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Chaminda Jayanetti examines the hidden impact of Labour's disability benefit cuts - from carer's allowance to railcards.

"When they receive the annual service charge statements, they find costs that bear no relation to the services they receive - street lighting for a block of flats, access to facilities they are not allowed to use, or simple paint jobs costing tens of thousands of pounds with no say over who carries out the work or how it is done." Labour MP Kate Osborne says the end of the feudal leasehold system cannot come soon enough.

Seventy years before congestion pricing landed in New York City, Lewis Mumford sounded the alarm on letting automobiles run amok in America’s downtowns. David Zipper tells his story.

Tim Radford reviews The Age of Diagnosis by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan: "How do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from right-wing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."

"At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn't a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: 'I think you should look into incel culture.'" Jack Thorne on writing Adolescence.

Luka Ivan Jukic casts light on an unexpected corner of European history: Latin remained a live language in Croatia until the middle of the 19th century.

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"The government is trying to solve the wrong problem. They are focusing on those who are out of work, when it is increasingly clear that one big reason people with disabilities are not in employment is because work environments have fewer roles they can fill." Ruth Patrick and Aaron Reeves argue that cuts and caps to benefits have always harmed people, not helped them into work.

Fred Garratt-Stanley, writing for The Lead, finds malaise, discontent and the rise of Reform UK at the English seaside. "When you take away someone’s belief in the place they live in, you lay the groundwork for radicalisation. And when progressives lose the argument and subscribe to the right-wing view on the roots of this deprivation, it creates a vacuum waiting to be filled."

Wendy Chamberlain reviews The List - a moving documentary about one family’s attempt to rescue hundreds of artists from the Taliban during the fall of Kabul in 2021.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the state-controlled international news channel RT has all but disappeared from Western screens. But, report Rina Nikolaeva, Anastasia Korotkova and Dmitry Velikovsky, vloggers are being paid to spread the same pro-Russian propaganda.

"In 1968, when I was 28, I wrote the first English book on art deco." Bevis Hillier talks to dezeen about the centenary of the style.

Jim McCarthy, in an extract from his book Flowers in the Rain: The Untold Story of The Move, writes about the band and drugs: "Trevor Burton was definite and truthful, about the path into drug taking, 'It was only Ace and me that took drugs in The Move. We were like kids in the sweet shop. Our other thing was amphetamines. When you’re gigging six nights a week - you don’t mind a little help.'"

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"With just two days until we mark three years since the invasion, we need to talk about this man, because no one truly knows what could have happened if he hadn’t been there to lead. This is a man who could have left. A man who was expected to leave. The world was really expecting he would run." Victor Kravchuk pays tribute to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Jennie Kermode is worried that US politicians are again talking about mass sterilisation: "The US first began sterilising people with mental illness - requiring neither their consent nor that of their next of kin – in Pennsylvania in 1905, and in 1927 this was formally ruled to be in accordance with the constitution. Although never actually banned, it decreased dramatically after 1978, when new regulations ruled that consent was ... necessary."

When did rock 'n roll die? Chris Dalla Riva and Daniel Parris offer a statistical analysis.

"In an unnamed city, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) keeps his head down in the Department of Records, covering for ineffectual boss Mr Kurtzmann (a brilliant Ian Holm). Meanwhile in his dreams, he is a winged warrior, who soars amongst the clouds, battling a giant samurai creature and rescuing a Botticelli Venus from her aerial cage." Tim Pelan celebrates the chaotic genius of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Londonopia finds that the grazing of sheep in London's parks has a long and complex history: "Just when you thought sheep had permanently retired from their park-keeping duties, along came World War II. With food shortages rampant and every inch of available land needed for practical use, parks across London were repurposed for the war effort. Victory gardens sprung up in many green spaces, and in some cases, sheep were reintroduced to provide both wool and meat."

Ben Austwick takes us to Lud’s Church, a natural geological feature in the Staffordshire Peak District, with rich literary and religious connections.

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Hannah Forsyth surveys the history of the commercialisation of higher education and concludes: "Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose."

John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses – of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally."

"G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them." Martin Robbins argues that Donald Trump - and Robert Peston - have broken the news, and that it's probably time to rethink your information diet.

Many of the oligarchs who supported Hitler ended up in concentration camps, reports Timothy W. Ryback.

David Trotter reviews the new British Film Institute book on Ken Loach's Kes (1969): "Kes marked a conscious departure from the 'go-in-and-grab-it' style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal."

"In the popular imagination, Birmingham isn’t thought of as an artistic bohemia. The city’s historic stereotype, judging by the backdrop to the likes of Peaky Blinders or the risible Tolkien biopic from 2019, is summed up by no-nonsense men bashing iron in huge factories, often to a heavy metal soundtrack." But there's more to the city than that, says Jon Neale as he looks at the role of the Arts and Crafts movement in its history.

Face-down restraint of patients still widely used in NHS

Danny Chambers MP, the Liberal Democrats' mental health spokesperson in the Commons, is alarmed by new NHS figures on face-down restraint of patients obtained by the party, reports the Guardian

The figures show that the controversial technique was used in England 5,247 times during 2023 and 3,732 times in the first 10 months of this year.

Danny told the Guardian:

"Physical restraint can cause significant distress for vulnerable patients and leave staff with severe injuries. That some institutions are physically restraining mental health patients far more than others shows that our NHS services have been neglected and overlooked for too long."

He added that it is is "particularly worrying" to see restraint being used so persistently despite the implementation of 'Seni’s law' - the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act - in 2021. 

Danny urged ministers to launch an investigation into the situation, which has arisen because the last Tory government failed to improve mental health care and "some of the most vulnerable people in our society are now paying the price".

The figures, says the Guardian, were also condemned by the Centre for Mental Health thinktank and by the mental health charity Mind.

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

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"Al-Fayed died before he could face justice but imagine how many women’s lives would not have been ruined if anti-SLAPP legislation had been in place and journalists had been able to report freely on the case," Labour MP Joe Powell tells Gareth Davies et al. from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Aaron Rabinowitz says we need to talk about men: "Trump has doubled his share of Black male voters, and across all racial demographics his gains were highest among younger men. As always, problems like this are intersectional and multifaceted, but one of the crucial facets we need to discuss is clearly the persistent problem of disaffected men."

"For the last decade, the question of who gets to interrogate historical questions, and why they are motivated to do so, has become very fraught in Britain. And the topics that have become most central to this controversy are the British Empire, British imperialism, and ideas about race, identity and belonging in the British nation." Charlotte Lydia Riley reflects on recent controversies in history and the emotional register of the debate.

Octavia Randoph on slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.

"In The Secret Agent, you go from a shop in Soho into a space like Greenwich Park, where the bomb incident takes place – quite an interesting journey in itself – and then, at the end, there’s an extraordinary marching-away into the suburbs of one of the characters who walks through endless anonymous, curious areas." Iain Sinclair chooses five favourite London novels.

Tanya Lynch visits the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle: "From the moment I stepped inside this Aladdin’s Cave, I was immersed in a world where poetry and books are the ultimate remedy for the soul. Shelves lined with carefully selected publications, pages that invite you to lose yourself in their rhythm, and beautifully designed stationery, that makes you want to pick up and a pen and start journaling your heart out - honestly this store is a bibliophile’s paradise.

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James Crouch argues that the greatest challenge the Conservative Party faces is a lack of unity among both its members and its remaining voters.

"In their speeches to this week’s Labour Party conference, Rachel Reeves mentioned it only briefly and in passing, and Keir Starmer not at all. It’s absurd, especially as the guiding theme of both speeches, as of the government’s entire incoming communications message, is that of the dire inheritance bequeathed by its Tory predecessors. Brexit can hardly be excluded from that reckoning." Chris Grey says there’s still little sign Britain has accommodated itself to Brexit or has any idea how to do so.

"It’s night. I’m trying to sleep. I’m so tired. But a voice says, 'What time is it?'. It’s half two, Mum, go to sleep. Half an hour later again, 'What time is it?'. Mum, it’s night, that’s why it’s dark. Please be quiet and let me sleep. 'Oh, okay.' Ten minutes later, 'Mick, put the light on for me'. My brother Mick hasn’t lived in this house for over 40 years! Again, I calm her down. But it only lasts for a bit, and finally at quarter to four I give up on this night, get out of bed and start the day." Anna Schurer talked to a carer and describes her life in her own words.

Andrew Anthony reviews a new book on Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter.

"It was a seminal moment in chess history, comparable to the 1945 USA v USSR radio match when the Americans, quadruple Olympiad gold winners in the 1930s, were crushed 15.5-4.5 to launch 45 years of Soviet supremacy, interrupted only by Bobby Fischer." Leonard Barden on India's dominant performance in the chess Olympiad.

Jon Hotten remembers Graham Thorpe: "His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that."

Don't treat social problems as problems within individual children

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There was a good letter from Dr Lucy Johnstone in the Guardian earlier this week about the supposed mental health crisis among schoolchildren.

She wrote:

The "staggering" rise in anxiety among children (NHS referrals for anxiety in children more than double pre-Covid levels, 27 August) deserves a more sophisticated response than installing counsellors in every school, useful though that may be in some cases, and I say this as a mental health professional - a consultant clinical psychologist.

Well-meaning awareness campaigns that encourage us to translate every feeling into a "mental health issue" convey the message that children have an individual deficit, while obscuring the reasons for their distress. And yet research consistently shows that their feelings are understandable in context.

Your article mentions pressures from target-driven education, online bullying, poverty and uncertainty about the future. None of this will be resolved by funding extra mental health professionals, helplines and support hubs. Indeed, that is likely to perpetuate the cycle, since these are not fundamentally medical problems – they are social ones.

This is a point that I hope my fellow Liberal Democrats will bear in mind, as the call for a mental health professional in every school was in our general election manifesto.

There's is currently a vogue for imposing zero-tolerance behaviour policies on pupils in state schools, particularly in areas where many of them are working class or from ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile, free from the ministrations of Ofsted, private schools now, as I once put it:

trade ("children can get muddy") on their freedom from the straitjacket imposed by the Gradgrinds at the Department for Education.

Will the new Labour government makes things better?

The signs are not promising. Pam Jarvis has pointed out on Bluesky that the DfE's new behaviour and attendance external reference group includes a police officer but not a psychologist.

Ace Kefford Stand: Daughter Of The Sun

Every band needs a lost genius, and with the Move it's Ace Kefford. He played bass on their first hits of the Sixties, but left the band in mid 1968 because of the stresses of touring.

After leaving the Move, he worked on a solo album with the producer Tony Visconti, but it never appeared. 

In 2003 the tracks he had recorded for it appeared on a CD, Ace the Face, that promised "the lost album and more". The more was some tracks by the Ace Kefford Stand, the band he formed in 1968, and Daughter of the Sun is one of them. Very good it sounds too.

In 2002 Ace Kefford talked about his mental health problems to the Move's lead singer, Carl Wayne, on BBC WM:

AK: I've been unsettled since I was a kid. Our fame was instant really: within about a year we were in the charts, weren't we? I think similar to a lot of people who were growing up and described as sensitive children, I was like that.

CW: We were. Do you think we were insensitive to your needs in the Move?

AK: No, I don't think you understood. People didn't understand then. I mean, if I was having a panic attack on the Hendrix Tour - which is what we call it these days, a panic attack - people wouldn't understand. If I'd got a panic attack on the Hendrix Tour or on Top of the Pops and I've got to get out of that place as fast as I can, people don't understand. So really that's what it was, but I've been in and out of mental homes and drug rehabs on all sorts of stuff all my life to get myself to here.

I hope Ace is doing well today. There's a long interview with him recorded this year on YouTube - in two parts - that I've not listened to yet.

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"One gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system. Indeed, the authors conclude with several reasonable goals - deduced from their empirical findings - for the party: "re-empowering the local", "a socially liberal party", "future proofing the party", and "the Liberal Democrats as a movement?" each of which would put the party on firmer ground." James Dennison reviews a new study of the party.

"We already have the Bob Willis Test at Edgbaston (prostate cancer) and the Ruth Strauss Foundation Test at Lord's, so why not the Graham Thorpe Test at The Oval? An event around the Test that raise awareness of mental health issues and money for mental health charities." James Buttler on the reaction to Graham Thorpe's death and his own mental health struggles.

Jacqueline Garget reports on the harnessing of technology to combat the invasion of American mink: "At the start of 2024, the team announced that it had cleared East Anglia - its 'core area' accounting for almost 5 per cent of England - of mink. The work had started in earnest in 2020, and for the last two years there was no evidence of mink reproduction following extensive trapping."

Dave Osland has been reading a study of the socialist journalist Paul Foot's career. 

"In Coalbrookdale at Night (1801), coke hearths above blast furnaces release giant plumes of yellow and orange smoke into the sky. The ironworks have cast the rest of the landscape in shadow, with a portion of the moon visible on the right. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon travels along metal rails that had been installed in 1767 to facilitate the transport of materials across the site." Stephanie O'Rourke looks at the way British landscape painting reacted to the Industrial Revolution: 

Brian Phillips celebrates the children's writer Joan Aiken, whose "favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead."