Niall Gooch

The classic book The Railway Children contains several episodes that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern children. None perhaps are more shocking to the modern mind than the incident where some public schoolboys on a cross country run are directed through a tunnel on a working public railway. Unsurprisingly, this does not end well, with one of the boys – Jim – breaking his leg and almost being hit by a train. We must ask whether more rules are always the right response to these kind of tragedies If I remember correctly, there is little hint in the novel of anybody regarding the decision to let the boys run through the tunnel as a bad thing in and of itself, which is even more remarkable given that the author Edith Nesbit was a prominent and vocal social reformer.

Most law students in the English-speaking world will have come across R v Dudley and Stephens, from 1884, which established the precedent that necessity is not a defence for murder. The case has a particular grisly attraction, as the defendants were sailors who had resorted to cannibalism after being cast adrift on a lifeboat for nearly three weeks. Such scenarios, though rare, had occurred at sea before, and with public opinion apparently favourable to Messrs Dudley and Stephens, they were finally sentenced to only six months in prison. Strong taboos against cannibalism have been widely shared in sophisticated societies throughout recorded history. However, as the New Scientist pointed out this week, they have not been universal.

In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing philosophy in the US. ‘The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ He was giving voice to a venerable, and continuing, strain in left-liberal thought which regards conservatism as little more than incoherent grumbling about inevitable and irresistible change. In this view, such change is, naturally, best managed by those clever, mature left-liberals.

From time to time, a would-be edgy Tweeter or columnist will shock us all by stating or suggesting that the boring white people who until the last third of the twentieth century made up almost the entire population of the United Kingdom, have no real culture to speak of. There is a twofold implication to this rhetorical ploy: that indigenous Britons should fall on their knees in eternal gratitude for the hitherto unknown liveliness and dynamism of the various diaspora communities who have made their homes here, and also that the demand that newcomers integrate into our way of life is meaningless because there is nothing into which the new Britons can integrate.

This week the BBC interviewed the last of the Few. Group Captain John Hemingway, 104, is apparently the only remaining RAF pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain. This brings home how long ago the second world war was. The year the war broke out, 1939, is closer to the battle of Gettysburg than today. There is a tangible sense in modern Britain of something ancient and grand slipping away, to be replaced by something shinier, louder, and more comfortable, but also shallow and brittle For people of my age, this chronological distance has sometimes been obscured by the war remaining, until quite recently, a powerful cultural presence in British life.

The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the chief antagonist in the most recent James Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international skulduggery is known as Athelstan; a former City trader with a Kentish accent, he espouses a boisterous, saloon-bar English nationalism of the kind usually ascribed to the former Ukip leader. The men drawn to Athelstan’s scheme are preposterous caricatures of the kind of people whom Higson dislikes – i.e. people who have any kind of reservations about any aspect of progressive politics The author, Charlie Higson, has had a certain amount of commercial success with his Young Bond novels.

Two or three years ago, the Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was ridiculed for describing himself as ‘someone who grew up on Dad’s Army and Porridge and loves those traditional programmes of the past’, even though he was born in 1990. The suggestion was that if you weren’t old enough to vote when Tony Blair left office, then it was rather strange to retain a fondness for sitcoms which completed their original runs in the late seventies. This is not right, however. I know from personal experience that if you were raised in a household with traditional media tastes then even an eighties and nineties childhood – before the fragmentation of audiences driven by digital TV and the internet – could leave you with an enduring affection for the classic shows and personalities of a previous era.

What a strange document the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket (ICEC) has produced, in its ‘Holding up a mirror to cricket’ report. Rambling, explicitly political, antagonistic and poorly-argued, it ignores some obvious explanations for the ills it discusses, and fixates on irrelevancies. The authors situate their conclusions within the world of intersectionality and other well-worn academic buzzwords. This limits the usefulness of its conclusions because every problem is shoehorned into a particular framework, rather than being carefully considered on its own terms. Take, for example, the identification of a severe decline in cricket participation by black Britons.

Almost as soon as Charles III acceded to the throne last September, we began to hear whispers and speculation about what exactly his coronation would look like. Many of these stories were alarming to traditionally-minded people. The King wants a slimmed-down ceremony, with less flummery and fewer fancy costumes, insisted those ever-available knowledgeable insiders. Others fretted about his long-ago musing that he would like to be Defender of Faith, not Defender of The Faith (an important definite article, that). A few months ago, it was reported that the coronation procession would feature NHS key workers and representatives of the ‘Windrush generation’, those two mythic cornerstones of the implied national refounding in the years after the second world war.