sir_guinglain

The title is a little misleading, as part of Isabel Hardman's argument is that the popular perception (if she sets it up accurately) that the United Kingdom has the wrong politicians is mistaken, and that to some extent politicians are trapped in a system which too many people have vested interests in not changing. The bias towards people able and willing to fund their own campaigns - both to become a candidate, and then to be elected to parliament - and against women - with conservatism over women's roles rife in all parties. The book is rich in anecdotes about selection, election, bill committees, select committees, and the combined results of the efforts of the whips and the sheer weight of government business to ensure that bad bills reach the statute book. Few pages - indeed, only a few lines - are devoted to comparisons with other legislatures, and only a little more space is devoted to reform. Ideas include reviving bill committees after the passage of a bill so that members can hear evidence on how a bill works in practice, but it's difficult to see how this would provide a constructive method to improve on legislation. More concrete suggestions include salaries for parliamentary candidates, and salaries for members of select committees, as well as dedicated staff.

This isn't an apologia, even though Hardman did fall in love with one of her MP case studies which I'm sure isn't recommended practice. There is a lot of reporting of situations in recent years where MPs off and on the front benches should have done much better, being distracted by the legality of a proceeding - such as the invasions of Iraq and Libya - over the practicalities and details of the post-invasion plans, or in the case of Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill allowing it to career into the Commons without either of the Coalition government party leaders understanding what was planned. However, while entertaining it leaves one more frustrated with the state of affairs than confident about solutions.

I intend to complete the BBC charter review questionnaire, but was struck by how little I really know about the principles guiding (or purporting to guide) the BBC and how they have changed over time. The BBC Trust website maintains a handy archive of past and present BBC charters to chart this process and help provide some (but my no means all) of the answers to the (admittedly largely rhetorical) questions raised in the media in the last few days.

As readers might have seen elsewhere, I approved of this letter to The Guardian from David Hendy.

I'm about to fly south (on wheels) for the rest of the winter, but first, some links:

Where will we live?
James Meek surveys the background to the current British housing crisis and looks at the competing interests making a bad situation worse today, in the London Review of Books

2015: An Ugly Stramash
The post-independence vote scenarios which Westminster isn't thinking much about, but Scotland is. With thanks to nwhyte

Doctor Who at the Lord Mayor's Show, 1981
A brief clip from the BBC coverage of the Lord Mayor (of London)'s Show, voiced by Eric Robson, is followed by some of Kevin Davies's own recording of Peter Davison's first public appearance in costume as the Doctor, accompanied by what we'd now call cosplaying fans, but didn't then.

0tralala linked to the Hansard report of this speech in the House of Lords by Lord Lucas (Ralph Palmer, twelfth Baron Lucas, a hereditary peer, accountant and publisher of The Good Schools Guide) concerning Amazon's business model and its effect on publishing. An informative read. The rest of the debate - including contributions from Lord (Michael [House of Cards]) Dobbs and Baroness (Ruth) Rendell of Babergh - I've only skimmed, but there's more of interest, including concerns about open access publishing and the application of a model designed for STEM academic publishing on the humanities.

Not good, not good at all. From miriammoules:

Three activists hassled by police, two of them disabled [public]

Despite my best intentions, I didn't leave my flat today until early evening, and even then that was only a shopping trip to a different town and a different supermarket to the ones I normally buy from. This was not only a consequence of the weather, but that the splitting headache I'd developed on Friday had not gone away. Exactly why I decided one of the most notorious Doctor Who stories of the third Doctor's tenure might have a medicinal purpose is lost to time and the unfathomable workings of my mind.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the only story of Jon Pertwee's last season where UNIT play a consistent and substantial role in the action; they are also returned to the streets of London for the first time in several years, since (I think) The Mind of Evil in 1971. This return to quasi-realistic spectacle shakes some of the cosiness out of the UNIT set-up, but in doing so it shows how much Doctor Who had changed within Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. The hard-edged near-future of most of his first season could not be returned to, and instead the deserted London under martial law is a self-consciously allegorical landscape, where order is maintained under emergency powers. Looters are detained in the expectation of a revival of old norms, but those norms didn't include prehistoric monsters roaming the streets, nor allow that authority figures are actively working to erase the very society which authenticates their power and status.

The DVD's picture quality is remarkable, and the colour restoration on part one (the videotape of which was mislaid, presumed destroyed, probably not long after transmission in 1974, leaving only a black and white film print presumably made with the intention of being exported to non-colour markets outside the UK) impressive even if it's of variable quality; the colours of the location scenes on part one bring out the dry grass of a hot summer evening in mid-1970s England when the sun is low in the sky, and is fitting for this London forced into a twilight existence. Throughout the story the film exterior sequences have more vibrant colours than 1970s telecine often manages, and the model shots of the foam rubber puppet dinosaurs are well served. The dinosaurs are not that bad, with the apatosaurus in particular well-realised; but then, large, placid and stupid is probably easier to achieve than fierce and terrifying. It's to be regretted that too much is demanded of the weakest of the models, the tyrannosaurus rex, and that some of the angles chosen during the model sequences expose the artificiality of monsters and their miniature sets.

Matthew Sweet's visual essay puts the contributions of the production team in context and points out just how hard the political allegory is made. The films in the 'Reminder Room' on the 'spaceship' on which the self-deluded colonists believe they are travelling to New Earth (though no cat-nuns will they there find) represent the selective, alarmist hand-wringing of sometime bien-pensants who have given up on the vast majority of their fellow human beings. Matthew Sweet observes that writer Malcolm Hulke was a longstanding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and in the 1960s many on the established left looked on askance as ecologist politics previously associated with fascism became adopted by their comrades. There's definitely something of the crisis of the social democratic state in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, from the political new directions offered by Charles Grover to the misguided idealism of Mike Yates and the drive for efficiency of General Finch, to the petty grandiose dreams of Professor Whitaker, a salutary tale of what can happen when the grant application of an Oxford don is rejected. This isn't so frivolous an observation as it might seem - Oxford has had a reputation as a more political university than its fellow ancient university Cambridge, educating several shapers of the so-called post-war consensus. Malcolm Hulke and script editor Terrance Dicks were perhaps inclined to reflect wryly on this, as they were Cambridge men.

Jon Pertwee might have resolved to leave the role of the Doctor, but he was still the consummate showman at this stage, seizing the opportunity for comedy when arrested as a looter, deploying a couple of variants of his Cockney accent, and convincing as a man of action through sheer authority despite - as David Brunt's production notes remind us - suffering from a long-term back injury that meant most of his falls were performed by Terry Walsh. Elisabeth Sladen observes in a 2003 interview included in the set that on this, her second story, she found herself playing a gentler, less assertive character than she did in her debut, The Time Warrior. Even there, Sarah was perhaps less dominating than she would have been had she been played by April Walker, whose casting, and sacking following objections from Jon Pertwee, was revealed in David Brunt's infotext in this set and is perhaps the greatest coup of the production notes. Lis Sladen describes her resolve to keep putting her all into the part despite its becoming a more passive companion role than expected with her usual smiling, positive demeanour, and it was not really a surprise that it was while watching this interview that my headache disappeared.

There's a meme going around urging support for LiveJournal after the recent DDoS attack. While I post from Dreamwidth, it remains really a back-up journal, and most of my interactions remain on LJ. The meme links to this Moscow Times article which emphasises how important LJ is in the distribution of opinion in Russia, in a fashion which the security apparatus does not seem to like. It's worth reading for a reminder of the contexts in which LJ has to operate.

I've just watched some of yesterday's Lords debate on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. If Ed Milliband was looking for examples of Liberal Democrats held hostage in the Conservatives' car boot, there were no better ones than Lords Wallace of Tankerness and McNally, huddled close on the government front bench without a Conservative in sight, while opposition peers - led by former lord chancellor and present shadow justice minister Lord Falconer of Thoroton - laid into the lack of research behind the government's proposals for the equalization of representation and the flaws in the government case, drawing on research by (among others) Lewis Baston published at the LSE politics and policy blog. Wallace, speaking for the government, was unable to refute many of Falconer's charges. A sad state of affairs for the party of democratic reform.

I have never warmed to James Purnell as a person when seeing him on television, nor am I impressed by his background as John Birt's consultant at the BBC in the 1990s - the sort of job I can't imagine anyone so young with so little experience of the world doing, yet thousands of twentysomethings do this every day - and helping to wreak morale-sapping havoc on an already beleaguered institution. He seems to recognise (whatever the unworldly Matthew d'Ancona thinks on his Spectator blog) that he is not the person to lead the Labour Party at the moment. The resignation of someone without an obvious base of either power or sympathy in the Labour Party is not having anything like a uniform effect, with at least one critic of Brown also attacking Purnell as a careerist. Gordon Brown is nevertheless damaged by this resignation, but it's not in itself a killer blow to his premiership; just another suggestion of encroaching chaos.