Neil Clark

A Labour chancellor called Healey grappling with the public finances amid fears of an economic collapse. Pressure from the right to slash spending, from the left to put the people before the bankers. Politicians generally at that time were more cultured and interesting than today’s equivalents Sounds familiar? Well, actually I’m talking about 1976 not 2026 and Denis Healey, not John.  I suppose I couldn’t have picked a better day to be transported back 50 years to watch The Gang of Three, a wonderful play in which Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland ‘clash over the soul of British socialism and their own relentless ambitions’. But while the economic situation seems more or less the same, the calibre of the politicians is sadly most definitely not.

The World Cup starts in just four days' time, but England games apart, I shan’t be watching. Instead, at the same time that the games are on, I’ll be heading back forty years to rewatch the 1986 Mexico World Cup, courtesy of my old VHS videos. There are plenty of good reasons for diehard football fans to give this year’s tournament a red card. Ignoring the principle that more is less, the tournament has been ludicrously expanded to 48 teams – meaning it’ll drag on for six long weeks. Do we really want to spend three hours of our lives watching Jordan v Austria and Uzbekistan v Colombia in the group stages? What we have this year is an over-bloated greed-fest. Admission to the 1982 World Cup final in Spain cost just £4.15, the top-priced tickets for this one are £24,500.

This is not the piece about the Grand National that I expected to write. I had planned to write one saying how the old magic of the race had gone, that the changes made to it in recent years had removed almost all the drama and the excitement. But let’s be honest. Yesterday’s race was a cracker. It was indeed a ‘throwback’ to the old days especially on the first circuit, when two of the leading fancies (Grangeclare West and Panic Attack) departed early on and other runners were soon separated from their riders. There were loose horses getting in the way, outsiders running huge races and one of those outsiders – the 28-1 shot Jordans – made a valiant dash for glory as the field headed for home.

The famous dictum – that all political lives end in failure- was certainly true of James Callaghan. The man who became Prime Minister exactly 50 years ago today, will be forever associated with the so-called Winter of Discontent – a disastrous wave of strikes in late 1978 and early 1979 which effectively brought down his minority Labour government. This left the door of Number 10 wide open for Margaret Thatcher, who then – according to the dominant narrative – sorted the whole thing out. Indeed, people’s memories of that period – and its vivid imagery of the rubbish piling up high in Leicester Square, and pickets here, there and everywhere – were such that it was nearly 20 years before the electorate trusted Labour to govern again.

Whatever happened to British ecology? I was thinking that when I read two reports in the Times this week, both pretty depressing. The first concerned a new study, based on maps, which suggests that England and Wales have lost almost a third of their grasslands, including wildflower-rich meadows, over the past 90 years. The second was about the ‘catastrophic’ collapse in the number of juvenile salmon in Dorset’s River Frome, described as ‘one of the country’s most important rivers for the species.’ Rivers that had ‘tens of thousands of salmon in the 1980s’ today reportedly have only a few hundred. The head of fisheries at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust was quoted as saying that salmon ‘could disappear from our UK rivers in the next 30 years.

Bank Holidays are like buses- you wait ages for one before they all come along at once. Tomorrow will be our fourth state-mandated day off since the 18th April. It might be another golden opportunity to head to B & Q and buy bags of compost. But isn't it all a bit much? Don’t get me wrong. I love Bank Holidays, and I think we should have more of them. But why do so many of them come in an April and May cluster? After tomorrow we have nothing till late August - and then no more until Christmas. Reinstating Whit Monday would be a welcome affirmation that we are not ashamed of our Christian heritage Why is this? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we substituted the old Whit Monday Bank Holiday, which often fell in June, with a new, secular ‘Late Spring Bank Holiday'.