Property Gambling And Local Councils

It is the end of the year and time to be serious. Diane Coyle, the Enlightened Economist has another good post.

It is a review of Brett Christopher's "The New Enclosure: The Appropriation Of Land In Neoliberal Britain" which explains the recent huge shift in UK property ownership from public to private.

The Bureau Of Investigative Journalism has "The Public Services Gamble Councils Borrowing Billions To Play The Property Market" which is long but very worrying if one is your local authority.

This has happened without us knowing what has been going on literally under our feet.

We have had major changes in property owning down the centuries so it is not "new" in that sense. A different century a different way of doing of doing it.

What happened to the peasants; could we be about to join them?

The Past Casts A Shadow

Above is William Henry Beveridge, then Director of the London School of Economics, who transformed its work and status and built an empire of social studies with an international range and reputation.

Later was he the man who delivered the crucial Beveridge Report (see Wikipedia) in December 1942 setting out the kind of society and state provision that many envisaged for the post-war future of the UK. He was made a peer in 1946.

Beveridge was a child of the Raj of India and of the 1936 students some may have been hoping for a career in the Colonial and perhaps even the ICS, the Indian Civil Service. His father, Henry Beveridge, of Scots origins, was a senior judge and a leading Orientalist in sympathy with Indian nationalism.

Henry, born in 1829 was a young man when the Mutiny broke out which led to the demise of the old Honourable East India Company Service, HEICS, and the takeover of authority by the British Government. Change had already begun in the attitude and policy to India before this.

The new regime was different in many ways from that of the late 18th and early 19th Century and similarly how rule was conducted and how the British society in India lived changed too.  The old India had seen people like Charles Hindoo Stuart with Charles Metcalfe and not least James Skinner.

William Beveridge was born in 1879 and grew up in an India in which Auckland Colvin was a major figure shaping the Raj that we are more familiar with. The old was not far away. Colvin's mother was half sister to one of Skinner's closest officers,

Ralph Henry Sneyd, who was also close to Metcalfe, naming a son after him, had been nominated to the HEICS army by Stuart and for good measure ended his service as Commander of the Governor General's Body Guard, later the Viceroy's and now the Presidents.

Sneyd ended his days in Hampshire across the fields from the Duke of Wellington, the former Sepoy General, and next door to Elizabeth, widow of Colebrooke Nesbitt, one of the HEICS Nesbitt's in The City named for the Colebrooke family so prominent in the early Raj.

It was Sir Henry Colebrooke who founded the Royal Asiatic Society in London in 1823, modelled on the 1784 Asiatic Society in Calcutta.

Beveridge was brought into the Civil Service in 1908 by Winston Churchill, who had served with the 4th Hussars in India, to add some intellectual bite to the projects of the then Liberal Government. He did key work during World War One before going to the Webb's LSE in 1919 to promote his ideas on social administration derived from India and the new theory of Eugenics.

Because the Raj had been run by an Indian Civil Service on a centralised and greatly planned basis with tight controls over subordinate authorities, using agencies and controlled private sector commerce. It was always that Calcutta, and later Delhi knew best and where all authority lay.

It is commonplace now for it to be argued that the central direction of affairs from London in the UK arose from the two world wars. This is true because of the demands of those wars.  However the Raj had been born out of many wars and was always at risk of others.

It was the Raj and it's many senior men in politics, government, law, education and administration that bestowed on changing Britain the basic attitudes, mind sets and principles of state control and how to do it. I recall from around fifty years ago the number of former colonials in senior jobs in central and local government.

In this way we are all children of the Raj. But in the 21st Century it is not going to be the British who will be in charge and cracking the whip, it will be the children of our former subjects.

Ladies Day

One feature of the modern age is that the depiction and ideas about females of the past are at variance with the females of seventy and more years ago. The picture above is a case in point.

It was taken late in 1915 during the First World War and shows that women had taken over the dirty and basic job of dealing with steam locomotives because the men had gone. If correct this was at the Bank Hall Locomotive Depot on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Co. line into Liverpool Exchange.

The women may have included ones known to my family, perhaps as wider family, or as neighbours, friends and acquaintances. Women who they would meet when shopping or in any ordinary daily life. Thirty years later I may have met one or two.

They will have had little education, a handful of years in a class of 50 to 60 in an Elementary School. They may have been religious up to a point as people in general were obliged to be, without making much of it. Their horizons were limited as few will have traveled far. They will have done little reading and the literature and arts were for others.

Yet their class were the great majority. Which raises the question what were they really like? The other question is what happened to them, why have they all gone? It is because that world has gone as has the women. Also we have lost their men. Those working class communities no longer exist.

If the population has four or five generation groups then in the two youngest groups those communities, the work they did and the lives they led are lost to history but history has lost them because it is written by others with other political and philosophical agendas.

The older two generation groups will depend on any passing media characters of fiction. It is only the oldest group which will have any memory and this is tarnished by the decades of media etc. fiction and the contempt of the political and metropolitan classes.

The ones I recall were good and capable women with a strong sense of right and wrong and could be relied on and trusted. They worked hard to build a better life for their children and grandchildren. But today the youngest generations are taught to despise them.

Poetry In Motion

Gary Lineker with an axe,

Gave the Brexit forty whacks.

When he saw what he had done,

He gave his Twitter forty one.

May's Guide To The Galaxy

The figures we were given were that in the vote of confidence by her party Prime Minister Ms. May had 200 votes and the No Thank You 117 votes. The media seem to be unaware of the significance of these figures.

In the original "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" of my fond memory the time travellers were taken to the great computer in the sky which knew everything. Many years before the ancients had asked it to tell them the meaning of life and everything.

It was due to deliver and when it did the answer was very brief. It was 42 which did not seem to have any immediate significance.

But if you subtract 42 from 200 the answer is 158. If you then add 42 to 117 the answer is 159. Were the Tory vote to have been this it would be goodbye Ms. May, welcome well who might it be?

Ms. May if not exactly a dead duck could be a Xmas turkey if so many voted No. For which of the many candidates to lead the Tory party does the figure 42 have any significance?

Wheelie Bin

No sooner had I posted the previous item than a visit to the news sites tells me that The Sky has fallen.

Team Sky in cycling after a successful decade are to finish in 2020 and are up for sale to the highest geared bidder, if there is any interest. This is not guaranteed.

This is the BBC News and it is being reported in other media.

The world of sport and TV coverage is changing rapidly and audiences are moving with it, so cycling may not be a good option for various reasons.

Where are my roller skates?

Bigger Bang

It has been a busy period with one thing after another, time has flown. But on Sunday the short post "The Future Of Earth" was, you may imagine, supposed to be a joke.

Perhaps is wasn't so funny if you read this one from Science Daily about how in the deep past we lost so many interesting species. Supernovae are nothing new or an idea lodged in the thinking part of one of a creature whose kind has been on Earth for a short while, but maybe not much longer.

In Europe our present obsession with some purely temporary political and economic matters seems like a large creature pursuing smaller creatures when at the same time it has created a system which will cause the food supplies to disappear.

What is that one we like to sing at this time of year? "It came upon a midnight clear"? Any millennia, or perhaps any decade now. You have been warned.