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Post by Adam in Stroud on May 20, 2020 18:43:52 GMT
I have more friends who are or have been Labour politicians than I do Conservatives. I am not as tribal as you may think. Friendship trumps politics and we can agree to disagree. High culture trumps anything, as does involvement in the arts. I do have a thing about LDs I confess. Have had very few LD friends or associates. The fact is I did not know John was a Liberal. Probably an old style National Liberal like my Dad? Arlott was actually a proper campaigning radical. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01944rfIndeed, I thought that was pretty well-known, especially due to his role in the D'Oliveira affair |
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Post by yellowperil on May 20, 2020 20:03:06 GMT
There, a Liberal parliamentary candidate who was very much Carlton's sort of chap. One does have to wonder how that is possible. Did Carlton ever catch up with him on some of his more controversial contributions to Any Questions? I of course cheered those on- did Carlton? I have more friends who are or have been Labour politicians than I do Conservatives. I am not as tribal as you may think. Friendship trumps politics and we can agree to disagree. High culture trumps anything, as does involvement in the arts. I do have a thing about LDs I confess. Have had very few LD friends or associates. The fact is I did not know John was a Liberal. Probably an old style National Liberal like my Dad? I find that quite amazing. Apart from his two goes as a high profile parliamentary candidate (1955 and 1959, I think) and the fact that he was a regular and fairly controversial panellist on Any Questions, I would say he was probably the most widely known Liberal in the country in the 50's and 60' s apart from the obvious parliamentarians and as you might well observe there weren't too many of them. This was an era when I was still in (sort of) the Labour Party but there were a number of Liberals I admired (and yes, some I definitely didn't, which is why I never joined the Liberal Party). Arlott I always thought was one of the good guys. |
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Post by finsobruce on May 20, 2020 20:59:53 GMT
I have more friends who are or have been Labour politicians than I do Conservatives. I am not as tribal as you may think. Friendship trumps politics and we can agree to disagree. High culture trumps anything, as does involvement in the arts. I do have a thing about LDs I confess. Have had very few LD friends or associates. The fact is I did not know John was a Liberal. Probably an old style National Liberal like my Dad? I find that quite amazing. Apart from his two goes as a high profile parliamentary candidate (1955 and 1959, I think) and the fact that he was a regular and fairly controversial panellist on Any Questions, I would say he was probably the most widely known Liberal in the country in the 50's and 60' s apart from the obvious parliamentarians and as you might well observe there weren't too many of them. This was an era when I was still in (sort of) the Labour Party but there were a number of Liberals I admired (and yes, some I definitely didn't, which is why I never joined the Liberal Party). Arlott I always thought was one of the good guys. Famously when he went to South Africa and was asked on the form to fill out his race he wrote in "human". He was quite prominent in the early campaigns against apartheid. |
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Post by carlton43 on May 20, 2020 21:18:35 GMT
I have more friends who are or have been Labour politicians than I do Conservatives. I am not as tribal as you may think. Friendship trumps politics and we can agree to disagree. High culture trumps anything, as does involvement in the arts. I do have a thing about LDs I confess. Have had very few LD friends or associates. The fact is I did not know John was a Liberal. Probably an old style National Liberal like my Dad? I find that quite amazing. Apart from his two goes as a high profile parliamentary candidate (1955 and 1959, I think) and the fact that he was a regular and fairly controversial panellist on Any Questions, I would say he was probably the most widely known Liberal in the country in the 50's and 60' s apart from the obvious parliamentarians and as you might well observe there weren't too many of them. This was an era when I was still in (sort of) the Labour Party but there were a number of Liberals I admired (and yes, some I definitely didn't, which is why I never joined the Liberal Party). Arlott I always thought was one of the good guys. Yes. I too listened every week to Ted Leather, Ralph Weightman (what timing and what an accent), Lady Barnet and John and thought of them as characters and polemicists, and, yes, entertainers, much more than partisans and party spokesmen. It is all long ago but they seemed to deliver personal experience and personal views far more than do the on-message, rehearsed and briefed poltroons we get today. There was a better spirit and a lighter more informal touch to it. And, No, I have no recollection of him being a Liberal or a politician at all. The concept 'Liberal' hardly crossed my mind at all then. There were only 6, in odd places I had never been too, and they seemed like an odd eccentricity hanging over from a previous age when they did mean something! And now 50-years later, they seem like ........................ ................................................ Well. You can finish the sentence yourself. |
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Post by yellowperil on May 21, 2020 6:30:06 GMT
I find that quite amazing. Apart from his two goes as a high profile parliamentary candidate (1955 and 1959, I think) and the fact that he was a regular and fairly controversial panellist on Any Questions, I would say he was probably the most widely known Liberal in the country in the 50's and 60' s apart from the obvious parliamentarians and as you might well observe there weren't too many of them. This was an era when I was still in (sort of) the Labour Party but there were a number of Liberals I admired (and yes, some I definitely didn't, which is why I never joined the Liberal Party). Arlott I always thought was one of the good guys. Yes. I too listened every week to Ted Leather, Ralph Weightman (what timing and what an accent), Lady Barnet and John and thought of them as characters and polemicists, and, yes, entertainers, much more than partisans and party spokesmen. It is all long ago but they seemed to deliver personal experience and personal views far more than do the on-message, rehearsed and briefed poltroons we get today. There was a better spirit and a lighter more informal touch to it. And, No, I have no recollection of him being a Liberal or a politician at all. The concept 'Liberal' hardly crossed my mind at all then. There were only 6, in odd places I had never been too, and they seemed like an odd eccentricity hanging over from a previous age when they did mean something! And now 50-years later, they seem like ........................ ................................................ Well. You can finish the sentence yourself. How different your recollection is from mine, but then your recollections from the era we are talking about ( high point is probably mid to late 50's) will be pretty juvenile , won't they- in 1955, say, I was 16 and politically very aware, but you I think would have been only 12, at that point that's a pretty significant age gap. I also attended quite a few of those progammes from in the audience, not just hearing it on the "wireless"- many of them were set near my home,not "odd places" at all! Ralph Wightman (and it was Wightman not Weightman) was intended as the comic relief I think and I always regarded him as the complete poltroon, together with that transparently fake Dorset accent (transparent to anyone who lived among the real thing, anyway). They used to alternate Wightman with Street (AG-he famously didn't have real names) who was just marginally less of an idiot than Wightman.Ted Leather was better than that but a pretty typical Tory politician and I certainly remember him , usually to disagree strongly. Isobel Barnett I don't remember on this though I think I knew she did some- pretty fluffy and lightweight I would have thought. Interestingly I don't remember the Labour representatives from that era, at a time when I was definitely Labour. The other person I remember from that era , and certainly from one programme I was actually present for making a huge impression, was Violet Bonham-Carter, who was one more of the few high-profile Liberals of the time. I hope you aren't going to say you didn't know the Bonham-Carters were Liberals! |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on May 21, 2020 7:49:43 GMT
I think carlton43 was quite clear that he admired Arlott as "an accomplished poet, editor, critic and writer; plus a considerable expert on fine wines" - the politics to him is incidental or irrelevant to that. I can admire the songwriting of John Lennon or the comedy of Frankie Boyle without sharing their politics. Are you leftie cricket fans unable to admire Ian Botham because he is a Conservative? Should us conservatives upbraid you if you did as if he is our personal property? Well perhaps Arlott himself would share this approach - he said during the Cambridge Union debate on politics and sport, "It is political commitment and political belief that can make a man think that his opponent's views are so obnoxious that he will abstain from playing any game with him as a protest against what the other man believes. Any man's political commitment, if it is deep enough, is his very personal philosophy and it governs his whole way of life, it governs his belief, and it certainly governs the people with whom he is prepared to mix." This is almost a prototype of the 'cancel culture' we see today. In my experience it is very much a more common attitude on the left of politics on the right, born of a sense of moral superiority. carlton43's position seems to be that he will view a person in the round, consider all their qualities and attributes with their political beliefs being only a trivial consideration if a consideration at all. For you on the other hand the political stance is everything with any positive qualities negated by an incorrect opinion. I'd invite the reader to judge which of these is the more juvenile.. |
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Post by yellowperil on May 21, 2020 8:13:08 GMT
If that "you " is directed at me, it is a travesty of where I actually stand, a made-up version of your own creation. On the IT Botham question, I can admire the approach to cricket, and all those walking ventures etc, and raise the odd eyebrow at some of his political beliefs, and it is interesting that Arlott and Botham could be such close personal friends. I came close once to having a personal connection to ITB- I taught cricket for a while in the secondary modern school where Botham was a pupil just a few yeas later, so we nearly overlapped! Incidentally, I don't think it's true that carlton43 was viewing Arlott "in the round "- he just picked on a few bits of him where he could agree and simply hadn't noticed his liberalism which was a pretty huge wrong reading of the man, as you , given the quote you have just used, must be very aware. |
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Post by carlton43 on May 21, 2020 9:19:10 GMT
Those two immediate past posts are illustrative of the different approaches to the whole of life of two stands of Englishness. yellowperil is correct to say that I had quite missed out on Arlot being political and not associating him with the Liberals at all. I didn't. I liked the accent, the attitude to life and the centrality (as I then saw it) of basing a life round a core of wine, literature, cricket, and companiable living; and I thought that was a model to be admired and if possible copied. Pete Whitehead is correct to make the pertinent emphases that he does. It is a telling difference between those where the core of assessment is theory and politics based, and those where it is 'way of life' and cultural interests based. I had not seen and still don't see Arlott as in any way a political figure at all, because that part of him was not important to me; not because I was young in 1955 nor ignorant, nor uncaring: It just didn't matter to me. I had the same mental relationship with the philosopher and broadcaster Brian Magee, who happened to be 'of the left' and a sometime Labour MP; and with Glenda Jackson, a superb actress with a most distinctive voice, and an ability to nuance roles and characterisations, but was also of the firm left and long time Labour MP. I am able to completely factor-out parts of a life that are not central to me and that do not affect my perception of their other qualities. It is not ignorance nor lack of awareness, nor a complication in my assessment of them. I am not 'in their heads', nor leading their lives. I don't have to be aware or to care at all, because that does not matter to me. Surely this is easy enough to understand, as it is with veganism, sexuality, religion and taste in art? Those sides are parts of the person and one may be aware and not care or not even notice, until and unless the features become so strong as to cloud the relationship altogether? I can overlook Picasso and Schiele their treatment of women, Caravaggio's brutality and murders, the politics of Pound and Wyndham Lewis, with near complete indifference; but the relgiosity of Blake, the idiocy of Grayling, and the nonsense of Izzard have put each well beyond tolerance for me. |
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Post by Andrew_S on May 21, 2020 18:11:24 GMT
I wish I'd heard John Arlott doing live cricket commentary but I didn't become interested in the game until the summer of 1990. I think the fact that I did become interested in it was almost entirely down to Richie Benaud's style of commentary on BBC television.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Dec 13, 2022 21:49:06 GMT
2019 Notional result on new boundaries | Con | 29319 | 54.4% | | Lab | 15290 | 28.3% | | LD | 6550 | 12.1% | | Grn | 2102 | 3.9% | | Oth | 677 | 1.3% |
| | | | Majority | 14029 | 26.0% |
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