Not that “putting down the country” means the same thing to all people. I’m sure we could argue with Michael Gove long into the night about each of those words, not least “country” which descends quickly into mythologies ancient and modern. According to reports, the government wants to tackle what they call “non-violent extremism” and that begins with a blanket descriptor which states that “Extremism is the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values”.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? One person’s non-violent extremist is another person’s David Walliams… or Holly Willoughby… or that Hairy Biker who has started to wear cravats. 

Where will these lines be drawn? With a day of clapping for Greg Wallace? Buttering up an Archbishop? Cheering the UK’s entry to the next Eurovision? Not to disrespect our king but will we atheists be forced to ask God to save him? Isn’t it time somebody asked Adrian Chiles to write a column about it? We need answers, ideally in a loosely argued 300-word “column” for The Guardian.

Not that any of this has been explicitly announced. For the moment, it exists in the Vale of Rumours, in the Shadow of What-Might-Yet-Be, the Brownfield Site of Idle Speculation. The government response to the report was to simply say “we keep our approach to tackling extremism under review to ensure it meets the evolving challenge it poses.”

And yet…

And yet there’s always an “and yet”.

The “and yet” amounts to a gnawing sense of the inevitable. The direction of travel has been clear for some time. Satire – the very stuff of talking down the government and, they would like us to believe, the country – might not be dead, but a concerned crowd stands over its prostrate body as we try to force some oxygen into its failing lungs.

Breathe damn you! I won’t let you go out like this!

Where does fair criticism end and “undermining the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values” begin? We can’t even agree on the big issues like what democracy and free speech look like. We can’t even agree about poppies.

Private Eye was widely condemned this past month for a cover which some saw as a suitably satirical response to the ongoing situation in Israel. Others were outraged and thought it unconscionable. Around the same time, The Guardian sacked its cartoonist, Steve Bell, for what seemed like his dozenth offence. This time he’d portrayed the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cutting the shape of Israel into his chest using scalpel and whilst wearing boxing gloves. Bell explained it was a reference to a classic cartoon by David Levine in which President Lyndon Johnson is seen showing off a scar in the shape of Vietnam. As Bell describes it, he’d sent the cartoon to the paper and then “four hours later… I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangely cryptic message ‘pound of flesh’…” 

The cartoon had reminded somebody of The Merchant of Venice and that tenuous logic was enough to make Bell guilty of antisemitism. By the same measure, one can suppose he was also guilty of making jokes about black culture, rape, and people with facial tattoos since the boxing gloves were clearly a reference to Mike Tyson…

And the left glove did look like my Uncle Wilfred without his teeth in, which on a personal level I found deeply offensive…

The climate is censorious, but it might well be worse than that. The party that once mocked Tony Blair’s nanny statism has itself become deeply prescriptive and even more proscriptive. Mere disagreements are escalated, rival opinions deemed heresy. Nobody is supposed to expect the Spanish Inquisition but these days it’s a daily occurrence. It suits the government who clearly believe the next election will be won (or partially saved) by demonising its critics for daring to believe in – wait for it – “something else”.

This is new to our politics. It’s unwelcome. It also feels so… unpatriotic. 

After all, what defines us better than our ability to talk down our nation? Isn’t it what we’re good at? It’s a defining British characteristic. Anybody taking the citizenship test should be tested not on their knowledge on which king ran which flag up which flagpole but on their ability to sound jaded about the size of eggs, the weather, the BBC, the strange bit of fuzz on Gary Lineker’s chin, the restoration of the Palace of Westminster, the diminished quality of hedgerows, the arrogance of farmers blocking footpaths, the pestilence of bagged dogsh*t hanging from trees, cyclists, cycle lanes, the lack of cycle lanes, Marmite, the quality of chocolate (no, I won’t take back what I said about Caramac), and any manner of mild irritants (cough, Jeremy Vine). If you can’t complain about LadBaby and the dire Christmas Number One, then you shouldn’t hold a passport. 

Give us your poor befuddled masses, especially if they have a snarky side…

Our government needs to remember what fuels a big part of this nation and it’s not bouncing through Hampshire meadows and deploying heroic couplets about Fiona Bruce. I write this sitting in Manchester, a great city (and let’s agree it’s the real capital of the UK given the cultural vibes and lower cost of living), where every street corner looks like the cover of a Smiths album, and every guttural vowel sounds like a single by The Fall. In fact, I was reading about Gove’s plans this morning while listening to The Fall and it felt like one was throwing heavy shade on the other. It made me wonder how many of our great bands and artists would survive a crazy political stunt designed to put a scarlet letter on those who badmouth the country.

Listening to Mark E. Smith’s version of Jerusalem made me doubt if The Fall would pass that test.

I became a semi-autistic type person
And I didn’t have a pen, and I didn’t have a condom
It was the fault of the government
I think I’ll emigrate to Sweden or Poland
And get looked after properly by a government

How’s that for a bit of “undermining”? But even Blake’s Jerusalem as popularised by Edward Elgar’s music is different things to different people: sung at Labour Party conferences, a favourite at The Last Night of the Proms, as well as being one of those tunes often cited by English politicians as being the embodiment of patriotic zeal. It is all those things whilst being none of those things.

What this government calls “undermining” might also be a healthy cynicism towards government, conventions, and the status quo. Mike E. Gove would be better served to put down his Edward Thomas and listen to some Mark E. Smith for a more grounded sense of the people and places he is meant to be levelling up.

O’er grassy dale, and lowland scene
Come see, come hear, the English Scheme
The lower-class, want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags
The clever ones tend to emigrate

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@DavidWaywell

Take this past weekend when the world adopted the posture of a 1950s scream queen: wide-eyed and knuckles to teeth in abject terror at the possibility that aliens were visiting our planet.

These aliens, we were told, had arrived in slow-moving balloons, the size of a small car, constructed from a high-tech material that miraculously disappeared the moment it was hit by a $400,000 AIM-9X sidewinder missile. But that was not all. So advanced were these “balloons” that their slow speed and fragility made it hard for even F22s to lock onto their targets. Harder too for any aircraft to move slowly enough to deal with the threat.

I think I see it… Oh I can see… Whoosh… Where did it go!?

The aliens were so advanced that they’d realised that the answer to the problem of speed was… wait for it… slowness! They’d crossed the vast interstellar distances in something the size of a Dacia Sandero driving at the speed of a moderate westerly breeze (well, plus a jet stream or two) only to see their mission blasted out of the sky somewhere over a Canadian goose reserve. How is ordinary human intelligence meant to defeat such an advanced civilization? AI can’t come soon enough to take over from us.

Now, of course, not everybody was hyperventilating about an alien invasion. Sober voices were explaining that if it walks like a balloon and quacks like a balloon then in all likelihood it is a balloon. And that was the only bit of this whole narrative that made any sense. These objects were moving from west to east, which would mean they happened to follow the natural atmospheric pattern for the northern hemisphere. They were also balloons with no obvious means of propulsion. It was extremely unlikely that, as some reports suggested, they were moving as though under power and making sharp right turns. Much more likely they were being propelled erratically by local wind currents.

The biggest clue was that these sightings came after America had already detected, photographed, and eventually downed a Chinese spy balloon. In response, NORAD has increased the sensitivity of their systems to detect smaller objects. This change was likely to have resulted in lots of false positives and no sooner was the change made than the system started to spot sky debris. F22s were essentially being sent up to do the work of high-tech Wombles, blasting trash out of the sky. And let’s not overlook the fact that there is a lot of rubbish up there. America is a large country, with many weather stations, schools, universities, and – almost uncountable – hobbyists, Youtubers, pranksters, and merely the curious messing around with weather balloons. The only surprise was that we didn’t get any reports of an F22 taking out Jake Paul floating at 30,000 feet in his patio chair.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, was caught between a rock and a hard place. No sooner had Biden’s military chiefs said there was no military or intelligence reason to down the Chinese balloon near populated areas than Republicans called him out for passivity in the face of Chinese aggression – happy to ignore the fact that these incursions have apparently been happening for years but had not been spotted under the previous administration. Biden then ordered that the balloon be shot down once it was safe to do so. Republicans then called him trigger-happy and asked why he was using expensive sidewinders on balloons. Maybe they thought he could just use a pin on a very long stick.

How ludicrous all this was never seemed to strike anybody. Nor did it seem to factor into the thinking inside the White House which appeared flat-footed when it came to shutting down the speculation around an alien invasion. The downed balloons were leaving little debris, or debris in hard-to-reach places in the middle of winter. As crazy as it sounds – and it does sound crazy – it’s as though they needed that little bit of balloon fabric with a label that read “Made in China / Machine Washable at 40°C” before they would conclusively rule out aliens. And, so, the Biden administration refused to comment, leaving a huge space for wild conjecture. (Yet if it had mistakenly ruled out aliens, any later announcement about a real invasion would have given them bigger headaches than dealing with the minor political pushback about their earlier denial. So why not just rule it out and stop all the ridiculous speculation?)

Meanwhile, over on this side of the pond (about 140 hours flying time at the speed of a UFO), the UK government reacted perhaps exactly how you would expect a sensible government to react: it issued assurances that the skies are being monitored and our defences would be reviewed in light of that. Reasonable talk even if the media were beginning to sound hysterical. Chinese balloons would need to travel nearly entirely around the globe before passing over us. Besides, does China need spy balloons over the UK when they apparently already own all CCTV cameras across the country (“Surveillance watchdog issues starkest warning yet over security risks posed by devices and drones built in Beijing that are used by Britain’s police forces”, Daily Mail, 15 February)?

The absurdity of the week belies some serious issues. China is being provocative in a way they would argue mirrors America’s belligerent attitude towards Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. It is a false equivalency to say that America’s insistence that they are navigating international waters is in any way comparable to China’s insistence that they can’t tell a balloon where to go. But China is playing a game whose ultimate goal might not be entirely about intelligence gathering.

If they were looking to give Western officials many late hours, cost America a small fortune in responding to a negligible threat, learn a little about America’s defences, but also cause widespread fear, paranoia, as well as increase misinformation and suspicion of Western institutions, then they achieved their goals.

Everybody has been made to look a bit silly this past week, except for any alien actually up there monitoring us. They sensibly kept their heads down. All seven of them.

Klaatu barada nikto.

Follow David on Twitter: @DavidWaywell

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If 2021 was the Chinese Year of the Ox, here in the UK it was the Year of the Intemperate Mule when we all argued over anything and everything and then stubbornly did it all again. Though it was always theorised that we might agree on Covid or passports or the art of taking the knee, of course, we never did. Then there were trans rights and bathrooms and who should be the next James Bond…

Whether you were for Idris Elba, Henry Cavill, JK Rowling, Greta, Piers (Corbyn or Morgan), Lawrence Fox… 

“The name’s Mogg. Jacob Rees Mogg?”

Whatever your poison, it’s time to pass the bottle and let’s drink to your health!

‘Tis not the season to be “doing your research” so I really won’t labour the point. I hope you have a very Merry Christmas, you and your loved ones. We can then agree not to mention masks or vaccines or the small matter of “following the science”. You already know where I stand (or currently lie) on “Working From Home” and if you stand or lie differently… Well, it’s Christmas, so have a good one!

We don’t even need to argue anymore about Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen’s last lap or the state of English cricket, right and wrong (but mostly wrong). Our footballers came close, and anything else remains an argument for next year’s World Cup. Just enjoy a joyful holiday and wait to hear what’s the Christmas Number One. And then, if you still want to argue, I’m sure there’ll be time after the turkey but before the Queen at three. Just be sure to restrict our disagreements to the music and not Elton’s position on abortion or the Elgin Marbles or whether Quidditch is a politically correct sport. Leave those problems to stew where they are. There’s a whole year not yet opened and due to be delivered in just seven days. 

And if we do settle back to watch some TV, let’s not argue if GB News is news or, if you’re so inclined, wonder the same about the BBC. Just let Santa weave his magic without questioning why, or how much tax he pays, where he pays it, and how he could save the world if he ever put his magical reindeers to better use. Even if you have a good point to say, perhaps don’t say it. It’s just not the festive way.

And if somebody does stupidly mention the ‘B-word’ over the next two weeks, let’s just bite our lips. We’ve had 350 days to reach an agreement and never once did. It’s unlikely to start now so let’s sing a carol instead or pull a cracker or strain a wrist on a Brazil. Do anything but talk about trade deals. Not till 2022. 

And then, no doubt, we’ll debate Liz Truss in January and probably February and even into March, if she lasts. And as for Boris (the other B-word) let’s hope that he takes a back seat for two weeks, though he’ll probably return after Boxing Day. He’ll be either too early or too late (depending on your point of view) to lock us all down again, but now isn’t the time to argue that point. I know the temptation is to say more, but I won’t if you won’t. It’s Christmas, for goodness’ sake!

And if all of this means putting Christmas back into Christmas, then you’ll get no argument from me about whether it was ever missing in the first place. We have the whole of next year to argue about the words that annoy. So, let’s have no cultural Marxism this Christmas. No Antifa under the tree. No snowballs or gammon or cancelling either you or me. Let’s put the silence back into “Silent Night” and enjoy a very merry holiday. 

Happy Christmas! The Culture War is over!

At least till 2022.

McCullin was the first photographer whose work pulled me into street photography, which is why I’d also hope to have a decent camera in my pocket (my trusty old cheap Fuji died recently). I’m no more than a flâneur when it comes to photography, but I love the challenge and surprise of finding interest in the ordinary. Give me something unbalanced and askew by Daido Moriyama or Garry Winogrand over any well-composed banality. On that basis, Liverpool isn’t a great city to engage in street photography. The centre where you find all the people is too clean, the grubby historic parts too empty. Manchester, by contrast, has a vibe closer to that of London. It’s an uglier and less friendly city, but easier to lose yourself in, though increasingly plagued by security guards patrolling the privately owned public spaces.

I’d probably hit my favourite spots on the waterfront first. This is where I took one of my favourite pictures a few years back (I can’t explain it, beyond it’s weird and makes me smile). I’d then head back into Liverpool One shopping centre and go to Waterstones for coffee, books and maybe a sneak peek of the photos I’ve taken. After that, if my legs could handle it, I’d head across to the Walker Art Gallery, take another break in the new library, and then head back to Lime Street for the hour-long journey home.

Like I said: it’s a humble plan but, given the year I’ve been having, it is as ambitious as it is unlikely.

Things to do:

Visit the Tate Liverpool

And see the Don McCullin exhibition; more than 200 photographs of Liverpool, the north and international conflict, captured over the last 60 years. The exhibition runs until 5 September 2021.

Explore the funfair

The funfair on the waterfront around the Royal Liver Building is always good for some kitsch in summer. Taking pictures around there makes me feel a bit like Bruce Gilden photographing Coney Island.

Take a break at the Liverpool Central Library

Originally opened in 1860 and later bombed during the Second World War, the newest reconstruction is a five-story building with a domed atrium.

George Kent is no Brando, though given the most famous attempt to impeach a president was Watergate, it seemed fitting that the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs does resemble Hal Holbrook who played “Deep Throat” in the film adaptation of Watergate’s most famous book. Kent walked into the committee room on Wednesday wearing a bow tie and a suit complete with waistcoat and a breast pocket handkerchief. He looked out of place in a room dominated by the rigid TV suits that characterise American politics. Here was a man markedly different and easy for an audience to read. It suddenly made sense that the impeachment process is now going public. We would have faces to attach to facts, archetypes to associate with a story. Here, it seemed to say, is a real expert on Eastern Europe and he even wears a bow tie.

Next to him sat Ambassador William Taylor who would provide the gravitas. America’s news networks had made much of his not-quite Geoffrey Robinson levels of baritone, but they were right. When he spoke, people listened. This wasn’t going to be the underwhelming performance that characterised the last days of the Mueller Report. Say what you like about the Special Counsel’s service to his country but Robert Mueller’s performance on the Hill had given the nation a collective nap. Chair of the committee, Adam Schiff, was right to start with these two men. Between them, Taylor and Kent were to provide a health tonic to the sugar-rush of this presidency. Their testimony wasn’t thick with the dumb labels that have come to define the debate. There would be no “fake news” and “corrupt media”. There was none of the “bullshit”, “bastard” and “son of bitch” that has come to define presidential language in recent weeks. These were intelligent men, offering sharp responses and precise meanings. Dates flowed as easily as the geopolitics.

It was beyond impressive. It was affirming. The overriding sense one had was to thank God these people are on our side. They are the serious people who staff the Foreign Office in London and the State Department in Washington and, if our countries are great, it’s not because Rod Stewart has slept with a googolplex of women or that Marlon Brando made a million for however many tortured seconds he endured in Superman The Movie. It’s because Stewart makes model railways and Brandon lived a second life as an inventor and amateur radio enthusiast. It’s because men like George Kent understand why it’s in American’s national interest to aid Ukraine and can explain why America is leaning into Russia on the Ukraine border.

Given all the talk of headcounts in the Senate and a Republican party hostage to Trump, it’s too easy to think this impeachment is merely about the game of politics. Watergate was a domestic incident that was largely confined to the political sphere. There were the famous dark arts, the so-called “ratfucking”, which amounted to juvenile pranks straight out of fraternity culture. Yet there was nothing truly malicious in what they did. Nixon retained enough honour at the end to walk away and spare his nation the prolonged scandal. Even the Clinton impeachment was about bodily juices in the Oval Office. He lied, it’s true, but arguably for the same reasons that many people who commit marital infidelities find reason to lie. Wednesday provided a stark reminder of why the Ukraine scandal is different. Taylor explained why it’s in the national interest to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian Bear and why America’s president is putting lives at risk in pursuit of his own political ambitions.

Although there’s no way of knowing the on-the-ground effect of the delay, aid withheld is a struggle intensified. Taylor talked movingly about being on the front lines where brave Ukrainians thanked him for aid he knew had just been suspended on the President’s orders. Is there blood on Donald Trump’s hands? Taylor didn’t go so far as to say that simply because he couldn’t correlate deaths to delay. But the meaning was clear. Donald Trump was playing games with the lives of real people.

Much of the rest we already knew, though a few new facts did emerge. Taylor reported for the first time that one of his staffers had overheard Trump’s phone call with Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland. That staffer will now appear before the committee on Friday. For the most part, however, the five hours of testimony amounted to a study in dedication. Taylor grabbed the headlines but it was George Kent who left a lasting impression. Here was a true representative of the “Deep State”, that moronic phrase which was exposed here as being utterly crass if it means the men and women who devote their lives to learning, analysis, and service to a country. Kent spoke with the quiet confidence of a man who understands his brief. He contextualised everything. Spoke precisely about dates and percentages. It was hard not to be reminded of a better era of political analysis. There was about him something of the late William F. Buckley.

The Republican response was surprising in that it offered no meaningful defence. Devin Nunes again attempted to make the story about the Whistleblower but he was, as usual, projecting a fixation of the President.

You don’t need to question the forecaster who predicted winter when you’re up to your ears in snow. Yet here the Republicans were, seeking anything that could distract the American people from the damning testimony of the key players.

In the end, the Republican’s counsel, Steve Castor, had the impossible task of shaping an articulate response to a hopeless case. There was no shame in failing. Instead, the screaming was left to Jim Jordan, added to the committee at the last minute in order to provide some of that shirt-sleeved-Jimmy-Stewart-goes-to-Washington-and-turns-bad energy, but his ineffective performance only highlighted the disparity between the two worlds. Out in social media land, Eric Trump tweeted “snoozefest” like the jock he and so many of these chancers surely are. Next, he’ll be kicking somebody’s books over and doing that “wet willy” thing where he sticks his finger in their ear because, on the evidence here, the Republicans have no defence. They repeatedly ticked off their talking points…

They said Ukrainian politics is mired in corruption. Well, yes it is.

They said the American government has the right to insist on Ukraine cleaning up its act. Indeed they do.

They asked if the President has a responsibility to do that in conversation with Ukraine’s leaders. “Yes” came the reply.

Getting witnesses to repeatedly say “yes” looks good for the TV cameras but that’s as far as it goes. Republicans never addressed the principal charge that the President has undermined American national security in order to cheat his way to re-election. By blackmailing desperate people threatened by Russia (more than 14,000 have already lost their lives), Trump had proved that he “cares more about the investigations of Biden” (the words of Ambassador Sondland, reported by Taylor).

It now looks certain, then, that Trump will be impeached by the House but that does not mean he’ll be forced from office by the Senate, where 67 votes will still be needed to find him guilty. But Trump’s failure can (and will) be measured by degrees. If he is not cleared by the House (unlikely), he will become only the third president to be impeached in America’s history, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. That would be mitigated somewhat if he was cleared by a majority in the Republican-dominated Senate. That’s more likely but it would take only a few Republicans to switch. The sensible money would be on him being found guilty by a majority in the Senate, which would be utterly damning, but not enough of a majority to remove him from office.

It would then become a matter for electors in November and the cold eyes of history going forward. Listening to Kent and Taylor, knowing what comes next and what was also contained in the Mueller Report, it’s hard not to see Trump as simply the most corrupt individual to occupy the White House. Wednesday was damning for it revealed a culture in which men like Trump can achieve the highest positions in the land and men like Taylor and Kent are destined for mid-level… Well, “mediocrity” isn’t the right word. There’s nothing mediocre about either man but that’s the point. Rod Stewart’s model railway might be the best thing he’s ever done. It reflects poorly on us, rather than him, that he felt it necessary to hide it away in his attic.

I am just a bloke who happens to own a bike and who was cycling back when cycling was unfashionable. Mine is the unstylish bike you see chained outside the local newsagent, chemist, or supermarket. It doesn’t have 42 gears, rotating aerodynamic flanges, or a seat so narrow it comes with extra blades from Gillette. It’s just an ordinary and slightly abused bike that gets me from Point A to Point C and, if I’m lucky, there’s no Point B in between, where my chin has come into contact with tarmac, car, or tree.

Because I’ve always thought of myself a cyclist, I do feel insulted whenever a new rider tells me that I’m not the “real” deal. They’re right, of course. I’ve watched with bemusement as cycling experienced an almost 16% growth in participation over the past 10 years. Since the London Olympics, we’ve seen a new breed of cyclist take to the roads. They are the reason bike stores have multiplied and prices have taken off like they’ve just hit a pothole. Yet not being a “real” cyclist means that I am stuck somewhere in the middle of the ongoing “battle” between cyclists and road users.

It grants me the space to be pragmatic and recognise that this debate shouldn’t be about two sides. We need to make more distinctions between casual cyclists as well as the more committed road warriors; ordinary drivers as well as the petrolheads. We should also be talking about people who ride a bit, occasionally use a car, often use the bus or train, but also see themselves as pedestrians. We should, in other words, recognise that most people are not one thing and that this debate should more properly be about the entirety of our transport infrastructure.

Not that a common sense approach would be popular among the strictly devout. Cycling has become one of those perennial points of conflict and humour, such as we see between dogs and cats, the English and the Scottish, Labour and Tory, Brad and Angelina. Cyclists hate drivers. Drivers hate cyclists. Let the battle commence…

Except there is a real danger in promoting this as a battle. The debate is wrongly characterised as a “war” for Britain’s roads, with antagonists on both sides making the figurative fight real. Lobby groups exist for both camps and we’re routinely inundated with footage from head and dashboard cameras as if to prove that one side is more to blame than the other. The machismo of being aggressive towards cyclists is sadly prevalent but, at the same time, militant cyclists boast about kicking cars that get too close and delight in winding up irate drivers for a little Youtube fun.

It was helpful, then, that Chris Boardman recently admitted that “the roads are statistically safe but it doesn’t look it and it doesn’t feel it.” This comes from the man who was considered the face of British cycling until that face started to grow Bradley Wiggins’s stubble. When Chris Boardman makes these dark proclamations and admits “now I try to do more of my riding off-road”, cyclists should listen and understand that this isn’t a battle between two mutually exclusive sides. Boardman’s own mother died last year in a cycling accident in North Wales. An 18 year old woman was killed in Salford just last Friday. This follows the much publicized story of Charlie Alliston, the cyclist who illegally took a fixed-gear bike (they don’t have brakes) onto the road and knocked down and killed a pedestrian in Old Street, East London last year.

Anybody who has ridden a bike in traffic needs to admit that there is a problem. As much as my heart and sympathy reside with the cyclists, my brain thinks about the pedestrians hit by cyclists running through red lights or the driver hesitant about overtaking the cyclist hogging the road and who is now waving them to pass on a blind corner. I also recall the sight I witnessed just last week, of a mother and child riding down a local B road I no longer have the nerve to ride. The mother was in front and the child, on a bike at least one size too big, trailing behind, wobbling, veering from side to side, constantly on the edge of becoming unbalanced. Much as I love and promote cycling, there is a wilful naivety among some cyclists that their right to be on the road will magically protect them from harm.

It is why, despite my overwhelming belief that cycling should be promoted, I also have sympathy for Adam Boulton whose much publicized rant a few weeks ago led this past weekend to a quite bellicose article in The Times about my favourite mode of transport:

Forget about zombies and North Koreans: the cyclists are coming. In fact they are already here. As cycle lanes proliferate, the number of people commuting to work in London by bike has doubled in a decade and is still increasing fast. On narrow country roads more and more Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) and younger male and occasionally female counterparts can be found, riding two abreast for their own protection as their lobby groups advise.

Boulton’s continued investment in the debate highlights how much of a nerve he has touched, and he is right to argue that “anyone who complains that cycling is evolving in the UK without proper regulation and at the expense of pedestrians and motorists faces ridicule and online abuse.” Where he would be wrong is if he believed that it’s only cycling that has this problem. It is endemic to debate where being on the “winning side” seems far more important than the reasonableness of any argument, whether it’s for or against Brexit or the casting of the next Doctor Who. Our first challenge is to stop enjoying this contest. We need to talk seriously about the compromises we all need to make in order to solve the problem of Britain’s roads.

Part of doing that will, no doubt, involve reassessing the relationship between drivers and cyclists. Yet we should also re-examine all of our prejudices, such as the relationship we’ve allowed to persist between cyclists and pedestrians. Cycling is but one part of a broader problem we have with transport in the UK and that debate has nothing to do with the demands of the long distance rider. It has to do with people like you and me simply going about our daily lives. It has to do with a system that prices people out of public transport, where the fare to go a single bus stop is the same as the fare to cross an entire county. There are parts of the country where the cheapest form of travel is the taxi.

We should also begin by accepting that whilst cyclists cannot be entirely removed from traffic there are many parts of the country where cyclists needn’t be forced onto the road. This need not always mean expensive infrastructure work but, rather, a more pragmatic approach to the infrastructure we already have. It seems ridiculous, for example, that cyclists in 2017 are still governed by the Highways Act of 1835 written to prevent those that “shall wilfully lead or drive any horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine, or cattle or carriage of any description, or any truck or sledge, upon any such footpath or causeway”. Considerations about ass and swine does not make for a modern transport plan.

Consider how many roads connecting our small towns have paths along at least one side where cyclists can still be prosecuted for riding, despite the fact that these pavements are very rarely walked by pedestrians. Some councils are more proactive in opening these up to cyclists but, naturally, many are wary of the pedestrian lobby. And, yes, pedestrians might well complain and complaint is good if it leads to debate. I should also add that I see myself as even more of a pedestrian than I do a cyclist. I cherish pedestrian rights more and resent, for example, the expansion of privately owned public spaces. I also abhor cyclists that speed through crowds. That does not mean, however, that cyclists and pedestrians cannot often share the same space.

This, indeed, gets to the root of a problem in which debate is too often ridden with interest groups, lobbying campaigns, and ring fenced topics. It is hard for cyclists to make a case when they have drivers on one side and pedestrians on the other. The solution will involve more segregation of cyclists from road traffic but in the context of a properly mature legal framework which permits cyclists more freedom, even if it means stronger punishments on those that abuse that freedom.

Literally and figuratively cyclists must not be squeezed between drivers and pedestrians. That, at the moment, is too much of the problem.

The eyes were of the children who Shirley Baker photographed around Salford during the 1960s, as Manchester was in transition from industrial Victorian powerhouse into an early version of the modern city we now know. Baker documented the demolition of the red-bricked terraced world. Her work captured the urban squalor of urban housing in Northern England but also life as it was then led. Her favourite subject was the street children, sub-Dickensian urchins in their oversized and undersized clothes, playing games despite (and sometimes amid) the half collapsed buildings and septicemic rubble. Yet what I found so striking and, indeed, surprising, was the number of children looking back at us; their eyes more captivated by the camera’s gaze than perhaps even the camera’s gaze was captivated by them.

There lay my problem. It was all about the eyes.

The children aren’t alone in this act of gazing back at us. The faces of men and women also look at us with bemusement, if not outright amusement. This is social documentary but of a kind where the role of the photographer is all too evident. The difference is the difference between street portraiture and that vaguely ambiguous term “street photography”. This exhibition is primarily about street portraiture and the portraits do tell us something about that world. Yet, at first glance, it is questionable how much they really tell us. One has to view them with a certain detachment and doubt the motives of not just the photographer but the subjects smiling into her camera. If you don’t ask why they smile, this can descend all too quickly into lazy sentimentality and crass judgements about happier days and a more naive world.

I was reminded, in all of this, of Bruce Davidson’s pictures of Wales, taken back in 1965, which were part of the particularly excellent Strange and Familiar exhibition which has just left Manchester. I’d felt similar qualms about the fixed poses, the stereotyped scenes, and the complicity of real people turned into actors. It was only later that I’d heard Garry Winogrand express his own visceral reaction to Davidson’s work, telling an audience of Rice University students that the work “is about his misunderstanding of [Diane] Arbus’s work. He thinks her work is strong because he thinks she collaborated with who she photographed.” The result, said Winogrand, was “morally sickening” and “all about what the white middle class liberals wants to think what the blacks are like.”

Not that Shirley Baker’s pictures provoke that kind of response, but some of this feels not dissimilar to how I responded to Davidson’s vision of Wales. I wasn’t quite sure how much of it to believe.

The temptation with Baker’s work, as well as any that turns a camera on an underclass, is that it might too easily be judged by its content; as a version of that modern tendency of some photographers who gravitate to vagrants because of their inherent drama and character. It’s really a danger of viewing art by content and not by form, as Susan Sontag once argued. “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous,” she wrote in Against Interpretation. “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.”

Reducing Baker’s photographs to the subjects of the title can and perhaps does tame it.  Yet on that third visit, I realised something else. It was on my third visit that I ignored the sequence and didn’t follow the pictures as they led around the gallery walls. I was, by then, almost immune to the eyes of the children. I, instead, found myself loitering around groups of less celebrated photographs, moving against the flow of the crowd and searching for points of similarity.

Because if you can ignore the sad look of the women and children, and look beyond the baleful stares of the loitering men, you begin to realise that they’re surrounded by a world Baker reveals with haunting insight. The highlights, for me, are those photographs that aren’t so neatly described and where Baker’s understanding of photographic form are more evident and deserve greater credit. The impish smiles and devilish amusement of the street kids can distract from the pictures of the half demolished buildings and scattered architectural detail. Landscapes of crushed homes are punctuated by buildings standing like the last teeth on the cusp of a gaping dark maw. It’s the dark humour of the graffiti and also the pictures where the eyes of the subject are not diverted towards the camera. Suddenly the actors are actors no longer and are real people frozen in their proper context.

Baker has an eye for nuances and darkness, such as the squat dark building that stands with twin entrances both described by roughly painted arrows pointing at them and the word “shit” is repeated next to both. It’s as far from the smiling children as you could get and, in its way, it’s even more rewarding.

Part of the way around the exhibition is a map on which visitors are encouraged to pin flags denoting where they or their family lived in Salford. It’s a reminder that much of this exhibition is parochial. It is meant to evoke a world for people who once lived it. Many of the children gazing from the photographs have gazed on those pictures, visited the exhibition, and, indeed, some have contributed to the content. Yet this says nothing about the photographer and, really, the art is found in photographs as photographs and not as photographs as social realism.

This might sound like a highfalutin quibble but I hope it’s not. A lot of the exhibition reminds you that the photographer is present in the scene. Perhaps the strongest connections that emerge are between Baker and the people she made her life’s work.

As for the artist: that’s there too if you deeply enough. Look beyond the eyes and all impish charm and you will find moments of profound transparency. There you find a very powerful narrative of urban living, from a time before high rise blocks and long before the Grenfell Tower disaster was a sad reality. What that story tells us is a lesson about then but also about now and the role of an underclass physically, literally, but also psychologically trapped by architecture.

Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men, at Manchester’s Art Gallery until Monday 28 August 2017. Free

Except politics, like boxing, is rarely a sport that’s easy to read before the first punch is thrown. Our job is made even more difficult when we turn our attention to the vacant blue corner and those lining up outside the ring to become the Democratic challenger. It might be too early to make big pronouncements but those looking for a red fight-back certainly have few reasons to feel optimistic. The Democratic party could well have something of a problem. They have no obvious challenger to Donald J. Trump.

2020 might be a long time away but “a long time” is the very definition of most presidential campaigns. The race for the Democratic nomination began the moment Hillary Clinton lost the election back in November. That doesn’t mean that we’re ready for a new round of jazzy logos and snappy campaign mottos. At this stage, contenders are simply trying to get noticed amid the noise of ordinary (or what now passes for ordinary) politics. To extend our boxing metaphor: it’s about looking sharp as the fighters jab the air; trying to prove they have the graft, grace, and guile as they shadow box their opponent’s moves.

Yet what we have seen, thus far, hardly amounts to competent ring craft. The minority leaders of the Senate and House, respectively, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, are doing a half-decent job of providing an opposition given their limited resources but the politics of Congress are not the politics that lead directly to the White House. It’s leadership on the national stage that is notably lacking.

Obama is out of the running, of course, but also, apparently, out of the conversation. He’s kept quiet since January, even as events presented him with ample opportunities to respond to the paranoid attacks emanating from the Mar-a-Lago penthouse suite. His erstwhile deputy, Joe Biden, remains on the periphery, regretting not running in 2016 but also dismissing a bid in 2020. Biden would be the obvious figure to galvanise Democracts. He has a personal warmth which is so rare in politics as well as a knack of stealing the headlines with a cleverly constructed quip. Yet Biden will be seventy-eight in 2020. We might be in an age of medical wonders when the years don’t always carry the same ominous warning but there’s a limit to what even science can achieve. That’s why we should probably look beyond the other obvious leader. Come 2020, Bernie Sanders will be another four years older, increasing the problem that blighted his previous campaign. Entering the White House, he would be seventy-nine – or older than any president by the time they left office.

The next obvious rallying point would be at the Clintons’ door but the defeat looks like it sent Hillary into an existential crisis from which she is only now emerging. It might seem ridiculous to consider another Clinton run but there are a couple of arguments that fall in her favour. First: she’s still only sixty-nine, meaning that by the time it comes to the 2020 election she’ll be seventy-three, which is still older than any president but younger than Bernie Sanders would have been had he won the nomination last year. She would still have the distinction of being America’s first female president, able to argue that the longevity of presidents has always been measured according to the shorter lifespan of men. The second reason a bid might be possible: those factors that made her such a terrible candidate in the past have been somewhat negated by her defeat. The theme of the Clinton narrative was previously that of hubris. She now become the hero cruelly denied her victory by Russian forces.

Yet if Clinton was thinking to run, then surely this would be the moment she would begin to signal her intent. If one were to write this as a Hollywood movie, ridden with the usual clichés, Clinton would have taken the moment of her defeat to prove herself the leader she always wanted to become. As a former Secretary of State, she is placed better than nearly anybody to comment on the decimation of the State Department under Trump and the peculiar approach that Rex Tillerson is taking to the job. It might be easy to scoff but sentimental clichés are part of American politics and Hillary Clinton as bulwark to Russian intrusion into American politics would have been a powerful narrative to take forward.

The fact that this hasn’t yet happened suggests that even Clinton thinks that 2020 is a dream too far. Which means that we’re already beyond the big beasts of the Democratic party and have to look towards a younger set of contenders, would-be contenders, and should-be contenders.

Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are two most often cited favourites to run in any future race yet, in different ways, each have failed to lead the resistance. Warren briefly shone when Mitch McConnell did her the enormous favour of silencing her Senate speech but there’s some logic to the rumour/quip that it was the White House that wanted her silenced in order to raise her profile. Warren is reportedly the opponent most favoured by Trump and it’s easy to see why. She is earnest but often too earnest in that way that’s self-defeating. Her words are measured but she lacks the physical presence to deliver them. A rather weak voice means that her oratory falls flat. Perhaps that’s an unfair reason to dismiss her chances but politics has little to do with fairness. She lacks, for want of a better word, that gravity that voters look for in a president. Booker, meanwhile, shines on the talk show circuit but, if his has the physical presence to hold a crowd’s attention, his rhetoric can be third rate and hollow. His moment to stake his claim came at the beginning of the Jeff Sessons confirmation hearings and it was stunning to see how little of that stake he claimed.

There are other names that are routinely floated but few, thus far, have done anything to catch the eye. Candidates such as California’s Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Senator Kamala Harris, and Senator Tim Kaine, have a certain presence in the national picture but, really, one is left waiting for their much-lauded magic to begin.

Those that do catch the eye are those providing the greatest opposition to Trump. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island cuts a believable figure with his anti-corporate message. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has opposed all of Trump’s nominations. Not because I’m a betting man – or even because I’m inclined to trust people who display a sense of humour – but my pick would be Al Franken.

Al Franken? I find myself going back to Franken. He might not be the obvious choice but no other Democrat has proved as effective as Franken in the past two months. There’s already a SuperPAC operating called DraftFranken2020 which aims to persuade the Minnesota senator to run for the party’s nomination. He would be a strong pick. Franken has spent much of his time in the Senate trying to persuade his colleagues that he’s more than a former joke-writer from Saturday Night Live. Yet, somewhat perversely, it’s that very quality which could make him the ideal pick. Franken’s questions led Jeff Sessons into trouble at his confirmation hearings. Franken also provided one of the highlights when he embarrassed Betsy De Vos. Franken is smart and has a ready wit. More importantly, he a character that easily fills the national stage. If Democrats have sense, they’ll push Franken to the fore. However, very little about the Democrats have made much sense since November and, arguably, for a few years prior to that.

In truth, it’s all so very early to reach conclusions. Obama emerged quite late to burst through the field to take the Democratic nomination in August 2008. There is time for the same to happen again. Yet what’s surprising this far out is how few of the contenders are genuinely making any running. Despite the popular “resistance” to the Trump presidency, no single Democrat has harnessed that energy to take an early lead. All of which makes one wonder if the race to 2020 might not be defined by some other factor. Was Oprah really joking when she said she’d consider a bid? Was Kanye West? Trump hasn’t just redefined Republican politics. He might well have set a precedent to be emulated by those with egos as big as their bank balances. We might be looking towards 2020 hoping that it will make a return to normality when, in fact, it could be the start of a whole new style of crazy.

The lesson of Listerine is that not everything finds its place in the world at the first, second, or even third attempt. That’s certainly true of the Liberal Democrats who have spent decades finding their unique selling point in a two party system, only to see their fortunes wane after the Lib Dem tonic was shown not to cure the Tories of what ailed them.

Re-launched with a promise to rid us of the Brexit headache, the Liberal Democrats might now have found their rightful place in British politics. Sitting squarely in the centre ground, they offer the only mainstream opposition to Brexit, with Professor Richard Dawkins going so far in a letter to The Guardian yesterday to suggest the Lib Dems change their name to ‘The European Party’. ‘I’m sure I’m not the only former supporter of the Liberal Democrats who would gladly make a generous donation to help the newly named European Party on its way,’ he wrote.

Such optimism makes sense if you believe that the Liberal Democrat victory in Richmond Park marked a significant shift in political fortunes. The problem is that few commentators do. No sooner does poor Tim Farron win his first by-election than he discovers that it was the wrong sort of by-election to win. It was the wrong sort of voter responding to the wrong sort of issues.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t and they weren’t. Richmond Park was merely an event that didn’t fit the prevailing narrative.

The problem with narratives is that they often have an irrational pull. The pull of the Referendum narrative has the media rejecting any analysis that sounds too similar to that previously voiced inside their echo chamber. The Referendum taught them to listen more carefully to the political underclass and to disregard establishment voices. It’s why they are now going out of the way to rob Farron and the Lib Dems of their victory. Richmond Park doesn’t count because to read anything into it would be to fall back into the ‘bad thinking’ of pre-Referendum days. Ignore a pro-European constituency that naturally inclines towards the Liberal Democrats, they say: the answers lie in the North. Urban, metropolitan London doesn’t count.

It’s a strong argument but founded on a misguided narrative about the North. Trying so hard to remedy the fact that they didn’t listen, the media might not be listening particularly well. It’s beginning to resemble one of those old comedy sketches where an authority figure shouts ‘stop talking and everybody listen! We’re going to listen and listen we will! Listen, people! Listen!’ And, of course, nobody ever gets chance to listen.

So, let me offer an alternative reading of Richmond Park base on what I’ve heard. I don’t claim to speak for Brexit Britain but I do live in one of those places that are always painted blue on the Brexit map. My point here is to simply say that nothing is as absolute as some would want us to believe. Blue was never truly blue as yellow was never totally yellow. Let’s forget about ideology and politics. Instead, let’s talk about people and, specifically, the people I know and meet here in the North.

Before the referendum, the local mood led me predict that the country would marginally vote to leave the EU. I’d even offered numbers of 48% and 52%, which were 0.1% away from the actual figure, though getting the numbers almost right was, I admit, down to sheer luck. My estimate was based on speaking with friends, neighbours, and family members who had never voted in their lives but were now committed to Brexit. I understood some of their grievance. It sometimes feels like I’ve spent most of my adult life writing about censorship, the bad instincts of liberal mobs, and the media’s habit of stifling debate, specifically around the subject of immigration. Wherever you live in the UK, the past two decades have seen a noticeable change in demographics and those changes have always been noticed and discussed inside communities. It’s just in the political mainstream that those discussions were deemed unacceptable. It left many ordinary citizens hostile to politicians and explained why they went on to identify with demagogues speaking from the fringes of the acceptable. That was the reality that the media were too slow to recognise.

Since the referendum, opinions have changed in small but demonstrable ways. Outside my home town, we have a sign that welcomes visitors. It proudly proclaims how we’re twinned with a place in France. There was a time when that fact would have drawn a sneer from a local. ‘What do we have in common with t’French?’ they’d laugh. ‘We can’t even pronounce it!’ Except now that French town’s name has been daubed out in black paint by some vandal and a few attitudes have changed. ‘Blame it on Brexit’ muttered the guy on the bus who’d spotted the vandalism at the same time as me. The tone was disapproving.

‘Blame it on Brexit’ (or versions like it) is becoming a familiar refrain. It is not meant as political commentary but simply a statement of reality. On a train into Liverpool the other day, I heard a woman boasting about her next holiday to America, ending with a complaint about the exchange rate. ‘That’s Brexit’ said her friend. You hear similar in supermarkets, in NHS waiting rooms, and out in the street. That’s not to say that there’s been a total shift in the national argument and the problems of immigration remain present and the complaints real. Yet to argue that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ is to miss the point that opinions do change and that is as true in the North as it is in Richmond Park.

It’s why Professor John Curtice presented, perhaps, the best analysis of Richmond Park I’ve heard. On This Week’s By-Election Special he said:

“This is what I would worry about if I were Dianne Abbott: the possibility that some of the two thirds of Labour voters who voted for Remain, many of whom are clearly not that happy about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, might begin to say ‘Ah ha! Perhaps there is finally an alternative in the Liberal Democrats’ and they will finally begin to forgive the Liberal Democrats for what obviously many of the Labour supporters believe was the sin of going into coalition with the Conservative Party.”

And, naturally, it fell to the aforementioned Diane Abbott to display the razor-sharp political acumen that we all come to expect from our shadow Home Secretary.

“It’s not going to happen. […] I can’t see Labour voters in the Midlands, in the Welsh valleys, in the North of England, saying: ‘Oh, guess what. We’re going to vote Lib Dem’ because they’re so passionate about Remain’.”

Really, Diane? Because, not only do I believe this will happen, I know for a fact that it is already happening. Just as attitudes can harden, they can also soften. The only question is whether these shifts are enough to affect the outcome of the next election. We also need to remember that the referendum involved an unusually motivated electorate. The turnout was about 6% bigger than the previous general election. Much of that could be accounted for by people motivated to vote for a first or rare time. Those traditional non-voters might not turn out next time, in a way similar to Obama’s first victory in 2008, which was easier than his re-election in 2012. Furthermore, not all new Lib Dem voters will come from Labour ranks. The Conservative Party’s grass roots may be largely in favour of Leave but it would be foolish to deal in the level of absolutes that Diane Abbott favours. Some will be tempted by the centrist appeal of the resurgent Liberal Democrats.

Consider, lastly, one of the most significant clues of the past month that was largely dismissed by the media. When Tony Blair returned to the UK to launch his centrist pro-EU policy unit, he was derided and described as an irrelevance. Yet, for all his perceived sins, Blair has always had an acute sense of the public mood. I think he’s right to recognise the yawning chasm at the centre of British politics. Richmond Park might be a false flag but, equally, it might be a fair flag wrongly interpreted as false. This week wasn’t the first time that the Liberal Democrats have looked surprisingly strong. In Witney, back in October, they came second, with a 23.5% increase of their vote share in a safe seat for the Tories. Labour have reasons to fear the Liberal Democrats but, arguably, so do the Tories. There is a craving for representation in a still divided nation but to assume the nation is static is to misunderstand people. The 48% are no longer an irrelevance but slowly emerging as powerful lobby in its own right. Forget what the partisan cynics might say. Tim Farron could well be onto something.

2. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, which means that America can still claim to be a largely rational nation.

3. It might well be a one term presidency. Nothing suggests that Trump will be a good fit for the lifestyle of a President and we can be sure that, in four years, the Democrats will field a strong candidate.

4. Republicans are now entirely in charge. No more battles between the White House and the Hill. It means that the country will quickly get to decide if they like Republican government.

5. It’s the end of the Clinton dream. Democrats can now get back to the serious job of picking a proper candidate without a deeply divisive back story who doesn’t alienate huge segments of the electorate.

6. It’s going to be a great time for America’s arts, as people have four years with an object worthy of their skills and scorn.

7. This might finally remind the many people who didn’t vote or who made a protest vote that these things can actually happen. The failure of the black vote to turn out in favour of Hillary is one of the key points of the night.

8. The media might look at themselves and reassess what they do. They allowed Trump to walk to the White House without once facing proper media scrutiny. At the beginning they treated him as a joke when they should have been treating him seriously.

9. Trump will continue to destroy the Republican Party, only from within rather than from outside. The Republicans now wake up to a President they dislike and who dislikes them. That’s an interesting dynamic.

10. Trump’s biggest promise was that he would build a wall. He won’t. That simple fact alone will haunt American politics into the future. Post-Trump America might have to come up with proper plans for border security and immigration. It might also destroy the myth that outsiders can fix the system.