‘Up for Grabs’ shouted a notice at the ticket office at Sissinghurst. It was not easy to buy a ticket without signing the National Trust’s petition which the slogan advertised: ‘For decades our planning system has protected much loved places from harmful development. Now the government’s reforms turn this on its head, using it primarily as a tool to promote economic growth instead.’ Each signatory then declares: ‘I believe that the planning system should balance future prosperity with the needs of people and places — therefore I support the National Trust’s call on the government to stop and rethink its planning reforms.’ But one of the main ‘needs of people and places’ today is more housing. Why does the National Trust, which has saved so many good houses, endorse the pernicious English view that new houses have to be bad? Why does it not stop obstructing, and instead use its enormous skills and resources to build thousands of handsome houses for people of modest means, adding to our heritage as well as preserving it?
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As the school year starts, the Eton College News and Events reports how the headmaster greeted new boys in 1942: ‘It is my job to induct you into Eton. I didn’t say “welcome” and I didn’t say “Good morning”, because many of you will find this one of the most distressing inductions you will ever undergo. You may have been big pots at your junior schools, but here you are nothing… You may have heard it said that you are here to be prepared for a life of distinction. Not a bit of it. You are here to be kept off the streets during your difficult years. So you will be made to work every hour God gives you. If you are dim, you will be helped over the hurdles. If you are clever, your potential will be assessed and you will be punished if you don’t fulfil it. Your spare time will be spent fagging for older boys, and if you don’t do what they tell you, or any of the staff tell you, you will be punished. But I wish you good luck. You are going to need it.’ I find it genuinely difficult to tell which is worse — the bleakness of this approach to schooling, or the sentimentality of the modern ‘every child is special’ attitude. The old way gave an institutional excuse for unkindness. The new way is a guarantee of disappointment. My one overwhelming feeling is how happy I am that neither I, nor my children, will have to start school ever again.
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I have recently had two contrasting experiences of television. After I wrote a column saying that the left’s analysis of capitalism was sounding dangerously plausible just now, I was invited to appear on BBC Newsnight. I almost always refuse to do this because the programme goes out after I am in bed, but the editor assigned to me, Mark Lobel, was very charming, and before I knew where I was, I had agreed to make a short film. This was exactly what I had wanted to avoid because it means that, instead of just walking into the studio, saying something, and walking out, one has to be filmed knocking on a door, travelling, eating lunch, or whatever. The idea is to impart visual interest to one’s mere words. It took all day to produce about five minutes of film. Mark and the cameraman were delightful, but it was a stupendous waste of time. A few weeks earlier, in California, I was interviewed for the Hoover Institution’s internet channel, Uncommon Knowledge, by its extremely well-informed presenter, Peter Robinson. All I had to do was sit in a studio for about an hour being asked intelligent questions about Margaret Thatcher. The channel then broadcast about 40 minutes of it, in five eight-minute bursts. It got straight to the point. Why this difference? The BBC, having near-monopoly power, uses its guests to do what it wants, and makes us conform to stupid orthodoxies like the idea that talk programmes need more than talk to sustain them. Channels like Uncommon Knowledge, being small, and operating in a free market, realise their best policy is simply to let their guests say more or less what they want. As a viewer, let alone a performer, I prefer the latter approach. It never forgets that television is only a medium, and should therefore mediate, not dictate.
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Violet Naylor-Leyland, the daughter of friends, was recently accosted in a west London street by a Chelsea pensioner driving in the direction of the A4 on a mobility scooter. Did she have a mobile phone? She did. Could she please ring the AA and tell them that his scooter was running out of batteries? She did. ‘Madam, whether he’s a member or not,’ said the AA, after some discussion, ‘we don’t have a breakdown service for mobility scooters.’ In that case, said the old man, please could Violet send for his nurse to come and fetch him. When she protested that she didn’t have her number, he suddenly produced two mobile phones, hitherto concealed, from the pockets of his uniform, and asked Violet to ring the number programmed in. Mr X’s nurse was surprised to hear he was ‘heading for Reading’. She was unable to sally out, and so asked if Violet could leave the scooter and bring Mr X back. Violet decided that the scooter should not be left alone, and so took Mr X and his scooter to her nearby flat to wait for her boyfriend to return and drive Mr X back to the Royal Hospital. Mr X sat on his scooter and he and Violet chatted. But her boyfriend did not show up, and she had a deadline to meet, so she got Mr X into a cab to Chelsea, and tried to compose her cover story for a New York online magazine perched on the scooter, until the boyfriend arrived to help move it. Four days later, a charming letter arrived from the Captain of Invalids, thanking Violet. Mr X, it said, ‘is 91 years old and became somewhat disoriented on his return from a shopping trip. The result of this incident has highlighted the fact that although Mr X has been independent until now, perhaps it is time he realised his limitations.’ All this coincided with the riots, and therefore seemed particularly touching.
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