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Culture war

In political science, a culture war is a type of cultural conflict between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology (beliefs, virtues, practices) upon their society. In political usage, the term culture war is a metaphor for "hot-button" politics about values and ideologies, realized with intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters of public policy and of consumption. As practical politics, a culture war is about social policy wedge issues that are based on abstract arguments about values, morality, and lifestyle meant to provoke political cleavage in a multicultural society.

Kulturkampf
In the English language, the term culture war is a calque of the German word Kulturkampf (culture struggle), which refers to an historical event in Germany. The term appears as the title of an 1875 British book review of a German pamphlet.

Criticism and evaluation
Since the time that James Davison Hunter first applied the concept of culture wars to American life, the idea has been subject to questions about whether "culture wars" names a real phenomenon, and if so, whether the phenomenon it describes is a cause of, or merely a result of, membership in groups like political parties and religions. Culture wars have also been subject to the criticism of being artificial, imposed, or asymmetric conflicts, rather than a result of authentic differences between cultures.

Researchers have differed about the scientific validity of the notion of culture war. Some claim it does not describe real behavior, or that it describes only the behavior of a small political elite. Others claim culture war is real and widespread, and even that it is fundamental to explaining Americans' political behavior and beliefs.

A 2023 study on the circulation of conspiracy theories on social media noted that disinformation actors insert polarizing claims in culture wars by taking one side or the other, thus making the adherents circulate and parrot disinformation as a rhetorical ammunition against their perceived opponents.

Political scientist Alan Wolfe participated in a series of scholarly debates in the 1990s and 2000s against Hunter, claiming that Hunter's concept of culture wars did not accurately describe the opinions or behavior of Americans, which Wolfe claimed were more united than polarized.

A meta-analysis of opinion data from 1992 to 2012 published in the American Political Science Review concluded that, in contrast to a common belief that political party and religious membership shape opinion on culture war topics, instead opinions on culture war topics lead people to revise their political party and religious orientations. The researchers view culture war attitudes as "foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens."

Artificiality or asymmetry
Some writers and scholars have said that culture wars are created or perpetuated by political special interest groups, by reactionary social movements, by party dynamics, or by electoral politics as a whole. These authors view culture war not as an unavoidable result of widespread cultural differences, but as a technique used to create in-groups and out-groups for a political purpose.

Political commentator E. J. Dionne has written that culture war is an electoral technique to exploit differences and grievances, remarking that the real cultural division is "between those who want to have a culture war and those who don't."

Sociologist Scott Melzer says that culture wars are created by conservative, reactive organizations and movements. Members of these movements possess a "sense of victimization at the hands of a liberal culture run amok. In their eyes, immigrants, gays, women, the poor, and other groups are (undeservedly) granted special rights and privileges." Melzer writes about the example of the National Rifle Association of America, which he says intentionally created a culture war in order to unite conservative groups, particularly groups of white men, against a common perceived threat.

Similarly, religion scholar Susan B. Ridgely has written that culture wars were made possible by Focus on the Family. This organization produced conservative Christian "alternative news" that began to bifurcate American media consumption, promoting a particular "traditional family" archetype to one part of the population, particularly conservative religious women. Ridgely says that this tradition was depicted as under liberal attack, seeming to necessitate a culture war to defend the tradition.

Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins have written about an asymmetry between the US's two major political parties, saying the Republican party should be understood as an ideological movement built to wage political conflict, and the Democratic party as a coalition of social groups with less ability to impose ideological discipline on members. This encourages Republicans to perpetuate and to draw new issues into culture wars, because Republicans are well equipped to fight such wars.

According to The Guardian, "many on the left have argued that such [culture war] battles [a]re 'distractions' from the real fight over class and economic issues."

1920s–1991: Origins
In American usage, "culture war" may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict. This followed several decades of immigration to the States by people who earlier European immigrants considered 'alien'. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernizing trends of the Roaring '20s, culminating in the presidential campaign of Al Smith in 1928. In subsequent decades during the 20th century, the term was published occasionally in American newspapers.

1991–2001: Rise in prominence
James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, introduced the expression again in his 1991 publication, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter described what he saw as a dramatic realignment and polarization that had transformed American politics and culture.

He argued that on an increasing number of "hot-button" defining issues—abortion, gun politics, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, censorship—there existed two definable polarities. Furthermore, not only were there a number of divisive issues, but society had divided along essentially the same lines on these issues, so as to constitute two warring groups, defined primarily not by nominal religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation, but rather by ideological world-views.

Hunter characterized this polarity as stemming from opposite impulses, toward what he referred to as Progressivism and as Orthodoxy. Others have adopted the dichotomy with varying labels. For example, Bill O'Reilly, a conservative political commentator and former host of the Fox News Channel talk show The O'Reilly Factor, emphasizes differences between "Secular-Progressives" and "Traditionalists" in his 2006 book Culture Warrior.

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez attributes the 1990s emergence of culture wars to the end of the Cold War in 1991. She writes that Evangelical Christians viewed a particular Christian masculine gender role as the only defense of America against the threat of communism. When this threat ended upon the close of the Cold War, Evangelical leaders transferred the perceived source of threat from foreign communism to domestic changes in gender roles and sexuality.

During the 1992 presidential election, commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for president against incumbent George H. W. Bush. In a prime-time slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan gave his speech on the culture war. He argued: "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In addition to criticizing environmentalists and feminism, he portrayed public morality as a defining issue:

The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.

A month later, Buchanan characterized the conflict as about power over society's definition of right and wrong. He named abortion, sexual orientation and popular culture as major fronts—and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate flag, Christmas, and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the negative attention his "culture war" speech received was itself evidence of America's polarization.

The culture war had significant impact on national politics in the 1990s. The rhetoric of the Christian Coalition of America may have weakened president George H. W. Bush's chances for re-election in 1992 and helped his successor, Bill Clinton, win reelection in 1996. On the other hand, the rhetoric of conservative cultural warriors helped Republicans gain control of Congress in 1994.

The culture wars influenced the debate over state-school history curricula in the United States in the 1990s. In particular, debates over the development of national educational standards in 1994 revolved around whether the study of American history should be a "celebratory" or "critical" undertaking and involved such prominent public figures as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and historian Gary Nash.

2001–2012: Post-9/11 era
A political view called neoconservatism shifted the terms of the debate in the early 2000s. Neoconservatives differed from their opponents in that they interpreted problems facing the nation as moral issues rather than economic or political ones. For example, neoconservatives saw the decline of the traditional family structure as well as the decline of religion in American society as spiritual crises that required a spiritual response. Critics accused neoconservatives of confusing cause and effect.

During the 2000s, voting for Republicans began to correlate heavily with traditionalist or orthodox religious belief across diverse religious sects. Voting for Democrats became more correlated with liberal or modernist religious belief, and with being nonreligious. Belief in scientific conclusions, such as climate change, also became tightly coupled with political party affiliation in this era, causing climate scholar Andrew Hoffman to observe that climate change had "become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars."

Topics traditionally associated with culture war were not prominent in media coverage of the 2008 election season, with the exception of coverage of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who drew attention to her conservative religion and created a performative climate change denialism brand for herself. Palin's defeat in the election and subsequent resignation as governor of Alaska caused the Center for American Progress to predict "the coming end of the culture wars," which they attributed to demographic change, particularly high rates of acceptance of same-sex marriage among millennials.

2012–present: Broadening of the culture war
In the early 2010s, the American right took issue with the perceived worldwide dominance of leftism in international politics and corporate activity, anti-nationalism, and secular human rights policies and activism not based on Abrahamic religious worldviews.

While traditional culture war issues, like abortion, continue to be a focal point, the issues identified with the culture war broadened and intensified in the mid-late 2010s. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, identified a rise in cancel culture via social media among young progressives since 2012, which he believes had "transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world," in what Haidt and other commentators have called the "Great Awokening". Journalist Michael Grunwald says that "President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war" and lists Black Lives Matter, U.S. national anthem protests, climate change, education policy, healthcare policy including Obamacare, and infrastructure policy as culture war issues in 2018. The rights of transgender people and the role of religion in lawmaking were identified as "new fronts in the culture war" by political scientist Jeremiah Castle, as the polarization of public opinion on these two topics resembles that of previous culture war issues. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum described opposition to wearing face masks as a "senseless" culture war issue that jeopardizes human safety.

This broader understanding of culture war issues in the mid-late 2010s and 2020s is associated with a political strategy called "owning the libs." Conservative media figures employing this strategy emphasize and expand upon culture war issues with the goal of upsetting liberals. According to Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University, this strategy is a substitute for the cohesive conservative ideology that existed during the Cold War. It holds a conservative voting bloc together in the absence of shared policy preferences among the bloc's members.

A number of conflicts about diversity in popular culture occurring in the 2010s, such as the Gamergate controversy, Comicsgate and the Sad Puppies science fiction voting campaign, were identified in the media as being examples of the culture war. Journalist Caitlin Dewey described Gamergate as a "proxy war" for a larger culture war between those who want greater inclusion of women and minorities in cultural institutions versus anti-feminists and traditionalists who do not. The perception that culture war conflict had been demoted from electoral politics to popular culture led writer Jack Meserve to call popular movies, games, and writing the "last front in the culture war" in 2015.

These conflicts about representation in popular culture re-emerged into electoral politics via the alt-right and alt-lite movements. According to media scholar Whitney Phillips, Gamergate "prototyped" strategies of harassment and controversy-stoking that proved useful in political strategy. For example, Republican political strategist Steve Bannon publicized pop-culture conflicts during the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, encouraging a young audience to "come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."

Canada
Some observers in Canada have used the term "culture war" to refer to differing values between Western versus Eastern Canada, urban versus rural Canada, as well as conservatism versus liberalism and progressivism. The phrase has also been used to describe the Harper government's attitude towards the arts community. Andrew Coyne termed this negative policy towards the arts community as "class warfare."

Australia
During the tenure of the Liberal–National Coalition government of 1996 to 2007, interpretations of Aboriginal history became a part of a wider political debate regarding Australian national pride and symbolism occasionally called the "culture wars", more often the "history wars". This debate extended into a controversy over the presentation of history in the National Museum of Australia and in high-school history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media, with major broadsheets such as The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age regularly publishing opinion pieces on the topic. Marcia Langton has referred to much of this wider debate as "war porn" and as an "intellectual dead end".

Two Australian Prime Ministers, Paul Keating (in office 1991–1996) and John Howard (in office 1996–2007), became major participants in the "wars". According to Mark McKenna's analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library, John Howard believed that Paul Keating portrayed Australia pre-Whitlam (Prime Minister from 1972 to 1975) in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor movement from its historical support for the monarchy and for the White Australia policy by arguing that it was the conservative Australian parties which had been barriers to national progress. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during the Second World War. Keating staunchly supported a symbolic apology to Australian Aboriginals for their mistreatment at the hands of previous administrations, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech of 10 December 1992 (drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson). In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he refused to issue an official apology. Howard saw an apology as inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt"; he said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to colonial origins: including deference for ANZAC Day, for the Australian flag and for the monarchy in Australia, while Howard supported these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke (Prime Minister 1983–1991) and Kim Beazley (Labor Party leader 2005–2006), Keating never traveled to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".

In 2006 John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "Political Correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities". Also in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign-affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars ... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".

The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007 and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the Aboriginal Stolen Generation with bi-partisan support. Like Keating, Rudd supported an Australian republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd declared support for the Australian flag and supported the commemoration of ANZAC Day; he also expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.

Subsequent to the 2007 change of government, and prior to the passage, with support from all parties, of the Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate", a view contested by others, including conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen.

Climate change in Australia is also considered a highly divisive or politically controversial topic, to the point it is sometimes called a "culture war".

African continent
According to political scientist Constance G. Anthony, American culture war perspectives on human sexuality were exported to Africa as a form of neocolonialism. In his view, this began during the AIDS epidemic in Africa, with the United States government first tying HIV/AIDS assistance money to evangelical leadership and the Christian right during the Bush administration, then to LGBTQ tolerance during the administration of Barack Obama. This stoked a culture war that resulted in (among others) the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.

Zambian scholar Kapya Kaoma notes that because "the demographic center of Christianity is shifting from the global North to the global South" Africa's influence on Christianity worldwide is increasing. American conservatives export their culture wars to Africa, Kaoma says, particularly when they realize they may be losing the battle back home. US Christians have framed their anti-LGBT initiatives in Africa as standing in opposition to a "Western gay agenda", a framing which Kaoma finds ironic.

North American and European conspiracy theories have become widespread in West Africa via social media, according to 2021 survey by First Draft News. COVID-19 misinformation, New World Order conspiracy thinking, QAnon and other conspiracy theories associated with culture war topics are spread by American, Pro-Russian, French-language, and local disinformation websites and social media accounts, including prominent politicians in Nigeria. This has contributed to vaccine hesitancy in West Africa, with 60 percent of survey respondents saying they were unlikely to try to get vaccinated, and an erosion of trust in institutions in the region.

United Kingdom
A 2021 report from King's College London argued that many people's views on cultural issues in Britain had become tied up with the side of the Brexit debate with which they identify, while the public party-political identities, although not as strong, show similar alignments and that around half the country held relatively strong views on "culture war" issues such as debates on Britain's colonial history or Black Lives Matter. However, the report concluded Britain's cultural and political divide was not as stark as the Republican–Democratic divide in the US and that a sizeable section of the public can be categorised as having either moderate views or as being disengaged from social debates. It also found that The Guardian, as opposed to the centre-right newspapers, was more likely to talk about the culture wars. The Conservative Party have been described as attempting to ignite culture wars in regard to "conservative values" under the tenure of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

However, others argue that it is the left who are engaging in "culture wars", particularly against liberal values, accepted words and British institutions. Observers such as Johns Hopkins University professor Yascha Mounk and journalist and author Louise Perry have argued that the collapse in support for the Labour Party during the 2019 United Kingdom general election came as a result of both a media-induced public perception and a deliberate strategy of Labour of pursuing messages and policy ideas based on cultural issues that resonated with more university educated grassroots activists on the left of the party but alienated Labour's traditional working class voters.

An April 2022 survey found evidence that Britons are less divided on "culture war" issues than has often been portrayed in the media. The greatest predictor of opinion was how people voted in the UK's referendum on membership of the European Union, Brexit, yet even among those who voted 'Leave', 75% agreed "it is important to be attentive to issues of race and social justice". Similarly, even among Remainers and those who last voted for the Labour Party, there was moderately strong support for several socially conservative positions.

European Union
Poland's Law and Justice party, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Serbia's Aleksandar Vučić, and Slovenia's Janez Janša have each been accused of fomenting culture wars in their respective countries by encouraging dissent, resistance to LGBT rights, and restrictions on abortion. One facet of the controversy in Poland is the removal of Soviet War Memorials which is divisive because some Poles viewed the memorials positively as commemorations of their ancestors who died during World War II while others felt negatively due to the oppression that some Poles experienced under the Soviet-backed Polish People's Republic Culture war in Hungary is alleged by Kim Scheppele to be a disguise for democratic backsliding by Viktor Orbán. Ukraine, meanwhile, has experienced a decades-long culture war pitting the eastern, predominately Russian-speaking, regions against the western Ukrainian-speaking areas of the country. LGBT rights are controversial in Poland, as exemplified by President Andrzej Duda vow in 2020 to oppose both same-sex marriage and LGBT adoption.

Different interpretations of bitter events during World War II have become especially contentious in Poland since 2015, shortly after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War. One disputed issue is whether Poland bears any responsibility for the Holocaust, or whether Poland was entirely a victim of Nazi Germany. This dispute is embodied by the "Polish death camp" controversy (involving concentration camps that had been built by Nazi Germany during World War II on German-occupied Polish soil) and an attempt to address that controversy with a now partly repealed law A second issue, also addressed by the partly repealed law, revolves around Poland–Ukraine relations

Poland is not alone in the region in passing a law to criminalize negative interpretations of the country's collaborationist nationalist movements during WWII and Poland–Ukraine relations have suffered as a result of a similar law in Ukraine that was criticized in Poland for deflecting blame away from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and their massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

Drugs

 * Drug decriminalization
 * Harm reduction
 * Legal drinking age
 * War on Drugs

Education and parenting

 * Corporal punishment and child discipline, most notably spanking
 * Creation–evolution controversy
 * Family values
 * Homeschooling and educational choice
 * Sexual education and abstinence only education

Environment and energy

 * Global warming controversy

Gender and sexuality

 * Age of consent
 * Anti-gender movement
 * Circumcision controversies
 * Feminism
 * LGBT rights and same-sex marriage
 * Polyamory
 * Sex work
 * Sexual revolution
 * Toplessness and Nudity

Law and government

 * Crypto wars
 * Disfranchisement
 * Gerrymandering
 * Gun rights
 * Immigration reform
 * Law and order
 * Red state vs. blue state divide

Life issues

 * Anti-war movement
 * Capital punishment
 * Reproductive rights including birth control (and its coverage by insurance)
 * Right to die movement and euthanasia
 * Stem-cell research
 * Universal healthcare

Society and culture

 * Animal rights
 * Cancel culture
 * Christmas controversy
 * Counterculture
 * Cultural conflict
 * Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
 * Cultural Revolution
 * Food desert
 * Gentrification
 * Geographical renaming
 * History wars
 * Media bias in the U.S.
 * Moral absolutism vs. moral relativism
 * Multiculturalism
 * Negationism
 * Owning the libs
 * Permissive society
 * Race, affirmative action
 * Secularism and secularization
 * Social justice warrior
 * Squatting
 * Theory wars
 * Woke
 * Woke

title: Culture war


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Beeching cuts

The Beeching cuts, also colloquially referred to as the Beeching Axe, were a major series of route closures and service changes made as part of the restructuring of the nationalised railway system in Great Britain in the 1960s. They are named for Dr. Richard Beeching, then-chair of the British Railways Board and the author of two reports – The Reshaping of British Railways (1963) and The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (1965) – that outlined the necessity of improving the efficiency of the railways and the plan for achieving this through restructuring.

The first report identified 2,363 stations and 5000 mi of railway line for closure, amounting to 55% of stations, 30% of route miles, and the loss of 67,700 British Rail jobs, with an objective of stemming the large losses being incurred during a period of increasing competition from road transport and reducing the rail subsidies necessary to keep the network running. The second report identified a small number of major routes for significant investment. Such was the scale of these cuts that the programme came to be colloquially referred to as the Beeching Axe, though the 1963 report also recommended some less well-publicised changes; including a switch to the now-standard practice of containerisation for rail freight, and the replacement of some services with integrated bus services linked to the remaining railheads.

Protests resulted in the saving of some stations and lines, but the majority were closed as planned. Beeching's name remains associated with the mass closure of railways and the loss of many local services in the period that followed. A few of these routes have since reopened. Some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes. Others have since been built over, have reverted to farmland, or remain derelict with no plans for any reuse or redevelopment. Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines.

Background

After growing rapidly in the 19th century during the Railway Mania, the British railway system reached its height in the years immediately before the First World War, with a network of 23440 mi. The network had opened up major travel opportunities for the entire country that had never been available before. However, lines were sometimes uneconomic, and several Members of Parliament had direct involvement with railways, creating a conflict of interest. In 1909, Winston Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, argued that the country's railways did not have a future without rationalisation and amalgamation. By 1914, the railways had some significant problems, such as a lack of standard rolling stock and too many duplicated routes.

After the war, the railways faced increasing competition from a growing road transport network, which had increased to 8 million tons of freight annually by 1921. Around 1300 mi of passenger railways closed between 1923 and 1939. These closures included the Charnwood Forest Railway, closed to passengers in 1931, and the Harborne Line in Birmingham, closed to passengers in 1934. Some lines had never been profitable and were not subject to loss of traffic in that period. The railways were busy during the Second World War, but at the end of the war they were in a poor state of repair and in 1948 nationalised as British Railways.

The Branch Lines Committee of the British Transport Commission (BTC) was formed in 1949 with a brief to close the least-used branch lines. This resulted in the loss (or conversion to freight-only operation) of some 3318 mi of railway between 1948 and 1962. The most significant closure was that of the former Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway in 1959. In opposition to these cuts, the period also witnessed the beginning of a protest movement led by the Railway Development Association, whose most famous member was the poet John Betjeman. They went on to be a significant force resisting the Beeching proposals.

Economic recovery and the end of petrol rationing led to rapid growth in car ownership and use. Vehicle mileage grew at a sustained annual rate of 10% between 1948 and 1964. In contrast, railway traffic remained steady during the 1950s but the economic situation steadily deteriorated, with labour costs rising faster than income and fares and freight charges repeatedly frozen by the government to try to control inflation. By 1955, the railways' share of the transport market had dropped from 16% to 5%.

The 1955 Modernisation Plan promised expenditure of over £1,240 million; steam locomotives would be replaced with diesel and electric locomotives, traffic levels would increase, and the system was predicted to be back in profit by 1962. Instead losses mounted, from £68 million in 1960 to £87 million in 1961, and £104 million in 1962 (£ billion in terms). The BTC could no longer pay the interest on its loans.

By 1961, losses were running at £300,000 a day; since nationalisation in 1948, 3000 mi of line had been closed, railway staff numbers had fallen 26% from 648,000 to 474,000, and the number of railway wagons had fallen 29% from 1,200,000 to 848,000.

The Reshaping of British Railways (Beeching I)
The first Beeching report, titled The Reshaping of British Railways, was published on 27 March 1963.

The report starts by quoting the brief provided by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, from 1960: "First, the industry must be of a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects. In particular, the railway system must be modelled to meet current needs, and the modernisation plan must be adapted to this new shape" and with the premise that the railways should be run as a profitable business.

Beeching first studied traffic flows on all lines to identify "the good, the bad, and the indifferent". His analysis showed that the least-used 1,762 stations had annual passenger receipts of less than £2,500 each (£ as of ), that over half of the 4,300 stations open to passengers in 1960 had receipts of less than £10,000, that the least-used 50% of stations contributed only 2% of passenger revenue, and that one third of route miles carried just 1% of passengers.

By way of example, he noted that the line from Thetford to Swaffham carried five trains each weekday in each direction, carrying an average of nine passengers with only 10% of the costs of operating the line covered by fares; another example was the Gleneagles-Crieff-Comrie line which had ten trains a day and five passengers on average, earning only 25% of costs. Finally there was the service from Hull to York via Beverley (using part of the Yorkshire Coast Line, which was not closed, and the York to Beverley Line, which was). The line covered 80% of its operating costs, but he calculated that it could be closed because there was an alternative, albeit less direct, route.

Out of 18000 mi of railway, Beeching recommended that 6000 mi—mostly rural and industrial lines—should be closed entirely, and that some of the remaining lines should be kept open only for freight. A total of 2,363 stations were to close, including 435 already under threat, both on lines that were to close and on lines that were to remain open.

He recommended that freight services should mainly be for bulk commodities such as minerals and coal, and that the freight system make use of new containerised handling systems rather than less efficient and slower wagon-load traffic. The latter recommendation would prove prescient with the rise of intermodal freight transport in the following decades.

The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (Beeching II)

On 16 February 1965, Beeching introduced the second stage of his reorganisation of the railways. In his report, The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes, he set out his conclusion that of the 7500 mi of trunk railway only 3000 mi "should be selected for future development" and invested in.

This policy would result in long-distance traffic being routed along nine lines. Traffic to Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland would be routed through the West Coast Main Line to Carlisle and Glasgow; traffic to the north-east of England would be concentrated through the East Coast Main Line as far as Newcastle; and traffic to Wales and the West Country would go on the Great Western Main Line to Swansea and Plymouth.

Underpinning Beeching's proposals was his belief that there was too much duplication in the railway network: "The real choice is between an excessive and increasingly un-economic system, with a corresponding tendency for the railways as a whole to fall into disrepute and decay, or the selective development and intensive utilisation of a more limited trunk route system". Of the 7500 mi of trunk route, 3700 mi involves a choice between two routes, 700 mi a choice of three, and over a further 700 mi a choice of four. In Scotland, only the Central Belt routes and the lines via Fife and Perth to Aberdeen were selected for development, and none were selected in Wales, apart from the Great Western Main Line as far as Swansea.

Beeching's secondment from ICI ended early in June 1965 after Harold Wilson's attempt to get him to produce a transport plan failed. It is a matter of debate whether Beeching left by mutual arrangement with the government or if he was sacked. Frank Cousins, the Labour Minister of Technology, told the House of Commons in November 1965 that Beeching had been dismissed by Tom Fraser, then Minister of Transport. Beeching denied this, pointing out that he had returned early to ICI as he would not have had enough time to undertake an in-depth transport study before the formal end of his secondment.

The closures

The first report was accepted by the Conservative government of the day, which argued that many services could be provided more effectively by buses. Most recommendations were subsequently taken forward by the Labour government elected in 1964, but many of the proposed closures sparked protests from communities that would lose their trains, a number of which (especially rural communities) had no other public transport.

Line closures had been running at about 150–300 miles per year between 1950 and 1961. They peaked at 1,000 mi in 1964 and came to a virtual halt by the early 1970s. One of the last major closures was the 98-mile (158 km) Waverley Route between Carlisle, Hawick and Edinburgh in 1969; the reopening of a 35-mile section of this line was approved in 2006 and passenger services resumed in September 2015.

Holiday and coastal resorts were severely affected by the closures. The report recommended closing almost all services along the coasts of north Devon, Cornwall and East Anglia aside from Norwich to Great Yarmouth. All services on the Isle of Wight were recommended for closure, as were all branch lines in the Lake District. One of the most significant closures was the Great Central Main Line from London Marylebone to Leicester and Sheffield.

Not all the recommended closures were implemented. Reprieved lines include:
 * Lines through the Scottish Highlands, such as the Far North Line, were kept open, in part because of pressure from the powerful Highland lobby.
 * The Central Wales Line was said to have been kept open because it passed through so many marginal constituencies that no-one dared to close it.
 * The Tamar Valley Line, between Gunnislake and Plymouth, was kept open because the local road network was poor, with no direct route from the towns served to Plymouth.
 * The Marshlink line between Ashford and Hastings remained open because of problems running a replacement bus service with the existing network.
 * Other routes (or parts of routes) planned for closure that survived include the Settle-Carlisle line, Ipswich–Lowestoft, the Hope Valley line, the Buxton line, the Avocet line, Ayr–Stranraer, Glasgow–Kilmarnock, Glasgow–Edinburgh via Shotts, Barrow–Whitehaven, Middlesbrough–Whitby, York–Harrogate, Leeds/Bradford–Ilkley, Nottingham–Lincoln, Boston–Skegness, Birkenhead–Wrexham, Liverpool–Southport (and other Merseyside commuter routes), Bury-Manchester, Leicester–Peterborough, St Erth–St Ives, and Ryde–Shanklin.

The Beeching Report was intended to be the first stage in the rail network's contraction. As a result, some lines it had not recommended for closure were subsequently shut down, such as the Woodhead line between Manchester and Sheffield in 1981, after the decline of the freight traffic (mostly coal) on which it had relied. Many surviving lines were rationalised, including reduction to single track and consolidation of signals. Most of the Oxford–Cambridge Varsity Line closed despite its strategic location serving Milton Keynes, Britain's largest "new town". Kinross-shire, and Fife especially, suffered closures not included in the Report, including the main line from Edinburgh to Perth. King's Lynn was to have remained at the centre of routes towards Norwich, Hunstanton and Wisbech, all of which closed.

With a few exceptions, after the early 1970s proposals to close other lines were met with vociferous public opposition and were shelved.

Disposals of land and structures

Beeching's reports made no recommendations about the handling of land after closures. British Rail operated a policy of disposing of land that was surplus to requirements. Many bridges, cuttings and embankments have been removed and the land sold for development. Closed station buildings on remaining lines have often been demolished or sold for housing or other purposes. Increasing pressure on land use meant that protection of closed trackbeds, as in other countries, such as the US Rail Bank scheme, which holds former railway land for possible future use, was not seen to be practical.

Many redundant structures from closed lines remain, such as bridges over other lines and drainage culverts. They often require maintenance as part of the rail infrastructure while providing no benefit. Critics of Beeching argue that the lack of recommendations on the handling of closed railway property demonstrates that the report was short-sighted. On the other hand, retaining a railway on these routes, which would obviously have increased maintenance costs, might not have earned enough to justify that greater cost. As demand for rail has grown since the 1990s, the failure to preserve the routes of closed lines, such as the one between Bedford and Cambridge, which was closed despite Beeching recommending its retention, has been criticised.

Acceptance of rail subsidies
By 1968, the railways had not been restored to profitability and Beeching's approach appeared to many to have failed. It has been suggested that by closing almost a third of the network Beeching achieved a saving of just £30 million, whilst overall losses were running in excess of £100 million per year. However, the precise savings from closures are impossible to calculate. The Ministry of Transport subsequently estimated that rail operating costs had been cut by over £100 million in the wake of the Beeching Report but that much of this had been swallowed up by increased wages. Some of the branches closed acted as feeders to the main lines, and that feeder traffic was lost when the branches closed; the financial significance of this is debatable, for over 90% of the railways' 1960 traffic was carried on lines which remained open ten years later.

Whatever the figures, towards the end of the 1960s it became increasingly clear that rail closures were not bringing the rail system out of deficit and were unlikely ever to do so. Transport minister Barbara Castle decided that some rail services, which could not pay their way but had a valuable social role, should be subsidised. Legislation allowing this was introduced in the Transport Act 1968. Section 39 made provision for a subsidy to be paid by the Treasury for a three-year period. This was later repealed in the Railways Act 1974. Whether these subsidies affected the size of the network is questionable: the criteria for reprieving loss-making lines had not altered, merely the way their costs appeared in the railways accounts—previously their contribution to the railways' overall loss was hidden in the total deficit.

Replacement buses and proposed alternatives
The "bustitution" policy that replaced rail services with buses also failed. In many cases the replacement bus services were slower and less convenient than the trains they were meant to replace, and so were unpopular. Replacement bus services were often run between the (now disused) station sites (some of which were some distance from the population centres they served), thus losing any potential advantage over the closed rail service. Most replacement bus services lasted less than two years before they were removed due to a lack of patronage, leaving large parts of the country with no public transport.

The assumption at the time was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.

Many of the closed lines had run at only a small deficit. Some lines such as the Sunderland-to-West Hartlepool line cost only £291 per mile to operate. Closures of such small-scale loss-making lines made little difference to the overall deficit.

Possible changes to light railway-type operations were attacked by Beeching, who wrote: "The third suggestion, that rail buses should be substituted for trains, ignores the high cost of providing the route itself, and also ignores the fact that rail buses are more expensive vehicles than road buses." There is little in the Beeching report recommending general economies (in administration costs, working practices and so on). For example, a number of the stations that were closed were fully staffed 18 hours a day, on lines controlled by multiple Victorian era signalboxes (again fully staffed, often throughout the day). Operating costs could have been reduced by reducing staff and removing redundant services on these lines while keeping the stations open. This has since been successfully achieved by British Rail and its successors on lesser-used lines that survived the cuts, such as the East Suffolk Line from Ipswich to Lowestoft, which survives as a "basic railway".

The Marshlink line between Ashford International and Hastings, threatened with closure in the Beeching Report, is now seen as important due to the opening of the Channel Tunnel and High Speed 1. Traffic on the single-track Golden Valley Line between Kemble and Swindon and the Cotswold Line between Oxford and Worcester has increased significantly, and double track has now been reinstated on the Golden Valley Line, partly to facilitate a diversionary route during electrification and other works on the Severn tunnel line.

The people and the politics
The Conservatives increased their Commons majority in the general election of 8 October 1959, their first with Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister. Ernest Marples, previously Postmaster General, was made Transport Minister two weeks later in a cabinet reshuffle; Macmillan noted that the Northern working-class boy who had won a scholarship to a grammar school was one of only two "self-made men" in his cabinet.

Marples had a background with a successful road construction company. When opening the M1 motorway, he said: "This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold scientific age in which we live. It is a powerful weapon to add to our transport system." His association with the high-profile construction company Marples Ridgway became a matter of concern to both the public and politicians. As is customary, he resigned as a director of the company in 1951 on becoming a junior minister, but he only disposed of his shares in the company in 1960 after the company won a contract to build the Hammersmith Flyover, when questions were asked both in the media and also in the Commons on 28 January 1960; he made a statement to the House later that day confirming that the sale of shares was in hand and would be completed "very soon", noting that as part of the agreement he could be required to buy the shares from the purchaser at the original price after he ceased to hold office, if so desired by the purchaser. While it was reported that he sold the shares to his wife, she denied in a newspaper interview, that any transaction had taken place. It was reported that he had transferred his shares into an Overseas Trust. In July 1964, Marples Ridgway and Partners Limited were awarded a £4.1 million contract for the "Hendon Urban Motorway" extension of the M1, in the same year that the company was taken over by the Bath and Portland Group. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing on anyone's part in this or any of the other contracts awarded to the company during his term of office, but it did lead to a sense of unease, not least within the railway sector.

In April 1960, Sir Ivan Stedeford established an advisory group known as the Stedeford Committee at the request of Harold Macmillan to report on the state of the British Transport Commission and to make recommendations. Sir Ewart Smith, a retired former Chief Engineer at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), was asked by Ernest Marples to become a member of an advisory group; Smith declined but recommended Richard Beeching in his place, a suggestion that Marples accepted. Beeching, who held a PhD in physics, had been appointed to the main board of ICI at the age of 43. The board consisted of senior figures in British businesses, and none of the board had previous knowledge or experience of the railway industry. Stedeford and Beeching clashed on a number of issues, but the future size of the railway system was not one of them. For all the suspicion it aroused, the committee had little to say on this and the government was already convinced of the need to reduce the size of the rail network. In spite of questions being asked in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was not published at the time. In December 1960 questions were asked in the Lords about this "secret" and "under-the-counter" study group, criticising the continued withholding of the report and its recommendations. It was later suggested that Stedeford had recommended that the government should set up another body "to consider the size and pattern of the railway system required to meet current and foreseeable needs, in the light of developments and trends in other forms of transport ... and other relevant considerations".

Marples then appointed Beeching as Chairman of the British Transport Commission in March 1961. He would receive the same yearly salary that he was earning at ICI, the controversial sum of £24,000 (£,000 in terms), £10,000 more than Sir Brian Robertson, the previous chairman of the BTC, £14,000 more than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and two-and-a-half times higher than the salary of any head of a nationalised industry at the time. At that time the government was seeking outside talent to sort out the huge problems of the railway network, and he was confident that he could make the railways pay for themselves, but his salary, at 35 times that of many railway workers, has been described as a "political disaster".

The Transport Act 1962 dissolved the British Transport Commission (BTC), which had overseen the railways, canals and road freight transport and established the British Railways Board, which took over on 1 January 1963, with Dr Beeching as its first chairman. The Act put in place measures that simplified the process of closing railways by removing the need for the pros and cons of each case to be heard in detail. It was described as the "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854".

The general election in October 1964 returned a Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson after 13 years of Conservative government. During the election campaign Labour had promised to halt rail closures if elected, but it quickly backtracked, and later oversaw some of the most controversial closures. Tom Fraser was appointed Minister of Transport, but was replaced by Barbara Castle in December 1965. Castle published a map in 1967, Network for Development, showing the railway system "stabilised" at around 11,000 route miles (17,700 km).

Section 39 of the Transport Act 1968 made provision for grants to be paid in relation to loss-making lines and services, but many of the services and railway lines that would have qualified had already been closed. A number of branch lines and local services were saved by this legislation.

After 1970, when the Conservatives were returned to power, serious thought was given to a further programme of closures, but this proved politically impossible. In 1982, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, Sir David Serpell, a civil servant who had worked with Beeching, compiled the Serpell Report which said that a profitable railway could be achieved only by closing much of what remained. The report's infamous "Option A" proposed greatly increasing fares and reducing the rail network to a mere 1630 miles, leaving only 22 miles of railway in Wales (a section of the South Wales Main Line from the Severn Tunnel to Cardiff Central) and none in Somerset, Devon or Cornwall. The Midland Main Line was planned to close, leaving Leicester and Derby without a rail link, while the East Coast Main Line, part of the key London/Edinburgh link, was intended to be cut north of Newcastle. The report was published on 20 January 1983 and received an immediate backlash from the media. It was quietly shelved in the run up to the 1983 election.

Ian Hislop comments that history has been somewhat unkind to "Britain's most hated civil servant", by forgetting that Beeching proposed a much better bus service that ministers never delivered, and that in some ways he was used to do their "dirty work for them". Hislop describes him as "a technocrat [who] wasn't open to argument to romantic notions of rural England or the warp and weft of the train in our national identity. He didn't buy any of that. He went for a straightforward profit and loss approach and some claim we are still reeling from that today". Beeching was unrepentant about his role in the closures: "I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping".

On 7 June 2019, former Minister for Transport Andrew Adonis delivered a speech on "Reversing Beeching".

Reopenings

Since the Beeching cuts, road traffic levels have grown significantly. As well, since privatisation in the mid-1990s, there have been record levels of passengers on the railways owing to a preference to living in smaller towns and rural areas, and in turn commuting longer distances (although the cause of this is disputed). A few of the railway closures have been reversed. However, despite the considerable increase in railway journeys since the mid-1990s, rail transport's share of the total passenger transport market remains below that of the early 1960s, with road overwhelmingly the dominant mode: rail's market share was 13% in 1961, 6% in 1991 and 2001, and 10% in 2014.

Some closed stations have reopened, and passenger services have been restored on a few lines where they had been removed.

Heritage railways
Some lines closed under the Beeching cuts have reopened as private heritage railways. Some examples are East Lancs Railway, Great Central Railway (heritage railway), Mid Hants Railway, North Yorkshire Moors Railway, North Norfolk Railway and West Somerset Railway.

In popular culture
Flanders and Swann, writers and performers of satirical songs, wrote a lament for lines closed by the Beeching cuts entitled "Slow Train" (1963). Michael Williams' book On the slow train takes its name from the Flanders and Swann song. It celebrates 12 of the most beautiful and historic journeys in Britain, some of which were saved from the Beeching cuts. It perpetuated the myth that the Beeching cuts were concerned solely with sleepy rural branch lines, but they actually also concerned well-used "industrial" and commuter lines.

The BBC TV comedy series Oh, Doctor Beeching!, broadcast from 1995 to 1997, was set at a small fictional branch-line railway station threatened with closure under the Beeching cuts.

In the satirical magazine Private Eye, the "Signal Failures" column on railway issues is written under the pseudonym "Dr. B. Ching".

The lyrics of the I Like Trains song "The Beeching Report" are a criticism of Dr Beeching and the Beeching cuts.

Closures by year

The list below shows over 7000 mi of closures:

After this period, "residual" Beeching closures took place: Bridport to Maiden Newton in 1975, Alston to Haltwhistle in 1976, and Woodside to Selsdon in 1983.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Beeching cuts


text:
Heidelberg Appeal

The Heidelberg Appeal, authored by Michel Salomon, was an appeal directed against the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Heidelberg Appeal's goal was similar to the later published Leipzig Declaration. Before the publication, Fred Singer, who has initiated several petitions like the Heidelberg Appeal, and Michel Salomon, had organized a conference in Heidelberg, which led to that document. It was published on the last day of the 1992 Rio Summit, and warned against basing environmental policies on what the authors described as "pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data." It was initiated by the tobacco and asbestos industries, to support the climate-denying Global Climate Coalition. According to SourceWatch the appeal was "a scam perpetrated by the asbestos and tobacco industries in support of the Global Climate Coalition". Both industries had no direct reason to deny global warming, but rather wanted to promote their "sound science" agenda, which basically states that industry-funded science is good science and science contradicting those science (such as environmental science) is bad science or "junk science".

Originator
Michel Salomon was the editor of the Paris-based "Projections" magazine. They had already been successful with:
 * TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) in the US under Steven Milloy,
 * SEPP (Science & Environmental Policy Project), run by Fred Singer and semi-attached to TASSC.
 * ESEF (European Science and Environment Forum) run by Roger Bate on secondment from the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.

Following the Heidelberg Appeal, Salomon established for them the ICSE (aka "CIES") which is variously quoted in the tobacco archive documents as the International Center for a Scientific Ecology or, in French, the Centre International pour une Écologie Scientifique.

Creation
The technique used by Salomon's group to enlist members of the scientific establishment to lend their names to climate denial by signing the Appeal document, was quite unique. At this time, some sections of the environmental movement were anti-science, and anti-technology. They blamed the scientists as much as the industrialists for damaging the ecology of the planet.

The document most of the signatories thought they were signing was an appeal for the society to pay more attention to scientists than to the many irrational health and environmental activists. They were objecting to the way in which they were losing their privileged position as the 'go-to authorities' on all such health and environmental matters. They didn't see this as a climate-denial statement.

One of the signatories, Philip Anderson, physicist at Princeton University, cited the continued dispersal of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a prime example of an environmentally hazardous situation identified by scientists. He complained that despite science's disapproval, CFC's persists to be released as a result of industrial interests and denial of potential harm. He asserted that: "'It's a sneaky thing to keep the CFC plants going. [... However ... ] industrialists, not scientists are to blame for much of the planet's ecological degradation.'" He agreed with Salomon in attacking the animal-rights people as ''"clearly irrational?" [... ] "This is obvious when they resort to illegality and violence to propagate their ends." [such] forces "make the public afraid of science."''

No draft of the original signed document exists, but participants have since claimed that the document they signed was a general 'motherhood' statement about the need for better science in dealing with hazardous and health-related products. However, when release and publicised by Fred Singer's Science & Environmental Policy Project operation specific mention of climate change was added in the introductory passages and press release. It was carefully released to coincide with the opening of the Rio Earth Summit.

Usage
The Heidelberg Appeal has been enthusiastically embraced by large corporations and individual critics of the environmental movement. Conservative think tanks frequently cite the Heidelberg Appeal as proof that scientists reject the theory of global warming as well as a host of other environmental health risks associated with modern science and industry. Its name has subsequently been adopted by the Heidelberg Appeal Nederland Foundation, which was founded in 1993 and disputes health risks related to nitrates in foods and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Heidelberg Appeal was promoted in 1993 by the International Center for a Scientific Ecology, a group set up by Michael Salomon "that was considered important in Philip Morris' plans to create a group in Europe similar to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC)".

ICSE
The Board of the Center: Pierre Joly. President of the Association Francaise pour la Recherche Therapeutique: former President of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. Constant Burg. honorary member of the State Council honorary managing director of INSERM : President of the Institut Curie: Gilbert Rutman. chief mining engineer : President of the Conseil National des ingénieurs et des Scientifiques de France: S. Fred Singer, Doctor of Physical Science. President of the Science & Environmental Policy Project: former Director US Weather Satellite Program: Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences. University of Miami: Deputy Assistant Administrator of US EPA: Gary Nash. Secretary General of the International Council on Metals and the Environment (ICME) : former Director General in the Canada Department of Energy. Mines and Resources: Michel Salomon. coordinator of the Heidelberg Appeal: former science journalist: magazine editor.

The UK tobacco industry's on-going contact to the ICSE (which involved the ability to check and launder their public statements) was conducted through one of the tobacco industry's long-term statistical consultants, Peter N Lee.

title: Heidelberg Appeal


text:
Laura Blundy

Laura Blundy (2000) is a historical novel by Julie Myerson set in Victorian London. It is the story of a woman whose life takes a turn for the worse.

Plot summary
After her mother has died in childbirth, Laura Blundy is brought up by her loving and caring father, a merchant and shopowner who also pays for her schooling. One day, on her way to her ailing aunt, she is given a lift by a young man in a carriage who rapes her and then throws her out of the carriage again. She becomes pregnant, and when both her father and her aunt die she is left penniless.

Unable to care for her baby son, she manages to have him raised in an institution. She occasionally goes there to inquire after him, but one day she is told that he has died and that he has been buried in an unmarked grave. The feeling of loss she experiences never leaves her again.

Laura Blundy spends the following 18 years of her life in the streets of London. When another woman's baby dies in her care she is charged with murder and has to go to prison. Years later she is set free again but almost immediately after her release she is run over by a carriage (whose driver does not stop). She is brought to hospital, where her leg is amputated. However, she falls in love with her surgeon. They get married, but Laura is attracted more by his cleanliness and moderate wealth than by his character or potency.

When, in mid-winter, Laura decides to commit suicide by drowning in the river Thames, she is rescued by Billy, a young worker employed in the building of the Victoria Embankment and London's sewage system. At one point in the novel, Billy comes into direct contact with Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer on this project. Although Billy has a wife and children, they start a love affair.

Some time later Laura beats her husband to death in his own home, making Billy an accomplice after the fact. Laura cuts up her husband's body, and then she and Billy carry the body in several bags to the river. As the surgeon's head keeps bobbing up and being washed ashore they eventually have to burn it.

At this point in her life Laura, already in her late thirties, may be pregnant once again. The lovers have plans of escaping to France.

title: Laura Blundy


text:
The Constant Nymph (novel)

The Constant Nymph is a 1924 novel by Margaret Kennedy. It tells how a teenage girl falls in love with a family friend, who eventually marries her cousin. It explores the protagonists' complex family histories, focusing on class, education and creativity.

Reception and influence
The novel sold well from its first appearance, becoming the first novel of a genre sometimes called "Bohemian". Much of its success was due to its then-shocking sexual content, describing scenes of adolescent sexuality and of noble savagery in the Austrian Tyrol.

There is a complimentary allusion to the novel in the 1934 detective story The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. Fifteen-year-old Hilary tells her father she aspires to write novels: "Best sellers. The sort that everybody goes potty over. Not just bosh ones, but like The Constant Nymph." Sayers includes a positive mention by two characters in her 1930 epistolary novel, The Documents in the Case.

The character and appearance of the composer Lewis Dodd was based on the artist Henry Lamb, who was a gifted pianist. Kennedy's cousin George was one of Lamb's oldest friends. Attributes of Albert Sanger were taken from Augustus John, particular the artists' colony he set up in 1911 at Alderney Manor. Kennedy may have been trying to protect herself against accusations of using her friends as models by transferring to both of them the talents of musicians rather than painters.

Adaptations
Margaret Kennedy and Basil Dean adapted The Constant Nymph for a three-act play that was published by Doubleday, Page and Company (Garden City, N.Y.) in 1926. A differently treated, second stage adaptation of the play was published by William Heinemann (London) in 1926. The play was performed on the London stage in 1926 and featured Noël Coward and Edna Best.

The novel was first adapted as a silent film in 1928 by Adrian Brunel and Alma Reville and directed by Brunel and Basil Dean. This version starred Ivor Novello, Mabel Poulton and Benita Hume. It was adapted again in 1933 by Dorothy Farnum and directed by Dean. It featured Victoria Hopper, Brian Aherne and Leonora Corbett. A third film adaptation in 1943 featured Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, and Alexis Smith. It was adapted by Kathryn Scola and directed by Edmund Goulding.

title: The Constant Nymph (novel)


text:
Danish pastry

A Danish pastry (wienerbrød ) (sometimes shortened to danish, especially in American English) is a multilayered, laminated sweet pastry in the viennoiserie tradition. It is thought that some bakery techniques were brought to Denmark by Austrian bakers, and originated the name of this pastry. The danish recipe is however different from the Viennese one and has since developed into a Danish specialty.

However, the origin of the pastry is not clear as it is called Kopenhagener in Austria and Wienerbrød in Denmark.

Like other viennoiserie pastries, such as croissants, it is a variant of puff pastry made of laminated yeast-leavened dough that creates a layered texture.

Danish pastries were brought with immigrants to the United States, where they are often topped with a fruit or cream cheese filling, and are now popular around the world.

Composition
Danish pastry is made of yeast-leavened dough of wheat flour, milk, eggs, sugar, and large amounts of butter or margarine.

A yeast dough is rolled out thinly, covered with thin slices of butter between the layers of dough, and then the dough is folded and rolled several times, creating 27 layers. If necessary, the dough is chilled between foldings to ease handling. The process of rolling, buttering, folding, and chilling is repeated multiple times to create a multilayered dough that becomes airy and crispy on the outside, but also rich and buttery.

Butter is the traditional fat used in Danish pastry, but in industrial production, less expensive fats are often used, such as hydrogenated sunflower oil.

Terminology
In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, the term for Danish pastry is wienerbrød (or wienerbröd), meaning "Viennese bread". The same etymology is also the origin of the Icelandic vínarbrauð, Finnish viineri and Estonian Viini sai ("Viennese pastry"). In Vienna, the Danish pastry is called Kopenhagener Plunder, referring to Copenhagen, or Dänischer Plunder.

History
The origin of the Danish pastry is often ascribed to a strike amongst bakery workers in Denmark in 1850. The strike caused bakery owners to hire workers from abroad, among them several Austrian bakers, who brought along new baking traditions and pastry recipes. The Austrian pastry of Plundergebäck soon became popular in Denmark and after the labour disputes ended, Danish bakers adopted the Austrian recipes, adjusting them to their own liking and traditions by increasing the amount of egg and fat for example. This development resulted in what is now known as the Danish pastry.

One of the baking techniques and traditions that the Austrian bakers brought with them was the Viennese lamination technique. Due to such novelties the Danes called the pastry "wienerbrød" (Vienna bread) and that name is still in use in Northern Europe today. At that time, almost all baked goods in Denmark were given exotic names.

Denmark
Danish pastries as consumed in Denmark have different shapes and names. Some are topped with chocolate, pearl sugar, glacé icing, and/or slivered nuts and they may be stuffed with a variety of ingredients such as jam or preserves (usually apple or prune), remonce, marzipan, and/or custard. Shapes are numerous, including circles with filling in the middle (known in Denmark as Spandauers), figure-eights, spirals (known as snails), and the pretzel-like kringles.

Varieties
In Sweden, Danish pastry is typically made in the Spandauer-style, often with vanilla custard.

In the UK, various ingredients such as jam, custard, apricots, cherries, raisins, flaked almonds, pecans, or caramelized toffee are placed on or within sections of divided dough, which is then baked. Cardamom is often added to increase the aromatic sense of sweetness.

In the US, Danishes are typically given a topping of fruit or sweetened cream cheese prior to baking. Danishes with nuts on them are also popular there and in Sweden, where often icing, and, sometimes, powdered sugar and chocolate spritzing are also added.

In Argentina, they are usually filled with dulce de leche or dulce de membrillo.

United States
Danish pastry was brought to the United States by Danish immigrants. Lauritz C. Klitteng of Læsø popularized "Danish pastry" in the US around 1915–1920. According to Klitteng, he made Danish pastry for the wedding of President Woodrow Wilson in December 1915. Klitteng toured the world to promote his product and was featured in such 1920s periodicals as the National Baker, the Bakers' Helper, and the Bakers' Weekly. Klitteng briefly had his own Danish Culinary Studio at 146 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Herman Gertner owned a chain of New York City restaurants and had brought Klitteng to New York to sell Danish pastry. Gertner's obituary appeared in the January 23, 1962 The New York Times: "'At one point during his career Mr. Gertner befriended a Danish baker who convinced him that Danish pastry might be well received in New York. Mr. Gertner began serving the pastry in his restaurant and it immediately was a success.'"

title: Danish pastry


text:
Mr. Skeffington

Mr. Skeffington is a 1944 American drama film directed by Vincent Sherman, based on the 1940 novel of the same name by Elizabeth von Arnim.

The film stars Bette Davis as a beautiful but self-centered woman who has many suitors but marries Job Skeffington, played by Claude Rains, solely to save her brother from going to prison. It also makes a point about Skeffington's status as a Jew in 1914 high society and later in relation to Nazi Germany. Supporting actors include Walter Abel, George Coulouris and Richard Waring.

Plot
In 1914, spoiled Fanny Trellis is a renowned beauty with many suitors. She loves her brother Trippy and would do anything to help him. Fanny learns that Trippy has embezzled money from his employer Job Skeffington. To save her brother from prosecution, Fanny pursues and marries the lovestruck Skeffington. Disgusted by the arrangement, in part because of his prejudice against Skeffington being Jewish, Trippy leaves home to fight in the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I.

Job loves Fanny, but she is merely fond of him and largely ignores him. She becomes pregnant with his child, but when Trippy dies in France, she states she is "stuck" with Job, and the marriage then becomes wholly loveless, continuing only for the child's sake. Job and George Trellis, Fanny's cousin, also enlist but are stationed near home.

Fanny enjoys playing the wealthy socialite, stringing along a persistent quartet of suitors who are unfazed by her marriage, as well as much younger lovers. Lonely, Job finds solace with his secretaries. When Fanny finds out, she divorces him, conveniently ignoring her own behavior.

Fanny neglects her young daughter (also named Fanny), who understandably prefers her loving father and begs him to take her with him to Europe. Although Job fears for his child and tries unsuccessfully to explain to her the nature of prejudice she will encounter as a Jew abroad, he finally, tearfully and joyfully, says yes. Fanny is relieved to be free of the encumbrance of a child. Fanny has a series of affairs, living well on the extremely generous settlement Job has left her – half his fortune – and hardly giving a thought to her daughter, whom she does not see for many years.

She retains her beauty as she grows older (much to the envy of her women acquaintances), but when she catches diphtheria, it ravages her appearance. In denial, she invites her old lovers (and their wives) to a party. The men are shocked (and the women relieved) by how much Fanny has changed, leaving her distraught. Her latest young suitor, Johnny Mitchell, falls in love with her daughter, who has returned from Europe because of the rise of the Nazis. They marry after only a few months and leave for Seattle. Fanny's daughter explains that, while she wishes her mother well, she feels no real love for her, and pities her for discarding the one man who truly loves her. Shortly before her daughter's departure, Fanny suffers the ultimate humiliation when one of her old beaux makes what she at first believes to be a sincere marriage proposal, only to withdraw it when he begins to suspect, incorrectly, that she is no longer wealthy. Fanny is left alone with her maid, Manby.

Fanny's cousin George brings Job back to Fanny's home unannounced. The Nazis have left Job penniless and worse, George tells Fanny, and he calls on her to be generous. Fanny's vanity nearly prevents her from venturing down her home's grand staircase to see Job.

When she does finally enter the parlor, Job moves to her, stumbles and falls: He is blind (due to torture in a Nazi concentration camp). Fanny rushes to cradle him in her arms. As she takes his arm and guides him up the staircase, she tells the maid that "Mr. Skeffington has come home." Job had once, long ago, told Fanny that, "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." George tells Fanny that, at that moment, she has "never been more beautiful." At long last, she realizes the truth of it.

Cast

 * Bette Davis as Frances Beatrice 'Fanny' Trellis Skeffington
 * Claude Rains as Job Skeffington
 * Walter Abel as George Trellis, Fanny's cousin
 * Richard Waring as Trippy Trellis, Fanny's brother
 * Marjorie Riordan as Fanny Rachel Trellis, Fanny and Job's daughter as an adult
 * Robert Shayne as MacMahon, a local gangster
 * John Alexander as Jim Conderley, one of Fanny's four persistent suitors
 * Jerome Cowan as Edward Morrison, one of Fanny's four persistent suitors
 * Peter Whitney as Chester Forbish, one of Fanny's four persistent suitors
 * Bill Kennedy as Bill Thatcher, one of Fanny's four persistent suitors
 * Johnny Mitchell as Johnny Mitchell, a younger suitor of Fanny's who later marries her daughter. Born Douglas Lamy, this actor changed his name to that of his character.
 * George Coulouris as Doctor Byles
 * Dorothy Peterson as Manby, Fanny's housekeeper
 * Creighton Hale as Casey (uncredited)
 * Halliwell Hobbes as Soames (uncredited)
 * Ethan Laidlaw as Cop (uncredited)
 * Jack Mower as Man (uncredited)
 * Will Stanton as Sid Lapham (uncredited)

Production
Julius Epstein said "They had four or five scripts that had never been made, including one by Edmund Goulding and one by John Huston. We took a look at Mr. Skeffington and said, ‘First of all, it shouldn’t be English; it should be made with an American family. Secondly, the trick of the book was that its title was Mr. Skeffington, and he never appeared in the book. He should be a character in the movie.’ And it was made."

Paul Henreid says he was offered the male lead but turned it down as he felt he would not be convincing as a man who looked on passively while his wife had affairs.

According to the 1989 book Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine, Davis was going through intense personal torments at this time, which was reflected in her treatment of co-stars on this film, and several others at the time, culminating in a vicious personal attack. Apparently, while Davis was away from her dressing room, the eyewash she always used after filming the day's scenes had been poisoned, causing Davis to scream out in pain. Director Vincent Sherman, with whom Davis had once been romantically involved, admitted to the detectives investigating the incident, "If you asked everyone on the set who would have committed such a thing, everyone would raise their hand!" Even Bette Davis is quoted as saying "Only a mother could have loved me at this point in my life."

Box office
According to the Warner Bros. records, the film earned $2,456,000 in the U.S. and $1,365,000 in other markets.

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, 57% of seven critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.9/10.

Awards
Bette Davis was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress, and Claude Rains was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

title: Mr. Skeffington


text:
Talk:Treaty of Nice

Untitled
Removed line claiming that the Nice Treaty amendment to the Irish Constitution would enable future Treaties to be passed without the need for a referendum. Such a claim was made during the Nice II referendum and denied by the Irish Government. If it had included that, the referendum would have been voted down by 80%+ of the electorate. Even if it got through with such a provision, public anger at not holding a referendum on any future occasion would have been such that no political party would dare to vote through a new Treaty merely by putting it through parliament, for they would be committing political suicide. (And Europe would have guaranteed that Ireland would block every subsequent Treaty without exception in anger.) It would have been a very very very stupid clause to have included. JTD 01:31 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC) - Suggest that this page could do with re-structuring. Content is good and generally NPOV, but the current structure intermingles straightforward factual descriptions of the treaty's provisions with various criticisms. Suggest three headings: (1) Treaty provisions [purely factual]; (2) Discussion of Treaty [or similar] [with criticisms etc]; (3) Ratification [pretty much as it stands]. If I get a chance, I might look at some of these reworks, but time is pressing at the mo. Toby W 10:35, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Irish ratification
When I added the note on the Irish ratification of the European Constitution (now moved to Irish referendum on the European Constitution), I said that there was a second referendum held on the Treaty of Nice with no modifications, yet someone subsequently modified it to say that there WERE changes to it. I just accepted that I was wrong, but yet here it once again says that no changes were made. The page (On the european constitution) continues to say that there were changes made so please see it, to understand exactly what I mean.

So were there or weren't there changes made?

Title
The article is disambiguated as Treaty of Nice (2001), yet there's no disambiguity notice at the header and the basic Treaty of Nice redirects here. If there's another such Treaty, it should be noted in this article's header, or the basic title should be made into a full diambig page. If not, why the parenthesis? Radagast 03:30, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've moved the page back to just Treaty of Nice. I have also started the other article (the 1892 article). People typing Treaty of Nice will, in 99.99 % (or even more) of cases be looking for this article, so they should be taken here directly, not to some ambiguation page. Those should be used when a reasonably large minority of people will be looking for non-majority articles. The few people (I'm guessing one or two a year, excluding the ones clicking the link out of curiosity) looking for the 1892 treaty can then just click the dablink. Lilac Soul 09:06, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

This is not true
"In response to the failed sanctions against Austria following coalition including Jörg Haider's party having come to power, and fears about possible future threats to the stability of the new member states to be admitted in enlargement, the Treaty of Nice for the first time adopted formal rules for the application of sanctions against a Member State."

These rules were adopted by the Amsterdam Treaty (ref.: Fiala, Pitrová - Evropská Unie, 2004, page 149) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.194.171.149 (talk) 10:22, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Nice
This is nice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.220.162.177 (talk) 11:18, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

title: Talk:Treaty of Nice


text:
Mrs. Parkington

Mrs. Parkington is a 1944 drama film. It tells the story of a woman's life, told via flashbacks, from boarding house maid to society matron. The movie was adapted by Polly James and Robert Thoeren from the novel by Louis Bromfield. It was directed by Tay Garnett and starred Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon appearing together as husband and wife for the fourth time.

Plot
At Christmastime in 1938, Susie Parkington, an elderly society matron and widow of the wealthy businessman and financier Major Augustus Parkington, is visited by her many relatives, with the exception of her beloved great-granddaughter Jane. Except for Jane, Susie's heirs are boorish, dissolute, and unhappy despite their wealth. When Jane does appear, she informs her great-grandmother that she plans to secretly elope with Ned Talbot, her father's employee, who wishes to take her away from her family and their way of life.

Susie has a flashback to her own life. As a teenager, Susie helps her mother run a boarding house for silver miners in Leaping Rock, Nevada. She meets Major Augustus Parkington, the owner of the mine, when he stays at the boardinghouse on a visit; the miners complain to him about dangerous working conditions, but he refuses to fix them as it would slow down the yield of the mine, instead paying the miners higher salaries to take the risk and telling them to quit if they are so afraid.

Shortly afterwards, a serious mine accident occurs which kills Susie's mother along with a number of miners. Rather than leave Susie to an uncertain fate, Augustus marries her and takes her away to New York City. Susie is introduced to Baroness Aspasia Conti, a French aristocrat and close friend and former mistress of Augustus, who helps Susie pick out clothes and learn the social graces needed for a woman of her station.

Back in the present, Susie arranges a meeting with Ned, where he reveals that Jane's father Amory (Susie's grandson-in-law) is being investigated for fraud, and Ned planned to take Jane away in order to avoid telling her or having to testify against Amory. Susie disapproves of Ned's handling of the situation, prompting Jane to send Ned away. Amory confesses to Susie and Jane that he did commit fraud, and begs Susie for a loan of $31 million to cover his actions in hopes of avoiding prison. Susie is inclined to give him the loan, but says he must ask the rest of the family, as Amory would be spending their inheritance.

Susie once again reminisces about her past. She remembers how, on their third anniversary, Augustus presented her with a grand house, furnished with Aspasia's help. Susie announces that she is pregnant, and an elated Augustus holds a ball to celebrate, inviting the wealthiest and most socially prominent citizens of New York, but his happiness turns to fury when most of them refuse to attend due to his blunt, outspoken behavior. His rage upsets Susie, and when she runs away from the dinner party, she runs upstairs, faints, falls down the stairs, and has a miscarriage.

Augustus angrily vows revenge against the non-attendees, and unbeknownst to Susie, manages to force many of them out of business over the next few years. Susie only finds out after Mrs. Livingstone, whose husband is about to be put out of business by Augustus, pleads with Susie for help and informs her that another man committed suicide after Augustus ruined him. Susie has words with Augustus, who remains unrepentant, so she separates from him and takes up new quarters on Long Island, with frequent visits from Aspasia. Several weeks pass before Augustus begs his wife to return home, revealing that he has been unsuccessful in his mission to put the Livingstones out of business. Susie then informs him that she has been secretly financially supporting the Livingstone business and that his vendetta must stop. Augustus agrees and the couple reunite.

Back in the present, as Susie expected, her heirs refuse to lend Amory the money. Amory, overcoming his fear of going to prison, resolves to make a full confession to the authorities; Susie approves, saying that is what the Major would have done.

Once again, Susie has a flashback, this time to when her son Herbert (father of greedy granddaughters Madeleine and Helen) was killed in an accident while playing polo. Susie becomes a recluse for a year and Augustus moves to England, renting a lavish country home and carrying on an affair with Lady Norah Ebbsworth. Aspasia convinces Susie to fight for her marriage, so Susie follows Augustus to England and, with the assistance of the Prince of Wales, convinces him to end his affair.

Following this, Aspasia reveals that she will be moving back to Paris. She also admits to Susie that she has always been in love with Augustus. Susie reveals that she has always known, and after she herself was sure of Augustus' love for her, she loved Aspasia too. Augustus and Susie have a heart-to-heart in which he hopes that if their grandchildren develop the weaknesses he associates with money that is inherited rather than earned, he or Susie will be alive to set them straight.

Once more in the present, Susie realizes she made a mistake in having Jane send Ned away, and tells Jane to follow her heart and go after Ned, which Jane gladly does. Finally, Susie makes the decision to bail out Amory anyway, as many "little people" would otherwise lose their money through his fraud. Her daughter, granddaughters, and great grandson leave in disgust after learning they will be cut off by Susie. Once they leave, Susie calls upstairs for her lady's maid to make ready for the day. She also shouts to her that after the finances are distributed, they'll be returning to Leaping Rock, Nevada.

Cast

 * Greer Garson as Susie Parkington
 * Walter Pidgeon as Major Augustus Parkington
 * Edward Arnold as Amory Stilham
 * Agnes Moorehead as Baroness Aspasia Conti
 * Cecil Kellaway as Edward VII, Prince of Wales
 * Tala Birell as Lady Nora Ebbsworth
 * Gladys Cooper as Alice (née Parkington), Duchess de Brancourt
 * Frances Rafferty as Jane Stilham
 * Tom Drake as Ned Talbot
 * Dan Duryea as Jack Stilham
 * Helen Freeman as Helen (née Parkington) Stilham
 * Lee Patrick as Madeleine (née Parkington) Swann
 * Rod Cameron as Al Swann
 * Peter Lawford as Lord Thornley
 * Hugh Marlowe as John Marbey
 * Fortunio Bonanova Signor Cellini
 * Selena Royle as Mattie Trouson
 * Harry Cording as Humphrey
 * Hans Conried as Mr. Ernst
 * Gerald Oliver Smith as Taylor
 * Gordon Richards as James
 * Wallis Clark as Capt. McTavish (uncredited)
 * Al Ferguson as Miner (uncredited)
 * Byron Foulger as Norman Vance (uncredited)
 * Howard Hickman as Dr. Herrick (uncredited)
 * Brandon Hurst as Footman (uncredited)

Awards
Garson was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress and Agnes Moorehead for Best Supporting Actress. Moorehead also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Box office
According to MGM records, the film earned $3,062,000 in the US and Canada and $2,569,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $2,198,000.

Radio adaptation
Mrs. Parkington was presented on Lux Radio Theatre November 25, 1946. Pidgeon and Garson reprised their roles from the film.

title: Mrs. Parkington