I SUED SHEARINGS – and guess who won?

by Christopher Draper

I’VE just returned from a North Wales Courtroom where I was the litigant in a Breach of Contract legal action and “Shearings Holidays Ltd”, the defendant. If you are one of the few people in Britain who’ve never enjoyed a Shearings coach holiday you must be very young or a southern snob (or possibly both) and when the Wigan-based business celebrated its centenary last year it was described as the biggest and most successful coach holiday company in Europe, carrying over a million holidaymakers every year but all was not as it appeared.

Herbert’s Story

The Company was started in Oldham, in 1919 by pioneering motor mechanic Herbert Shearing, who’d six years earlier been fined a pound for barrelling along Manchester Road at a speed in excess of the legal limit of 5 mph! Herbert began by taking coachloads of Oldham working folk down to Devon for their annual week-long holiday. While other coach touring companies stayed at different hotels every night Herbert used a Torquay hotel as a base for daily trips out. His bargain-basement prices soon attracted customers from across the Pennines and this prompted him to start a “feeder-service” bringing Yorkshire-based customers to his Oldham depot but his enterprise wasn’t appreciated by rival proprietors. When Herbert, in 1934, advertised a feeder-service from Halifax he first had to overcome objections from Leeds-based, Wallace-Arnold Coaches. As his network expanded by 1936, he offered Liverpool customers, “a ten day all-in holiday in Scotland for £8.40 or nine days in Devon for £6.50”. “Shearings” thrived after the war although Herbert himself retired to Torquay where he died on 14 July 1945.

Post-War Shearings

Shearings prospered under a series of different owners and in 2005 even swallowed up its old Yorkshire rival “Wallace-Arnold”. By 2015, the company owned and operated over 200 coaches, 52 hotels and annually conveyed a total of 1.1m passengers by coach, rail, air and ship to over 170 destinations worldwide. In 2016 Shearings was acquired by Lone Star Funds, a private equity company and although a positive spin was put on this takeover at the time “to fund expansion plans etc” in reality it was extremely bad news.

Lone Star or Black Hole?

Texas based Lone Star is more “Vulture capital” than “Venture capital”, specialising in buying up “distressed assets” and sucking the life and value out of them. Founded, owned and controlled by 64 year old John Grayken, Lone Star manages over seventy billion dollars of assets, with Grayken’s personal fortune valued at 7.4 billion dollars, making him the 196th richest person on the planet. Born in Boston, Grayken is an Irish citizen, having renounced his U.S. nationality for tax purposes and according to Forbes magazine, “Amongst the robber barons of the new-millenium, few are as secretive – or as loathed”. Despite his American birthplace, Irish citizenship and Dallas HQ this modern day robber baron naturally lives in London, the tax-avoiding plutocrat’s domicile of choice. His seventy million dollar

Chelsea mansion is equipped with a glass elevator, basement pool, cinema and Japanese water garden and was purchased through a Bermudan company. Grayken also owns Pyrford Court, a fifteen-bedroomed Surrey manor house with a twenty-one acre garden and La Bergerie, an extensive Swiss estate overlooking Lake Geneva though he prefers to spend summers in Massachusetts where he owns the exclusive White Head Island.

Ruthless Economy

I missed Herbert’s era but over the last forty years I’ve enjoyed many Shearings holidays and until recent times the company maintained decent, old-fashioned business ethics. After Lone Star took over Shearings adopted a ruthless, Ryan Air style business approach. “Dynamic pricing” was introduced with an emphasis on online sales, hotel prices were segmented into all sorts of price levels with supplementary charges, higher payment was demanded for sitting on the front seat of coaches and an extra cost levied for using feeder-coaches. Petty economies extended to withdrawing bread rolls from meal times and charging for post-dinner coffee. Years ago when Shearings failed to attract enough passengers on a trip I’d booked they generously offered me a longer alternative holiday at no extra cost. This sharply contrasts with my recent experience.

Last Tango to Harrogate

For the last few years my partner and I enjoyed annual coach holidays in Harrogate, staying at Shearings’ St George Hotel (their best by far). In July 2019 I booked and paid a deposit to return the following January (2020) only to receive a phone call, six weeks later, informing me that Shearings no longer intended to honour the booking and wouldn’t run a coach to Harrogate for unexplained “operational reasons”. I offered to make our own way to and from the hotel if the company agreed to cover rail costs but they adamantly refused. Initially unable to specify which provision of our binding contract the company relied upon to legitimate this cancellation, Shearings eventually cited “clause 9” which states that “As we plan your holiday arrangements many months in advance we may occasionally have to make changes or cancel your booking and we reserve the right to do so at any time.” I pointed out the significance of the words “have to make changes”, meaning that for any cancellation to be legitimate it must be forced upon the company by external circumstances (such as the hotel having burnt down), NOT simply the company’s whim. On the internet I discovered Shearings were marketing the same category of room and meals at the St George for the identical four day period at three times the price contracted to me and “coincidentally” Harrogate was that week hosting a Sales Convention at the Conference Centre opposite the hotel. On the face of it, Shearings appeared to be cynically selling our contracted rooms at a much higher rate to incoming sales reps. I printed off this page and when I checked a few days later all these rooms had been sold, presumably at this higher price.

Terminological Inexactitude

In a letter dated 11.9.2019 Shearings’ “Customer Relations Manager” Angela Fowler re-stated the company’s position - “we may occasionally have to make changes” and “we are not able to agree to any of the choices that you have given us” (my emphasis). Instead of addressing the critical distinction between forced changes and voluntary choices Ms Fowler claimed a similar inability to finance alternative transport. I realised that ultimately Grayken’s ruthless regime was pushing Shearings’ minions into screwing customers like me but I wasn’t intimidated and decided to sue for “Breach of Contract”.

Justice Delayed

After essential pre-action exchanges of letters I filed formal court papers on 3.10.2019. You don’t need a barrister, solicitor or horsehair wig, just £35 (less online). I claimed £257.60, the cost of two ordinary return rail fares from my home in Llandudno to Harrogate. Shearings’ defence amounted to no more than a restatement of Angela Fowler’s previously quoted letter. I was duly informed that the case would be heard on 20.3.2020, unfortunately Covid intervened and the hearing was twice postponed until on Friday 6th November 2020 at 2pm I was finally called into Prestatyn’s Court Number Three for a hearing before Deputy District Judge Morris.

Justice Denied

The judge ruled against Shearings’ defence that the contract gave carte blanche for the company to amend or cancel at will. I was awarded my original claim plus costs, amounting to £317.60. Unfortunately in the interval between launching the claim in 2019 and this November 2020 judgement Shearings went bust.

It’s difficult to calculate how much wealth Lone Star extracted before eventually driving Herbert Shearing’s century-old company over the edge. E & Y (previously “Ernest & Young”) will certainly make a fortune from their dismemberment (“Administration”) of the company’s residual assets as they’re legally entitled to feast on the carcase before lowly “unsecured creditors” like me get a look in. Leger Travel bought the Shearings trading name and customer-list but none of its liabilities, 2,500 employees lost their jobs while innumerable suppliers were left with unpaid invoices. Although I don’t expect to get my £317.60 I’d still encourage people not to submit to big company bullying. If all else fails, suing isn’t difficult or expensive and authority everywhere relies on deferential, fearful compliance. As I write John Grayken’s Lone Star has just sunk its fangs into another well-known “distressed asset”, so if you’re contemplating moving into a McCarthy & Stone retirement home, think again.

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Is Trump Expendable? by Les May

I’VE never bought into the idea that Labour losing last year’s General Election was because a Corbyn led government’s policies made it ‘unelectable’. I think a more plausible explanation is that Labour’s so called ‘Red Wall’ crumbled because those voters wanted ‘Brexit’ and knew that Johnson would deliver it, but Corbyn couldn’t be guaranteed to. The intervention of a Brexit party candidate in my constituency effectively helped to defeat Labour.

Those who voted Tory at the last election came from two ‘tribes’, each of which spoke their own language, had their own values and were incomprehensible to each other. One was the tribe which always voted Tory; the other was the tribe made up of those who usually voted Labour, or not at all, but who for their own reasons simply wanted to leave the EU.

Britain will leave the EU on the last day of the year. Job done! Why vote Tory next time? Boris Johnson knows this, that’s why he is so eager to push his ‘levelling up’ agenda which seems to me no more than a rebranding of the old ‘trickle down’ economics of Margaret Thatcher.

Donald Trump’s sojourn at the White House came about because two ‘tribes’, incomprehensible to each other, put him there in 2016. One tribe was drawn from Americans whose livelihoods were threatened because the industries they worked for were losing ground to cheaper foreign imports or were simply past their sell by dates like coal production, the inhabitants of the so called ‘rust bucket states’. The other tribe was composed of socially conservative, for which read abhors homosexuals, same sex marriage and abortion, devout, Bible immersed, fundamentalist Christians. Trump knew exactly what he was doing selecting Mike Pence to be his Vice-President. Pence is the real deal. At the end of the first meeting between the two he suggested they hold hands for a short prayer.

Trump now faces the same problem as Boris Johnson. He’s delivered a Supreme Court bench with a built in conservative majority which could last for the next thirty or forty years which his Bible bashing supporters can reasonably expect to deliver the sort of socially conservative rulings they want to hear. Job done! Why vote for an ersatz vulgarian like Donald Trump when you can have the real deal in the shape of someone like Pence in four years time?

The smart money is on Trump still being a major force in the Republican party in the next four years. I’m not so sure.

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Blackmailers Always Want More Revisited

by Les May

SEVERAL days ago the High Court struck out a claim for libel against the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) made by Tony Greenstein. The organisation now boasts that the ruling made it permissible for it to call him, and presumably anyone else, a “notorious antisemite” in articles on the CAA website.

The problem for anyone challenging the CAA over such personal attacks is that whilst they are made with all the certainty of them being objectively true, the law treats them merely as opinions, and as the saying goes ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’.

The finding makes Mr Greenstein liable for costs of nearly £68,000, something else the CAA is eager to crow about.

Having seen off Greenstein the CAA is now renewing its attacks on the Labour party claiming that Starmer has ‘conned’ them and offered them ‘crumbs’ by allowing the Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension to be dealt with by the Labour Party’s existing disciplinary procedures which resulted in the lifting of the suspension. If Starmer thought that his removing the Labour whip would result in him being allowed to deal with complaints of anti-semitism in his own way, he was mistaken. The response from the CAA has been to claim ‘New evidence emerges showing that incompetence, factionalism and politicisation remain the hallmarks of Labour’s disciplinary process under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership’. Blackmailers always want more.

Not content with that, at the end of October the CAA submitted a short letter and almost 70 pages of allegations against a number of former and sitting Labour MPs who it referred to as ‘Respondents’ as if it had some legal authority . If Starmer actually read these he must have wondered who is in charge of the Labour party, himself or the unelected Gideon Falter and Joe Glasman of the CAA.

It should also be said that Starmer’s action in removing the Labour whip from Corbyn may be the start of an attempt to reverse the democratisation of the party which placed the decision about who should by Leader in the hands of the membership, and not in the hands of the parliamentary party.

The ruling against Greenstein is a warning that it is not possible to challenge the tactics of the CAA head on, pernicious though they are. But it is possible to point out some of the shortcomings of this organisation.

The CAA likes to present itself as a ‘non-governmental organisation’ and a ‘charity’. In 2019 its income was almost £900,000, almost all from legacies and donations. But when the Charity Commission investigated complaints against the CAA’s Gideon Falter said, ‘There are many people who oppose our mission and complain to the Charity Commission at every opportunity’ and described it as an ‘orchestrated campaign’. In October 2018 the report in the Jewish Chronicle showed how the CAA had broken charity law;

The Charity Commission told the JC its investigation was launched "following concerns raised about a petition launched by the charity which called for the resignation of the leader of the Opposition".

A spokesperson said: “Charities are free to campaign and engage in political activity in furthering their purposes...

"But there are rules that charities must follow. One of the most important of these rules is that charities must stress their independence from party politics and demonstrate party political balance.

"This is a cornerstone of charity law and the public rightly expect us to uphold it robustly."

The commission instructed CAA to change the petition's wording "to ensure it complied with our guidance on campaigning and political activity".

Reading the CAA’s most recent complaints against named individuals in the Labour party, which quote exactly which of the Labour party’s rules have been broken, it is difficult to see how the organisation can be said to complying with rules set out for charities.

The CAA makes much of its ‘methodology’ in its investigations into anti-semitism. But this is what the Institute from Jewish Policy Research had to say about its methods in January 2015;

However, unfortunately, the organisation’s survey about antisemitism is littered with flaws, and in the context of a clear need for accurate data on this topic, its work may even be rather irresponsible.

Its report is based on two surveys – one of Jews living in the UK, exploring their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism, and one of the general population of the UK, exploring its attitudes towards Jews.

In the first one, the data about Jewish attitudes are based on an open web survey that had very limited capacity to assess whether respondents were in any way representative of the British Jewish population. So the percentages quoted are of survey respondents, not of Jews in the UK. The findings might be representative of the Jewish community in some way, but it is at least equally likely that they are not. Unfortunately, due to quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses, there is absolutely no way the researchers or any readers of the report can really know

.

Because of this, the claim in the report, for example, that “more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s” verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate. Moreover, the very inclusion of such a question in the survey, which most credible scholars of the Holocaust utterly refute, was a dubious decision in and of itself, and raises issues about the organisers’ pre-existing hypotheses and assumptions. Professional social researchers build credible surveys and analyse the data with an open mind; the CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis.

The second survey, conducted by YouGov, is much better – the results are certainly broadly representative of the UK population. The findings would have benefited significantly from greater contextualisation, both in terms of attitudes towards other minorities, and the inclusion of some positive statements about Jews rather than just negative ones, which would have helped to provide some balance and nuance. But the research makes a valuable contribution to knowledge. The inclusion of some context might also have altered the way in which the results were presented in the CAA report and press release, which included the rather sensationalist claim that almost half of British adults harbour some kind of antisemitic view.

A far more accurate and honest read of the YouGov data would highlight the fact that between 75% and 90% of people in Britain either do not hold antisemitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4% to 5% of people can be characterised as clearly antisemitic when looking at individual measures of antisemitism. This figure is similar to Pew data gathered in 2009 and 2014 which estimated the level of antisemitic attitudes at somewhere between 2% and 7%, and Anti-Defamation League data gathered in 2014 which, while also flawed, put it at 8%, and, more robustly, identified the UK as among the least antisemitic countries in the world. It is possible that the proportion has risen in light of the summer’s events in Gaza (and those interested should look out for the next results from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey), but the notion that it has risen to such a significant degree seems to be highly implausible.

So much for the Campaign Against Antisemitism's‘methodology’.

In what I write and say I try to avoid using words like ‘racist’, ‘islamo-phobic’, ‘anti-semitic’, ‘fascist’, ‘nazi’ etc, largely because the way they are sometimes used against individuals is difficult to distinguish from what has been called ‘hate speech’. Nor do I find it easy to distinguish the repeated attacks by organisations like the CAA on Corbyn and other individuals, easy to distinguish from what is called in social media circles ‘trolling’.

The Labour party and those of us who support it have a choice to make. We can go on trying to appease organisations like the CAA or we can insist that if it feels it has the right to call people anti-semites, we have the right to defend ourselves against such charges and to criticise the policies of the state of Israel and those who act as apologists for it. To paraphrase Shakespeare: 'Caesar would not be wolf, if the Romans were not sheep'.

The Charity Commission website carries details of the CAA. The page headed ‘What, who, how, where’ is revealing, and rather difficult to equate with it’s recent activities with regard to the Labour party and its supporters.

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Letter from 14 Labour NEC members orders general secretary to rebuke Starmer and instruct him to immediately restore whip to Corbyn!

FOURTEEN members of Labour’s 39-member National Executive Committee (NEC) have written a damning and explosive letter to Labour general secretary David Evans about the conduct of party leader Keir Starmer – one that blows open the opaque events of this week surrounding Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement.

The letter:

Condemns the ‘double jeopardy’ and ‘deliberate political interference’ of withdrawing the whip from Corbyn after he was reinstated by an NEC panel;

makes clear that the decision of the panel was based on independent legal advice and the recommendation of Labour’s disciplinary investigative unit;

implies that their advice was that there were no valid grounds for Corbyn’s suspension;

confirms that the whip had been restored to Corbyn on the lifting of his suspension, making an utter mockery of Starmer’s excuse that he was ‘not restoring’ the whip rather than withdrawing it;

makes clear that the meddling in the disciplinary outcome is exactly that kind of ‘political interference’ the EHRC has ruled unlawful;

accuses Starmer and other right-wing MPs of smearing the NEC panel members who acted in accordance with the party’s rules and the legal advice they gave;

says that Starmer has put NEC members in a legal bind – and that as a highly-qualified barrister he has no excuse for his ‘unconscionable’ choice;

demands that Evans rebuke Starmer for his political interference in party processes and undermining public confidence in Labour’s disciplinary process;

‘requires’ Evans to immediately ‘demand’ that Starmer upholds the NEC panel’s decision and restores the whip to Corbyn:

Dear David,

On Tuesday 17th November a Disputes Panel of the NEC sat to consider current discipline cases one of which was the complaint against Jeremy Corbyn MP. The Panel after many hours of consideration and deliberation, including advice and guidance on process from the Head of Disputes in GLU and an independent Barrister provided by the party, established that there had been no breach of Labour Party rules. As such the Panel determined that Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension should be lifted.

As with all other cases considered by the Dispute Panels, as soon as the panel’s decisions have been ratified as per the agreed process, Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension was required to be immediately lifted. Any consequence of the suspension, namely the suspension of the whip, was of course to immediately fall away as a consequence of the NEC panel decision.

The decision of the Leader the following day to withhold the whip from Jeremy Corbyn MP is an act of deliberate political interference in the handling of a complaint. It defies the decision of the NEC panel, is a matter of double jeopardy that flies in the face of natural justice, it undermines the Rule Book and it is precisely the type of action found to be unlawful indirect discrimination by the EHRC report.

We would remind the leadership that the political interference criticised by the EHRC included interference intended to speed up the disciplinary process.

The Leader of the party in addition made commentary that the Jewish community have no faith in the process of the Dispute’s panel. Although intended to be a damning comment on the Dispute’s process generally it is of course a direct criticism of the decision reached by the Dispute’s Panel on Tuesday. This criticism has been joined by other MPs, no doubt following the lead of the Leader.

Neither the Party nor the Leader have made clear that the Disputes Panel in question received legal advice on the day and as is the norm that includes a recommendation from the GLU staff, in particular the Head of Legal appointed by the Leader as to the sanction that should be awarded.

This is an unacceptable attack on the lay volunteers elected to uphold the Rule Book, it is direct political interference and it is unacceptable.

We understand that the Party will now face legal action as a result of the decision of the Leader to undermine the disciplinary processes. This will inevitably mean that members of the panel are asked to give evidence in a Court of law. It is unconscionable, given that the Leader is Queens Counsel and must have read and digested the EHRC report, that members of the NEC should be placed in this position by his actions.

As members of the NEC with responsibility to uphold the Rule Book we require confirmation that the General Secretary will now write to the Leader of the Party to admonish him for interfering in the NEC processes, for levelling public criticism intended to undermine confidence in the dispute process and for taking a decision that is directly contradictory to the NEC Panel decision. The General Secretary must demand that the Leader upholds the decision of the Dispute’s panel and immediately reinstates the whip to Jeremy Corbyn MP.

Signed

Howard Beckett

Jayne Taylor

Ian Murray

Andi Fox

Mick Whelan

Andy Kerr

Pauline McCarthy

Ellen Morrison

Lara McNeill

Mish Rahman

Laura Pidcock

Yasmine Dar

Nadia Jama

Gemma Bolton

Unite union leader condemns Starmer decision!

YESTERDAY the UNITE union general secretary, Len McCluskey said: “I am astonished at the decision to withdraw the Parliamentary Labour Party whip from Jeremy Corbyn.

“This is a vindictive and vengeful action which despoils Party democracy and due process alike, and amounts to overruling the unanimous decision of the NEC panel yesterday to readmit Jeremy to the Party.

“This action gives rise to double jeopardy in the handling of the case and shows marked bad faith.

“The unity of the Party around the need to implement the EHRC recommendations in full is being recklessly undermined.

“The continued persecution of Jeremy Corbyn, a politician who inspired millions, by a leadership capitulating to external pressure on Party procedures risks destroying the unity and integrity of the Labour Party.>

“I urge Keir Starmer in the strongest terms to pull back from the brink.”

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Unite is Britain and Ireland’s largest union with members working across all sectors of the economy. The general secretary is Len McCluskey.

Anti-socialism In The Labour Party

by Les May

A COUPLE of weeks ago the Sunday People newspaper carried a piece headed ‘Don’t talk about Jez’. It claimed that General Secretary David Evans, had written to constituency parties warning members not to talk about Corbyn’s possible expulsion. It went on to claim that one MP who was at the meeting which discussed the EHRC report said ‘In forty years I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a bit scary. Starmer spoke at length. He never mentioned Jeremy Corbyn once. It’s like 1938 in the USSR with the show trials.’

Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration and a bit of paraphrasing it seems that Corbyn is being ‘unpersoned’ in the Labour party. Starmer’s decision to exclude Corbyn from the parliamentary Labour party by not to restoring the whip to him would presumably mean that he could not stand as an official Labour candidate in any future General Election. The problem for Starmer is not that Corbyn is anti-semitic; it’s that he is pro-socialism.

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LANCASHIRE RE-UNITED?

For a New Lancashire County-Region

WHILE our Yorkshire neighbours are building up momentum for a ‘One Yorkshire’ region, Lancashire is lagging behind. This paper argues for a re-united Lancashire, with its own democratically-elected assembly, based in part on its historic boundaries but looking to the future for a dynamic and inclusive county-region that could be at the forefront of a green industrial revolution. As well as a new county-region body to replace the mish-mash of unelected regional bodies and mayors with little accountability, a re-united Lancashire also needs strong local government working co-operatively with the communities it serves and a vibrant economy that is locally based.

Back in 1895, Bolton writer Allen Clarke said: “I would like to see Lancashire a cluster of towns and villages, each fixed solid on its own agricultural and industrial base, doing its own spinning and weaving; with its theatre, gymnasium, schools, libraries, baths and all things necessary for body and soul. Supposing the energy, time and talent that have been given to manufacture and manufacturing inventions had been given to agriculture and agricultural inventions, would not there have been as wonderful results in food production as there have been in cotton goods production?”

(Allen Clarke, 1895, slightly adapted)

THAT was Allen Clarke, the Lancashire journalist, philosopher and novelist writing in 1895. Utopian? Perhaps (we need our utopian visions!) but there’s an element of realism there too. He recognised that capitalism had unleashed enormously powerful productive forces, but not necessarily with the best results. What Clarke was saying over a century ago is being said by many green activists and thinkers today and was what Gandhi preached in his own time. Humanity has the resources and skills to create a better world, for everyone; the consequences of not trying are worsening climate change and all that follows from it.

Clarke looked forward to a Lancashire that was a greener, more self-sufficient place – within a co-operative rather than a capitalist system. Now, as we struggle to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, is the time to think differently about the world we live in. This paper is about what Lancashire could look like in the next twenty years – by which I mean the ‘historic’ Lancashire, including Greater Manchester and much of Merseyside. But this is not about looking backward – it’s about creating a progressive and inclusive vision for a re-united Lancashire ‘county-region’ within a prosperous North and a Federal Britain. A Lancashire Co-operative Commonwealth.

The STATE of the COUNTY

THE Lancashire of Allen Clarke’s day has changed in so many ways. In the towns, gone are the mills and mill chimneys with their attendant pollution and poor working conditions inside the factory walls. But we have also lost some of the civic pride and buoyancy of the great Lancashire boroughs including Clarke’s beloved Bolton. ‘Lancashire’ itself has been split and divided in what was a travesty of democracy. No wonder there is a very worrying degree of despondency and cynicism within these towns that ‘nothing can be done’ and we are powerless. It becomes easy to blame scapegoats, be they immigrants, asylum seekers, politicians or whoever.

Lancashire has yet to find a new role that can build on its past achievements, without just being a dull collection of retail parks, charity shops and sprawling suburbia, nor indeed a heritage theme park. We have many successful businesses and a thriving academic sector with great universities, some world-class, in many towns and cities; there is the potential for that to spin-off into new industries and services that are world-leaders.

Manchester has emerged as a dynamic regional centre, though many of the once-thriving towns surrounding it are in a parlous state. This has got to change and consigning towns like Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale and Bury to the role of commuter suburbs is not acceptable. Instead of the centralised ‘city-region’ we need a more decentralised and collaborative ‘county-region’.

There is a disconnect between urban and rural, with tourist ‘honeypots’ around Lancashire and areas like the Ribble Valley and Trough of Bowland besieged by traffic from towns and cities and homes for local people made unaffordable by urban dwellers buying up second homes – a process accelerated by Covid-19.

The County that was Stolen

ALLEN CLARKE’s Lancashire has been shrunk by an undemocratic diktat in the 1970s. Nobody asked the people of Bolton, Rochdale, Oldham, Wigan and other towns if they wanted to be part of ‘Greater Manchester’. We have an elected mayor but without the democratic oversight of an elected council – which at least the original Greater Manchester Council had, before it was abolished by Mrs Thatcher in 1986. Something else we weren’t asked about. Now, in 2020, some politicians are talking about further municipal vandalism with the destruction of the remaining ‘Lancashire’ county council and three ‘super’ councils replacing it and the existing districts. Talk about making a bad job even worse. In Cumbria, there is talk of creating one single unitary authority; this would mean the death of ‘local’ government.

Allen Clarke was a strong believer in municipal reform and backed The Municipal Reform League, formed in Lancashire in the early 1900s. There’s a need for something like that but on a bigger scale, addressing the huge democratic deficit in the English regions, particularly the North, as well as the loss of power by local government. We need a ‘Campaign for Northern Democracy’ that can involve Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and the North-East as friendly allies and partners.

Samuel Compston of Rossendale, a radical Liberal of the old school, spoke of the virtue of ‘county clanship, in no narrow sense’. He was on to something and his words were carefully chosen. Regional or county pride does not pre-suppose antipathy to other regions and nations, and it needs to include everyone within the region. But it requires a democratic voice, not just one person elected every few years as ‘mayor’, nor a collection of local authority leaders whose prime loyalty is to their own council ward.

Yorkshire has been quicker off the mark and the Campaign for a Yorkshire Parliament has won wide cross-party support; the Yorkshire Party has made several local gains. The Yorkshire-based ‘Same Skies Collective’ has developed some fresh new ways of thinking about regionalism.

Here, there’s a ‘Friends of Real Lancashire’ but the issue needs a higher profile and cross-party support. A reformed Lancashire that includes Greater Manchester and Merseyside makes sense as an economic unit but also chimes with people’s identities – in a way that artificial ‘city regions’ never will.

‘Greater Manchester’ has reduced the once proudly-independent county boroughs to the status of satellites - commuter suburbs of Manchester (or ‘Manctopia’ as it was described in an excellent TV programme recently). Nearly 50 years on from the creation of ‘Greater Manchester’ our ‘city region’ still has precious little legitimacy and if there was a referendum tomorrow on being part of Lancashire or ‘Greater Manchester’ I have little doubt about the result.

A Democratic New Lancashire

REGIONAL democracy must be the next big jump for our political system with regional assemblies, elected proportionately, taking real powers out of Westminster and Whitehall, backed up by strong well-resourced local government which has the right scale (not too big!).

In England, we haven’t grasped the distinction between the national, regional and local, with cack-handed attempts to combine the regional and local (witness current attempts to create a unitary authority for all of Cumbria and three huge ‘local’ authorities covering all Lancashire). The latter are neither sufficiently ‘strategic’ to be effective regional bodies, and anything but ‘local’. Cumbria itself is big enough to be a county-region but still needs effective local government beneath it.

We need to get power out of the centre – Westminster/Whitehall – and give country-regions such as Lancashire real powers (see below) complemented by local government which really is ‘local’ and relates to historic, ‘felt’ identities which make economic and political sense.

Parameters and Powers

A RE-CONSTITUTED Lancashire county-region should include much of what once constituted Lancashire with the additions of parts of historic Cheshire to the south (Stockport, Tameside and Trafford in Greater Manchester). The historic ‘Lancashire north of the Sands’ really makes more sense within a Cumbria county-region that works closely with its Lancashire sister. This provides a county-region of significant size able to wield economic clout without being too large (which a region of ‘The North’ would be, both in population and geographical scale). Crucially, it would reflect people’s identities.

A major failure of the attempts to create regional assemblies during the Blair Government was their obvious lack of powers, prompting the successful attempts by the advocates of the centralised status quo to label them as expensive ‘white elephants’. While on one hand it makes sense for a new county-region to evolve gradually in terms of the powers and responsibilities it has, it must be able to demonstrate a clear reason to exist from the start. That means taking over responsibility for many of the areas which Wales and Scotland already have. It should include tax-raising powers.

The county-region should be empowered to support economic development across its area, investing in emerging industries, research and marketing. The ‘Lancashire Enterprises’ of the 1980s, stimulated and overseen by Lancashire County Council, would be a good model to start with. Part of its role should be to encourage new social enterprises and encourage greater employee and community involvement in large enterprises.

For transport, a ‘Transport for Lancashire’ should be created to take over the powers of existing transport authorities, as well as the ineffective Transport for the North. There should be close collaboration between sister bodies in Yorkshire, Cumbria, the North-east, and the Midlands, with formation of joint bodies to develop inter-regional links.

Another regular canard against regional government is that it creates ‘more politicians’ - ’Jobs for the boys’, another effective line of attack against the idea of a North-East Assembly in 2004.

It depends how you look at that. Regional devolution must include reducing the number of MPs at Westminster, as their functions transfer to the county-region. The same goes for the civil servants. Some powers that are currently devolved, but with little democratic scrutiny (transport health, etc.) would simply come under the democratically-elected county-region, with members elected by a proportional voting system.

Localising Local Government

ONE of the most disastrous decisions of local government reform in the 70s was the destruction of small, usually highly efficient, local councils. Medium-sized towns, such as Darwen, Heywood, Farnworth, Radcliffe and others often ran their own services, built good quality housing and underpinned a very strong sense of civic pride. They were ruthlessly destroyed in the spurious cause that ‘big is better’ and the knee-jerk approach of far too many bureaucrats to centralise as much as possible. Can anyone honestly say that these medium-sized towns have benefitted from the changes imposed on them in the 70s?

Within a Lancashire ‘county-region’ local government should be based on smaller but empowered and well-resourced units that reflect people’s identities – the Darwens, Athertons, Radcliffes as well as larger towns such as Oldham, Burnley, Blackburn and Blackpool.

These smaller but more powerful local councils should co-operate with their neighbouring communities on issues of mutual concern within a Lancashire county-region – a ‘co-operative commonwealth’ as argued below.

Having vibrant town as well as city centres must be a major element of the county-region. This means having a vision for town centres which offer something that the mega-stores don’t offer: a sense of conviviality and sociability. The arts have a key role to play – small galleries, larger public facilities including theatres and annual festivals (Bolton’s Film Festival is a good example) can help revive town centres and give them a new role.

Some Lancashire towns have been successful in developing niche manufacturing which offer highly skilled, well-paid jobs – but there’s a need for much more, working in partnership with the higher education sector. The ‘Preston Model’ should be rolled out to other similar-sized towns and cities to encourage much more local procurement and business support. It all needs sensitive encouragement which should come from re-structured and empowered local councils working within a collaborative framework provided by the county-region’s Lancashire Enterprises, as part of ‘The Lancashire Co-operative Commonwealth’.

A new Lancashire industrial revolution

ALLEN Clarke’s prophecy in Effects of the Factory System in (1895) that the cotton industry was doomed has finally come to be. Most of the Bolton mills that you could once see from the moors above Bolton, described so vividly in his Moorlands and Memories (1920), have been demolished. A few have survived but many are in poor condition, with only the prospect of demolition ahead of them unless something is done. The University of Bolton has had the sense to re-use some old mill buildings as part of its campus.

Yet most of the surviving Lancashire mills, perhaps with the exception of Manchester’s Ancoats, don’t have the wonderful mix of creative industries, office space and living accommodation that has been achieved with some of the mills in Yorkshire. At Saltaire, Salt’s Mill is perhaps the finest example, though rivalled by the Dean Clough Mills in Halifax. More should be done to protect our Lancashire mills and find good uses for them. Why should Yorkshire have all the fun?

Allen Clarke would have loved the idea of putting the mill buildings to better use - as places to live, but also as office and art space, recreational centres and performance areas. How about mill roof gardens? There’d be no shortage of space, with room to grow fruit and veg. Time for the ‘Incredible Edible Mill’!

We also need to build new, inspirational buildings that can take their place alongside the fine architecture bequeathed us by past generations. We need a vision, at least as radical as that of the Bolton landscape architect T.H. Mawson, of what our towns and cities should look like in the next 20 years, not what developers think is ‘good enough’ for us and makes the quickest return for them. We need some new Lord Leverhulmes, women and men of vision, able to work collaboratively and creatively.

Lancashire needs to be at the forefront, once again, of an industrial revolution – but this time a green revolution which benefits the many and not the few...

Sharing the same Skies: the countryside for everyone

ALONGSIDE a vibrant urban society, economy and culture, we need to make the best of our countryside, the ‘green lungs’ that make Lancashire so special. At its best, it can compete with the Lakes and the Peak District in terms of scenic beauty and is relatively well served with vibrant shops and smaller towns. It’s a huge asset in attracting talent into the region as a place to live and work.

Yet public transport access to the countryside is nothing like as good as it ought to be. Some of the most attractive areas have little or no bus services, or they don’t operate on Sundays – just when people need them. Places like Rivington, Pendle and Holcombe – let alone the Ribble Valley and Pendle - can be heaving with cars and motor bikes at weekends. At the same time, many stations that gave walkers access to the countryside, have closed.

Never mind HS2, let’s rebuild a world-class local transport network. For a fraction of the cost of that high-speed white elephant, we could have a network of modern, zero-emission trams and buses serving town and country, feeding in to a core rail network. If we look at the examples of Germany, Switzerland and Austria their popular rural areas typically have either frequent train services or rural trams connecting from the larger urban centres.

One of the few bright spots during the coronavirus outbreak has been the remarkable growth in cycling. Clarke and his friends Johnston and Wild would be delighted. Quiet roads, good weather and time on your hands was the ideal combination. Cycle shops have enjoyed a boon. I hope this renewed interest in cycling will survive, particularly if the Government puts its money where its mouth is and provides funding to expand cycle facilities in both town and country.

People will still use their car to get out into the countryside and that needs to be managed and provided for. Car parks can be ugly, but so can cars parked alongside verges. The more alternatives there are available, the less likely we are to assume that the only way to enjoy the countryside is by that form of transport which does most to disfigure it.

Why not copy the example of some of the national parks in the United States, which prohibit car access to the most sensitive areas? If you get there by car, leave it in a ‘parking lot’ and either walk, get on a local bus or hire a bike. It could work in some of our national parks including the Lakes and popular visitor locations such as Rivington and the Pendle Forest. The exciting plans for a ‘South Pennines’ regional park could include sensitive measures to restrict visitors’ car access and promote use of public transport, cycling and walking.

Allen Clarke want to see a new ‘agricultural revolution’ in Lancashire, and that’s still relevant. Much of Lancashire has a highly productive agricultural sector and we need to guard against precious agricultural land being lost to development. We need to do much more to feed our own people and not be dependent on imported foods. The ‘incredible edible’ model, of small-scale food production within towns was invented here in Lancashire and needs to be rolled out in every town and village.

Beyond a boundary: a Red Rose Co-operative Commonwealth?

THE future of England should be about county-regions co-operating with empowered, but geographically smaller, local councils. There should be strong encouragement to co-operate on issues when it makes sense, and to share resources and specialist staff. That co-operation should extend further, across the North. Why not a ‘Northern Federation’ of regions – Lancashire, Yorkshire, the North-East and Cumbria, collaborating on issues of joint concern, such as strategic transport links and academic co-operation? As the late Jo Cox (a committed regionalist) said, “we have far more in common than what divides us.”

Good, democratic governance must be about addressing inequality, jobs, the environment, health, education and having a thriving and diverse cultural sector. Allen Clarke’s vision in 1895, of locally-based and socially-owned units of production make sense in a modern digital age, co-operating as equals with partners across the globe.

His idea of a ‘co-operative commonwealth’ could certainly work at a Lancashire level; after all, it’s where co-operation began. Allen Clarke, with and his radical friends Solomon Partington, the co-operator and feminist Sarah Reddish and Samuel Compston looking over his shoulder, would have said “what are you waiting for?”

And we can’t wait. The coronavirus pandemic has focused people’s minds on the dysfunctional way we have lived our lives. An even bigger threat is climate change which requires re-thinking every aspect of how we live, travel, work and play.

Now is the time to create Allen Clarke’s vision of a ‘Lancashire Co-operative Commonwealth’ that can, in the words of Clarke’s heroine, Rose Hilton – get agate with the job of “washing the smoky dust off the petals of the red rose” and create a county-region that is fit for the 21st century. A Lancashire re-united.

Lancashire Day, November 27th 2020

See facebook group #LancashireUnited and www.lancashireloominary.co.uk

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Regulator: On Censoring Carillion Slowly! *

by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced that it intends to take further action against the failed outsourcer Carillion for 'misleading' shareholders with false information.

In a warning notice published the watchdog said that a number of senior executives were 'knowingly concerned' in numerous breaches of market rules, and had acted 'recklessly'

The FCA, had in fact issued warning notices to the company that 'certain previous executive directors' over a series of breaches of the financial rules before the business collapsed into administration in 2018 with liabilities of almost £7bn after a series of financial troubles caught up with the outsourcing giant.

This included giving 'false or misleading signals as to the value of its shares'; 'failing to take reasonable care to ensure that its announcements were not misleading, false or deceptive' and 'failing to take reasonable steps to establish and maintain adequate procedures, systems and controls'.

Yet the FCA has so far failed to as yet issue 'a financial penalty' or comment on possible sanctions against the guilty men et al or to even name the directors involved, because the case is ongoing. The FCA insisted that the warning notices were not final decisions and individuals might appeal against any decisions to its upper tribunal.

Meanwhile, Pro. Prem Sikka from Sheffield university and a member of the House of Lords, told the Financial Times: 'There are 30,000 small and medium-sized enterprises who have lost money, thousands of employees who have lost jobs and pension rights, and the regulator has taken two years to do little or virtually nothing.'

Carillion, which had 43,00 employees including 19,000 in the UK, was liquidated in January 2018 with £29m in cash and £7bn in liabilities, leaving the goverment to step in and pick up the pieces to ensure delivery of vital services including school meals and cleaning hospitals and prisons.

An inquiry into the collapse carried out by MPs described the collapse as 'a story of recklessness, hubris and greed', and said that the firm’s business model was 'a relentless dash for cash'.

For the individuals in question, the FCA has recourse to a number of additional penalties.

Carillion and the individuals in question will have 14 days to make representations to the Regulatory Decision Committee (RDC).

At the same time we can name some of the culprits because MPs haave demanded that Richard Adam, a former finance director, Richard Howson, a former chief executive, and Philip Green, a former chairman be held to account for their role in the biggest UK corporate failure in recent years. It is also the case that the Financial Reporting Council is investigating the conduct of Mr. Adams as well as another former Carillion finance director, Zafar Khan.

During their tenure, the company ran up debts and sold assets so that it could continue paying dividends to shareholders. It also paid 'performance-related bonusess to executives just months before its collapse' according the today's Financial Times.

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* SOME HISTORY OF THE CARILLION COLLAPSE

ON Tuesday 15 January 2019, Northern Voices reported: All Carillion's victims.

AFTER a year the fall of Carillion is still having consequences with many sub-contractors having lost huge amounts. Today in Construction News Rob Davies spoke with some of those affected to find out why:

In the aftermath of Carillion’s failure, there were concerns that its liquidation would lead to multiple collapses in the contractor’s supply chain.

Unite union criticises lack of action

Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, bemoaned a lack of action taken against former Carillion directors, who were accused by a committee of MPs of “recklessness, hubris and greed”, reiterating calls for a criminal investigation.

The Unite assistant general secretary, Gail Cartmail, said: 'It is staggering that a year after the biggest corporate failure in modern UK history the government has carried on as though it is business as normal.

'The fact that no one involved in Carillion has yet had any form of action taken against them, demonstrates either that the regulators are failing to do their jobs or that existing laws are too weak. If it is the latter then we need better, stronger laws.

'A year on from Carillion’s collapse the government needs to stop prevaricating and start taking effective action to drive bandit capitalism out of the UK.'

The government has introduced measures to make companies in charge of major public sector contracts draw up “living wills” to ensure the smooth operation of the services they provide in the event of financial failure.

But Unite said the measures did not go far enough to reform the system of public procurement. A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office, which manages the outsourcing of public sector contracts and faced criticism over its role in the administration of the bust of Carillion, said the government had put in place measures to prevent a repeat.

She said: 'This government has taken great strides to improve how we work with the private sector, including requiring companies to demonstrate prompt payment to suppliers and piloting "living wills" for critical contracts, allowing contingency plans to be quickly put into place if needed.'

The accounting watchdog Financial Reporting Council (FRC), which was criticised by MPs for being 'chronically passive' over the audits of Carillion by firms including KPMG, is still investigating the circumstances of its failure.

The REAL HONOURS LIST! by Christopher Draper

TWICE a year, Buckingham Palace bestows royal recognition on hundreds of celebrity nonentities and local minions. For centuries the Crown and its serially sycophantic governments refused to release the names of the honourable men and women who declined the blandishment of these trinkets and tawdry titles. It eventually required the Freedom of Information Act and the intervention of the Information Commissioner’s Office to enable me to compile this select list of our most truly honourable citizens.

1) L S LOWRY (1887-1976) Refused OBE 1955, refused CBE 1961, refused Knighthood 1968, refused Order of Companion of Honour 1972 and 1976.

Salford painter Laurence Stephen Lowry holds the supreme honour of having turned down more pathetic baubles than anyone else. The Establishment initially upped the ante from MBE, through CBE until it reached the level of Knighthood in 1968 and when that failed to impress they tried another tack, attempting, twice, right up to the year of his death, to lure Lowry with offers of the more modest title “CH” but he never succumbed to such unworthy blandishments. Respect!

2) KEN LOACH (1936 - - - ) Refused OBE 1977 – “I turned down the OBE for several reasons; it’s not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who’ve got it… As a republican, I can’t accept anything from the Queen… It also meant I would be receiving something in the name of the Empire, which as an anti-Imperialist I don’t see how anyone can accept.”

3) HOWARD GAYLE (1958 - - - ) Refused MBE 2016 – the first black footballer to play for Liverpool FC declined “for the reason that my ancestors would be turning in their graves after how the Empire and Colonialism had enslaved them.”

4) KINGSLEY MARTIN (1897-1969) Refused Knighthood 1965 – Conscientious Objector to WWI. Martin was a journalist with the Manchester Guardian before editing the leading left-wing magazine the New Statesman from 1930 to 1960, where “Martin positively relished being a perpetual critic of the Labour leadership”. In 1957 he chaired the founding meeting of CND and in his books “The Magic of Monarchy (1937)” and “The Crown and the Establishment (1962)” Kingsley Martin put forward the first modern arguments for British Republicanism. “The Monarchy…is the secret well from which the flourishing institution of British Snobbery draws its nourishment.” In a cynical and ill-judged attempt to undermine Martin’s reputation, in 1965 he was offered a Knighthood which he rapidly rejected.

5) ALBERT FINNEY (1936-2019) Refused CB 1980, refused Knighthood 2000 – “Knighthood is a disease that perpetuates snobbery… Maybe people in America think being a 'Sir' is a big deal but I think we should all be misters together.”

6) IORWERTH PEATE (1901-1982) Refused OBE 1963 – joint founder of “St Fagan’s Museum”, Wales’ national folk-life collection. After registering as a Conscientious Objector in 1941 Peate was sacked as Curator of the collection but later re-instated by the museum’s Board of Governors. Uninterested in joining the English Establishment and committed to studying, preserving and promoting the culture, language and everyday artefacts of the people of Wales, in 1963 Iorwerth Peate creditably refused to be appointed an “Officer of the Order of the British Empire”. Da Iawn, ti!

7) BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH (1958- - - ) Refused OBE 2003 – Rastafarian performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah comprehensively rejects everything the honours system represents - “I get angry when I see the word “empire”; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.” Benjamin deserves an extra honours point as his eloquent shaming, live on Channel Four News, of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, MBE not only prompted her to guiltily return the bauble but transformed her in into a vociferous (if belated) critic of these cringeworthy awards.

8) HONOR BLACKMAN (1925-2020) Refused CBE 2002 – Acclaimed actor, self-declared republican and Liberal who opposed Monarchy and Margaret Thatcher, “She was merciless…she did damn all for empowering women… I’m not too happy about the Falklands either…” Honor by name, Honour by nature!

9) J G BALLARD (1930-2009) Refused CBE 2003 – Novelist James Graham Ballard was contemptuous of the honours system, “It is exploited by politicians and always has been…I think it’s deplorable when leftwing playwrights like David Hare who have worn their socialist colours on both sleeves for so many years, should accept a knighthood… The honours system is a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up the top-heavy monarchy… It makes us look a laughing stock and encourages deference to the crown.”

10) BOB HOLMAN (1936-2016) Refused MBE 2012 – In 1987 Christian Socialist Bob Holman abandoned his comfy life teaching “Social Administration” at Bath University to put theory into practice and work on community projects in Easterhouse, one of the most deprived parts of Glasgow. Spurning the condescension of royal recognition in 1987, Holman comprehensively excoriated the honours system not just to explain his own action but explicitly to incite others to decline: “The unelected monarchy reinforces and sanctions inequality. The BBC and most of the press pour undiluted praise on the royals whilst imposing a virtual gag on the views of republicans. No senior politician has the courage to question the continuation of the monarchy…Refusing a royal honour is a small step but one in the right direction.” Amen brothers and sisters!

(This is the third and final part of Chris’s series on the British Honours System – previous articles are archived and available on this NORTHERN VOICES site)

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Lies, Damn Lies and Lies About Statistics

by Les May

AFZAL KHAN, MP for Gorton recently wrote, amongst other things, ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’ and ‘We have seen during this Covid 19 pandemic that people of Muslim heritage have been disproportionately affected.’

The latter statement is complete bunkum because there is no evidence to support it. Kahn’s use of the term ‘Muslim heritage’ is an attempt to give credence to his claim that the followers of Islam form a distinct racial group and should be treated as such. This claim will no doubt come as something of a surprise to all the people who would identify as being Muslims in Africa and China and the Middle East.

The latest research, published only today, indicates that Black people are about twice as likely to become infected as White people and Asian people about one a half times more likely. It provides no statistics and makes no comment about ‘Muslim Heritage’, and no doubt Black and Asian people whose heritage is that of Buddhism, Christianity or Judaism, share an increased susceptibility to infection.

It has been speculated, and it is only speculation not an established fact, that this increased susceptibility results from multi-generational family structures, the nature of their employment and higher prevalence of co-morbidities in these two groups. Equally plausible are that it results from genetic differences or differences in behaviour.

What Kahn is trying to do is claim exceptionalism for Muslims, something which no other religious group in this country has. Roman Catholicism is frequently subject to criticism due to its views on homosexuality, divorce, contraception and abortion. What would your reaction be if Roman Catholics insisted that such criticism is a form of ‘racism’?

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Belarus: Release 42 trade unionists who were arrested this afternoon

A few days ago I wrote to give you the good news that four union leaders who had been jailed in Belarus were now free.

  

We know that our campaign helped.  They told us so in a video.

But this afternoon we received some terrible news: some of those very same union leaders, together with around 40 other union members, were arrested by the police and are now being held in a local police station.

They are likely to be held until Monday and possibly much longer.

The independent trade unions of Belarus and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) have called for a global campaign of protest.

Please join us in sending an urgent message to the local and national police demanding their release.

 

Free the 42 jailed trade unionists now!

Thank you!

Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow trade union members.  Thank you!

Eric Lee ***********************************************************

John McDonnell: 'Mistake' on Spy Cop Powers

POLITICS 09/10/2020 14:14 BST

John McDonnell has warned Keir Starmer it is a “mistake” to order Labour MPs to abstain on controversial laws that give MI5 and police undercover operatives the power to commit crimes.

The former shadow chancellor was, along with Jeremy Corbyn, one of 20 Labour MPs to defy Starmer’s orders and to vote against the legislation this week.

He described the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, which will put into law for the first time an exemption to allow undercover informants working for the police and MI5 to commit crimes, as “unsupportable”.

And he urged Starmer to give Labour MPs a free vote in future divisions on the legislation, describing it as a “matter of conscience” because it deals with life and death.

Campaigners have long called for informants’ shadowy practices to be put in law, as long as there are safeguards to explicitly exclude murder, torture or sexual violence.

But the bill is deliberately vague on this as ministers fear that terrorists or others will be able to expose undercover agents by setting them tests against a “checklist” of crimes.

Starmer has said he will try to amend the Bill but McDonnell stressed: “I just can’t see what amendment would enable Labour to vote for this legislation and therefore if you can’t vote for it, and it is so serious, you just have to vote against”.

On Labour’s apparent plans to continue abstaining on the laws if it cannot pass amendments, McDonnell told HuffPost UK’s Commons People podcast: “I just think it’s a mistake.

“On issues like this, they are matters of conscience, they are dealing with life and death in some instances and certainly in terms of extreme emotional and physical harm that could take place as well.

“I think actually you do have to take a decision and you have to stand up on these ones.

“If the Labour frontbench doesn’t do that, that’s a matter for them, but I’ve made it clear that I won’t vote for this legislation.

“And I can’t see how it could be amended to make it in any way effective in those terms.

“I do not see how we can sanction state agents, whether they be military, police or others, or undercover agents, to perpetrate murder, rape or torture in our names.”

McDonnell described the timing of the Bill’s introduction as “extremely suspicious”, despite a recent court case on the issue, and speculated that Boris Johnson and his chief aide Dominic Cummings may be trying to undermine Starmer’s attempts to paint himself as a patriot.

And he called on Starmer and other party leaders to give their MPs a free vote.

McDonnell said:

“I think it is, to a certain extent, Boris Johnson and Cummings and others playing politics with this./i>

“Keir quite rightfully has, in his conference speech, made it clear about his own personal patriotism and what the party stands for in that respect.

“And I wonder, I just speculate, whether these Bills were brought forward with a view to try and undermine some element of that.

“If it is a grubby political exercise like that by the Tories I think it’s despicable.”

He added: “Anything that involves the potential of determining life and death like this I think is a matter of conscience and I would rather there was no whip whatsoever across the whole House.”

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'Muslimness': What's it all in aid of?

by Brian Bamford

BRING ON the Bandwaggon of Muslim Awareness!

AFZAL KHAN MP for Manchester Gorton, wrote to Rochdale Council:

'I am writing to you in my capacity as vice-chair of the All Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. As you may be aware, in 2018 we published our report on 'Islamophobia Defined: the inquiry into a working definition of islamophobia'. The definition is 'Islamophobia is rooted in racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or a perceived of Muslimness', and includes an inexhaustive number of contemporary examples of Islamophobia. It has now been adopted by over eight hundred organisations, such as Manchester and Salford City Councils, Bury MBC, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

'Islamophobia is sadly rife across Britain - including the media and public life - and can have distressing real life implications for our Muslim community, including the threat of violence. We have seen during this Covid-19 pandemic that people of Muslim heritage have been dispropotionately affected. This Muslim Awareness Month, is the responsibility of everyone, including all levels of government, to tackle this insidious hatred.'

Yesterday, a concerned Carl Faulkner wrote in response to this that: 'Rochdale Labour and Rochdale Council have adopted a definition of Islamophobia that actually has no legal standing, but is simply something that has been pushed upon them by Afzal Khan MP.'

A CAREER BUILT on being MUSLIM

Afzal Khan was born in Pakistan and came to the UK aged 11. After leaving school without qualifications, he had a number of jobs, including as a Greater Manchester Police constable, before returning to education and qualifying as a solicitor:[1] He is now a partner of solicitors Mellor & Jackson in Oldham.

Khan was first elected a Labour Councillor in 2000, being re-elected in 2004, 2007 and 2011, representing Cheetham Ward. He served as Executive Member for Children's Services. Khan became the first Muslim Lord Mayor of Manchester, taking the position for 2005–2006.

In 2010, Khan was appointed CBE for his race relations work.

In March 2017, he applied to be Labour's candidate in the 2017 Manchester Gorton by-election and was officially selected on 22 March.[14] During the by-election, he said "I condemn the statements made by Ken Livingstone and I believe there is no place for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party." He added, "I have been a lifelong campaigner against racism and anti-Semitism. In 2008, I was awarded a CBE in part for my work encouraging greater understanding between Muslims and Jews."

GORTON's FASHION for 'FOOT in the MOUTH' MPs

Khan was again selected for as the Labour candidate for Gorton in the general election and was elected, becoming Manchester's first Muslim MP.[17] In July 2017, Khan was appointed Shadow Immigration Minister.

However, in July 2019, Khan had to humbly apologised when he shared on Facebook two years earlier a video of American comedian Jon Stewart talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. The text under the video referred to an "Israel-British-Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate" and "mass murdering Rothschilds Israeli mafia criminal liars". Khan said he was "mortified", claiming "I didn't read the text below, which contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy about the Rothschilds. I would never have shared it if I had seen that".

It may be worth mentioning that from 1983-2017, Sir Gerald Kaufman, Father of the House of Commons, represented the same Manchester Gorton constituency. And should I say funnily enough in November 2015, he too was castigated by none other than Jeremy Corbyn for claiming: “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative party – as in the general election in May – support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives,” Kaufman said. “There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel whatever government does and they are not interested in what Israel, in what the Israeli government does.

“They’re not interested in the fact that Palestinians are living a repressed life, and are liable to be shot at any time. In the last few days alone the Israelis have murdered 52 Palestinians and nobody pays attention and this government doesn’t care.”

At that time predictable Jeremy Corbyn released a statement saying that Kaufman’s remarks were 'completely unacceptable and deeply regrettable'. He added 'Such remarks are damaging to community relations, and also do nothing to benefit the Palestinian cause,' he said. 'I have always implacably opposed all forms of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia and will continue to do so. At my request, the chief whip has met Sir Gerald and expressed my deep concern.'

In such a climate of clumsy bumbling blundering politicians, can we be sure that the smart suited former solicitor Afzal Khan MP for Gorton, will not fall foul again of the standards and the taboos of the Muslimness criterior, which he and others are recomending? Or is it just another opportunity for virtue signaliing

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A Nasty Smell from the Pork Barrel by Les May

ONE might have hoped that now that the anti-semitism witch hunt has begun to subside in the Labour party we might see a period of relative calm punctuated only by the ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ knocking eight bells out of each other and in between these bouts there might have been a focus on the things that Labour needs to put right in this country. Things like the gross inequalities in income and wealth, which are linked to both differences in total life expectancy and length of life without disability, and the lack of social housing forcing people into the hands of a new ‘rentier class’ of private landlords.

Seemingly not, judging by a tweet from Rochdale Labour Group which seems eager to sow the seeds of yet another witch hunt, this time in the name of ‘Islamophobia’.

The definition they propose to accept runs as follows; ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type or racism that targets Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. Quite how anyone got from a religious belief, which is open to anyone to adopt, or not, as they so wish, to being a form of ‘racism’ is anyone’s guess. But then again logic does not seem to be a strong point for those who like to dabble in identity politics.

Nor are we offered a working definition of ‘Muslimness’, which seems like a convenient oversight. Is it for example adherence to fasting between dawn and sunset during Ramadan so that believers can experience what it is like to be someone who is so poor that they have to go without food? Or is it cutting someone’s throat because they have been perceived as causing offence? Is it risking your life in a Red Crescent team trying to rescue someone from a collapsed building? Or is it detonating a bomb in a crowded building? As with every other religious faith some of its adherents are good and some are evil. Or as the line from the film ‘The Dynamite Man from Glory jail’ runs, ‘God uses some people, and some people use God’.

This definition has no legal status and to the extent that it can be seen as an attack on our freedom of expression, including the freedom to offend, it is unlikely that any court would offer support to any council, public body or company attempting to using it as a criterion for determining someone’s suitability for continued employment.

Rochdale Labour Group’s decision to announce this looks rather like an exercise in what our American friends call ‘Pork Barrel Politics’, intended to secure the loyalty at the ballot box of a particular group of voters. I look forward to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Pagans lining up to demand similar protection from criticism. And don’t forget the Vegan who wants his dietary choices classed as stemming from a religious belief!

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The Covid 19 Vaccine Has Pros and Cons.

by Les May

THE new vaccine developed to provide protection against the SARS Cov2 virus which causes the disease which we know as Covid 19, has one huge advantage; it does not contain any attenuated or killed virus particles. Potentially this makes it an even safer candidate for extensive use.

The four letters mRNA stand for messenger RiboNucleicAcid. Viruses whether they infect, bacteria, fungi, plants or animals, are essentially strings of instructions, (messages) which tell infected cells what to produce and how it should assemble the components. An mRNA vaccine works by copying just a small part of these instructions. It’s the bit which instructs the cell how to produce just the molecules (antigens) found on the surface of the virus which the immune system of our body recognises. The immune system then produces antibodies which can lock onto the antigen on the surface of any virus particles if the individual becomes infected.

Because the synthesis of the mRNA is essentially a chemical process done in the laboratory there is no possibility of virus particles being introduced into the vaccine. But there’s some bad new as well.

The molecules of mRNA are not stable at higher temperatures and in this case ‘higher temperatures’ are still very much colder than your average deep freeze. After manufacture the vaccine must be kept at about minus 80 degrees Celsius at all times, otherwise it will degrade and become non-functional.

This is not a problem for laboratories and hospitals, but it is for local surgeries and pharmacies, both of which have been suggested as locations where the vaccine could be administered.

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‘Little faith’ in spy cops inquiry getting to truth

By Zaki Sarraf Justice Gap reporter 3 November 2020 |

The public inquiry into undercover policing Inquiry began yesterday five years after the then Home Secretary Theresa May announced the inquiry. It will examine the contribution that undercover policing has made to tackling crime, how it is supervised, regulated and the effect on individuals involved. The inquiry will also examine whether individuals may have been wrongly convicted in cases involving so called spy cops.

Bindmans Solicitors are acting for a number of the core participants. ‘Our clients have waited more than five years for this Inquiry to commence,’ the firm said. ‘During this time the Inquiry has granted anonymity to most of the undercover police officers being called to give evidence, in some cases to their cover names as well as their real names.’

‘Those of us who have been following the Undercover Policing Inquiry go into the start of proceedings today with very little faith in the process,’ commented core participant Tom Fowler. ‘The huge concessions to police anonymity that that has been partly responsible for the delays that have taken five years for the Inquiry to get started gave made sure of that. We will however be watching proceedings closely in the hope that some droplets of truth will sneak out. Myself and others will be providing live updates over the duration of the hearings, using the #spycops hashtag on Twitter.’

Theresa May’s announcement of the judge-led inquiry in 2015 was in response to Mark Ellison QC’s review which sought to answer whether there was evidence of corruption in the Metropolitan Police during the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence; whether the Met had evidence of corruption it did not disclose to the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder; and whether there was inappropriate undercover activity directed at the grieving Lawrence family.

The Ellison review found undercover officers being deployed to influence and smear the Lawrence family campaign whilst the Macpherson inquiry was ongoing. Specific allegations by police officers of corruption against other officers were ignored by their superiors and not brought to the attention of Macpherson; key evidence was shredded by the Police; and undercover officers failed to correct evidence given in court which they knew was wrong. In March 2014, Theresa May May described its findings ‘profoundly shocking’ and ‘of grave concern’.

The Lawrence case is one example of undercover policing and there are over 230 core participants in the UCPI including individuals that have been duped into relationships with undercover officers, families of victims of murders, politicians, trade unionists and more – a full list of the core participants can be found here. Sixty-nine officers’ names have been published from the Special Demonstration Squad to enable members of the public to determine whether they were affected by undercover policing and come forward with evidence.

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Stuart Christie and the Spirit of Don Quixote

by Brian Bamford

REASSESSING STUART CHRISTIE IN CONTEXT

Stuart Christie: a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. Aged 18, Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo, General Francisco Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges. When he died he was probably the best know anarchist in the UK.

Born: July 10, 1946, Partick, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Died: August 15, 2020

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From Shakespeare's Macbeth: "I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none." in Macbeth act 1

From Christie's 'My Granny...' on pages 32-33: 'I couldn't warm to Shakespeare in the classroom. He simply had no resonance with us. The language was remote and difficult, as was the historical period...'. (Rabbie) Burns* was my first encounter with the emotions and ideals I've since come to call socialism. Who could grow up to be anything but a class war socialist on reading Burns' clarion call to egalitarianism in "A Man's A Man For A' That".'

ON REVIEWING Don Quixote and Cervantes** in 'The LITERATURE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE' Gerald Brenan writes: 'the KNIGHT of the DOLEFUL COUNTINANCE is mad, and that's that. But presently it dawns on us that his madness is confined to one thing - the belief, not itself irrational by the standards of that age, that the books of Chivalry were true histories. Once that is taken for granted, it was no more mad for him to attempt to revive the profession of knight-errantry than it was for a monk to imitate the Fathers of the desert.'

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WHEN CONSIDERING the role of Stuart Christie and his adventures on the Spanish peninsular in August 1964, we would do well to observe his likeness to the knight of the Doleful Countenance. We learn for instance that Don Quixote was conceived by Cervantes in a Spanish jail at a low water mark in his life. Much like, I dare say, Stuart's autobiography 'My Granny Made Me An Anarchist'.

Interestingly Gerald Brenan writes of Don Quixote: '...in so far as Cervantes intended the figure of Don Quixote to stand for anything, it was quite simply for a man who ruins himself and others by his romantic and generous illusions and by his over-confidence in the goodness of human nature.'

Moreover, Brenan claims: In the novel '...there is the contrast between the actual situation and what it appears to be to Don Quixote: there is that between his noble and exalted way of feeling and Sancho's peasant shrewdness and self-interest: and if one likes, that between the knight's wise and sane ratiocinations and his violent fantasies whenever the subject of Chiivalry enters his head.'

In all this it is hard to escape the feeling that the Stuart that I met in Paris in August 1964, already commited to carry explosive to Madrid, was so full of Rabbie Burns* and the Bonnot Gang. So wound-up was he on romance that he could have been a younger version of Lord Byron or a kind of blunt working-class Rabbie Burns; pioneer of the Romantic movement .

In El País, the historian Julián Casanova Ruiz has recently written in what I think is the best memorial of Stuart: 'Yet he was a committed anarchist using his pen and engaged in cultural aggitation, in times when the revolutionaries with "consciences" have past into history. Anarchist solidarity, that reflects on the concequences of industrial capilalism, nuclear disarmament, and abuses by the State. He was a Scot who would have loved to live in the golden epoch of Spanish anarchism.'

Julián Casanova's suggestion that Stuart Christie was steeped in the 'spirit of the older epoch of Spanish anarchism' implies that he was indeed a romantic soul. Quixote, who has gone mad owing to reading too many books about Chivalry, according to Brenan should not be regarded as 'lacking in shrewdness or being gullible by nature' because 'his delusion is a result of a long secretly sustained wish to rise above the dullness of his monotonous life, have adventures and distinguish himself.'

Any objective reading of Stuart Christie's autobiography will I think confirm that that in 1964 he was determined to escape his dreary life in Glasgow and somehow experience what he then believed the anarchist Holy Land. I felt the same about escaping Manchester and going to Spain in the winter of February 1963.

Alas, the actual Holy Land, as was shown in Don Quixote, was in reality somewhat more complex than any of us anticipated in our overwrought and vivid imaginations. Stuart was determine and he asked: 'Why did I, for the most part an unaggressive and easy-going person, commit myself to going to Spain to engage in an unspecified but violent campaign against the Franco regime?' and he continued 'I wanted to change the world because the world needed to be changed. Right in the middle of Europe, Franco was running one of the most brutal and represive regimes in modern history - he had killed more Spanish people than Hitler killed German Jews - and the Western democracies were now helping him to survive. Even now, while the civilized world was humming along to the songs of the Beatles and the Supremes.... the number of political dissidents being arrested and tortured by Franco's secret police was steadily increasing.'

Stuart's view here is clearly that of a foreigner looking at Spain in the early 1960s, and seeing it with eye of an outsider; the Spaniards I got to know between March 1963 and August 1964 both in the fishing village in Alicante where we lived and worked, and later on in La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, certainly did not have the feel of being downtrodden. The workers I worked with were mostly optimistic, cheerful and I felt they were more amiable than the workers I knew in England, we all seemed have enough money to live on, but I struggled to put something on one side for a rainy day.

All this everyday reality in the period 1964-67 when Stuart was in jail in Madrid was outside his grasp, and he was consequently able to decieve himself about the nature of Spanish life as it was evolving for most workers in the 1960s. Clearly in 1964, I was financially better off working 5-days for the MOD at the airport in Gibraltar, earning just over £8 for a 40-hour week; than when I was working a 48-hour week in Alicante at the Casa Such for 750 Pesetas (about £5).

Among other things, Stuart seemed to have been influenced by George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia', and Orwell wrote in an essay 'The Art of Donald McGill' that 'If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?' and he wrote:

'Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with "volupuous" figures. He it is who punctures your your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth...'

It seems to me that these attitudes have been poetically displayed in the adventures of Stuart Christie and is amply demonstrated in his autobiography especially were he describes his chance meetings with many amiable fellow prisoners who he concluded to be 'champion' only to later learn that they had committed unimaginable crimes: someone he thought was a 'nice chap' turned out to be Gestapo officer awaiting extradition on charges of mass murder, or an OAS terrorist, a South American gangster, a professional assasin, an arms dealer, a rapist etc. Prison life is like that, you come across all sorts of folk, I don't know about Spain but in places like Strangways prison in Manchester there were clear hierarchies with the wife-killer and the murders at the top, and then people like debtors would be at the bottom, and in the 1960s, this last category were distinguished by having to wear brown, and these days I believe the child abuser is the lowest of the low.

Stuart had been brought up a protestant and he writes:

'Before I went to prison my world-view was black and white, a moral chessboard on which everyone was either a goody or a baddy. But the ambiguities in people I came across in prison made me uneasy and I began to question my assumptions about the nature of good and evil.'

Orwell felt that to be among Spaniards in Spain was to be in the best country in the world for a foreigner. The 10th, July 1967 was Stuart's 21st birthday, and the jefe de servicio agreed to use the infirmary dining room to organise a party for him. The menue was set-up with a kid goat cooked in wine with roast potatoes, ensalada, coffee, cheese and ice cream. Beer, wine and Spanish brandy were supplied. The cabaret was put on by a Philipino rock star who was inside for murdering his agent, together with a band of gypsies who singing and dancing flamenco. The 'do' lasted from 2pm to 11pm. Everyone ended up legless.

Anyone who has lived in Spain and worked among Spaniards in the 1960s will find this account perfect plausable. No wonder Stuart was later to favourably compare his Spanish prison experience with life in an English jail. Somehow the Spaniards conduct themselves a more human manner, sometimes it can be delightful as it was for me when I was detained in the barracks of the Civil Guards up in the province of Segovia after I'd failed to carry my passport as identification returning from a journey to report on a strike of miners in the Asturias. The Civil Guards were unbelievably kind and considerate, and their wives served me up a dinner fit for a King. Maybe a Spaniard who'd failed to carry his identity card would not have received such sympathetic treatment because, as the Gibraltarians have often noted, Spaniards can be cruel to each other; I note for example that Fernando Carballo, Stuart's contact in Madrid, was treated much more roughly in police custody: his wrists were hammered with the butt of a policeman's pistol while another 'systematically punched him in the kidneys and stomach'. (see 'Granny' page 165).

We learn from Gerald Brenan that 'Don Quixote grew out of Cervantes' long and painful experiences of frustration and failure' and he adds 'It thus deals with one of the classic themes of Spanish literature - disillusionment.' According to Brenan, who lived in Spain on and off from 1919 when he came out of the British army after the First World War, 'Spaniards who commonly set their hopes too high and expect a miracle to fulfil them, often come to feel themselves deceived by life.'

When we were in Paris in February 1963 and about to leave for Spain, Salvador Gurucharri our handler told me he was atheist who believed in the God of nature,and I've noticed this with other Spaniards over the years. Gerald Brenan in his book The Spanish Labyrinth writes about this importance of nature with regard to Bakunin: 'He (Bakunin) therefore maintains that a free society will necessarily create strong, open, outstanding men and accepts without fear a strengthening of those great conservative forces that govern societies - custom and public opinion, which are good "because they are natural".' Brenan writes 'Something must be said about this word "natural", for it is one of the keys to Bakunin's ideas.' Bakunin, rather like John Ruskin and the romantics, seems to have felt angish at the growing artificiality of modern life, Brenan claims that for Bakunin 'all artificiality in his eyes was bad, so all "nature" was good.'

Bakunin is recognised as having a great influence on Spanish anarchism.

When I set out to write this piece on Stuart Christie I had in mind a critique based on the idea that he was a romantic who had too much faith in actions like setting off small bombs that at best only got the coverage of a small column in a foreign newspaper outside Spain. Yet I've been seduced by re-reading Stuart's autobiography in conjunction with re-reading Gerald Brenan's Literature of the Spanish People.

Yet, I am aware of that some would have liked me to contrast Stuart Christie's approach to anarchism with that of David Graeber who also died in August this year. Graeber in the USA, and for example Colin Ward in the UK, took a more considered rationalist approach. When I thought about it I remembered what George Orwell said about Tolstoy in his essay 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool', in it he wrote of Tolstoy: 'Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His (Tolstoy's) reaction is that of an irritable old man pestred by a noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?".' What Orwell concludes is that people like the pacifist Tolstoy would 'make children senile'. On reflection my worry is that those of who argue for a more cerebral approach to life and social change may simply be urging that the young should become old before their time.

It would seem, from this point of view, that the journey for all of us is bound up in an eternal pilgrimage from the madness of youth to the senility of old age.

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* Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and the Ploughman Poet and various other names and epithets,[nb 1] was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country.

** Wikipedia on Cervantes: Aside from these, and some poems, by 1605, Cervantes had not been published for 20 years. In Don Quixote, he challenged a form of literature that had been a favourite for more than a century, explicitly stating his purpose was to undermine 'vain and empty' chivalric romances.[61] His portrayal of real life, and use of everyday speech in a literary context was considered innovative, and proved instantly popular. First published in January 1605, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza featured in masquerades held to celebrate the birth of Philip IV on 8 April.[51]

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