Who gets out - and who comes in

 I doubt the liberal congoscenti will begin to comprehend the spittle flecked fury raging across the country about the erroneous release of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant who arrived on a small boat and was convicted of sex offences on a 12 year old girl and a woman. When we heard this was the very dude whose original arrest was the trigger for the protests and disturbances at the Bell hotel, Epping it was a "you could not make that up" moment.

To my surprise the story wasn't even on the front page of most of the newspapers the next day which I found bizarre.

He's now been nabbed but the story epitomises the general air of incompetence around anything to do with the British government and the functions and services under its control. Many in authority will just sigh that this sort of thing is inevitable. I don't for a moment believe it is.

On the latest figures over 260 prisoners were incorrectly released in the 12 months to March 2025, a 128% increase on the previous year. So the number more than doubled. David 'Mastermind' Lammy said the government had "inherited a system that was collapsing" but he and Shabana Mahmood have overseen it getting much worse.  Something is clearly wrong in the system and I agree with the commentator who said this isn't really about an error by one person. If one officer did make an error I'm left wondering how the relevant process doesn't build in adequate checks.

Apparently the paperwork is awfully complicated. That sounds a very lame excuse. There will, I accept, be resource limitations and there is currently huge pressure on prison officers in our inadequate and overcrowded prison estate (another Tory failure, I must say. One would have thought building more prisons would have played well with their base).

But still none of that is an excuse. I don't know whether it is, but I would expect all paperwork on dangerous prisoners to be clearly marked. But I would also have expected that high political risk prisoners, like Kebatu, would be identified. There can't have been many higher political risk prisoners in the jail categories lower than A, the highest security. One can only assume they are not, which I find incredible.

Stats on the gov.uk website suggest that something like 90,000 prisoners a year are released, mainly on licence, and claims a "success rate" of 99.5%. I think that's a pretty abysmal performance for this particular activity. 1 in 200 is a fairly typical of a human error rate in a system without proper checking. A system that should be aspiring to very high reliability should be able to easily get to 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and a high integrity system would expect to do much better than that. The government doesn't need to hold an expensive and time consuming public inquiry. It needs to marshall some of the expertise readily available to it and get a team of independent people with experience in prisons and in sectors like aviation, rail and nuclear and sort out a process that works. Releasing the wrong person shouldn't really happen more than a handful of times a year at the most, if ever.

Meanwhile the long run up to Rachel Reeves's budget continues and speculation grows. Why did she push the budget back to the latest possible date? The reason, as any accountant will tell you, is that bad numbers take much longer to add up.

I may return to what Reeves should do in her second budget but for now one can't help reflect that she didn't make particularly sound and robust decisions in her first, which was meant to be a "sort things out, once-off this parliament" budget. The general air of doom and despondency Reeves allowed to take hold in the run up to her last budget is being repeated. Talking down the economy and hiking taxes, with the ill judged NI increase made inevitable by Labour's rash manifesto promises, all pushed in the opposite direction to Labour's aspiration for growth. As Charles Colville pointed out in the Sunday Times if you talk down the economy and increase taxes on businesses then those businesses don't invest. Who knew? Well everyone, pretty much.

One straw in the wind I saw was an analysis by Chris Walker, of the independent economics consultancy Chamberlain Walker, which suggests that 1,800 former non-doms have left the country since April, twice the number expected, after Reeves abolished non-dom status which allowed people whose permanent homes are abroad to escape tax on their overseas income and wealth (note not their UK income). Most people would shrug their shoulders about that but it probably means that Reeves won't anything like get the extra £34 billion she predicted. Indeed I would expect the tax take to go down from the abolition of non-dom status. Which is why so many chancellors had left an arrangement that dated back over 200 years in place. Rachel clearly thought she knew better than two centuries of her predecessors.

The Treasury responded that the 1,800 estimate was based on "anecdotal evidence that we don't recognise". That is because the Treasury rely on data from HMRC, which collects information from people in employment. The wealthiest non-doms would be investors in and owners of businesses, not employees. Chris Walker concluded that the Treasury was "effectively flying blind" about the the behaviour of the most responsive group of non-doms, with no real idea of how many have decided to decamp to places like Dubai.

There is a less anecdotal piece of evidence which the Treasury didn't comment on. Ferrari limited its supplies of cars to Britain six months ago amid concerns that some people are getting out of the UK for tax reasons, as it's Chief Executive told the FT. OK, so we know who to believe then.

Reeves countered concerns that non-doms were leaving in an interview with the Guardian last week, in which she said "this is a brilliant country and people want to live here".

Sure Rachel, a lot of them do. The keenest seem to be folk like the guy who was removed under the one in one out deal with France and was back on a small boat within a month, d'oh...

I suppose that did show that we have some processes that work as at least that dude was immediately identified. Still, it's shame we can't swap out these two

Bonnie Blue and the swords of a thousand men

A couple of months ago there was a media tizzy over the Channel 4 "documentary" 1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue story. Rather to my surprise, Mrs H agreed we should watch this to make our own minds up about the, ahem, journalistic merit of the story.

Bonnie Blue is the alter ego of Tia Billinger from Nottinghamshire, a girl with a middle class upbringing and a fascination with reality tv who turned a side hustle into a lucrative business based around exploiting her body utilising the OnlyFans "platform for creators".  Having become a "webcam model" and finding she could earn $5,000 a week she launched her OnlyFans page and established her USP in the porn market: having free sex with members of the public provided they consented to it being filmed and posted on line. The Sun showed her holding a poster saying "bonk me for free, let me film it".

The documentary charted her progress as she increased her monthly earnings into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring a support team to help produce the videos and deal with all the paperwork. In order to grow her number of regular followers she decided she didn't just need to create content but to plan ever more eye popping stunts. She'd already run a series of videos about having sex with "barely legals" (which she noted wasn't her phrase) which put a whole new angle on university freshers' weeks. Her big wheeze was to set a world record by having sex with over 1,000 men in a day.

The documentary showed her planning and then posting the invitation, telling punters where they could report to take part while wondering aloud to the camera whether anyone would actually turn up. The film showed lines of men (waist down) queueing to take their turn. Bonnie had already told us they would get 40 seconds each to "do what they wanted", penetration counting as "having sex". This was some production line.

The stunt achieved its publicity objectives and her income soared to $500,000 dollars a month (some sources say over $2m a month). Where's there's muck, there's brass as they say.

However when she planned her next big stunt - being tied up naked in a glass box while members of the public did what they wanted to her - OnlyFans tired of her attention grabbing antics, or rather the credit card business that collects the cash from her punters decided it was harming their image and pressured OnlyFans to ditch her. The documentary showed a crisis meeting with her team as Bonnie realised her income had gone down from megabucks to zero in an instant.

She was more than put out - she had run every idea past the OnlyFans people before publishing her videos and got their ok. And, as she pointed out, while it might be a "platform for creators" the overwhelmimg majority of content posted is porn. She was more than miffed by the double standards.

She was only allowed to continue posting material if it used actors. So she returned to more conventional porn for a while but the need to maintain interest amongst her followers meant multiple men. Which she noted was exhausting because they were much fitter and stronger than members of the public.

Salvation was at hand in the form of another, less well known, site called Fansly. Bonnie fretted about how much the change would hit her income. Reports don't confirm her income on the new platform but it would be no sweat for her fans to migrate to Fansly so my guess is she's still putting it out there and coining it.

What did we think of the Channel 4 "documentary"? The content was tawdry, vulgar and undignified but the way it was portrayed, with some pixellation of Bonnie's anatomy and her punters only ever shown from the waist down and never actually doing anything could not be called obscene. 

Perhaps the grossest moment in the film was when Bonnie, having completed her epic feat of endurance cast her eyes over the floor of her ad hoc studio which was littered with discarded condoms and the odd bit of mislaid clothing (some of her punters must have arrived home with the odd sock missing). With a mischievous glint in her eye as an idea formed she lay down on the floor and did that snow angel thing with her arms an legs that people do in the snow, brushing the detritus aside. Yuck!

Surprisingly we warmed to some aspects of her personality. She seems close to her family and looks after them. While her parents had been shocked at their daughter's choice of "career" they are supportive, but then they've had their mortgage paid off. Her mum acts as Bonnie's PA and several of the family are Bonnie's payroll.

Her school mates have said they were shocked and surprised at how their friend's life has evolved. Tia married her privately educated boyfriend Olli, who had encouraged her when she had doubts about her webcam career, thinking she wasn't pretty enough and people wouldn't want to watch her. "No, you're beautiful, do it" the Sun reported. Olli's parents had subsidised the couple in the early days before her revenue earning took off and, at the start of the period covered by the documentary, they were still married. But by the end the weren't together.

There were a couple of take away messages from the Bonnie Blue documentary besides the obvious titillation. 

Firstly, Bonnie said she found what she did "empowering". I get that - it's certainly empowered her to accumulate a lot of money very quickly. It's her choice what she does with her body. But the obvious point to make is that what empowers her helps to disempower, intimidate and hurt large numbers of other women who aren't so assertive. The documentary didn't probe that issue, which left one feeling it was really just - er - light entertainment.

Secondly, there was some furore in the media over the ease with which young people could avoid age restrictions and view the documentary on Channel 4's streaming service. While it was tawdry it didn't show anything the majority of even "just teens" wouldn't already have been exposed to. Not that that's a good thing but that pass was sold a long time ago, unfortunately. But I wouldn't have wanted younger children to see it, with Bonnie (clothed) discussing with her producer whether the various bits of furniture were at a comfortable height for her purposes and trying out (on her own) some different positions. I'm very critical of the social media companies for not doing enough on age verification. But when the government can't seem to make sure that only people of an appropriate age watch services like Channel 4 catch up or BBC's iPlayer, how do they expect facebook, youtube and OnlyFans to do what they aren't doing with organisations under their control? For me that was perhaps as significant a point as any.

On a rather different note, after watching the programme I found myself humming a song from the early 80s I don't think I've heard in 40 years. After a while I identified it as punk influenced Tenpole Tudor's song "Swords of a Thousand Men". Ha, that's why I was humming it!

More on Tenpole Tudor below. And here is Bonnie Blue in a slightly more demure pose than some of them in the documentary:

1000 men and me: the Bonnie Blue story "documentary" is available on Channel 4's catch up service.

1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue Story review - the troubling tale sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. The Guardian, 29 July 2025

Bonnie Blue bedded hundreds of teens. But she also had a private school rugby husband and a VERY middle class upbringing. The Sun 11 November 2024 https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/31632237/bonnie-blue-middle-class-upbringing-husband/

I remembered punk recording artist Tenpole Tudor from his role in Julian Temple's 1981 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in which he played himself, being called "Tadpole" throughout by Irene Handl's character. Swords of a Thousand Men was his most successful recording, reaching number 6 in the UK singles chart in the same year with its singalong chorus of "Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah, yeah - over the hill with the swords of a thousand men" over a simple but catchy guitar riff. Tenpole performed under the name of Edward Tenpole, though his real name is Edward Felix Tudor-Pole. Yes, he's an actual aristocrat, a descendent of Owen Tudor, grandfather of King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Punk rockers, eh?

China Syndrome

I'm puzzled by the collapse of the case against House of Commons researcher Christopher Cash and his buddy Christopher Berry. Most of the media scrum concerns whether the government gave in to bullying from China. While that would be a big story my concern is rather different. The case collapsed because China was not officially categorsed as an enemy. But why does a country have to be classified as an "enemy" for unauthorised passing of information to be a criminal offence? 

It also made me wonder how many countries are classified as enemies of the UK and which ones are they?

Having signed the Official Secrets Act myself many years ago I was under the impression that passing official secrets to anyone unauthorised would be in breach of the Act. On the occasions when I was in possession of classified documents it wouldn't have seemed to me to be a defence to say the recipient didn't belong to an enemy country. After all the recipient might pass it on.

The Commons Defence Select Commitee seemed to struggle with this when considering the Integrated Review of Security and Defence, which was carried out in 2021 and updated in 2023. The current government would therefore say it's not their work and out of date, but as they haven't updated it, it is theirs.That report concentrated on Russia and China, noting that that the Integrated Review only categorises Russia as an enemy (or at least "the most acute direct threat"). This left me wondering about Iran and North Korea for starters. But surely it wouldn't be a good idea to pass nuclear secrets to, say, Pakistan? Is that country an enemy?

It seems far too simplistic to categorise countries as enemies or allies. I'm sure there are many countries who are both friendly and antagonistic, depending on the issue. But even without those shades of grey, there's a lot of information we wouldn't want allies to see, especially at particular points in time e.g. in the run up to a trade negotiation. And there could be plenty of embarrassment if frank assessments of our allies and their leaders were leaked, as happened with comments about Trump. Are these sort of documents official secrets? Having worked in the nuclear industry not the Foreign Office, I've no idea but I doubt it.

Did the information Cash and Berry passed to the Chinese contain official secrets? We don't know. One of them was detained at Heathrow returning from China and found to have £4,000 in cash in his briefcase. Suspicious sure, but it can't have been especially valuable information, unless that was a down payment. I could easily imagine that the two prunes had a little side hussle going passing reports of tittle tattle (what's on the menu in the House of Commons tea room maybe, alongside some snippets of overheard gossip perhaps) to what they saw as gullible Chinese contacts. 

If they were passing stuff which did not contain material marked as officially secret that doesn't mean it was harmless. If the law doesn't prohibit passing of harmful info even to supposedly friendly countries it should. But a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act might not have been appropriate or the best way to proceed. In the case of the Commons researcher an employment sanction could have been considered though there would be the risk, had he been sacked without prosecution, that would have seemed weak, so politically risky. And it's not clear that avenue was open for the teacher. 

The collapsed case has also led to some angst about how to manage our relationship with China. It was remarkable with hindsight that we got into a position where a Chinese company, Huawei, would have been at the heart of our 5G network, all because BT had made major commercial deals with that company in 2005. At the time there seemed no great security concern: going back to before 2012 it seemed commerce and trade were the main aims of China but no-one appeared to ask any "what if?" questions. The "what if" came to pass when Xi Jinping became secretary, chairman and president of everything in China between 2012 and 2013. China's clampdown on Hong Kong and the Uigurs and it's more aggressive military stance in the Pacific followed. Meanwhile the UK seemed on autopilot, with David Cameron quaffing pints with Xi in the Cotswolds and the USA (Trump in particular) having to pressure Boris Johnson about Hauwei, who we seemed to want to stick with purely because of the extra cost and timescale of ditching them. It seems to have taken us a decade to get our mind round the simple fact that China wants to trade but also wants to spy on us.

Josh Glancy argued in the Sunday Times that we should choose how to deal with China pragmatically on the specifics of each issue: buy chairs from Beijing but not your wifi he said. That sounds simple but there are still many awkward areas. For example, clothes ok but what about electric cars? The Chinese company BYD is rapidly expanding its market share in the UK. Many experts think it's a very bad idea to have lots of high tech electric Chinese vehicles on UK roads. I tend to agree. But they're very much cheaper. This is not the only specific area where security and net zero would appear to be in conflict.

However we try to manage our relations with China it seems to me that we've been carelessly slow in trying to develop appropriate policies.

Together with the mess over defining and protecting our "secrets" from states that might not be enemies but might not always have our interests at heart (i.e. every other country) it's all quite a Laurel and Hardy situation really.

Post publication note: while I've concentrated here on the oddity that the recipient of leaked information appears to have to come from an enemy state for a succssful prosecution - which I'm still not sure I believe - there is one "smoking gun" in the government's position that it did not collapse the case. Starmer's National Security Adviser, the slippery Jonathan Powell, belongs to the 48 Group Club, a UK based organisation with deep ties to China's ruling communist party that aims to foster UK-China business and political relationships. That would seem to be a clear conflict of interest and completely inappropriate for his role. I find it bizarre that he didn't leave that group on his appointment as NSA. There is also the point that his deputy, Matthew Collins, included in his witness statement passages lifted from the Labour party manifesto. Sources say he wouldn't have done that without ministerial direction and that he has admitted privately that the decision not to provide the evidence requested by the CPS had been "political", contradicting claims made by Starmer and his ministers in the Commons. I note that Boris Johnson's defenestration was partly because of "misleading" parliament. Hmmm.

 P.S. Talking of employment sanctions I once terminated the contract of a project manager who had been passing commercial information to a competitor. We had evidence in the form of emails but the individual went for the modern day playbook, accused his boss (a very careful and measured chap) of bullying and took us to an industrial tribunal. There was some satisfaction when the chair of the tribunal, seeing straight through all of the nonsense, declared there was only one bully in the case and it was the claimant. I still remember the buzz that went around the open plan building after a resource manager and member of the HR team escorted this chap out of the building having arrived at his desk and requested his pass and keys. We could have been more discreet and invited him to a meeting but we wanted to make a visible example. Was that bullying? I don't think so, but it didn't backfire on us. I wonder if someone decided to make an example of Berry and Cash - and found it did backfire?

P.P.S. The China Syndrome was a 1979 film thriller starring Jane Fonda with a storyline about reporters discovering safety cover ups at a nuclear power plant. Just twelve days after the film was released the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania made it seem prescient. The title is based on the figure of speech term for a nuclear reactor core melting down through the various containment structures and underlying earth all the way to China. While the story was fanciful I recall a key part of the plotline was the discovery of major corner cutting: all of the radiographs supposedly veryifying the different welds on a leaking component were identical. The organisation I worked for through the 1980s and 1990s pioneered the development of some non destructive testing techniques for nuclear components and was responsible for qualifying the inspectors of the Sizewell B reactor pressure vessel, basically exam testing the testers. I can't speak for the systems in place in the United States in the 1970s but reassuringly there were too many layers of verification for that particular ruse to have worked on Sizewell B, commissioned in 1995.  At Three Mile Island extensive monitoring of 30,000 people for 20 years showed no adverse health effects. I think I recall that, despite an awful lot going wrong leading to a fairly significant release of radioactivity, no member of the public received a radiation dose larger than a dental x ray.

* House of Commons publication Chapter 3: The UK in the world: allies and adversaries https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldintrel/124/12406.htm

This City Is Ours, La

Mrs H and I are overly infuenced by reviews these days when it comes to what we watch on TV. Life is too short to watch even half of the first episode of a new series before having the debate about whether it's worth persevering with. It always feels as if we've failed to give it a chance if we bail out so early but the alternative is sticking with it all the way through only to conclude that's several hours of life we wasted and won't get back. 

Based on positive reviews we gave the BBC series This City Is Ours a go. It's based around a drug dealing family in Liverpool, which sounded fairly grim and unpromising. But we gave it a go and can recommend it.  

The lead character is played by James Nelson-Joyce who, despite his seemingly posh double barrelled name, hails from Orrell Park 3 stops on Merseyrail towards the city centre from the suburb where I was brought up. Most of the scouse accents are convincing, but his is real. He's the mean looking dude in the centre below:

Nelson-Joyce plays Michael Kavanagh, correctly pronounced in the northern way, to rhyme with Savannah with the gh having essentially no impact, rather the the southern way as in a colleague I worked with in Oxfordshire whose surname Cavanagh was pronounced Ca-vn-are. 

Kavanagh is not part of the family but is the patriarch's trusted and long serving number 2 introducing inevitable tension with the oldest son, who is somewhat younger than Kavanagh but has also come to believe he should take over the business now its founder has started thinking of retirement. And also, as a result, got greedy for larger returns, setting it up for things to go wrong.

Which made me ponder - how many drug dealers get to retire peacefully anyway? Spoiler alert - the patriarch, played by Sean Bean (who makes no attempt at a scouse accent) doesn't get to retire in good health.

We liked the many authentic scouse touches, such as the son referring to Kavanagh as "soft lad", which doesn't mean he's a softie, it's a form of mild scouse abuse meaning soft in the head, i.e. a bit dim. Soft lad can also be used as a term of teasing endearment. An example is when Mrs H, finding she needed to buy a new golf glove before playing and with no means of paying, told the our club pro shop to "put it on soft lad's account" (i.e. mine). Which produced a slightly surprised "what did you call him?" response. "Soft lad". "Oh, right then".

It turns out that Kavanagh is a bit of a softie in some ways, as well as a hard case. But I won't say more in case you decide to watch.

The series is well made, with some good choices of music and some stunning views of Liverpool as well as the inevitable grittiness. I could readily nitpick - as an example would the Colombian cartel's Spanish contact man really walk around the streets of Liverpool without a minder? But we'll definitely watch the second series which has already been commissioned.

I told Mrs H that that I'd read several years ago that Liverpool was the only English city in which the drugs trade hadn't been taken over by foreign gangs. Indeed, according to the Guardian 5 years ago, Liverpool gangs dominate the trade in guns and drugs everywhere in the UK outside London. The lead dude at the National Crime Agency's Firearms Threat Centre was quoted as saying "the evidence is that the north-west groups pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK".

Amongst their 'achievements' are gun factories which use cheap components sourced from China to convert £135 handguns from Slovakia and the Czech Republic into automatic firearms they can sell on for £5,000. They import cocaine from South American cartels via the city's container port and feed the "county lines". Links have been made with organised crime gangs in Ireland and they have good connections into Scotland.

"In Liverpool and the north-west there is a combination of really good business entrepreneurs that have evolved...learnt new mechanisms, means of communication, transport and concealment" the NCA source said. This criminal skill set should be considered alongside the city's demographics: before the pandemic a third of the city's children lived below the poverty line. "You look at the consistent demographic of unemployment and deprived areas and how serious organised crime has evolved. If you did an assessment of how society has evolved with serious organised crime, Liverpool's gangs have probably been at the forefront.... It's about sculpting your business model".

In a way that isn't at all right, proper or approriate it makes a son of Merseyside feel rather proud in a strange kind of way.

Liverpool gangs dominate guns and drugs trade outside London. The Guardian 11 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/11/liverpool-gangs-dominate-gun-and-drugs-trade-outside-london

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nelson-Joyce

Not My Country

I find I don't live in the country I thought I did as I grew up. 

Not due to immigration, though how one cannot be concerned at the remarkable numbers of people still arriving and claiming asylum puzzles me. Blair and Brown were culpable for engaging in a deliberate experiment with open borders but Boris Johnson lost all semblance of any control. However, that argument seems to have been won, with 56% of people saying in a recent poll that it was their biggest concern and most political parties trying to outdo each other with tough statements, though not much sign of any practicable solutions to back them up.

Rather, I always tended to think that we lived in a basically decent country where one could trust that public officials would be efficient and honest rather than being self serving and engaging in cover ups when things go wrong while leaving a trail of wrecked lives in their wake.

This specific thought occurred to me after belatedly watching the wonderful ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I didn't feel the need to watch the series at first as I've followed the story in the Sunday Times for over a decade after they picked up on the original Computer Weekly item from 2008. It's been like watching a slow motion disaster movie for most of that time. The lead characters and villains, specifically Paula Vennells and the Post Office's ability to bring prosecutions seemingly at a whim were all well known to me, as was the damage it had caused to so many innocent individuals. I'd been horrified by the saga for so long why watch the programme? But the reviews and the continued dragging of heels in resolving the claims caused us to watch. It was well worthwhile, from the opening scenes at Mr Bates's Post Office at Craig-y-don, just two and a half miles down the road from us. Indeed here it is:

As you can see it's a charity shop, now not a post office, though the post box is still in use on the pavement.  Here's how they made it look for the TV drama:

Awful as the Post Office scandal was - and still is - it's far from the only sorry tale of the UK's uniformly useless response to it's seemingly institutionalised inability to do the right thing by its people.

I give you as further examples the contaminated blood scandal, the numerous health trust scandals involving maternity care in particular and the poor regulation that allowed crooked businesses to create the Grenfell Tower inferno followed by the totally inadequate response that has also left many individuals all over the country suffering prolonged consequences.  

There's also the sodium valproate issue, another slow burn problem with evidence emerging in the 1980s and 1990s that the anti-epilepsy drug could cause problems for foetuses. It was downgraded as a first line treatment for women of child bearing age in 2004 but children continued to be born disabled and mothers were denied the truth. In 2018 Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary, commissioned a report by Baroness Cumberlege to examine valproate and two other health scandals. Her report, published in July 2020, found that patients had been "dismissed, overlooked and ignored", in some cases for decades. The government accepted some recommendations but rejected compensation. In 2022 Hunt, then chairman of the Health Select Committee, called the scandal "the most egregious injustice" and said it was time "the British state faced up to its responsibilities". England's patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, was asked to examine redress and how it would work. See reported 18 months ago since which silence.

One of the points I cannot get my head around is the poor safety and accountability culture in the health service revealed time after time by the various health trust scandals. I don't begin to understand how the NHS can be so dysfunctional at escalating what we used to call "unusual occurrences" in the nuclear industry, learning from events whether they caused actual damage, constituted a "near miss" or just struck someone as possibly being "not quite right". All employees and contractors were actively encouraged to report what we called UNORs (unusual occurrences) and they were all investigated appropriately with feedback provided. The culture was "if in doubt, report it", whereas the NHS seems to adopt "if in doubt keep your bloody mouth shut".  To be fair, I later found that the UK rail industry had more of a climate of fear, with contractors reluctant to report issues in case they count against their companies in future bids for work.  Perhaps nuclear, chemicals and aviation which also have strong safety cultures, are the outliers. In many other fields of endeavour whistleblowers are not encouraged or actively bullied into silence.  

Most of these industries - don't kid yourself the health service is an industry, after all it's England's biggest employer by a street* - act in silos, pretending but not actually spreading best practice within but ignoring anything "not invented here".

Grenfell is a more complex story with an interplay between ineffective regulation and dishonest pactices by private developers and suppliers but the awfully inadequate and painfully slow response is from the same playbook.

It seems we just cannot trust that our political leaders have the know how, willpower and common decency to sort these things out.

Paula Vennells eventually returned her CBE, a few weeks before the King revoked it. But that is unusual. The majority of the culprits of that scandal and all the others just seem to sail on. The lack of accountability is concerning, but not as concerning as knowing that the culture all remains in place. So the scandals will continue.

I used to be horrified by these scandals, but now I feel ashamed as we just get empty words from empty suits who seem capable of belated apologies but never willing or able to actually fix anything.

As I said, not my country, or at least it's one a long way from the one I thought it was.

* The NHS employs around 1.5 or 1.6 million people in the UK depending which source you believe. If you add together the next nine largest employers in the UK (in order Tesco, Sainsbury's, The British Army, the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, HSBC, the Metropolitan Police and Barclays Network Rail you still don't get to much more than a million. You could add HMRC (which I suspect should be in that top 10) the RAF, the Royal Navy, the BBC, the Home Office, the Scottish and Welsh governments and the UK Parliament and still get nowhere near the NHS total. 

PS Jeremy Hunt seems to be one of the few good guys in all of this, pushing for reparations for contaminated blood as Health Sec but being frustrated by the Treasury - until he went there. 

PPS I only just realised that Craig-y-Don means rocks and waves, very apposite for its location near the Little Orme.

Abandoned. Five years after a report called for payouts - and 100 parliamentary questions - the families of children born diabled as a result of an anti-epilepsy drug await justice. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

Who are the UK's top 10 employers in 2024? https://ukvisajobs.com/blog-detail/87

https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=post-office-whistleblowers-former-shop-llandudno

Liars, damned liars and dissemblers

Are NHS waiting lists coming down? A simple yes/no question it would seem.

NHS England claimed last month that"hard working staff" had delivered "record numbers of treatments" with waiting lists falling by 260,000 since Labour was elected.

But there are two things going on here.

According to reserach by the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation the NHS is still treating fewer patients than are joining this waiting lists. So the trend remains upwards.

So why has the waiting list total come down? It seems hospitals have got round to validating the list by removing those who have had private treatment, left the country or died. Nothing unusual in that, they should be maintaining the list. But they are doing it because they're getting paid to do what should be their job anyway. NHS England, as part of its recovery plan, is paying hospitals £33 for each patient removed from the waiting list. Since the NHS doesn't spell out what the reasons are for taking people off the list, there is a lack of transparency.

I am left wondering why on earth hospitals have to be bribed to do part of their job. Personally I'd suggest a "negative bonus" for the managers responsible for not doing their jobs if there isn't eveidence of waiting list maintenance would work just as well.

What is clear is that  public statements by the NHS and health ministers on the waiting list issue should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

What is worrying is that they must know they are, at best, dissembling. Or maybe I should just say lying?

Waiting lists being cut for £33 a patient. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

A trio inspired by statistics

 The "interesting statistics" part of the rubric below my blog title has perhaps been ignored a tad recently. So, to put that right... Some dishes are called a trio (of say lamb, or desserts). Well here's a trio of pieces inspired by statistics that caught my eye.

Racism by Machine

I was reading recently about how many first round job interviews are now carried out by AI. So, as many applicants CVs will have been generated by AI, we are in a circular competition of the bots. However, there are problems. Candidates report that the process is soulless and they don't get any feedback or sometimes any response whatsoever and are just "ghosted". But it's worse than that. University of Washington researchers used real CVs but varied names associated with white and black jobseekers in AI recruitment systems and found that the AI favoured the white-associated names 85% of the time. Female-associated names were picked only 11% of the time. "If we're not careful, AI will just automate discrimination at scale". They also found that AI interviewers trained on datasets dominated by American speakers could be biased against different accents, non-native English speakers or individuals with disabilities that affected their speech. "Candidates... can be ruled out regardless of [their] skills...reinforcing existing workforce inequalities".

I'm waiting for the first legal case of discrimination to be taken against a company which was using AI for recruitment, or other employment related processes. It wouldn't surprise me if the first such case was taken out by a law firm using AI to generate its cases.

Meanwhile we all carry on playing games and viewing videos on our phones, the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

The significance of the dollar as the world's reserve currency

I've long known that the dollar is the predominant currency for currency transactions around the world. But I didn't realise that the dollar is used in 88% of global forex transactions. Nearly every commodity is priced in dollars. This simple fact is one of the main reasons for the USA's enduring financial strength and resilience. It also gives the USA the platform to bully/impose order/sanction miscreants (delete as appropriate). It is undoubtedly a big part of the strength and influence of the West on the world. 

The dollar's overwhelming position as the world's reserve currency is coming under threat by the USA's long term shift to being utterly spendthrift - one expected it of the Democrats but not the Republicans - but that is now being amplified by President Trump's economic "policies". China, Russia and probably quite a few other countries would much prefer to conduct business without recourse to dollars. The so called BRICS countries are making some progress towards that end. But it seems to me that the seeds of the fall of the West are already there to be seen and are of the West's own making.

The implications of falling birth rates

Tom Calver, who writes a fact rich column in the Sunday Times titled Go Figure, recently reviewed a book called After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation. The book's central premise is that we are on the upper left side of a gigantic population spike. In about 50 years we will reach the peak and then humanity will start shrinking. And shrinking fast. The cause is simple. Nearly every country is on a downward fertility trend. To maintain the same population size the average woman must have two children, the review said. (Actually it must be a bit higher. It was generally reckoned to be about 2.1 depending, I guess, on infant mortality rates).

The stat that caught my eye was that, while western Europe has struggled to reach that number for some time, every other country now has the same problem. In India, the world's most populous country (interesting quiz question that, many people guess China) the average woman has 1.98 children. And that ratio is falling. The comment that really caught my eye was as follows: "No country in the world has managed to consistently increase its birth rate once it has fallen below this rate".

Unless the trajectory changes the world's population will peak at about 10 billion in the 2070s or 2080s, then fall back to about 8 billion by 2150 and - if we continue at this rate - be around a mere two billion people by 2350.

Many of our current environmental problems are caused by there being simply too many people. But the shape of this population spike has huge implications for humanity. One of the big issues with a smaller global population is a declining rate of innovation. Calver gives an example: had the global population been 10 million, not 1.4 billion, in the 1870s the chances of the light bulb being invented would have been considerably smaller.

Birth rates have been pushed back up briefly in some western countries, including in America where, between 1976 nd 2007 it grew from 1.7 to 2.1 despite increased reproductive rights and more women entering the workforce. But these examples have proved temporary. 

Nevertheless, Calver thinks the authors have exaggerated the nature of the spike. It only looks like a spike if we "zoom out". In real time he calls it more of a gentle hill. He reckons we need to find a way of getting the number back up to 2 by 2125. Which gives plenty of time for plenty of bright people to work on it.

But, of course, surely there's going to be AI to do that for us?

No, I wouldn't rely on that either. But the seeds of humanity's downfall, not just the West, are perhaps coming into view.

Interviewed by a bot: how AI is ruling the jobs market. Sunday Times 22 June 2025.

I've read the stat about the predominance of the dollar in global transactions in several places, but I saw it most recenty in Irwin Stelzer's brilliant American Account column in the Sunday Times.

Calver's review of After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso was in the Sunday Times on 6 July 2025

The obsession with one particular version of slavery

Why are today's young scholars so obsessed with the supposed wickedness of the European people trade while apparently indifferent to the Roman slave economy, or for that matter the Arab one?

So said Max Hastings in a review of Tom Holland's book The Lives of The Caesars.

The only issue I'd take with that comment is the word "supposed" as there was undoubtedly wickedness.

But I'd go further. The nation that initiated the end of the transatlantic slave trade seems to be castigated more than any. How come?

I can't help thinking there's a simple answer. Those young scholars are suffused with guilt (rarely a helpful emotion, I find).  And so they jump on a bandwagon for reparations etc, being pushed by - guess who? Those who will benefit.

I've often been heard to say that my ancestors do not appear to have directly benefited from the slave trade. Oh, sure, they'll have possibly gained some indirect benefit through the wealth brought into the UK, though I'd estimate it as tiny.

Indeed, look further and I daresay that my ancestors (and yours) were victims too, of feudal system, serfdom etc. Moreover, if you look around the world and through history, enslavement of conquered nations and the less powerful was pretty much the norm. Rome wasn't built in a day - or without slaves.

It is impossible to right all past wrongs. Picking an aribitrary set of such wrongs, or an arbitrary cut off in how far one goes back, has no justification. I would argue that we should not go back beyond the lifetime of anyone's parents, as proving cause and consequence is otherwise problematic. 

Times have changed and, for the most improved at least in what we sometimes call the "free world". Most of the descendents of African slaves living in countries like the USA and UK are arguably better off than if their ancestors had not been taken (or sold by other Africans most likely). I realise that would probably a grossly offensive argument to those descendents of slaves (and those young scholars).

But does it make it any less true?

And, since outside of the "free world" slavery in various forms still persists around the world to this day, aren't there better and more important targets to focus on?

The Max Hastings book review appeared in the Sunday Times some time ago.

This one's for the birds

The transition from spring to summer is not without it's downsides, I've found.

One of my favourite periods of the year is when the male blackbirds are in full song, singing their hearts out in their attempt to attract a mate. It's fascinating that they tend to take it in turns to deliver their performances. They don't try to drown each other out, but wait for a nearby bird to finish, then do the equivalent of "that's nothing, get this!" A bit like two or three guitarists jousting, taking turns to play a solo. Each blackbird has a song that, while recognisably characteristic of the species, is unique to the individual bird, often with a very characteristic ending. Which helps us identify individual birds by their song, especially given they tend to return to the same place to breed each year.

At our last house we had one such bird whose song was highly specific and recognisable as it ended with a flourish that sounded just like our telephone ringing. Indeed the first time we heard it we thought it was the phone. Sitting on the decking at the back of our garden, which was on quite a steep hill so the deck was well up towards roof level, we heard this chap for several years in a row, singing from one of the nearby rooftops. It was a sad spring when he didn't return.

In the early spring I was gardening, which often attracts birds that come very close looking for insects and worms that have been disturbed, when I heard a curious song that sounded a bit like a blackbird. Actually it sounded very like a blackbird but the song was curiously truncated, coming to a rather sudden and abrupt end, without a flourish. (Blackbirds do go on a bit). That's odd I thought. Then I spotted the bird, quite close to me on the ground. It was definitely a blackbird. It was a male, the males being black and the females looking exactly the same but brown. The females do sing, despite what many (but not all) of the authoritative texts say, though not as ostentatiously as the males. I've seen one doing it, so close that there could be no mistake.

But this one was definitely black, so male. It looked a bit on the small side and a bit skinny. So I'm guessing it was a young male. I was watching and listening to an adolescent male just starting out and developing his song. You'll need to make it a bit longer and showier if you want to find a mate, chum, the girls will just giggle at that!

That wonderful period when the blackbirds are in full song has now long passed, to be replaced by the squawks of the seagulls. We sleep in our loft conversion bedroom with its windows in the sloping roof. We sometimes call them "veluxes" even though they are a competitor brand, because people understand that as an almost generic term. The windows are locked slightly open at night for most of the year, apart from deep winter. Locked so they don't suddently blow off their hinges in the strong coastal winds we often experience.

This arrangement, with our house up a hillside, has implications. Birds, usually noisy seagulls but sometimes boringly repetitive collared doves*, like sitting right on top of the gable end that is only a few feet away from the open windows at the foot of our bed. But also, because the house is built half way up an untamed Welsh hillside, our open window is at just the height that the seagulls fly while looping around doing circuits above the houses below us.

All of which makes for a noisy time at 4 and 5 am from May onwards until the various mating seasons end the nights start getting shorter.

I find it heartwarming when I wake up in the bright early light of May to hear a male blackbird in full song and drift off back to sleep feeling that all is well with the world. I feel a very different emotion if I'm woken by a seagull squawking on the gable roof.

Some folk seem to find seagulls attractive. I've not got a problem with them in their natural habitat, on the cliffs of places like the nearby Great Orme. The problem is they are scavengers and attracted to the food that people throw away, leave unattended or are just in the act of eating. I'm far from the only one to have lost an ice cream on Llandudno pier to a gull - they sneak up behind you with surprising stealth for such a large creature, knock it out of your hand then swoop around to pick it up (not in my case, I made sure neither of us got the ice cream!) A friend of Mrs H's recently had a sandwich she was eating snatched from her hand on the golf course. That one also came up from behind her. You need to stand back to something like a wall, or have a lookout. Some folk refer to pigeons as flying rats. Seagulls are more like flying foxes: bigger and much more cunning.

You do see foolish tourists feeding the gulls. Presumably they like them - don't they realise that it only encourages them? We've even seen people feeding the gulls while sitting right by a sign telling them not to do so. The tourists also seem to have huge affection for the famous Llandudno goats - which I like, when they stay on the Orme. When we are walking around the Orme, or indeed at some times of year in Llandudno town centre, I'm not fond of wading through piles of goat poo. So I wasn't surprised the other year when cuddly toy goats became a big thing to sell to tourists here. But this year the cuddly toy they seem to want to acquire out of those grab machines is a seagull with a chip in its beak:

Call me a grumpy old sod (fair cop, I am one) but I don't find that at all endearing. But the bigger problem is seagulls make a godawful racket. We have, however, come to recognise some of the characteristic calls they make, besides the straight forward squawk. 

When an old building a mile or so a way was knocked down to make way for our local Lidl (oh great joy, he said sarcastically, being left completely cold by the oddity that is the "middle of Lidl") the large number of displaced birds that used to nest there had to find new locations, many of them on the roofs of the houses we overlook. A near neighbour's dormer roof has become what we call a "seagull mating station". It's probably the same birds that return there each year to make a mess and a lot of noise on our friend's roof. It's very specific, always the one one on the right as we look at the two dormers on the back of his house.

A male homo sapiens probably shouldn't throw this particular stone into this particular glasshouse, but a male seagull takes quite a while to perform and makes a lot of stupid sounds while doing so. There is a difference though: the male seagull can go again (and again and again) much more quickly.  "Oh, get on with it" Mrs H has been heard to say as the repetitive "birdsong" goes on and on.

I was, however, a bit more amused when I found I could identify variants of the normal seagull cry.

The period when seagull chicks have hatched and are leaving the nest can be quite trying. Before flying they walk around a lot. Presumably they flutter, or more likely do an ungainly flapping tumble, to first get to the ground but then they stand a lot and walk around now and then. Building strength I suppose, before attempting flight. Sometimes you see a parent with them but often not right by them, more likely keeping an eye on them. At that time of year the parent birds sit on vantage points, like the end of our gable roof, periodically making a sound that sounds quite like "quack, quack, quack, quack". Always three or four times and at a tiny fraction of the volume of their standard shriek. I'm guessing this is seagull speak for "I'm here, where are you?" I think I've heard a chick call back in similar vein but generally they just stand there before going for a bit of a plod.

It's not great if you get a seagull chick walking around your garden as the parents are quite likely to swoop aggressively down at you if you venture anywhere near. We found this out a few years ago when a planned barbecue with our son's family nearly had to be abondoned because of a chick we'd seen in the garden. Every time I stepped out of the kitchen patio door I'd hear an agitated version of the seagull cry and had to dodge what felt like a Stuka dive bomber swooping down and over my head. A golf umbrella and a tennis racquet proved useful in defence. The golf umbrella as an "iron dome" shield of course. The racquet was deployed like someone doing a tennis serve while leaping in the air, as the equivalent of anti-aircraft fire as the seagull swooped past. I knew I couldn't possibly hit the bird of course but it was getting sufficiently close to me (and my racquet to it) that it started keeping a bit higher above me. I'm doubtful about unpredictable behaviour as a touchstone of international statesmanship but making the birds think you're crazy does seem to make them steer a bit more clear of you. Eventually a tense cease fire was enacted when the chick, which had been hiding behind some shrubs, walked round to the other side of the house, probably muttering the kind of thing that kids say about their parents.

The "attack" cry is very like a standard seagull cry but sharper and more urgent, so ever since then I've been been alert to the sound of a seagull cry as it takes off from the taller house next door. A standard cry and it's wheeling away over the houses below. Anything that sounds sharper makes me glance up in case the bird is swooping down towards me, in case it thinks the gardener with his hosepipe is hunting their chick.

But this year I heard another variant of the standard seagull cry and with some urgency  and wondered what was going on. The chicks as they are first flying make heavy work of it, flapping away in a slightly unco-ordinated manner, much like a novice human swimmer. I looked up and saw just that but very close behind and adult bird squawking repeatedly and with urgency compared with the rather languid if noisy standard call. Ah, I thought, a parent saying the seagull equivalent of "keep going, don't stop" just as dads do when teaching a child to ride a bike when they are just getting going. This wasn't gentle parenting: the larger bird kept surging near the chick, which flapped ever harder and dodged around a bit. It certainly kept the chick flapping.

I found the seagull flying lesson endearing. Until I heard exactly the same cry breaking through my slumber early the next morning as parent and chick flew laps around the rooftops below our open bedroom window, with the parent making a noise that I could now recognise.

So in addition to the mating season, we have the flying lesson season to contend with.

So it's time for a bit of nudge theory to be deployed in this avian - human stand off to encourage our flying foxes to choose another vantage point than the end of my gable end roof to survey the neighbourhood. The hosepipe, with it's high powered jet setting, gets used during the daytime to move the bird that likes to sit on the gable roof. But what to do at 5am? This modest anti-aircraft gun is now loaded and standing by:

The water pistol only just has the required range so I might have to upgrade the air defences with the equivalent of a Patriot missile: one of those super soakers the boys used to have such fun with in their youth.

Just to reassure you I realise that, though a grown and rather ageing man, I'm trying to understand birdspeak (if not being away with them, or the fairies) while waging a mini-war I can't possibly win.

But I remember what my then teenage son said to me after I'd lured a Labour canvasser into thinking I was sympathetic by saying I was concerned about education and health before giving him a huge piece of my mind. This was back in 2005 and my most caustic remarks were aimed at Gordon Brown, I recall. "I don't know why I do these things" I said to my son afterwards. "My paint brush has started drying out". "Yes, dad, but it had to be done!" was the reply.

Maybe we should get an aircon unit so we can close the windows? No, not going there, unjustifiable use of energy. The battle goes on!

* bird species in which all the individuals sing what appears to be exactly the same simple and boring song remind me of those occasions when one group of football fans chant to another group "you've only got one song!"

 

Let's go to Glasto again

Great excitement a couple of months ago in the Holden household - well half of it anyway - when it was announced that Roy Harper would be headlining the Acoustic stage at Glastonbury on Sunday 29 June, a few weeks after his 84th birthday.

There had been no signs of Roy playing live since his last tour in 2019 (and before that it was 2016 and then 2013). Most Harper fans had begun to suspect he had, this time, retired from live performance for good. His blog and facebook posts had become very rare and totally silent on the issues of recording and performance. Inevitably I began to wonder if time and age had taken too much toll.

Harper originally retired from playing live more than 15 years ago but was persuaded back into performance by the American singer Joanna Newsom who, like Kate Bush and several others, attributes her presence in the business to being inspired by him. We saw Roy support Joanna in 2010 and, while he played well, his voice seemed a bit frail. But the tour prompted a resurrection. More gigs, a new album Man and Myth - which I'd put in the top half of his career bounty of more than 20 albums - then a tour (when he sang strongly and well) and a burst of recognition greater than he received in most of his career which will now go into a seventh decade. That recognition included a Lifetime Achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 folk awards, a slew of interviews in daily newspapers and music mags, several appearances on TV including BBC Breakfast and a guest spot on Test Match Special playing his 1975 classic When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease.

Disastrously for Roy's Indian Summer period (and quite possibly prompted by the extensive publicity) this was all soon followed by a historical sexual abuse allegation which put everything on hold. Roy's had a knack of upsetting a lot of people over the years. He was persona non grata for 3 years with the media until the case against him, which always sounded tenuous in the extreme, collapsed. 

So it was a relief to see him playing again in 2016 and 2019. And playing without blemish, apart from one song where he caused his backing "orchestra" of a string quartet, double bass and second guitarist to chuckle when he said, after the applause had died down, "you know I always thought that song had four verses, but I found it only needed three". 

Of course people can be forgetful at any age and all musicians make mistakes which they either have to cover or recover from. When we saw Harper in 2013 he was backed by another of his young American acolytes, Jonathan Wilson. Harper had gone to Los Angeles where Wilson produced four of the seven tracks on the album and then they toured together, Wilson playing his own set and then backing his mentor on second guitar and various percussion. I have a vivid memory of two things from that gig. The first is that Wilson took to the stage barefoot, which would always seem odd to someone like me who gets cold hands and feet almost year round - but in Manchester in late October? The second was how gently and with great respect Wilson supported Harper's performance, most notably during Twelve Hours of Sunset which has featured in Harper's stage set since 1974. At a conservative estimate Harper must have played this song to an audience several thousand times. With rehearsals that number must be into five figures. But we saw quite clearly from our front row seats a look of panic in Harper's eyes part way through the song as he reached a transition from verse to chorus: it was clear as he looked up towards Wilson that he couldn't remember the next chord sequence. Fortunately the previous chord is held on sustain anyway and Wilson mimed the next four fret positions which introduce the chorus. Harper's head snapped back round to the front and he went straight into the main motif in the song with such a slight delay that it was probably noticed by few present and certainly no-one beyond the first few rows of seats. These are the moments that I think make watching a live performance so special. But I'm hoping Roy doesn't have any of those heart in mouth  moments at Glastonbury. I'm expecting he will have his son Nick filling the second guitar role this weekend. Nick, a performer and recording artist in his own right of long standing, has made 15 albums of his own. And nobody other than Roy knows the songs better as Nick grew up hearing them. The photo below shows Nick on stage with his dad at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1967

But there is another, tantalising prospect. Harper's big buddy since the late 1960s might be a special guest - Jimmy Page. We can but hope.

Having played there several times before Harper is a link to an earlier, simpler, less commercial and, yes, more "hippy" Glastonbury, though Harper would reject the hippy label just as much as he would the folk label.  He was on the Main stage in 1970, in 1981 on the newly built Pyramid stage, again on the Pyramid in 1982 and, most recently, the Acoustic Stage in 1990. Indeed he headlined in 1982 and there's a story behind that. 

In 1981 Ginger Baker's band headlined on the Friday, with Roy on next to last. There are many accounts on the internet of what happened that night, succinctly summarised by the BBC as follows:

In a moment that certainly trumps Lee Nelson's stage invasion during Kanye West's set, Baker caused an almighty ruckus by setting up his equipment while the previous act, folk-rocker Roy Harper, was still playing. Understandably miffed, Harper confronted him and the two ended up scrapping on-stage. According to an eyewitness account on UK Rock Festivals, the crowd then pelted Baker with bottles during his set, with one hitting him square on the forehead. Some claim that Baker, hardman that he is, simply carried on drumming.

Apparently Michael Eavis felt so bad about what had happened that Harper was immediately invited back as a headliner the following year.

When I told Mrs H about the Glastonbury announcement she reminded me that we "don't do festivals". I said that was irrelevant, which worried her - but then clarified that all the tickets, costing several hundred pounds each, are sold long before the line up is announced. On TV then? Harper fans wait to see whether any of his show will be broadcast: the Beeb doesn't routinely broadcast from the Acoustic stage (there are ten stages at Glastonbury these days). Given Harper's status as one of the few significant performers from the 1960s still around I expect BBC will at least show a snippet (he's due on stage from 9.30 to 10.30pm).

But, on the back of the Glastonbury announcement, a "Final tour part 2" was revealed, comprising 3 gigs in Manchester, London and Birmingham in September. Yes, of course we're going, though in Mrs H's case she says only to keep me company driving back afterwards. But she has always enjoyed Roy's Me and My Woman which I think he has played on most of the occasions I've seen him - around a dozen, since 1971. The song starts with (for me) a classic couplet:

I never know what kind of day it is

On my battlefield of ideals

That's certainly a possible for the Glastonbury set, but if Jimmy Page is with him, they'll play the equally classic song from the very same album as Me and My Woman, Roy's withering take on Christianity and Catholicism in particular, The Same Old Rock.  Oh please....

You can take a listen here. The song is a good, but far from the only, exemplification of one critic's categorisation of Harper as "epic, progressive acoustic - a category of one". I expect mainly shorter songs on Sunday, but we don't have long to wait and, hopefully, see and hear.

PS There's a brilliant book published by Penguin on the history of the Abbey Road studios by music author David Hepworth. After 11 chapters on EMI, the Abbey road building and it's uniformed commissionaires, the producers who wore suits but sports jackets at the weekends, the in house development of equipment and recording techniques, the many famous artists of all types from classical to stars like Noel Coward and Gracie Fields to comedy artists like Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and of course pop musicians including the Beatles, I came to the chapter where EMI, speculated by creating the Harvest label. They gave studio time and resources to a gamut of obscure artists from the college scene like Edgar Broughton and the Third Ear Band. Amongst them was Roy Harper and I was delighted to find this unexpected excerpt:

...by common consent the zenith of Harper's entire career as a recording artist, also took place in Studio One. Harper had a passion for cricket, one he shared with Ken Townsend (a long serving EMI producer) and the members of Pink Floyd. This had led him to write a song about the strange vibrations which thoughts of the game set off in the English breast. It was decided, with more thought for history than accountancy, that what would set this song off a treat was a brass band. Thus no less august a body than the entire Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band was brought down from south Yorkshire and set up in Studio One, where they performed under the baton of David Bedford. The resulting record, When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, is one of the dozen greatest records ever made at Abbey Road.

Wow. Hepworth's rationale for that comment is that, while the sound of that brass band could have been attempted by some local session musicians or, in another era, digitally dubbed in, it just wouldn't have the same emotional effect. The song endures in the imagination because one can "close our eyes and imagine the performance taking place", "we knew it had been delivered by a bunch of burly men in their cardigans, men who sprang from the same soil as the song". He called it "proof of the genius of the studio system".

PPS I feel able to call my hero by his first name having met him and spoken one to one for several minutes. Roy being Roy he made as much eye contact with Mrs H standing silently beside me. She said she immediately understood why his compendium of lyrics, The Passions of Great Fortune, is littered with photos of his many lovers (and those were the ones who were happy to be in print...) But he's settled down a bit since the 1990s and I've also met his lovely wife Tracey, who sends out email and facebook updates and deals with all the mail orders personally, on two occasions.

The title of this piece comes from a song called Glasto on Roy's penultimate (as yet) album The Green Man released in 2000:

It has some classically whimsical Harper lyrics:

Michael is running the party (actually his daughter does now of course)/Helping us all pay the rent/So that Billy the kid/Can spend a few quid/Being out of his tree in a tent

 and

And watching the bare naked protest/Is the giggly teengirl from Tring/She can't understand/How a man could have planned/To protest the odd shape of his thing

 with the chorus

Maybe there'll be summer/Maybe It won't rain/Maybe it don't matter/Oh let's go to Glasto again

12 artists you never knew headlined Glastonbury, BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/f4764a16-9f5f-4405-bed0-6d9d0651e4cf

Farewell to the Grand Old Lady

Quite a few words to start with in this post, but - to give you some incentive - later on it's nearly all pictures.

In 1999, The Independent newspaper journalist David Conn gave Goodison Park the nickname "The Grand Old Lady". Over the last decade I've used that phrase many times to excuse the obstructed views, the limited (though generally adequate) refreshment and toilet facilities and the general condition of the stadium, which looked a throwback at best and not like a "Premier League" ground. How are the mighty fallen, given that when I first went in 1963 it was commonly considered the best club ground in the country - and by some distance. In conversation I've often described the ground as "an ancient and historically significant monument". And all that was before the club finally got its act together on moving home.

Many people picked up on the "old lady" moniker. But if it is a lady it's not a very polite one and a bit uncouth. Nevertheless the press coverage of Everton's last match at Goodison Park, at least for the Everton team as we've always knew it, i.e. the men's team, was not only extensive but hugely positive. I heard several lengthy features on Goodison on Radio 5 Live over the weeks running up to the last match there. The newspapers gave huge numbers of column inches to many individuals who wrote sentimental and loving pieces about their experiences there with their families. Many football journalists wrote about how it was one of the best, if not the best, football stadium at least for atmosphere. Martin Samuel wrote* about how, after his first visit there in 1985, he told everyone it was the best ground in the country. "I'd still argue" he wrote "on that night, it was". 

Samuel's first match at Goodison just happened to be one of the most famous ever at the ground, the European Cup Winners Cup semi-final 2nd leg when Everton beat Bayern Munich 3-1. I was there and it was a fantastic occasion, though for atmosphere I can think of two matches at least, victories against Liverpool in the 60s and 80s, that felt even more intense, but maybe that was just to to me.

A number of Premier League managers said it was the most hostile stadium for an away team to visit, though I've often experienced it being rather meek. It needs something to kick start the crowd, but when they get going...   Arsenal manager and former Everton player Mikel Arteta perhaps summed it up best when he said after his last visit there in early April:

"If you want to describe to somebody from abroad what the Premier League looks like, go to Goodison Park and experience it." A bit late even then, Mikel, getting tickets for those last few games was all bar impossible, with some changing hands for thousands of pounds. But it was good advice.

I went to an Everton Legends event the evening before the last match. It was a really good night, but Peter Reid said one thing that stuck with me - in recent years it's the fans who have kept Everton in the Premier League. I'd certainly agree with that in season 2021-22, when it looked for all the world that they were sliding meekly to relegation with 3 months of the season to go. The fans started greeting the team buses with an enormous street party. I went to the first match where this was planned and saw the plumes of blue smoke from flares from a mile away as I exited the Mersey Tunnel at the Liverpool end. When I got to Goodison Road it was littered everywhere with beer cans and bottles, discarded flares and ticker tape. The noise outside the reception area, which would be easily audible to both teams, was enormous. Many of the fans looked like smurfs with blue paint from the flares. Everton recorded several vital home wins leading up to the critical 3-2 win over Crystal Palce (from 2-0 down) and I believe Reid is right - that team had lost belief and the fans made the difference.

Everton announced shortly before the last (men's) home match that Goodison would be retained as the home for Everton women's team. Some felt that this took the edge off the last match - it wasn't actually the last match anymore - but given the expansion of interest in women's football and the fact that Everton women have outgrown their home in nearby Walton Hall Park (capacity not much more than 2,000) the decision was perhaps forseeable, though I do wonder about maintenance and reconfiguration costs. Perhaps Everton's owners were influenced by Chelsea FC selling their women's team to their owners for "considerably more than £150 million". One of the reasons the Premier League hasn't apparently made much of that latest bout of financial chicanery by Chelsea is that several other clubs may see it as a future "get out of jail" card for themselves.

It is a fitting home for the ladies team as Goodison Park held the record for attendance at a women's match anywhere in the world for 99 years: 53,000 saw Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 on 27 December 1920, just before the FA banned women's football in England. And at least I'll still be able to do that behind the scenes stadium visit that I've been meaning to get round to.

Talking of financial chicanery, Premier League Chief Executive Richard Masters won what one fan called the "Brass Neck of Eternity Award" by showing his face at the game. He ran a gauntlet of "heckles" according to the media as he made his way to the main reception on Goodison Road. I suspect heckles is a very polite way of saying vitriolic abuse, but at least it was no worse than that. There's no hiding place in those narrow streets around the stadium: this photo of the scene in Goodison Road before the kick off. The photo comes from the Times:

There's more on the Everton fans' problem with Masters and the Premier League in the PS below. 

On a more positive note the post match show went very well and was clearly emotional for all Evertonians. Whoever chose the ending - John Lennon's In My Life  followed by a Last Post style rendition of the Z Cars theme, used to greet the team onto the pitch since the 1960s, nailed it. Bill Kenwright, with all his background in theatre, couldn't have done better. It was touching that the scouse singer was either overcome by emotion, or maybe just couldn't sing, but the choice of John Lennon's  In My Life was very apposite, the lyrics capturing how many were feeling.

However, my last match at Goodison was the penultimate fixture a fortnight earlier. A very strange and bittersweet experience. Here are some pictures from that match and some other matches I went to in the last season at Goodison Park.

Having parked in Kirkdale a good walk away from the ground I soon past one of my most frequent stopping points en route to the ground in recent years. This flashy looking establishment is the Medlock Hotel:

I didn't call in on this occasion as I'd been in there very recently and the journey had been quite quick so I wasn't in need of the loo. However it does have behind the bar one of the most apposite signs I've ever seen in a pub:

Funnily enough I've never asked how much they charge for rooms at the Medlock Hotel.... I pressed on and got some refreshment in another favourite haunt, the Barlow Arms, about 400 yards away from the ground:

This pub was given Mrs H's seal of approval on her last visit to Goodison (and her first for 30 years) in September on account of the ladies loo being "quite nice, clean and with plenty of soap and handtowels". It has my seal of approval because, unlike some of the pubs near the ground, it still serves draft bitter as well as the now obligatory huge range of lagers. But also because the bar has a remarkable and beautiful backdrop:

Note the "cash only sign": in the stadium it's card only even for a cuppa. As this was a 3 o clock kick off and I 'd parked up by 1230 it was time to get lunch from my regular if dodgy looking Chinese chippy:

To be fair I mainly pick it because the ones right by the ground get very busy and I don't like standing in a queue tens of yards long, whereas here I've rarely been in a queue of more than 4. On Mrs H's visit she surprised me by declaring it to be "cute" (and yes, she did get some chips). For me it was the usual sausage, chips and curry sauce which was absolutely standard and therefore just to my taste:

I couldn't help reflecting that, sadly, with the ground relocation some of these businesses will struggle to survive in the future. While consuming my feast as soon as it was cool enough, I walked towards the stadium, soon getting into bigger crowds as I neared Spellow Lane and my next nostalgic call at the "Spellow Brick Road". This was built by the club adjacent to the Everton in the Community hub and the successful free school it runs. Fans could buy the commemorative bricks laid in the curving pathway around 5 years ago:

As it's probably fifty to a hundred yards long the first time I went to find the brick my son got for us I couldn't find it, though in my defence it was dark and I didn't have much time on that occasion. But once I found it and an associated landmark it 's easy to spot, if already looking a bit faded:

"Phil and Dave Holden COYB" (Come On You Blues, of course).  Everton have built a far more ambitious walkway by the new stadium, the Everton Way, with 36,000 personalised stones. Yes, I've bought one. Imaginatively it says "Dave and Phil Holden COYB". It should actually be easier to find as they are embedding stones to commemorate Everton "legends" at regular intervals so you just need to know which legends your stone is between. Hopefully.

Another hundred yards and Goodison Road and the ground came into view, always a great sight on match days - a bit flat when the streets are deserted:

  

Just a bit further on you come to the Everton shop, built in the style of the Everton lock up (or Prince Rupert's Tower) landmark in Everton:

This shop is called Everton One, the shop in the Liverpool One shopping centre being known as Everton Two. So it's address is, of course, Everton Two, Liverpool One. 

I didn't go in the shop this time as  the chips and curry had left me needing a liquid top up so I called in a bar at the top of Spellow Lane, near Dixie Dean's statue, that has been there for many years but I don't recall visiting before:

The time it took to get served reminded me why I prefer to call at the Medlock, the Barlow Arms or the  Saddle Inn on the other side of Walton Road. Or the Thomas Frost or the Brick on Walton Road, all better bets. Then on through the growing throng up Goodison Road past the main stand:

and the "Evertonian's pub" the Winslow, right opposite the main stand:

I have been in the Winslow but only once that I can recall and then only to tick it off as it were as, of course, on match days it's chocker. Even the Spellow, up Goodison Road past the ground, isn't quite as manic:

I popped along to have a look for old times sake as this has been the most common meeting point with friends over the years, though I fell out with them a bit a year or so ago as now the only bitter is canned Boddingtons (I tend to find the lagers far too cold, especially in winter).  So it was time to go past the statue by St Luke's Church of Everton's Holy Trinity:

 

This of course is Alan Ball (man of the match in the 1966 World Cup Final), Howard Kendall and Colin Harvey from the 1970 championship winning team. Which was the last time I had a season ticket - but next year...

And along Gwladys Street with the street vendor on the corner

A great uncle (or maybe great great uncle) of mine lived in Gwladys Street but I never thought to ask my father if he knew whether the house was in the row of terraced houses still standing off to the left in this picture, or those that were demolished in 1938 to enable the Gwladys Street end to be enlarged, making the ground entirely two tier with seats on the top deck and terraces below all the way round

And then round into Bullens Road where I was going in:

It's very tight in there under the Lower Bullens Road stand but, remarkably, both here and in Gwladys Street I could nearly always stand up when the ref blew for half time, navigate the queues for the loo and the half time cup of tea and get back just in time for the 2nd half.

I hope the new stadium is as well designed, haha. I had the use of my buddy's season ticket on this occasion - luckily as getting a ticket through the official members scheme would have been nigh on impossible (my relatives all failed). In the paddock and close to the halfway line it had one of the best views in Goodison Park and not just because there are no pillars in the way:

Close to the pitch but not too low and far enough back to be under the roof when it rains! (I didn't take the equivalent shot this time so this photo is actually from the game against Manchester City in February - you can see City's Bernardo Silva nearest the camera who impressed me for one moment of superb skill but also for having one of the smallest pairs of feet I've seen on a men's football pitch). Well, I did take an equivalent photo, as the teams were coming on the pitch. But as Everton made quite a song and dance about this penultimate match as well as the last one, there were banners in the way so at that point you couldn't see a thing:

Though that is still a better view than some of them I've had over the years. Earlier this season the "letterbox" view from the Lower Bullens:

And here a very typicl Goodison view. This was from the corner of Upper Gwladys Street stand for a match in 2023:

I know that pillar is blocking out one of the goals but you can bob either way and that is far more exhausting if the pillar is across the centre of the pitch, so I counted that seat as not too bad!

This time the match itself was an odd affair - the atmosphere was understandably a bit strange with nothing at stake. It was almost - but not quite - the last match and a lot of spectators seemed quietly reflective rathert than overtly emotional. Everton took a 2-0 lead against relegated Ipswich and an easy win seemed likely but Ipswich scored a "worldie" to make it 2-1 before half time and got a second half equaliser. But the day wasn't really about the football. So I took some photos of the famous Archibald Leitch architecture:

Got a long suffering steward to take my picture by the pitch (the nearest I've got to going on it) - a few others had asked already but after me a long queue had formed. And yes I am wearing a vintage 1990s replica shirt, bought recently for me by my son (the son who's a red, like his mother):

A last picture from the corner of the Lower Bullens where I used to sit regularly with my two then quite young sons in the early 90s (now that was a good view when we could bag one of those):

And, after getting hurried along by a steward keen to get home, out of the ground with a last look at that amazingly tight area under the Lower Bullens Road stand:

And away from Goodison Road with a last look back from Walton Road down a side street:

Yes, that's The Brick, but I didn't go in it, it was time to drive home. But, on a whim, via the Dock Road and a glimpse of the new stadium. Which looks, as one scouser who went to one of the test events there said "like a f**king spaceship has landed".

Beam me up Scotty. It's time for a new era, new episodes, some new characters and, hopefully, plenty of drama. After a strange, happy/bittersweet/sad kind of day, I can't wait. 

P.S. The Everton fans have been booing the Premier League anthem since the points deductions and that was no different at the last game. I'm glad Masters was there to hear it. After all, if you don't know why the Everton fans sing "Premier League, corrupt as f*ck" (to the tune of Tom Hark if you were wondering) then consider this - why is the Manchester City case still outstanding? I know it's complex but Pep Guardiola  expected the result within one month back in February. Then it was "before the end of the season".That has come and gone and there is a deafening silence.  Now I've always thought that most of the charges against City are unproveable, for example off book payments to Roberto Mancini when he was manager. If the Inland Revenue isn't interested I don't see how the Premier League can prove that one. However, City were found guilty by UEFA on several charges which it was eventually decided were time barred. Those same charges are on the Premier League's rap sheet and the Premier League has no time bar so those, for me, are a slam dunk case of guilty. Though UEFA normally levy a financial sanction - and a modest one at that - so City would certainly appeal any other form of penalty.

 I suspect the Premier League want to get an agreed result, with some guilty charges which City won't contest, so the case doesn't rumble on indefinitely, consuming huge legal fees (which don't seem to count for "fair play" calculations, else City couldn't threaten to litigate till hell freezes over). I also suspect that City aren't playing ball and won't accept any punishment without contesting it. Either way, when City eventually escape with a penalty not much more than Everton's 8 point deduction - or even a small multiple of it - you might agree with the Gwladys Street's verdict about how corrupt the Premier League is.

Everything possible at the new place, but it will never be Goodison, by Martin Samuel, Sunday Times 18 May 2025