Getting your fingers dirty

This week: a new dawn for West Yorkshire, and some people who literally drowned in sewage. But first: why don’t the Greens whip?

All the usual newsletter goodies below. Before we get started, though, a quick announcement about something that, in all the excitement¹ of the election campaign, I forgot to mention. The nice people at Substack asked if I’d be interested in mentoring a younger writer as part of the “A Writing Chance” programme it runs in conjunction with New Writing North. The guy I’m working with is the award-winning writer and music producer Matt Taylor, who writes about his experiences of growing up in care, being abandoned by the state at the age of 18, and getting from there to both a career in the music industry and Oxford. Matt is, in a fairly literal sense, awesome, and you’ll be hearing from him via this newsletter soon. In the meantime, though, you should consider subscribing to his own Substack, Underclass Hero:

Now, on with the show. Buckle up, everyone, I’m about to say something sympathetic to the Green Party. 

That shouldn’t really be a surprise. I have, on occasion, voted Green. There are individual Green politicians and activists I rate very highly. And I can get behind the idea of both a force that could stop Labour taking its left flank for granted, and one that can stop the rest of us doing so for our entire planet. The Greens have four MPs now, and are challenging both major parties. That feels like a good thing. 

Lately, though, I’ve been getting increasingly disillusioned with the Green Party of England and Wales.² They complained incessantly about HS2; then, once Rishi Sunak cancelled half of it, they looked sad and complained about that instead. In many areas, they oppose not only housing (which annoys me, but isn’t inconsistent with their entire professed system of values), but also wind turbines or solar farms (which absolutely is).

The party has, in other words, conflated environmentalism (saving the planet) with conservationism (saving that tree over there). Perhaps that is inevitable – all parties are coalitions and, as noted, the Greens are now winning victories in Tory areas too, places where continuity Corbynism is less likely to be popular. But it does raise questions about both the “addressing the climate emergency” and the “keeping Labour honest” functions I was hoping they’d play.

A whole different thing that wound me up arose during the election campaign. The Green Party of England and Wales, we were told, would not whip its MPs, but would instead allow them to make decisions based on their own conscience. This sounds, on the face of it, like a good thing, too – who wouldn’t want an MP that does the right thing instead of kowtowing to the party machine? – but it managed to infuriate me nonetheless, because 

a) it renders the manifesto meaningless, since any office holder who disagrees with any of it can vote however they want, and 

b) it’s obviously a nimby charter. “We support building,” it allows MPs to say, “we just don’t support it here.”

I still think all those things. But, following a chat with a very clever and thoughtful contact in Westminster – not a Green themselves – I’m also feeling ever so slightly more sympathetic.

Consider, my contact suggested, the Brexit wars. In the late 2010s, the GPEW had two parliamentarians: Caroline Lucas, representing Brighton Pavillion in the Commons; and Baroness Jenny Jones of Moulsecoomb in the Lords. The former was pro-European; the latter was passionately not.

Imagine that, at that point, the party had attempted to whip its representatives to vote a particular way on Brexit. Whichever way it went, it seems almost certain that literally half its parliamentary party would have rebelled. It would have immediately made a mockery of the need for a position at all. 

There are six Green parliamentarians now – four MPs, two in the Lords – and even though Brexit is behind us the same problem applies. If a particular vote splits the party, as seems entirely possible, what sanction is available to punish those who defy the whip? You can hardly throw them off the front bench: you’d only be highlighting their rebellion and punishing those who remained with increased workload. Threaten to remove the whip altogether, and the party looks sillier than they do. There are no plum jobs with which to bribe the troublemakers. What’s left?

Better, surely, to spin it as a positive. We don’t whip our MPs to follow the herd. We prize free thinking. It’s called, as one green councillor cheerily opposing a solar farm once told the BBC, democracy.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s called making the best of a situation. If the party was bigger, this refusal to take a position might start looking silly. Then again, if the party was bigger, it wouldn’t have this problem.

Books, books everywhere

Readers who follow me on Instagram will be aware that this was the week I finally addressed the book overflow situation. For some time now, I have had books double stacked or piling up on the dining room table. Last winter, in a fit of exuberance for sorting my life out, among other tasks, I finally bought and built some shelves. 

But then my mental health collapsed, as it is wont to do in the aftermath of bereavement, and the idea of reorganising all my existing book shelves started to seem overwhelming. And so, for the last six months, I’ve lived with both books all over the place and some entirely empty bookshelves, and I’ve acted as if this was entirely normal. Amazing what you can get used to.

Anyway, this weekend I finally cracked, immediately realised I didn’t actually need to reorganise or alphabetise anything, and you know how long it took to sort out? About 45 minutes. I cannot imagine I will learn a single thing from this.

One thing I’ve done with the new shelves is to introduce a shelf for all my books – different editions, translations and so on. This is not interesting for anyone but me, and will probably be immensely off putting to anyone who ever makes it as far as my bedroom to see it, but it does at least give me an excuse to remind you that you can now buy three books with my name on the spine, and that they all make excellent holiday reading.

You can buy my latest – A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps – from  Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops. But why not also buy The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything or Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories (and How Not To Fall For Them) too? You’ll enjoy them, probably.

Right, sales pitch disguised as home decor content over with, let’s get on.

Literally drowning in sewage

“Look at the Thames and know the time for metaphors is over,” read a headline on Marina Hyde’s Guardian column back in April, “our politics is drowning in effluent”. 

Far be it from me to criticise Marina who, at risk of sounding a bit luvvie, is not satisfied with being a brilliant writer but compounds her crimes by also being both lovely and an absolute hoot. In fact, in the text of the column – which concerns the direct line between the failure of water privatisation and the fact that Oxford’s rowing crew was defeated this year not just by Cambridge but by E. coli – she notes that “as metaphors go, it is on the nose in all senses”. This is a classic case of “But I didn’t write the headline, though”. Personally, I blame the subs. 

Nonetheless, the time for metaphors is clearly not over, because “Our politics is drowning in effluent” is a metaphor. Nobody in Britain in 2024 – yet – is actually drowning in sewage. This has not always, in history, been true. 

Consider the Erfurt Latrine disaster of 1184: another event which works unnervingly well as a metaphor, but which did literally involve several dozen of the most senior nobles in medieval Germany literally drowning in sewage. Erfurt today is the capital of the central German state of Thuringia, but for most of the middle ages it was held by the Electorate of Mainz, whose archbishop was one of the seven prince-electors who got to pick the Holy Roman Emperor. It was thus something of an issue for relations between city and emperor that Conrad, the Archbishop of Mainz, and Ludwig, Landgrave³ of Thuringia, hated each others’ guts. 

The reasons why are a bit too Game of Thrones to get into here.⁴ Suffice it to say that there was a feud, and Henry VI, the king who’d later be elected emperor just so long as he kept Conrad sweet, didn’t want there to be. And so, he called everyone involved to Erfurt Cathedral to talk it through.