WHO PLUCKS THE FRUIT IN TORY BRITAIN?

Back in late July this year I published a blogpost: 'WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND YOUR BACK IN A NEOLIBERAL SOCIETY - LOST LANDS OF BRITAIN'. I acknowledged my debt to an article published in the London Review of Books (LRB) on May 23: 'The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain' in which Brett Christophers estimates that the state has sold off 2 million hectares of public land - a tenth of our land mass - since 1979, the value of which at today's prices stands at £400 billion. The social housing component of that total is worth £40 billion - the single most valuable slice of that total sum but still only one-tenth of that extraordinary figure. Here's the link - press here - to take you back to that important and disturbing post.

Sometimes, an image can speak volumes …. a thinking point for you, dear reader.

Around the same time as I was publishing that blogpost, I read a special report in the i newspaper that was headlined: Aristocrat UK: landed gentry's fortunes double (Saturday 20 July 2019). Cahal Milmo's story revealed that Britain's 600 aristocratic families have become as wealthy as they were at the height of the British Empire over the last thirty years and specifically that their fortunes have doubled over the last ten years. In other words, since 2010 and the Tory premierships of Cameron and May - with their imposition of austerity that has seen millions impoverished - the landed elite have been raking in the money. This was material that needed sharing more widely. The links with the economic policy of neoliberalism in Britain require teasing out. Financial deregulation and economic liberalisation have been of huge benefit to these very rich men and women.

Just a reminder of where we've come from - another thinking point for you.

A hereditary title is now worth an average of more than £16 m - nearly twice the value it stood at prior to the global financial crisis of 2008. Since 1979 and the start of the Thatcher years, the value of

GLOBAL CLIMATE STRIKE - 20/09/19 - GOOD AND BAD NEWS

Brace yourself. This post will make for uncomfortable reading. Regular readers will know that my understanding of the world has been shaped by articles that are published in the London Review of Books (LRB) and that I value the opportunity to widen the circulation of these important ideas through the medium of my blog-posts. At the beginning of August, the LRB edition included a review by Francis Gooding of a book by David Wallace-Wells (2019), The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. Here's the bad news:

Marshalling research from all quarters, Wallace-Wells 'paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale'. His focus is on the most direct effects of global warming - hotter temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather, and so on. He reminds us that of the five previous mass extinctions that we now know have occurred on our planet only the most recent was caused by an asteroid. The other four were all due to 'climate change produced by green-house gas'.

Our children are speaking truth to power. 

We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate 'considerably faster' than it took to cause the almost total destruction of complex life in the deadliest of these mass extinctions, 250 million years ago. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that if emissions continue at their present rate, the earth could be warmer by 4.5 degrees C by 2100. Permafrost in the Arctic is already melting, with the potential to release large amounts of methane. Hydrogen sulphide is currently bubbling out of the sea and forming vast organic dead zones of green sulphur bacteria in four hundred identified zones, totalling an area the size of Europe. The oceans are beginning to die.

Our future - their future - their children's future

'Dying Oceans' is one of 12 chapters in which Wallace-Wells analyses what he calls the 'elements of chaos'. Each is dedicated to a particular feature of a warming world, such as:

Crop failure - freshwater shortages - violent and unpredictable weather - leading to greater migration and more wars.

The US military is planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming; so too is China. We are looking at the fantasies of science fiction coming true: end-time resource wars on a dying planet.  

Disaster movie - for real

Everything that happens within our interconnected ecological system has consequences elsewhere. One major wildfire in California can wipe out the emission savings of the entire state for a year. The loss of forests to fire adds to the disaster of worldwide deforestation, a major cause of increasing carbon emissions.

The 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions accepted that  a reduction by 2 degrees C was a 'must-meet target'. This now seems improbable. Overall emissions continue to rise. Wallace-Wells writes: 'We have now already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate systems that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.'

Extinction Rebellion protest during the PM's visit to the Royal Cornwall Hospital - 19/08/2019  

Faced with a planetary-scale crisis that requires urgent action now, the powerful and wealthy elites who govern us are left exposed - and that is why Friday's Global Climate strike is so important. Our children are saying the Emperor has no clothes - he is naked. Stop pretending - and act now.

12 noon - Monday 19 August, 2019 - the PM of the United Kingdom is driven away in convoy from the RCH, Truro as Extinction Rebellion and supporters deliver their message. The protesters never saw him - did he see or hear them? Press coverage of the protest: virtually non-existent.  

What we need - urgently - are vast, co-ordinated programmes of de-carbonisation.

What we have is the former head of British counter-terrorism claiming that Extinction Rebellion represents 'anarchism with a smile'. State security services and corporate interests line up to declare environmental groups a threat. In fact, such groups are in Francis Gooding's words: the 'vanguard of planetary salvation'.

Walls have ears - word got out of the PM's visit - the Extinction Rebellion protest was arranged forthwith - smart work! Supporters of Extinction Rebellion are shown in this image; Rob Donovan, the author, is on the far left …. 

If we are to save ourselves, the IPCC says that global mobilisation on the scale of the second World War will be necessary. This Friday is lighting up the way to such action. JOIN US, PLEASE!   I'm at Lemon Quay in Truro from 10.30 am - google to find the location of your nearest strike for sanity.

Finally, do click this link BY PRESSING HERE to revisit or read for the first time my May blog-post: CLIMATE CHANGE SOS - AND THE ROLE OF A JEREMY CORBYN-LED LABOUR GOVERNMENT

JAGO STONE - THE AMERICAN CONNECTION - PART SIXTEEN

In this blogpost I am sharing the material from the August edition of my Mailchimp Jago newsletter. If you have already seen this, I hope you enjoy refreshing a memory - and there is something new to savour: an image of the Amazon order page for 'The Remarkable Life of Jago Stone' where the book is available for a pre-publication order at £20. Personally, I would take advantage of the pre-publication order at £15 on the Unicorn PG website - Unicorn is my publisher. If you are interested, press here for the link.  

www.unicornpublishing.org/page/detail/The-Remarkable-Life-of-Jago-Stone/?K=9781912690428

AUGUST 2019 - UPDATES ON 'THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF JAGO STONE' - THE BIOGRAPHY

The biography is still waiting in a queue at Unicorn for final edits but the marketing team led by Louise Campbell has been in touch and various avenues are being explored. More on that next month. In this post, I will focus again on yet more Jago discoveries that came to me through cyberspace this past week.  


 The publication date is October 1, 2019

If you know anyone you think might be interested in these mailings about 'Jago' please encourage them to follow the link to my website. Here it is: http://www.robdonovan-author.co.uk/JagoStone-Biography.html They can join you as subscribers - 64 to date. Thank you, Suzannah, for adding your name to the list of subscribers.

You can also use this page to access all my Jago Stone blogs. The blog-posts are also there for your enjoyment - and comments. Press this link here to start accessing these posts:  https://robdonovan.blogspot.com/2019/01/jago-stone-american-connection-part.html

First, a solution to last month's puzzle:
Where was the location of 'The Fox and Hounds' - Jago Stone (1978)?

Tantalisingly, the location of this particular Fox and Hounds remained unclear and so I made my plea for help. 
Trevor Jones, a Jago fan here in the UK who has been helpful before, came up trumps on 25th July when he emailed me with a google link, advising: 'Try this one, Rob'.  I did and it is

JAGO STONE, PRISON REFORM - AND THE MADNESS OF BORIS JOHNSON

The i newspaper published a piece by The Secret Barrister last Wednesday - August 14 - which deserves wider circulation. It has two headlines:

Johnson's plan to lock up more criminals is a con

While the Prime Minister is lying to you, the rest of the criminal justice system rots 

HMP Birmingham in crisis - Lockdown - 1 March 2019

Here is a summary of the main points - and a link to the secret barrister's website: press here.

•  Boris Johnson's plans are a con. He declares: 'Left-wingers will howl. But it's time to make criminals afraid - not the public'. Criminals must 'get the sentence they deserve'. In other

WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND YOUR BACK IN A NEOLIBERAL SOCIETY - LOST LANDS OF BRITAIN

My main source for what follows is a piece by Ian Jack entitled 'Why did we not know?' in which he reviews a new work by Brett Christophers: 'The New Enclosures: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain'. The article was published in the London Review of Books on 23 May 2019. Not for the first time, I have finished reading a piece in the LRB determined to share its important insights at a later date in a blogpost.

People matter which is why I am a socialist. The question of land matters because people matter.

Ian Jack begins his review with a personal story from his family's past about some local land that had been bought from the War Office for property development in Scotland. He comments:
'Nobody thought to wonder why we didn't know who had bought the land …. or who had made money from developing it as a housing estate; or why, as it was public land, owned by the state and therefore indirectly by us, we had never been consulted.'

Our new housing estates are not meeting our national need for affordable housing.  

Such a lack of legitimate questioning has been typical of popular attitudes to the sale of public land. That is the core argument that underpins the work of Brett Christophers. He calculates that the transfer of land from state to private ownership is the biggest of the privatisations that began under

JAGO STONE - THE AMERICAN CONNECTION - PART FIFTEEN

This blogpost begins by recycling stories and images from this month's Mailchimp Jago Newsletter. There are 63 subscribers to date and I'm always happy to see the number of new free subscriptions rise - the Newsletters contain material that I haven't shared before so if you do subscribe you're the first to hear about the latest developments in the Jago story. Here's a link to press to get to the online form for completion. The number of Americans connected with Jago Stone for whom I have either an email address or  a Facebook Message connection now stands at 50. There are a further 84 contacts that fit this bill from the UK.


'In late June this year I sent out a template email to all my Jago contacts, advising them that the biography would be published by Unicorn on October 1 this year. I personalised some with a reference to when the first contact had been made. One of those I emailed was Celia Taylor who is an American lady now living in Pocahontas, Tennessee and the daughter of Upper Heyford American vets. Celia attended the Upper Heyford/Croughton American High School between 1976 and 1978. In December last year, she had left a comment on a Facebook 'Jago' post explaining that her parents had a couple of paintings by Jago - but the lead was not developed at that time.  
On June 24, Celia posted this to me: 
'I visited my dad in March and took some photos of his Jago Stone pics'
 I replied:
'Wow! Just opened up your message before going to bed - thank you so much! I'll be back in touch tomorrow.'

Two pictures appeared through cyberspace. Here they are, in the best photoshop shape I could achieve:

'Ebrington, near Shipston on Stour - Jago Stone (1978)

The Fox and Hounds - Jago Stone (1978)

Tantalisingly, the location of this particular Fox and Hounds remains unclear. Can anyone help, please?

Celia also added that her mum and dad had gifted a third Jago painting - a watercolour of Blenheim Palace - to their other daughter as a wedding gift because she had a picnic in the grounds there on her English wedding day. Maybe, an image of this one too will find its way across the Pond to my screen. We will see.

And so the Jago story has a few more pieces in its jigsaw - and the search continues.

The biography will be published in October but there are more stories and images still out there. That feels exciting.'

So much for the material from the Mailchimp newsletter I published in early July. Since then, though, there have been further developments in the search for the identity and location of 'The Fox and Hounds' depicted by Jago Stone in 1978.

Last Wednesday - July 10, 2019 - Trevor Jones, a Mailchimp newsletter subscriber and reader, emailed me to say he thought the painting showed 'The Fox and Hounds' at Charwelton near Daventry. Trevor had first made contact with me in February this year, sending me this email:

 Hi Rob - hope this photo comes through. My Jago Stone book has this message
in it - maybe someone will remember it. I live in Adderbury Oxon where he painted
many houses one being The Old Wheatsheaf which cost my friend a bottle of scotch . He also painted pictures of my friends pub at Priors Hardwick and was paid with meals. Lino [Pires - the landlord and owner of The Butcher's Arms at Priors Hardwick] loved him and gave us both a mention in his book called Fantastic . Look forward to your own book coming out. Trevor Jones 

The photo that Trevor refers to is this image below - an inscription written by Jago Stone inside a copy of his autobiography called 'The Burglar's Bedside Companion' that was published in 1975.

'For Maureen - & for Des - a few tips in case you are ever redundant - Jago Stone'

Jago had provided his readers with a detailed account of how he worked his trade as a burglar.

As soon as I received Trevor's suggestion of a location, I googled this hostelry and made contact with David the landlord. With the help of a pub regular who is a longstanding resident of Charwelton, we were able to establish that Jago's painting was not in fact that of the Charwelton 'Fox and Hounds'. We are back to square one. The search continues.

Nevertheless, the area around the door and windows in Jago's painting is similar to the Charwelton hostelry. Could it be that Jago was creating an archetypical 'Fox and Hounds' that came from his imagination and memories of all 'The Fox and Hounds' that he had ever encountered?

I would love to receive more suggestions about exactly where is the location of this Jago pub!


With publication of the biography drawing nearer, I thought readers of these American Connection blogposts might find it interesting to learn more about the Oxford connections of the biographer. Upper Heyford is close enough to the dreaming spires to mean that perhaps most USAF veterans will be familiar with the city where I spent three years as an undergraduate and then a decade later six years as a resident, living in Summertown with my wife, Louise.

This link below will take you into a light-hearted exploration of the myths and reality of Oxford through the eyes of a transitional object.

robdonovan.blogspot.com/2019/07/peter-ted-goes-to-his-oxford-gaudy.html

You will have to open the link to find out more but here as a further enticement is a painting of the interior of the famous Sloop Inn in St Ives in Cornwall where we live. The two humans featured are myself and my wife - Rob and Louise. The transitional objects you can see behind us were placed there by the artist who had met them that day. He was none other than Merlin Porter, the Oxford artist and Jago Stone's youngest child, born in 1981. How cool and complex is that!

Detail: 'Rob and Louise and PT and SA in the Sloop' - Merlin Porter (2017)

A fuller story of our connection with Merlin is told in the Jago biography to be published in October. This link below is to a blogpost that I published in 2016 that gives an outline of part of that story.


robdonovan.blogspot.com/2016/04/jago-stone-part-3-weekend-with-artist.html


I hope you have enjoyed these glimpses - do leave a comment and let me know.

SCREWING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE FOR PROFIT - THE MISGOVERNMENT OF UK HOUSING

The Mirror Politics morning briefing is a useful guide to contemporary politics in the UK. Often, I find myself in broad agreement with the writers - although not so in one respect. They are hardly immune from the  mainstream media (MSM) commitment to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist Labour Party. On such matters, I obviously part company. The Mirror Politics morning briefing - and even more so the posts that the SKWAKBOX publishes with the Facebook emails and posts that I receive from Koser Saeed - they, together, give me an alternative take on the presentation of news and 'truth' peddled by the right-wing elements in the press and in television.

This blogpost has been inspired by today's Mirror Politics morning briefing and I acknowledge my debt. You have here the Mirror text as I read it this morning, for the most part. When the wheel is as well-shaped as this, who am I to reinvent it?

'In the end almost every important domestic issue comes back to housing.

If you want to know why the economy is skewed towards the rich, why social mobility has stalled, why opportunities are curtailed and why health inequalities persist it is impossible to discuss any of these themes without reference to housing.

This is one of the wealthiest countries in the world - and one of the most morally bankrupt?

Having a decent home to live in should be a basic right but there are more than one million people on the waiting list for social housing.

Rent takes up 40% of our income on average, the highest in Europe where the average is 28%. This consumes money which could, for instance, be spent on purchasing better quality food. It is no