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Jul 23 2011
Book review: “The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism”
I suspect most people will see me as an "Orange Book" Liberal Democrat, so I thought I should read the eponymous "The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism" edited by Paul Marshall and David Laws.
The Orange Book was first published in 2004, when Charles Kennedy was leader of the Liberal Democrats. He contributes a foreword which is fully supportive of the Liberal inheritance but a little guarded on the policies proposed. The book was written at a time when Labour had been in government for 7 years, the start of the Iraq War was one year past and the economic outlook was fair.
The contributors include Nick Clegg (an MEP at the time), Vince Cable, David Laws, Ed Davey, Chris Huhne, Susan Kramer, Mark Oaten, Steve Webb, Jo Holland and Paul Marshall. The essays cover Liberalism, localism, Europe, global governance, economics and social justice, the environment, the health service, crime, family policy and pension reform.
The value of the essay over a news presentation of policy is that the proposals are preceded with some sort of background indicating how they were motivated; as a consequence I found The Orange Book rather more interesting reading than I was expecting.
The book starts with an essay by David Laws on the Liberal inheritance; decomposing it into the personal (to do with individual freedoms), political (devolution and Europe), economic (free trade and controlling state as well as private monopolies), social liberalism (welfare and health by consumer power). Along with Paul Marshall in the introduction he has some harsh words for socialism.
Ed Davey’s piece on localism and Nick Clegg’s on Europe fit well together: envisaging respectively dissociation of power from Westminster to local councils and Europe. I commented after the election that an accommodation with the Tories over Europe was not as surprising as many people had thought; the seeds of this can be seen in Nick Clegg’s chapter where he advocates abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy and repatriation of the powers that led to the social chapter and much of the regional support mechanism leaving behind only those components that provide inter-country benefits and support for regions whose governments could not provide support themselves. Somewhat less comfortable an idea for Tories will be more foreign and immigration and asylum policy being handled at the European level. Clegg also provides a catchy headline to keep the EU in proportion: it has a budget of 1% of European GDP and a civil service the size of Birmingham City Council.
Ed Davey’s piece on localism (devolving power to local councils) is well-established Liberal Democrat policy, and looks to more control by local democratic institutions rather than central government. A benefit of this approach is that services can be crafted to local needs rather than a central blueprint, furthermore it allows for more experimentation at smaller scale as to how to best deliver services. To enable this shift there needs to be improvement in the accountability of local councils, with the ending of local one-party states through fairer votes.
For reasons I can’t quite fathom the chapters on global governance, liberal economics and social justice, and the environment passed me by without making a great deal of impact.
Mark Oaten’s headline of Tough Liberalism regarding crime seems a little out of place since the emphasis of his piece is on education within the prison system and seeing the process of release of prisoners into the community at the end of their sentences as a “settlement” not “re-settlement” since many prisoners have never had settled lives to return to.
David Laws’ second chapter is on the health service: it outlines the flaws of the NHS, what the goals should be for the health service and proposes a solution. He sees a scheme of simply boosting funding through the current mechanism as being a short-term solution – easily susceptible to future unravelling. Perhaps it will be a surprise to many that he sees one of the problems with the NHS that its cost control is too effective, referencing the phenomenally high bed occupancy rate which leads to longer waiting times. His proposal is for a National Health Insurance Scheme with the NHS as one potential supplier of care with providers only able to offer non-clinical services as top-up to the national insurance specified clinical services. This scheme is based on those found in other European countries.
The chapter by Steve Webb and Jo Holland on family policy seems a little more interventionist than might be considered Liberal with an apparent enthusiasm for encouraging marriage rather than partnership. However, one welcome idea is to scrap a target for getting 70% of single parents into work. This attitude has always struck me as a bit jarring: that work is so important that the State will encourage you to work whilst paying someone else for the work of raising your children.
The book finishes with a chapter on pensions, a subject close to my heart at the moment. Liberals have been at the heart of pensions from their inception in the UK with Lloyd George and later in the Beveridge Report implemented by Labour in the post-war government. The problem with pensions is that since Beveridge, in the 1940s, things have changed a lot. The original pension scheme is pay-as-you-go: current payers of National Insurance pay for current claimants. No-one is contributing to their own state pension. At the time of its foundation in 1948 this scheme was relatively inexpensive (only £4billion per year in current terms), currently the state pension costs £40billion per year – due to a larger retired population relative to those working. For this reason the value of the state pension has fallen over the years since there is not the political will to lift current contributions to match the original commitment. Marshall proposes a compulsory funded pension to supplement the current system. The funding system at least forces the government to be explicit about their liabilities in pensions. Over the next 20 years or so the pensions problem will become more acute: currently the dependency ratio (the ratio of those in retirement to those in work) is 0.3 by 2030 it will be 0.4.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the policies presented this is the type of policy discussion I expect to see taking place in my party. The "Orange Book" label feels more like an attempt to personalise a division between old-style Liberals and social democrats, and to cut off the Liberals from a Liberal past rather than any useful description of political thought. It also has the air of being more about Coalition with the Tories rather than any differences in policy.
Jul 21 2011
Book review: “At Home: A short history of Private Life” by Bill Bryson
I’ve been on holiday for a week, this has meant a lot of reading! Next up is “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. A thick book arranged thematically around the rooms in Bryson’s house, a rectory in Norfolk. The links between the various rooms and the topics discussed are sometimes tenuous, such as the one between the cellar and the Erie Canal.
As I have commented before my book “reviews” are as much about noting things that I learnt from a book as they are “reviews” but in this case I struggle since there are simply so many facts to absorb.
Since Bryson lives in a rectory “men of the cloth” feature; here I learnt the distinction between vicars and rectors: vicars received the little tithes of the parish, and rectors the great tithes. This meant for many years that they had quite considerable incomes for not necessarily a great deal of work. Some made great use of their copious spare time for strenuous intellectual activity, as a measure of this Bryson suggests searching for vicars and rectors in the Dictionary of National Biography – there’s an awful lot of them, more even than politicians. The era of wealthy reverends finally ended with the collapse of agricultural incomes in the 1870s.
Agricultural incomes collapsed in part through the arrival of long distance imports from North America and New Zealand. These were facilitated in part by steam ships but also by the introduction of refrigerated transport arising from the Wenham Lake Ice Company, started in 1844. Prior to this transport within the US had been improved by the building of the Erie Canal linking New York City to the Great Lakes. The Erie Canal was built between 1817 and 1825, and was the making of New York City since it provided a link through the Appalachian Mountains from the populous East to the breadbasket of the mid-West. At the time it was a substantial achievement – it was to be the biggest canal in the world at a time when the US did not have a single native born canal engineer. The link with cellars is that what goes on in the cellar holds the whole house up (well, not quite, but it’s a literary device) and that materials are important in enabling development: building the Erie Canal was facilitated by the invention of a new hydraulic cement.
Whilst agricultural incomes were collapsing in the UK, the US was experiencing its Gilded Age during which industrial output surged and some people become tremendously wealthy (such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt amongst many others). They spent this money on houses, amusing themselves and philanthropy – very little seems to have gone in tax – Bryson states there was no permanent income tax in the US until 1914.
I was surprised by the late arrival on the scene of professional architects. The book talks in some detail about John Vanburgh (1664-1726) who designed Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, however it was not until the end of the 19th century that compulsory examinations were required of architects in Britain and a full-time academic courses were established. Vanburgh was brought up in my home town – Chester.
I was also interested to read of John Lubbock who grew up in the same village as Charles Darwin. As a keen entomologist he discovered in 1886 the pauropoda – a family of mites, but not only this: in later life he was to introduce both the Bank Holidays Act and the Ancient Monuments Act. He was also first president of the Institute of Bankers and married the daughter of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, one of the founding fathers of archaeology. He founded the Electoral Reform Society – it difficult to read his biography and not be astounded by the sheer range of his achievements.
1851 pops up regularly – this is the year of the Great Exhibition in London. Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal Palace in which it was housed, taking advantage of standardised components (the iron glazing bars) and newer, cheaper materials (plate glass) to build a quite remarkable building. The speed with which he achieved this is incredible: design to completion in under 16 months. George Peabody stepped in to fund the American contribution at the last minute, an area which displayed many ingenious machines for manufacturing. Many Londoners learnt the wonder of the flushing toilet; this would lead to a flood of toilets being installed across the city, overwhelming the sewerage system which would be then be rebuilt by Joseph Bazalgette.
The book ends with the decline of the British country house during the first part of the 20th century following the introduction of death duties by William Harcourt.
Exceedingly readable, as you would expect from Bill Bryson, and endlessly interesting. There’s a sizeable bibliography and index but no footnotes. There’s evidence of depth in what he writes, in the sense that he does dig a little deeper into stories rather than necessarily repeating the most popular version. And I leave you with this quote:
In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.
Jul 16 2011
Lead mining in the Yorkshire Dales
Bunting level: building, level entrance and hush
On a recent trip to the Yorkshire Dales we came across the remnants of lead mining; as with many things in the field these are blank discoveries with no indication of what they mean at the site. A very long time ago I did an OA level in geology, and I seem to have inherited an interest in industrial archaeology, so I resolved to find out more…
The majority of the mine workings we saw were in Gunnerside Gill, which extends north from Swaledale shown on the map below. On the ground we found rock strewn gullies and heaps of gravel, still devoid of vegetation. There were also ruined mine buildings, the occasional opening into the hillside and the odd bit of rusting ironwork. The most distinctive elements of the remains are the “bouse teams”, these are sets of bunkers – just the dividing walls remain – which were used to store the ore (or bouse). Quite a few of the stone surfaces are covered in a reddish deposit; elsewhere this has been identified as a lichen, but I believe it’s lead oxide. The workings are named by the “level” or horizontal tunnel which they served, the photos here are taken around the Bunting (or Bunton) level.
Lead mining: bouse teams at Bunting Level
Further down the Gill, closer to Gunnerside, are the Sir Francis Level workings; although these are less extensive at ground level, they turn out to have quite fantastic remains underground. Intrepid cavers have been down and taken some impressive photos, and you can read more about the Sir Francis Level workings in this report , here and here too. These were the most recent workings in Gunnerside Gill and were in operation from 1864 until 1891.
Lead mining has been carried out in the Yorkshire Dales since Roman times, the workings at Gunnerside Gill started in the 16th century but the majority of the visible surface remains are from the 19th century. The Bunting (or Bunton) level where the photos were taken was opened in 1802 and closed in 1898.
Lead mining: entrance to Bunting level
The Yorkshire Dales are substantially formed from limestone and gritstone outcrops laid down in the Carboniferous Period some 320 million years ago1. The lead ore occurs in veins which were deposited hydrothermally: hot pressurised liquids containing a range of minerals were forced through cracks in the native rock and deposited what they carried when the pressure and/or temperature dropped. The minerals are not conveniently deposited by type but mixed together. The veins are quite narrow – typically only a metre wide – but stretch deep underground.
This is reflected in the manner in which they are mined: initially vertical shafts were mined down to follow the veins. Later horizontal “levels” were mined to meet up with these vertical shafts which made the extraction of both ore and water easier – water will drain out of a level but puddle in the bottom of a shaft. In addition to this type of mining “hushing” was also used: this involves sluicing large quantities of water down the line of the vein to erode out the rock. This process was used in the Gunnerside Gill area from the 1780s to 1820s, and is what has left a large part of the surface remains. These are marked on the map as “hushes”. The extent of the workings can be seen quite clearly in Google Earth images (here).
The particular mineral in which the lead occurred is galena (lead sulphide), it is relatively dense and this property was used to separate out the galena from other minerals using a process akin to panning for gold. The ore containing rock is broken up into pieces and as far as possible the galena rich chunks are picked out and chipped off using hammers – this is known as dressing. This ore is then further broken up into smaller pieces. Earlier, this would have been done manually but later it was done using a water-powered mills, and still later it was done by steam-powered machines. These smaller pieces of ore are then buddled in troughs or hotching tubs – basically this simply means add water then shake, this separates out the material by density.
Lead mining: mill culvert at Bunting Level
Stonebreaker above Bunting Level with Sharon in background
Once reasonably well-separated ore is obtained it is converted to metal in two chemical steps. First the ore is roasted to drive off the sulphur and convert it to lead oxide, then the oxide is smelted with carbon which removes the oxygen from the lead to produce the metal. There were smelting mills in Gunnerside Gill but ore was also transported underground to the next valley and smelted in the Old Gang Smelting Mills. We didn’t visit these but they had flues extending up the hillside a distance of hundreds of metres. The reason for this was two-fold: firstly, the gases driven off the ore during smelting were pretty noxious and secondly, the long flue allows soot to condense back out as it cools and this soot can be contain high concentrations of minerals.
Life for the miners sounds pretty grim; they were expected to work for 6 hours a day underground and the mine workings were often inaccessible without accommodation so their days may well have started with an hour or so walking simply to get to work. The Swaledale Museum, in Reeth, as well has having a great deal of other information on lead mining has some mining company rules, dated 1872. One of them states: “Children aged 12-16years only allowed to work 54 hours per week, or 10 hours per day.”
Footnotes
1. See p13-22 of this report by the North Yorkshire Geodiversity Partnership for more geology.
2. Related is this report on the Peak District Lead Mining Industry
3. English Heritage scheduled monument report
Jul 16 2011
Reeth
In a change from usual service we went to the Yorkshire Dales rather than the Lake District for our summer holiday, this is the land of my father – whose family lived, and still live for the most part around the southern edge of the Dales. We stayed in a cottage in Reeth (2, Nurse Cherry’s Cottages), recently built but in the old style. The advantage of this are that it’s spacious and the plumbing was not added as an afterthought. I think the cottage was advertised as sleeping up to four people, with two bathrooms and a downstairs toilet it would take 6 pretty comfortably. We are only two, so had plenty of room. We arrived in a downpour but for the rest of the week the weather was pretty good. Reeth is a small village which was once a centre for mining and farming but now is a centre for tourism – lying in the Yorkshire Dales and on the coast to coast path. It’s dominated by a large central green, although there are older buildings many are quite modern but built in the same style as the older, using the local stone.
Day 1
A pleasant walk up Arkengarthdale to Langthwaite, and back along Fremington Edge Top. The walk outwards is through pasture and many narrow styles in stone walls with little gates to prevent sheep escaping. Shortly before Langthwaite there is a footbridge across the river which takes you to a short walk through woodland before climbing up through old lead mine workings up onto Fremington Edge Top. We took the route which avoided the hamlet of Booze, considering that it was so small that it was unlikely to have a good quality sign to picture ourselves besides. Nearby is Blea Barf, and at the top of the valley on the road over into Hawse is Lovely Seat, one can’t help thinking that when the Ordnance Survey visited the locals had some fun.
The walk along Fremington Edge Top is dead straight along the side of the wall. I wonder whether these walls date to the time of the old iron fence posts in the Lake District – perhaps relating to some Enclosures Act. The wall runs along the edge of wild moorland to the north and after a pleasant, if not a little windswept walk you drop back down towards Reeth.
Reeth viewed from Fremington Edge
Day 2
A route from The Green Book starting at Gunnerside, heading to Muker then up Upper Swaledale towards Keld and then back towards Muker via the Pennine Way and so along the river back to Gunnerside. Highpoints were the waterfalls at the foot of Swinner Gill and Kisdon Force. Photographers will know there is a knack to photographing waterfalls such that the water appears milky rather than frozen in time by a short exposure. The problem is this requires long exposures (about 1/2 second) and this is a bit tricky to do without a tripod – a handy rock or handrail must suffice instead. Crackpot Hall was also interesting, the term Hall is rather grandiose but the views down Swaledale were spectacular. Much birdlife to be seen including a greater spotted woodpecker, dipper, spotted flycatcher, grey wagtail, plover – no photos of these since that requires patience, speedy reactions and so forth. Lapwings all over the place.
Kisdon Force
Day 3
A more restful day today: we headed down to Harrogate and the RHS Harlow Carr garden. This is horticulture, so I’ll leave the details to The Inelegant Gardener. It’s a fairly lengthy drive down to Harrogate from Reeth – a little under an hour and a half. My abiding memory will be of coffee and Fat Rascal in Betty’s Tea Rooms, attached to the gardens but not providing a route in or out. After a morning at Harlow Carr we headed back home via Richmond: a rather smart little town on a steep hillside with a huge castle (and more waterfalls). The Market Square would be spectacular if it weren’t for a flotsam of cars which spoil any photo. Sharon and I both seem to suffer from a list which prevents the photography of buildings without post-processing. A balanced diet today of Fat Rascal, sausage roll and icecream, available from the icecream shop in Reeth a mere 100 yards from our door (via shortcut).
Richmond Castle
Day 4
Back to walking, this time one of my own devising. Starting from Gunnerside we headed up Gunnerside Beck until we reached the lead workings at Melbecks Moor. There a several sets of ruined buildings and mine tailings as you head up the valley. After climbing up through the surface workings we got onto the moor top where were visible grouse, grouse grit stations (where they can pick up grit for their gizzards) and grouse butts from where they can be shot at. You have to get pretty close to grouse before they break cover. Finally, we dropped down into the valley where we got a little lost (and quite badly nettled) trying to find the path through Rowleth Wood. Once on the path through the wood, which is narrow and overgrown, we were further nettled and as I write now a couple of hours later my legs are still tingling from the knees down.
After our walk we visited the Swaledale Museum, which although small was highly informative on the local mining industry – a subject I shall return to in another blog post.
Stonebreaker, with Sharon in background
Day 5
Over to Wensleydale for our walk today (from the Green Book), from Bainbridge up to Semer Water (a rare natural lake in the Dales) and then onwards and back via the Roman Road. The Roman Road was very straight, and as usual somewhat disappointing – it requires a great deal of imagination to call up the requisite Roman soldiers. The weather was rather better than yesterday which was overcast and prone to the odd shower; today it is a little cool out of the sun.
Wensleydale from the Roman Road
Day 6
Final day, today we went back to Wensleydale for a walk from the Green Book starting at Aysgarth Falls and taking in Bolton Castle. The Falls are a bit of a disappointment, the approved viewing locations are a little distant from the falls and are rather confined. Richmond falls offer something similar, with slightly peaty-brown water cascading over flat slabs, but with much better access. Bolton Castle, on the other hand is rather impressive, visible on the valley side for many miles it is a solid, square chunk of masonry. It was built for Richard de Scrope in 1379, and is quite substantially intact.
Bolton Castle
The Yorkshire Dales are quite different from the Lake District: the peaks are less peaky, the valleys wider and more gentle, although the moors can be bleak when the wind blows and the clouds come down. There are also a lot of picturesque waterfalls, not in the style of the Lake District which tend to be frenzied plummets down ravines but cascades over broad rocky shelves. Villages like Hawes and Reeth can get quite busy as the day goes by but out walking we scarcely saw a soul. The stone walls are all pierced with small stone stiles, which have been the distinguishing feature of this holiday.
More photos here.
Jul 15 2011
Book review: “In defence of History” by R.J. Evans
I’ve been interested in the history of science for some time, as a result of hanging around with historians on twitter I have been led to historiography – the study of history and its methods. This has brought me to "In Defence of History" by Richard J. Evans. It provides an opportunity to compare the ways of the historian with those of my area of science.
In his introduction Evans makes clear the book is a response to postmodernist criticism of historical practice. I was also amused to note that he cites a source as saying that historians were resistant to philosophising about their subject and criticism of their methods. As a scientist it sometimes feels as if other academic disciplines, such as philosophy and history, are on a crusade to "help" science with their criticism – this has never felt at all supportive or helpful. What this book makes clear is that one shouldn’t lump all such outsiders into one hostile blob!
It becomes clear through the book that postmodernism is not really a single thing. The core is the idea that all things are text, and that an external, objective world is less relevant – this idea originated with linguists and philosophers who were relatively unconcerned with the external world. As a somewhat hostile outsider Evans probably does not provide the best introduction to postmodernism, although he does acknowledge that ideas from postmodernism have been useful in the study of history and historical study.
As a by-product of this defence Evans gives a clear survey of what history is and what it claims to do.
The book begins with a history of history: raising first pre-modern styles of history, such as the chronicle and the morality tale of Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Leopold von Ranke is cited as the father of the modern method, that’s to say the inspection of contemporary documents in the historical record using them to identify causes for historical events and "facts". Here the distinction is made between the primary sources and secondary sources. For Ranke the key subject of history was politics, a view that held sway for many year but more recently has been receding. The key to the historical method therefore is hunting down original documentation and reading it with a mind to its original purpose and the context of other documents of that period with a care not to be caught out by changes in language and unspoken purposes.
Evans also identifies the crisis in history following the First World War, a stark reminder to historians that predicting the future was tricky although Evans does not sign up to the idea that history is at all about predicting the future. There’s an interesting parallel here between Toynbee’s "A study of history" which tried explicitly to make laws of history for predicting the future and Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, which are based on precisely this idea. Predicting future events sets a high barrier for successful prediction, some fields of science face similar challenges such as in seismology – we can say an awful lot about earthquakes but exactly where and when are not amongst the things we can say. For these fields it’s typical to talk about the probabilities of events and the statistics of large numbers of events.
One thing that struck me was the statement that history was a scientific, imaginative and literary exercise, the first two are things that a scientist would sign up to for their own field immediately, but literary? For sciences such as the one I trained in, physics, students are scarcely asked to string words together. Exam questions are largely a case of putting a sequence of calculations together. My own writing is a reflection of this lack of training.
At one point Evans spends time trying to motivate the idea that history is a science, this seems to me an empty discussion – once you’ve decided whether or not history is a science what are you going to do? Put on a labcoat?
Since Ranke’s time history has diversified immensely with the increasing focus on non-political history such as social history and an appreciation of a wider range of themes , I find this liberating since my interest in history is primarily in "people like me", therefore social and scientific, rather than political.
In contrast to any scientific research I know the political beliefs, defined broadly to include race, gender and sexuality, have a strong bearing on historical research with fields driven to support currently political agendas and the political leanings of the researcher a subject of comment. The same goes for nationality with many European historians focused very much on their own nations and with a distorted view of their importance. It’s very difficult to find parallels in scientific research, to stretch a point you can perhaps look at genetic and brain imaging studies of homosexuality. There is a degree to which there exist national styles of scientific research which have varied with place and time but this research driven by the political agendas of the researcher feels alien to a scientist.
When doing battle with the postmodernists the work of a scientist is easier than that of a historian, since ultimately the usefulness of science is measured by tangible outputs, by impact. If postmodernism increases tangible outputs then it is welcomed into the fold, if it doesn’t (and I don’t believe it does) then it isn’t. Science is tied down by reality which is always there for a return visit, with new methods, in case of dispute. History on the other hand is always flowing past, with no chance of return.
An interesting note on style is the forthright criticism of other historians through the book, and also in the afterword where he addresses his critics in detail and at length. This type of writing is rarely seen in science, that’s not to say the thoughts do not exist just that such discussions are left to the bar, or other informal locations.
I found this book immensely thought provoking because it describes the inner workings of history from the point of view of a practioner, making a striking contrast with my own workings as a scientist.
About
I've worked as a scientist for the last 30 years, at various universities, a large home and personal care company, a startup in Liverpool called The Sensible Code Company (formerly ScraperWiki Ltd), GBG and now as a consultant in data science.
I write about:
* the books I have read, typically science and history (or both), partly as a reminder to myself and partly as a review;
* science, things I have done or things I find interesting;
* technology, programming and gadgets;
politics, and current affairs;
* ...and other stuff as it takes my fancy - holidays, photographs and things I want to remember.