Follow That Mouse

There suddenly seems to be an outbreak of hedgehogism in Politics. Its happening in Downing Street, apparently, and its happening in Basildon Town Hall, too; so it is happening on both sides of the political divide.

‘Mr Brown is prickly,’ says Mr Prescott. ‘Oh no he isn’t,’ says Mr Milliband. ‘Oh yes he is’ we all retort from the stalls. It was a supreme moment of political pantomime.

Over in Basildon things are just as comical. Following the recent council elections in which a further seat was added to the Tory cull, you would expect the Conservatives to be right behind their leader, Councillor Buckley. And they are. With kitchen knives. Tory councillors, have told the Echo of growing tension in the party about the appointment of his wife, Sylvia Buckley, as chairman of the development control committee. One said: “The majority of the group agrees this does not look good. It is about public perception. Some people feel either she goes as chairman or he as leader.”

There was even a challenge to him, from another Councillor, Councillor Jackman, who, the Echo informs us with barely concealed glee, ‘was banned from the Conservative Party Conference at Blackpool in 2002 and 2003 for his involvement in selling hemp-oil lollipops. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2002 he had the cannabis lollies confiscated, but was later cleared of wrongdoing by Strathclyde Police.

The same year he dressed as Santa to hand out lollies, and hemp oil snacks and drinks in Basildon Town Centre.

On St George’s Day, 2004, he held a meeting at Pitsea Leisure Centre to explain the benefits of hemp, which he described as his favourite plant.

In 2004, Mr Jackman spoke at Legalise Cannabis Alliance conferences. In a speech at the group’s 2006 conference, he said: “I believe hemp can save the planet. The Governments of the world are saying no and the people are saying yes. Keep going everyone.” ‘

So now you know where Labour managed to dispatch its Loony Left to. They are in the Conservatives now. Hurrah.

The news that an archive of Black British history has received sufficient funding to give it a permanent home is good news. The Thatcher and Major years saw a cutting of education, libraries and archives to the bone. They could not see it as a potential for making vast profits so they were not interested. But we need our histories. I don’t think the Conservatives, as they were, understood how important to each one of us our personal and social history is; it is in fact part of our identity.

There are gay archives which have permanent homes, and an online archive or two; and there are some archives set up by the short lived University of the Third Age, which was an early new Labour gimmick which nevertheless did do some good work in documenting people’s working and social histories and enabled some new groups and societies to set up.

I realised just how important archives are some years ago when I started collecting material from the 1960s. So much of the 1960s which we took for granted at the time has now vanished into the mists of time and to hear recordings of sounds bring back memories - especially in the little details that you suddenly remember.

I understood the importance of personal history when my mother went into a sheltered accommodation and I discovered her work basket had been thrown away. ‘Do you mean they’ve thrown away your mother’s thimble?’ ‘Yes. (sob) You understand.’

Later when my mother was placed in a care home, she wanted to remember her mother’s middle name. She had lost everything except her memories, and was trying to reconnect to the key facts of her life. I knew the name, and could prove I had remembered it correctly, because she shared the same middle name as someone else we both had known. So I realised then how important signposts and connections are to memory.

Have you got a family photo album? Are all the people in all the photos named? Locations? Dates? Have a look and see if you can fill in the missing details. You will be very grateful later to have all these prompts for your memory.

Personal histories are vital to our identities and we need to know where we came from to understand where we are going. Put it down!

In Ireland, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner was all ready to present their annual report to the Irish Government, and there was an embargo on reporting its contents until 11 am on 8 May. To make sure the report was available to download on time, the office decided to put the reports contents on the online server ready but leave the link to the pages from their home page until the last minute.

A blogger found them and reported the contents some hours earlier than the embargo expiry time. They had forgotten all about Google. Google, of course, looks at all available servers and notes any changes. So it was easy for the blogger; he knew the report was coming out that day and he Googled it, and found it! Embarassing, and red faces, yes; but it highlights to us how easy it is to forget the many ways we have to remember to protect peoples’ personal data. And it is vitally important that we do so.

It is so easy to forget, that I suggest we make a point over the next week of reminding ourselves of the data protection principles, as they seem to be fading out of the collective memories of more than one public service organisation here in the UK as well. They are:

Personal data must be processed fairly and lawfully.

Obtained only for lawful purposes and only used for those purposes.

Adequate, relevant, and not excessive.

Accurate and kept up to date.

Must not be kept for longer than those purposes require.

Processed in accordance with the rights of the data subject.

You must protect the data against unlawful disclosure to third parties.

Can only be transferred to other countries with similar protection in place.

We read of breaches of those principles almost every week. Next time you are asked for personal information, it might be an idea to challenge it. Do they really need to know all that? What is it for? Refuse to give information you find excessive.

Your Mouse has heard of a ship being placed in quarantine - unable to dock or land its cargo and/or passengers and crew - due to an outbreak of disease which needed to be contained. This is the first time I have heard of a train being quarantined. Still, it goes on to confirm that the image of Canadians being boring is well short of the mark.

What a good idea. Yesterday, I was in the barbers and as usual Radio 1 was blaring out. I am completely unable to follow what is going on on Radio 1. The presenters don’t make any sense to me and all this strange sampling music which takes bits of old records and plonks them on to backing tracks - which the presenters then rave about - is highly suspicious. Maybe Radio 1 should be placed in quarantine.

40 years ago a single on the Stax label, then distributed by Polydor records, caught my attention for its jazzy, and very high class, sound: Able Mable, by Mable John. Mable had been a lead singer in Ray Charles’ Raelettes and you could hear the first class swing and phrasing throughout the record. It remains one of my all time favourites to this day. Another one is her stunning ‘Don’t get caught’.

Mable John in Honeydripper

There are few remaining superstars of 1960s American music still surviving, but one of them is the formidable Mable John, the sister of the blues singer Little Willie John who died many years ago. She is steeped in soul and blues; blues runs in her veins. She was, with William ‘Smokey’ Robinson, there when Berry Gordy decided to start Motown records. She is one of only three people who recorded for both Stax and Motown - the article is wrong there, the third was Gladys Knight, who sang with Carla Thomas on one of her Stax LPs.

So congratulations to Mable for her tenacity, her unique talent, her wonderful music - she would not know how to make a bad record after all this experience - and her performance in the new film about the blues and soul music of the 1960s, Honeydripper.

… sang the Billy Cotton Dance Band when I was a baby. It was a record played all the time on the light Programme. These days hardly any of us even know who our neighbours are.

“I think people have lost the ability to talk to one another and they’ve lost the habit of saying good morning,” says Joan Tibbs of Crosskeys Homes, Peterborough.

The figures are stark:

1 in 10 of us will have spoken to no neighbours in the current week (thats Your Mouse)

1 in 5 of us think neighbourhoods we live in are unfriendly

1 in 4 of us will have spoken to as many as ten neighbours during the current week.

I am not surprised. In our 32 years together we have only had one set of what you would call ‘normal’ neighbours, Barbara and Roy. How we miss them! Our current neighbours are the worst neighbours we have ever had and we simply do not want to get involved with the drug dealer/pimp, the fence for stolen goods or for the mad old woman who reported us to the RSPCA for cruelty to animals (we did not have any and still don’t!)

Neighbours are not worth knowing in days when civilised behaviour has broken down and on slum estates. Yet the role of neighbours is crucial especially if there is someone elderly or lonely.

Our society needs to think again about behaviour and neighbourliness.

> Photo Credit: Vermilion County, Illinois.

Your Mouse has always thought that building hundreds of thousands of new homes on flood plains or land prone to flooding is one of the most stupid ideas that have come out of this Labour government. My opinion has been given more credibility this morning by, er, leaks of some of the findings of the official report into last years flooding, in which the electricity grid came under pressure and some substations nearly went under the water, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their water supplies and even had to be evacuated from their homes.

Last summers flooding served as a wake up call to the utility industries and one of the reasons why our bills have been higher lately is to pay for the improved flood defences that they have had to build around key installations since those floods caught them by surprise.

The report into the flooding is not yet complete let alone finished but lets pray the Government has a rare moment of common sense and immediately drops its ideas of building homes on flood plains.

I remember many years ago having a leaflet from the Halifax building society which explained all about the house buying process and one of the points it made was that by the late Victorian era all the best sites which were suitable for buildings had already been built on.

I also remember a housing estate being built on land which had been set aside as unsuitable for housing off Nottingham Road, Melton Mowbray. In less than a year after the houses were occupied, owners were having to abandon house or have them relined because they had grass growing on their dining room walls.

Leave flood plains to the floods.

Yesterday NOS Radio 5 turned itself into Radio Oranje for the day. Radio Oranje was the name of the radio service broadcast from London to The Netherlands through the facilities of the BBC European Service while Holland was occupied during the second world war. Radio Oranje first broadcast on 28 July 1940 and the opening broadcast was a special message by Queen Wilhemina of The Netherlands. An important part of the broadcasts of Radio Oranje was the broadcasting of Watergeus, a cabaret.

There was a whole day of archive recordings and the music of the time, some of which I had not heard for years, and which brought back memories for me of the immediate post-war Light Programme. As usual, the staff of NOS Radio Five did a fantastic job of the special occasion. Even the world-famous ‘Victory V’ interval signal that was used during the war was broadcast once more.

So many people in The Netherlands were listening to Radio Oranje, that the German occupying regime registered all radios and required them to all be handed in to the authorities on 13 May 1943. Needless to say the Dutch got round this by building new home made radios which they kept in secret so they could go on listening.

May 7 and 8, 1945 was declared VE Day (Victory in Europe Day). There were two days set aside for VE Day because the Russians insisted on their own signing of the surrender of Germany. So there was one ceremony on the 7th May and one in Berlin for the Russians on the 8th.

It seems crazy to me that here in the UK we never mark VE Day. In view of the enormous sacrifice of the whole population, and the enormous expenditure and national debt which crippled our economy for nearly two succeeding decades, and the huge political risks taken, and the inventiveness and determination with which we developed new technologies to defeat the enemy, there really ought to be a Europe wide celebration of the Liberation and the restoration of normal democracy throughout Europe. Lets have a European wide holiday to remember those sacrifices.

Many years ago my dad took me to the small village of Teigh, Rutland, and we went into a café and had a cup of tea and a cake so that I could tell my friends at school that I had had tea in Teigh.

Little did I know, until today when I read the story, that just a few years earlier the little village had been a hotbed of rumours and allegations about a German spy in their midst - their vicar.

“The Reverend Henry Stanley Tibbs, who had ministered to his 72-strong flock for 15 years, was sent to prison accused of being a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite who promoted Hitler from the Harvest Festival pulpit.

Their vicar, parishioners said, was a member of the British Union of Fascists, harboured German spies, denounced Churchill and pledged allegiance to the Fuhrer,” says the BBC, examining just-released declassified secret files.

There was no truth in it, of course, and he was released. Then he very quickly died. Oh, how convenient!

The story is worth reading for two reasons:

It reveals that there were more sympathisers with the Nazis here than was publicly admitted; and

Its a fascinating study of how gossip and innuendo quickly become fact.

Well, now the dust has settled, some things have become clear about the mood of the country.

The first thing that has become clear is how deeply unpopular the Labour Party Leader is. People do not like him, his abolishing the 10p tax rate has cost his party dearly, and the public did not like being snubbed by not being allowed to vote on the Lisbon Treaty or by not being asked last year to endorse him as Prime Minister and give him a fresh mandate, in which he has, as I suspected at the time, committed the same fatal mistake as James Callaghan did all those years ago. Serves him right, for being frit, as Mrs Thatcher would have delicately expressed it.

Another thing which has become clear is that the mood of the country has apparently swung to the Conservatives. But all is not what it seems. Your Mouse looked at some of the swings. There was one council where the Conservatives took control, with a 6.3% swing to them. But although Labour lost control, despite everything, there was a 3.4% swing to them, as well. It was a typical squeeze on the third party - in that case, Lib Dems, who were nearly wiped out - on that council.

The low turnouts, in my view, mean you cannot read too much into the results. The results vary widely and are not a foundation for a predictable General Election result.

Also clear is that Boris Johnson won fair and square in London’s Mayoral contest. Ken was not deeply unpopular, but Boris managed to motivate his voters and worked them up into a frenzy of voting in the outer suburbs, where he managed turnouts approaching double the usual rate for a local election - around 50% in some cases. So his win will be divisive unless he manages to keep Ken on board in some meaningful way - perhaps as Chief Executive?

An interesting week. Cameron looks more like a future Prime Minister and election winner if he can keep it up and if Labour do not get their act together. I think Brown will be unable to get his 42 day detention period through Parliament now - or much else, frankly; the past year has confirmed your Mouse’s opinion that Brown is not up to the job, and it would appear that many agree with your Mouse.

Brown would be wise to watch his back. And so would Cameron. For the final thing that became clear, this week, to me, Cameron, is that Boris is after your job. He has outshone you and is now the star of your Party. Watch out for him.