Alistair Chisholm. Best known as Dorchester's award-winning town crier, he's also an independent member of West Dorset District Council, where he feels his voice is not quite so well heard.

IT’S ALMOST three months since I was elected to West Dorset District Council (WDDC) as an independent candidate for Charminster and Cerne Valley and time, perhaps, to make some early observations.

Unfortunately much that I’d been warned about in relation to the way in which the District Council conducts its affairs appears to be true.

There is precious little “democracy” as evidenced by the fact that there’s virtually no debate on major issues.

Decisions affecting the district are taken by an executive committee comprising seven members of the majority party (Conservative) each of whom is personally selected by the leader of that party (Cllr Robert Gould). I sense that their selection is based on the degree to which they can be relied on to go along with and enthusiastically support every decision he makes.

West Dorset has, effectively, an unelected Mayor.

I’m not suggesting that WDDC are behaving in an unlawful way but I am saying that, within a total of 48 elected representatives, there are bound to be different views and differing priorities. In my innocence and ignorance I fondly thought that there might be room, at this lowly but important level of local government, for the free exchange of ideas and opinions on issues which affect the people of the district.

No individual or party group is all-knowing and proper open debate is a fundamental safeguard of our much vaunted democracy which, if unavailable to democratically elected representatives, makes for a dangerously narrow and limited view of what is appropriate for the district.

The building of £10million new offices for WDDC (and a new £5million library for Dorset County Council) on the Charles Street site in Dorchester is a classic (and most expensive) example of a decision reached by the very few but claimed to be in the interests of the many.

There needs to be more open discussion at an early stage so that ideas are properly tested and do not become a sticking point from which the leader will not withdraw for fear of losing face. “Cabinet” style local government, brought in in 2000, has done little for democracy in West Dorset.

I should add that my comments apply to the manner in which important decisions are made by elected members and in no way reflect on the majority of council staff. The staff have their hands full facing, as they do;

1. a 25% decrease in central government funding,

2. an uncertain future in the case of some staff as WDDC and Weymouth and Portland Borough Council develop their “partnership working” arrangements,

3. an increased workload linked to the move into new offices and

4. a considerable number of additional tasks associated with next year’s Olympics.

I admire the staff of both councils who continue to perform their duties in challenging times. I most sincerely hope that the independent support measures, which I’m assured are in place, are sufficiently robust to cater for those who currently, and in future will increasingly, feel the pressure associated with these challenges.

I haven’t heard a cuckoo yet but I have seen the next best thing. A man, a very brave man, canvassing for the Liberal Democrats.

There he was, large as life and twice as bouncy carrying a clip board and sporting a rather large yellow rosette. Out on the stump already and the nominations are not even closed yet.

I suppose that desperation might be the order of the day. If the polls are to be believed come the first weekend in May there may be a few glum faces in that particular neck of the woods and there is no reason to suppose that Bridport will differ much from the rest of the country.

The recent edition of their Focus leaflet opted for honesty and showed both of their faces. Reams of stuff condemning Tory cuts and lauding the ways in which our gallant lads and lasses on the Lib Dem local government benches are fighting them tooth and nail. Then there’s a side-bar telling us what a spiffing job their parliamentary colleagues are doing in coalition with those self-same Tories in Westminster.

Come off it matey – you can’t have it both ways. Not now that you are part of the government you can’t.

Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong and there are two Liberal Democrat parties.

We shall see as the fight to retain places on the council develops and true colours are either shown or carefully hidden.
As the old boy said when he was a lad, “The times they are a-changing”.

This article titled “Police pay review: ‘Cameron has declared war on the public sector’” was written by Helen Carter, for The Guardian on Tuesday 8th March 2011 21.42 UTC

PC Clive Chamberlain has more than 30 years’ service with Dorset police. Now 50, he began his career in 1980 and has spent most of his service as a patrol and community beat officer.

He says Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary said there should not be more than 12% cuts in police services – yet the proposals suggest 20%. Some officers could have their pay cut by £4,000 a year.

“The government is quite clearly happy to utilise police officers to protect them from people who are unhappy about their policies and cuts,” says Chamberlain. “The irony is the people policing the demonstrations are likely to be in the same situation – or worse off – as those protesting.”

Chamberlain says he is likely to lose a competency-related payment, introduced by Labour home secretary David Blunkett, of £1,000 a year. “What they are doing is under the guise of ‘we won’t get rid of so many people if you take a pay cut’.

“Police officers don’t have a choice over whether they work overtime. If they are ordered to stay at work, they can be disciplined or sacked for refusing.”

Chamberlain, who has been injured in the course of duty – damaging ligaments and tendons after he jumped out of the way of a stolen car that was driven at him – says the Hutton report on public sector pensions is likely to bring further gloomy news for officers. He fears elements of policing will be deregulated and privatised.

“I know people who are struggling to live in Dorset because they can’t afford it,” Chamberlain says, adding that an increasing number have been seeking debt counselling. “Bush declared war on terror, Blair declared war on crime and it’s like Cameron has declared war on the public sector.”

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It seems we are a microcosm of The Big Society, the thing invented by Oliver Letwin for the Tory manifesto after attending too many functions in this village.

Lots of things go on here. We’re an active kind of a place. Things get done.

But in order to be taken seriously, to be a voice to be reckoned with, we apparently need a Parish Plan. Others have done it and found, hey presto, the district and county councils and bureaucratic bodies of all kinds suddenly sit up and listen.

Funding is found, resources are channelled, things finally happen.

However, according to a report I read in the local paper, our parish plan will be more than that. We will be a pilot, a beacon. All eyes will be on us to see how we operate down here in this hilly corner of Dorset.

I will be going along to the meeting tonight to find out more. But if it involves being told what to do, I’m out. We need space to be creative thinkers, not central government skivvies.

In all this talk of Big Society this and that, there is something no-one has factored in. It’s a key ingredient to a thriving Little Society: it’s called energy.

And for that you need ley lines. And we have several of them, crossing right through the centre of Lush Places.

But you try telling that to Mr Cameron. He’d think we’re barking.

Dorset County Council's newspaper Your Dorset. The Red Bladder questions its value at a time when the council is planning to cut £31 million.

SO, EVEN in these straitened times, Dorset County Council has still managed to bring us yet another edition of that little belter Your Dorset.

A 16-page, full-colour publication that unashamedly assures us that the council is constantly striving to make our lot a better one and glorifying in its own spectacular achievements in a way that would make even the Communist-era Pravda blush.

Self-gratifying, vainglorious and Panglossian are words that might spring to your mind when thumbing through its turgid prose but they are not ones that I would use to describe it – I would be a lot blunter.

It comes at a time when old Eric ‘give him the money Mable’ Pickles, our much-loved Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, keeps harping on about what a waste of money these ludicrous rags are.

After all they have to be written, designed, printed and then, probably most costly of all, distributed to every household in the county. None of that comes cheap.

Still the bigwigs in County Hall are facing tough decisions, burdens must be shouldered and the pain shared out.

So come on then lads, which is it to be, lollipop ladies guarding and protecting the children of the area or another batch of free lining for the bottoms of their hamster cages?

We know that you are all wonderful on the Council, we know that you labour tirelessly both night and day to improve our lot and we know that making cuts hurts you just as much as it hurts us.

So for pity’s sake stop telling us about it in expensive publications  and, just for once, face up to your proper responsibilities.

Editor’s Note: You can download a PDF of Your Dorset by clicking on this link – that is, if you never got your copy, or you’ve mislaid it, or you’re visiting from elsewhere and you’d like to assess it for yourself.

Your Dorset is written by the county council’s communications team, designed by Deep South Media of Bournemouth, printed by Newsquest in Weymouth, and distributed by the Royal Mail. The council says the cost is about 12 pence per copy.

It’s hoping to attract new members who are fed up with Conservative-Liberal Democrat policies on social justice and the environment.

The party normally meets once a month in Dorchester, but this Monday it’s gathering in Bridport.

Julian Jones said: “Many people are opposed to the policies of the Coalition and looking for a alternative.

“The Greens have a real chance of winning seats in the May local elections so we are inviting both long established members and new people to come to this meeting to help achieve change.”

Time: 7.30pm, Monday 24 January.

Place: The Red Brick Cafe on St Michael’s Trading Estate in Bridport.

Contact Julian Jones on 01308 458959 for more information or just turn up.

At the moment, responsibility locally lies with West Dorset District Council but as of April 2011, it will be with Dorset County Council. 

Up to now West Dorset has been offering extra concessions e.g. free travel before 9.30am. Older people elsewhere in the UK – depending on the goodwill of their councils – have to travel after rush hour.

What seems to make sense in towns and cities where buses are busy with people travelling to work does not necessarily add up in remote parts such as ours. 

Imagine you live in Melplash and need to go to Yeovil for the morning. If you can no longer take the 07.44, the first bus available is at 10.24, getting you to Yeovil at 11.20. 

And if you want to travel from Beaminster to Weymouth without going around the houses, then you can no longer do it for free as the only bus is at 08.45. 

The consultation ends this Friday, 14th January (it started on 3rd December). Seems a bit short but I have only just been made aware of this (then again, I don’t qualify for free travel yet!). 

I understand that this consultation has had a postal survey and a web survey. If you qualify for a free bus pass, are affected by the proposed changes but have not been made aware, here is your chance: 

 http://consultationtracker.dorsetforyou.com/concessionarytravel

A Dorset County Council spokesman commented: “Whilst the official deadline is 14 January we will be processing responses received for at least 5 working days after the deadline.”

He went on: “We are consulting, amongst other things, on the possibility of restricting the use of passes before 0930 on weekdays in West Dorset, East Dorset and North Dorset (this restriction already applies in Christchurch, Purbeck and Weymouth & Portland).

“The final decision will be made by councillors taking into account the much reduced government grant and the impact on passengers of such restrictions.

“It is, however, highly likely that where buses are infrequent officers will be recommending that exemptions are allowed (there are already precedents for this in areas where the pre-0930 restriction already applies).

“We are currently identifying those journeys likely to be recommended for exemption and it is quite a long list!” 

The move is part of the council’s efforts to save £48.6 million over the next three years.

Temporary Traffic Regulation Orders are normally advertised in paid-for newspapers rather than free publications, so the Dorset Echo, Bournemouth Echo, Bridport News and Western Gazette are likely to be most affected.

A spokesman said: “The county council currently spends around £50,000 a year advertising its own works and £60,000 advertising utility works – the latter of which is completely recoverable from the utilities so doesn’t cost DCC anything.

“We would be looking to reduce the £50,000 figure to around £5,000 by signposting – i.e. small ads in the papers directing people to our website to see all notices in full. This way we would still fulfil our statutory obligation of making public notices accessible.”

Councils are required by law to publish certain notices – such as lists of planning applications they have received – so it is impossible to stop paying for adverts altogether.

The last Labour Government considered whether councils should be allowed to stop advertising planning applications in local newspapers. The saving could have been £15 million a year. The proposal was fiercely resisted by the Newspaper Society, which feared for the public’s right to know about planning matters and for newspapers’ loss of revenue, and the idea was dropped in December 2009.

“I want frontline services”

The Newspaper Society’s stance was challenged by Rick Waghorn, the Norfolk-based journalist and entrepreneur who runs the online local advertising system Addiply.

In his blog, Mr Waghorn wrote: “In the current climate – as austerity bites ever deeper into those front-line services we hold dear – defending your right to demand payment for printed, planning application advertising isn’t a winner.

“It doesn’t wash.

“I want a lollipop lady outside my lad’s school; frankly, I’ll take my chances on whether or not South Norfolk District Council hide the planning application for a second floor extension to the semi in Conifers Lane…”

“The public has a right to information”

The Newspaper Society points out that not everyone has access to the internet. And it argues that the crux of the matter is not papers’ right to demand payment; it is the public’s right to know.

A spokesman said: “It is important to recognise that removing the requirement for councils to publish statutory public notices in newspapers would lead to a more secretive, less open local government and to many grass roots issues being decided without proper consultation and debate.

“This goes to the heart of the public’s democratic right to information and transparency and should not simply be dismissed as an unnecessary cost.”

He went on: “Publishers are working with their local councils around the country to help them achieve the most cost-effective method of communication. For example, we believe that councils in Cornwall have an arrangement in place which allows them to place unlimited public notices in their local papers for a set annual fee. This apparently works well for both the council and the publisher.”

The Society spokesman also cited adverse public reaction when councils tried to remove public notices and other advertising from local papers in Cornwall and in Lincolnshire.

Could there be an outcry about what Dorset wants to do with adverts about roads? The implications for newspapers could be significant. Say fifty councils all choose to save £50,000 a year in the same way; that’s £2.5 million gone from publishers.  

What do you think?

Dorset County Council’s move could (theoretically) cost a journalist his or her job, if we assume that the true cost of employing somebody is twice what they’re paid.

So, a senior reporter on £20,000 a year actually costs a publisher roughly £40,000: think expenses, desk, computer, pension, National Insurance, etc, etc.

(Note: this example is by no means perfect. For a start, the ownership of paid-for newspapers in Dorset is divided between Northcliffe and the American-owned Newsquest – and wages vary – but you get the drift.)

On the other hand, 500 council workers are expected to lose their jobs this year. Let’s pretend you’re number 501 on the list. Would you want Dorset County Council to keep spending £45,000 a year on publishing Temporary Traffic Regulation Orders in their entirety in local newspapers?

Editor’s Note: This is the second piece in an occasional series about otherwise unheralded Dorset cuts. The first piece was about Dorset County Council pulling out of the European Assembly of Regions.

UNKNOWN DETAILS: Does anyone know if an annual set fee is paid by Cornwall Council to local newspapers? And if it is, the amount?

Yet I cannot face the New Year without feeling a pang of sorrow and pity for their plight.

At some stage, before they moved up from being minnows to being the goldfish in the political aquarium, they must have held strong beliefs. Now they may well be faced with coming face-to-face with a few of the sharks that inhabit the same waters. Not an inviting prospect.

Minor Injuries Unit cutbacks “a disgrace”

The decision to cut the hours of the Minor Injuries Unit at Bridport hospital, simply to save a bit of money, is nothing short of a disgrace and will certainly prove a disaster for some poor devils at some time. There must be a few local Lib Dems who feel absolute fury at the decision.

Yet it was taken by far-away Conservatives. The big boys in the national coalition to which the Lib Dems signed up as the second XI.

So what should they do? There is a dilemma with horns upon which few of us would enjoy finding ourselves. Do they rock the boat and kick up a fuss? If they do, the powers that be will not be happy and even a rag-tag gaggle of disorganised ne’er-do-wells like the Liberal Democrat Party must try to have some form of disciplinary control, at least I’m certain they would now like to have.

Of course local politicians are not the lickspittle bunch of self-serving, idlers chiselers and vagabonds that crowd the benches of Westminster. The locals do not depend on their salaries and their expenses, well not so much anyway, mortgages and bills could still be paid, holidays taken and mistresses kept in silk stockings and luxurious chocolates even if the fountain of money that gushes from our pockets dried up on them.

They can afford the luxury of a conscience and can, in theory at least, speak up for what they truly believe and so hold their heads high and stare their reflection in the shaving mirror straight in the eye each morning.

Speak up for Bridport

So what will they do? Create an unholy stink about a local service which is vital to us all being emasculated on the altar of the false god Mammon? Take the course of action that they know, in their hearts, to be right and truly represent those who elected them in the first place?

So come on lads, and lasses, have you got spines?

Have you got hearts?

Do you possess a grain of compassion?

Speak up for Bridport and speak up now.

Editor’s Note:  Bridport’s Minor Injuries Unit is at Bridport Hospital in Hospital Lane, North Allington, Bridport, Dorset, DT6 5DR. Tel 01308 422371. It’s a nurse-led service currently staffed from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week.

From February 1, opening hours will be changed to 10.30am to 6pm, for what’s described by Dorset Community Health Services as a six-month feasibility test. 

This article titled “Billy Bragg: Are you ready for the revolution?” was written by Jon Henley, for The Guardian on Saturday 1st January 2011 00.06 UTC

‘Look out the window, Jon,” says Billy Bragg, bounding from a low-slung taupe armchair in a swish hotel room that’s every shade of brown. He’s still fired up from playing to 3,000 people the night before in an old cinema on the Commercial Road in east London, hard by the hallowed anti-fascist ground of Cable Street, and also the house where his mum was born: the last date of a triumphant UK tour on which that characteristically gruff, tender, fervent call to arms of his has – rejoice! – rarely felt more relevant.

With love songs and folk anthems and an unshakeable commitment to democratic socialism, Bragg and his guitar have been preaching a modest, very English kind of revolution from stages up and down the land for more than three decades now, and seriously, he’s seldom felt more hopeful something might come of it.

We look out of the fifth-floor window over the frozen rooftops of central London. “Is it cold out there?” he asks. “Is it very cold? Are there clouds – heavy clouds? It looks to me like it’s going to snow, Jon. Course, you can never say for sure. But there are things happening now that I’ve never seen before. Something’s moving.”

It’s difficult, in truth, not to be stirred by the strength of his convictions; he’s 53 now, a successful singer-songwriter living in a nice, big house overlooking the sea in Dorset, and still angry. But let’s consider the signs.

The first stirrings, he reckons, were in May, when the forces of righteousness won the battle of Barking: all 12 of the BNP councillors elected in 2006 were sent packing, and party leader Nick Griffin given a right kicking in his bid for parliament. (Not, of course, that the victorious Margaret Hodge MP should be counted among the forces of righteousness, since New Labour – Bragg is quite clear about this, and cares because Barking is where he was born – was “absolutely complicit” in the fact the battle had to be fought in the first place.) No, the people of Barking saw the British National Party for what it was, and they ran it out of their town.

“What had happened in Barking,” says Bragg, “was that Tony Blair had said: we can take the white working class for granted. Barking and Dagenham doesn’t really belong in the south-east of England; it’s a post-industrial town. But the people aren’t racist, no more than anywhere else. What they wanted was decent social housing, better hospitals, proper schools, decent jobs. They felt disaffected, disenfranchised, and they had the BNP knocking at their door.”

So they sought out “the bluntest weapon they could find, to send a message to New Labour – and it was those toe-rags”. Four years later, though, they’d looked into the eyes of the beast. They’d understood the BNP was never “going to bring Henry Ford back to Dagenham”. They voted clearly and unambiguously, and the BNP was vanquished.

“And what that says to me,” says the Bard of Barking, who devoted a great deal of energy to the battle in a town that has, for some years now, boasted a Bragg Close, “is, I’m really quite encouraged. We can trust our fellow citizens.”

Bragg’s always been an optimist – ever since he bought his way out of the army in 1981, got politicised by Rock Against Racism and a formative Clash concert, released his first record and, in 1983, persuaded John Peel to play it by sprinting round to the BBC with a mushroom biryani when Peel happened to mention, on air, that he was feeling a bit peckish.

“I have to be [an optimist],” he says. “I’m a socialist. I’m a glass-half-full person. Look, if we’re going to do this, we have to believe we can, don’t we? Nothing pisses me off more than the cynics. Not sceptics. I mean the people who’ve given up hope, and want you to give up too. Eeyores. The BNP – they’re cynics. You know, it’s not capitalism or conservatism that’s the greatest enemy of those of us who want to make a better society, it’s cynicism. Not least our own. We have to guard against our own cynicism, too. Look at me: I once voted for Tony Blair.”

But there’s plenty to feel optimistic about, he reckons, for this Year of (Possible) Revolution 2011. Things are afoot, and on several fronts. The battle of Barking was just the start. Politics in the second decade of the 21st century are, against all expectations, starting to look quite exciting. “Free market capitalism,” declares Bragg cheerfully, sucking on a mineral water, “is in crisis.”

Because what people are beginning to grasp, he says, is that we have to find “a way to hold the markets to account – rules to constrain their worst excesses, and to make sure that when the banks fuck up, they’re the ones that lose their arses, not us. Self-regulation’s an oxymoron. Turbocharged capitalism’s tanking: people are coming to understand that unregulated markets are a scam, a profiteering scam.”

It was, sadly – if inevitably – under New Labour that the City was raised to its present pinnacle. “All growth is good – that was a dogma shared by all the parties,” Bragg says. “But when you’ve got a chancellor saying, ‘I can’t do that because the markets won’t like it …’ Well, a society run by the market isn’t a democracy. The market’s like fire, you know? Constrain it, harness it, and it’ll provide you with warmth and light and heat for your cooking … Let it rip, and it’ll destroy everything you hold dear.”

He’s warming with Essex eloquence to his theme, the boy who failed his 11-plus, who was never expected to do anything but work in the car plant; the young punk rocker whose dad, Dennis, warehouse worker, sales manager for a Barking hat maker, died of lung cancer at the age of 52, when Billy was just 18. (“I’m older than my dad ever was,” he says later, outside in the corridor. “That’s part of what’s made this year special.”)

But it’s not just the markets that people have had enough of. “There’s a whole lot of issues out there beginning to coalesce: tuition fees, bank bonuses, tax avoidance, the decimation of the public sector, fair pay, opposition to globalisation … And what connects them all, Jon? A wishy-washy word called fairness.”

But that fairness, he goes on, is “nothing to do with the Big Society I hear David Cameron talking about. It’s a society run for the benefit of all, that puts markets at the service of the people, not the other way round. It’s a compassionate society.”

Which brings us, he believes, to the potential game-changer here, the one big difference between now and, say, 1968: the fact that, these days, “We’re living in a post-ideological period.”

The people out protesting now, Bragg says, are the first generation ever to be able to talk about socialism without having the long shadow of Karl Marx hanging over them. If, indeed, they even describe it as such. “To be honest, I don’t care if it’s called socialism,” he says. “Anyway, what is socialism but organised compassion?”

Today’s young protestors, he points out, “don’t need the SWP to tell them what they’re fighting for, or the TUC to tell them where to march. They’re making their own connections, and at the bottom of them all is an absolute sense of unfairness. That’s what’s politicised them. Not some abstract interest in dialectical materialism.”

He doesn’t hold with violence, mind: “One of the lessons of the failed anti-globalisation protests is, you don’t change the world by smashing up branches of McDonald’s.” Nor, he says, are these protestors Thatcher’s children. “They’re Attlee’s children,” he insists. “They’re standing up and saying, this should be funded from collective provision. Besides, there was a generation between ours and this one, you know. They were Thatcher’s children. They went shopping.”

And where is music in all this? Back in the days of the miners’ strike, of Red Wedge, the Falklands and the poll tax, there was music, wasn’t there? So where is it now? It’s a question, he admits, that he’s thought about a lot. The 60s generation, Bragg reckons, believed they could change the world through music, because their own lives had been changed forever by rock’n'roll.

“It wasn’t that simple,” he says. “You can’t change the world by selling records. But in the 1980s, that helped me, and others like me. Because when Red Wedge and all that happened, the people who ran the music magazines, they’d all been teenagers in 1968. They gave us a platform. Whereas today, it’s not accepted for young bands to be political. They need to feel confident, to feel they’ve got a base, and it’s not there yet. It’ll come, though. No one wrote about Vietnam until they started conscripting college-age kids.”

The musicians of Bragg’s generation can help, he believes, by “showing them that they’re not the first to have fought the fight. That’s the real role of the musician. Look at me. I wouldn’t be sitting here if I hadn’t once been to see the Clash. But it wasn’t the Clash that changed my world. It was the audience. In the office I was working in at the time, there was a lot of casual racism. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t big enough to say anything. But then I went along to Victoria Park in Hackney one afternoon, and there were 100,000 kids there who felt exactly like me. So I went back to work on Monday morning, and I knew I wasn’t alone. My world hadn’t changed, but my perception of it had. And that’s the role of the musician.”

Changing perceptions or not, Bragg’s never been busier. Besides the tour and the battle of Barking, last year he refused to pay his tax bill as long as the government refused to cap bonuses at the Royal Bank of Scotland. He’s visited a dozen prisons as part of his Jail Guitar Doors campaign to bring music-making into prisons; he’s been working with the Featured Artists Coalition, representing artists’ interests in the digital age.

He curated the Leftfield pop-and-politics tent at Glastonbury; appeared at Speakers’ Corner; performed in Pressure Drop, “part play, part gig, part installation” at the Wellcome Collection; visited and inspired student sit-ins. And he was in America for the mid-terms.

As a tactical Lib-Dem voter since 2001, he feels “a dreadful sense of betrayal” now they’re in government. “They had some positive things in their manifesto, and they seem to have abandoned the lot of ‘em.” But he is still a firm believer in the benefits of more plurality in politics, and has been active in the Take Back Parliament campaign for voting reform.

He’s taken some flak, but hey, “If you stick you arse out the window, you never know if they’re going to kiss it, kick it or stick a flag in it.” Right now, though, wife Juliet and son Jack – who took to the stage with his dad last night – are waiting down the corridor, eager to start the drive back to Dorset.

Last year was, he says, “a galvanising year”, and 2011 will be more so. “I’m excited, really. We should never underestimate the vigour of youth, and their ability to remake the world. We’ve got a lot to learn from them – their ability to join things up, take the initiative, not hang around and see what Marx would have said. The old men can sit and shake their heads, you know. Or they can follow the students to the barricades. I know where I’ll be.”

Here’s wishing you a very Happy New Year, Mr Bragg.

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