Bronterre News

In refusing, and then relenting on, extra cash, Wales first minister may not have keenly appreciated huge importance of Aberystwyth collection of cultural treasures 

WITHOUT fully functioning national libraries, countries are in danger of becoming disconnected from a multiplicity of reference points essential for a firm grasp of their historical, and current, identities and cultures.

  Without these connections, they could find themselves drifting towards a sluggish sea of incoherent assumptions, vague perceptions and individual bias, vulnerable, for one thing, to the wiles of political messiahs and social scientists interested in self-seeking redrafting of portraits of a nation. 

  In the absence of, or with weakened versions of, these big libraries there would remain other historical and cultural anchor-points. But missing would be the 360-degree, 20/20 vision and insight enabled by the archival comprehensiveness of these national institutions.

  This is why the recent threat to 30 jobs, and a consequent significant cut in services, at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth was so very serious. 

  Rather late in the day, that threat appears now to have been lifted. After months of uncertainty and protest, including a 14,000-signature petition demanding “fair funding”, the Welsh government last week announced a £2.25m rescue package to protect jobs at the library. 

  Earlier, despite an assurance that a £1.5m increase in annual grant would be enough to avoid cuts, the government had insisted no more money was available. Three cheers therefore for the power and effectiveness of the campaign to safeguard this unique asset.

  At the height of the stand-off, Mark Drakeford had paid tribute to the library as a “wonderful institution”. Fatally, however, what was not detectable here was something so very necessary – a visceral awareness of the fundamental importance of the place, and that inseparable from an unshakable commitment to move heaven and earth to always protect, and never to weaken, it.

  The library’s sheer stature seemed to be not fully recognised, its scope not keenly enough understood: a books collection of staggering proportions, rare and unique manuscripts, a vast assemblage of newspapers and periodicals, an enormous collection of maps, thousands of pictures, a screen and sound archive… (Someone tell me if I’ve left something out.) 

  Has the message now filtered through? Weaken this towering institution, and you diminish a paramount actuality, a vital symbol, of national identity and culture. This an option that must never again see the light of day.

WITHOUT fully functioning national libraries, countries are in danger of becoming disconnected from a multiplicity of reference points essential for a firm grasp of their historical, and current, identities and cultures.

  Without these connections, they could find themselves drifting towards a sluggish sea of incoherent assumptions, vague perceptions and individual bias, vulnerable, for one thing, to the wiles of political messiahs and social scientists interested in self-seeking redrafting of portraits of a nation. 

  In the absence of, or with weakened versions of, these big libraries there would remain other historical and cultural anchor-points. But missing would be the 360-degree, 20/20 vision and insight enabled by the archival comprehensiveness of these national institutions.

  This is why the recent threat to 30 jobs, and a consequent significant cut in services, at the National Library of Wales was so very serious. 

  Rather late in the day, that threat appears now to have been lifted. After months of uncertainty and protest, including a 14,000-signature petition demanding “fair funding”, the Welsh government last week announced a £2.25m rescue package to protect jobs at the library. 

  Earlier, despite an assurance that a £1.5m increase in annual grant would be enough to avoid cuts, the government had insisted no more money was available. Three cheers therefore for the power and effectiveness of the campaign to safeguard this unique asset.

  At the height of the stand-off, Mark Drakeford had paid tribute to the library as a “wonderful institution”. Fatally, however, what was not detectable here was something so very necessary – a visceral awareness of the fundamental importance of the place, and that inseparable from an unshakable commitment to move heaven and earth to always protect, and never to weaken, it.

  The library’s sheer stature seemed to be not fully recognised, its scope not keenly enough understood: a books collection of staggering proportions, rare and unique manuscripts, a vast assemblage of newspapers and periodicals, an enormous collection of maps, thousands of pictures, a screen and sound archive… (Someone tell me if I’ve left something out.) 

  Has the message now filtered through? Weaken this towering institution, and you diminish a paramount actuality, a vital symbol, of national identity and culture. This an option that must never again see the light of day.

The grinding tyranny of low pay and uncontrolled rents: an uncivilised combination that mustn’t be allowed to continue

WHEN PEOPLE stood on their doorsteps cheering NHS staff they weren’t applauding the resilience of nurses eking out a life on low pay. 

  Perhaps they should have been or, more to the point, maybe they should some time ago have been squaring up to successive governments and demanding a civilised deal for nurses and other NHS workers in a perennial scrabble to make ends meet.

  Consider London, where the average gross salary of a nurse is £26,427. That’s £11,514 less than the £37,941 average for the capital, and £5,034 below the £31,461 UK average.

  On 25 November, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced in his latest spending review that NHS nurses would get a pay rise in 2021, though he didn’t say how much. But the indications for the average London nurse may not be good, given that Sunak went on to say that the “majority” of public sector workers would see a 2021 rise as part of an earlier pledge to boost pay by at least £250 for anyone earning below £24,000.

  That of course would be a shredded teaspoon of chicken-feed, £250 being somewhat less than a cabinet minister would spend on lunch for themselves and a favoured crony, and an indication of even leaner pickings for poverty-line nurses in London – and in loads of other places across the UK – who may – or may not – find Rishi’s largesse will cover the price of a couple of cups of coffee at their hospital’s Costa. 

  A supporting document published by the Treasury says that NHS workers are being excluded from a general freeze on public sector pay in recognition of the “unique impact of Covid-19 on the health service”.

  But it immediately backtracks by adding that, in setting the level of pay rise for NHS workers, the government would need to consider “the challenging fiscal and economic context”. 

  (Yes, indeed. And tell that to former prime minister David ‘we’re all in this together’ Cameron and his Downing Street successor, Theresa May. In 2019, he raked in £836,168 from media and speaking fees, while she made nearly £400,000 from private engagements.)

  Tell it too to the London nurse I spoke to who potentially put her life on the line recently when caring for Covid patients.

  She, with two colleagues, found themselves priced out of renting a modest-sized flat after a fourth nurse dropped out of the joint tenancy and a replacement couldn’t be found.

  Home for her now is a single room in a hospital complex with a shared kitchen and lavatory and an absence of any communal living space.

  For her, Rishi’s couple of extra quid will provide no hope of escape back to a civilised standard of accommodation. As she tells her story, overwhelmingly you encounter positivity and no more than the merest hint that she’s ill-rewarded for her cheerful dedication to the job. What you see is someone in the predicament shared by millions of other low – and close to destitute – workers immobilised in the trap of crap pay and towering rents.

  Average rent for a one-bedroom flat in London – depending on the area – is between slightly more than £2,100 and about £2,500 a calendar month; for a two-bedroomed place between £3,300 and £5,700. Such outgoings would swallow up the totality of, or more than, our nurse’s net salary.

  Beyond London, the figures are slightly different (nurse salaries, on average, are a bit lower, as are rents), but the gap between pay and private sector rents is equally daunting.

  Uncontrolled rents are at the very heart of the problem, and statutory regulation is the nettle politicians in Britain will not grasp, leaving owners with unfettered freedom to charge what they like, restrained theoretically by market forces but in reality aided and abetted by the avarice of fellow landlords.

  Meanwhile, the general taxpayer, as well as the low-paid, is the poorer through forking out for housing benefit or universal credit to help people on low incomes to pay rents.

Berlin’s answer: a five-year rent freeze, and a cap on excess

ONE WAY forward, towards the practical application of the principle that housing is a human right, not a commodity, would be to follow the lead taken by the Berlin Senate, which last October introduced an unprecedented amendment to rent-limitation law, ushering in a five-year freeze on rents in the city and the capping of excessive rents.

  One-and-a-half million flats built before 2014 will be affected, with the imposition of a 9.80-euro upper limit per square metre. Taken into account will be year of construction and facilities and equipment included. The expectation is that a previously rapid increase in housing prices will be slowed and rents reduced to a more socially acceptable level.

  It’s this kind of rent-control model that any civilised society should feel obliged to adopt. It’s also a considerable advance on, to take another example, the Swedish system, under which rents are controlled only during tenancies, but can be raised between lettings, thus ensuring that rapacious landlords merely have to bide their time. 

THAKEHAM, the Sussex house-builders planning, outrageously, to build over thousands of acres of prime Cambridgeshire farmland, has gone into hiding.

  After a fleeting foray into the public gaze in early December to announce its awful intention to plonk 25,000 homes across a vast swathe of countryside amounting to half the size of Cambridge, the speculative development company is unsurprisingly batting away questions over a proposal which would crush the identity and surrounding landscapes of nine villages in the south-west of the county.

  In the middle of December, Bronterre News approached Thakeham with a series of questions central to a highly destructive scheme meeting fierce opposition, notably, understandably, from people living in the villages facing ruination – Barrington, Bassingbourn, Foxton, Melbourn, Meldreth, Shepreth, Orwell, Whaddon and Wimpole.

  The company did not reply. Last week, in a call to the company’s Billingshurst headquarters querying its silence, we were told: “We are not talking to journalists at the moment.” No explanation was given.

  The communication blackout is starkly and revealingly at odds with the open, all-friends-together, oh-so-deeply-green persona projected on Thakeham’s website over another treat the company has in store for Cambridgeshire – a plan for 400 homes at Comberton.

  This waxes on about “20% Biodiversity net gain”, “new landscape planting”, wildlife corridors and bat-boxes. 

  But ask, as Bronterre has, whether, over the 25,000 homes proposal, Thakeham has carried out a comprehensive environmental impact assessment, to include a full carbon audit, and precisely what constituents of the existing natural environment within their proposed site parcel were included in these investigations, and there’ll be no reply.

  We also wanted to know who carried out Thakeham’s research – assuming such has been carried out – how long the exercise took and if the outcome report was available for public-media examination. The company is silent on that, too.

   Equally, the public is being kept in the dark over the number of landowners with whom Thakeham have purportedly reached agreement, and the number with whom they are currently in negotiation and expect to be in the future.

  Without sufficient land, this ill-judged scheme is still-born. As for landowners, they need to realise they are not entitled to regard themselves as sealed-off entities, answerable to no-one but themselves and their creditors. Take away countryside and everyone is disadvantaged. Build over precious arable land in one of England’s most fruitful farming regions and we all pay the penalty in terms of loss of domestic food-growing  capacity. Thakeham may not with impunity make inroads into food-supply sustainability.

  This is why a plan to rip up thousands of acres of prime farmland is a million miles from nimbyism. So why is Thakeham refusing to tell us the total acreage it’s aiming for, and the approximate delineation of its proposed site?

  How much of the land it seeks is currently part of the company’s land-bank portfolio? How close to existing villages would it be building?

  Crucially, Thakeham says that ‘all that we do focuses on community, family and well-being’, offering as a sop that the new town and villages it proposes would be zero-carbon. 

  Therefore we asked: ‘Since your stated focus is on community, would Thakeham withdraw were it to become apparent that existing communities were by and large opposed to your proposals because they believed the realisation of your plans would be inimical to the well-being of the many existing communities that would be impacted, including to the families within those communities?’ 

  This company stands damned by its own silence.

Landscapes are a lifeline. Erode them, and we lose food, wildlife…and our sanity

SITES FOR thousands of new homes have been put forward by developers and landowners as part of the continuing Local Plan process in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire.

  As things stand, the plan will guide development in the Greater Cambridge region until 2040.

  As part of the process, Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council – worked together as the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (GCSP) service – put out a ‘call for sites’ to be considered for inclusion in the plan.

  Developers and landowners submitted a total of 675 proposals covering 16,103 hectares – nearly 38,650 acres – and 170,000 to 200,000 homes, far more than could possibly be needed, meaning most of the suggestions will not proceed.

  According to the Greater Cambridge Planning Service, the suggested sites have at the moment no planning status, and the councils have not made any judgment about which sites might be right for development.

  “Sites will be rigorously tested for their suitability, for example looking at flood risk, landscape impact, transport access, and other factors. We will also consider their sustainability, and how they fit with the strategic direction of the plan. We will consult fully on any sites which may be included in the plan, as part of the plan-making process.”

In reality, however, how many homes will be needed, and how many anyway should we allow – taking into account a shrinking natural environment, and the consequent threats to the human spirit, to wildlife, to biodiversity as a whole, as well as the crying need to hang on to land for food-production and taking into account limits to future water supplies?

THE official consensus is that the Greater Cambridge area, which had 121,000 homes in 2017, is expected to need between 40,900 and 66,700 more homes by 2040. 

  There are already plans in place for 36,400 homes at Waterbeach, Cambourne West, Bourn Airfield and Northstowe, meaning the new Local Plan is expected to find room for somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 homes.

  Developers and landowners have suggested new towns in the South Cambridgeshire countryside at Elsworth and Dry Drayton, along with major developments at Croxton, Madingley, Bourn, Cambourne, Babraham, Cherry Hinton and Teversham. Some 5,000 to 10,000 homes have been proposed for near Six Mile Bottom, and Trinity College wants to expand Cambridge Science Park north of the A14.

  We need to say calmly but very emphatically: stop, and take a very deep breath. 

  This is all excessive, especially because of the things listed above in italics.

  Proceeding at such a mad pace would ensure the destruction of environments we rely on for our sanity. It’s as serious as that.

  Accurate population predictions are notoriously difficult to arrive at. But, above that, we need to break open one particular taboo and say, with great clarity: by any sensible calculation, population growth must be aligned with what the planet can support. And that may well mean people having fewer children.

Macron tosses highest award to leader of repressive Egyptian regime

TOP OF the list of people you might jib at sharing a Covid bubble with is Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, president of a country that has emerged as having one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, with a worsening human rights record and prisons packed with dissidents.

  But your aversion would presumably not be shared by Emmanuel Macron, the French president who has just presented el-Sisi with the country’s highest award, the Légion d’honneur.

  So what can have possessed Manny, leader of a nation that presents itself as a paragon of human rights and liberty, to burnish the ego of a man whose government has in recent weeks arrested three employees of one of the country’s few remaining human rights organisations, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, prompting a global outcry? The three men were released on bail but still face vague national security charges. In early December, Italian prosecutors charged four of Mr Sisi’s enforcers in the 2016 Cairo kidnapping and murder of doctoral student Giulio Regeni.

  Under al-Sisi’s government, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch says, Egypt has been experiencing its “worst human rights crisis in many decades.”

  How, then, to explain the honour? Look no further, presumably, than a conclusion by Macron that it would be judicious to reward the ruler of the Arab world’s most populous land for being a loyal customer of the French arms industry.

  France profits handsomely from weapons sales to Egypt, and during his visit el-Sisi met the leaders of Dassault Aviation, which sells Cairo Rafale advanced fighter-jets, as well as those of Airbus.

  “I will not condition matters of defence and economic cooperation on these disagreements [over human rights],” Macron was quoted as saying as el-Sisi’s visit began. “It is more effective to have a policy of demanding dialogue than a boycott which would only reduce the effectiveness of one of our partners in the fight against terrorism.” So did the purportedly humanitarian Macron have to steel himself to speak thus, or were his words delivered with that certain insouciance he likes to cultivate?

  An obvious clue to the French president’s inner feelings on the matter must be assumed to be the fact that there was absolutely no announcement about the conferring of the honour by the Paris government, and no French correspondents were invited to cover the ceremony, or indeed other events during the Egyptian’s state visit. Underlining their exclusion, French media outlets seeking footage of the events suffered the indignity, ironically, of having to resort to state media in Egypt, among the countries in the world with the highest levels of censorship.

But council admits it keeps no records on spraying with glyphosate

CAMBRIDGESHIRE schools are allowed to authorise contractors looking after their grounds to use a weedkiller suspected of causing cancer.

The admission follows repeated approaches by Bronterre News over several weeks. Shockingly, however, the county council admits it has no information on which schools spray with glyphosate, a highly controversial herbicide said by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer to be “probably carcinogenic in humans”.

  This despite the fact that German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer recently reached a $10.9bn settlement for 95,000 US cancer patients who claimed their illnesses were caused by Bayer’s glyphosate-containing weedkiller RoundUp, though the company admitted no liability or wrongdoing.

  The council’s Liberal Democrat opposition immediately pledged an urgent investigation into glyphosate alternatives. Group leader Lucy Nethsingha said her personal position was that the authority should move away from it without delay.

  She told Bronterre News: “It is an extremely damaging chemical and we should not be spraying it around. I am keen that we develop a different attitude to diversity in plants, and that ‘weeds’ be reconsidered as bringing that diversity, which is so important for the entire ecosystem in which we live.”

  The council has also confirmed that it uses glyphosate to spot-treat weeds in parks and gardens and on roadside verges, but said the spray was not used in nature reserves.

  It added that all schools in the county managed their own contractors. But it admitted it kept no information centrally on which schools allow use of glyphosate products. A statement added: “Each school adheres to Control of Substances Hazardous to Health regulations and follows health and safety guidelines on school sites, including managing the use of pesticides on school sites.”

  In December 2017, the Health and Safety Executive agreed to renew its approval of glyphosate for five years. Apart from RoundUp, the chemical is also included in other brands of weedkiller marketed for back-garden use, and is widely employed in farming.

  Last year, a slew of English councils announced they would phase out the use of chemical weedkillers on playgrounds, parks and pavements after a US court ordered Roundup manufacturer Monsanto, which is owned by Bayer, to pay just one user $80m (£61m) in damages after he developed cancer.

  Hampshire county council said it was re-examining its use of glyphosate herbicides, the London borough of Richmond immediately began trials of non-chemical weed-removal and Trafford borough council voted to phase out all pesticides and weedkillers on council land.

  Cambridge City Council last year introduced a total ban on its use of herbicides, saying that when it declared a biodiversity emergency it committed to making its parks and open spaces more hospitable to plants and animals.

  Elsewhere in the UK, 31 local authorities have variously banned or are phasing out glyphosate and pesticides, while 18 have introduced restrictions. C

Mac McGuire, the Cambridgeshire council’s Conservative chairman, failed to respond to an earlier approach by this website.

Details of the Cambridgeshire authority’s continued use of glyphosate emerged as a result of inquiries by bronterrenews.com.

WHY IS Cambridgeshire County Council still using a notorious weedkiller said by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to be “probably carcinogenic”?

  And why is it so reluctant to admit that it does?

  The council is among a rapidly shrinking number of local authorities in the UK to continue to douse school grounds, parks and other public open spaces with various brands of glyphosate – the active chemical within Roundup and many other herbicides. In doing so it appears worryingly backward.

  IARC is after all not a name to be shrugged off. Funded by the World Health Organization, its crucial research is seen as the benchmark for determining what agents may be cancer-causing. 

  In sounding the alarm, it’s far from being alone. In February 2019, a high-profile collaborative study by three US universities reported that people with particularly high exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides – for instance those spraying it – could have a 41 per cent increased relative risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

  Multiple theories have been voiced about why this increased risk might arise, such as the idea that glyphosate may mimic the behaviour of certain hormones. One study, by researchers in Thailand, suggested that, by doing so, even low levels of glyphosate could increase the growth-rate of breast cancer cells in petri dishes.

  There are claimed links between glyphosate exposure and everything from coeliac disease to autism, and suspicions of a connection with inflammatory disorders such as intestinal cancer.

  There is concern that it could pose a risk to bees, and it has been known for many years to be hazardous to fish.

  There is thus a multitude of reasons to wonder at Cambridgeshire County Council’s sanctioning of glyphosate. It operates over a huge swathe of eastern England totalling more than 1,300 square miles, and it now emerges that a so far undeclared number of its departments contribute to the vast quantities of glyphosate-based herbicides sprayed across gardens and fields worldwide –  an estimated 6.1 billion kilos between 2005 and 2014 – the most recent point at which data has been collected. That is more than any other herbicide, and it makes the council’s continued use of the chemical a matter of significant concern.

  It’s not as if we’re talking about a pressing need to take stern action to counter the threat of triffid-like abominations that will happily leap at your throat when your back is turned. Rather, in addition to human health considerations, this is about not killing beautiful and interesting plants likely to be of enormous importance to the world’s rapidly declining insect populations.

  One morning recently I watched despairingly as an outside contractor for the council soaked with herbicide a fascinating range of wild plants in the grounds of a primary school in Trumpington.

  I asked the company, based in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, what they had used. Was it glyphosate? The reply was  evasive. “It is an amenity approved chemical used in all open spaces. We are not allowed to even buy any other. Used in all schools and public areas.”

  In the same way, try to extract from the council basic information about what – if anything – is its policy on herbicides and other chemical sprays and you’re likely to be in for a long haul.

  I asked whether, like Cambridge City Council, the county council had adopted a policy over use of herbicides and pesticides in open spaces – including school grounds – that it manages and, if it had, what that policy was.

  To prise from the authority the fact that yes, it does spray glyphosate, but no, it would decline to reveal immediately any detailed information on its use, took another five emails spread over six days. Far too many councils readily forget that they are not elected in order to then shut out the public. 

  Initially, I was told by the a member of the council’s communications department: “I’ve looked into this for you, but as the use of herbicides and pesticides falls across a number of different departments I would recommend you contact the FOI team about this.”

  Why? Why erect a barrier when a council’s default position ought to be one of openness? Why do so many councils persist in making the free flow of information the exception not the rule? 

  In a less secretive society, the Freedom of Information Act would never have been necessary. A vast range of authorities now employ specific staffs merely to relay simple answers to simple questions from the public and from journalists, answers that in a healthy democracy would be readily and openly available without the requirement to wade through a welter of bureaucracy.  

  The FOI is enormously costly to taxpayers, yet the fundamental superfluity of this piece of legislation is rarely acknowledged, publicly or privately. There was in fact no earthly reason why Bronterre News should have to go through a lengthy rigmarole simply to find out whether a council uses a specific herbicide.

  Further evasion followed.

  Three days after my initial inquiry, we were told: “Cambridgeshire County Council does not have one formal policy on the use of herbicides and pesticides in open spaces, but each department carefully considers its use of them. We do have specific policies, such as not using them on nature reserves, and only using them elsewhere where we need to spot treat weed growth. We are working longer term to better maintain verges to improve biodiversity and reduce weed growth and seeking natural alternatives.”

  Fine. But do you use glyphosate?

  Later the same day, the curtain of secrecy – mixed perhaps with discomfort about what turned out to be the council’s clearly unenlightened position – inches upwards. 

  “Glyphosate products are used by some departments but not others”, the council admits. “For example, they are not used in our nature reserves.”

  For Heaven’s sake, this is getting silly. We ask: “So which departments do use glyphosate products? Please provide specific information.

  “Are they, for example, used in parks and gardens managed by the county council?

  “Are glyphosate products used in school grounds?” (On 26 September, I had witnessed liberal backpack spraying in the grounds of, and around the perimeter of, Fawcett Primary School, Trumpington.)

  But the mad time-and-money-wasting palaver ground on. 

  On 5 October, the council yet again batted back our simple yet important query, a press officer telling us: “As this enquiry will need to be put to several departments across the council and will take a significant amount of time to respond to, I recommend you submit an FOI request.” 

  It’s a recommendation we will ignore.

* By continuing to use glyphosate, Cambridgeshire County Council finds itself increasingly isolated.

  In contrast, the progressively greener Cambridge City Council, which has pledged to get more and more trees planted, introduced a total ban on its use of herbicides from August 2019, saying that when it declared a biodiversity emergency it committed to make its parks and open spaces more hospitable to plants and animals.

  Elsewhere in the UK, 31 local authorities have variously banned or are phasing out their use of glyphosate and pesticides, while 18 have introduced restrictions, according to the admirable campaigners Pesticides Action Network UK.

WALK THROUGH Borth, near Aberystwyth, and you’ll be struck by the number of posters in people’s windows signalling continuing fierce opposition to a ghastly plan to carry out substantial civil engineering works on the wild, uncluttered beach near the village’s Bronze Age sunken forest.

This would be vandalism. How else is it possible to describe the digging of a vast and ugly hole – about 40 feet deep – in this Special Landscape Area beach in order to install concrete foundations and concrete and steel piles to support a 30-foot cast-metal effigy of a windblown oak tree?

From where could such a dotty yet destructive idea have emerged? Well, from artist Robert Davies, who declares a wish to create “a cultural response” to changes to the coastline that have taken place during the thousands of years since the Bronze Age. (Imagine if you like the forest then a sea of green.) Robert’s blind spot seems to be that he does not see that the simple thrill of looking at these wonderful and increasingly visible ancient tree relics renders entirely superfluous any imposed – and, in this case, alien – representation.

And so to the practicalities. These are that Ceredigion County Council and the community council long ago declared themselves against this madcap scheme, but an appeal to the Welsh planning inspectorate resulted, very regrettably, in reversal of the county council’s refusal of planning consent. 

But, at an official level, all is not lost. For between high and low water the beach here is owned by The Crown Estate and let to the county council under a so-called regulating lease, which gives the authority management powers over the foreshore, and the council says it hasn’t received any formal written application for its consent, as leaseholder, to erect the structure.

Support for Davies is vanishingly small. It would be so much better if he now admitted defeat and gracefully withdrew, leaving undisturbed this heaven-sent stretch of unsullied serenity.

IN THE circumstance, Rachel de Ruvigny knew she had to be firm.

Yes, the Countess of Southampton was very keen to continue to cooperate with Anthony Van Dyck over his unfolding portrayal of her as the goddess Fortune, complete with shining globe and sunbeams hinting at the dispelling of a glowering cloudscape.

And, yes, she was not going to be deterred from proceeding with this, a most fitting fantasy, by the approach, so she was informed, of a particularly nasty plague. Thus, she decided, she would agree to wear a protective mask fashioned from the same shimmering, metallic blue, faintly ethereal, material as her dress, with its moderately and casually scooped neckline. It is 1638, four years before the beginning of the English civil war.

Leg delicately crossed, one hand on globe, a swathe of the same blue stuff draped around one shoulder, she was ready once more for the attentions of the artist. Wherein lay a potential, rather delicate, problem.

Resolutely, but with suitable dignity, she addresses the celebrated court painter: “Mr van Dyck, it appears to me appropriate to make clear that, at this unusual time, you must forgo your painterly custom, evident during your carrying out of this commission, of making what you clearly regard as necessary, if somewhat bold, adjustments to the neckline of my costume…I know you will understand that, while such a restriction will no doubt be an interference with the expression of your flawless and admirable artistic judgment, it must be a necessity for as long as this wretched infection remains in the air.”

History does not record how, or even whether, van Dyck responded.

The painting that emerged, however, is now, for the first time, there for all to see. Never before given a public showing, it is included in a marvellous series of masked portraits by various artists – all painted at times of public distress over rampaging infections – at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

John Everett Millais’s Bridesmaid wears a delicate floral mask to match her silken gown, while The Twins, Kate and Grace Hoare, prepare for an outing with their faithful hound. In Jan van Meyer’s portrait of The daughters of Sir Matthew Decker, the girls play safely and ensure their little doll also follows social-distancing measures, and the subject of Rembrandt’s 1650 Portrait of a man in military costume appears for the first time in disguise.

 

IN A  report on 8 October, The Daily Telegraph’s science editor, Sarah Knapton, quotes Graeme Ackland, professor of computer simulation at the University of Edinburgh, as saying that “lockdown does mean that the number of deaths you save goes down, so there is a short-term gain, but it leads to long-term pain…” 

  Either Prof Ackland got his words muddled, or he is misreported, since the quote as it stands means that there is a gain if fewer people are saved from death – in other words, if more people die. Clearly, that cannot be what he meant.

  Sympathy for Sarah Knapton may not be misplaced. Yes, you can argue that, in either event, she should have spotted the mistake. On the other hand, take into account that she is working without the benefit of that traditional safety-net every reporter relies on – a strong team of in-house sub-editors.

  Three years ago, the Telegraph’s daily and Sunday titles suffered a devastating loss when about 20 subs were made redundant, their work outsourced to the Press Association (PA) news agency’s office in Howden, Yorkshire, about 190 miles from the paper’s London offices.

  Distance matters, which is one of the things which makes remote subbing inherently problematic. 

  Good subbing matters because, without it, newspapers risk printing inaccuracies or – as the above example featuring the professor of computer simulation shows – sheer nonsense.

  Allow either of those to happen too often, and a newspaper’s reliability and authority – and reputation – go out the window and, with it, to be generous, that publication’s invaluable contribution to keeping any given democracy fast flowing, not becalmed or stagnant.

  In the traditional set-up, a sub-editor with a query on a story could stroll across the room to check with the reporter concerned. This is dramatically less likely to happen if, as is probable in the present case, sub and writer are unknown to each other and sitting in offices hundreds of miles apart. 

  None of this is necessarily to call into question the competence or commitment of PA subs. It’s just that, realistically, they won’t be bringing to the job the close investment of an established Telegraph staffer.

  Of the sub-editors who lost their jobs, many were long-serving people who lived and breathed the Telegraph titles, and there was said to have been “absolute outrage” when staff got the news. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) duly erupted. National organiser Laura Davison said: “Members will want to know why the management is prepared to take the risk of outsourcing subbing when other companies have tried it and the track record is one of abject failure.” Exactly so.

  I point out the lockdown howler in a letter to the editor. Unsurprisingly, they don’t use it. How much better if they had.