Jeremy Hutchinson’s life tells us why civil liberties matter – and how Labour was largely to blame for their erosion

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Alex Grant

Just occasionally, you meet someone with a life story so extraordinary that you pinch yourself as you hear it. Jeremy Hutchinson – one of Britain’s leading criminal barristers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, former chairman of the Tate Gallery, former husband of Peggy Ashcroft, and still going strong today – is one.

A biography, Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories, was published by John Murray earlier this month to coincide with Hutchinson’s 100th birthday. Its author, Thomas Grant QC, is himself a high-flying barrister – better known to me as my older brother Tom – but has produced a ripping yarn easily accessible to those, like me, with no legal training (all my lawyering has been of the barrack-room kind).

Meeting Hutchinson, as I was once lucky to when I accompanied the author at one of his interviews, it’s unnerving to hear him reminisce about meeting Virginia Woolf or Duncan Grant (no relation), or being a Labour candidate in 1945, as a first-person witness rather than a historian. Modestly, he says that “the life of the advocate is enjoyably ephemeral” and he took some persuading to co-operate with his biographer. I am glad he did. Continue reading →

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Greenwich Peninsula: how a council own-goal took the heat off greedy developers, and the Tories who let them get away with it

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Alex Grant

Hats off to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for its new exposé of what’s been going on at the Greenwich Peninsula: a billionaire developer reducing levels of affordable housing from 35% to just 21%, and the local council’s attempts to keep the “viability report” that justified these changes from being released.

It’s shocking to learn that the surviving affordable housing will be moved away from the riverside to less salubrious plots (some of them close to the busy A102, the motorway that leads to the Blackwall Tunnel and one of the worst pollution blackspots in London). What’s more, it’s shocking there was no proper public consultation on these drastic changes to how the Peninsula will be developed (the council cited the technicality that there was no new planning application, but a variation to an application that has already received permission).

As a former Greenwich insider – I was a councillor in Greenwich until 2014, chaired Greenwich Council’s planning board between 2006 and 2010, and sat on the board sporadically before that, helping to approve the original Peninsula masterplan back in 2004 – I’m also shocked to hear the council tried so hard to keep these vital reports secret.

As the BIJ’s Nick Mathiason has explained, the justification given for such a huge reduction in affordable housing seems very dubious. The council seems, at best, to have been guilty of gross naivety when it agreed to the reduction in February 2013. The developers – a Hong Kong consortium called Knight Dragon with a market capitalisation of $4.6 billion – argued that property prices in Greenwich had not increased in 2012 and would not rise in 2013. This is a completely barmy argument that only a idiot would fall for (in fact, the London property bubble was only temporarily deflated by the banking slowdown: London property prices have risen in almost every quarter since 2009, and in Greenwich by at least 6% in both 2012 and 2013). Councillors appeared to have swallowed officers’ advice that “The slow progress of development on this site has been exacerbated by the economic downturn that commenced in 2008 that has effectively made residential development on this site unviable”  hook, line and sinker. They should have been much more sceptical.

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Another reason why Labour’s 35% strategy was so wrong: the mysterious disappearance of the three-way marginal

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Alex Grant
Thurrock was almost a dead heat between the Conservatives, Labour and UKIP in 2015. Such three-way marginals are much rarer than they used to be

Thurrock was almost a dead heat between the Tories, Labour and UKIP in 2015. But 3-way marginals like this are rarer than they used to be

A lot’s been said in the two weeks since the election about the folly of Labour’s 35% strategy – the theory that cobbling together its core vote plus a few ex-Lib Dems to reach a 35% vote share would be enough to propel Ed Miliband into Number Ten as the leader of a centre-left coalition, if not an outright victor.

As Progress’s Robert Philpot has pointed out, the 35% strategy was “fatally flawed”: it wrongly assumed that Labour did not need to pick up Tory switchers as it could rely on most Lib Dem voters to “come back” to Labour. It was madness to assume that Lib Dem voters are innate Labour supporters who would suddenly see the error of their ways once Labour is in opposition. Most people  who voted Lib Dem in 2010 did so because they liked their policies, or because they always cast protest votes for minor parties (many psephologists now believe that a large chunk of the Lib Dems’ 2010 voters plumped for UKIP this time).

35% turned out to be wishful thinking in any case. Labour got only 30.4% of the vote nationwide, well behind the Tories on 36.9%. But had Labour got 35%, would it have been enough to win?  I’m not a professional psephologist so I’m not qualified to give a definitive answer. But my hunch is that it would not have been.

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A storm in a teacup: the Guardian misses the point about Charles’ black spider memos

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Alex Grant
Image result for PRINCE CHARLES WRITING

Dear Minister,

Thank you so much for joining me at the inaugural symposium of my Global Bear Preservation Initiative at Clarence House recently.

I know that I will be lampooned by so-called “modernisers” as a inexcusable old stick-in-the mud, but I hope you will indulge me when I observe how vitally important it is to remember that these mammals do not just live and procreate, but also defecate, in the world’s precious woodlands? ….(continues ad nauseam)

 Dear Prime Minister,

I was so delighted to host you and Cherie for the weekend here at Highgrove last month. I am sorry that other engagements compelled you to leave shortly after pre-dinner drinks on Friday evening. It seemed that you left almost as soon as you arrived! However I much enjoyed our lively, if brief discussion about how politicians, faith leaders, and “awkward customers” (!) like me can collaborate to promote international inter-faith dialogue.

There is one insight which I promised to put in writing: has it escaped your attention that as well as being an important spiritual leader in his own right, His Holiness the Pope is also leader of the global Catholic church. This under-reported fact is often overlooked by the secular “experts” whose over-rational view of the world has inflicted such damage on …. (continues ad nauseam )

It’s easy to mock Prince Charles’ turgid, un-self-conscious and pompous tone (as my parodies above attempt to) in the 27 letters and memos published in the Guardian today. Many of them are ponderous statements of the obvious. Touching on subjects as obscure as Captain Scott’s crumbling Antarctic hut, the albatross and even the Patagonian tooth fish, they have prompted a predictable tide of indignation from republican commentators pointing out that the Prince is misguided, out of touch and guilty of inappropriate Royal lobbying.

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Complacent, patronising and stuck in the past: Labour’s 2015 campaign was doomed from the start

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Alex Grant

Capture

John Thaw playing Labour Leader George Jones in the original production of the Absence of War at the National Theatre in 1993. More than 20 years later, Labour seems to have learnt few lessons from its 1992 defeat

A few days before the election I committed what some may consider to be an act of treachery. Without telling anyone I logged on to a gambling website and put £5 on the Tories winning an outright majority.

I did so not to make a lot of money (the odds were 7-1 so I’ve only made £30), nor because I looked forward to a Tory victory (which I regard as a disaster for Britain). Nor did I do it so I could brag about how good I am at predicting election results (I also put £5 on Charles Kennedy keeping his seat in Scotland). The reason was simple: several weeks earlier I had concluded that Labour was doomed to lose and wagering money on it was a way of softening the blow.

Firstly, let’s not underestimate the scale of Labour’s defeat – electorally much worse than 1992, and psychologically almost as bad as the 1983 catastrophe. Labour’s collapse in Scotland and the near-annihilation of the Lib Dems have dominated the headlines this weekend, but Labour’s woes in England and Wales are almost as serious. Continue reading →

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In the last days of the election campaign Labour should talk about three things: housing, housing and housing

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Alex Grant

CIMG4972“We are not in principle opposed to right to buy but the Tory plan doesn’t work,” said Ed Miliband at the leaders’ debate on April 15th. “Any plan based on right to buy has to mean there are more houses, not less.”

Of Ed’s contributions at the debate – many of which were very effective – this was one of the weakest. Contrast it with Nicola Sturgeon’s verdict on the Tories’ plan to extend the Right to Buy to 1.3 million housing association tenants. Their plan was, Sturgeon said, “‘one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard… in Scotland we’ve abolished the right to buy. It’s a policy that has had its day”.

It was an awkward moment in the debate, in which the manacles of New Labour, holding back Miliband from venturing any real criticism of right-to-buy, could be heard clanking in the background. Such timidity is depressing as Labour has a good story to tell on housing in this campaign: fully costed pledges to ban extortionate letting agents’ fees, introduce three-year tenancies and cap rent rises at inflation; to give councils new “use it or lose it” powers to stop developers sitting on land; and to create local development corporations to build homes where the private sector has failed to. Continue reading →

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Salman Rushdie’s right about Charlie Hebdo. Cowardice in the face of gunmen is one thing. Served up cold, it’s another

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Alex Grant

What is it about some sections of the liberal left and Charlie Hebdo? The decision of six authors to withdraw from PEN’s annual gala, over the organisation’s decision to honour Charlie Hebdo with its ‘Freedom of Expression Courage’ award, is stomach-churning. The Pontius Pilate-like excuses of one of those authors, Francine Prose, about how she deplores the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists but can’t support a posthumous award being given to them, is one of the worst bits of nonsense I’ve read in years.

The Guardian‘s stance shortly after the massacre on January 7th was almost as craven: editor Alan Rusbridger argued that “he didn’t agree that it was necessary to show solidarity by republishing the offensive cartoons”.

This fence-sitting results in some contorted thinking. According to Prose – who even likens the Charlie Hebdo staff to  neo-Nazis marching in Illinois – the unforgivable crime of being “white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists… feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East” (she forgets that at least one of those gunned down was Muslim).

This relativism suggests that writers should lie in bed all day, writing nothing, in case they offend someone. Furthermore, it’s immoral to do anything that might provoke Islamic terrorism, just in case it also provokes a neo-con politician to invade Iraq again.

Thank heavens there have been saner voices. Salman Rushdie – not someone who I always agree with – is quite right to call out such humbug. Continue reading →

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Eight media myths about the 2015 election – and why they are wrong

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Alex Grant
election picture

I missed the start of this campaign: for the first ten days of April I was in France, in a house without Wifi or even a telephone. Coming back to the UK on April 10th I scanned the papers and remembered why I hate the British media so much during General Election campaigns.

It’s as if everyone is covering the election with both hands tied behind their backs. There’s very little objectivity, proportion or historic perspective. The broadcast media – and in particular the BBC – are so terrified of appearing biassed that they rarely attempt any serious analysis at all (Radio Four’s The Week In Westminster, by far the best radio programme on British politics, has been replaced with Campaign Sidebar,an idiotic half-hour of puff from Hugo Rifkind). As for the print and online media, editorial lines are stuck to with theological rigidity: the Sun and the Mail unveil front pages saying Ed Miliband lost leadership debates before the debates are even finished, while the Mirror sycophantically gushes about Miliband “looking more prime ministerial every time he appears on the telly”. The heavyweight Guardian, for its part, seizes on one rogue poll showing a six-point Labour lead and splashes with the headline The Day the Polls Turned.

Almost all media coverage depends on a rehash of several myths about this election. Let’s look at them – in no particular order – one by one.

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Oxbridge applicants shouldn’t despair if they did not “get in” this week. For me, Balliol was an academic cul-de-sac

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Alex Grant
balliol
Balliol College, Oxford: I made great friends there, but the course I studied closed minds rather than opened them

Over the next few days thousands of young people will  be watching their doormats, and email inboxes, with dread. From January 7th onwards Cambridge University – and from January 9th onwards Oxford – will be letting applicants know if they have “got in” or not. Those who hear they have not “got in” – more than 75% of the 35,000 who applied – may be disheartened. Don’t be.

At first you’ll feel like a political football. Just as predictable as Turkey sandwiches is another post-Christmas ritual: the annual Oxbridge admissions post-mortem. Every January politicians and journalists line up to accuse Oxford and Cambridge universities of elitism, and Oxbridge responds with retaliatory accusations of political correctness and dumbing-down.

As the proportion of Oxbridge students from state schools increases very slowly, if at all, both universities have grown increasingly defensive and argue that it’s not their job to increase social mobility: they are there to admit the best applicants regardless of what school they went to. Oxford’s website states proudly that it’s “committed to recruiting the best candidates, irrespective of their age, colour, disability, ethnic origin, marital status, nationality, national origin, parental status, race, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, social background or educational background”. But behind these silky words lurks a harsher rhetoric from the bigwigs who run the universities. Every year Oxford grandees say that it’s not their fault that the statistics change so slowly: back in 2006 Professor Alan Ryan, then Warden of New College Oxford, even said that the problem was not that selective schools coach applicants, but that schools weren’t selective enough.

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So long, Greenwich. I predict that by 2050 you’ll swallow up Lewisham and Bexley. The Thames Barrier will be a boutique hotel. And everyone will be mad as hell about air pollution

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Alex Grant
By 2050 the Thames Barrier will be redundant as a flood defence, but doing a roaring trade as a Boutique Hotel
By 2050 the Thames Barrier will be redundant as a flood defence, but doing a roaring trade as a Boutique Hotel

I’m moving out of London later this week, with my partner and our daughter, after 35 years living in the borough of Greenwich – the last 16 of them as a Labour councillor here. There are few things more boring than ex-councillors hanging around the fringes of Greenwich politics like Jacob Marley’s Ghost, banging on about how everything was better in their day, or would be better now if only they still had a hand on the tiller. I’ve tried to resist the temptation to do either of those things, but moving out of Greenwich seems the best way of making sure I don’t. This blog will continue to cover Greenwich matters from time to time, but less frequently. 

Aside from a few years in the mid-1990s I’ve lived here continuously since 1980, originally in Westcombe Park, then a couple of years in Charlton and for the last decade in a terraced house near Plumstead Common.

Leaving somewhere that’s been home for more than three-quarters of my life – I moved here aged six and I’m now 41 – does not make me an infallible oracle for the future. But having lived in Greenwich for nearly 35 years I’ll venture some predictions for the next 35.

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