Cardiff Council votes to levy higher parking charges on SUVs

A big Liberal England "well done" to Cardiff Council, which is to to become the first local authority in Britain to require large vehicles to pay more for parking.

The Guardian reports:

Councillors voted on Thursday to approve a new parking plan for the city whereby owners of larger vehicles will be charged more for parking permits because their cars "take up more parking space and are a danger to other road users".

The plan states that vehicles that weigh more than 2,400kg fully laden will be subject to a surcharge "to encourage drivers to switch to smaller vehicles"; this will later be reduced to 2,000kg for non-electric vehicles.

Dan De'Ath, the cabinet member for transport on the Labour-run authority, is quoted by the paper as saying that SUVs (sports utility vehicles) are:

"much larger than your average car, they produce far more wear and tear on our roads, but fundamentally if you hit a child while driving a heavy SUV the chances of that child dying are grossly inflated.

"We don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people driving those kinds of vehicles to pay a little bit more for road wear and the extra space they take up. We’re not talking about SUV-shaped cars, we’re talking about very heavy American-style vehicles."

No doubt there will be protests, and those protests will be widely reported. But Sadiq Khan's ULEZ (ultra-low emission zones) schene in London, and his refusal to bow to a noisy minority, provides a good model for Cardiff Council to copy.

Two years ago the Conservative Party was convinced that opposition to ULEZ was going to win them the coming general election, Today they never mention them.

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

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Donald Trump has launched a full-frontal assault on liberal democracy. So, argues, William Wallace (rightly, I think), we have no choice but to increase taxation.

Dani Garavelli writes on the suicide of a 16-year-old in state custody: "At some point on Saturday or early Sunday, he wrote three long letters to his family. 'It's night-time now,' he wrote. 'I've only been in here for two sleeps.' 'Been crying a lot'; 'Everyone’s terrorising me'; 'Please help me.' Then he hanged himself from the top bunk."

"Now we appear to have a secret request by the home secretary to Apple by the British government to have, in the words of the Washington Post, 'a blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, [which] has no known precedent in major democracies'." Alan Rusbridger says it’s time to say no to the government spying on our secrets.

Miranda Bailey listens to a university vice-chancellor try to defend the cuts to her institution.

Paul Casciato has some good news: "Research published in the journal Bird Study, found that - hectare for hectare - solar farms situated in agriculturally dominated East Anglia contained a greater number of bird species and overall number of individuals than surrounding arable land."

"As hotel proprietor-cum-town accountant Urquhart (Dennis Lawson) makes clear, it’s easy for outsiders to romanticize a place that’s difficult to survive in. Forsyth derisively referred to this concept in the wider culture as 'the Brigadoon thing'." Sara Batkie marks the 40th 42nd anniversary of the release of Local Hero.

This time the Lib Dem leadership kept its discipline during the election campaign

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The Liberal Democrats' targeting strategy was an extraordinary success. I believe Jeremy Hunt's Godalming and Ash was the only seat to evade us.

Those who devised the strategy and communicated the rationale for it to the membership deserve congratulation.

In some quarters there was clearly a worry that the membership would lose discipline and start campaigning in their own constituencies rather than work in the target seats they were asked to.

But the striking contrast with 2019 this time round was that the Lib Dem leadership kept its discipline.

In retrospect - and Michael Mullaney said so on this blog immediately after the election - the change from backing a second referendum to a policy of revoking Brexit was a mistake. But it was approved enthusiastically enough by that autumn's party conference.

That was not true of the decision to allow Boris Johnson the general election he craved, which was described by Nick Harvey as "a catastrophic mistake".

Nor was it true of Jo Swinson's declaration at our campaign launch for the 2019 election that she could be the next prime minister.

And our targeting strategy in 2019? Liberator 397, the September 2019 issue, asked:

Are some people getting carried away by trying to extrapolate the European election results into Westminster terms and then wondering how randomly first-past-the-post might work with four parties in contention?

A briefing to peers indicated a startlingly high number of seats shown as potentially winnable in some scenarios if such trends continued. This has led to some seats suddenly being judged winnable that look, to put it politely, speculative.

These include Battersea (8 per cent), Chipping Barnet (5.4 per cent and a close Tory-Labour marginal too) and even more remarkably Cardiff North (3.3 per cent).

I think the answer to that question was yes.

Five years later it's wonderful how far we have come thanks to a leader with good judgement and a consistent strategy that has been properly communicated to members.

Peter Freeman, George Thomas and the NUT President who caned 199 innocent schoolboys

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Let's begin this story with Peter Freeman.

Freeman won Brecon and Radnor for Labour at the 1929 general election, but lost it two years later after Ramsey MacDonald's formation of a National Government split the party.

He returned to the Commons as MP for Newport in 1945, having beaten Roy Jenkins to the Labour nomination, and represented the seat until his death in 1956.

In 2004 Mike Bloksome published a biography of Freeman under the title The Green Casanova. The blurb on Amazon describes its subject as:

arms manufacturer, cigar producer, international tennis player, MP, theosophist, animal rights and green issues campaigner - and ladies' man of renown!

An article about the biography on Wales Online said of Freeman:

In the 1930s, '40s and '50s, he was considered too extremist to be ministerial material. Now his views on animal rights, pacifism and banning capital punishment would be considered progressive or orthodox. 

It turns out Freeman was also an opponent of corporal punishment and a champion of children's rights, though any reasonable person would be alarmed at a case he brought up in the Commons in 1954:

The Leicester Mail for 20 July 1954 reported his intentions:

Caned 200 boys: MP's question 

Mr. Peter Freeman, Labour MP for Newport, is to question the Minister of Education (Miss Florence Horsbrugh) on Thursday about the punishing of 199 innocent schoolboys. 

He will ask "whether her attention has been called to the action of Mr. Oliver Whitfield, of the Secondary Modern School, Durham, who caned 200 boys became he was unable to discover a misdemeanour alleged to have been made by one of them: whether such mass corporal punishment cf children has her approval: and whether she will issue instructions for the dismissal of this headmaster for punishing 199 innocent boys."

And ask it he did on 29 July 1954.

In reply, Florence Horsburgh said:

I have seen reports of the incident in the Press. Disciplinary matters of this kind are within the discretion of the headmaster and of the local education authority, and I would not wish to intervene. In any case, I have no 668power to require the dismissal of the headmaster.

That did not satisfy Freeman who asked a supplementary:

Is the right hon. Lady aware of the statements made by the Home Secretary on this question of punishment a few days ago, when he said: "the two requirements of natural justice that have gone back to the beginning of civilisation are that a person who may be punished should know what the complaint is against him and that he should be given an opportunity to meet it. That is the basis of the rule of law throughout the ages."

Was either of those conditions fulfilled in the case of any one of these 200 children? Is this not a gross abuse of the ordinary custom of justice which is being denied to these children and has not the right hon. Lady the responsibility of safeguarding their rights? What action does she intend to take to prevent this gross abuse of justice?

Despite his eloquence, Horsburgh gave much the same answer.

Then someone else on the Labour benches rose:

Is the Minister aware that the parents in this district are not complaining, and that it would be an advantage if my hon. Friend the Member for Newport (Mr. Peter Freeman) would leave the teaching profession alone for a while? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Is the Minister further aware that the discipline of this school can only suffer from the publicity given to a Question of this sort?

That MP was George Thomas, the future secretary of state for Wales and Commons speaker.

If you had shares in Thomas, I hope you sold them, because in recent years his reputation has plummeted. 

In 2017, the journalist Martin Shipton published a biography, Political Chameleon: In Search of George Thomas. Among its revelations is that Thomas somehow dodged the call up in the second world war and that he met Stalin as a new Labour MP after 1945. Yet he ended his life as a supporter of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party - a precursor of Ukip.

Thomas's enthusiasm for the caning of innocent schoolboys may make more sense if you listen to his appearance on the Desolation Radio podcast around the time his book was published. He say that when he was a teacher, Thomas had a reputation for brutality.

You may even remember that in 2014, seventeen years after Thomas's death, a man came forward to say he had been raped by Thomas when he was aged about nine.

But Thomas's attitude in that Commons exchange is probably best explained by the fact that he was an official of the National Union of Teachers before he became an MP. You can hear the deafening clang of a profession closing ranks as he speaks. Complaints of individual injustice have little chance against that.

We should not forget that, with the single exception of some Evangelical Christians, the teaching unions were the last people to oppose the abolition of corporal punishment in schools.

And what of Oliver Whitfield, the headmaster? Here's the Daily Mirror for 13 September 1954:

169 bravos for `caning master' 

Headmaster Mr. Oliver Whitfield has received 180 letters from different parts of the world since he caned 200 boys because not one of them would own up that he made a rude drawing on the school wall. 

"And all but eleven of the letters told me I did right," Mr. Whitfield, who is head of the Usworth (Co. Durham) secondary modern school, said yesterday. 

I'm not surprised he received letters - the subject has its enthusiasts - but surely this was the end of his time in the limelight and he then returned to obscurity?

Not a bit of it. Fast forward to 1966 and the Newcastle Journal for 14 April:

Teachers' president a skilled leader

Today the last words will be spoken by the nation's teachers at their annual conference at Eastbourne.

Although he would probably be the last one to admit it, Mr Oliver Whitfield, President of the National Union of Teachers who was born and bred in County Durham has contributed In great measure to its success.

Already his skilled leadership is making itself felt and it is a pretty safe bet that posterity will have cause to remember him as one of the union's great presidents.

Posterity turned out to have better things to do, but if you go to the Wikipedia page for the National Union of Teachers you will find that Whitfield was indeed elected president of the union for 1966-7.

I was going to end by pointing the moral that the social reforms of the Sixties were desperately needed. But we should remember that corporal punishment was not outlawed until 1986 and in all private schools until 2003.

Four In A Bed: Cardiff hotel guests say they won't return after 'cat sat on breakfast'

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

Just another day in the Conservative Party

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And it's only just gone six!

From the Independent:

Matt Hancock has been placed under investigation by parliament’s standards commissioner – for allegedly "lobbying" the sleaze watchdog to influence its findings.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards confirmed on Wednesday afternoon it was looking into the former health secretary’s conduct for "lobbying the commissioner in a manner calculated or intended to influence his consideration of whether a breach of the code of conduct has occurred".

From South Wales Argus:

A Conservative member of Pembrokeshire County Council, alleged to have said that all white men should have a black slave, has withdrawn from the political group and referred himself to the Ombudsman.

Conservative county councillor for Haverfordwest’s Prendergast ward Andrew Edwards is claimed to have made the comment in a recording, which it is said was then sent to Pembrokeshire County Council’s monitoring officer.

From Lancs Live:

Blackpool South MP Scott Benton is one of three MPs who has been placed under investigation by parliament's standards watchdog.

The politician - currently suspended by the Conservative Party - is under investigation for allegedly misusing his parliamentary email address. According to the Commons standards watchdog, Mr Benton's case opened on Tuesday (April 11) and concerns the "use of facilities [parliamentary email address] provided from the public purse".

From Nation Cymru:

A prominent Young Conservative who tried to become a Cardiff councillor last year has posted a video on social media in which she launches a condescending attack on the people of Wales and its capital city.

Jasmin Cogin, who stood unsuccessfully in the Cyncoed ward in the 2022 Cardiff council election, is seen sitting in a living room with bookshelves behind her and a caption on the screen which reads: "Welsh people have lower IQs. Sorry not sorry x".

From the Guardian:

Henry Smith, a backbench Tory MP for 13 years, is also being investigated for an alleged breach of the rules on using taxpayer-funded stationery. 

A forgotten canal tunnel in the centre of Cardiff

Here's the "gloriously unexpected survival right in the centre of the city" I promised you when posting another video from Bob's Rail Relics. That showed a short stretch of the long-abandoned Glamorganshire Canal that is still in water.

The city in question is Cardiff, and the survival is a canal tunnel that today acts as a pedestrian underpass. I think what got me so excited was that you can still see the grooves worn there by the narrow boats' towropes.

Cardiff Council, incidentally, has ambitions to create a 'canal quarter' by uncovering another artificial waterway in the city. This once fed water to the docks so that vessels could leave them even at low tide. 

I don't know if it linked with the Glamorganshire Canal or was used for navigation, but it was also closed during the second world war.

You can subscribe to Bob's Rail Relics on YouTube, and don't forget the remarkable footage showing the canal lying abandoned in 1945 that I have linked to before.

A preserved stretch of the Glamorganshire Canal near Cardiff

I once blogged about a wonderful film from 1945 of the derelict Glamorganshire Canal, which used to run from Merthyr to the sea at Cardiff Docks.

Most of the route has been lost to road schemes and redevelopment, but stretches do survive.

Bob's Rail Relics found one of them in Forest Farm Country Park in the northern suburbs of Cardiff and posted this video.

He has another video about a gloriously unexpected survival right in the centre of the city, and I shall post that here another day.

You can subscribe to Bob's Rail Relics on YouTube.

Searching for Cathays Cemetery station

The long-vanished Cathays Cemetery station was built on the Cardiff to Rhymney line to bring coffins and mourners to the city's New Cemetery.

Best of all, it was built by the railway contractors Logan & Hemingway - Logan as in J.W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough and hero of this blog.

More videos from Bob's Rail Relics on his YouTube homepage.

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"The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley - all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War." Helen Lewis on the end of the second Elizabethan Age.

Max Ghenis, Nikhil Woodruff and Charles Bauman make the case for bringing the taxation of land values and universal basic income together.

Tom Ravenscroft looks at 20 significant buildings opened by the Queen during her 70-year reign.

"We read to prepare for life. It follows, then, that we are raising our boys to dismiss other people’s experiences, and to see their needs and concerns as the centre of things. We are raising our boys to lack empathy." Caroline Paul says boys should read books with female protagonists.

"Harold was in high spirits, and read to us his favourite lines about cricket, from Francis Thompson’s poem 'At Lord’s', with added relish: 'For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,/ And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,/ And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host/As the run stealers flicker to and fro...'" Shomit Dutta remembers playing cricket with Harold Pinter.

David Cantwell senses a Creedence Clearwater Revival revival.