Category Archives: Politics

The early days of Britain’s National Health Service

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The National Health Service–known to friends and wolves-in-friends’-clothing alike as the NHS–began in 1948, when World War II was over but food was still both scarce and rationed, the economy was just staggering out of a severe recession (no, I hadn’t heard of it either), and the empire was in the process of collapse. 

Introduce anything so ambitious these days and every sober advisor in (and out of) sight would tell you, Get serious. Maybe you could just replace the program with a nice slogan. So how did the prime minister, Clement Atlee, and his minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, manage this little trick?

For starters, the system they introduced didn’t drop from the sky. It had been taking shape since at least 1909. 

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–although if you read to the end it becomes semi-relevant since you could argue that it’s deepest pink. Or at least tinged with red.

 

Background

Here at Notes, we–by which, of course, I mean I–can never tell a story without going backward first, so let’s go backward. What happened in 1909 was the publication of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, under the leadership of Beatrice Webb. The commission was looking for something that would replace the Poor Law and the punitive Victorian workhouses. The minority report argued for “a national minimum of civilised life . . . open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”

Its focus was on preventing poverty rather than providing relief once it was entrenched. But this was a minority report. The majority report argued for individual responsibility and charity. 

What happened? The party in power, the Liberals, tossed both reports into the revolving file, also known as the trash, but Webb and her fellow Fabian socialists printed copies of the minority report and sold 25,000 of them. I’d be happy to see one of my books sell half as well. 

The minority report had far more impact than the majority’s and became  central to the thinking that eventually formed Britain’s welfare state. In some estimates, it led to the Beveridge Report, which leads us to our next subhead.

 

The Beveridge Report 

Despite its name, this was not a misspelled report on what people drank. It was a 1942 report that created the blueprint for a cradle-to-grave social services system. Most importantly for our purposes, it included the idea of a free health service, funded by the state and spreading the cost of healthcare out over the country’s population instead of having it fall on the individual or family unlucky enough to get sick. 

Some 250,000 copies of the full report were sold, along with 370,000 of an abridged version and 40,000 of an American edition. In twelve months. 

Britain’s 2,700 hospitals, at this point, were run by a mix of charities and local governments. National insurance existed, but it only covered people who were working. The number of wounded coming back from the war pushed the system toward bankruptcy, adding to the pressure for a unified, state-run health service.

 

Churchill, Atlee, the war, and the welfare state 

During the war–that’s World War II in case you got lost somewhere along the way–the Conservative and Labour parties governed in coalition. Churchill–a Conservative–was the prime minister, and Labour, the junior partner. pushed for the Beveridge report to be put into practice. Churchill was reluctant to commit the country to hefty new expenses until the postwar economic picture was clear, but he also advocated a “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” He didn’t oppose the Beveridge Report but wouldn’t commit himself to implementing it, and privately called Beveridge “a windbag and a dreamer.” 

That left Labour in a position to campaign as the party that would put the report–”the full Beveridge”–into practice, and in the first election after the war Labour won a big honkin’ majority: 393 seats to the Conservatives 197. Labour was a socialist party at this point (it no longer is) and on the first day the new parliament met, its MPs sang (or in some tellings, bellowed) the socialist anthem, “The Red Flag.” 

The link will take you to the song if you can’t go on without hearing it. This version is sung, not bellowed, which is a bit more important than being shaken not stirred.

Once he was prime minister, Atlee threw his weight behind the creation of a welfare state–a huge undertaking, including not just medical care but housing, education, and financial assistance to the unemployed, retired, and disabled.

“We had not been elected to try to patch up an old system but to make something new,” he said. “I therefore determined that we would go ahead as fast as possible with our programme.”

The program also included the construction of housing and the nationalization of key industries. Railroads and coal mines were “so run down,” as the Britannica puts it, “that any government would have had to bring them under state control. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.”

I should probably stop here and say what will be obvious to some people and not at all to others: there’s no single definition of socialism that all socialists agree on. I think a fair summary of this version is that key industries were nationalized and the state was responsible for supporting people’s overall welfare. It was a form of socialism that coexisted with capitalism.

But let’s go back to the end of the war. The country was well past its eyeballs in debt and Keynes had warned earlier that the country faced a “financial Dunkirk.” It had borrowed massively to fund its role in the war (a lot of it from the US), and wartime industries like aviation were bigger than it now needed while basic industries like coal and railroads needed serious repair–which is to say, investment. As the Britannica (again) puts it, “With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food.”

Loans from the US and Canada helped the country get through a short stretch. The Marshall Plan got them through another stretch of time. But food continued to be rationed, and the fifties were a pretty gray time for the country.

In that situation, how were they going to pay for this massive investment in a welfare state? At least part of the answer was the National Insurance Bill–an extension of a system put in place before World War I–which had working-age people paying in every week specifically to support the benefits everyone in the country could draw on. (Married women who worked didn’t pay in, but don’t worry, they suffered enough inequalities to more than make up for it.)  

 

The NHS

In 1948, the National Health Service was launched, under the leadership of Aneurin–called Nye–Bevan, the minister of health. 

Bevan had started work as a miner at 13 and chaired his miners’ lodge at 19. He also chaired the local Medical Aid Society, a system that had members paying in and getting healthcare in return. Initially, this didn’t include miners’ families. During his tenure, membership expanded to include non-miners,until 95% of the town was eligible. This became his blueprint. 

“All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more,” he said. “We are going to ‘Tredegarise’ you.” 

The NHS was set up to help everyone, and care would be free and based on need, not ability to pay. “A free health service is pure socialism,” he said, “and as such is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” 

Opposition came from the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association, and the right-wing newspapers.

Okay, historians argue about whether the Conservatives belong on the list. Their 1945 manifesto backed health services available to all citizens but didn’t commit to it being free. At any rate, they voted against Bevan’s version of the NHS and compared it to Nazism. That probably makes it fair to say they opposed it.

No one argues over whether doctors opposed the plan, at least as a group. Bevan claimed he won them around by “stuffing their mouths with gold”– allowing consultants to treat paying patients privately and still work inside the NHS. He later claimed he’d been “blessed by the stupidity of my enemies.”

 

And now?

I’d hoped to take you through a bit of more recent NHS history, but I dipped a toe into that water and just about drowned. Now that I’m back on the couch, safe and dry, I’ll risk nothing more than the most superficial of summaries. The NHS is immensely popular–basically, it’s the national religion–and most people find the idea of medicine for profit both shocking and counter-intuitive. But profit has crept into the system, and for the moment at least, socialism has been pushed to the political fringes. 

I’ve lived in Britain for 18 years and seen the NHS reorganized in assorted ways, all of them disastrous. Huge chunks have been privatized so one corporation or another could make a profit by running it as cheaply as possible, all in the name of efficiency, but somehow, magically, it all gets less and less efficient. At the moment, the NHS is suffering from years of underfunding. Waiting lists are long, jobs can’t be filled, and nurses and doctors are leaving the system to work somewhere–anywhere–else. 

With the next election predicted to return a huge Labour majority, I’d like to think the problems will be fixed–or at least addressed in some way that serves the public interest–but I’m doubtful. The current party leadership has been telling us we can’t expect much from them and I’m inclined to think they’re telling the truth. 

Still, for all its problems–and they’re many–the NHS is a magnificent thing: a system that makes healthcare free at the point of delivery, as the saying here goes. I’m originally from the US, so I’ve seen what the alternative looks like. A for-profit system is primarily interested in, um, making money, so what matters is whether a person can pay. US healthcare can and does bankrupt even the comfortable and well insured. It neglects the poor and milks the rich and–oh, hell, I could go on but you get the point. Both systems have their problems, but I much prefer the problems of a socialized system.

*

Now that Labour’s taken distance from any suggestion of socialism, I wondered if it had also taken distance from its old song, “The Red Flag.” Apparently not. Its 2022 party conference made headlines when the delegates sang it. The song opens with the words, “The people’s [or “workers’,” depending on the version you choose–and probably your politics] flag is deepest red / It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead.” A parody runs, “The people’s flag is deepest pink / It’s not as red as you might think.”

And with that I’ll leave you for the week. Stay well out there, people. It’s not safe to get sick.

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

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Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing. 

How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”

I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.

I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby. 

Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. 

Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.

The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.” 

That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.

In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.” 

You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?

Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.

But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.

Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”

Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols. 

How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and  the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments. 

Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned. 

In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.) 

The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.

The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.

In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.) 

Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.

For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one. 

 

And after that?

In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.” 

In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely. 

After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.

In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the  manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face. 

In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.

 

And the result?

I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it. 

As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t  the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.

Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured.  The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured. 

So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one. 

What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.

How many prime ministers does it take to destroy a party?

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Is anything more fun than watching a political party you despise come apart in slow motion? This isn’t innocent fun, I admit, because the Conservative Party’s woes risk tearing the country apart as well, but as long as it’s happening I see no reason not to enjoy the spectacle. 

What’s going on? The most recent news is that a section of the Conservative Party seems to be plotting the overthrow of yet another prime minister. That’s a prime minister who belongs to their own party, remember. Who leads their own party and who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who–

Et cetera. 

Irrelevant photo: primroses and lesser celandine.

What’s the latest plot?

A group of MPs (Members of Parliament; you’re welcome) met to discuss replacing Rishi Sunak with Penny Mordaunt. The group comes from the right wing of a party that has no left wing and whose anatomically awkward center wing is increasingly hard to spot (at least from the vantage point of my couch). Still, they seem to have located a few moderates to meet with and discuss their plotlet.

When I talk about the party’s right wing, mind you, I’m not talking about some unified group. They split apart as easily as mercury. This particular group could, if they’d wanted to, have backed Mordaunt in the last battle over who would be prime minister (she did run) but they wouldn’t because they didn’t like her views on trans rights. 

What are her views on trans rights? Good question. Two years ago, she either did or didn’t want to make it easier for them to transition. And she either did or didn’t make a U-turn on whatever her earlier position was. Or wasn’t. But since she hasn’t denounced them as a threat to women, weather, and western civilization, the culture warriors consider her woke.

Am I work? I got up at 5:30 this morning, walked the dog, and had two cups of tea. I’m writing this at 7 a.m. and I’m about as woke as it’s possible to be in that situation.

But we weren’t talking about me; we were talking about important people. If the right wing of the party–or this winglet of the right wing of the party–is going to back Mordaunt, the papers say she’d have to agree to farm out culture war issues to them. That way she could protect the purity of whatever she turns out to believe while still letting people who believe the opposite do whatever they think will earn votes from the rabid wing of the country’s electorate. 

Am I biased? I do have a few biases. They’re like accents: everyone has at least one, whether they know it or not. I like to take mine out and waive them around once in a while–it keeps them as fresh as if I’d dried them on the line–but my posts are as accurate as I can make them and I do my best to link to reputable sources. 

Will Mordaunt bite at the bait the plotters are dangling in front of her? She hasn’t said so, at least as I write this, but she also hasn’t said she wouldn’t, although her supporters make it sound unlikely.

This is political maneuvering, though. We can’t expect what people say to always match what they mean. Polls predict Mordaunt will lose her seat at the next election. It’s not out of the question that she’d rather wander out into the allegedly real world as ex-prime minister than as a lowly ex-MP.

 

Why choose Mordaunt?

The plotters have several reasons to have taken Mordaunt off the hanger when they chose their outfit for the day. One is that, as I’ve said in multiple posts, the Conservatives have an extremely shallow talent puddle and they’ve pretty well splashed all the water out of it. That’s what happens when you give kiddies rubber boots and turn them loose in wet weather. But the most important factor may be that during the king’s coronation she carried an eight-pound sword, upright and well in front of her body, for fifty-one minutes. 

The newspapers all agree that this is no easy trick. Since I’ve never tried it–we don’t have a lot swords at my house–I’ll have to take their word for it. The articles were written by serious journalists who wouldn’t just close their eyes and trust Mordaunt’s publicity machine on something this important. They will have borrowed eight-pound swords and tried it themselves.

If any of you have relevant experience, I’d love to hear about it. A reader who drops in to Notes from time to time is a weightlifter and has pulled a truck in competitions. Is she a good candidate for prime minister? She’s looking better all the time.

Sam, if you’re out there, we need your help here, at least as a sword-carrying consultant and quite possibly as a candidate for prime minister. Our slogan will be, Our candidate can pull a truck. Can yours?

 

Does the sword really matter?

Maybe not. Some people in the know are speculating that it isn’t Mordaunt the plotters want. They’re using her to hide their real plan, which is to trigger yet another leadership contest in the Conservative Party before the next election. Then they could put her in as prime minister and when she leads them into what pretty much everyone expects to be a disastrous defeat at the next election, they can blame her. That will clear the path for candidates who are further to the right to really, really lead the party, because waiting in the wings and oozing ambition are Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, and Grant Shapps.

Will anything come of this? Anyone who thinks they can predict where we’re headed is delusional. 

As for Rishi Sunak, our prime minister du jour, he says his party’s united and life is fine. I have no information on how long he can hold a sword upright.

When will the next election be? Best guesses at the moment are that the election will happen in November. Or October. Or some other month. The latest possible date is January 25, 2025–five long years from the last one–but prime ministers can set earlier dates if they get lonely. 

 

What’ll happen at the next election?

Polls suggest a disaster for the Conservatives, although they’re hoping that if they postpone it long enough the economy will improve, all the gods I don’t believe in will descend from Mount Olympus to intervene, and they’ll scrape through. One of many wild cards, though, is that the main challenger, Labour, has divested itself of almost everything it ever stood for. That’s supposed to make them bulletproof. You know: if you don’t hang up a target, it’s hard for anyone to hit a bullseye. 

Whether that will get people to vote Labour is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to work up much passion for a party whose slogan is We’re not the Tories. Vote for us and we’ll all find out what we stand for. If anything.

As for the Liberal Democrats–the other major nationwide party–no one ever did know what they stand for. Or at least no one I know.

In the meantime, multiple MPs–whole flocks of them–are announcing that they won’t run again. Many have taken phone calls from reality and realized they can’t win, but it’s not just Conservatives who are giving up. Across the political spectrum, many are saying, essentially, “I can’t stand this anymore..” 

As Carolyn Lucas, a Green Party MP, put it, “In any other walk of life, if people behaved as they do here, they’d be out on their ear. . . . It is utterly, utterly dysfunctional. I mean, really, it’s loopy.”

Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain

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Residents of a care home in Surrey were sent Valentine’s cards–red heart, pink bow, all the traditional stuff—from that most caring of senders, a local funeral home. A spokesperson for the care home said residents were thrilled to get the cards, and doesn’t the involvement of a local business go to show how deeply embedded the care home is in the community? Read the quotes and you can hear “Look on the Sunny Side” playing between the lines.

Residents’ families, on the other hand–at least those who were quoted–said things like “appalling” and “insensitive.”

The funeral home itself said, “Oops” (that’s a rough summary), followed by some verbiage about “unintended distress,” and it’s that “unintended” that makes this a particularly British story. Because tossing in screamingly unnecessary adverbs is a very British thing. My favorite is when newsreaders tell  us that someone “sadly died.”

As far as I’ve been able to figure out—and I’ve lived here for almost 18 years now—you can’t die in this country without doing it sadly. You can’t die absurdly, or with a sense of relief, or even unnecessarily. Above all, you can’t die unadorned. The word died isn’t allowed out in public until it’s fully dressed and the correct adjective has been buttoned up to the neck.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom. Indoors.

 

Immigration and the search for an enemy

Ten years ago, when Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe was still searching for a group of people frightening enough to rile up the populace, the Home Office discovered foreign students and offered them up as a target for some of the free-floating hate that drifts across the island with the rains that blow in from the Atlantic.

Why foreign students? The better question might be, Why not foreign students? They needed someone. The Home Office was led at the time by Theresa May, and she was working to establish her right-wing credentials by declaring a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, which ended up creating a hostile environment for legal ones. A hefty number of them were deported, but it’s never enough to satisfy the anti-immigrant lobby, so lucky Terri, Santa Claus brought her the off-season gift of a BBC documentary about cheating on the English-language competency tests that foreign students had to pass before they could renew their visas. The documentary focused on just a few test centers, but Terri turned off the TV and said, “Right. We’ll cancel the visas on 35,000 of them.” Or to put that another way, 97% of the people who took the test.

Is it even vaguely credible that 97% of the people who took the test cheated and, until Terri turned off that fateful TV program, got away with it?

Who cared? It played well with the anti-immigrant lobby, who by then had left the lobby and were occupying seats in the House of Commons.

Cue dawn raids, students held in detention centers for months, lost degrees, lost careers, lost reputations, and deportations before anyone had a chance to appeal or prove that their English was just fine, thanks. What the hell, they were a bunch of foreigners. Of course they cheated. Give them a chance to appeal and they’ll tie this mess up in red tape forever. Give them a chance to demonstrate their competence and they’ll only make us look silly.

Foreigners are sneaky like that.

So here we are, ten years late. Some 3,000 former students have won appeals and a new group is starting what sounds like a mass appeal. And since a TV series dramatizing a post office scandal drove politicians of all parties to make noise about compensating some deeply wronged sub-postmasters, a group of the former students are working on a TV script about what happened to them. To date, noise is all that’s come of the political agreement about the sub-postmasters, but still, if you can’t get justice, the illusion of it is comforting.

*

Lest you should be silly enough to expect consistency from the Home Office, lately it’s been closing its eyes and flinging work visas in what sound like some dodgy directions. Not because it now loves immigrants. It’s at least as anti-immigrant as it was under Theresa May, although it’s found a new boogey man: refugees who cross the Channel in small boats. They make for scarier headlines than foreign students.

The current crop of visas are meant for people to work in the care sector, which is understaffed and underpaid and relies heavily on immigrant workers. But the visas don’t go to individual care workers, they go through care providers, who get licenses to sponsor immigrant workers, and those providers are popping, mushroom-like, out of the soggy ground of our political bog. Or of our overdone metaphor.

One company that was granted 275 visas didn’t exist; 268 companies have never been inspected and some aren’t registered with the watchdog that’s supposed to do the inspecting. Some don’t have addresses, only post office boxes. Some have been formed so recently that they’ve never filed company accounts. One has a website with reviews from clients named John Doe and Jane Smith.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you. And myself.

The assumption is that the companies are selling the visas. I’ve seen reports of immigrant workers in the care sector paying as much as £15,000 for visas and once they get here being “housed in sub-standard accommodation and even forced to share beds.with colleagues.

“Some have been paid for just a fraction of the hours they have worked or [been] subjected to racist remarks, harassment, and intimidation if they complain about the treatment of the people they care for.

“Others have worked for several months without being paid by their employers, who claim this is to recoup fees towards the cost of the migrant workers’ training or accommodation.”

The number of companies with the power to sponsor visas more than doubled between 2022 (41,621) and 2023 (84,730).

 

How much for that Mao in the window?

A London auction house was selling artifacts–that’s a fancy word meaning stuff–from China’s Cultural Revolution, and a rare early edition of Mao Tes-Tung’s Little Red Book was expected to sell for more than £30,000.

What’s wrong with this picture? So much that I have no idea where to start, so I’ll leave you with the picture and save my adjectives for the time when, sadly, I have to report a death.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a free stuffed toy . . .

. . . I can tell you how to get one.

This didn’t happen in Britain, but with a little work it could’ve, since it could happen any place where attractive nuisances entice people to trade coins for a chance to pick up stuffed toys with a mechanical claw and drop them down a chute so their kids can take them home and love them for ten minutes or so. Or not drop them down a chute, because no matter how simple it looks the machine never gives you quite enough time to get the toy where it needs to be.

In Australia, a three-year-old found a better way to get what he wanted. In the half-second when his father got distracted, he climbed up the chute and materialized inside the machine, standing upright among all the stuffed toys any kid could dream of.

Since using the claw to drop him back down the chute didn’t seem like a good idea, the father called the claw machine company, which asked helpful questions like, “How much money did you put in the machine?”

The only thing stuck in the machine was his son, he said, and he’d like to have him back.

The person on the other end of the line wasn’t programed to deal with that and the police ended up smashing the glass and extracting the kid. The media is (sadly) silent on the all-important question of whether the boy got to take a toy home.

 

From the Department of Historical Preservation

In an effort to polish Britain’s reputation for eccentricity and historical hoo-ha’s, the owner of a pub in Staffordshire, The Crooked House, has been ordered to rebuild it, brick by brick. It was built in 1765 and sank into the ground either because of mining in the area or a nearby water wheel (no, I don’t understand that last one either), until it sat at a 15-degree angle. It had been propped up in various ways over the years and was doing just fine until it was sold and–oops–mysteriously caught fire.

Then, just to make sure of things, the new owner had the shell bulldozed.

Local people got up in arms. Or up in containers, which they used to store 23,000 bricks that they salvaged from the rubble, and the new owner’s been ordered to put them back where they were, and at the pre-fire angle. Unless the owner appeals, they have three years, but they may be too distracted to bother, since the fire’s being treated as arson.

Britain’s unwritten constitution and its, ahem, challenges

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You’d think Britain was a careful country. It’s concerned enough with health and safety to make a lot of jokes about it. (Or them if that’s a plural. The words have melded together so solidly in the national consciousness that it’s hard to tell.) It’s survived long enough to be obsessed with its own history, which keeps those of us who share that obsession occupied happily. Somehow, though, it got careless with its constitution and never wrote it down. 

Yes, that is embarrassing, but the country makes do with something called an unwritten constitution.

What’s an unwritten constitution? Well, it has words, it’s just that they’re not on paper. Or not any one piece of paper. They’re on lots of pieces, in lots of places, and I’m not convinced any two people agree on which pieces, which places, or which words. What everyone agrees on is that it’s made up of statutes, rulings, precedents, treaties, and a yellow onion aging gently in the back of my refrigerator. And because Britain takes itself and its history seriously (most countries do), people who’ve grown up here consider this normal. It’s only people like me, who having wandered in from other places, say, “An unwritten what?? Is that even possible?” 

It is: what exists must be possible, but its unwritten state puts a lot of pressure on precedent–not to mention on me, as the keeper of that onion. Precedent becomes not just history and habit and revered tradition but (I’m repeating myself but this is central, so bear with me) an element of the constitution itself. And that leaves everyone wondering which precedents go into the constitution (who knows? It’s not written) and which ones get filed under Anomalies.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this shrub is, but it’s growing outside a neighbor’s house and it flowered in late January. I’m impressed.

I’m writing about this now because not because the status of the onion has changed (sleep well tonight: it’s fine) but because a recent political and legal uproar has brought it into focus–again.

 

The uproar

I’ll tell you the tale in a minute, but before I do I have to ask, Don’t I sound clever when I use words like anomaly? Hell, I even spelled it right without the help of my spellcheck. 

Thanks. Now I owe you the tale. 

In 1999, the Royal Mail introduced a new computer system called Horizon, which was made by Fujitsu and cost a billion pounds to install. I hope that included the purchase price, but you know, a billion pounds doesn’t go as far as it used to, as you’ll have noticed the last time you were in the supermarket. It definitely doesn’t include the legal costs of what turned out to be a royal fuckup. It’s way too early to calculate those.

Horizon was used by sub-post offices, which are post office counters set up in corner shops and village shops–mom-and-pop operations for the most part–and the users soon started reporting glitches. Serious glitches. The kind of glitches that said, “Your calculations are off by a few thousand pounds today.”

Since their contracts with the post office said they had to make up any shortfall, you should picture sub-postpeople tearing their hair out, weeping, shouting, and calling the post office to report a problem.

And to each of them, the post office said, “Geez, no one else is reporting any problems. It must be you.” The post office not only didn’t look for the source of the problem, it demanded its money and it prosecuted people for financial shenanigans.

Businesses were lost. Marriages were lost. People went broke. Disaster entered people’s lives in multiple forms. Some 4,000 sub-postpeople were accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting, 900 ended up in court, and a lucky 236 went to prison. Eventually, sub-postpeople contacted each other and compared notes. They discovered it wasn’t just them and went public with their stories.

Anyone in Britain who stays awake for the 6 o’clock news heard about this years ago, and Parliament started hearings on the issue in 2021. The hearings ground on quietly until–I’m serious here–the BBC aired a TV show dramatizing the sub-postpeople’s fight, at which point, politicians said, with one voice, “You’re right. Somebody ought to do something.”

Then they remembered that they were the somebodies in charge. That’s even more embarrassing than forgetting to write down your constitution.

Shocking revelations from the hearings jumped from obscurity to page one of pretty much any paper you can think of. Except, maybe, the Sun. We all collectively found out that Fujitsu knew about the program’s glitches as early as 1999. We learned that the post office not only knew about the glitches but edited witness statements from Fujitsu so they didn’t acknowledge the program’s bugs. We learned that the post office didn’t disclose relevant information and now claims it’s not realistic for them to work evenings and weekends all these years later to find it. I could go on, but you get a feel for the shape of this mess, right?

With that sort of thing floating into public view, suddenly all the ways of addressing the problem that either weren’t necessary or weren’t possible before became not just possible but politically necessary, and if they weren’t exactly done they were at least promised, which in PoliticalLand is the same thing.

On the symbolic level, the former head of the post office gave back her CBE, an acronym that stands for Commander of the British Empire. 

What would the British Empire have done if she’d issued a command before giving back her award? Nothing. It doesn’t exist anymore. As far as I can figure out, all the CBE gives a person is bragging rights and a medal. If those matter to you, it’s important. If they don’t–well, you can put it on the table next to an egg, a sausage, baked beans, tea, and toast and you’ll have a small-scale version of an English breakfast, although I don’t recommend eating the medal. Or the beans.

On a more practical level, the government jumped in and promised compensation and said it would introduce a bill to overturn all those convictions for fraud etc.

How much compensation are we talking about? One former sub-postmaster says it would cover 15% of his losses. Another called the offer offensive and cruel. A third said it wouldn’t cover the interest on what she was owed. But let’s nod nicely to that little game of three-card monte (you’ll want to keep your hand on your wallet as we get close) and move on. We need to talk about the bill to overturn the convictions, because that’s the one that raises constitutional problems.

 

Why? What’s wrong with doing justice on the cheap?

At first glance, a bill to overturn unjust convictions looks good. Sweep a forearm across the table and shove all those convictions onto the floor, where they’ll land alongside the egg, baked beans, sausage, tea, CBE medal, and broken crockery. Labour–the opposition party just now–in the person of its leader, Keir Starmer, jumped in and said yes, the bill’s a great idea, and walked out of Parliament with baked beans sticking to his shoes. 

I was tempted to write that everyone strode off into the sunset singing “Rule Britannia,” only–did I mention that the empire’s dead and gone? What’s more, the Commons’ Defense Committee estimates that Britain’s army would run out of puff after only a few months of fighting a more or less equal power. So we’ll find some other song. “Goodnight Irene,” maybe. One verse goes, “Sometimes I live in the country / Sometimes I live in the town. / Sometimes I take a notion / To jump into the river and drown.”

You’re right. I shouldn’t be allowed out in public, but have faith, someone will come up with the right song. I look forward to fielding comments on the subject. Y’all are almost as irresponsible as I am.

In the meantime, the proposal has some built-in problems. If anyone really did steal money from the post office, the bill would overturn their convictions along with those of the innocent. In an effort to iron out that wrinkle, the government proposed that no one could get their compensation without swearing to their innocence. In writing. That way, if they turned out to be guilty, they’d end up back in court, because (ironically, given that the context here is an unwritten constitution) putting a statement on paper and swearing to it can be legally binding. 

That brings us to a new wrinkle: the sub-postpeople are understandably wary of swearing to anything. They don’t trust the courts, the post office, or the goodwill and sanity of bureaucrats or the government. They may be reluctant to open themselves up to another unfair prosecution. 

Larger than that, though, is the constitutional problem: Britain’s courts are independent of Parliament. In other words, politicians can’t overrule them, but here they’d be doing exactly that. This is written down exactly nowhere, but it’s a longstanding precedent and part of our invisible constitution.

What happens, then, when a new precedent comes along and overturns the old precedent? Irresistible force; immovable object. I never did know the answer to the question of what happens when one meets the other. The best I could do is say that either one turns out not to be immovable or the other one turns out not to be irresistible. I also don’t know what happens when a new precedent tries to elbow out an old precedent. Are they equally powerful? What does the constitution have to say?  The answer depends on interpretation, and on who gets to do the interpreting.

Ken MacDonald–sorry, Lord Ken MacDonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions–explained the issue by saying, “What we have is Parliament seizing from the courts and the judges the right to say who is guilty and who is not guilty. And the problem is that once this dam is burst–we can all see it’s being done for the best of reasons here–who’s to say how such a process might be used in the future?”

It’s not unreasonable for him to worry. The government’s already going nose to nose with the courts over a bill to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional and right away a right-wing edge of an already right-wing Conservative Party called for Parliament to overrule the court and review the courts’ authority over the government. It called for the prime minister to “step up and do whatever it takes.” 

Depending on how recently you’ve had the wax cleared out of your ears, “whatever it takes” can sound either down-to-earth and practical or threatening. To my ever-so-clean ears, it sounds like a call for the courts to be swept aside when they get in the way of a party’s political agenda. 

To date, the prime minister has tried to placate the right without ripping up the invisible document that’s supposed to govern the way he governs. He’s introduced a bill that declares Rwanda to be a safe place to deport people to. The idea is that if Parliament says it’s safe, then it is, so the Supreme Court won’t be able to say it isn’t.

No, I didn’t make that up.  

The bill passed the House of Commons and is, I believe, currently being eviscerated in the House of Lords. If I’m right–and I don’t know how the vote there will go–it couldn’t happen to a nicer bill. The problem is that the Lords can only hold the bill up, not chop it into little pieces and put it on the compost heap. 

If you begin to get a picture of vocal sections of the country calling for the introduction of an authoritarian regime, then you’re standing in the same museum I am, and looking at the same picture. Precedents aren’t hard to find on the international scene, and they’re influential although they don’t get to become part of Britain’s constitution. 

The bill may not be necessary in any case. There’s a way to overturn the post office convictions without chopping holes in the invisible constitution: the Court of Appeals could speed up the appeals process by trundling in retired judges to help and hearing the cases in large batches, a bit like chocolate chip cookies in an industrial oven. But that doesn’t give anyone political credit for getting things done, so where’s the fun in it?  

Meanwhile, back at the post office . . .

. . . they’re still using the Horizon software. In fact, the post office paid £95 million to extend Fujitsu’s contract for two years. Or some amount along those lines. The article I pulled that from is full of numbers, and numbers and I aren’t on good terms. If you want serious numerical reporting, go follow the link and don’t bother me. What I can tell you is that Horizon’s still full of glitches and the post office is trying to replace it but seems to be trapped. It spent £31 million trying to move the work to Amazon–and failed. 

If the post office ever gets out of this mess, is the story over? Hell no. Last Sunday’s paper announced that the software used by Ofsted inspectors periodically wipes out everything they’ve put in, leaving them to recreate days’ worth of work from memory. 

Ofsted inspectors? They’re the folks who go into schools and rule–often on shaky grounds, if the reports I’ve read are correct–on whether a school is failing or fabulous. The school’s future depends on their judgment. Schools aren’t told when the inspectors are working from memory, so if they challenge an inspector’s conclusions, they can’t use that as evidence.  

An Ofsted spokesperson said, “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. We’ll wake you if we need you.”

Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.

How much does a free portrait of the king cost?

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Britain’s government, in its wisdom, has set aside £8 million so that schools, police stations, courts, and any organization run by the state can request a portrait of King Charles. In full regalia, as a government website reminds us, making him sound like an action figure–the kind you’ll find on the shelves of your local toy store–and I won’t post the link for that because this is the first paragraph and posting links in the first paragraph is against my religion.

But this is not only a portrait of the king in full regalia that’s on offer, it’s a free portrait of et cetera. True, you don’t get any extras with it–no surprise gift, no fries, no pickle–but still, free is free. Especially if we don’t count that £8 the government will fork out for however many it sends or the £86.3 million the country pays to support the monarchy itself. 

Irrelevant photo: I think this is a kind of thistle. Anyway a wildflower. Definitely not a king.

The portraits will be particularly welcome in police stations and courts. There’s nothing like getting arrested to make a person grateful for a glimpse of the overdressed face of authority.

 

Hang on. How much does the monarchy really cost?

That £86 point whatever million is only the Sovereign Grant, formerly known as the Civil List–money that funds the monarch’s official duties, which include cutting ribbons, pulling cords that dramatically sweep back itty-bitty miniature curtains to unveil plaques. (Cue applause from thrilled spectators.) Ah, but that’s not all. The royal family’s duties also include dressing in improbable clothing for ceremonies, waving, smiling (not as easy as you think), and entertaining a carefully selected group of interlopers on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. 

The Sovereign Grant also has to cover property maintenance, travel, payroll, and whatever I’ve forgotten.

But that’s not the royal family’s only income. We haven’t counted the money it gets from Cornwall and Lancaster, which are duchies held personally by the prince of Wales (Cornwall; £21 million a year) and the king (Lancaster; £24 million). We also haven’t counted whatever else is included because that info’s private.  

Even without that, I may still be underestimating their cost to the country, because we should add security–possibly only security for special events like the queen’s funeral, but hey, this all gets murky pretty quickly–and I have no idea what else. Republic, an organization trying to establish (you saw this coming, right?) a republic, estimates the total annual spend at £ 345 million.  

So £8 million for a free portrait? Don’t be stingy. It’s a bargain.

 

By way of comparison

In 2012, the Department for Education was prepared to spend £370,000 to send a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country. The government was supposed to cough up the money, but all hell broke loose and the program ended up being funded by–well, the list I glanced through featured a lot of hedge-fund gazillionaires and donors to the parties that were then in power, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

That didn’t shut up anyone who thought the thing was a waste of money (most schools already had a bible, they said, so what was the point?), but it did let me compare the number of pages in the King James Bible (many) with the number of pages in the king’s portrait (one) and wonder what they’re printing these portraits on. I mean, yes, photographic paper’s expensive, and yes, the King James Bible Project only sent out 24,000 Bibles compared to no-one’s-saying-how-many portraits, but still, on a page-to-page and order-to-order comparison, it does sound pricey.

 

And since we’re talking about that Bible project

The then-education secretary, Michael Gove, was asked if he’d back a similar plan to send around copies of the Quran. 

Um, yeah, sure, he mumbled. The Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud. What the hell. Name a holy book and he was all for it–and all the more so because you can’t say Quran in a positive context unless you buffer if with several other holy books

Oddly enough, that was the last we heard of those follow-up projects.

*

Discussing the bible project with Lord Google raised some interesting issues. People, he reminded me, often ask whether the British crown owns rights to the bible.

Sure, I thought. And it’s got a monopoly on god. 

It turns out the question isn’t as silly as I thought. The King James version is covered by crown copyright, which applies to work made by civil servants, government ministers, and other people you can stuff into related categories. To quote WikiWhatsit, “There is . . . a small class of materials where the Crown claims the right to control reproduction outside normal copyright law due to letters patent issued under the royal prerogative. This material includes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.”

I don’t usually quote Wikipedia. On an average, it’s as accurate as standard encyclopedias (or was when I was working for a standard encyclopedia and looked it up), but it’s also subject to brief fits of madness, and it changes, making it an awkward beast to cite. But it’s late in the week, I post on Fridays, and I’m short of time. It’ll do.

According to a copyright advice website, “To split hairs a bit, the King James Bible is not subject to copyright in the UK, however because of Letters Patent issued by the Crown, only the Queen’s Printer may print, publish and distribute the KJV Bible within the UK and its Overseas Territories.” 

A grammar advice website (mine will do in a pinch) would tell you to replace the comma before “however” with either a semicolon or a period. You’re welcome. 

But to return to the copyright issue, if you planned to print the King James Bible in the back bedroom and you live in the UK, you’re advised to find a new hobby. If you have other plans for the weekend, this won’t affect you.

Religious oaths in British history, or how to keep groups you don’t like out of Parliament

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The British state is as tangled in arcane rules as a kitten in a ball of yarn, but it’s not above issuing itself a scissors when either necessity or the political mood of the moment demands, and that’s what it did in 1833, when a Quaker, Joseph Pease, was elected as a Member of Parliament. 

The strand of yarn that needed to be cut was the requirement that MPs swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment. Who’s not called the monarch-of-the-moment but the king or the queen, with a capital letter I can’t be bothered to hand out, and it’s all taken very seriously, thank you.  

Irrelevant photo: This is what cats do on a rainy day. But hey, I did mention kittens…

 

Quakers and oaths

The problem in 1833 was that Quakers didn’t swear oaths, and I assume they still don’t. It’s against their religion, and you don’t have to read very far into Quaker history to find that when something’s against their religion, serious Quakers will go to no end of trouble not to do it. Their founder was well acquainted with prison. He was jailed for blasphemy, for refusing to take an oath, for having long hair, for assorted other things. That long-hair charge was ruled not proven (i’m not sure how–you’d think the evidence would be on hand, or on head), but he and several others weren’t released. Instead they were fined for refusing to take their hats off in court. They refused to pay the fine, which they considered unjust, and were returned to prison. 

They’re a stubborn lot, the Quakers. I admire them. 

So, no oath for Joseph Pease, who wasn’t the first Quaker elected to Parliament. One was elected in 1698 but never got to take his seat. Three years earlier, Quakers’ affirmations had been accepted in place of oaths in most situations. The exceptions were giving evidence in court, serving on a jury, and holding a paid crown office. (in 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence. (In 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence.)

MPs weren’t paid until 1911–they were assumed to be independently wealthy and the setup pretty much restricted the post to people who were–so it wasn’t irrational to think the new MP might be able to take his seat. He wrote to the speaker saying he hoped “my declarations of fidelity . . . might in this case, as in others where the law requires an oath, be accepted.”

The hell it would be. No oath, no seat in the Commons. A by-election was ordered and someone else was elected. 

 

Which brings us back to Joseph Pease

That explains why when Pease was elected he expected trouble. He told his constituents that he was prepared to “go through much persecution in your cause” and wouldn’t “be surprised if the [Commons’] Serjeant-at-Arms be ordered to take me into custody.” 

But it was now 1833–practically modern times, right? Two seventeenth-century laws that kept anyone but Anglicans out of public office had been repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed in 1829.  

So Pease showed up, announced that he wouldn’t take the oath, surprising no one, and was asked–or possibly told–to step outside while the Commons discussed its response. 

What the Commons did was set up a committee to look at laws and precedents, because what Britain has instead of a written constitution is an endless collection of precedents. How anyone who enters that maze finds their way back is beyond me, but find a way back they did, and in what must be record time they recommended that Commons accept his affirmation. The house agreed and he got to take his seat.

That same session of Parliament passed a law accepting affirmations for jury duty and public office from Quakers and Moravians.

Moravians? They’re a Protestant group founded in Bohemia by Jan Hus and predating Martin Luther. (Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t know about that pre-dating business.)

 

Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?

Um no. Because although Catholics had been admitted to Parliament in 1829, Jews had to wait until 1858. And voting was still restricted to people with money. 

Did I say “people”? I meant men. The idea of women either voting or running for office was too absurd to spend time on. So let’s focus on the next category of people to wriggle through the eye of the political needle.

Jews weren’t specifically excluded from Parliament, but to take a seat they had to swear an oath that included the words, “Upon my true Faith as a Christian,” and you can see what that’s a problem if you take this stuff seriously. Or even if you don’t. That would be a step too far, even for my own irreligiously Jewish self.

Disraeli, who’s known as Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, was born Jewish but converted as a child, when his parents did, so he had no problem a Christian oath. Interesting that he’s still considered a Jewish prime minister, don’t you think?

We can also unearth an MP and a Lord or two who had Jewish ancestors somewhere in the background but who was Christian enough to feel comfortable about the oath. Were they Jewish? Weren’t they Jewish? I’m sure it depended on who you asked, and quite possibly still does. 

In 1850, a clearly Jewish Jew was elected to represent Greenwich, and instead of disappearing politely as a previous Jewish would-be MP had, he took his seat and refused to leave, causing an uproar. The house voted on whether to adjourn and he cast a vote. He also spoke on a motion that he be asked to withdraw.

The whole thing went to the courts and he was fined £500 for every vote he cast.

Over time, the Commons passed more than one bill that would have allowed Jews to take a different oath, but the Lords kept blocking it. Eventually, a compromise allowed each house to modify their oaths by a special resolution for each Jewish member elected. 

None of this applied to people from other religions, or to atheists, although I haven’t seen evidence that any either ran for office or got elected at this point.

It’s hard to say when dissenting Protestants were allowed to take seats in Commons. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, according to Parliament’s website, some dissenters attended Church of England services occasionally to be sure they wouldn’t be excluded. That makes them hard or impossible to count. 

So basically, I can’t offer any information on them.

 

But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again

Once he took his seat, he had one last problem to contend with: In this period, men took off their hats as a sign of deference to their superiors, and Quakers refused to recognize either superiors or inferiors, so they kept their hats on their heads. That’s one of the things George Fox was jailed for. So as Pease came in, the Commons doorkeeper would sweep his hat off for him and leave it in the Commons library. 

Problem solved. 

Breaking with tradition, he didn’t address the Speaker of the House as sir, and where other MPs referred to each other in speeches as the honorable member, he settled for the member. The roof did not fall in.

 

What oath do MPs take these days?

It’s all loosened up considerably. If they’re going to swear, they use a wording settled on in 1868. They get to choose their sacred book and say, “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to [his or her] Majesty [fill in the appropriate name], [his or her] heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” 

I’d recommend inserting an and before “heirs and successors,” but no one’s asked me. 

Having a choice of sacred books reminds me that, to date, no Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster member has been elected as an MP, which is a shame because they’d have to appear with a colander on their head and hold a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

May I live long enough to see that happen.

But we’re not done with the choices now available. They can take the oath in Welsh, in Cornish, or in Scottish Gaelic. They can hold the book up. They can raise a hand but not hold the book. They can kiss the book. They can dance the hula and leave everyone speechless.

No, you can’t trust everything I say.

On the other hand, if they’re going to affirm, they say, “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to” etc. 

I don’t know why they have to both declare and affirm, but it’s okay because it comes with a side of fries and a fizzy drink, but they don’t get to dance the hula.

What happens if you’re an anti-monarchist? You have a problem. Would-be MPS who don’t either swear or affirm their loyalty to the crown can’t take their seats, speak in debates, vote, or receive a salary. They can’t pass Go. And they can be fined £500 if they try to do any of that. And if that isn’t enough, their seat sill be declared vacant “as if they were dead.”

The Conservative Party drains its shallow pool of talent

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I’ve suspected for quite a while that the Tory talent pool would run dry, but we seem to be seeing the final drops of run out. 

What am I talking about? Well, the story starts some years ago, when Labour was in power and Gordon Brown was, so briefly, the prime minister. He committed the country to building HS2, a high-speed rail line that would link London with the north–Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Whether it was a good idea is open to raucous debate, but since then one government has tossed it to the next–from Labour to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to a series of Conservative governments–and it’s gone further and further over budget. 

The initial budget was £32 billion. Okay, it was £32.7 billion, but when you’re dealing with billions, who cares about the .7? According to some estimates, the whole thing would now cost £100 billion.  

Irrelevant photo: Not a dandelion but one of a zillion flowers that look like them but aren’t.

Ah, but the whole thing won’t be built. One leg of a Y-shaped line was canceled years ago, and now the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the entire northern part of the project is going in the scrap bucket and the money that saves will be spent on other transportation projects in the north of England. 

Why the north? Because the whole thing was sold as a way to connect London and the north, and prime ministers du days past, especially Boris Johnson, made a lot of noise about how that would bring prosperity to the north, which could use a bit of that, thanks. His favorite phrase was the annoying leveling up. I expect he was nervous about letting that scary word leveling run around bare-ass nekked, because folks might think the project would take something away from London. 

So he reassured London that it would continue to be the favored child, but the north would now become just as favored, just as rich. Every child would be the favorite. And I’ll become my own grandmother.

It’s in this context that, in the midst of the Conservative Party conference, the government published a 40-page prospectus to back up Sunak’s cancellation of the northern leg of the line: Network North: transforming British transport. On the first page, it plonks Manchester down where Preston’s supposed to be. Since I can’t locate either Preston or Manchester, I’m taking the word of two sources, one of which says, cautiously, “At first glance . . . it seems to relocate. . . .”

I’m not sure what happens at second glance or why it only seems. Still, even appearing to misplace a major city does give the impression of carelessness.

But let’s not be hasty. The prospectus is clearly the product of deep thought and careful work. It promises to fund an extension of the Greater Manchester Metrolink system to the airport, although the system linked to the airport in 2014. It promises improvements in Plymouth, which even I can find, right down there on the south coast, which is another way to say, Not in the north. Bristol–also not in the north–was promised a £100,000 investment until, overnight, the promise disappeared in the online document and was replaced with some vague verbiage about the west. Which is, likewise, not in the north. And then there’s a commitment to upgrade a road near Southampton (situated where the name makes you think it would be, not in the north), but that was a mistake. They meant Littlehampton, which isn’t on the south coast but is pretty damn close. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to love British politics.

 

So what’s left after the cancellation?

What’s left is an expensive train from London to Birmingham. Which–I’m getting tired of typing this–isn’t in the north. It’s in the Midlands, where it’s always been. After trains reach Birmingham, they might end up using the existing track to Manchester, but instead of being high-speed, they’ll run slower than the trains that already run on that line. The existing trains tilt. The new ones won’t. The article I stole this from doesn’t say so, but I assume that means they have to slow down on the curves. 

Oh, and the platforms are too short for the high-speed trains the system was originally planned for, so they’ll be replaced by skateboards. 

Can’t stay upright on a skateboard? Get out on the highway and stick out your thumb.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, has since clarified that his department was only giving a few examples of where the money might be spent so we needn’t get so starchy about it all. 

And did I mention that £1 billion has already been spent on the canceled part of the line–or at least invoices amounting to that have already been submitted? You see why I can’t get worked up about the £.7 billion, right?

The House of Lords: how it formed and what it does

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Britain’s House of Lords traces its history back to the 11th century, which means it predates the country itself, because although Britain did eventually show up at the party, it was unforgivably late.

The part of the 11th century that we happen to be talking about is the Anglo-Saxon part of the century, before the Norman invasion, when the king had a witan–a group of advisors to consult if and when he wanted to. It would’ve been made up of the king’s ministers plus the most powerful of the lords and religious leaders–you know, the country’s big bruisers–and a wise king sometimes made sure they’d support whatever he had in mind before going too far out on a limb.

Although having said that, there’s some debate about who got invitations to the witan and who got to stay home and sulk. A lot of Anglo-Saxon history is subject to debate, but we’re going to rampage through this quickly because we were looking for Britain, remember? And Britain isn’t here yet.

Irrelevant photo: morning glories, a.k.a. bindweed

Before we leave, though–have a drink while I’m messing around, why don’t you?–I should mention that whatever the Witan did (and that sounds a little hazy too), it did get to select the king. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t automatically go with the oldest son. 

 

Then the Normans invaded and everything changed…

…except for what didn’t. Kings still summoned the country’s big bruisers once or twice a year. Because in theory the kings might’ve been all-powerful, but they couldn’t govern without the backing from their lords–at least not well and not for long. It’s not hard to find examples of English kings offending the nobility more than they were willing to be offended and ending up in history’s large and unsentimental trash can. 

After one of those not-quite-all-powerful kings was forced into signing Magna Carta (1215, and yes I did have to look it up), he and all the kings who came after him were committed to asking the barons’ consent before they imposed taxes. This gave his proto-parliament–that yearly or twice-yearly gathering of lords–a well-defined power. 

As the thirteenth century wore on, locally elected representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs also began to be summoned when taxes needed to be approved. Among other things, this made the taxes easier to collect. 

Representatives of the towns and cities were called burgesses and tended to be rich lawyers and merchants. Representatives of the counties were called knights of the shire and were mostly from the landed gentry. I haven’t a clue what representatives of the boroughs were called. They may also have been called burgesses, since the root word looks the same and a borough was nothing but a town with a fancy hat. 

The burgesses outnumbered the knights and were paid two shillings a day when parliament met, but the knights (probably) dominated the proceedings because they were better connected and, as everyone at the time would’ve agreed, more important and better looking, and in recognition of all that were paid four shillings a day. 

After 1325, no parliament met without the commoners.

Now let’s get to the small print: When I said these assemblies could approve taxes, that doesn’t mean it was easy for them not to approve them. They had to go pretty far out on a limb to say no. In 1376, when they did refuse one, they had to claim that funds had been misappropriated by some of the king’s courtiers. 

Short of saying no, though, they could negotiate. They could drag their feet and sulk. They could, in general, be a pain in the neck. 

Never underestimate the power of being a pain in the neck.

Much to the monarch-of-the-moment’s annoyance, he (or the occasional she) needed Parliament. The monarchy’s income from its own lands had decreased over the years–hey, it’s tough up there at the top of the heap. And they kept taking the country to war, which is an expensive little habit. So however annoying parliament became, the monarch was constantly driven to call it back and ask for some new tax. 

Parliament was also the place where communities and individuals, high and low, could go to petition the king, and it was petitions involving the affairs of the country gradually drew parliament into a law-making role. At first, it was the king’s prerogative to initiate a law, but in the 14th century parliament began petitioning the king about this or that and making gradual moves into what the king’s territory.

 

The houses separate

But we’ve spent entirely too much time brushing our refined elbows against the commoners elbows. We should be talking about lords.

If we can duck back for a minute to the 13th century, we’ll see a forerunner of the House of Lords in a small group of councilors clustered around the king. And by councilors, of course, I mean important people, and by important people I mean nobles. By the 14th century, they’d become a larger group that began meeting separately. These were dukes, earls, barons, marquesses, viscounts, and the top layer of the clergy. They were called, collectively, the peerage. 

And I’m sure the peers were much happier meeting that way. The commoners had been getting too big for their little bootsies. An anonymous publication from the 1320s argued that parliament’s barons could only speak for themselves, unlike (as the BBC puts it) “the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented ‘the whole community of England’ . . . who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.”

Yeah. A pesky lot, those commoners. 

As the two groups separated, the king’s key officers–the chancellor of the exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household–met with the lords, not the commoners, and the real business was done there, at the top. As someone put it in 1399, the commons were merely “petitioners and suitors,” and all judgments of parliament “belong solely to the king and lords.”

 

The mysterious shrinking peerage

This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s interesting: during the Tudor period (start counting in 1485 and stop when Elizabeth I dies), the number of peers shrank. Part of that was the War of the Roses–the count dropped from 64 to 38–but nobles had always died in wars; under normal circumstances dead ones would’ve been replaced with live ones who were either their heirs or, if no heir was to be had, someone the king owed a favor to. Or liked or wanted to placate or hoped to control. Or whatever motivated that particular king at that particular moment. 

Henry VII, though–the first of the Tudors–didn’t replenish the stock, probably because he didn’t want a group of powerful nobles who might challenge him, starting another war. He’d seen enough of that, and the country was out of roses anyway. 

So start there, then run through the rest of the Tudor kings and queens and count the number of nobles executed for treason whose titles were taken from them, which meant their heirs didn’t inherit them. I doubt being a Tudor-era peasant was a barrel of laughs, but belonging to the nobility had its own dangers. Romanticize it all you want, the Tudor era was a dangerous time to be part of the nobility.

For the last 30 years of the Tudordrama, the country had zero dukes, in spite of the after-VII Tudors (not to be confused with After Eight Mints) having created some new peers as they went along, and most of the 16th-century nobility were of recent coinage. 

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the number of abbots in the House of Lords (no surprise here) shrank, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there wasn’t an abbot to be found in the Lords, and only 26 bishops. For the first time, the secular lords formed a majority. Semi-relevantly, the secular lords were and still are called the Lords Temporal, because everything needs a fancy name.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled drama.

 

From the Civil War to the 19th century

From the Tudor period, it’s a short march to the Civil War, when Parliament seized power. In 1642, it excluded bishops from the House of Lords. Then in 1649, it abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. I’m sure that made the bishops feel better about having been tossed out. Guys, the party ended just a few years after you left, so don’t feel bad.

When the monarchy was restored, everybody pushed the Reset button and Parliament was reconstituted in its old form–Commons, Lords, Church worthies–and when (you thought we’d never get there, didn’t you?) Scotland and then Ireland were folded into the batter that became first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, the Scottish and Irish peers elected representatives to the Lords. 

Now we do a couple of fancy steps until we get to the 19th century, when the number of bishops in the House or Lords was limited to 26 and the monarch got to create life peers. That’s as opposed to hereditary peers. Once they’re appointed, they can put down roots and make themselves at home, but they can’t shoehorn their kids in after them.

 

20th century

In the 20th century, the story gets interesting enough that I’ll slow it down again. By the beginning of the century, it was standard for the prime minister to govern from the House of Commons, so basically the power had shifted. The last PM to govern from the Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

Then we get to 1906, when the Liberals won a big honkin’ majority in the Commons–132 seats–and figured they’d use it to introduce radical things like sick pay and old age pensions.

Horrors, the Lords said in one aristocratic voice. And double horrors because the programs would be paid for by a tax on the rich–especially on the landed rich: in other words, on the people sitting in the House of Lords.

You might have already figured out that the House of Lords had a built-in Conservative–and lower-case conservative–bias. So predictably enough, the Lords refused to pass the budget. After a bit of back and forth, including a general election, the Lords did pass the budget, though, along with the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited  the Lords’ power. 

Why’d they do that? Because the government threatened to flood the house with 400 new Lords, all of them Liberals. 

The bill left the Lords with the power to, at best, delay money bills by a month, and it completely lost the ability to veto bills. It could delay non-budget bills for two years, but that was the limit.

The two years have since been reduced to one.

That takes us to 1958 and the Life Peerages Act, which poured in a group of life peers, including experts in various fields and for the first time–gasp; horrors–women. It was a gesture in the direction of counteracting the house’s built-in rightward tilt. 

Then we skip forward again. Tony Blair had a three-stage plan that would fold the House of Lords into a paper airplane, sail it out to sea, and replace it with a fully elected house. 

How did that fare? Well, the House of Lords started 1999 with 758 hereditary lords and ended the year with 92, but then it all bogged down. The plan’s probably still stashed on some governmental shelf, gathering dust, and we still have 92 hereditary peers. They’re chosen by all the country’s hereditary peers, making the aristocrats, in a nice little piece of irony, the only elected members of the Lords.

People who think seriously about these things, along with people who don’t but who shoot their mouths off anyway, have suggested all sorts of ways to reform what’s clearly an antiquated system, including setting a limit on the number of lords, but tradition allows outgoing prime ministers to shovel in new members, and we’ve been through a lot of prime ministers lately. Each one got a shovel of their very own. A committee’s supposed to weed out anyone who’s inappropriate, but the committee doesn’t get the final say. 

At the moment, 779 people sit in the House of Lords. Or don’t sit there. Nothing says they have to show up.