Aug72017
Aug72017
This week's selection comes from David Govier, Oral History Archivist.
The Second World War saw women take on roles that they had not been expected to undertake before. Women moved from the home into factories, ship yards and pivotal roles in war administration. In one of the earliest recordings used in the British Library’s Gay UK exhibition, Mary Wilkins (born 1909) remembers her war experience and reflects on how it informed her identity.
Mary describes how her emotional feelings towards women developed during her childhood. She remembers making a promise to herself, while working as an ambulance driver during the Second World War, to join a peace organisation. She also describes listening to the pacifist and suffragist Sybil Morrison give a speech in Coventry and falling for her ‘hook, line and sinker’.
Mary Wilkins on falling in love_C456/066
This interview extract is part of the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive which is part of the British Library's Sound Archive. It is a collection of 113 oral history interviews relating to lesbian and gay experience in Britain, and, together with the Hall Carpenter physical archives held at London School of Economics, is one of the largest resources for studying gay activism in the UK. The British Library’s current Gay UK exhibition uses over a dozen oral history extracts from the Hall Carpenter collection to tell the varied stories of a broad range of gay people throughout the twentieth century.
The Hall Carpenter Memorial Archive was established in 1982 and grew out of the Gay Monitoring & Archive Project, which collected evidence of discrimination and police arrests in the UK. The archives were named after lesbian author Marguerite Radclyffe Hall and writer and early gay rights activist Edward Carpenter. In 1985 the archives employed Margot Farnham to coordinate an oral history project documenting the life experiences of lesbians and gay men in Britain. Farnham worked with volunteers who located interviewees, carried out interviews, and helped produce documentation such as summaries and transcripts. In 1989, an anthology called ‘Inventing Ourselves – Lesbian Life Stories’ was published based on the interviews with lesbians.
You can find out more about the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive and our other oral histories of sexuality in our collection guide.
Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty is a free exhibition in the entrance hall at the British Library until 19 September 2017.
Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.
Aug72017
Following stories in the media on the future of Help to Buy Equity Loan, the Department for Communities and Local Government has made the following statement.
We remain committed to the Help to Buy Equity Loan Scheme to 2021, ensuring it continues to support homebuyers and stimulate housing supply.
The Government also recognise the need to create certainty for prospective home owners and developers beyond 2021, so will work with the sector to consider the future of the scheme.
The Department regularly reviews the Help to Buy Equity Loan Scheme, with the last review taking place in 2015. To infer from this that the Help to Buy Equity Loan scheme will be cancelled is simply incorrect.
2 Marsham Street
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General enquiries: please use this number if you are a member of the public 030 3444 0000
Aug72017
I agree with the government that UK gross state debt is on the high side. It makes a significant contribution to total UK debt.
There is a simple way to bring it down. The Bank of England should announce that from next month it is going to reduce the stock of government debt it owns by £7bn a month. Over a five year period this would eliminate the £435 bn of government debt the Bank of England owns on our behalf. It would reduce state debt by around one quarter and would reduce our total indebtedness as a nation by a little over one fifth of National Income.
There is a precedent for this. The USA has announced its plan to start to cut the US state debt the Fed owns.
How can this be done? At the moment every time a government bond owned by the Bank is repaid they go out and buy another bond to replace it. Basically they can stop doing this and accept the repayment, which cancels the debt. They would need to switch bonds of varying maturities from time to time to ensure a smooth pattern of debt reduction.
What is the downside? The danger is such action tightens money too much. As an offset the Bank should relax its some of its strictures against new mortgage and car loan borrowing, whilst still policing proper evaluation of individual credit worthiness. It should keep interest rates low whilst reducing the stock of debt in this way. It should be ready to abort the programme of debt reduction if money tightens too much.
If instead money grows too quickly for other reasons then of course it can take other action to avoid any inflationary threat.
What’s stopping them getting on with this? We should be taking strides towards a more normal monetary policy now.
Aug72017
The fund will go towards supporting the delivery of the End of Life Care Delivery Plan 2017-2020, published in March this year. The three year plan outlines how the Welsh Government intends to improve services for patients and their families across Wales. It covers all aspects of palliative and end of life care, delivered by both primary and secondary care and the voluntary sector.
Care at the end of life has been improving in Wales since the publication of the first Delivery Plan in 2013 in hospitals and for those who wish to spend their final days at home.
To ensure patients’ experiences are consistently improving, the allocated funding will be used for activities such as providing additional training for health professionals to initiate difficult conversations about End of Life Care with patients and their families.
This funding will also be used to support the development of an all Wales streamlined, advanced care planning electronic record system, to take forward research priorities and to support GP clusters in Wales.
It will also be used to pursue a compassionate community approach to End of Life Care through projects such as the ‘Byw Nawr – Live Now’ initiative, which aims to get people in Wales talking more openly about dying, death and bereavement through awareness raising activities and online resources.
Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething said:
“Dying is one of life’s few certainties, and as a result of advances in modern medicine, there are many people living longer with terminal illnesses. It is therefore vital that the best possible end of life and palliative care is made available across Wales.
“I’m pleased to allocate the additional £1m funding to support the End of Life Care Delivery Plan, which reaffirms our commitment to ensuring people have a healthy, realistic approach to dying, and are able to plan appropriately for the event.
“We want people to be able to end their days in the location of their choice – be that home, hospital or hospice and we want them to have access to high quality care wherever they live and die, whatever their underlying disease or disability.”