Northern snobbery

From Redfellow Cott to the magnificent Beningborough Hall is half-a-dozen miles, three hundred years of history, and an infinite number of social classes.

About 1716, and a fine place to be on a Bank Holiday.

So having wandered the grounds (my Fitbit scored 2.53 miles), observed the munching Aberdeen Anguses (Mac spell-check tried to edit the “g”, thus nearly managing a wrong’un there), and educated the grandsons in the nature of a ha-ha, we were into the accommodation.

What it isn’t, strictly, is a “stately home”. In one of those we might expect the family’s second-best crockery laid out on banqueting tables to impress the yobs. Beningborough has been cleaned out repeatedly, and the furnishings — though adequate — are more about filling space than flaunting hereditary opulence.

The last of the Great Personages to inhabit this glorious monster was Enid Edith Scudamore-Stanhope:

Whose full-length portrait hangs properly over one of those grand fireplaces, which require half-a-tree or the labour of a small pit-village. Lo! Enid Wilson, just into her twenties, and about to be married to a nob/knob twice her age and become Countess of Chesterfield.

By then a widow, she moved into a farm cottage in 1941. The Hall became an Air Force billet for the bomber crews at nearby Linton-on-Ouse, from which it was redeemed by the National Trust. Since Countess Enid, the RAF’s and RCAF’s land-lady, a grand-niece of the Iron Duke, was still in the vicinity, keeping a shrewd eye on the doings, life must have been less-than-easy for the CO of 76 Squadron, deputed as liaison officer and peace-keeper, one Squadron Leader Leonard Cheshire.

Beningborough is now a regular out-house for the National Portrait Gallery. At one level, this means the walls are well-hung with decent oils of various worthies of the eighteenth, and into the nineteenth century. I even hit on a John Singer Sargent. Two items gave me particular pleasure:

At the top of the stairs, on the second floor, as introduction to the peripatetic NPG bit is Henry IX, the Cardinal King of Britain, the last of the Stuarts (and probably as near total sanity as that lot came):

No eight-year-old should be dressed that way; and he’s pointing to the White Cliffs of Dover, where he’ll never get (though George III paid him a pension when the Stuart monies ran out). The importance of the strange dog eludes me.

Then, in the galleries, a breath of modern fresh-air: Tom Wood’s beguiling portrait of a Yorkshire and National hero, Alan Bennett:

Now the viewer needs to explain the impedimenta: the mug, the paper bag, the plug-and-cable, even the glow in the background. Awareness of Bennett’s work solves the mysteries.

Definitely  a day not wasted.

You are old, Father Malcolm …

I’d expect that headline needs an explanation.

When I we’re but a lad, every school English course came via an anthology. We didn’t get far without Robert Southey’s The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them:

“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”

That’s from 1799; and by mid-Victorian times (1865 to be precise) an Oxford don felt it ripe for parody:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

Which I’d guess is the version better known — if recognised at all — today.

All of which is provoked by:

• the revelation that the US military uses archaic 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations;

and

• a follow-up piece on the BBC Technology page.

And I’m shouting: why — for Heaven’s sake — not?

I still have the tools my father made as an apprentice locomotive fitter at LMS Sheffield Brightside. A ball-pein hammer is a hammer. A spanner (albeit imperial, not metric) is a spanner.

My English-Greek Lexicon, by Charles Duke Yonge, although now reduced to very infrequent use, is a battered first edition from 1849. In these degenerate modern times it is available on-line. My English-Latin dictionary, by Smith and Hall, is the 1870 edition — and it’s still in print.

When I was teaching a Shakespeare text, I always found the khaki-green (or failing that, the red reprinted) Warwick editions as good a vade-mecum as any. And they go back to the turn of the Nineteenth Century.

I’m preparing this post on a 2011 Mac: my grandsons regard it as antique. Young fools! They forget the anecdote of the Mac SE from the late 1980s, which a Cambridge lab had been recycling as a door-stop. Then someone, out of interest, plugged it in, switched it on … and bong!

Similarly, when we moved house three years ago, I had to clear the attic. The BBC Micro B (circa 1982) would still play Snapper and Hopper on the metal-box of a 12-inch monitor — so well that it took me three days to switch it off. That is, once I had found an equally-obsolete tape deck from which to load the games. The pizza-box  LCII from 1992, with a 68030 chip and a massive 4MB RAM, went on-line, no bother. But s-l-o-w.

A couple of weekends ago, I was at MOSI, Manchester’s Museum of Science and Technology. When the Apocalypse comes, we’ll be heading there for durable, low-tech equipment to re-start our society.

So, in these parts, we don’t go along with Ecclesiastes 12:1-6:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low;
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

No: because I know Dear Old Dad’s battered hammer, with its chipped hickory handle, nails a wheel broken at the cistern as well as any.

Don’t look back

Remember The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

My past has a positive gazetteer of “foreign countries”:

• In the beginning there was post-War London, with its winter smogs, watching the conductors with their bull’s-eye lamps leading — yes, leading —  trams through the filth of a London particular. And being totally embarrassed by the word “nun” in my father’s The Star crossword. But Londoners had the choice of three evening papers then.
• There is Wells, Norfolk (see previous posts ad nauseam), where tumbledown flint cottages (yours for hundred quid a throw, or less) became the second-homes for Islingtonians (starting print £350,000 plus).
• Schull, West Cork, which has suffered a similar fate to north Norfolk, and where I spent a series of mixed-miserable schoolboy-vacations, translating Euripides, swimming among the sea-wrack, and catching a huge pollack (which left the house-cat bloated). And where I was accosted by the Parish Priest and reminded I had not been in church that Sunday. When I protested I was not of his congregation, I was further told that was not the point: I should have been in my church.
• The light-hearted, golden-age, early-’60s Dublin, where one could eye-ball the likes of Paddy Kavanagh, in the flesh, in his cups, in McDaid’s, for the price of a pint. Now he has a seat by the canal; and the pub has a website.
• And one particular parenthood (after the other two). This the one we hadn’t expected. Carrying a toddler off the rocking ferry onto Staffa, and across the machair to Fingal’s Cave. Years passing, and having her near-pass out climbing a 13,000 foot peak in the Rockies (she would go on to camp at 18,000 feet in the Himalayas). Then having her escort her ageing Pa past the Spanish Steps, across the Piazza di Spagna, to acknowledge the Keats-Shelley House.

And so on. And so on.

Which brings me to this, in the New York Times. So tell it like it is, Angel Daphne:

I, too, am Eugene Gant. But I can’t look back: my old neck’s too stiff. But I, like Thomas Wolfe, recall my Lycidas:

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny’d,
Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

Hell upon earth

Two ways into this:

• I’ve not a regular with The Guardian‘s Long Read. It’s there. I’m glad it’s there. I’m delighted that at least one British quality daily has a commitment to serving its readers with more than pap. It’s just that — well, err — there’s only so much worthy fretting one can do in one short day. But today is the exception …

My grandfather, my great-grandparents, and even their parents originated from Wisbech, deep in the Fens. For two generations they are “AgLabs”, the staple agricultural labourers in many family trees. Then Great Grandad Matthew, who was an apprentice blacksmith, lost an arm, became a “letter-carrier”, and rose to Post Master.

• Furthermore, I grew up in North Norfolk — the contrived town motto (even Latinised) was “between land and sea”. That was a statement of fact: the economy of Wells came from whelking and farming, with a bit of bunce from a few short weeks of summer visitors. In the 1950s the farm workers’ strikes of the previous generation were still painfully remembered.

So I’ve just spent the length of three cups of tea, reading with fascinated horror Felicity Lawrence’s dissection of The gangsters on England’s doorstep, a recital of how Wisbech (and other small towns in the profound depths, well away from the metropolitan consciousness) have become infested with crookery and thuggery imported from eastern Europe:

A web of several competing eastern European gangmaster operations hiring out migrant labourers seemed to be connected to an increase in crime — although it was politically charged to say so. There had been a spate of apparent suicides among young eastern European men who had come in search of work — five within a year between 2012 and 2013. Three of the dead had been found hanging in public places around the town; one of them had been recovered from a small park near the BP garage next to graffiti that translated as: “The dead can’t testify”.

These were not the only disturbing deaths: a 17-year-old Latvian girl had disappeared from Wisbech in the summer of 2011, and her partially clothed, decomposed body was only discovered five months later, on the Queen’s Sandringham estate. A Lithuanian courier was killed in an arson attack on the van in which he was sleeping. There had also been reports of knife attacks by migrants on migrants but victims would disappear or turn out to have been using false identities.

The “locals” have felt their only way to fight back was to make grumbling noises and vote UKIP:

Most of us do not see the brutal parallel universe at the heart of the mainstream economy. But in the Fens, it has been highly visible – along with the transnational organised crime running a part of it. This has made people very angry. Now they want out of Europe – more than two–thirds of voters in Wisbech’s parliamentary constituency said in a 2014 survey that they would favour the UK leaving the EU.

Lawrence, though, sees beyond the cleavage in Fenland society, to look to fundamental causes:

From the late 1980s on, new technology allowed employers to eliminate much of the financial risk from their end of the chain. Supermarkets, for example, only reorder stock when a customer buys an item and its barcode is scanned, generating an instruction to their suppliers to replace it by the next day. Orders can double or halve within 24 hours, so workers to process and pack the goods are called in at short notice. This reduces costs and increases profits, since businesses no longer have to keep inventory or pay for full employment. Instead they have outsourced labour provision to agents or gangmasters. Agriculture and food processing pioneered this lean approach to business, but its zero-hours practices have spread to other sectors – to care homes, catering and food service, hotel work, cleaning, construction, and personal services such as nail bars and car washes.

Earlier waves of migration brought foreign workers to other East Anglian towns, but the availability of cheap housing has drawn gangmasters more recently to the Wisbech area. The last census of Wisbech in 2011 put the population at around 25,000 but officials accept that it is now probably nearer 30,000, with about 10,000 of those people recently arrived foreigners. The size of the private rental market doubled in a decade to more than 2,000 properties in 2015. Houses of multiple occupancy (HMOs) – the gang-run houses where new migrants mostly live – now account for a substantial percentage of housing stock. Government agencies trying to reach vulnerable migrant groups visited around 500 homes in the year from January 2014. By then, three of Wisbech’s wards had become some of the most deprived areas of the country.

Her article painstakingly traces the central villains’ progress from running labour gangs, to slum-landlording, to money-laundering, to exploitation, to theft, to prostitution and fake marriages, to … what else? When the nasties came to court:

The trials conjured up a nightmare of Fenland life, where there were no rules where you expected them to be, and when rules did exist, there was no one to enforce them.

Note that: no one to enforce them:

There were also only three housing officers for the whole Fenland district council to carry out inspections at the time – the council had suffered a 37% cut in its budget since 2010. […]

HMRC had just 142 national minimum wage inspectors for the whole country. According to the government’s migration advisory committee, this means that the average business, statistically, should expect a visit from an inspector once every 250 years. Unions that might have overseen conditions in fields and factories in the past are in decline. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority has lost staff, having had its budget slashed over the course of the last parliament by 20%.

I’ve written about the causes of all this before. It’s not just the “cuts” (though they are bad enough). It is more, much more to do with the savage assault on workers’ protection over the years. I was making these points eight years ago, and tracing the causes back to a root. Allow me to dig up that oldie (slightly updated):

Norfolk-born, Norfolk-bred ..

Malcolm’s alter ego originated in Wells-next-the-Sea, which in those distant days enjoyed the privilege of a Labour MP.
In 1945 Eddie Gooch, of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, displaced the squirarchical Tommy Cook, though the radical tradition had been there even before Noel Buxton took the seat for Labour back in 1929.

The North Norfolk seat later, in 1964, was inherited by Bert Hazell, then President of the NUAW.  Bertie survived into his 102nd year, to die in 2009 the longest-living former MP of recent times.

It was always, sneeringly, implied that Eddie Gooch’s and Bert Hazell’s tenures of the constituency were helped by the local farmers who voted to keep them at Westminster, rather than causing them problems through the NUAW. That canard ignores the local tradition of radicalism.

The years the locust ate

Après Bertie, le déluge.

The complexion of the constituency changed. Employment on the land fell rapidly. That also drained much of the bitterness that had persisted since the agricultural depression of inter-war years, and the farm-workers’ strikes of 1923 and 1926. Moreover, the second-homers started to arrive. Added to which, North Norfolk is now home to the largest “retired” percentage of the national population.

All conspired so that for the next two decades, the ’70s and the ’80s, the North Norfolk constituency was the fiefdom of Ralph Howell.

Howell, like Peter Mandelson, was one to whom taking an instant dislike saved a deal of time.

He was xenophobic, rabid, a Thatcherite before the Lady, an apologist for white racist régimes in Africa, and a supporter of the Turks in Cyprus.

He was instigator of the “Right to Work”, which sounds well but (in his terms) amounted to a curious, even Stalinist notion that the unemployed should be conscripted, either into national service or be otherwise deployed by the state. Howell had come close to defining “Workfare”.

Yet, he had saving graces: a good war-record, served his constituents conscientiously, was afraid of nobody (even his own Whips): a self-made (and proudly so) agri-businessman.

Reaping what the Thatcherities sowed

Wisbech didn’t get into this situation willingly. But this situation has been willed.

As Lawrence reminds us:

The Agricultural Wages Board, which set out employment terms for field workers, was abolished in 2013. The EU working time directive aims to prevent workers doing dangerously long hours, but the UK allows an opt-out, seeing it as a burden on business. The pressure on large producers to cut costs – one of the key drivers of labour exploitation – is often blamed on supermarkets squeezing their margins. A recommendation by the competition authorities in 2000 that this excessive buying power be countered by a groceries adjudicator took 13 years to be implemented. The adjudicator only acquired the power to impose penalties in 2015, and has yet to do so.

Liberalising trade rules and financial flows has enabled the free movement of goods and capital across Europe – and, with them, people. But while World Trade Organisation rules prescribe global hygiene standards in minute detail, they are largely silent on the social and labour conditions in which the goods are produced.

A complex web of small rules widely obeyed – from paying your tax to insuring your car, to giving workers proper breaks – are the threads that weave a democratic social contract and a protective state. Many people in Wisbech have become more rightwing, in protest at what they see. The collapse of totalitarian structures of state control in former-Soviet eastern Europe has combined with a shrinking of state in the west. This shrinking of the state has created the vacuum into which organised crime has rushed.

I’m sure “Sir” Ralph Howell would approve of much of all that. So, ironically for the folk of Wisbech, would UKIP (but can’t and won’t say so locally).

There are remedies, and obvious ones:

• ensure that agencies are properly resourced. In the Fenlands the “cuts” are not just financial: they are also human lives, and deaths. Lest we forget:

  A police force that handed over the bulk of its back-office functions to the private sector now spends the lowest amount per head of population on policing in England and Wales, a report has said.
  Lincolnshire Police has slashed its spending by nearly a fifth or £5 million per year, equal to the cost of 125 police officers. 
  The police force cut their budget through a deal with security firm G4S, transferring several administrative departments over to the private firm.

• with those resources, beef up the enforcements of housing conditions, “fair rents”, over-crowding and minimum wage.
• The “light-touch” regulation of gangmasters has clearly failed. In the light of what Lawrence’s article shows, read between the lines of this self-exculpation by (oh, the irony!):

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Modern Slavery and Organised Crime (Karen Bradley)

The GLA [Gangmasters Licensing Authority] is an organisation which regulates the supply of labour to the farming, food processing and shellfish gathering sectors and protects workers in those sectors from exploitation. The GLA works to embed a framework through which workers are treated fairly and labour providers and labour users operate on a level playing field. The GLA also plays a significant role in enforcing the protection of workers and directly tackling those who choose to abuse the system.

• eliminate, make illegal, the gang-master system. We used to have efficient employment exchanges, through which workers [were] treated fairly and labour providers and labour users operate[d] on a level playing field. Would it be a gross affront to liberty to have all short-term agricultural employment channelled through them, rather than factored clandestinely, in the early hours, on the forecourt of a petrol station? And, if not, might wage-payment be made through the same channel — that proper amounts paid and deductions made?
• ensure that migrant workers have “champions”. These used to be called “trade unions”.
• make the “social market” work for decent people.

As good an excuse as any …

How to fill an hour before a long, liquid pub lunch?

• Empty the dishwasher? Done.
• Read the Sundays? Andrew Rawnsley as good as ever. Mail as disgusting (but I’d not be buying that, in either sense).
• Think great thoughts? Too taxing.
• Blog those great thoughts? As if.
• Sort out why this Mac won’t talk properly to this Epson printer? Aha! Fixed.

And we need some musical ac-cump-knee-mint.

The Big Bastard back-up disk offers weeks of possibilities. But,  a none-too-great thought intrudes. Little Brother was at Billy Joel’s regular Madison Square Garden do this month, so let me share the goodness:

Indeed: when we all had hair.

The odour lingers

Remind me: which of the local elections in the late 1960s, when it went pear-shaped for Labour, was blamed on some utterance by Richard Crossman? Dick Crossman, being an honourable type (much of the time) took the blame. All those defeated candidates, who felt they had been crapped on, were not forgiving.

Cue Brutus:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene ii

Suddenly, thanks to Ken Livingstone (and if one takes on trust the “findings” of the Sunday punditocracy), Sadiq Khan’s remarkably-successful campaign for the London Mayoralty, Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

If it goes sour overnight next Thursday (indeed, if the count becomes a damn close-run thing — which the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say), guess who will be held to blame. And quite deservedly.

For some public figures:

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

For his brief moment, Tony Blair was one such. Blair was wrong on many things, but in the first Mayoralty election in 2000, he had Ken bang-to-rights.

Others enter with more than a whiff of brimstone.

Such has been, for a long political life, Ken Livingstone. He will not be missed.