Bedales

Thursday

Gus Carter

Keir Starmer’s plan to soften Brexit

42 min listen

This week: Keir Starmer’s plan to soften Brexit Katy Balls writes this week’s cover piece on Labour’s plans to establish close ties with the EU. Every member of Starmer’s cabinet voted Remain, and the government is trying to ‘reset EU relations through a charm offensive’. Brussels figures are hopeful: ‘There was no real goodwill for the Conservative government.’ There are tests coming: the first deal, Katy writes, could be harmonisation on veterinary standards. But will the UK have to abide by the European Court of Justice? Then there’s the issue of Chinese electric cars: will Starmer accept cheap imports, or follow the EU in raising tariffs on them? For now,

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The cult of Bedales

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t. Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since. Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now