A sporting oddity from my past, by Wiggia

A short tale away from the usual doom and gloom that daily saturates opinion columns to a degree that is unprecedented in my lifetime.

This came about after Rolf. knowing that I raced bicycles on the track/velodromes many years ago, asked if I had seen a recent episode of the Antiques Roadshow on the Beeb, that had been broadcast from Roundhay Park in Leeds. I hadn’t but naturally looked on iPlayer for the episode and there it was, the only banked grass track as far as I know in the UK and probably the world.

Still in use, it has been there since 1894 and still remains part of the sports complex in the park. It was built at a time when cycle racing was attracting large crowds. Road racing did not really get going until the turn of the century and this was a relatively cheap way of providing a track. 1,200 unemployed men were used by the council to build the track and other facilities, and as well as being banked it is almost certainly the only permanent grass track still in situ.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001w2vs/antiques-roadshow-series-46-14-roundhay-park-leeds-3

This also gives a short history of Beryl Burton, probably the greatest woman cyclist we have ever produced (at 15.10).

I did compete very often on grass tracks. All were simply grass athletic tracks with bikes on them, not easy to ride as with no banking the bends are not easy to navigate at speed and with fixed gears as all track racing bikes have there was a danger with the lean angles on bends, of pedals digging in.

In the early days wooden rims were used as they had more ‘give’ on the bumpy surface and Dunlop actually produced a special tubular tyre for grass track racing, more of a sort of ‘off road’ tyre that gave much better grip. These were much coveted as Dunlop stopped making them through lack of demand.

But there was another side to grass track racing. During the summer fetes and galas all over the UK would include grass racing among various other events. These were much sought after as they actually gave worthwhile prizes that in many cases could be traded back for cash or sold; remember this was an amateur sport then.

Were there any really good riders on grass? Well one springs to mind: Neville Tong who was selected to ride for England in the Commonwealth games in ‘58 in the kilometre. This is a very hard solo time trial from a standing start against the clock. He won the gold medal in this event with a record time, he was then taken under the wing of legendary Reg Harris at Fallowfield track Manchester in an attempt to convert this grass track strength into a hard track sprinter. Sadly the attempt failed and Tong went back to what he was good at, grass track racing.

Below he is seen at the Maindy Stadium Cardiff taking his lap of honour, and below on his beloved grass.

My infrequent forays into grass track racing were rewarded in an outing to Hertford fete in ‘59 - was it really that long ago? - when I won the star event, the five mile scratch race and took home for my mum a silver tea service, which adorned the sideboard for a few years.

(Excuse the old faded press cutting.) From memory this was my last effort on grass, not many events in 

southern England and the hard track took priority. Nonetheless the Antiques Roadshow revived some old and pleasant memories.

Beleaguered: PMQs 2nd April 2025

Before the session began the Speaker read out a statement of his recent visit to the Ukrainian Parliament. He and other European assembly Speakers were there for the third anniversary of the Russian massacre at Bucha. He took with him messages of support from the Commons and the major English parties. The PM also referenced Bucha in his opening remarks. Later the Lib Dem Leader commended Starmer for his ‘commendable leadership over Ukraine.’

The consensus is dangerously comfortable and exclusionary. Nobody mentioned the ECHR’s ruling last month that Ukraine had failed to prevent the massacre of ‘anti-Nazi activists’ at Odessa in 2014; or the 14,000 killed by Ukrainian forces in the Donbas before Putin’s invasion. It is not even clear who in Parliament understands the white-hot hatreds at work in Ukraine, where Stalin killed millions in the Thirties; or that Russia today is not the USSR, which was a Communist bloc set on world domination; or the risks we run in stoking conflict with a nuclear power that could easily finish us with an EMP as Peter Hitchens has pointed out.

Our foreign relations are in further difficulties. The Chagos Islands giveaway is still a hot issue and was the subject of another ‘urgent question’ from the Opposition straight after this session (the USA seems unconcerned, perhaps mistakenly - China takes a long strategic view.) Attempts to stave off the impact of President Trump’s tariffs have been complicated by our lamentable record on free speech - though less so than the EU’s, it turns out.

The PM is clearly aware of a creeping crisis. He is fond of evasion and stock responses but his phraseology gives the game away. Today he said ‘national interest’ five times and ‘calm and pragmatic’ three times (and ‘calm’ once more after that.)

Calm was needed: the Lib Dem Leader urged a ‘coalition of the willing’ (including the EU and Commonwealth) against the US tariffs and Sir Keir replied that he had to keep options open.

Nevertheless the NIC hike was going ahead, whatever the objections from the other side - and as before, Mrs Badenoch was caught on the PM’s fork of not wanting it yet being unwilling to say she would reverse it. Again, he noted that the Conservatives were complaining about council tax increases that Labour had promised to freeze, but they themselves had allowed increases in twelve of their post-2010 years in power.

Sir Keir came under fire from another direction. Ayoub Khan (Independent, Birmingham Perry Barr) said that the piles of uncollected rubbish in Labour-run Brum were ‘so large that they can be seen by satellites orbiting in space.’ For him, it demonstrated that Labour were unable to govern. However Khan omitted to mention that a major factor in the Council’s financial problems leading to the bin strike stemmed from a court ruling upholding women’s entitlement to equal pay, backdated and costing £760 million.

It was the chance for a classic socialist point but the PM failed to exploit it. Instead he gave a familiar recitation on increased NHS appointments, the rise in the national minimum wage and ‘record investment into this country, growing the economy.’ The first is a service improvement but the second a potential threat to employment and the third, if Starmer’s dealings with Bill Gates and Larry Fink are a factor, potentially a matter of concern: what is left to sell off?

Ed Davey gave an example of what happens when we sell national assets to foreigners. In 2022 the American private equity firm KKR bought a 25% stake in Northumbrian Water, steeply increased consumers’ bills and last year dumped almost a million tonnes of raw sewage into a conservation area. Now it wanted to buy into Thames Water. Starmer said the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 addressed some of the issues ‘but we will go further.’

Returning to Ayoub Khan, it seems he himself is not aiming for socialist equality but special treatment. For example, he and many of his co-religionists seek to influence our foreign policy respecting Gaza - a convert to Islam very nearly unseated Jess Phillips MP on that issue in last summer’s General Election. (Labour’s Jayne Kirkham also called for the restoration of aid and supplies to the Strip, as well as an investigation into the killing of aid workers there last year.) Another Birmingham MP, Tahir Ali (Labour), has been campaigning for a new airport in Pakistan. Since 1689 our Constitution has been based on national sovereignty, but internationalism is raising its head once again.

The Labour Party has its hands full trying to hold onto this vigorously universalist element in its ranks, which is a growing one: a 2017 study by Pew Research estimates that by 2050 Muslims may comprise up to 17% of the UK population. The Tories may be half-dead, yet how long will it be before Labour too are ‘Yesterday’s Men?’

There is still a little life left in the Conservative dog: only yesterday and at the last moment, but thanks to the efforts of Robert Jenryck MP, the Sentencing Council suspended its advice to judges to offer ‘two-tier’ justice to miscreants. Maybe one day the ‘protected characteristics’ general challenge to impartial law will be overturned.

Another sign that Labour’s juggernaut may swerve slightly came in last week’s PMQs when Kim ‘Reaper’ Leadbeater MP, already backtracking on the timetable for implementation of her ‘assisted dying’ bill, sought an assurance of continued support from Starmer. He carefully noted that there were ‘different views’ on the issue, identified her ‘as the Bill’s promoter’ and said he would work with her as he would ‘for every private Member’s Bill that passes Second Reading.’ One feels a gentle distancing in progress.

There were so many other items put on the PM’s to-do list. Claire Hanna (SDLP) wanted an assurance that the digital services tax would not be cut, so as not to pander to Trump’s ‘bullying’. Gavin Robinson (DUP) wished the PM to resist EU ‘retaliatory action’ on imports to Northern Ireland. Tim Farron (Lib Dem) asked for help to end the poverty of hill farmers and to maintain the landscape. Mrs Elsie Blundell (Labour) wanted skilled jobs for her Mancunian ‘grafters’. A North Devon hospital was still in need of long overdue repairs, said Ian Roome (Lib Dem.) Thousands of Scunthorpe steelworkers were facing redundancy, said Martin Vickers (Con). Greg Smith (Con) said increased costs created by the Government were causing layoffs at a local chocolate-maker (out came the ‘£22 billion black hole’ in reply.)

All this and more. Uneasy lies the head that wears the cloth cap.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Niamh Crowley, by JD

Niamh Crowley is an Irish violinist and was a child prodigy, appearing on television at the age of five (see final video below.)

She began her musical training at the age of four and attended the Royal Irish Academy of Music for eleven years. She continued her studies in Violin and Piano at the Royal College of Music, London.Niamh works regularly with the National Symphony Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra, and the National Sinfonia. She is an experienced recitalist and has performed concertos with many orchestras including Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the RTE,Concert Orchestra and Saint-Saens Violin Concerto in the National Concert Hall, Dublin.

http://homepage.eircom.net/~samusic/about.htm

Not a Theme Night - Muinera (Niamh Crowley and gang)

Not a Theme Night - Fiddle Faddle (Niamh Crowley)

Not A Theme Night - Glór Shligigh (Niamh Crowley)

Song for Guy (Niamh Crowley and Kieran Quinn)

Niamh Crowley performs 'Csárdás', a piece she also performed on The Late Late Toy Show as a child.

A Rat Writes

 

‘Oo does ‘er think she is, slagging off us rats?

We’m doin’ a service to the public, cleanin’ up the mess out the black bags. Good as a job in town, as the wife’s uncle used ter say.

If ‘er wants to criticise chobblin’ she can ‘ave a go at David Lammy what spent seven thousand on biscuits.

Yampy cow.

Fog of war: PMQs & ‘Spring Statement’ 26th March 2025

The PM “is not answering the question about discipline in schools … [and] did not answer the question about compensating schools for the jobs tax,” said the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch.

“[Sir Keir] did not answer the point on the digital services tax,” said the Lib Dems’ leader Sir Ed Davey, who wanted him to rule out scrapping it.

“[Starmer’s] answer had nothing to do with my question,” said Sir Julian Lewis (Con), “which was to ask why the Government are ordering the permanent sealing of Britain’s only two shale gas wells.”

The PM goes through the motions at question time, simply as a tedious obligation. Objections can be ignored; just put up a smokescreen. The grand strategy has been set and there is no turning back.

David Starkey calls Labour’s approach “magical thinking“, believing in the power of words until they collide with hard reality. The increases in the minimum wage and employment protection legislation, plus the NIC hike, were intended to improve the lot of working people, but they also incentivised employers to lay off staff and not take on more.

Like WWI generals, the Government has decided not to retreat and regroup, but go for ‘one more push.’ They will not repeal those previous measures, but in the hope of making the books balance, they will cut welfare benefits.

The sad consequences are predictable. When Labour’s Sojan Joseph asked how a blind constituent could get a job, the PM spoke of money invested in help programmes and “the right to try work guarantee” – (yes, ‘try’). When the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, himself previously disabled, asked Starmer to explain to children of the disabled “how the Labour Party making mum and dad poorer will lift them out of poverty”, he got some sympathy and another attack on the Scottish Government.

Bradley Thomas (Con) had another doomed go at modifying damaging Government policy. The NIC increase was going to cost Acorns hospice an extra £416,000. Would the PM exempt hospices from this burden? Starmer dodged into talk of additional funding for equipment, etc., and when greeted with Conservatives’ cries and groans, snapped that they “would have a lot more value if they started their questions with an apology for crashing the economy in the first place”. So there.

Yes, rhetoric trumps logic – as it did in Sir Keir’s response to Sir Julian Lewis’s question on capping shale gas wells that might be needed in an energy emergency. The PM focused on the drive for renewable energy in the aspiration to “independence and the next generation of jobs and to lower bills”, without considering the possibility of failure. He celebrated record investment in this so that “a tyrant like Putin cannot put his boot on our throat”.

Thank goodness for bogeymen: Starmer had opened the session by welcoming in the gallery a delegation from the Bring Kids Back (from Russia) initiative, founded by his khaki-sweatshirted pal Zelensky. The PM’s Scottish Labour friend Blair McDougall called the abductions ‘an act of pure evil’, and Starmer concurred – “sickening”. Hate is the chilli in Labour’s cuisine; it masks duff ingredients.

Yet if only this Government could succeed! The country has been let down for such a long time. The PM may prevaricate in these weekly verbal confrontations, but it is also easy for him to counterattack the Conservative Opposition, whose previous incompetence and voter betrayal have led us to this pass.

Since there is little else that she can come at the PM with that does not invite the reply ‘your lot got us into this’ or ‘your lot did the same’, Ms Badenoch’s theme this time was education. She asked why had Labour voted against banning phones in schools, which disrupted lessons? It should have been relatively easy to do if, as the PM said, most schools did so already (but he was wrong, said Kemi). Denying the accusation that he was “ideological” (!), Starmer ducked the shot and diverted attention to the need to control the content accessed by young people, in school or out.

Censorship is a can of worms. Sir Ed Davey was keen on media regulation, too, citing the currently popular TV drama ‘Adolescence’, which portrays a white British teenager (it would have to be, one supposes) seduced by online material into committing murder. The narrative may additionally imply a false justification for further suppressing opinion, something now in progress with the new Online Safety Act that is already chilling political comment threads.

Would the PM “guarantee that British laws on tax and social media will be written in this House, and not the White House?” asked Sir Ed, adding a little anti-American spice to counterbalance today’s anti-Russian sentiment. The PM welcomed the Lib Dem leader’s illiberal support, saying: “We need to see whether we can go further on this issue, because there are concerns about whether the measures go far enough.”

But the House was waiting for the main event: Rachel Reeves’ post-PMQs supplementary ‘spring statement’ (aka Daffodil Budget?) that was coming less than five months after the first unadmitted disaster. She reaffirmed “our commitment to deliver just one major fiscal event a year” after this one, for now it would put us back on course, as the Office for Budget Responsibility seemed to confirm in her welter of optimistic statistics.

We shall see. ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’, as the saying goes, and there are more contacts with reality to come. The spring offensive has yet to claim its full toll of casualties.

Crossposted from Wolves of Westminster

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Neville Brothers, by JD

The Neville Brothers were an American R&B/soul/funk group, formed in 1976 in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were four brothers; Art (1937–2019), Charles (1938–2018), Aaron (b. 1941), and Cyril (b. 1948).

The group formally disbanded in 2012 but reunited in 2015 for a farewell concert in New Orleans. Charles Neville died of pancreatic cancer on April 26, 2018, at the age of 79. Art Neville died on July 22, 2019, at the age of 81. A cause of death was not provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neville_Brothers

The Neville Brothers - Bird On A Wire

Neville Brothers - Yellow Moon

Healing Chant

LINDA RONSTADT - 'Don't Know Much' (feat. Aaron Neville) 1989

The Neville Brothers - Don't Take Away My Heaven (Live at Farm Aid 1994)

Seeing The Light

There was something going on. Traffic was slow and we could see a small crowd near the island, yellow banners and placards, people walking among cars with handouts.

Was it an industrial dispute?

Funny place to have it, at Birmingham’s Five Ways. Long time since there was any manufacturing so near the city centre.

I wound down the window and took what looked like a newspaper - nice quality newsprint. It was the latest edition of The Light.

The front page article was headlined “Were 55,000 killed by NHS?” and included this startling graph:

I’ve seen medical execution at first hand, and wrote about it two years ago. The dying ward was brightly lit, the nurses cheerful - not rushed off their feet as in other hospital areas. In their heads they will have been doing the right thing, otherwise they would not have told me so calmly that they were withholding fluids from my friend; that is, letting him die of thirst while so heavily sedated that he couldn’t complain if he wanted to, while his organs were collapsing.

I didn’t ask what the drugs were, but like as not it was the cocktail I call “M+M” - midazolam and morphine. There’ll be a lot more of this when Kim Leadbeater MP’s assisted suicide Bill becomes law; already Parliament is snipping off safeguards.

Back to the protest. It takes a lot to make white middle-class people (for that’s what they appeared to be) take to the streets.

The Light is a reactionary publication. The r-word is one of those that stops you thinking - it carries associations with other terms such as '“far right”; but it simply describes a reaction and there’s a lot to react to now, and with rational justification. The current issue also discusses digital ID, Net Zero, combatting official misinformation, lawfare and so on.

And the reaction to these reactionaries?

If you look around the internet you’ll find that quite a lot of Nazi propaganda has been preserved for study, so we can see how a religious and law-abiding people could be turned into bloody-minded lunatics. It wasn’t just posters, newspapers and rallies, it was movies too; fiction as well as slanted documentaries.

We have the same today, though in different causes, and run by people who once again think they are doing the right thing - just as German policymakers and influencers thought of themselves, four generations ago.

Now we are in the age of the internet, so the struggle goes on there too, to corral diversity of opinion. The people are in danger of getting out of control!

Twitter/X used to be full of right-thinking gauleiters and now works far better since 80% of its employees were laid off; so well in fact that many of the righteous have decamped to alternative social websites so as to avoid being contradicted. Scratch a hippy, find a fascist, as the saying goes.

However Wikipedia is still going strong. I use it a lot but when it comes to contentious subjects you quickly feel the iron fist in its velvet glove. I looked up The Light and the result should be permanently retained for future generations to wonder at: “The Light is a… far-right and conspiracy theory newspaper… which primarily claims the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax…”

The pseudonymous writer warms to his theme with every kind of boo-word (“far-right” appears 13 times!) and throws in the kitchen sink with a side panel: “Part of a series on Antisemitism.”

Read the latest issue and decide for yourself how far it resembles Julius Streicher’s “Der Stürmer” (published weekly, 1923-1945.) But that’s not the idea of the Wiki article, which clearly wishes to poison the well so thoroughly that no-one would come near it because of its stink.

The trouble with the Leftists is that they seem to have little idea of what real fascism is like. My mother could have told them.

Mum grew up in East Prussia in the 1930s. A keen reader, she entered the school library one day to find big gaps in the shelves, which had been cleansed of Jewish and socialist writers. The history teacher was sacked and replaced by the janitor. The teachers all joined the Party, knowing which side their bread was buttered (I seem to recall the Inner London Education Authority was like that vis-à-vis Labour in the 1970s), and tried to browbeat Mum into following suit; she resisted, since her father (a gentleman farmer) despised Nazis as low-class scum and forbade her. The children - wretched conformists, as the young usually are - fought her in the playground, but she was athletic and beat them. But everywhere, propaganda, as the National Socialists fixed the foundations of the country’s economy and society.

Golly, if we tried hard we could draw some parallels! Even our farmers are targeted these days. And the new education Bill is a piece of work - you may even not be allowed to keep your children out of State indoctrination centres. The new Online Safety Act, with its ill-defined terms, is already scything through social media comment threads; pub landlords will have to police customers’ banter.

Dylan said it as long ago as 1964:

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand 

At the mongrel dogs who teach 

Fearing not that I’d become my enemy 

In the instant that I preach