There's a row going on down Clacton way.

The defection of Douglas Carswell to UKIP and the resultant prospect of a Clacton by-election should put the cat among the pigeons and not only at CCHQ. Apparently UKIP's chosen son for Clacton was supposed to be former tory Roger Lord and he is not best pleased at being elbowed aside by Carswell. A return to the Conservative Party and "ripping out Carswell's throat" are apparently two of the options that Lord is contemplating.
Clacton is an interesting constituency, To the north east is the anal retentive Frinton. Designed as a small and refined resort for the haute bourgeoisie, it would cling on to delusions of grandeur long after the posh people had come to the conclusion that it was better to be seen dead than seen in Essex and the town would resist such horrors as pubs and fish and chip shops right into the 21st century.

South west lies the former plotland of Jaywick the place that lays unenviable claim to being the most deprived human settlement in England. Clacton itself was a busy, cheerful seaside resort and home to one of Billy Butlin's first holiday camps. How we laughed at the jokes about the Martello Tower on the perimeter being there to stop campers escaping. Well Clacton's heyday is long gone and nobody is laughing now.  Like so many formerly thriving resorts the place has never really found a new future for itself.

In Frinton, Jaywick, Clacton and in the rest of the constituency people know that something is wrong. They can't quite put their finger on it but are pretty sure that none of this is their fault. An interesting place. Interesting times.

Public school/Oxbridge elite rule country shock.

The stats of inequality always make for sobering and sometimes shocking reading. Ever since I first started to take an interest in politics I have been digesting statistics about the percentage of global wealth owned by a tiny minority of the population. Now the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission have published a report detailing the social and financial advantages of attending private school and Oxbridge. 71% of senior judges, 62% of top army posts, 47% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Sunday Times Rich List, 35% of Cameron's Cabinet, were all educated privately. But surely this is not a surprise. If there were not such huge advantages to a private education no one would pay the fees.  What is surprising is the numbers of working class people who by hard work and determination manage to break through and reach high standards of personal academic achievement. Some remember where they came from and devote much energy to giving others a hand up - others do not. At the end of the day inequality of opportunity means the loss to society of a huge reservoir of talent and the sad loss of personal fulfilment for countless millions. But we all know this. What we need is not the likes of Owen Jones foaming at the mouth and jerking himself off over the stats of inequality but a vision of what an alternative might look like and how to get to there from here.

Learning the ropes.

I always do my best to make newcomers welcome down at the allotments and if I can pass on any of my limited knowledge of growing a bit of veg I am only too happy to do so. I can well remember when the boot was on the other foot.
When Her Indoors and I rented a cottage and three acres in South Devon back in 1970 we were full of enthusiasm but totally lacking in any knowledge of how to care for livestock or grow anything at all. We borrowed books from Plymouth library but by far our main source of information was due to the kindness of neighbours who patiently explained what to them must truly have seemed the "bleedin' obvious". There was the couple who, as well as holding down full time jobs, ran a small egg and veg enterprise and they took us under their wing and showed us the basics of poultry keeping and horticulture.  There were also the two Arthurs.  One of the Arthurs just seemed to turn up on the doorstep one day, introduced himself and suggested that we keep a few pigs. Being suspicious townies I think that we might have wondered what his game was at first but in no time at all he had formed a pig keeping partnership with "Her Indoors", found us some work spud picking on the farm where he was employed and had become a constant source of information and encouragement.
We inherited the other Arthur as he was keeping bantams on part of the property when we arrived. Arthur number two was a retired farm labourer who lived with his large family on the council estate that bordered our holding. Previously the whole clan had lived in an isolated,and from all accounts pretty primitive, tied cottage with a herd of goats and countless chickens and ducks. The various boxes, runs and coops of bantams kept in our garden were Arthur's link to his past life. Always wearing a flat cap and usually dressed in a rather greasy gabardine raincoat with a piece of baler twine tied around the middle, Arthur would appear in our kitchen every morning, remove his cap, perhaps extract a particularly pretty bantam hen from his pocket, and make polite conversation about the weather before going off to feed and water his flock.   Arthur had spent all of his life in rural Devon apart from during the First World War when he had been "Out in Mespot. " He did his best to advise us but frequently struggled to come to terms with the true depths of our ignorance. One time I decided to scythe the field for hay to feed the goats during the winter. I ran the plan past Arthur. "So I cut it, leave it to dry, turn it and leave to dry again, then bring it in? Is that all you have to do with it Arthur?"  The old chap was silent. Removed his cap. Scratched his head before replying, " Well, there ain't much more you can do with it is there?" We had never met anyone like Arthur before and I doubt if he had met anyone like us either. He would never know that those two clueless young people would remember him for the rest of their lives.

Sale of the century.

I am mainly aware of writer and journalist James Meek through The Peoples Act Of Love, his epic tale of Revolutionary Russia, the Czech Legion, castration cults, armed trains and the Siberian winter. If it were possible for a Scot to write a great Russian novel in the 21st century Meek is your man. Earlier this year he wrote one of the most insightful articles about the current situation in Ukraine that I have come across and now turns his attention closer to home with a new book Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else. The great British knock down sale of national assets may not have been quite as traumatic as the Russian equivalent but it changed the face of this country and there is little sign that the increasing polarisation of wealth is likely to stop any time soon. There will be no going back. I look forward to James Meek's contribution to understanding how it all came to this.

Norman Cornish and the new Kings Cross.

A few days ago some journalist or other, I can't remember what paper, was banging on about how wonderful the new Kings Cross is. Comparing today's uber-sterile environment to the old Kings Cross of prostitutes and junkies this scribe was claiming to wait for a later train these days so cool and trendy had the place become. I would be the last one to glamorise either the sex trade or smack addiction and I well remember just how grim a road York Way was in the seventies but am I the only one to think that the back of the station redevelopment has been hyped up out of all proportion? I wandered through the area the other day on my way to visit the Norman Cornish exhibition at Kings Place. Cornish, who died earlier this month, was the last of the so called Pitmen Painters and his work captures the thirty years he spent in the mines as well as the life of the local pubs and streets. For better or worse it's a world that has gone forever now - and it was a world away from the new Kings Cross.

A sporting weekend to remember.

It was certainly some weekend for British sport. What with the biggest ever medal haul at the European Athletic Championships, the England team taking home the Women's Rugby World Cup, Alistair Cook   coming good in the end and leading his team to victory in the 5th Test and series against India and Sheffield's Kell Brooks winning the IBF version of the World Welterweight Championship, blimey!
What all this sporting activity meant for most of us of course was spending hours slumped on the sofa watching other people exert themselves. All well and good, and I spent far too much time glued to the box myself to start throwing stones at anyone else, but perhaps we could have done with a bit more publicity for initiatives like the Street Games charity who while all the splendours of the elite side of sport were going on gave 1,500 disadvantaged London kids the chance to try a sport at a multi-sport festival. Yes, I do know about the Coke and Mars sponsorship but needs must.

Covert insertions and tangled webs.

Some Kurdish factions are claiming that the jihadist fighters of Islamic State are being secretly trained by the Turkish Army in the hope that IS will act as a buffer to Kurdish national aspirations. It might seem unlikely that the Turkish government would want to fund a force that could well bite the hand that feeds it but when discussing this with "The Man Who Knows" he was quick to point out that it's no more unlikely then the Israelis setting up Hamas as a counter to the PLO or the CIA being patron to mujahadeen/Al-Qaeda. Such are the machinations of realpolitik.