7.20pm, there was a huge power failure caused by a fire at Battersea Power Station; most of West London experienced a blackout, including the Underground Central Line and – more importantly from the BBC’s perspective – Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush.

At the time of the blackout, BBC1 had already switched to its regional centres for local news programmes, so the senior service continued to be received by viewers outside of London; once everyone realised what was happening, network broadcasting then switched to Alexandra Palace, the site of the BBC’s TV beginnings 30 years before. Periodical bulletins were issued on BBC2 from Alexandra Palace as the few who could receive it waited for programmes to begin, but the decision was eventually taken to postpone the launch till the following day. Rumours swiftly circulated this had been a dirty trick by ITV, a revenge attack for the BBC stealing the headlines on ITV’s launch night in 1955, when the dramatic death of Grace Archer shocked the-then far larger radio audience; but nothing was ever proved. With the intended opening a write-off, a new children’s series aimed at the pre-school viewer, ‘Play School’, therefore became the first-ever BBC2 programme by default when it went ahead at 11.00am on 21 April 1964. When the service belatedly began proper at 7.20 that evening with ‘Line-Up’, the first image viewers saw was a candle that was then blown out by presenter Denis Tuohy before uttering the immortal words, ‘Good evening. This is BBC2.’

The new channel’s commitment to innovative programming was soon reflected in two contrasting successes – the heavyweight documentary series, ‘The Great War’ (which benefitted from the fact there were still plenty veterans of the conflict alive in the mid-60s) and ‘The Likely Lads’, a sitcom that put the vogue for The North on the small-screen in a comedic context for the first time. But it wasn’t until David Attenborough accepted the offer to step back from the camera and become BBC2 controller in 1965 that the landmark programmes for which the channel’s eclectic early years remain defined by were produced. Amongst those that appeared on Attenborough’s watch were ‘The Forsyte Saga’, ‘Civilisation’, ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’, ‘The Ascent of Man’, ‘Man Alive’, ‘Call My Bluff’, ‘The Money Programme’, ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’, ‘The Goodies’, and ‘Pot Black’. The latter series, as with BBC2’s Wimbledon coverage, couldn’t have happened without 1967’s shift into colour broadcasting, another innovation Attenborough oversaw.

BBC2 today, as with the television landscape as a whole, is a very different beast indeed; a cursory glance at the channel’s schedule on the day of its 60th birthday finds a trio of lunchtime cookery programmes, live snooker and women’s rugby, and a glut of repeats intended to mark the anniversary. Part of me wishes ‘the Soviet Union’s leading comedian’ was amongst them, but not so, alas. Happy birthday, then, BBC2; I knew you when you were worth watching.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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PRETTY VAGRANT

‘The League of Gentlemen’, that superb 1960 British caper movie with a delicious dollop of black comedy, highlighted the irony of how particular talents that are valued in wartime are rendered redundant once peace comes around. The bitter ex-Army officer character played by Jack Hawkins, given his cards by his superiors due to there being precious little for him to do anymore, attempts to get his own back on the establishment that abandoned him by assembling a motley crew of former war heroes whose post-war careers on Civvy Street have seen them drift aimlessly on the seedy fringes of society, gifted with skills that peacetime has no outlet for. He surmises the only outlet left for those skills is to use them for criminal means via an audacious bank raid; and all goes well up until the inevitable climax when the team is naturally foiled by the boys in blue. The film tapped into a dead-end that confronted the demobbed when returning to ‘normal life’, though this wasn’t a sensation unique to the aftermath of WWII. A rarely-mentioned side-effect of the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about by the victory of Waterloo in 1815 was the decommissioning of His Majesty’s Forces, men who suddenly had nowhere to go once their country no longer needed them to do their duty. After 20 years of battling post-Revolutionary France, a battle that necessitated a constant supply of cannon-fodder, Britain received an influx of bewildered and often mutilated men for whom there was no safety net in place.

For all the reverence in which the ruling class held Waterloo, the men that had contributed to victory in Europe were effectively left to their own devices thereafter; the sorry spectacle of maimed ex-servicemen begging on street corners and in shop doorways was a commonplace sight in the decade following the Duke of Wellington’s finest hour. By 1824, the government of the day decided to crack down on the problem not by providing homes for heroes, but by introducing the Vagrancy Act, making rough sleeping and begging a criminal offence. The problem of ‘vagrants’ had also been exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, in which large sections of the workforce had been deemed surplus to requirements via new machinery able to do their jobs quicker and cheaper. Moreover, the imposition of the Corn Laws and the Enclosures Act had had a catastrophic effect on those who worked the land, forcing the destitute from the countryside into towns as they desperately sought employment, competing for attention on English streets alongside economic migrants from Ireland and Scotland.

The criminalisation of homelessness that the 1824 Vagrancy Act instituted also included prostitution, but the Act was routinely expanded throughout the 19th century to cover a multitude of social problems, and something that was initially restricted to England and Wales encompassed the whole of the UK by 1871. The original Vagrancy Act was repealed in Scotland in 1981 and Northern Ireland repealed the section outlawing begging and vagrancy in 1990; but as far as the rest of the UK goes, it still applies. Prosecutions have increased in recent years, though a case which received substantial press coverage in 2014, concerning three homeless men arrested for taking discarded food from a skip and bins outside a branch of Iceland supermarkets in London, was dropped by the CPS; to many, it seemed to be antiquated legislation of basic meanness from a less compassionate age, punishing those whose circumstances were already so desperate they’d been forced to locate a meal in a bloody skip. At 200 years old, homeless charities argue the 1824 Vagrancy Act has outlived its usefulness and should be repealed altogether; the Government’s response has been the new Criminal Justice Bill.

You might recall that during the first phase of the pandemic there was a sudden rush to ‘protect lives’, which included providing accommodation for the nation’s rough sleepers – as though they’d never needed such help before Covid. A couple of years later, MPs voted to repeal the Vagrancy Act, with the Government delaying action in order to devise new means of ending rough sleeping once and for all; what they’ve devised gives police powers to fine (up to £2,500), move on or incarcerate anyone ‘intending’ to sleep rough, giving the ‘appearance’ of having slept rough, or emitting an ‘excessive smell’ that might suggest a lengthy detachment from home comforts. Sounds like progress, and should definitely bring to an end what Suella Braverman once referred to as ‘a lifestyle choice’! The fallout of the financial and social meltdown caused by a lockdown that was instigated and imposed by government ruined more lives than we probably yet know about, and it’s unarguable that the ramifications of that disastrous decision – one taken without any consultation with the public whatsoever, lest we forget – caused many to lose homes they’ll never regain.

The latest survey carried out by the Government into homelessness listed almost 4,000 people sleeping rough on the streets of England on just one night – a 27% increase from the year before; studies also estimate over 242,000 households are experiencing homelessness in one shape or another, from sofa-surfing to residing in temporary accommodation. So, one would think this is the ideal time for a humane interjection by the powers-that-be, yet in replacing an Act that was introduced to punish the casualties of a social crisis rather than resolve it, Rishi Sunak appears to be following in the footsteps of Lord Liverpool in 1824. 37 housing and homelessness charities have written to James Cleverly – currently Home Secretary, in case you haven’t kept up (who has?) – telling him that this legislation ‘risks stigmatising people forced to sleep on the streets and pushing them away from help’. Matt Downie, Chief Executive of Crisis, says: ‘The Government cites a moral imperative to end rough sleeping, yet these new measures will make it more difficult to do so. They will punish people for having nowhere else to go and push them further away from support. If we focus on the solutions that work – building safe and stable social housing and investing in specialist support that helps people keep their home – we can end rough sleeping. But the first and easiest thing the Home Secretary can do is listen to the concerns of these experienced organisations and remove these cruel and counterproductive measures.’

In response to this criticism, the current Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins – who has the look of the sort of nonentity handed such a post by a dying administration with no remaining heavyweights – retorted with scripted reassurances. ‘We have been very, very clear,’ she said. ‘We want to stop some of the aggressive begging that can happen around cash points, for example, but we do not and will not criminalise people who don’t have a home – absolutely not. That is not what this bill is about. We are absolutely not criminalising people who sleep on the streets…what we want to do is support them into supportive accommodation because many people who are living rough have complex needs.’ Whether or not that’s the genuine intention of this legislation, it’s difficult to accept the sincerity of such a statement merely because it’s difficult to accept anything a politician says as sincere; and I have to admit to hearing Nicola Murray, the hapless Minister that the fearsome spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker is saddled with in ‘The Thick of It’, particularly the episode where she declares she wants to ‘inspire people out of poverty’.

One can’t help but feel the wording of the proposals could have been a little better; a term such as ‘nuisance begging’, coupled with the prospect of arresting someone ‘looking like they are intending to sleep on the streets’, just has the undeniable odour of a classic Tory plan to penalise people who aren’t in a position to fight back – a last throw of the reactionary dice in a desperate bid to prove they’re still ‘the Party of Law and Order’. But even if they wooed back a few estranged old UKippers to the fold by dragooning the homeless into spanking new workhouses, the Nasty Party has still blown it; and the homeless are still without a roof over their heads.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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THE RECKONING

If the current trend for everyone who ever lived before us being judged on the social and moral mores of our times rather than their own continues, one wonders how the present day will fare in the future’s cultural courtroom. How many individuals and attitudes will be found not guilty and how many will be condemned to eternal damnation without the hope of redemption? I’ve long suspected some of these individuals and attitudes will eventually be cast in the same negative light as those they themselves retrospectively demonise, yet for the vast majority of folk – who don’t control the means of mass communication or run corporations and institutions – the insanity of this ascendancy to positions of power and influence was both baffling and concerning from the off. Most of us already knew this wasn’t a good idea, but the sheer weight of propaganda relentlessly streaming from the platforms the masses depend upon – along with the vicious attack dogs those platforms can summon – has marginalised and suppressed dissenting voices and encouraged self-censorship. But were one to look into the crystal ball, it’s evident that today’s indulged ideologues are tomorrow’s slave-traders or eugenics advocates; today’s dogmatic mantras are tomorrow’s discredited belief systems.

One day, all but a diminishing smatter of nostalgic fanatics will look back to now with a shake of the head and wonder how it was that the leader of a major political party couldn’t define a woman when asked point-blank to do so during a radio interview or that another declared women could have penises; or that men would be allowed to enter women’s sports and unsurprisingly wipe the floor with the competition; or that the BBC could broadcast an educational film telling children there were over 200 genders; or that convicted rapists could simply proclaim they identified as female and be admitted to women’s prisons, or that the MSM, the police, the judiciary and the victims of such men would be forced to refer to them as ‘she’ in order not to offend their human rights as the female stats for sexual crimes would soar due to the addition of men posing as women. How will tomorrow’s jury view terms like ‘bleeders’ or ‘birthing persons’? How will they judge a self-proclaimed oppressed minority composed largely of middle-class men with a fetish for aping the stereotypical tropes of the opposite sex and erasing its hard-won rights in the process? How will they react to the fact that men were given a free pass into women’s and girl’s private spaces such as toilets or changing rooms, and that any women raising an objection would be branded bigots and hounded on social media?

How will they regard an age that aggressively policed Hate Crime yet turned a blind eye to women subjected to rape and death threats simply for having the gall to air an opinion contrary to the consensus, or that lesbians could be discouraged from participating in Pride events or be barred from holding speed-dating evenings because they refused to admit men in drag, or how prominent gays in the village could be cast out into the wilderness for questioning the wisdom of butchering children, of brainwashing sexually-confused adolescents into believing their nascent symptoms of homosexuality were an indication they needed to transition? This sinister and grotesque conversion therapy, promoted by ghastly parents desperate to signal their virtue, by immoral organisations like Stonewall and Mermaids, and – most unforgivably of all – by our glorious NHS, is at the heart of the most comprehensive study into the madness of the moment and one that will hopefully help reset the controls for common sense, the Cass Review.

This 388-page report into England’s gender identity clinics for the under-18s by Dr Hilary Cass was published last week; although dealing with a specific area of the issue, the findings of this landmark review will have far wider consequences as the scandal of the state-sponsored sterilisation of children finally, belatedly, goes over-ground and people are able to speak out against it without fear of losing everything in the process. The first whistleblower to expose the truth of what was going on in the notorious, now-closed Tavistock Clinic was mental-health nurse Susan Evans as far back as 2004. 20 f***ing years ago! Since then, the infiltration of our institutions by this dogma has enabled the ideologically-driven heirs to Dr Josef Mengele to experiment on vulnerable teens pushed into places like Tavistock following constant exposure to the fallacy of ‘gender affirmation’ via the online foot-soldiers and numerous non-binary salespeople, prescribed puberty blockers and eventually submitted for castration. Around 50 kids, mostly boys, fell under the radar of the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock in 2009; just seven years later, this number had risen to nearer 2,000 – with girls beginning to outnumber boys. The Cass Review has calculated 89% of girls and 81% of boys referred to this disgraced service were either gay or bisexual, earmarked for a transition their leanings never warranted. This was something – to use a hackneyed phrase – ‘hiding in plain sight’ for the best part of two decades, yet it has taken a measured, rational report of unarguable, detailed data by a medical academic to wrestle this subject free of the ‘bigotry’ that any opposing voices have been besmirched with by the dominant narrative for far too long; and its impact is already seeing many an about-turn by those who either said nothing or went with the flow.

To Trans Activists, the Cass Review will be held up as yet one more example of persecution that emphasises their imaginary oppression and thus preserves their precious faux-victimhood. To the rest of the world, it’s the long-overdue voice of reason that has the official seal of approval, unlike those brave souls who dared to pop their head above the parapet in isolation and were bombarded by the slings and arrows of entitled zealots without any support from their cowardly colleagues, who ducked down in shameless self-preservation and abandoned them to the wolves. The likes of Graham Linehan, creator of some of the most successful sitcoms of recent decades such as ‘Father Ted’, ‘Black Books’ and ‘The IT Crowd’, was a self-confessed Liberal Leftie who felt the full force of the lunatics promoted to the running of the asylum when he questioned the direction his long-time political position was heading in; disgracefully dumped by those he’d long imagined to be his ideological allies, Linehan saw his career grind to a full stop and has spent the past few years battling on alone.

Then, of course, there’s JK Rowling – another celebrity Leftie that the Left’s embrace of this toxic social engineering has exiled from the fold. In its perennial hunt for oppressed victims to patronise, the Left found a self-manufactured minority and anyone who quickly discerned the flaws in this ‘stunning and brave’ new world was dispensed with in the kind of purge even Stalin would have thought a bit severe. Rowling’s response to the opportunistic change of tack by certain guilty parties in the wake of the Cass Review’s publication has been delicious to witness, particularly her reaction to the prospect of those ungrateful little shits Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson seeking some sort of rapprochement. Basically, Rowling will not be crossing over any burned bridges in the event of those who owe her everything rebuilding them. She has been equally determined in her fearless stance against Scotland’s ludicrous Hate Crime bill. Good for her.

Similar to so-called ‘Anti-racism’, which advocates racial segregation without a hint of irony, the hardline Trans lobby claims to be all about ‘women’, yet it is bona-fide women who have the nerve to stand up for their rights that receive the most blisteringly misogynistic bile from these demented chicks with dicks – and its inherent homophobia has equally alienated gay men and women who could previously rely on the likes of Stonewall to act on their behalf. Just as militant vegans give vegetarians a bad name with their utter inability to refrain from lecturing and hectoring or refusal to accept that not everyone will automatically fall in line with their thinking, Trans Activists have done nothing but damage the progress of genuine transsexuals within society towards quiet acceptance, the majority of whom merely want to get on with their lives. The Cass Review will not affect overnight change of the prevailing trend dictated by the captured establishment – the trend is too deeply embedded for that; but it’s one hell of a good start.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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TAKE YOUR PICK

Whichever way one looks at it, the past fortnight has not been great when it comes to highlighting the ‘moral fibre’ of our elected representatives. Across the Irish Sea in that outpost of Albion known as Ulster, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been forced to resign after being charged with rape and other ‘historical sex offences’, despite the fact the latter charge always sounds like something that should be levelled at a dead Viking. On the mainland, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has been caught in Fleet Street’s headlights due to a property she sold back in 2015; accused of not paying the correct amount of capital gains tax on the house during the sale, the question of breaking the law or submitting false information depends upon whether or not the house was her principal residence at the time; most of us have to settle for just the one, but there you go. Anyway, this old news was primarily stirred-up by former Conservative Party chairman Lord Ashcroft, who incidentally avoided paying £112m in UK tax from 2000 to 2010 on account of his non-dom status. The theory previously aired by our old friend Mudplugger that most Labour scandals stem from financial affairs whilst most Tory ones tend to concern ‘Ugandan discussions’ appears to ring true with regards to the current woes of Conservative MP and vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee, William Wragg.

Wragg is the nondescript backbencher who has recently come clean about the fact he passed on the personal phone numbers of fellow MPs to a stranger he engaged with on gay dating app Grindr, a man to whom he’d already sent what one presumes were ‘dick pics’. Displaying a staggeringly naive approach to his own vulnerability as a public servant – an approach that even Huw Edwards would probably view as a tad foolish – Wragg claims that once this shadowy individual was in possession of said compromising images he then began demanding the numbers of other MPs; fearing exposure, the MP for the Greater Manchester seat of Hazel Grove capitulated and consented to the request because he was ‘scared’. Upwards of a dozen unnamed men believed to include a Government Minister as well as the odd SPAD and a few journalists embedded in Westminster Village life were then allegedly contacted by the same man, with some apparently flattered enough by the attention to respond with a few dick pics of their own. Do these fools never learn? ‘I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures,’ said Wragg. ‘We were meant to meet up for drinks, then didn’t. Then he started asking for numbers of people. I was worried because he had stuff on me…I’ve hurt people by being weak. I was scared. I’m mortified. I’m so sorry that my weakness has caused other people hurt.’

It’s probably just as well Wragg is standing down as an MP at the next General Election, for his actions have served to further reinforce the ongoing image of the Tories as a political party in an irreversible state of decay. No doubt he’s already blaming his lapse of judgement on ‘mental health issues’, the chic get-out-of-jail card for absolving public figures of responsibility for their actions. Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK yesterday referred to the Tories as having ‘a bunch of sexual weirdos permeating’ in a bid to deflect negative attention away from his own party, which has dropped a dozen of its intended candidates for the Election. Their alleged crimes were not being caught with their hands in the till or their trousers round their ankles, but offensive posts on social media, apparently of a racist nature. Tice also threw in references to the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism issue as a further way of pointing out neither of the two major parties can adopt a holier-than-thou stance as they paint Reform as the latest home for all the loony right-wingers the Conservative Party is no longer welcoming to.

When asked if he felt Reform’s vetting system needed a thorough going-over, Tice emphasised the problems faced by the limited budgets of the smaller parties in comparison to the money Labour or the Tories can pour into a campaign – of which the vetting process for candidates is a casualty. ‘It’s more difficult for a small, entrepreneurial party,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got £30-40m a year like the Tory Party and the Labour Party have got to do their vetting. We operate on a fraction of that. That’s why we welcome the extra scrutiny.’ Tice declared Reform was ‘the fastest party to get rid of candidates’ in the event of inappropriate behaviour, and considering the time it took Labour to wake-up to their intended man in Rochdale, he could have a fair point – though so many candidates being given the boot doesn’t do much for Reform’s reputation. Amodio Amato had been selected for Stevenage until he claimed Sadiq Khan would be running a Muslim army should Labour win the Election; Pete Addis was chosen for South Shropshire before he was found to have made sexist and racial remarks on social media; north of the border, Iris Leask was earmarked for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine until she opined that ex-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace ‘should be left to die in Afghanistan’. Richard Tice’s response was that ‘every party has its fair share of muppets and morons.’ Quite.

Whatever its politics, Reform faces the same uphill struggle as any small party in a first-past-the-post system; not only that, but whenever any small party appealing to disillusioned voters from either Left or Right begins to gain traction, the Tories or Labour then attempt to woo such voters back by stealing some of the policies that had tempted these voters away in the first place. It’s not unlike the way in which a newly-promoted club to the Premier League takes everyone by surprise, finishes in the top half of the table and then, come the close-season, sees the big guns swoop in and scoop up the team’s best players and – in some cases – their manager. Despite being in existence since evolving from the old Brexit Party in 2020, Reform has yet to acquire a presence in Westminster and only six of its hundreds of candidates won a seat in last year’s local elections. One might say Reform – like the Brexit Party before it – is still seen by many as a single issue party; it was virtually the sole dissenting political voice during the pandemic and in some respects remains portrayed as the anti-lockdown party, despite broadening its agenda post-Covid to include opposition to Net Zero and illegal immigration – issues that have a far more negative impact on a vast swathe of the electorate than any of the major parties will acknowledge.

Perhaps Reform also suffers from the absence of arguably its greatest asset in getting its message across to the people, i.e. Nigel Farage, who remains a household name and – regardless of his Marmite qualities – a figure many will listen to when he speaks; Reform’s founder and honorary president has access to platforms no other character on the Right bereft of a seat in Parliament can boast of, yet has refused to commit to any sort of frontline role during the General Election. The Tories must be heaving a sigh of relief at this, but they’re still anxious that Reform will contribute towards the loss of Conservative-held seats, chiselling away at the Tory vote till it splits, thus potentially handing these seats to either Labour or the Lib Dems, depending on the constituency. There’s no doubt the deep discontent many voters feel about the state of the nation is not being satisfied by the major parties, so the pull of an alternative is understandable; but when the only headlines a party like Reform receives concerns candidates being ejected for racist tweets, its enemies can simply say, ‘told you so’, and many may simply write off Reform as merely another collection of ex-UKIP ‘fruitcakes’ (© David Cameron), left to reluctantly opt for the usual suspects instead. And what a morally-upstanding bunch they are.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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THE RUNNERS AND RIDERS

During his star turn as the waspish comic relief to Cliff Michelmore’s straight man in the BBC’s 1970 General Election coverage, Robin Day’s relish at the pollsters having got the result so wrong was impossible for him to contain; at one point he confronted a professional pollster who had supplied what proved to be inaccurate pre-Election forecasts for the Evening Standard and Sunday Times; rounding on the hapless pollster, Day asked ‘Does it matter to you that the people in their wisdom seem to have treated the polls with contempt?’ Whereas professional pollsters relied on tried-and-trusted methods, the 1970 Election was the first time the BBC had attempted asking voters how they voted as they exited the polling station, rather than the usual formula of asking voters how they were going to vote beforehand. Although the phrase ‘Quiet Tories’ hadn’t been coined back then, there were few indications via the old way that so many would choose the Conservatives over Labour, suggesting plenty of those surveyed were reluctant to reveal the truth prior to putting a cross next to their chosen candidate’s name. The Beeb canvassed the electorate of Gravesend on account of it being named the most ordinary constituency in the country, claiming ‘if you know how Gravesend votes, you know how the nation votes’; as it turned out, they were right – and Gravesend swung to the Right, as did the rest of the UK, something the opinion polls failed to predict.

In the run-up to a General Election, it’s obvious that pollsters can only inquire as to the electorate’s eventual intentions well in advance of acting upon them, even if most of us know it’s not a scientifically-accurate barometer as to what they’ll actually do come the day itself. Nevertheless, these findings are then broadcast across MSM outlets and presented as a Mystic Meg-like prophesy, and we’ve certainly seen a great deal of that ever since the countdown to the next hustings shindig has crept closer. According to the latest YouGov findings, the Prime Minister is looking at a Tory defeat on a par with 1997, with YouGov predicting a 154-seat majority for Labour that would see Starmer’s barmy army capture 403 seats to the Conservatives’ 155. Big guns on the blue side we are told may lose their seats include Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, old mainstays like IDS and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and even the much-fancied (in more ways than one) Penny Mordaunt; other current Cabinet members at risk are people you’ve never heard of, like Michelle Donelan and David ‘TC’ Davies, apparently Science Secretary and Welsh Secretary respectively. Last time round, it was Labour that suffered a catastrophic loss whilst Boris led the Tories to a landslide; now it would appear positions are to be completely reversed, even if the ground lost by Labour in 2019 means the Party has a hell of a lot more work to do than the effortless victory pointed to by the polls suggests.

One of the most encouraging factors in the predictions of the pollsters is that Labour could finally oust the SNP and reclaim its former status as the largest party north of the border, estimating 28 Scottish seats to the former and 19 to the latter. The timing of the next Election couldn’t be better from the perspective of those not exactly impressed by the SNP’s governance of Scotland, as this is a party still tarnished by the sordid Alex Salmond affair and the dubious financial dealings of Nicola Sturgeon, not to mention being run into the ground by an Identitarian zealot like new man Humza Yousaf; the notorious Hate Crime bill he endorsed with such vigour came into force on 1 April and has already seen Police Scotland engulfed by 3,800 ‘Hate Crimes’ reported to them in the space of the first three days. Perhaps fittingly, it is the ranting First Minister himself who has been named as a Hate Criminal in many of these complaints, highlighting how the subjective nature of offence will be utterly impossible to police, as well as proving Scots have not lost their sense of humour despite living under such a humourless regime.

In the latest poll, the Lib Dems are projected to increase their seat tally to 49, though the much-hyped new home for the politically stateless – the Reform Party – haven’t fared quite so well, with no seats predicted as falling into their hands, despite reaching their highest poll rating so far on data collated in March by YouGov. This data puts Labour on 40%, the Tories on 21%, Reform UK on 16%, the Lib Dems on 10%, the Greens on 8%, the SNP on 3%, and Plaid Cymru on 1%. The Conservative share of the vote in this poll is the same as the Party had during the disastrous, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reign of Liz Truss, something which doesn’t really bode well for Rishi Sunak. YouGov has been surveying voters for the past four years and has been able to track the diminishing support for the Tories over that tumultuous period – support which peaked in the early months of the pandemic in 2020, a brief moment of national unity as Boris was hospitalised and the ‘we’re all in this together’ Covid mantra was still bought-into by the majority; at this point, the Tories stood at 53% in the polls. Labour gained control as the injustice of Project Fear hit home, with the Party (led by Sir Keir since April) rising to 40% in November 2020; the vaccine rollout and its accompanying, unquestioned-by-the-MSM hype pushed the Tories back in the lead in the summer of 2021, but the 41% lead evaporated in the wake of the Partygate scandal, with the Party’s standing plummeting to 28% by January 2022.

The fall from (dis) grace of Bo-Jo and the sitcom circus that followed his exit evidently didn’t do well for the Conservative Party’s poll ratings – at one point the Tories slipped as low as 19% whilst Labour shot up to 54% (the day after Truss’s resignation); and the Tories haven’t really recovered since, at least if the stats assembled by YouGov are anything to go by. Like the incumbent leaders of Scotland and Wales, Sunak was not elected PM by the electorate, but internally anointed by his own party, and the lack of involvement of the general public in choosing their Prime Minister probably hasn’t helped. Neither Sunak nor his immediate predecessor were given a mandate by the people – something at least the two other chosen-by-party-members PMs of the past decade (Boris and Theresa May) could claim they received; and whilst by-elections between General Elections are a notoriously unreliable method of measuring how a governing party will fare when the whole nation has a say, the Tories have performed abysmally in the majority of those held since 2019 – an additional factor adding to the overall perception of the Party as a spent force.

An even worse forecast for the Prime Minister came prior to the YouGov poll and was published in last weekend’s Sunday Times; this poll, undertaken by Survation, predicted the outcome of the next General Election would leave the Tories with just 98 seats to Labour’s 468, which would be an unparalleled disaster for a governing party in the modern political era. Compared to that, YouGov’s findings don’t look quite so bad, even if they still predict a comprehensive thrashing from the electorate. Both polls use a method that goes by the catchy name of multilevel regression and post-stratification – mercifully abbreviated to MRP. MRP is currently regarded as the most accurate system of forecasting election results; a large group of people are asked how they’ll vote, the answers are broken down demographically, then these results are used as a basis for calculating an election outcome constituency by constituency, sourcing data on the demographic makeup of the voters in each seat. When used during the 2017 General Election, the MRP prediction was considerably closer to the eventual result than any of the polls based upon more traditional methods, all of which pointed to a sizeable Conservative majority. Whether or not MRP might have appeased Robin Day’s low opinion of pre-election polls is debatable, but at this moment in time it appears to be the gold standard of crystal balls, whether Rishi Sunak likes it or not.

© The Editor

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WITHIN (AND WITHOUT) THESE WALLS

Without wishing this here blog to become a listings guide for Talking Pictures TV – though I admit it’s a tempting alternative to commenting on relentlessly grim contemporary headlines – I’m moved to mention a movie which comfortably slots into the station’s schedules, so much so that it appears to air every few weeks on there. ‘Hell Drivers’ is a gritty B&W British thriller of the late 50s, a low-budget look at the corrupt, corner-cutting haulage industry and the shady figures that profit from it. The film boasts a breath-taking cast of the best character actors this country could offer at the time, including Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Herbert Lom, William Hartnell, Gordon Jackson, Alfie Bass, Sid James, David McCallum, and even a pre-Bond Sean Connery. The motley crew of drivers employed by the company are incentivised to deliver their goods a minimum of twelve times a day; anyone failing to keep up with the demand is handed their cards whilst anyone exceeding the minimum amount of daily deliveries is favoured by management. Forced into competition with each other, the drivers take their lives in their hands by hurtling along narrow and bumpy country lanes on a 20 mile round-trip at increasingly reckless speeds. As seemingly irrelevant as ‘Hell Drivers’ is to our glorious modern age, its regular presence on TPTV is actually quite prescient with regards to an ongoing spat between elected and electorate that is well and truly under the radar of all but those who stand to be directly affected by it.

I’m constantly reminded of the movie when I receive regular updates on a proposed ‘super’ prison being built in a neighbourhood I know quite well, a project that will necessitate an invasion of HGVs on roads that were basically built to accommodate the humble horse-and-cart in what remains a semi-rural locality; these are roads that can barely cope with the rapid growth in car ownership, let alone pseudo-juggernauts careering along as though driven by Patrick McGoohan’s psychotic ‘Hell Drivers’ character, Red. The most potentially-threatened stretch of the King’s Highway in this particular case is Ulnes Walton Lane, a long and winding road on the outskirts of the Lancashire town of Leyland; it traverses a path through plenty green and pleasant land, but even in its current incarnation is something of a roller-coaster ride for the pedestrian. Having walked up an especially hair-raising section of the Lane a couple of years ago, constant dives into hedges whenever a flotilla of vehicles sped along a road bereft of a pavement implied innumerable accidents were waiting to happen. The prospect of the kind of huge, towering trucks required to deliver the materials for a major building project would only add to the dangerous ambience of the road, meaning those living along Ulnes Walton Lane are understandably up in arms. But their protests appear to be falling on deaf ears where those pushing the project are concerned, i.e. the Government.

Whereas once the likes of the Bastille or Newgate Gaol resided in the heart of cities, almost as though their intimidating presence served as a symbolic reminder for the people as to what fate awaited them should they stray from the path of righteousness, the trend for prisons to be situated a greater distance from the nearest metropolis seems to better emphasise the inmates’ exile from society, if making visiting day more of a headache for family members with urban postcodes. A case in point is HMP Wymott, an establishment that can boast such illustrious alumni as convicted footballing rapist Ched Evans and former ‘It’s a Knockout’ host Stuart Hall; opening its doors in 1979 as a short term Category C prison, Wymott sits on the outer rim of Leyland and was built when there were far fewer residential properties in the area than there are today. In 1988, it was joined by its sister nick, the Category B HMP Garth; but in recent decades, the next-door neighbours have seen what was a sparsely-populated farming community expand into a retreat for those seeking surroundings more picturesque than nearby cities such as Preston. The twin prisons on the community’s doorstep were a reminder of the area’s remote past, when it was an obvious location for keeping criminals far away from the scenes of their crimes; it wouldn’t be suitable for yet another, surely?

The proposal for a third prison to be built on a neighbouring site to the two whose vintage now stretches back to the very different Leyland of the 1970s and 80s naturally upset residents of the vicinity. Despite the incursion of the internal combustion engine, the rural fringe of Leyland is still the kind of place where the first sound one hears on a morning is the clippetty-clop of horse’s hooves rather than the disruptive roar of heavy goods vehicles. Angry residents were additionally alerted to what they’d have to look forward to once forming a campaign group name of Action Against Wymott & Garth 3rd Prison, when they began receiving horror stories from those in different parts of the country, those whose equally rural neighbourhoods had already been disrupted by the early stages of ‘mega-prison’ building. Objections to the Wymott & Garth third prison proposal were voiced early enough to reach the hallowed chambers of the local council, who threw it out over two years ago. However, the Ministry of Justice has held firm in its determination to press on in the face of overwhelming opposition from locals, utterly indifferent to their concerns; an appeal by the MoJ against Chorley Council’s rejection of the proposal was recommended for refusal by an independent planning inspector, but the Secretary of State for Buggering-Up – none other than our old friend Michael Gove – has taken it upon himself to announce that his department will have the final say.

This is a pattern that has been repeated across the country of late whenever any of these ‘super’ or ‘mega’ prisons have been proposed – one earmarked for Market Harborough faced similar opposition to the Leyland plan and was also rejected by the local council, prompting an identical appeal by the MoJ, leading to five delays on the decision as to whether or not it will actually be built. An impression as to what residents can expect if the MoJ succeeds in its roughshod riding comes via HMP Five Wells, open for business a couple of years ago in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire; images of cells that more closely resemble the rooms of a budget B&B are accompanied by descriptions of landscaped gardens, lakeside views, recreational facilities and eco-friendly solar panelling that sound like promotional guff from a holiday camp brochure. All of this obscures the fact that this isn’t supposed to be Butlin’s, but somewhere to house unpleasant individuals allegedly sent there as a punishment. But the whys and wherefores of punishment Vs rehabilitation isn’t really the issue here; it’s not so much the conditions within those walls as to the locations pencilled-in to site them.

Sure, we’re all familiar with the comical sight of so-called NIMBYs being roused whenever news of new housing intended for their greenbelt land is announced, but it’s not quite so amusing to be confronted by the prospect of a 1,700-capacity prison in the next field. Aside from the fact that the Leyland penitentiary is planned as a facility that will prepare inmates for the outside world by allowing some to venture beyond its gates on day release, the combined prison population of the locality if the third prison goes ahead will then outnumber the law-abiding residents – hardly a stat guaranteed to attract people or businesses to the area in the future. And, again, it is the utter unsuitability of the road networks in such places to cope with the immense influx of vehicles that come with this level of construction work which is causing anxiety for the residents. One cannot travel more than a few hundred yards around the area without seeing a banner or a placard opposing the third prison in Leyland, and the campaign group have been relentless in their organised opposition; but it’s clear the MoJ are determined to give it the green light regardless. With a local (Tory) MP in the shape of the uniquely useless Katherine Fletcher having done her best to avoid fighting on behalf of the community she serves only in theory, the resurrected public inquiry into the issue has now been adjourned until the middle of April. But with the final say in the ever-trustworthy hands of ‘Govie’, one feels only the Mr MacKay’s of this world will have a spring in their step by the end of it.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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IN THE DOCK

Talking Pictures TV, that dependable repository of cathode ray classics, has recently added another neglected gem to its nostalgic roster by giving a welcome repeat outing to one of the most unfairly-maligned British shows of the Golden Age, ‘Dixon of Dock Green’. Routinely – not to mention sneeringly – labelled ‘cosy’ (usually by those who’ve never seen it), the everyday stories of a London policeman originally ran for an impressive 21 years, which was no mean feat considering the lead character of Sgt Dixon (Jack Warner) was 81 when the series hung up its truncheon in 1976. This police procedural has a poor survival rate in the archives, but enough early episodes exist to keep the TPTV run so far strictly monochrome. And what the episodes from the 1950s and 60s undoubtedly convey is the look and feel of a soap opera – or ‘ongoing dramas’ as the BBC used to call them back then; some even contain a Light Programme-style arrangement of the theme tune that sounds like it belongs on ‘Music While You Work’. Unlike the later episodes from the 70s, these feature multiple scenes of Sgt Dixon at home and the family element is strong thanks to his daughter being married to DI Andy Crawford, with all three sharing the same residence. Ironically, soaps today feature an inordinate amount of criminal activity, largely thanks to the corrosive influence of Phil Redmond, though far more than can be seen in yer average episode of a literal crime series like ‘Dixon’. This is drama mercifully free of melodrama.

A decade ago, three DVDs were released that featured the surviving episodes from the last five years of the series, and these have a different feel to the ones TPTV has screened to date. There’s a poignant strain of melancholy running through the early 70s stories that is mirrored in the ageing, past-retirement and eternally avuncular figure of Sgt George Dixon. But Sgt Dixon is a man so indestructible that he cheated death at the hands of Dirk Bogarde (in the movie that inspired the series, 1949’s ‘The Blue Lamp’). Trailing Dixon pounding and plodding his beat along pavements straddling boarded-up properties is like watching a world pass away before our eyes – the post-war Ealing idea of England that trained Dixon to do his job hard but fair. And we trust him to uphold that principle as he criss-crosses a remarkable amount of waste-ground which wildflowers are already reclaiming as nature capitalises on the gap between the recent disappearance of one building and the distant erection of another. Dixon is oblivious of the goldmine his community is sitting on, but those that constitute the community will never benefit from the invisible gold once it comes to be mined; they, like Dixon himself, will be gone by then, edged out by prospectors.

The transition from monochrome to colour was largely on the surface when London was designated the cultural centre of the universe; the 60s never really swung in Dock Green aside from the odd visual flourish via the younger members of the community, and even then this flourish was a slow burner, not really showing itself until one decade had seamlessly morphed into another. Besides, the likes of George Dixon took it all in his seen-it-all-before stride; and it’s worth remembering this is a man who didn’t just emanate from a different decade, but a different century. He could recall every teenage tribe from Victorian hooligans through to cosh-boys in zoot-suits, never mind Teds, Mods and Rockers; it took more than yet another adolescent fad to faze him. Dixon is the physical embodiment of continuity with an era that is clinging on against the odds and under the radar; but everyone sensed it would all go when he did.

A man with the kind of gentle touch we were brought up to believe is a hallmark of British policing via the Ladybird manual, Sgt Dixon is the father figure overseeing a very human drama dealing with the little people who don’t stage audacious blags with sawn-off shooters. More often than not, he encounters life’s failures and does so with great humanity and sympathy. The streets of Dock Green can contain characters inhabiting the same rented accommodation, as in the wonderful 1976 episode, ‘Alice’ – including a burly northerner who once held ambitions to be a world-champion boxer, now reduced to wrestling every night to make ends meet; a small-fry businessman who talks the talk but is still stuck in a poxy little office; then there’s his West Indian secretary, over-qualified for her post, but presumably unable to get a better one because of her colour; and the socially diffident loner who gives the episode its title – a touching performance by Angela Pleasence as a girl with holes in her stockings, convinced she has what it takes to be a great violinist, though the viewer knows she’ll never make it.

Even in the bleaker 70s, Dock Green nick remains something of a comforting family firm – with the sergeant’s son-in-law DI Crawford overseeing a fluid squad of here today/gone tomorrow officers that the archive failed to preserve the complete careers of. But DI Crawford, like his father-in-law, is a static rock of stability in a landscape that is crumbling around him. Yes, he’ll get heavy with the bona-fide villains, but when confronted by innocents caught up in events born of their limited social circumstances, he recognises the signs and goes easy on them. The aforementioned apprentice violinist, name of Alice, is one such character. She possesses a damaged and delicate vulnerability, but the reasons behind why she’s the way she is remain unrevealed even as her sad story unfolds; gradually, however, we are exposed to a steely determination in Alice not to be walked over, something that is often the hallmark of the unlikely survivor and explains how they manage to cling onto the fringes of society, invisible and ignored, but ultimately defiant.

Dock Green is abundant with Alice’s, but the alienating elements of the big city are something the local Force is familiar with, and the causes of crime on the manor are often all-too evident. Even the genuine crooks are still recognisably Ealing-derived, most being the products of traditional criminal families stretching back generations, as much a part of the community’s fabric as Sgt Dixon himself (who has, in his time, nicked father, son and grandson). Innocent observers see the bad in them, but appreciate the nick will slap them on the wrist and send them to the Scrubs for a couple of years without fear of their criminal aspirations ever exceeding the low-level ambition their upbringing aims for. Their future heirs will not settle for that. No, when old coppers who can no longer handle their drink light their pipes and cluster round the Joanna for a run-through of archaic music-hall standards they know off by heart, you realise you’re watching one late, lamented incarnation of England in its elegiac death-throes.

The streets Dixon patrols are being eradicated and obliterated; where the Luftwaffe floundered, the town-planner has triumphed. A sense of place is as much about bricks & mortar as it is about people; when the bricks & mortar have been reduced to rubble, the people are reduced with them, and place is displaced for an entire generation – one which will never reclaim it. Hell, you think the crop that rule the roost as Dixon is on his last lap are bad – wait till you see their children and grandchildren when they get their chance. Schooled in the free-market casino that renders the little people Sgt Dixon has always striven to serve as collateral damage, morality will be a major casualty, as will any sense of shame as they fight to protect their self-interests at the expense of the rest. Their community is the community of Me. They will build towers that burn and evade prosecution at every turn because they can buy immunity, creaming their ill-gotten millions off each institution founded for the public and flogged to the private. They won’t give a flying f**k for the little people, and they won’t even have the decency to hide the fact or even feel the need to hide it. Is it any wonder the allure of the era before their abominable breed stained the surface of Albion retains its pull?

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Picture the scene: Scotland’s First Minister indulges in another of his race-baiting speeches, spitting out the word ‘white’ with enough thinly-veiled venom to warrant a complaint; once back home, there’s a knock at the door from the Edinburgh Police, who inform him he’s just committed a Hate Crime and they cart him off to the nick. That’s the trouble with creating monsters; the monster has a habit of eventually turning on the creator. Just ask Maximilien Robespierre. The architect of the Terror during the aftermath of the French Revolution was ultimately responsible for dispatching thousands of his fellow citizens to a rendezvous with Madame Guillotine, and yet he met the same fate himself a year after introducing the policy. The brief stint he enjoyed as the most powerful and feared figure in France saw Robespierre as a prominent member of the National Convention’s Committee of Public Safety – a title used without irony, yet one which has had echoed down throughout history ever since; it’s there in every totalitarian state that calls itself a Democratic Republic, and it’s there in legislation masquerading as fairness, tolerance and equality. War is Peace, indeed.

The build-up to Scotland’s notorious Hate Crime Act becoming law on April Fool’s Day (no joke) has been accompanied by a gaslighting campaign on the part of Police Scotland, convincing every Scotsman and woman that they have a bigoted little orange cartoon monster inside them, one that can erupt into a tirade against all ring-fenced ‘oppressed minorities’ at a moment’s notice. Presumably this warning only addresses those Scots unfortunate enough to have been born with white skin, mind, for as we all know, racism is an exclusively white ailment. The vagueness of what can be defined as ‘hatred’ in this soon-to-be law means the definition is entirely in the hands of those entrusted to police it, employing subjectivity and emotional responses to decide. So open to interpretation is this definition that talk has been of actors in stage plays or performers at the Edinburgh Festival being arrested should a complaint be lodged against them, and then there’s JK Rowling. The Edinburgh-based English author has already endured years of relentless online abuse from unhinged and demented Trans-activists accusing her of being the Antichrist, and some of these non-binary fruitcakes are planning to launch a series of complaints the day the Act becomes law in a bid to have her arrested for stating biological fact and for not pandering to narcissistic and misogynistic men in drag as they invade women’s safe spaces.

One of the most contentious – not to say worrying – sections of this Act is the possibility someone could be charged under the new law for stating an unfashionable opinion within the confines of their own abode. An Englishman’s home may once have been his castle, but it appears a Scotsman’s home could soon become a public space. Shades of the Chinese Cultural Revolution once again as younger members of the family are encouraged to grass-up their parents and report any indiscretions to the authorities; a similar policy used as a nightmarish example of an oppressive future society applied in the Dystopian 2002 movie, ‘Equilibrium’, though this approach was effectively road-tested for real at the peak of Project Fear, when reporting one’s neighbours for breaking the pandemic rules was regarded as a moral duty. Nobody yet knows precisely how this law will be enacted come April, though the threat to both freedom of speech and even freedom of thought is paramount. As yet, this will be restricted to north of the border, but a legitimate concern is the Labour Party, once in government, will cherry-pick whichever segments of the Act they fancy and seek to implement them UK-wide.

If so, perhaps whatever legislation arises can one day be used to prosecute Ministers of the Church of England as that doomed institution continues down its nihilistic path, fatally infected by an ideology that poisons all who contract it. In a desperate and misguided bid to stave off extinction, it would appear the Anglican branch of Christianity has morphed into a more contemporary cult and wholly embraced the modern mantra. The Archdeacon of Liverpool, Miranda Threlfall-Jones (yes, you guessed it – middle-class and white), has been criticised for comments that seem to be contenders for prosecution under Hate Speech. ‘Whiteness is to race what patriarchy is to gender,’ she tweeted. ‘So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy.’ As ever, simply reverse the sentiment and imagine the outrage. The Original Sin theory that has long been the backbone of the Church of Rome has now been adopted by the Church of England, though the Sin in this context is the colour of one’s skin. Yeah, you’re doing a great job of bringing the community together, vicar. Oh, and let us not forget the calls of senior clergy to increase the Church’s ‘slavery reparations’ (laughable enough) from 100 million to 1 billion; I mean, is there anything these clueless c***s won’t do to come across as ‘on trend’? It’s pathetic.

Race and gender are the top priorities in such legislation; class prejudice never gets a look in, strangely enough, despite it being a far more successful divider in separating the rulers from the ruled. But Scotland is not alone; it’s just got in there quicker than anyone else. This cancer is endemic across the Anglosphere, after all. Canada, arguably the epicentre of Planet Woke under Trudeau, is poised to introduce legislation that will facilitate the arrest and detainment of people suspected of one day planning to commit a crime when they haven’t actually yet done so. Again, we’re seeing elements of an old movie predicting a future Dystopia being used as a blueprint for governing an allegedly democratic society, this time ‘Minority Report’, which coincidentally appeared the same year as ‘Equilibrium’. I guess few in 2002 anticipated where we’d be 22 years later, though there’s no doubt the pandemic was the litmus test for seeing how much Western governments could get away with in restricting the freedoms of their citizens. As it turned out, they got away with a hell of a lot, and now they’re emboldened by their success.

The resignation of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been a minor success for opponents of the Thought Police approach to governance espoused by so many of the draconian ideologues in charge of Western nations, post-pandemic. Varadkar ticked all the boxes, being pro-Net Zero and a devotee of the gender cult, aping Nicola Sturgeon in admitting violent male criminals posing as ‘women’ into women’s prisons. He even had his very own Hate Speech Bill, one that promised to deal with ‘incitement to hatred’ as long as that hatred was directed at the usual suspects, one he did his best to rush through the senate following the riots that occurred in Dublin last November as a result of a violent attack on a female crèche worker and three small children by an Algerian national. Varadkar had already turned a blind eye to concerns by Irish natives to mass immigration, branding any opponents of his rainbow nation with the familiar labels of far-right, racist and xenophobic; he wanted to arrest and imprison such opponents, much like Justin Trudeau freezing the bank accounts of his own opponents during the truckers’ protests a couple of years ago.

What these figures all have in common other than an adherence to a dogma not shared by the masses is an absolute loathing of those very masses. Technocrats to a man (and woman), the leaders elected to power on mandates they have no intention of honouring are hell-bent on appeasing every chattering-class fad at the expense of the genuine concerns harboured by the electorate. The pandemic demonstrated how to do it, and the post-war consensus appears to be to carry on regardless. Leo Varadkar’s resignation came about due to the overwhelming rejection of his attempts to alter the Irish constitution in the worst referendum result an Irish government has ever suffered; as with the ruling elite here in 2016, the utter inability to understand why this has happened exposes the width of the chasm between elected and electorate, something Scotland has evidently yet to work out.

© The Editor

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LONG WAVE GOODBYE

‘Evolution, not revolution’ – so spoke Tony Hayers of his mission at the BBC in his role as the nemesis of Alan Partridge when Hayers was BBC Commissioning Editor in the 1990s sitcom, to which a Partridge desperate for a second series of his TV chat-show reacted enthusiastically by declaring, ‘I evolve…but I don’t revolve’. The character of Tony Hayers (played by David Schneider) represented the post-Birt BBC executive class at odds with the populist approach of the Norwich-based broadcaster (played by Steve Coogan); in the real world, the BBC has been inherited by Tony Hayers rather than Alan Partridge, and we – as licence-fee payers – have seen (and heard) the end results of this evolution over the past 20-25 years. The increasing move towards digital platforms for receiving Auntie’s output may well suit anyone under 50, but for an ageing audience not tuning in to ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’, the sudden transformation of BBC services to wholly accommodate a younger demographic whose viewing and listening habits have been entirely shaped by online activity has left loyalties severely tested for some. As of April Fool’s Day, Radio 4 will no longer have opt-out wavelengths for different programming, and – as usual – the hardcore audience accustomed to a traditional switch from FM to Long Wave and back again have had no say in this decision.

An opt-out slot is, in a way, a legacy of the old BBC Home Service, which would routinely pause for regional matters at various points during the day – not dissimilar to the manner in which the individual ITV franchise holders used to operate up until ITV’s transformation into a London-based, 24/7 networked entity around 20 years ago. The change from the Home Service to Radio 4 in 1967 didn’t eradicate this formula either; the content of Radio 4 could differ wherever you happened to be listening in the country till 1978, with the gradual spread of BBC local radio negating this aspect of the Home Service remit from the late 60s onwards. The South-west was the sole region immune to the 1978 overhaul, clinging onto the opt-out as late as January 1983, when the twin launches of Radio Devon and Radio Cornwall belatedly called time on a time-honoured practice. However, whilst regional opt-outs may have come to an end in the early 80s, wavelength opt-outs remained. Back in the now-unthinkable era when BBC Schools broadcasts dominated the daytime R4 schedules, a split between FM and Medium Wave (which the station then occupied) was necessary, but when Radio 4 swapped its MW band with Radio 2 in 1978, the old R2 Long Wave band became Radio 4’s opt-out option.

BBC radio has been transmitting on Long Wave for 99 years, beginning with its transmitter in Daventry, Northamptonshire, in 1925; there are still a trio of transmitters broadcasting Radio 4 LW on 198 kHz, though now owned by the private company Arqiva, which says significant investment is required to keep them going. However, with the Long Wave platform earmarked for eventual closure, it’s likely these transmitters won’t be maintained indefinitely. Since 1978 Long Wave has been a handy tool for niche programming where Radio 4 is concerned. The Shipping Forecast first aired on Radio 4 when the AM wavelengths were swapped between Radios 2 and 4, remaining in the same place on the dial as a result; the evergreen nautical recital is broadcast four times a day across FM and LW, though come April only the two daily FM broadcasts will still be heard, albeit with an additional edition at weekends. Other programmes that have benefitted from the two-way split include The Daily Service – and it’ll certainly be strange not hearing that mentioned at 9.45am just before Book of the Week – as well as Yesterday in Parliament’s extended version, both of which will henceforth only be found on Radio 4 Extra and BBC Sounds.

One already-notable absentee from Long Wave now is Test Match Special, a programme that has been shunted about a fair bit in recent decades. Launched in 1957, this Great British Institution took advantage of the empty afternoon airwaves occupied on an evening by the Third Programme and stayed in the same place – on Medium Wave – when the Third was rebranded as Radio 3; it remained on R3 up until the early 90s when the new MW-only station Radio 5 arrived as an intended home for all of the BBC’s radio sports coverage, and Test Match Special duly moved in; however, due to the somewhat…erm…lengthy duration of Test Cricket, the show also retained a presence on Radio 3 FM. It eventually found a fresh home on Radio 4 LW when Radio 5 was re-launched as the news-heavy Radio 5 Live in 1994, even if the Shipping Forecast, the Daily Service and Yesterday in Parliament – rather than rain – tended to routinely stop play. Despite extended coverage on the digital station Radio 5 Sports Extra avoiding these interruptions, LW broadcasts continued until the conclusion of the 2023 season.

I can completely understand listeners revelling in the crystal-clear haven that is a digital station, though I can’t deny the unique background sounds of mushy old Long Wave added a distinctive analogue accompaniment to the fine wine richness of the show’s legendary voices in the same way a vinyl crackle was integral to the ambience of a classic album from the 60s or 70s; it often used to sound as if TMS was being phoned-in from some distant village green in an imaginary Albion upon which the sun had yet to set. Perhaps that’s part of the nostalgic attachment to Long Wave, for all its failings at passing this century’s sonic quality test; its audio imperfections are so engrained in the listening experience that they have become part of that experience. When they are cleaned-up and ironed out by the digital transformation, something just seems to be missing. Of course, it depends what one happens to be listening to; I certainly couldn’t imagine enjoying Radio 3’s musical content in quite the same way on MW, for instance; but when it comes to the spoken word, especially one spoken with such mellifluous elegance as the ear masseurs of old on TMS, Long Wave undoubtedly guided the brushes painting the pictures in the listener’s head.

One can understand why some still preferred to listen on Long Wave long after the takeover of the superior soundscapes of the digital medium that superseded it, even if the choice of devices with which listeners can now access their favourite radio shows has multiplied way beyond the archaic trannie, and the bewildering amount of additional stations these new devices offer does make it hard to resist upgrading one’s audio equipment. The current issue of the Radio Times helpfully informs readers that if the listener doesn’t have a digital radio, a TV set or a smart speaker though which to access digital radio, or a Smartphone, or desktop computer or tablet, the listener will no longer be able to tune in to the listed programmes ‘as the schedules are unified’; it also points out older car radios with LW will be similarly affected. I don’t doubt that the more, ah, mature audience liable to be listening in to these particular programmes has already invested in the necessary gear and may well have been taking advantage of the proliferation of digital stations for quite some time; but, as always with the BBC, it’s hard to come away from this news without feeling yet again that a decision has been taken from on-high with no consultation with the audience that stands to be most affected.

One could accurately cite the disgraceful discarding of BBC4 as the sole BBC TV station still upholding the best Reithian traditions as a more extreme example of the contempt in which the Beeb holds some of its subscribers, and the binning of Long Wave is merely one small step in that ongoing process we call progress. After all, to paraphrase the great Alan Partridge, we evolve, but we don’t revolve.

© The Editor

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CROWN PRINCE OF WALES

Okay, let’s get it out of the way straight away: Wales will shortly be led by a black man, something that happens whilst Northern Ireland is currently led by a Catholic woman, not to mention the fact that Scotland is now led by a British Asian Muslim, and Britain as a whole is led by a British Asian Hindu – at least for a few more months. How’s the oppressed minority narrative going, then? Much is naturally being made about the fact none of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom are headed by a white man anymore; so, does this represent the ultimate triumph of multiculturalism? Does it spark the latest chapter in the demise of the indigenous population? Well, only if one concludes the indigenous population are best represented by a privileged clique of ex-public schoolboys; they’re the ones conspicuous by their absence from the premier political map of the nation at the moment, so if anyone feels the lack of white males in positions of power means the majority are no longer accurately represented, it’s not as if they were anyway. And whilst skin colour may have been elevated to a defining characteristic of a person’s value and worth thanks to the odious cancer of Identity Politics, it’s not exactly an accurate barometer for measuring whether or not someone makes a good political leader.

When Barack Obama was first elected US President in 2008, the novelty of a black man reaching the pinnacle of power was something that barely spanned the gap between election and inauguration. Once sworn-in, Obama then had to get down to work just like every other American President before him; the colour of his skin wouldn’t be the determining factor in his success or failure. Indeed, if I was Welsh myself, I think I’d welcome the election of Vaughan Gething as First Minister not because he’ll apparently be the first black political leader of a European nation, but because he’s not Mark Drakeford. The outgoing Tsar of Cymru was one of the UK’s worst lockdown zealots during the pandemic, pursuing Project Fear with a maniacal fanaticism that made Nicola Sturgeon resemble an anti-vaxxer; every additional curb on civil liberties demanded by the Labour Party in England was enthusiastically embraced and implemented by the Party’s man in the valleys. And, of course, when he was imposing 24/7 mask-wearing on the downtrodden Welsh population, he himself was caught on camera mask-free, doing his bit for diversity at a Diwali shindig as he blithely ignored the social distancing rules the plebs had to abide by – funnily enough, just like all the top Tories did at the same time.

Embodying the worst authoritarian aspects of the Left when it comes to the Lower Orders, Mark Drakeford actively pursued a green policy that has left many Welsh farmers up in arms, whilst his unworkable 20mph default speed limit in built-up areas confirmed the anti-motorist agenda at the heart of the political class governing these islands. Drakeford has run Wales since 2018, and it’s hard to imagine anyone echoing Mrs Thatcher come his retirement, concluding that he’s left the country in a better state than when he found it. Drakeford’s successor steps up from his role as Minister for the Economy, having won 51.7 percent of the vote in the leadership contest against Education Minister Jeremy Miles. With shades of Ford pardoning Nixon, Vaughan Gething paid tribute to the outgoing First Minister, describing Drakeford as ‘the right leader at the right time in the pandemic’, adding ‘we will be forever in his debt’; well, Gething himself probably will be, but it seems a bit presumptuous to include the Welsh people in his gushing obituary.

But, of course, little attention is being given to Mark Drakeford or his record as First Minister today; all eyes are focused on the new man, and (it goes without saying) the colour of his skin. SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf was predictably quick off the blocks. ‘What an incredible achievement,’ he declared, ‘to become the first black leader of a European country.’ Keir Starmer wasn’t far behind. ‘His appointment as First Minister of Wales, the first black leader in the UK,’ said Sir Keir, ‘will be an historic moment that speaks to the progress and values of modern-day Wales.’ Vaughan Gething himself wasted little time in noting his own achievement in his acceptance speech upon being elected. ‘Today we turn a page in the book of our nation’s history,’ he proclaimed. ‘Not just because I have the honour of becoming the first black leader in any European country, but because a generational dial has jumped too. Devolution is not something I have had to get used to or adapt to, or apologise for. Welsh solutions to Welsh problems and opportunities, is in my blood – it’s what I have always known throughout my adult political life.’

Gething’s life actually began in Zambia fifty years ago, though he is of Welsh descent, with his father being a vet from Glamorgan who met Gething’s black mother when working in the African nation. The family relocated to Monmouthshire when Gething was aged two, though the unpleasant experience of his father’s job offer being withdrawn upon his arrival with black spouse and child was a not-uncommon occurrence in less-enlightened times, and one worth remembering without being revived as an Identitarian marketing tool. Unfortunately, one suspects it will be weaponised to some degree, if only to uphold the discrimination storyline expected of any non-white figure on the Left, where exposure to racism forms a core feature of their profile. Even if the Gething family had experienced no prejudice whatsoever, the racism question would still be asked of the new First Minister and he would be expected to provide the correct answer.

As Keir Starmer’s representative in Wales, Vaughan Gething quickly toed the Party line by bigging-up the Labour leader when the subject of the impending Election was raised. ‘I know that we can win,’ he said. ‘We can win if we stand together, linking arms to defeat the narrow forces of division that seek to make a warm country turn cold. That only happens if we sweep the Tories out of office and send Sir Keir Starmer into No.10.’ If/when that happens, the brief exclusion of white male faces from political leadership in the UK will come to a swift end, even if Sir Keir presides over a Cabinet as racially diverse as the one Boris Johnson headed from 2019 – one that the ‘rainbow nation’ cheerleaders were mysteriously quiet about. Perhaps the likes of Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Suella Braverman, Sajid Javid, Kwasi Kwarteng, Nadhim Zahawi, and of course, Rishi Sunak didn’t see race as a selling point; indeed, their respective failures could no more be attributed to the colour of their skin than their limited successes could. Most of that, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, was down to the content of their character.

STEVE HARLEY (1951-2024)

One of the most intriguing and inventive acts to emerge from the ‘Art School’ strand of Glam in the early-to-mid-70s, Cockney Rebel – along with Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks, and Be-Bop Deluxe – helped give a much-maligned musical movement the kind of intelligent, stylish flair lacking in the likes of Gary Glitter or The Sweet. Cockney Rebel were led by Steve Harley, a charismatic singer-songwriter with a distinctive London drawl who fronted what was essentially a backing band; indeed, between the release of their second and third albums, Harley was abandoned by the bandmates who resented his dominance and he was forced to recruit a fresh batch. With the old band having enjoyed top ten hits with the curiously camp ‘Judy Teen’ and ‘Mr Soft’, Harley’s new line-up scored their only chart-topper, the evergreen ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ in 1975 – the lyrics of which were a barbed attack on his ex-colleagues. Like many artists of his generation, Harley found himself out in the cold when Punk exploded and struggled to recapture commercial success for the best part of a decade, only eventually returning to the top ten in 1986 – a duet with Sarah Brightman on the title track of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’; he went on to play the role of the Phantom on stage before being replaced by Michael Crawford.

Steve Harley continued to make music both on his own and in various collaborations, and was often a go-to interviewee when seeking a more erudite perspective on the era of pop he helped illuminate with his quirky, eccentric talent. He passed away at the age of 73, yet one more victim of the disease that forever seems to elude a cure.

© The Editor

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