The questions I would expect to be answered in a consultation of this kind are as follows:

In the case of Stratford-upon-Avon, I have some other, very specific questions. Stratford is (or was, last time I checked) Britain’s third most popular tourist destination. It will play a leading role in the Cultural Olympiad as part of the 2012 Olympics. It is home to the world’s most famous theatre, and the world’s most famous theatre company, and also to the Shakespeare birthplace trust. Parkway stations, such as Warwick Parkway, are typically constructed on out-of-town sites to give easy parking for local people to commute to perhaps London or Birmingham. They provide ample parking, hence the name Parkway and relatively easy access from motorways. It’s true there are people who have to go from Stratford to Birmingham or London, though my local station of Honeybourne is a deal more convenient, faster and more cost effective for trips to London, and Warwick Parkway is available on the other side of Stratford. But most of the potential growth in rail use for Stratford is inward, not outward: tourism is destined to play an even larger part in the town’s future, with the reopening of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre next year.

Therefore, I would want to know:

I am not saying that these questions are unanswerable. But, despite laudable sections on environmental and flooding impact, the consultation posters significantly fail to answer the basic rail-industry questions, and, equally, the more specific Stratford-facing questions.

I would very much like to be able to support the creation of a new station. However, on the evidence presented to me, I don’t believe I can. Right now — and I would be only too happy to be proved wrong — this seems to be yet another grandiose public construction scheme of the type that is plaguing this area, whether Labour-led (“Eco”-towns) or Conservative (Bancroft and Bridge).

If they know why they are doing this, please would they tell us? Otherwise, it is time to learn that just because we can build something, it does not mean that we should.

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I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the local campaign. You can follow the news at the Stratford Herald, or on the association’s website; if you are local, I do urge you to support it. But my concern right now is our antiquated UK planning system which, in my experience, penalises the honest and serves the well-lawyered, well-funded, and the simply brutal.

First off, planning decisions which have a disproportionate effect at a very local level are made at a distance. Broom’s planning decisions are not made by Broom Parish Council, nor even by Stratford District Council. They are made by the planning committee of Warwickshire County Council. In most cases, it means those making the decisions have neither local knowledge nor connection. True, both the Parish and District Councils can play an advisory role but, as we have seen in this particular instance, things can go wrong with this process, leaving local people no avenue to voice their concerns.

Second, there is no linkage between fulfilment of previous conditions and the granting of new approval. How can Cemex possibly be allowed to dig a new quarry when they didn’t finish (or even start) the reinstatement of the old land? Simply, because there is nothing to make them. If they were selling a product to the public — for example, a car, or computer software — and failed to comply with previous conditions placed on them, then the Office of Fair Trading, the courts, or even the European Union would impose punitive fines and ban them from further sales. If they were a private citizen who — for example — failed to abide by a Noise Abatement Order, then they would be given an Anti Social Behaviour Order, and if they failed to comply with that, would face a fine or prison. If they were a motorist, they would eventually lose their driving license. No such linkage is applied in planning law.

Third, all the money is on the side of those who make money. I remember vividly attending a planning appeal at another local authority, where the planning committee had turned down a proposal for a new housing development, and the speculative builders had immediately insisted on appealing. The council brought its own employed solicitor, who looked tired and worn down. The builders brought a smart QC — a silk, in fact — from London. Once the decision was overturned, as it inevitably was, since the council did not have resources to invest in defending it, the QC then demanded that all the costs of the appeal be met by the council. The request was granted. This was (to me) an extraordinary example of a quasi-judicial process thwarting the will of the electorate’s elected members. I subsequently learned that this was in fact quite common. It means that we, the electorate, are funding the means for our wishes to be ignored.

This is all exacerbated by the kind of quarrying targets that we find in the minerals core strategy. And, of course, we have seen the kind of flouting of local process that happened with the proposed imposition of the Long Marston Eco-Town.

What should be done?

At the moment, planning law is both confused and confusing. It is unsurprising that so many appeals by prospective builders and quarriers are upheld, since they are able to invest much more time in delving through the law to find grounds to overturn a decision. Elected councillors are not legal experts, nor should they required to be. Rather, their duty is to exercise their judgment on behalf of the entire community. To balance the needs of economy with the needs of local people to live quiet lives, unhindered and unimpeded by money-making ventures, is a political decision, not a legal one. If the councillors get it wrong, the electors are free to tell them so at the ballot box.

We do not need further amendments to planning law, but, rather a new simple, definitive system designed to make planning decisions easy to make, and restrictions easy to enforce — with penalties which are greater than the profits a company might make by flouting them. If you go to the government’s Planning Portal, and type the term ‘quarry’ into their search, you find 694 separate results. True, a number of these are news items, but every news item is included because it partially sets a precedent.

We also need to dramatically alter the balance of risk and reward in favour of the citizen, against materials extractors and speculative builders. In general, for most types of business in Great Britain, the balance is about right. Companies need to be able to bring new products to market and sell them, both to satisfy the consumer and in order to turn a profit which puts money into the economy. But for planning, that balance is heavily skewed. This is particularly an issue because the results of poor planning decisions are with us for decades or even centuries. I’m told that it will take 25 years before the Marsh Farm land would be back to normal if reinstatement started today. Very few businesses in the modern world will survive 25 years, leaving residents with nowhere to turn if reinstatements are not made.

Finally, we need to reassess what we really want to do with the landscape of Britain. On current strategies, we are perpetually increasing the number of houses, quarries and industrial plants. Do we really need to do so? Perhaps — but we ought to have the debate. Do we really need to continue to do so on green-field sites, while large swathes of urban areas are left to become wasteland? I think not. But it is naturally much more profitable to build on green-field sites than to work with all the pitfalls of building on former factories. Everybody knows this: you will not find a politician, planner or bureaucrat anywhere who wants to build on green-field as a preference to brown-field. But our planning system gives little true support to this view.

While we know what we should do, our system aids those who wish do to what we wish they wouldn’t. And this must change.

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The Transport Select Committee, it seems, agrees that transport policy is in disarray. It’s, of course, convenient to blame this on Labour (who are conveniently placed for many kinds of blame), but it transport policy has been in disarray for years. Barbara Castle, for those with long memories, was the one who shut down lots of the commuter and village railway stations. And Margaret Thatcher, famously, sold off the railways as a way to break the power of the unions. At the same time, lots of Labour local authorities across the country imposed the first of punitive parking regimes as a way of punishing motorists into behaving themselves.

Since then, motorists have been told that their road taxes, parking, petrol charges, and, increasingly, parking and speeding fines, are going up for all kinds of things — to save the environment, to pay for the roads, to support road safety, to manage congestion, to shift people onto public transport, to regenerate town centres, for cleaner air, for faster transits. The list goes on.

Does anybody really believe any of it?

It is disappointing that motorists no longer trust the government on transport policy. But the government has probably learned to live with mistrust now. More importantly, it seems that there is no longer a consensus within the various strands of government about what transport policy is trying to achieve. Nor much idea from the possible next government: David Cameron’s crew got very stroppy when petrol prices went up, and complained that this meant fewer road journeys, but it was their own Kenneth Clarke who introduced the fuel escalator with this very purpose. Do we worry that fewer car journeys will damage the economy, or do we worry that the endless increase in petrol consumption makes us ever more dependent on the rest of the world for oil?

Here’s another one. Until recently, diesel was more expensive in the UK than petrol. Why? Why do we tax diesel engines, which are 20% more fuel efficient (and therefore better for the environment) than petrol engines, in this way? Previously, diesel particulates were understood to be worse for pollution levels. But these are now filtered and the filtering strictly monitored through the MOT test.

And another — the new, much more expensive road tax for larger cars only affects newer larger cars. If you’ve got an old car, burning oil along with fuel as it chugs unhealthily along the road, then you pay less. But old cars are less fuel efficient and less safe. And another one — the Inland Revenue approved mileage rate is 40p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles, but only 5p per passenger: little in the way of incentive to car-share.

Until we can work out, as a nation, and agree it across local and national government, what transport policy is for, we will never work out what it should be.

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Forget, for a moment, how you choose to implement them. If you could have five things, what five? I tried this one with some of my colleagues. Making the unemployed work was a popular choice, so was making people more honest (remember, I did say don’t worry about how to deliver it). One person said she wanted to plant lots of trees, and make sure there were lots of parties.

For the record, my five things would be:

Restore trust in democracy
End human trafficking world-wide
Put a stop to predatory commerce (loan-sharks, scams, and those cash machines they put in deprived areas that charge you for your own money)
Make Britain an environmentally sustainable economy
Brand greed as a vice, not a virtue

This might strike you as an odd list for a Liberal Democrat. Why nothing about education, the health service, the arms race, child poverty? These are all important issues, but they’re also all issues which pretty much everyone agrees on. All parties are for health, against crime, against bloodshed, against poverty, for education. My five are things which either — generally — government shows little interest in, or problems to which no-one yet has an adequate answer. Things that are worth going down in history for, perhaps.

So, what are your five?

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It’s time for the Euro elections, and England (particularly — other parts of the Union are better at this) has never quite made up its mind as to whether the Euro elections are to be taken more or less seriously than Eurovision. Single issue parties come and go. Remember the Referendum Party? The Common Good? Respect? (Whatever happened to them?) Perennial favourites are back, of course: UKIP and the Greens accounting for right-wing and left-wing, under the guise of being about something important. But our most popular single issue party, the Official Monster Raving Looney Party, seems to give Europe a miss. Maybe they don’t take Europe as seriously as the others do. This time we have some new ones — English Democrats, the Jury Team, No2EU, Fair Play Fair Trade Party, Libertas, Mebyon Kernow, Animals Count, the Alliance Party, the Pensioners party, the Roman Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Socialist Labour Party, The Peace Party, Wai D, Yes 2 Europe, and the Christian Peoples Alliance.

That’s an awful lot of parties.

For a few years, we took a stand at the Greenbelt Festival with the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum. Generally speaking, we were there in a tent with about 100-200 organisations represented, all trying to have some impact through politics. They ranged from major charities through to one man bands. A few of them eyed us with suspicion, while others told us how hard it was to get the major parties to take them seriously. In some cases, they both eyed us with suspicion and told us the major parties wouldn’t take them seriously.

There are basically three kinds of single issue politics. One is temporary but important. One is well-meaning but fairly useless. One is dangerous and dishonest.

Joanna Lumley’s campaign for the Gurkhas is the most recent in a long line of highly focused campaigns on a single issue which attract cross-party support, achieve their goal, and then disappear. Lumley is not looking to form a Gurkha’s party, or to propel herself into parliament by this means. She identified an injustice which meant a lot to her (her father had fought alongside the Gurkhas), and invested her profile and talents working with the legitimate owners of the issue — the Gurkhas themselves. This is the first kind of single issue politics, and it plays an important role in British society. But, very, very rarely does such a cause form a party and stand at elections. Its strength is that it can work with the existing politicians for something which is evidently right.

Fair Play Fair Trade, Animals Count and the Peace Party are examples of the second kind. They raise a legitimate social issue. But, in fact, their involvement in the election does nothing to take their agenda forward. At best, they achieve nothing. At worst, they switch off the people who actually do get elected from doing anything about it. At the 2001 General Election, for example, I, as a very green first-time candidate, attended a meeting about asylum seeker rights — something about which I care passionately, though it’s not a popular issue with most people. It didn’t take long to realise that everyone else present was from one of the extremist parties, and the meeting had been organised to demonstrate that only they cared about asylum seekers. They did their best to make me welcome, but they didn’t conceal very successfully that the only reason they had invited me (and others, who did not attend) was in order to be able to say ‘we invited the main parties, but they weren’t interested’.

Then there are the parties that put forward a single issue, but are actually about something entirely different. I grew up believing that the Green party was a party of environmentalists. It was only when I started meeting them that I discovered they (at least in Britain) are actually an extreme socialist party that attracts attention and votes by flying the Green flag, but are closed to any form of environmentalism which does not tally with their underlying philosophy. If you want to save the planet, join Friends of the Earth instead. A number of the ‘save the NHS’ parties are run by people who had no previous contact with the NHS, except as patients, until they decided that the closure of a local hospital was an ideal issue on which to sell their party. Some of these are more honest than others. I believe that the Greens do care about the environment. On the other hand, every piece of literature I’ve ever seen from the BNP attempts to present a single issue, such as law and order, as their real concern. You have to read a long way down many of their pieces before you discover what they are really about.

Single issue campaigns are part of the warp and woof of British democracy. Single issue parties are the electoral equivalent of dithering: when it’s too hard to choose, perhaps because of a crisis of the kind we have seen over MP expenses, many people opt for them because they feel they have a duty to vote, and want to vote for something else, anything else.

But when these single issue parties have been elected, as with UKIP and the Greens at the last Euro elections, and as with the BNP and Respect on some councils, and, for George Galloway, in parliament, their record is depressing. Aside from going on Big Brother, it’s very hard to spot anything that Galloway has actually done since being elected as a Respect MP. UKIP lost their party leader swiftly, and lost another MEP to a benefits-fraud conviction, and have probably the worst voting record of any party in any European country. The Greens have not engaged in any positive dialogue which has generated any change that would not have happened if they had not been there. Although the BNP have failed to secure seats in any of our parliaments, their European cousins, Vlaams Blok in Belgium and LPF in the Netherlands, actually gained enough seats to form governments. But their governments quickly collapsed, because they lacked the consensus to put into practice their underlying racist policies, and they had no other policies on which to base an administration.

Hand wringing is all very well. No one can deny that many of our mainstream politicians have let us down badly, not just over the last couple of weeks, but over the five, ten or twenty years since they were first elected. But, like it or not, real politicians in real parties are in it for the long haul, and when all the bluster of scandal and election are over, they sit down together and work out — often across party boundaries — how to get the best deal for the public who elected them. They certainly don’t always get it right. But their record is infinitely better than the hand wringing or single-cynicism parties that surface especially at Euro elections.

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But — once the now almost inevitable leadership challenge has prematurely ended his premiership — his legacy will have been the perfect storm of crisis in Westminster, economic meltdown, and environmental collapse.

Brown waited ten years for the best job in politics, and within two years almost every shred of authority has fallen from him.

We are, of course, nowhere near the position of Germany in the 1930s. Confidence in our democracy has not collapsed to that extent, and our economy — though in poor shape — is not remotely like that of the Weimar republic.

Nonetheless — even accepting that our position, though appalling, is not desperate as theirs was — we must learn something. The extremist parties are already rushing to cash in on the combination of economics and crisis of trust. UKIP have lost an MEP to the criminal justice system as a result of benefit fraud, and yet they are attempting to make capital out of the ‘dishonesty’ of the MPs of the mainstream parties. Other groups, more extreme, widely exposed in the media for what they really are, are flooding the streets of susceptible areas with their promises to clean up politics.

Politics must be cleaned up, but the extremist parties are not the ones to do it. Great Britain must hold its nerve through this crisis. Electing someone just because they are ‘different’ is no sound basis for the future.

Gordon Brown’s tragedy is a personal one. He longed to serve his country, but the times were not right. We must not allow his to become our national tragedy. We are in danger of electing the most right wing set of MEPs in our European history, and in danger of doing the same thing at Westminster when the General Election comes.

Reactionary, right wing politics is no more likely to lead to upright, honest politicians than any other random stab in the dark. It is terribly hard, but Britain must rally round the core of centre politicians who have not been tarnished (except by rhetoric) in this scandal.

We owe it to ourselves.

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David Cameron has made a speech in which he bewails the lack of trust the nation places in politics and politicians. He is right to do so. He wants to ‘Mend broken politics’. A noble ambition. But he is the wrong person to do it. David Cameron, who will not come clean on his misuse of drugs as a student, who caused a photograph of himself at the head of a pack of drunken diners in Oxford to be withdrawn from circulation because of the image it painted of him (an accurate one), who engaged in nothing more than the politics of the playground in Tony Blair’s last months, who has demanded the toughest penalties for unproven allegations against Labour members, but dithered for 24-hours before withdrawing the whip from Derek Conway when there was no doubt about the case – this David Cameron is in no position to lecture the nation on mending broken politics.

This is the David Cameron who bewails Labour’s spin, but decided to have himself photographed cycling to work to save the environment, while a van drove behind him with his files inside (we should recall that the van was not supposed to appear in the photographs). This is the David Cameron who, in his work on an earlier Tory manifesto, was a man of the right wing, who now poses as a liberal, a centrist, a green, clean and friendly neighbourhood handy-man, ready with a hammer, some nails and a lick of fresh (green) paint to fix the fences that naughty Labour have broken down.

I’m no fan of Labour. I’m no fan of their centralising vision of government, their arbitrary imposition of the will of the towns onto the countryside, and their failure to take responsibility for the mess of half-truths and half-baked ideas that took us into Iraq.

But the corrosive style of politics that we have seen persistently erode public confidence in public figures is more a result of Cameron and his predecessors, Messrs Howard, Duncan-Smith and Hague. Cameron is strong only in sniping and jeering. We have yet to see a coherent set of policies for how he would run the nation. More importantly, we have yet to see any coherence between the values he claims to have now, and the values he appeared to live by before he was in the public eye. Yes, of course he is careful now. If he were not careful, he would never have been elected as Tory leader. But in the years when other people were volunteering to work at the Oxford night shelter, or counselling other students, or going off to work for charities and unpaid voluntary organisations, what was Cameron doing?

In an interview with Channel 4, David Cameron is recorded to have said that he had not taken Class A drugs since being elected to Parliament in 2001. This is extraordinary. Is this the best that he can possibly say for himself?

Pressed on drug use on Question Time, he is recorded to have said “I’m allowed to have had a private life before politics in which we make mistakes and we do things that we should not and we are all human and we err and stray.” Yes, quite possibly. We all did things as small children which we are ashamed of. But Cameron was punished at Eton for cannabis use. If he had been brought up in the area where I was brought up, and his parents had not had the power to protect him, he might quite conceivably have gone to prison for this. Legally speaking, it is clear that he engaged in criminal behaviour. Should we simply gloss over this? Perhaps. But the evidence is that he continued to use drugs at Oxford. Should we gloss over that? Not to my mind. I don’t ever recall meeting David Cameron at Oxford – I’m fairly sure he wasn’t a member of the Christian Union! I wonder if I ever saw him drunk in the streets with his dining club pals. At this distance, it is hard to tell. But I do recall absolutely that at Oxford, in those years, we considered ourselves to be adults, responsible for our own actions. That responsibility does not fade with time. But if the best that he can claim is that he has not used Class A drugs since 2001, and he made that claim in 2005, then all he has really said is that he has been clean for four years.

It is absolutely essential that politics in Britain is cleaned up. In fact, I am firmly of the opinion that a whole generation of MPs of the ilk of Derek Conway have to go. A Tory councillor recently confided in me that there were many more such as he, he merely had the misfortune to be caught. Giving those MPs a lick of paint, and parcelling them off to the back benches is insufficient. One of those MPs who should go is David Cameron. Perhaps with regret, perhaps with a sense of irony for a man who could have been much more if he had lived a law-abiding life from the days of his ‘wake-up call’ at Eton. But if Mr Cameron really wishes to mend broken politics, then his greatest contribution will be to leave it.

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Ultimately, children’s literature, if it exists at all, is literature which is written to make sense to, and appeal to children — though possibly with a wary eye to the adults who may be vetting it. Analytically, the most obvious point of reference for adult authors writing is to write about children themselves. This is something certainly borne out by a survey of the market (or the corpus, if we want to be academic). A very high proportion of children’s books being published today are about children, and even greater proportion of the most successful books are: Harry Potter, Lemony Snickett, Tracy Beaker, and so on.

Looking back at what we might call the ‘canon’, we see, going from the present to the past, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tom’s Midnight Garden, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, the Narnia books, the Box of Delights, Le Petit Prince, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Five Children and It, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — landmark books where children are the main characters. Set against that, we have Watership Down, The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows and Pinocchio, but Pinocchio is a doll that wishes to become a child, the rabbits in Watership Down are ingenues in a wider world, and Bilbo Baggins is physically always the smallest and least experienced person. I do not wish to push this point too hard, since it could be argued that even 007 in ‘You only live twice’, is the ingenue in a strange land, by which one could make ones way to the entertaining, but entirely unproductive claim, that all literature is about representations of children.

I am not offering this list as a definitive, in the tradition of FR Leavis: it is merely a list of books which spring into my mind, supplemented by someone else’s list from Wikipedia, which will no doubt have changed by the time anyone reads this. However, I should perhaps explain why neither Winnie the Pooh nor the Tale of Peter Rabbit are included. Children’s literature, I feel, should be about the books that children choose to read, rather than the books which are read to them. Perhaps I am being unfair to Peter Rabbit. It is also, I think, primarily about ‘books’, as defined by the point in children’s lives when they see the books they read as being essentially the same kind of thing that they see adults reading. This might be a difficult point to prove, but, thankfully, public libraries and publishers have made their own arbitrary judgements about these things, and both print and display books in such a way as to make it clear that these are picture books, but those are reading books.

I digress. For the time being, suffice it for me to make the claim that books about children are one of the fundamental categories of children’s literature.

With that in mind, there is immediately a fundamental problem to that fundamental category. One of the most basic requirements of any kind of fiction is that interesting things happen which are plausible within the context of the world in which they are set. This is naturally a relatively easy problem to solve in an entirely made up world. From the moment that we hear “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…” we know that we are in entirely different world, where all kinds of interesting things may happen. Sadly, there is a dreary back catalogue of authors who thought they could write tours-de-force of imagination like Tolkien or Kenneth Grahame, but produced something rather less significant than Noddy in Toyland: worlds which are neither interesting, nor believable.

For a story about children, the immediate problem is: what about the parents? Children are of course allowed to play, but children’s novels are not about children playing at interesting things happening, but about them actually happening. So one is left with the question: what kind of parents would allow a child to travel in danger right across Europe (The Lost Prince), tackle criminal gangs (any Famous Five story), fight pirates (Treasure Island), coast down the river on a raft (Huckleberry Finn), or take up with any random collection of strangers which happens to come along (Moonfleet)? Note that these examples are from books set firmly in the ‘natural’ world, without any hint of supernatural activity. Real parents would put a stop to such things straight away, and, if they didn’t, social services would be round in an instant to do what the parents wouldn’t.

The first problem, then, for the children’s author who chooses to write about children, is to get the parents out of the way, or otherwise neutralise them. Key approaches with a long pedigree include:?

What about author’s who choose not to use any of these solutions — who, in fact, choose not to solve the problem at all? Stan Barstow’s Joby, Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, and others represent a school of British naturalistic children’s fiction which is hugely popular with school teachers, but rather less so with children. As it happens, A Kestrel for a Knave does include the absent father, but it is not used to solve the problem of children’s literature, but to underline it. It could be argued that the parent-problem is only an issue when literature is escapist, but this is to fall into the trap (which also seems to have made a major come back in schools) of imagining that imaginative literature is somehow less valid than naturalistic literature, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This is to suggest that there is a ‘purpose’ to literature, either in the mould of Leavis (serving the purposes of life, whatever they are) or of Ruskin, in his criticism of the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. But imputing a purpose to literature is effectively saying that everyone writes with the same purpose, while, intuitively, authors know that they do not even write with the same purpose on different days of the week.
I think if put to it, I would argue that the greatest children’s literature of the 20th century was a quadrivium of fantasy books: The Box of Delights, The Hobbit, the first six Narnia books, and A Wizard of Earthsea. Some people would put Tom’s Midnight Garden at the head of the pack, and probably many would want to make a case for the Wind in the Willows. People who really dislike CS Lewis (you know who you are) would almost certainly want to change the time frame a little and include Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, though if we were to do that, it would be very hard not to include the Harry Potter books. All of these books are escapist fantasy: talking animals, wizards, travel through time, travel from world to world.
The same is true of the foundations of English children’s literature, written in the 19th century or at the very beginning of the 20th by authors who were part of that era: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and the E Nesbit books: naturalism has no place in these books, although the authors were careful to create the illusion of naturalism whenever it suited them, as a means of underlining what they were really doing.

When I read the comments of people who favour naturalistic British children’s literature, I’m always left with the sense that they feel there is something intrinsically immoral in doing away with the parents for the sake of a successful story. I also have the impression that they feel that 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies (although its solution to the parent problem is one of the most complete), The Pearl, The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird are good for children, because children can correctly learn that life is wretched, and will then be free to carry on growing up in the existential courage that was so popular round about 1922. But if this is the purpose of children’s literature, it is clearly not one shared by the better children’s authors (better, in the sense of more exactly being able to sell large numbers of books, which, in a wretched world, would surely by the only measure worth having), nor by the book-buying, book-borrowing and even book-stealing child-public.

Again, I digress.

The view I am putting forward, about the fundamental need of authors to solve the parent-paradox, may (by this point hopefully does) seem an obvious one, but it is not necessarily the general consensus. For example, the prevalence of orphans in children’s literature has attracted the attention of Philip Nel, of Kansas State University, who explains it rather differently: “The literary orphan dramatizes the difficulty of being a child. That is, to be a child is to be subject to the forces of people more powerful than you are. Well, being an orphan makes the powerlessness of childhood that much more visible. At the same time, many literary orphans are resilient characters who, despite their relative lack of power, find the emotional resources to beat the odds and make their way in the world.” (Quoted in USA Today, 7/2/2003)

Perhaps. The plight of the Baudelaires is clearly directly linked to their status as orphans, and it is clearly their powerlessness that Count Olaf exploits in his bid to obtain their inheritance. On the other hand, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim has complete freedom to live the way he wishes because he is an orphan. Tom Sawyer is incompletely free because he still has an Aunt Polly, whereas Huckleberry Finn is able to function with complete freedom. Peter Pan is either a lost child, an abandoned child, or an orphan, subject to which of the many of JM Barrie’s versions of the book and the play one considers. But, again, his unparented status is the source of his freedom, not his vulnerability.

Philip Nel is particularly thinking of Harry Potter when he talks about orphans, but Potter is a special case, as he (to begin with) has the worst of both worlds: no parental love, but guardians who prevent him from having any fun whatsoever. Even so, Potter discovers himself later to have been protected and guided by forces more powerful than his parents, and certainly than the Dursleys. It is precisely his lack of emotional resources to cope with the absence of his parents that provide the counterpoint to what would otherwise be a tediously easy access to the delights of magical power.

Nonetheless, orphans do outweigh other plausible solutions to the parents paradox in English children’s literature. Though their function in solving the problem of plausible scenario has been, I think, now soundly demonstrated, they clearly have a resonance which goes beyond their function. In fact, orphans have the strongest, or at least the oldest, pedigree in English literature: at the very beginning of our earliest epic, Beowulf, we hear that the very first character, Scyld Scefing, “ærest wearð feasceaft funden” — was first found an orphan. King Arthur is brought up as an orphan. Our other literary heritage — Latin — begins with the myth of Romulus and Remus, also foundlings, although they are not technically orphans, but the offspring of the God Mars.

It is beyond the scope of this essay — and perhaps of any essay — to realistically unpick the resonances of orphans in world literature and folk-tales. Which came first, the notion of orphans as the offspring of gods, or the resonance of orphans as figures in stories? How could anyone possibly find out? — although, naturally, as with most unproveables, it is an excuse to spill a lot of ink.

It is one of the great temptations of literary criticism to identify a common feature in diverse works and thereby assume that it explains everything. Orphans are not the hidden meaning of literature: if this essay has demonstrated anything, it is that there are a range of solutions available to the children’s author. What I believe I have demonstrated is that, within the confines of making a story work, the author must either choose not to write about children at all, or must find some means of suppressing parental interference, or is restricted to (possibly, but not necessarily quite grim) naturalistic writing.

Perhaps the ultimate escapism that children look for in children’s books is a plausible escape from their parents. But only so long as they are in the book.

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The most recent ICM poll shows that the Cameron factor is failing, and the Brown factor is unlikely to do Labour any favours, according to the Guardian today. By contrast, support for Lib-Dems has risen ahead of next week’s council elections, and smaller parties are also set to benefit.

Looking at polls is, in some senses, a mug’s game, because the only poll that actually counts is the one where voters turn out and make their mark on a ballot (or do the same thing by post or through a proxy). We won’t have to wait long for that one.

But.

In another sense polls of this kind give us information which is broader and in some ways more useful than the real poll. Local elections are fought on local issues, and every party will take both comfort and discomfort from next week in surprising places. The ICM poll gives us a picture of the next general election.

It seems that the next general election is highly likely to give us a hung parliament. In the past this would have been seen as electoral disaster, but the lesson first of Scotland and now also of Wales is that hung parliaments can lead to extremely rich and rewarding government by partnership and consensus. What is more, the lesson is that this works when both partners are equal in government. Britain’s coalition misfortunes of the past have largely been a result of the tendency of larger partners to expect the smaller partners to be grateful for being allowed in government at all. The results were unstable, unsatisfying, and left both with a sour aftertaste. Scotland’s productive coalition has been based on equal say and equal influence — a recognition that both partners are necessary for the government to function. In this environment, good policy has (largely) flourished, and bad policy has floundered.

We should remember that the Liberal Democrats went into the first Scottish elections with two key aims — to abolish tuition fees, and to provide free long term care for the elderly. Before the election, Labour candidates effectively stated that, whatever happened, those two aims would certainly not succeed. However, once the coalition was formed, both policies were put through. The first term of the Scottish parliament was memorable for precisely three things it achieved. Two of them were these two Liberal Democrat policies. The third was the commencement of construction of the Scottish parliament building, which ultimately went vastly over budget and has prompted widespread criticism.

At this point nobody can say who the partners might be in a putative Westminster coalition. But the lesson of Scotland is that coalitions can work, and that it is the party with the best ideas and most consistent policies which will achieve its aim, not necessarily the party with the most seats.

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