Saturday, 20 June 2015

Berwick Wildlife Trust Open Day

Regular readers of my blog may remember that I have always derived much comfort, in the face of the vicious local, national and international politics afflicting Berwick, from the herd of swans who swim serenely to and fro across the border, and that I have always admired the work of the Swan Trust with their  motto 'caring for wildlife both sides of the border'. So when I saw that they were having an open day I resolved to go. That was earlier today, and I was not disappointed.

The Trust was originally formed to protect swans from injury and the effects of pollution, but it has branched out to cover all kinds of wildlife and is officially called the Berwick Swan and Wildlife Trust.

It now has premises out on the industrial estate, named the David Rollo Centre in memory of a local vet who did a great deal of unpaid work for the Trust. Today the centre was housing: three adult swans, two cygnets, a brood of ducklings, two owls, assorted other birds, several hedgehogs, and a fox cub. The man who was answering questions said that they can't cope with otters, badgers, seals or deer. Seals are sent down the coast to Tynemouth or even Norfolk. Otters and anything large are taken in by the SSPCA (like the RSPCA only Scottish rather than Royal) over the border, who have more space and a bigger pond.

This cute little chap is a herring gull chick. They have lots of those. Apparently at this time of year a lot of chicks injure themselves by thinking they can fly when they can't. How sweet this one looked as he tried to flap his fluffy little wings and squirted out the contents of his tiny bowels! It was enough to make you forget that most Berwickers don't want herring gulls to survive, including me most of the time. Only, with timing so perfect you wouldn't dare make it up, one of the adult brethren of these little balls of fluff flapped his large noisy wings and emptied the contents of his large soggy bowels all over me as I walked through the town centre later this afternoon. That's right, on my head. I had to go straight home and wash my hair. Last year I lost a handbag to a seagull's forcefully ejected waste products. Still, as the man said, 'We are a wildlife trust, we can't discriminate between different kinds of wildlife.' He even claimed that numbers of herring gulls are falling. If they're falling in other parts of the country, that may be because they've all moved to Berwick.

This cygnet came into the centre because his mother rejected him and tried to drown him. Surely a case for avian social services. One of the adult swans was knocked down by a car on Holy Island causeway after the driver tried to cross before the road was clear of water - yet another example of the damage done by idiots who think they know better than the tide table.

The fox cub was adorable. There is still a division in rural areas between those who hunt foxes for sport and those who rescue and nurse injured foxes. A small child covered her ears in horror when the Trust worker explained that they feed the cub on day-old chicks, which seems to prove that pro-hunting propagandists are astute to use photos of hens ripped apart by foxes to support their case. Hunting is now technically illegal but hunts are doing everything they possibly can, up to and sometimes beyond the limit of the law, to carry on as before. The Conservative party once promised to re-legalise fox hunting when it was returned to power, but it seems to have quietly let that drop. The hunting-shooting-fishing lobby likes to describe its activities as 'the traditional country way of life'. Actually, the people who give their time and skills free to the Wildlife Trust are just as much true country folk.

Thursday, 4 June 2015

Berwick Castle At Peace

I am conscious that my last few posts have consisted of intemperate ravings about the general election, and feel a need to redress the balance. So here are some pretty pictures of the ruins of Berwick castle on a lovely summer evening (yesterday, in fact).

Despite its importance as a border fortress, there is not a lot left of Berwick castle, because it was inconveniently occupying the site deemed most suitable for a railway station by the Victorians. I have always admired the confidence in progress that led them to feel no qualms about knocking most of it down. A fine view of the only surviving outer wall can be had from the northbound platform of the station. It continues down the hill to the river, as seen in this picture.





Some local tourism activists would like to rebuild the castle, or at least erect a gift shop amid the ruins. This seems to me to be: a) barmy b) expensive and c) unlikely to attract visitors who have the option of any number of other castles within half an hour's drive. Castles are pretty much ten a penny in the English Borders. As somebody who grew up in the shadow of one of the most imposing, Alnwick, and regularly played on the beach beneath another, Bamburgh, I have serious castle fatigue. When we went on holiday to Wales during my teens I moaned all the time about being made to tour another load of castles - built of course for the same reason, to maintain English control over another nation of the British Isles. But lots of people from more peaceful parts of England love the things.

That bird obligingly alighted on those stones at just the right time. When a composition like this comes together in a fine evening light, I remember why I came to live in Berwick in the first place. On a wet Wednesday in January, the ruins just look, well, ruined. There are a couple of benches strategically placed for admiring the views that also provide a home for the local drunks, hence the fine scattering of broken glass all over this ancient monument. In the right mood I appreciate this for the same reason I appreciate the Victorians knocking the rest of the thing down. Life goes on. Some of the activities of medieval people that we research today would have been disapproved of and censored in their own time.

If you want to know about the history of the castle, read Jim Herbert's blog, Berwick Timelines (linked to in my sidebar). It's more his sort of thing than mine. He has all the dates and facts about the history of Berwick at his fingertips.


These rooms on the lowest level of the castle, used by the soldiers on duty to keep warm as best they could while keeping an eye out for the enemy, are the only rooms to have survived. I always find it a little creepy when walking past them to the river bank, as shown here. The atmosphere in the tunnel is dark and dank even in the summer. The local drunks treat the cells as convenient waste disposal chutes for their cans and bottles, and the metal grilles installed by the conservation bods make it impossible to reach and remove them. Yes indeed, life goes on.


Friday, 8 May 2015

Never Tickle A Sleeping Lion

Has David Cameron ever read any Harry Potter books? Surely his children must have told him about them at least. So he should know that the motto of Hogwarts school is 'never tickle a sleeping dragon', and yet he has learned nothing from it. A few hours ago Alex Salmond announced that 'the Scottish lion has roared this morning across the country'. This is not surprising to those of us who follow these things closely, because any lion would roar if it had been, not just tickled, but poked and prodded mercilessly for weeks, as the Scots have been by Mr Cameron.

The Conservative party decided that their best electoral hope was to terrify the English with dire predictions that a Labour government could only stay in power with the support of the Scottish National Party, and that it would thus be forced to allow its leader Nicola Sturgeon, whom it depicted as a combination of Valkyrie and Wonderwoman, possessed of political super-powers, to sweep down across the border and lay waste to England. This kind of rhetoric became more and more absurd as the campaign wore on, and by the final week before polling had crossed the line into being offensive. The final straw for me was when Boris Johnson, wannabe prime minister, said that a Labour-SNP alliance would be 'a jock-alypse'. Even allowing for the fact that Boris is known for his eccentric humour, this is not okay. He would not think it acceptable to coin a facetious term featuring any other ethnic nickname or stereotype, but somehow insulting the Scots is fine. The fact he did not realise that this expression was offensive illustrates the problem.

The Conservatives have now got what they wanted. The English have rejected the scary Labour party with its nasty foreign allies and returned a Conservative government with an overall majority, in defiance of all opinion polls. The Scots have rejected everybody except the SNP. The most memorable aspect of the night for me was hearing James Naughtie on Radio 4 sounding genuinely shaken by the Scottish results he was reading out. It takes a lot to shake a hardened news and politics presenter like James Naughtie. At one point he used the word 'revolutionary' about what was happening in Scotland, and he was right. This is not a vote for a political party, this is a wholesale rejection of the Westminster government and the present constitution of the United Kingdom.

The Conservatives are committed to holding a referendum on membership of the European Union in a couple of years time. There is a real possibility that it will return a majority for Yes to leaving in England but for No in Scotland, and Nicola Sturgeon has astutely reserved the right to demand a second referendum on independence if England tries to force Scotland to leave the E.U. against its will. I think she would be right to do so. But the consequences of that are frightening, at least from my viewpoint right on the border. We will once again have to face the bullet we thought we had dodged last September, that Berwick could become the frontier of the E.U.

I believe there is now almost no question that a second independence referendum would return a Yes majority. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum last September, I pointed out on this blog that the headline figure of 55% favouring staying in the UK should not blind us to the fact that the percentage of No voters had fallen steadily over the course of the campaign. Guess what, it has kept on falling for the last seven months and here we are with the result today.

There are only so many ways of saying 'David Cameron is an idiot' and I have used most of them on this blog over the past two years. To my great regret he is now an idiot who seems likely to keep being prime minister for another five years. His utterly inept handling of the Better Together campaign and his cynical use of the SNP as a bogeyman to frighten his core support in the south of England has brought us to this point. The only ray of hope I can see right now is that Boris Johnson, who is far more intelligent than Cameron, was on breakfast radio today already talking about the necessity to move towards outright federalism as the only way of countering the demand for full Scottish independence. I completely agree with him, and I hope he does penance for his ill-advised joke by forcing his party to get on with it and by ousting Cameron as PM if he refuses. The United Kingdom will not survive another five years of the Honourable Witterer for Witney.

Thursday, 7 May 2015

Tories receive 'every mark of disapprobation' - in 1859

I am writing this during voting hours for the general election, so I can't tell you who won yet. I've just returned from attempting to mark my cross with a choice of using either a pencil tied on the right-hand side (I'm left-handed, and we're about the only minority group you're still allowed to discriminate against) or a free-range pencil with a broken point. My polling station is the one shown here, which the rest of the time is St Cuthbert's church hall. The clerk told me he was already so tired that he was struggling to read the numbers on my card, because turn-out has been brisk. There is always a rather moving contrast between the extremely low-tech nature of actually voting and the vigour of British democracy. As far as I can see the only technical innovation in the last fifty years has been the provision of a gadget that allows blind people to mark their paper unaided.

So I thought this would be a good time to write about an election held in Berwick back in 1859, before the introduction of the secret ballot, long before women's suffrage, and after only the most limited reform of the franchise. Michael Cullen, a local historian, has painstakingly researched this subject and written up his findings in this short booklet. I am entirely indebted to him for this information.

It seems that Berwick was notorious for corrupt practices in elections even by the lax standards of the 1850s, and the goings-on at the 1859 election were even more deplorable than usual. It was regarded as a 'cheap' seat because it only had 1,300 enfranchised residents, and buying that many votes was considered do-able by most candidates, who seem to have treated the matter as a straightforward cost-benefit analysis.

In those days the voters had to announce their choice of candidate within earshot of anybody who cared to hang around the polling station. This resulted not only in intimidation but in a running total of votes being kept throughout the day, so that the candidate who was behind knew he was behind and would probably go out and drum up some more support by whatever murky means seemed necessary. Although only a small percentage of the adult males of the town had a vote, most of the population had an opinion and did not hesitate to make it known. One local paper reported that ' votes given for the Liberals were received with the most enthusiastic cheering, while those electors who gave their support to the Tories were received with hisses, groans, and every mark of disapprobation'. The other local paper described the anti-Tory protests as 'groans, yells, hisses and cats' noises'.  When it was announced that the Tories had won, the crowd broke down a barricade set up to keep them back, over-turned the table being used by the clerks for refreshments, and 'shied' the resulting pieces of broken glass and crockery around the hall. Then they rampaged around the town breaking windows in the houses of known Tory supporters.

The Liberals decided to challenge the results of the election on the grounds that their opponents had engaged in extensive bribery. This had only been technically illegal since the passing of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1854 and cultural change was lagging behind. Such a formal legal challenge was a recognised custom at the time, and although the fee was very expensive it could be worth it if the outcome of the election was reversed. The procedure was that a Royal Commission was set up to enquire into the matter and numerous witnesses were required to travel to London to give evidence. They were paid a per diem rate for their expenses there, and since it was more than many of the voters earned back home, the result was that some witnesses were dismissed by the judge as being too drunk to say anything useful or even coherent, and at least one was arrested for contempt of court. The judge was also exasperated by the mysterious loss of memory afflicting many of the witnesses regarding the question of payment for their vote, most amusingly in the case of a man who said that he had seen a hand place a coin under his glass in the pub but had never caught so much as a glimpse of the body to which the hand was attached. The final report complained that some of the witnesses had 'prevaricated and perjured themselves with the most hardened effrontery'.

The picture which emerges from the proceedings is that it was usual practice for the candidates to withdraw several hundred pounds in coins from their banks and present it to their election agents to distribute as they thought best, with many nods and winks. The going rate per vote seems to have been about £2. One voter was brought by train from Beadnell and claimed that the money was for his train fare, but was at a loss to explain why it had been necessary to pay £2 for a ticket that normally cost 2 shillings. Some men accepted cash from one side and then voted for the other. Some happily accepted cash from both sides. Some immediately spent a chunk of the money on getting so drunk that they had to be held up in the polling booth. A policeman stationed on the town walls had reportedly encouraged the crowd to go down and get their share of the goodies, as 'there was plenty going', though he later denied saying any such thing. Some of the ladies of the voters' families had been offered silk gowns. And beyond straight-out cash payments there was widespread 'treating', the lavish purchasing of food and drink for voters.

The Commission finally found a long-ish list of people guilty of giving or taking bribes. The Tory agent fled the country to avoid arrest. It was generally conceded locally that the Commission ought to have looked more closely at what was going on over on the Liberal side as well, since they were well known to be up to all the same tricks. Michael Cullen wonders if hostility to the Tories locally was driving support for the case. From their behaviour on polling day, it certainly seems that anger was widespread among those who had no vote towards those who did have one and sold it to a hated party.

More disturbing than actual bribery is the evidence that loss of employment was a real possibility for a man who voted in a way disagreeable to his boss or a potential future boss. One voter said he had only voted for the Tory candidate because he expected him to offer his son a job. The introduction of compulsory secret ballot in 1872 removed this fear, and it also removed much of the incentive to bribe, since a candidate had no way of knowing whether he had got his money's worth. In the long run, though, it was only the extension of the franchise that ended routine bribery, as the number of voters became un-affordably large.

I have some concerns that the rise in postal voting at the present time may be re-introducing some of the 'corrupt practices' of the 1850s. Over the last fifteen years or so there have been numerous reports of people selling their postal votes on Ebay, handing them over to strangers in the pub in exchange for a drink, or allowing helpful candidates to fill the forms in for them. But I can't believe that this is typical of the 21st century voter. Even in 1859 there were reportedly some Berwick voters who refused bribes and told the agents they were not to be bought. Looking at the number of people waiting to use the broken pencil in the church hall today, I believe that their spirit lives on. 

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

General Election 2015

One of my neighbours here in Berwick is leaving nobody in any doubt about where their political loyalties lie. Their flat has another set of windows round the corner and there are Green party posters in all of them as well. Walking past them every day is starting to have a slightly brainwashing effect on me.

But I don't really mind that because it forms a valuable antidote to the cartloads of leaflets that the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have been delivering to my mailbox. In fact the word 'leaflets' does not really cover it - some of them are disguised as newspapers.  So far the LibDems have the edge over the Tories both in sheer quantity of trees felled for the sake of winning my vote and in having the effrontery to send me a Christmas card. Their electoral machine was already fired up and running in December and at that time I had not yet learned to recognise a Derby return address as a warning sign that a letter comes from Clegg  Co., so I opened it eagerly in the expectation of finding a card from an old friend, only to find my local candidate Julie Porksen waxing lyrical about the happy family Christmas she was looking forward to and hoping I was doing likewise. I am sure that Ms Porksen would be saddened to learn that I hurled the card across the room and immediately became quite a lot less likely to vote for her.

But please don't think that the Conservatives are trying any less hard. This is their constituency office in Alnwick. The reason that their garden is looking so beautifully groomed may be that David Cameron honoured our constituency with a visit last week. I only found out about it after it had happened, so I missed the opportunity to avoid him. The Conservative candidate Anne-Marie Trevelyan is being promoted with the cringe-worthy slogan, 'take it from me, we need Anne-Marie'. Thanks to the party's strong support among the farming community, Mrs Trevelyan is beaming out at the voters from fields, hedges and caravan parks across the constituency.

Despite being thirty miles apart and usually behaving as if they were entirely unrelated to each other, Berwick and Alnwick are in the same parliamentary constituency. It is in terms of geographical area the largest in England, though it still has fewer residents than many. The constituency is named after Berwick, which I'm quite sure galls many residents of Alnwick ("we're the historic county town, you know!").  After the blip when it elected William Beveridge, it stayed solidly Conservative, but it turned Liberal again in 1973 after the MP of the day resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, and has kept on returning Alan Beith ever since, partly because he is a likeable and hard-working man and partly thanks to large scale tactical voting by people who would really rather vote Labour. Mr Beith - sorry, he's now Sir Alan - has decided that 2015 would be a suitable time to retire, and the Conservatives are certain that they can now take the constituency back, because the anticipated reversion to Labour by coalition-haters will cost the LibDems their majority. Hence the visit by the PM himself.

Labour have never bothered to seriously contest Berwick, but this year they have roused themselves sufficiently to send me one leaflet, featuring their candidate Scott Dickinson posing in front of the railway bridge over the Tweed in a manner rather too obviously calculated to indicate, 'I do actually know where Berwick is, you know'. Although distracted by the shocking standard of proof-reading in the leaflet (I do that for a living and I notice these things), I can't argue with their central point that last time we voted LibDem tactically to keep the Conservatives out and ended up with both of them in government, so this time why bother.

The Greens have not so far sent me any leaflets at all. Some of my friends report receiving a Green leaflet, so maybe they just don't have the personnel to cover the whole town, though I would have thought that the occupant of the multi-postered house shown above could have strolled around the corner to deliver a few. The Green candidate is called Rachael Roberts and I keep getting her confused with Rachel Reeves, a Labour MP who is often interviewed about economic matters. I imagine some other people do too, and who can tell whether this works for or against Ms Roberts.

UKIP have just got around to delivering their one leaflet. Their candidate,Nigel Coghill Marshall, is using a photo that doesn't do him any favours, but there's always something appealing about the sheer purpleness of the Kipper stuff. Mr Coghill Marshall sent me a nice email telling me about himself after I emailed all the candidates asking them to upload their CVs to the website Yournextmp.com, a project run by the Democracy Club. None of them have done that, and the other four never replied to me either. During the 2010 election campaign I scanned and uploaded leaflets for this project, but in 2015 I have opted out of that because if I try to keep up with all the Trevelyan and Porksen leaflets my scanner will probably catch fire.

Late in the day, a sixth candidate threw his hat into the ring. Neil Humphrey is standing for the English Democrats. They are apparently similar to UKIP but have split from them because they object to UKIP saying that they 'believe in Britain', rather than in England. Do try to keep up. The EngDems' main policy is the creation of an English parliament to balance the Scottish parliament, and they have targeted Berwick as a key constituency because of worries about what concessions the Scottish Nationalists may be able to extract in the next parliament. This is of course right up the street of this blog, so I hope that the EngDems are able to scrape together the cash to print a few leaflets explaining all this in more detail and put one in my mailbox.

Monday, 6 April 2015

The Lion and the Unicorn Are Fighting For Our Taxes

This is the coat of arms over the gateway of the Barracks in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I was vaguely aware that something similar turns up on many official institutions of the British state, but never knew what it meant until I finally got around to looking it up after taking this photo. Apparently it's the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom. Somehow I've managed to avoid learning that for the last five decades, which I think means I've just failed my UK Citizenship test.

The Lion is a symbol of England and, through English domination of the Union, of the whole of Britain. I remember in history lessons at school looking at Victorian cartoons from Punch magazine that showed ill-advised foreigners daring to 'twist the tail of the British lion'. It is less well known that the Unicorn is an old heraldic symbol of Scotland. The reason it is chained is because this mythical beast has such dangerous supernatural powers, as we all now know from the Harry Potter books. It has nothing at all to do with Scotland not being free, but of course the symbol of the chain has now acquired a new resonance.

Thanks to an 'interesting facts about Scotland' item in the Scotsman newspaper, I now know that the old royal coat of arms of Scotland showed a shield supported by two unicorns. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 King James VI / I replaced one of them with the English lion to represent the Union. The version of the Coat of Arms now used in Scotland shows the Unicorn on the left (because in our culture where we read from left to right the left-hand position is considered to have primacy) and also wearing a crown. It does though still seem to be chained.

A popular piece of verse made famous by Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass joked that the Lion and the Unicorn looked as if they were fighting over the crown rather than jointly supporting it. Since independence for Scotland became a live issue that view seems most apt. The reason for adapting the line for the title of this post is that today is the first day of the new tax year. It has a special significance here on the border because the first steps towards letting Scotland set its own taxes come into effect this month. As of April 1st (yes, I'm sure everybody's made that joke) there is an entity called Revenue Scotland up and running. It will start off by collecting some existing taxes and get geared up ready to collect new or different taxes that the Scottish government may introduce under newly devolved powers.

I don't claim to understand all the details but I am inordinately excited about this. I confess that life on the border has seemed a little dull and flat since the indyref returned a No result. But if and when Scottish income tax becomes higher than the English kind, we can look forward to a flurry of activity again. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing and house buying and selling. I can tell that this prospect is really worrying some people because the campaign against the SNP by all the other parties contesting the general election is starting to get dirty. That's way better than treating it as a joke like they used to. I love this stuff! Bring it on!


Saturday, 21 March 2015

Hail, Holy Light

Hail, holy light! Only a quotation from Milton can do justice to the joy those of us who live at these northern latitudes feel over the return of the sun in springtime. Today is officially the first day of spring, and I have now ceremonially washed my gloves and put them away in the drawer until the autumn. I'm holding off on parting with my woolly hat for a bit longer.

This afternoon was a gorgeous day of spring sunshine and I took this photo of the lighthouse at Berwick-upon-Tweed. We were amazed at the way the waves were breaking right over the pier. Today this was not because it was windy or stormy, as in the Craster post below, but just because the tide was exceptionally high. We were warned that it would be because of the proximity of the moon to the earth, related to yesterday's partial solar eclipse.

The eclipse was a fantastic experience. While London based broadcasters sulked in overcast conditions that rendered the sun invisible, we enjoyed a perfect clear, sunny morning. I was down on the quayside with a group of neighbours. As the moon began to move across the sun at about 9.25 am the seagulls seemed to become agitated and swirled around in a squawking flock. I was certain that it would take more than an eclipse to upset Berwick seagulls, the gangsters of the avian world, but I was wrong. At the point of maximum eclipse both the temperature and the light level  had noticeably dropped. The red tones of the stones of the Old Bridge were more pronounced than usual and the quality of the light resembled that before a thunderstorm. One of my neighbours went to have a look at the swans and reported that they had assembled on the slipway and gone to sleep, as they do in the evening.

I was kindly granted a look at the screen of a filtered camera one person had set up on the quayside, and sure enough there was a beautiful crescent sun at the point of 90% eclipse, the maximum visible here. Two people told me later that they had made pinhole cameras that gave an excellent view of the sun, but sadly I didn't think of that soon enough. What was really good was that when clouds passed over the sun as the moon was moving away, it was possible to look directly at the sun for a moment and see the silhouette of the moon very clearly behind the cloud.

I am rather regretting not taking a photo of the Old Bridge during the eclipse, but I'm not sure that the unusual lighting effects would show up in a photo. Instead here is one taken this afternoon, complete with a large clump of grass floating incongruously downstream, presumably dislodged by the high tide.