Man graduates 41 years after being denied ceremony by parrot problem

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, the Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Paul Tyler is a direct descendant of Cornish hero Bishop Trelawny

I've seen it claimed and now I have confirmation from the Beast's horse's mouth. The Liberal Democrat peer and former MP Paul Tyler is a direct descendant of the Cornish hero Bishop Jonathan Trelawny.

To be precise, Paul tells me he is the bishop's great great great great great great great great grandson. That's eight greats.

As the glee club at Liberal Democrat conferences never seems to know the tune of Trelawny, here's the Holman-Climax Male Voice Choir to help us.

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Stephen Williams makes the case for abolishing Bristol's elected mayor.

Samantha Rose Hill examines Hannah Arendt's writings on the links between loneliness and totalitarianism: "Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow, because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought."

With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is electroshock therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? John Read explains.

"Nottinghamshire has a long history of libraries, from the old penny libraries prior to the establishment of a public library service. If none of these had existed and I could design a new world the first thing I would want in my utopia is a place where knowledgeable staff help you choose books you can read *for free* then take them back for someone else to have the same pleasure." Ross Bradshaw on the wonder of public libraries.

Aris Roussinos.argues that Paul Kingsnorth has emerged as Britain’s foremost critic of industrial modernity and the  literary heir to a strain of thought that has survived in the English imagination, on both Left and Right, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Didn't you used to be Josh McEachran? The former Chelsea starlet reflects on his career and why things did not work out for him at Stamford Bridge,

A snapshot of forgotten post-war railway history

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Browsing railway photographs on GettyImages, as you do, I came across this. Taken at Bristol Temple Meads in May 1952, it shows a locomotive with a remarkable history.

British Rail 18100 was a prototype gas turbine-electric locomotive commissioned by the Great Western Railway in the 1940s but not delivered until 1951. It spent its working life hauling express passenger services on BR's Western Region.

In 1958 it was withdrawn from service to be converted into an electric locomotive, numbered E1000 (E2001 from 1959), and was then used for testing and staff training in connection with the electrification of the West Coast main line.

It was put into store at the end of 1961, but lasted until November 1972 when it was cut up for scrap.

Tory councillor who opposed any change to Bristol statue had a golliwog mascot

One of the suggestions for making the Bristol statue of Edward Colston more acceptable was to add a second plaque that spelt out his role in the Atlantic slave trade.

Even this was too much for one Conservative councillor, according to a 2018 report on Bristol Live:

Cllr Richard Eddy said someone taking the law into the own hands and ‘unilaterally removing’ the plaque, which recognises Colston’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, ‘might be justified’.

The website went on to quote him:

"This pathetic bid to mount a secondary revisionist plaque on Colston's Statue is historically-illiterate and a further stunt to try to reinvent Bristol's history..

"If it goes through, it will be a further slap-in-the-face for true Bristolians and our city's history delivered by ignorant, left-wing incomers."

If this is how a leading Tory met such a reasonable suggestion, it's easy to understand why people decided to take the matter in to their own hands.

You can see Cllr Eddy and his golliwog mascot in the Bristol Live report.

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Michael Mullaney says the Liberal Democrats must be a party for all of Britain.

"Face-to-face work is especially important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And they may find it harder to study in environments that are not conducive to learning. Remote learning must not allow these groups of students to become ever more remote." The former Conservative minister Chris Skidmore argues that universities must introduce extra financial and pastoral support to look after their remote students

"In Polanyi’s opinion, whenever the profit-making impulse becomes deadlocked with the need to shield people from its harmful side effects, voters are tempted by the 'fascist solution': reconcile profit and security by forfeiting civic freedom." Caleb Crain believes Karl Polanyi's thinking is newly relevant today.

Alan Morris finds that the Covid-19 lockdown has given Bristol people a sense of how much pleasanter their city would be if it was not dominated by motor vehicles.

Brendan Cormier looks at the home-made signs that have appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic.

What's the difference between Jack-in-the-Green and the Green Man? Icy Sedgwick explains.

Thank you, Roland Hall: In praise of generous university offers

After I left Boxmoor and my good school reports, life was difficult. I had moved from a comprehensive that had recently been a very traditional grammar school to one (a middle school) here in Market Harborough that had been a secondary modern.

I was left by my new school to sink or swim. There was no pastoral care and no help coping with a very different curriculum. I suppose my problem was that, though I was poor, I could pass as middle class so no one thought I might need help.

Most damaging, I found that if I did not work, no one was going to make me. I reacted as any 13-year-old boy would in such circumstances and stopped working.

When I moved to the upper school I found I had been put in a CSE set for maths. Having done mathematical aptitude tests in later life, I can say objectively that this was a crime.

Fortunately, I had an ally in the same situation and we fought and won a campaign to be moved up to an O level set.

Still, my O levels were not great - seven passes, two at grade B and five at grade C.

After that life got better. I was in the sixth form studying subjects I liked and was back on even keel academically.

I finally had a teacher (Mark Clay-Dove) who took a special interest in me and helped me with university entrance. I remember going to his house for coffee one Saturday morning, being introduced to his wife and looking over a statement about why I wanted to study Philosophy that one university had asked for. He told me it was fine and I don't think I changed a word before I sent it in.

I remember another conversation with him after school when I confided that I was worried about my A levels and what I would do if I didn't get to university. He told me not to worry and that I was bright enough to do a postgraduate degree.

One reason for my doing a part-time Masters in my thirties was to honour that conversation.

And he also told me that the school had given me a remarkably generous academic reference. It is now obvious to me that he had written it himself.

In retrospect, choosing a non-school subject like Philosophy was a smart move for someone with ropy O levels. It meant universities were more likely to rely on their own judgement and pay a less attention to exam results.

So when I went to Nottingham, was interviewed and wrote an essay while I was there, they responded by making me an offer of EE to read Philosophy with them. Delighted? You have no idea.

Another thing that made life good in the sixth form was my Saturday job in a secondhand bookshop. Yes, Market Harborough readers, there was once a bookshop in Nelson Street.

It was run by Mark Jacobs - an expert on the poet Laura Riding who still has letters published in the London Review of Books from time to time - and his wife Barbara.

When I told Barbara Jacobs (now a successful author) that I was off to the University of York for another interview, she told me that she had met a member of the Philosophy department there at a party while Mark was doing his PhD. He was called Roland Hall and was a very nice man.

I arrived at York to find that, sure enough, my interview was with Roland Hall. I was filled with a sense of confidence and wellbeing.

And he was a very nice man. We had quite a casual chat about Philosophy and why I wanted to study it, before he said: "What shall we say for an offer? Three Cs?"

Given that York accepted General Studies towards their offers in those days, this was generous yet challenging enough to ensure that I continued to work.

I still had to persuade my school to let me take A level General Studies. They said no at first - I am beginning to see a pattern here - but I persisted and in the end quite a few of us took it.

Since you ask, I got an A.

I am sorry to have written so much about my teenage self, because this post was meant to be a tribute to Roland Hall.

When I took it into my head to look him up a few months ago, I found he had recently died. I also found that he had lived a life that made his patience with spotty herberts like me remarkable:

Here are some extracts from an appreciate of him published in the journal Locke Studies:

In 1949 he joined the British Army for National Service. After basic training, which included touch typing, he was found a position where, in the words of one of his superiors, “his brain would not atrophy.” 

This was as Clerk to General Frank Simpson, the President of the Court at the British War Crimes Unit in Hamburg, during the four-month trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, regarded as Hitler’s greatest General Manstein had been taken prisoner by the British in August 1945. He testified for the defence of the German General Staff and the Wehrmacht supreme command at the Nuremberg trials of major Nazi war criminals and organizations in August 1946. 

Under pressure from the Soviet Union to hand him over, the British cabinet had decided in July 1948 to prosecute Manstein and several other senior officers held in custody since the end of the war. Roland’s job was to collate and safeguard all the written evidence for the Court, which he read in its entirety, and to keep track of the Court’s proceedings. 

This experience had a profound effect on Roland, only 19 at the time. It convinced him of the justification for war in the face of great evil, though, having seen the evidence against Manstein, he was amazed at the severity of the sentence passed upon him. 

When the sentence was given, he was able to hear it through the sliding doors of the room behind the court in which he was working and wondered whether he had misheard “18 years” for “18 months,” which would have made more sense to him.  

At the end of the trial, General Simpson was instrumental in Roland joining the British Forces Network, where he was responsible for producing classical music programmes at the Musikhalle for the Allied forces in Western Europe. 

He often ate at the Church Army cafe near the Alster and spoke with the German musicians playing there. One day he asked them about a particular piece of music they were playing. After that, they played Brüch’s Violin Concerto whenever he came in. 

Lest the impression have been given that his Army service was not very military, it should be added that Roland’s pay-book records that he was a first-class shot, meaning that he could hit the bullseye with a rifle at 300 yards.

And because I was taught by him, I am only two moves away from some of the greats of 20th-century British Philosophy:

He obtained the B.Phil under the supervision of two of the great names of linguistic philosophy, J. L. Austin and, briefly, Gilbert Ryle (when Austin was away in America). It was Austin who suggested that Roland should work on “a big word like ‘as’” when contemplating topics for his Bachelor’s thesis and who gave him a method, this being to “start with the dictionary.” 

Ignoring his supervisor’s sage warning against going into the academic profession - “There’s no money in it” - he took his first job in 1956 as Assistant in Logic at the University of St. Andrews. The next year he moved to Queen’s College, Dundee, as Lecturer in Philosophy, becoming Senior Lecturer in 1966. From 1961 to 1967 he was Assistant Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly. In 1967 he was appointed Reader in Philosophy at the University of York, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. 

Meeting Roland Hall and walking round York afterwards was enough to convince me that this was where I wanted to study.

So, thanks to his generosity and that of the department at Nottingham, my last university interview consisted of my gently breaking it to an academic at Bristol - a university that school rumour maintained would not even look at you unless you gave them your first preference - that I would not be studying with them.

In the first year at York I had to pass two papers: one on general philosophy and one on formal logic, which Roland Hall taught us. I passed both with an upper second mark, putting me in the top third or quarter of students on the course,

Thank you, Roland Hall.

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"I became involved with Labour Against Antisemitism, and looked at what local Labour members had been doing online. I saw Holocaust denial sitting side by side with Corbyn worship; accusations that ‘Israhell’ and ‘the Rothschilds’ were organ harvesting alongside heartfelt prayers for aliens to ‘kill the Zionists’." An anonymous contributor to Bristol Live shares her experience of antisemitism in the city.

"If political and TV programming decisions are determined by opinion polls and focus groups – and failing that by some image of a narrow-minded voting and viewing public with no attention spans– there’ll be no room for the high-minded. Debate will be replaced by an exchange of sound-bites." Chris Dillow blogs about Britain's intellectual decline.

John Stuart Mill's annotations in the margins of the books in his library tell us a lot about his mind, says Albert Pionke.

Andy Boddington explains how Joe from the Windrush generation helped shape his life. "As a shy, skinny weakling, I learnt the principles of equality even before I knew what those words meant. I got to understand the value of friendship. Joe treated me as an equal."

In Britain hauntings don't just occur in ancient manor houses, old inns and Gothic asylums. as Ray Newman shows.

NG and Beyond explores Nottingham's Lenton railway triangle.

Labour really does have a problem with anti-Semitism

If you doubt the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism, take a look at the motion debated by its Bristol West constituency party this week. (It was defeated by 108 votes to 84.)

It includes these words:

when people see inequality, ecological disaster and war alongside the accumulation of unprecedented wealth, in the private hands of a few, it is reasonable that they seek out explanations.

Given that this motion was condemning the constituency's Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire for joining a demonstration against anti-Semitism in the party, there is only one construction I  can put on them.

It is saying that it is understandable if people attribute the bad things in the world to a Jewish conspiracy.

True the motion also says racism is "completely unacceptable", so the proposers must be believe such theories are mistaken, but what is this idea doing in the motion in the first place?

I conclude that the Labour Party really does have a problem with anti-Semitism.

And to those who say the right has much more of a problem with it, I am not sure that is any longer true.

Everything I see from the far-right these days is obsessed with Islam. I do not see Jews and Jewish conspiracies mentioned at all.

The two series of Shoestring to be released as a DVD set

Good news! The series of Shoestring are about to be released on DVD.

The Network on Air site says:

Trevor Eve stars as radio "Private Ear" Eddie Shoestring in the massively successful BBC drama series. 

Co-created by Robert Banks Stewart, Shoestring also stars Michael Medwin as Eddie's long-suffering boss Don Satchley; Liz Crowther as station receptionist Sonia; and Doran Godwin as Eddie's landlady, on-off lover and occasional assistant Erica. This complete-series set also features appearances from Diana Dors, Harry H. Corbett, Toyah Wilcox, Geraldine James and Michael Elphick. 

Poison phone-ins and threats to a disc jockey lead Radio West to hire private investigator Eddie Shoestring – who discovers it may be a longer-running job than he first thought! 

This set also includes a brand-new book on the making of the series by archive television historian Andrew Pixley, with contributions from original cast and crew members.

The two series were broadcast by the BBC in 1979 and 1980, and made Trevor Eve a household name.

I once wrote of the programme's appeal:

Eddie Shoestring was always a bit of a fantasist. He had suffered some sort of breakdown while working in computers and his new image as a Philip Marlowe figure - stalking the streets, not of Los Angeles, but Bristol - was his way of coping. He life as a private detective did not represent an exploration of the real world so much as an escape from it. 

So Shoestring never was grittily realistic, In fact, like many fantasists, Eddie drew people into his world.

Lib Dem candidate is the favourite in West of England mayoral race

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The Bristol Post has promising news:

Former Bristol West MP Stephen Williams has been chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate for the Metro Mayor election in May – and has immediately become the bookies' favourite to win. 

Mr Williams, a former Local Government Minister, was nominated by party members after a vote between himself and former Bristol cabinet councillor Simon Cook.

According to the Post, Ladbrokes is quoting the following odds for the contest to be mayor of the West of England:

Stephen Williams (Lib Dem) - Evens
Conservative - 11/10
Labour - 7/1
Green - 50/1
Ukip - 100/1

I am not the greatest fan of elected mayors, and the idea of a mayor for the West of England sounds silly.

But it turns out to cover a sort of Greater Bristol, taking in the Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire council areas as well as the city itself.

Liberal England wishes Stephen the best of luck for the contest (and hopes he will now drop the 'MP' from his Twitter handle).

If you want to help him win, Andrew Brown on Lib Dem Voice tells you how.

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"The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right." Ta-Nehisi Coates on the history of the first African American White House - and of what came next,

Chris Dillow explains why the government is cutting the number of overseas students: it's target fetishism.

"Something is deeply wrong with this erstwhile national staple: it has become a travesty of trade, a grim parody of twenty-first century consumerism." David Butterfield explains how W.H. Smith became a national embarrassment.

"The spread of bad archaeology online is not fuelled by conspiracy theorists or Macedonian teenagers out to make a buck. It is fuelled by fans." Adrián Maldonado on the fate of archaeology in the post-truth era.

E.R. Braithwaite, the author of To Sir, With Love. has died in the United States at the age of 104. Sewell Chan wrote his New York Times obituary.

Matt Gilbert takes us to Johnny Ball Lane, a half-hidden route to Bristol's past.

Why I am a sceptic about the idea of a Progressive Alliance

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Last night, in a Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council by-election, the Conservatives held Trench ward with an increased majority.

Not a big surprise, you may think. But there was more to it than that.

Because both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens had stood down to give Labour a clear run.

It is always unwise to read too much into a single local contest, but the outcome here should remind us of an important lesson.

Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

And that is why I am a sceptic when it comes to the idea of a "progressive alliance" against the Tories.

Think of the Richmond Park by-election.

Would it have helped Sarah Olney if Labour had declined to field a candidate? I doubt it very much.

Think of the way that we hung the support that Zac Goldsmith had received from Ukip around his neck.

If Sarah had been endorsed by Labour she would have been "Jeremy Corbyn's candidate" on every Tory leaflet in Richmond Park.

That would have made it less, not more, likely that she would have won.

The Green Party did stand down in Richmond, which may have helped Sarah. Only people who were already going to vote Tory would have been discomfited by that.

But that is because the Greens do not matter than much at present. If they did come to be more significant in the minds of the voters, then deals with them would become more problematic,

True, they are not laden with decades of embarrassing baggage the way Corbyn and McDonnell are,
but they would then put off potential Lib Dem voters as well as attract them.

We should also ask what the Greens are after in return for standing down in seats like Richmond. I suspect it is because they are after a clear run in their own most promising seats.

As these are generally ones that we Liberal Democrats held as recently as 2010 - Bristol West, Norwich South - I am wary of giving them what they want.

(If you want a alternative view of a Lib Dem - Green alliance, read Clifford Fleming on the Social Liberal Forum site.)

Let's end by returning to the central point: parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

The corollary of this is that when voters have made up their mind to throw out the Tories, they are quite capable of organising themselves to do it.

Think of 1997, when the operation was carried out with ruthless efficiency.

Sometimes that was to the detriment of us Liberal Democrats. In several of our target seats (St Albans, Hastings and Rye, Bristol West again) Labour came from third place to beat the Tories.

Yes, some of our gains because Labour did not try to hard in those constituencies, but that is because informal pacts like those are more likely to bear fruit that any grand, publicly announced Progressive Alliance.

Revd J. P. Martin, the Uncle Books and Quentin Blake

An exhibition and conference that celebrate the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books are to be held next month at the New Room, The Horsefair, Bristol.

The exhibition will run from 7 to 22 October. It will explore the links between Methodism and publishing in Bristol, celebrate the Uncle books and mark the achievements of the Martin/Currey family, particularly the involvement of James Currey in the African Writers Series.

The theme ‘Writing and Publishing in Bristol’ will run through both the exhibition and a free one-day conference on Saturday 15 October.

Further details can be found on the New Room website.

I am pleased to see these events being held. The other day I came across a new book on Quentin Blake that does not even mention Uncle.

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"Oakeshottian conservatives prefer the devil they know; idealists, rationalists and managerialists think they can improve upon it." Chris Dillow returns to one of his favourite themes: the trouble with the Conservatives is that they are no longer Conservative.

Anoosh Chakelian meets Piers Corbyn, brother of the Labour leader.

"Our National Parks are dominated by sheep farms and grouse or deer estates, leaving almost all our hills bare. Nature is protected in isolated reserves which provide important refuges for biodiversity. But these refuges are not joined up, and so are very fragile in the long-term." Helen Meech makes the case for rewilding.

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross, is a celebrated modernist ruin on the Firth of Clyde. John Grindrod has photographs of it from the 1960s: "What's immediately apparent is how beautiful the building is. The arches, the windows, the concrete, the strange forms and shadows."

Richly Evocative introduces us to the elusive, slippery territory that is Ashley Vale in St Werburghs, Bristol.

Taylor Parkes celebrates The Professionals.

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"Eric's family hope you can join them for an afternoon to celebrate his life and work at The Royal Institution, 2.00pm on Thursday 30th June 2016. There will be a number of guest speakers, audio visual clips and music, followed by light refreshments." Details of the memorial service for Eric Avebury,

"I wish I'd never decided to work in an immigration detention centre," says an anonymous article on politics.co.uk.

Stephen Williams presents an electoral history of Bristol Liberal Democrats 1973-2016.

"Newsagents reached parts of the population that most booksellers and stationers hadn’t previously: the working class. Newsagents could provide a one-stop shop for working-class autodidacts in the interwar period." Misplacedhabits on the need for a history of newsagents' shops.

"Get Carter was different from all other films in that it somehow ‘belonged’ to the north-east – projecting and validating a tough-but-tender image of the region that chimed with the area’s self-romanticising view of itself." Neil Young on a great film, 45 years on.

Railway Maniac on a little piece of Lincolnshire railway history: the Allington Chord.

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Joanna Ferguson announces the relaunch of Liberal Youth's blogging platform The Libertine.

"Measurement, Bob says, is the big challenge facing the outdoor education industry. You can measure a child's progress in maths, spelling, grammar… so we tend to hone in on those things. But it’s so much harder to quantify how much more confident or empathetic or happy a child is this term versus last. So we don't prioritise these things, and so nor the activities that develop them.'" Dominic Collard speaks up for outdoor education.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent some time teaching in an elementary school in the Austrian mountains. Spencer Robins looks at that period's influence on his thought.

"Self went on to argue that understanding the age of buildings was a key to understanding the built environment. Elderly people were better at it, he said, because they had often seen the buildings being constructed. Young people less so." Steven Morris follows Will Self on a psychogeographic walk through Bristol.

Dave Walker is puzzled by an undeveloped plot in South Kensington. Someone Twitter said it had been earmarked for a new Iranian Embassy that cannot now be built because of economic sanctions.

London Traveller follows the Ravensbourne River through a surprisingly rural landscape from Bromley South station to Caesar's Well.

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Lynne Featherstone visits Bristol  to see for the initiatives taking place in this city to tackle female genital mutilation and violence against girls and women.

Polichic... asks why so much mundane political campaign documentation is marked "Top Secret" or "Highly Confidential".

"Mark Ramprakash burst on to the scene as a teenager in the 1988 NatWest Trophy final between Middlesex and Worcestershire. Coming in at 25 for 4 in pursuit of 162, many youngsters would have followed the lead of their senior team-mates and given their wickets away. When he was out, for 56, Middlesex needed just three more to win." Deep Extra Cover suggests memories of Ramprakash the unfulfilled talent will will be dwarfed by those of the domestic run machine.

The former world champion Garry Kasparov is to challenge the, er, eccentric Kirsan Ilymzhinov for the presidency of FIDE, the governing body of world chess, reports Chessdom.

Steven Gauge remembers his grandfather Reginald, who has died at the age of 104.

Mark Vanhoenacker, in the New York Times, calls for a new bridge for Manhattan to cater for cyclists and pedestrians but not cars.

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The 'Gotcha' style of questioning favoured by John Humphrys damages democracy, argues Robert Sharp on Liberal Conspiracy.

Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell brings psychotherapy to bear on relations between the parties: "Viewed through the prism of Transactional Analysis, it is no surprise that the LibDem-Labour coalition negotiations failed, but the Conservatives and the LibDems managed to strike a business-like agreement."

Germany offers the best model for the successful adoption of renewable energy, argues Osha Gray Davidson in an interview with AlterNet.

"As a child in Bristol in the 1970s, apart from school, mealtimes and the odd bit of telly (mostly Blue Peter!) my life from aged 7-11 essentially consisted of what experts now call ‘free play’. Although I was very lucky to have access to woods and gardens, much of this play took place in less-than-bucolic surroundings – car-parks, estates, disused patches of land and on the street. This didn’t matter. What mattered was having some freedom to roam and to just ‘be’, to call on friends and hang out with other kids, to be away from the adult world and to create our own." Playing Out on the importance of free play - and Peter Pan.

Duncan Stephen on the curious case of Joyce Hatto - who turned out not to be "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of".

"In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business." Spitalfields Life has a selection of Tony Hall's photographs of East End shops.

Why crime goes down when street lights are turned off

In the past I have supported the idea of turning off street lights in the deep of the night. This is not just because it saves money, but also because it may give us back the experience of seeing the awesome nighttime sky.

And in May I reported a counterintuitive claim from West Mercia Police that crime goes down when street lights are turned off.

But now there is a convincing theory as to why this is the case (found via Conservative Home).

Because This is Bristol quotes a city councillor, Ron Hardie:

“The police have told us they have not seen any notable increase in crime. 

“In fact, in some areas, there has been a reduction of 20 per cent. 

“I understand from the police that burglars don’t like it when it’s dark. 

“They like to be able to see their escape route and they like to ‘case’ a premises before they strike. 

“They would attract too much attention if they were using torches.”

Mr Hardie is a Labour councillor. His sensible attitude contrasts with his party's attempts nationally (encouraged by the Observer) to drum up a scare about street lights being switched off in the middle of the night.