The Flags Are Rising
The national awakening on September 13th represents a very strange statement being made by significant elements of the British people. Frustrated, and eventually driven to fury by the refusal of the governing classes to honour promises made to gain their vote, hundreds of thousands of flags of the four nations of the UK will suddenly make an appearance.
Flags for other countries are a cause of little comment. I was in Lithuania recently, and they were everywhere. Even our former colony across the pond will seek out every opportunity, or none, to raise the standard, proudly and unashamedly proclaiming its nationhood. Not so the British. For them there has to be a good reason, one which even unfriendly nations would seem churlish not to acknowledge. Ours are brought out sparingly, even judiciously, one might say. The reticent Brits are never anxious to over-egg their presence, even if their own flag once held sway across a quarter of the planet.
So what has caused this sudden about-turn? It was the bone-headed action of a local authority in cutting down British flags, put up to counter the appearance of a rash of foreign flags of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while leaving the proscribed flags in situ. It was the straw that finally broke a very patient camel’s back. To add insult to injury, the flags of the home country were unceremoniously binned like so much rubbish.
But the London Freedom Festival protest on September 13th, in reality, is about very much more than that bone-headed council. It is about long years of what amounts to abuse of the electorate: lies and bad faith, venal behaviour and pandering to the wishes of foreign states, many of which wish us harm, while all the time ignoring the wishes of the people who trusted them with their vote. No better example of the latter is the Chagos Islands fiasco. We end up giving something we own to someone who never owned it, and then paying that someone billions to lease it back. Tell me that I must have that wrong; but I haven’t. At the very same time we put our national security in peril, as well as that of our closest ally, by handing over the archipelago to a minnow of a state busily cosying up to the biggest threat the democratic world faces in the 21st century: expansionist and militarising China.
Also among the grievances are the years that a small minority of our people have preached to the rest of us of the wickedness of our ways. I speak of the fanatics of the woke brigade, the holier-than-thou bigots, the people who have allowed the tyranny of Stonewall to infect government, the law, academia, big business, the Town Halls – in fact, every agency which is in a position to make our lives a misery. Not only is their bigotry destroying lives, careers, marriages, you name it, but they are busy imprisoning people for voicing their opinions. Today, spontaneous talk is disallowed, since it must first run through the filter of: will it offend someone?
These same sanctimonious know-it-alls even have the gall to tell our young people that they should be ashamed of what their forefathers did around the world, and that a part of their hard-earned income should be handed over by way of restitution. The established church has even made a start on this absurdity by earmarking the first tranche of £100m. Where once our young people were encouraged to laud and seek to emulate the stupendous achievements of those who went before, these contemptible denigrators peddle an altogether different narrative and seek to instil a deep sense of guilt.
But what goes round comes round, and a reckoning is in the making. These young people who are now to be given the vote at 16 by this pork-barrel government are not, it seems, of a mind to vote for what they see as a band of losers. They do not buy into the prophets-of-doom narrative and the Britain-haters. Deep in their bones they know what a massive contribution their ancestors have made to the happiness of humankind. For the truth is their countrymen and women have made the modern world we know today, winning more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation.
If we go to work in factories, it is because they showed us how to do it. If we trade across the broad expanses of the world, it is because they sought out markets for the products of those factories. If a rules-based order protects those products, it is because they put that order in place. If capital can be raised to produce and grow those products, it is because they became both bankers and insurers par excellence. And when all the toils of making an honest living are done, and it is time to play, who gave the world football? Who gave it golf? Who gave it cricket?
And when China calls its own recent summit of ‘friendly’ countries, was it a multiplicity of national costumes that we saw? No, not a bit of it! It was the English suit, even on our sworn enemies. Finally, when the Great Hall of the People echoed to the voices of hundreds of delegates from far-flung lands, was it Mandarin Chinese we were hearing? No, it was our own sceptred tongue.
So, bearing all these things in mind, and so much more that there isn’t space nor reader’s time for, does it not make utter fools of those who seek to belittle us? And the ones who should be truly ashamed of themselves are those who come from within our own ranks.
Farewell to the Heroes of Britain’s Finest Hour
The recent passing of the last of the 2,900 pilots known affectionately as “The Few”, at the remarkable age of 105, should give us all pause for reflection. These brave individuals handed Nazi Germany its first defeat during the pivotal Battle of Britain. It is no exaggeration to say their courage and sacrifice did more than just save Britain; they changed the course of world history.
Had Britain fallen, Hitler would have been free to unleash the full might of his war machine against Soviet Russia, inevitably leading to its defeat. With the immense resources of Eurasia under German control, even the United States would have found itself powerless against an advanced enemy armed with weapons such as the feared V2 rockets. Winston Churchill famously warned of a “New Dark Age” descending upon humanity, a chilling prospect narrowly avoided thanks to “The Few”.
Twenty years ago, inspired by the heroism and selflessness displayed by these young pilots, I penned my own tribute to honour their memory and courage. My poem, “Salute to the Few,” is now proudly displayed at the Battle of Britain Museum. At this solemn moment, I would like to share it with you as a heartfelt reminder of their extraordinary bravery and sacrifice.
Salute to The Few
You were young and you were brave;
You a nation had to save.
Scrambled from your aerodrome,
Test those skills so freshly honed.
Whirling in your fighter high,
Fought your duels across the sky.
Like the famous knights of old,
You were fearless, keen and bold.
Never did a fate so grim
Threaten all with mortal sin.
Never did so very few
Save so great a multitude.
Spurn a deal that would have saved
All that men of empire made.
Chose the path of blood and debt;
Know that honour’s fully met.
Far beyond your nation’s shores,
All humanity took pause.
For it knew that you alone
Could for misspent time atone.
Be the first to best the Hun;
Yours a famous victory won.
Boyish banter in the sky,
Where you were so soon to die.
Almost out of school you came,
There to die in battle’s flame.
Fire and smoke and cannon’s roar,
Trapped within your cockpit door.
Feel the searing heat around;
See the fast-approaching ground.
Time to dwell but fleetingly
On that love on mother’s knee.
Bought you time that others might
Join you in that fateful fight.
Lift the terror, set men free;
Save them from base tyranny!
CANZUK: A Marriage Made in Heaven
There are few political outcomes about which any of us can be certain. However, the coming together of the Anglosphere seems almost assured. I am certain that when it happens, it will be a great boost for liberal democracy, becoming at a stroke the third pillar of the Free World after the US and the EU. It will also, at one leap, become one of the largest economic and military entities on the planet.
I speak, of course, of the settler communities of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand reuniting with their founder. A bipartisan poll has shown massive support in all four countries. While keeping their own parliaments, they propose to operate in unison in such areas as freedom of movement, job opportunities, recognition of each other’s qualifications, free trade, common currency; defence and intelligence, along with a joint defence policy. All will enjoy a high level of autonomy, much like the four countries of the UK.
This profound development could not have happened before this time. But a growing chorus argues that its time has come. Each of the now established nations needed to break free from the coattails of their founder, mature in their own right, shaking off any feelings of inferiority to their ancient motherland, and establish their own identity. This, over long years of autonomy, they have successfully achieved. All three punch well above their weight and are a credit to both themselves and their founder. The same could be said of the mighty United States, though its weight can never be in doubt.
Although the four nations of the proposed new union have been free for well over a hundred years to set their own policies, they have remained in remarkable lockstep with each other. So much so that if any of their citizens were to uproot themselves to another of the quartet, they would not feel themselves to be in a foreign land. So similar are all their institutions and the way they go about their daily lives, and so similar are the things they hold dear, that it is not surprising that such massive majorities for a reunion were achieved.
However, the world in which all four now operate has changed beyond all recognition. Who could have imagined that backward, dirt-poor China that occupied Australia’s backyard when it gained its independence would now be a digital, financial, and military colossus that casts a menacing shadow over its empty spaces, rich with rare earth materials and everything you can think of? How could Canada have known, when it achieved its independence 158 years ago, that its kindred neighbour to the south would grow so big as to make any dealings with it, trade or otherwise, totally unequal? Dangers and challenges surround these fledgling nations, as indeed they do their own mother-country since it left the EU. It is glaringly apparent that only their combined muscle can provide an answer.
Quietly and without fanfare, as is their preferred method, the nations of the Anglosphere are already reuniting. Britain’s exit from the EU has now got us back to where we were before that fateful sign-up decision that so upset our natural family. It has no option but to fashion a new future. In truth, it was never a proper fit with the EU, the successors of Charlemagne, wonderful as the concept of the EU was and is. It only joined because it was economically weak, while at the same time, Europe appeared prosperous. Britain’s horizons have always been global, notably marked by its history with the thirteen colonies. But that particular colossus, although it truly belongs in the proposed new union, cannot ever be a part. Ex-officio, maybe, but never a part. It is just too damned big. It couldn’t help itself from bossing the others around. Nevertheless, the emergence of a mighty new ally, fashioned in so many ways in its own image, could only but bring a smile to its face. The US would feel immense relief at no longer having to bear the burden of maintaining the post-war settlement alone. The creation of CANZUK (an acronym for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) would also be a boost to the Commonwealth, various members of which, with closely aligned values, might well aspire to join. Singapore springs to mind, as it already shares a great many of these and is an economic fit.
Few would argue that the world would not be a better, happier, and more secure place, were CANZUK to become a reality. As we move into the New Year, I am hopeful that 2025 will see some truly positive developments, even if CANZUK is not one of them. 53 years of Syrian misery is at an end, and I believe that the present leadership means what it says about a Syria for all factions. Ukraine, too, I believe, will see an end to the war, though it cannot be that Putin can claim any sort of a victory. Also, I am sure that there will be a resumption of the Abraham Accords, once the guns fall silent in Palestine. Peace may, at last, come to that benighted region, which we — I am sorry to say, as the arbiters of the time — messed up on and which our progenitor nation, the US, will, hopefully, after a hundred years, make good on.
With all these things in mind, and many more, I would like to wish my own small family of readers a very happy and contented New Year.
NATO’s Unity and the Challenge of Article 5
All of us have felt safe in the belief that, should any one of the thirty NATO countries be attacked, it would trigger an automatic response from all members, putting them at war with the attacker. However, today, for the very first time, I read in the Sunday Times that this is not the case. For Article 5 to become a reality, unanimity is required. If a single country were to demur, then it would not happen.
Now, in any situation that requires the unanimity of so many, it is next to impossible to envisage a scenario in which such a large number would agree. It is almost certain there will be one or more who will not, especially when what they are being asked to agree to is war. Some might argue that, in a real-world scenario, Article 5 is, therefore, worthless.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, there are two countries — Hungary and Bulgaria — who we know already would not agree, and there are likely to be more recalcitrants; one that springs to mind immediately is Turkey.
The alarming situation which now presents itself is that if a desperate Russia strikes out against either of the three Baltic states, or indeed Poland, which all four now see as a real possibility, then NATO will be shown to be impotent.
The only solution that stands any chance of making Article 5 mean what it says, which is almost certainly the reason why all of its members joined in the first place, is if the European Union came to the rescue. It could make it clear that any dissenting state would forfeit its place in the Union. Such a loss would be more than likely to bring any of the foot-draggers to heel.
In providing such a guarantee of its own, the Union would be protecting its own best interests since war in Europe would likely shatter what it has lovingly accomplished over the past seventy years.
As for NATO itself, it will need to look to the future—if there is to be one for it—at this impossibly high bar of unanimity and opt for a threshold of, say, 60%. Any member who will not agree to this should be invited to leave. That way, the remaining members will have what they have long, mistakenly, believed they always had: a cast-iron guarantee.
How D-Day’s Success Was More Than Just a Beach Assault
The most complicated and multifaceted project in human history was not the moon landing, but a seaborne invasion that took place 80 years ago. On June 6th, we commemorate the single most significant event of WWII. Had D-Day not taken place, or even worse, been a failure, as it could so very easily have been, Russia’s advance on the eastern front would have been brought to an abrupt halt.
For D-Day, there was only a narrow window of opportunity—what with tide and weather—that had it not made it when it did, Hitler would have known that his ‘Atlantic Wall’ could not have been assaulted until the following year. In that event, he would have felt free to withdraw massive forces from the western theatre and direct them to reinforce the eastern front. Had D-Day been activated and failed—a la the Dieppe Raid—he could have withdrawn even more forces and begun the process of throwing Stalin’s Red Army back, very possibly to its starting line, which would have left Hitler in control of almost all of European Russia. At that point, and contrary to what he had promised the Allies, he would almost certainly have sought a separate peace, so pulverised, depleted, and shorn of infrastructure was Russia.
For our part, we would have been left, along with our American allies, to fight on alone. Victory would still have been ours and, ironically, with nothing like the bloodletting that actually took place in the eleven months that followed D-Day. Little realised is the fact that in those eleven months following D-Day and peace in Europe, more lives were lost than in the preceding five years of war. Allied victory in Europe would have come not in May 1945 but in August had we been forced back onto our island following defeat on the beaches nor ever left it because we had missed that window. Hitler’s Reich would have ended that August not by British and American foot soldiers, but by the atom bomb. Not generally realised is that the atom bomb was first intended for use against Germany. We and the Americans had always had the ‘Germany first’ policy for whose defeat we would prioritise. It was only because D-Day was a success, with the bomb not deployable until August, that Hitler’s Reich was spared the horror that descended on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Some have argued that it would have been better if we and the Americans had sat back on our impregnable island, described at the time as ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’, and awaited the results of that first test in the New Mexican desert. Once in possession of the bomb, it was game over for any who opposed us. Germany would have received what the unfortunate Japanese received later. The Japanese, who had already put out peace feelers, would have seen what happened to Germany and rushed to avoid the same fate. As it was, they were left firmly believing, as many do to this day, that it was only used against them because they were Asians.
It is a fact that in terms of lives saved, civilian and military, the bomb’s deployment against Germany would have saved millions, as well as eastern Europe from forty years of misery and death from Soviet occupation. Cities and infrastructure would also have been saved. Of course, the great imponderable, while we sat it out for a year and awaited developments, was would it work. But the leading physicists involved in the Manhattan Project were confident it would work.
It is doubtful if humans will ever again put together so massive, complex, and costly a war operation as D-Day. The Apollo landings on the moon pale before it. Hitler was convinced to the end that the landing would fall on the Pas de Calais area. Why? Because an incredible deception was worked on him. He believed that although it was heavily defended, it was the shortest route, had plentiful harbours, and was the closest to Germany. He also believed that, short of defeating his enemy on the beaches, victory would go to whoever could get the most munitions and sinews of war to the combat zone quickest. Because he had trains and roads, he reckoned he could beat a water-reliant adversary. When he looked further down the coast, the seaborne crossing was four times as great and Normandy, in particular, had next to no ports.
Little did he know that the genius boffins working for the Allies had come up with a perfectly viable way to build a concrete harbour and tow it across the channel. It was code-named Mulberry. Then there was what seemed like the insurmountable problem of getting millions upon millions of litres of fuel for the thousands of tanks and other vehicles needed. Again, the boffins set to work. They came up with Pluto—Pipeline Under The Ocean—something that had never been done before. And they laid that under the very noses of the Germans.
Then came, perhaps, the most dazzling part of the Allied deception: they stationed an entire army of tanks, military vehicles, and aircraft all over Kent, the county facing the Pas de Calais. Except that they were never going to threaten Hitler’s Reich. They were beautifully crafted inflatable dummies. Seen by reconnaissance aircraft, they were totally convincing. Strutting around this mighty conglomeration of men and material was the Allies’ most aggressive and successful general, George S. Patton. Surely this had to be the clincher for Hitler!
A necessary action the Allies had to take, but yet one still rich in deception, was to paralyse German troop movements towards Normandy by bombing roads, marshalling yards, and rail networks. An incredible tonnage of high explosives rained down on the dukedom of the man who had changed England forever by launching his own invasion in 1066—only that time the invasion was the other way round. However, an equal if not greater tonnage was dropped on the Pas de Calais area. There was so much more that an entire volume would be needed to cover it.
Thus it was that Hitler remained convinced it would be the short route. For forty-eight precious hours after the dawn landings, he held back his armoured divisions, believing Normandy was a feint. Told that 150,000 men with accompanying armour and war material had been put ashore on day one alone and that over 5,000 naval vessels lay off the Normandy coast, he still held to his view. That goes a long way to explaining why the Allies had turned against the idea of having Hitler assassinated; he was, in Lenin’s term, the most ‘useful idiot’ of them all.
During that fateful lead-up to that most extraordinary of days on the 6th of June 1944, not a single leak of Operation Overlord’s true landing area reached the Germans. Almost three hundred miles of southern England stretching from Dover to Land’s End was little more than an armed camp, yet still the secret held. That, perhaps, is the most amazing thing of all as we salute the 80th anniversary of the storming of those beaches and those few magnificent heroes who are still with us today.
Unmasking Russia’s WWII Narrative
A crucial aspect of history has not received the attention it deserves: responsibility for starting WWII does not rest at Germany’s door alone; Russia was a joint partner in the enterprise. We, the British, had pledged to take up arms were Poland to be attacked. Well, she was—by Germany from the west and Russia from the east. When the two attackers met at the agreed line, their soldiers shook hands, and Poland disappeared for four years.
What the world was unaware of at the time was that the two dictatorships had secretly agreed between themselves, in that stunning Non-Aggression Pact—between two former ideological enemies—that they would share Poland between them. Russia went even further, getting the Germans to turn a blind eye to their seizure of the three Baltic states. Only an understandable reluctance to engage simultaneously with two major powers prevented Britain from declaring war on Russia as well.
Three more misconceptions, I submit, still cloud our vision of those times. Russia never refers to that conflict as the Second World War for a very good reason: it prefers instead to call it The Great Patriotic War. This spin allows it to pose as an innocent victim attacked while it had a peace treaty with a treacherous fascist power. Were it to acknowledge 1939, with the invasion of Poland, as the start of WWII, then its joint invasion would put it squarely in the crosshairs of culpability.
The third myth insisted on is that their country did the lion’s share of the dying. In fact, it was their subject peoples: the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Caucasians, the five Muslim Stans, and the Siberians, who took an even bigger hit than the Russians themselves. The Bolsheviks, when they took power, liked to pretend that they respected the sovereignty of all the nationalities that their Tsarist predecessor had vanquished; but they were never willing to give them back their freedom. They insisted on retaining the former empire’s conquests in their entirety, and they fought a bloody civil war to do so. To camouflage the empire’s continuance, they came up with the fiction of the USSR—a Union of Soviet (read committee) Socialist Republics. This, they held, was no empire like the British or French but a heartfelt union of free-minded people.
Yet another myth that the communists cultivated is that they won the war virtually unaided. How many people know that half the tanks used to stave off defeat in the Battle for Moscow were given, free of charge, by the British? How many people know that we and the Americans provided Russia with 20,000 aircraft, 19,000 tanks, and a veritable arsenal of every kind of war material you can think of, including the boots that the Red Army marched in? And that’s another thing; they didn’t need to do much marching. Its long advance towards Berlin was almost entirely motorised—courtesy of those same allies they still insist were of next to no help. Over one hundred Royal Navy ships went down in the freezing waters of the Arctic, where survival time in the water was two minutes, in getting those supplies to Russia.
Can anyone seriously doubt that, were a quarter of Hitler’s armed forces not tied down facing us in the west and been available for the attack on Russia, it would not have been successful? It very nearly was anyway. Moreover, if these enormous supplies were taken into the equation, can anyone further doubt that Russia’s defeat would have been even more catastrophic than that of France a year earlier? Hitler had no plans to exterminate Frenchmen as he did Russians.
History will eventually catch up on Russia’s false narrative of winning the war almost single-handedly. As for the bloodletting of the non-Russian nationalities, they too will receive the just homage they deserve. Not for a minute am I saying that the Russians themselves are not to be saluted. Their bravery and steadfastness in World War II are the stuff of legend. However, it is their leaders who cannot come to terms with democracy and seek only a continuance of the authoritarian model, which is all their benighted kinsmen have ever known. Theirs is almost the saddest of histories of any nation on the planet. One day, events will draw down the curtain on this mournful history and set them on a new path. Those events may be happening before our very eyes right now in distant Ukraine. A prostrate, defeated, and humiliated Russia may see its captured nations seize their chance to gain their independence. Across a front stretching for thousands of miles, Russia will be quite unable to contain their rebellions. Japan, still technically at war with Russia, might take back the Kurile Islands stolen from it at the very end of WWII. China apart—with its occupation of Tibet and Xinjiang—we may be about to see the breakup of the world’s last empire.
As for ourselves, in that titanic struggle a full lifetime ago, we were offered a very tempting deal at the beginning by Hitler: accept his dominance of Europe, and he would accept our dominance of that quarter part of the world our empire controlled. Funnily enough, it was the same deal that Napoleon had offered 140 years earlier. We rejected Hitler’s deal as we had Napoleon’s and, against all the odds, chose to fight on alone, which we did for over a year. It is fair to say that that hugely moral and brave decision saved the entire world from a dystopian nightmare that might very well still be with us today.
Britain’s Role in Shaping the Modern World
Britain has been so lucky. It was perfectly placed for the Industrial Revolution. As an island, it had short lines of communication and transportation with plentiful rivers. Where these were lacking, it dug canals and, forty years later, took trains to the remotest parts of the kingdom. No town or city was more than seventy miles from the sea. Despite its smallness, it had huge reserves of coal and iron. It had displaced despotic kingship with a parliamentary system and had finally become a settled state. Excellent universities worked with inventors and entrepreneurs. Even the factory system and workers turning up at a set time for a set number of hours was their idea. Previously, they had relied on the church bells or a man walking along a street knocking on doors to know the time. Now, thanks to Adam Smith and people like him, they all had affordable timepieces. Hard taskmasters as they were, they were also the first to introduce Bank Holidays.
Commerce was the big driver, even with empire, of which they were often reluctant participants. It even saw itself from the early 19th century as doing God’s work. Its queen, with her dedicated, hardworking German husband, strove to set an example of family life. Is it surprising that before long, they came to believe that the Almighty Himself had appointed them to be a light to the nations? They went out, Bible in hand, to bring the blessings of the scriptures and modernity to distant lands. Their hymns, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’, encapsulate their thinking. All this, and much more, combined with a good business ethos and an all-powerful navy, allowed it to forge ahead to create the world we know today.
How misbegotten it was when I was young to ridicule someone by calling them a Victorian. They were an astonishing breed. However, having said all that I have, any nation blessed with so many advantages would have achieved the same.
Autocracy vs. Democracy: The Stakes in Ukraine
Putin, with a population three times larger than Ukraine’s, plans to expand his armed forces by 170,000. Unable to defeat Ukraine in a fair fight, he seeks to employ the infamous ‘steamroller’ approach that both Stalin and the Tsars relied on: overwhelming numbers. This tactic worked against the plucky Finns in the 1939 ‘Winter War’. They, like the Ukrainians, initially bested the autocrat of their day in spectacular fashion, until the massed ranks of Russia’s poor peasantry were thrown against them.
This time around, the vastly superior ranks of the democracies must ensure a different result. Ukraine absolutely must be supported to the end. Should Trump win the upcoming election and withhold further funding – which I very much doubt – then Europe must step up to the plate. Its resources, both industrial and financial, are twenty times greater than Russia’s, and its population is three times larger.
Should the Ukrainians find their numbers in danger of being overwhelmed – for Russia’s rulers also have historically been careless with their soldiers’ lives – then volunteers from across the continent must step into the breach. Joining the Ukrainian army would not put their respective countries at war with Russia, any more than the International Brigade supporting the Spanish government against fascist insurrectionists put their countries in the firing line. The only reason the democratically elected government lost was that the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy stepped in to aid their fellow fascists.
The Western world must realise that this struggle between autocracy and democracy is one it cannot afford to lose. The consequences of defeat are too dreadful to contemplate. Winning, which must include the recovery of Crimea, may well set in motion the breakup of present-day Russia. It will certainly bring about the fall of Putin. Restive regions with non-Russian majorities may see a once-in-a-lifetime chance to break free. The most likely regions include South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Belarus, Transnistria, and various Siberian Republics. In this scenario, it is entirely possible that a weakened Russia will see the Finns regain the Karelian areas seized by Stalin following ‘The Winter War’, and the Kaliningrad enclave may opt to join the European family.
Unlike at the time of the USSR’s breakup, the democracies must this time embrace the new Russia and help set it on a course that Peter the Great deeply desired for his people: to become true Europeans. Russia has much to offer once it finally turns its back on despotic rulers. The brutal war against a fellow Slav nation, which has shattered the peace of Europe, is increasingly seen by Russians for what it is: one man’s megalomaniac dream of Empire. Empires were a fact of history – if you had the power, you used it, and others, for the most part, went along with it. But they are done and will never return. We, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French have all realised this. Only Putin hasn’t.
The Divergent Paths of Angela Kelly and Susan Hussey in the Royal Household
It still rankles with me, the contrasting treatment of Angela Kelly, the late Queen’s dresser, and Susan Hussey, her Lady-in-Waiting. Angela was ousted from her grace-and-favour home on the Windsor estate, while Susan was reinstated posthaste following her unfortunate dismissal. One, a docker’s daughter; the other, an establishment figure – the wife of a former director-general of the BBC.
During the last twenty years of the late Queen’s life, Angela transformed her couturier image from a lacklustre, dare one say, frump-like one to a colourful, stylish one. For that alone, she should have been awarded a Damehood. But more than this, she became such a close companion – enjoying TV and walks together – that the monarch is said to have exclaimed, “We could be sisters.”
Why on earth did the late Queen not anticipate how the establishment would turn on her friend once she was gone and safeguard her future? She knew the nature of the beast that stalked the corridors of her palaces. Despite the awesome position she occupied, the late Queen was of a humble disposition and should have made it impossible for her friend to be treated badly after her passing. I would like to think – though we shall never know, since royal wills are never published – that she left her a few million in gratitude.
From Armistice to Aftermath: Poem for Remembrance
On this Remembrance Day, the 11th of November 2023, we reflect on the armistice that ended the First World War, a day to remember the sacrifices of so many. In 2018 – the centenary of the World War I Armistice – I wrote and posted a poem, but since then, I’ve added two stanzas and modified another. My revisions stem from viewing the two World Wars as essentially one prolonged conflict with a conclusive outcome only in 1945. The same protagonists were involved, with one side refusing to accept its initial defeat, instead preparing during the interwar period for what it considered the rightful outcome in the second.
It was a misstep for the Western Allies to agree to an “Armistice,” a term suggesting a mere truce, at a time when the German army was collapsing, the Hindenburg Line had been breached, and the Kaiser had abdicated. With no path to recovery and its Home Front in revolutionary turmoil, the Allies could have demanded unconditional surrender – and likely would have secured it.
My original poem did not touch upon the second, more devastating round of conflict, nor did it delve into the role of artillery in battlefield losses. The common belief attributes most casualties to bullets, particularly from machine guns, bayonets, poison gas, among other weapons. However, it was in fact artillery – responsible for 60% of the losses – that served as the primary agent of death and injury.
Few war poems capture this immense tragedy comprehensively. I hope my poem does so, portraying the sorrow, waste, and madness of war with poignant clarity. As we commemorate wars past on this solemn day and observe ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, let us reflect once more on the madness of war.
Echoes from the Trenches
A sea of time has passed us by, and still, we think of them,
The lives unlived, the dreams curtailed, the legions of our men.
We did not know, we could not tell, what horrors lay in store,
As year on year the mournful call went out for more and more.
A maelstrom fell upon our men of iron, steel, and fire,
And sent a piteous wail of grief through every town and shire.
"We must resist," we told ourselves, "the evil, hated Hun,
Have not our leaders deemed this war a just and noble one?"
Through mud and ice and poison gas, the order was ‘stand fast’,
This agony, like none before, it surely could not last.
For four long years, we stood our ground and bravely would not yield,
Till battlegrounds ran red with blood through every poppy field.
Nigh half a thousand miles were dug of trenches where men slept,
Exposed and wet and freezing cold, companionship they kept.
Of lice, of rats, of mice and men, over whom they scurried.
Comes the light, the lice still bite, but off the others hurried.
A wasteland scowled between the lines with not a living thing,
Where even as the dawn came up, the lark, it would not sing.
To cross through no-man’s land and live might be a lucky feat,
But barbed wire and machine-gun fire could yet that luck defeat.
How could men cause such numbing pain and suffering to all?
What thoughts of gain or equity were on their lips to call?
How could they think to justify the carnage and the blood?
What rationale endured to turn their tears into a flood?
Delusions born of hubris' ease had caused them to believe,
This war would be no different from the rest they had conceived.
But science changes everything, and chivalry was dead,
Midst strafing planes and shrapnel shards and mustard gas and lead.
Oh God above, what did man do to vent his foolish spleen,
But sacrifice the best he had on altars of the keen?
How little did he think it through and cry aloud, ‘Enough!’,
But yet preferred to stumble on with bloody blind man’s bluff.
Versailles was born with bitterness and vengeance at its heart,
And so, in barely twenty years, a fresh war would it start.
Depravity beyond belief were hallmarks of this clash,
With millions lost to racial hate, their bodies turned to ash.
Then did at last all Europe rise and vow with every breath,
To put in place a Union to end this dance with death.
A world at war must nevermore be deemed a noble thing,
Its sons and daughters join as one, this anthem now to sing.
Brexit and Beyond: Uniting the Old Commonwealth
On the seventh anniversary of Brexit, it is both disheartening and exasperating that the project remains shrouded in negativity, with scant attention paid to the opportunities it presents. A dazzling prospect lies in wait for the British government. By overwhelming majorities, the citizens of our erstwhile Commonwealth allies – Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – have signalled their wish for a revival of the kinship that united us at the dawn of the 20th century.
While steadfastly maintaining their sovereign parliaments, these nations envision sharing with us a common defence, security, and foreign policy. They also aspire to enable freedom of movement, commerce, recognition of qualifications, and much more. This collective interest embodies a potential union that could function exceptionally well. Our levels of employment and standard of living are broadly comparable, and almost all aspects of our societal framework; our values, culture, history, parliamentary system, law and language, are remarkably similar. If realised, this would form the largest union globally, and provide a sturdy pillar of support to a beleaguered Uncle Sam.
Objectively, such an endeavour could be considered a straightforward decision and one that should draw cross-party backing. So, why does Westminster hesitate to seize this momentous opportunity? Could Brexit yield a more significant dividend than to reunite our familial ties in such a monumental development? The renewal of this close relationship, now known as CANZUK, holds a promising future.
The emerging power of the CANZUK union
Democracy and our Western way of life are currently in crisis. The rise of a militarised China, a crazed and delinquent Russia, and increasing numbers of authoritarian states pose what some see as an existential threat to our Western values. Yet, a powerful development could potentially reverse this situation.
Forces are gathering for a union of four pivotal democracies – an entity known as CANZUK, an acronym for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Public polling indicates broad support: 68% in Britain, 73% in Australia, 76% in Canada, and 82% in New Zealand. Each nation will remain sovereign, yet they’ll cooperate in foreign policy, defence, freedom of movement and trade, recognition of qualifications, and sharing of security concerns—an existing example of such cooperation being the Five Eyes Agreement, which also includes the United States.
In terms of land area, this proposed union would be larger than Russia, boasting a combined GDP of $6.5 trillion and a population of 135 million. Its military budget would exceed $100 billion, making it the third largest in the world.
While many draw parallels between CANZUK and the EU, crucial differences exist. The CANZUK nations share a common language, heritage, and lifestyle. Their standard of living, employment levels, and political institutions run in parallel. Critics of CANZUK have termed it ‘a white man’s club’, but CANZUK International, the organisation advocating for the union, has stressed that the door will remain open to other like-minded nations sharing the same values, including India.
Historically, the CANZUK countries have fought together in defence of freedom, never against each other – unlike the turbulent history of European nations. Another critical difference with the EU is that no CANZUK nation will impose rules and regulations on another, unlike the centralised control from Brussels.
The emergence of the CANZUK union could reinvigorate global leadership, inspire the United States to remain globally engaged, and establish a third significant pillar of Western values alongside the US and EU.
Each CANZUK nation will also gain unique benefits. Canada could negotiate on more equal terms without the overshadowing presence of its giant neighbour. Australia and New Zealand could face China’s assertiveness more confidently, and Britain, once history’s largest empire, would regain its international influence and join the largest confederation on the planet – a reinvigoration sparked by Brexit during its dire straits.
The prosperity of CANZUK members could significantly increase as a result of this union. Critics who question the viability of trade due to geographical distances overlook the success of global trading giants like China and Japan. Advancements in AI and green technology, like the US Navy’s move towards virtually crewless ships, are likely to reduce shipping costs in the future, making the trading prospects even more favourable.
But perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of this promising development will be the young. They would be free to live, travel, study, and work across the expansive regions of CANZUK. Even retirees could benefit from the freedom to relocate. This exciting prospect is, to borrow a popular phrase, ‘a no-brainer.’ It should be for us grown-ups too.
The rise of the CANZUK union could potentially reinvigorate global leadership, inspire the United States to remain globally engaged, and establish a third significant pillar of Western values alongside the US and EU.
While Brexit initially represented a step away from supranational involvement for Britain, it may have ultimately set the stage for a stronger, more aligned union with countries that share deep historical and cultural ties. The post-Brexit era for Britain may not be one of isolation, but of renewed global influence and connectivity.
Many didn’t think Britain had much of a future outside the EU, but the world has always been our oyster. The CANZUK proposal is just one way we’re demonstrating that. Even domestically, we may find a solution to the aspirations of our member nations of the UK. As federal states within the union, they too could at last stand proud as sovereign states.
The notion of poor, tortured Ireland reuniting and choosing to join this new brotherhood of nations is not beyond the realms of possibility. This would be a testament to the appeal and potential of CANZUK, its promise of mutual benefit, and its respect for national sovereignty.
This is not a mere dream; it’s a potential reality within our grasp. It’s time to seize the opportunity and make CANZUK a part of our shared destiny. In an era marked by uncertainty and rapid change, the promise of CANZUK is a beacon of stability and shared prosperity, a testament to what nations can achieve when they unite under common values and a shared vision. Let’s look towards this future with hope and determination.
Unravelling the mysteries of our origins
My followers might have already recognised my profound interest in our own history and that of the world at large. Despite my passion for various scientific ‘ologies’ like cosmology and archaeology, anthropology resonates with me the most.
Experts believe we diverged from our ape predecessors roughly seven to thirteen million years ago. Africa was our primal homeland, teeming with diverse hominoid species traversing its vast stretches.
After several million years on the African continent, some adventurous groups embarked on journeys beyond its confines, marking the beginnings of global colonisation. Approximately forty thousand years ago, four separate groups coexisted: Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and a metre-tall species colloquially referred to as “Hobbits.” However, the latter three disappeared, joining the numerous other hominoids that didn’t survive, leaving us to traverse the vast planet alone.
Interestingly, Eurasians obtained 1 to 2% of their genetic composition from Neanderthals due to interbreeding. The Neanderthals, necessitated by the harsher climate outside of Africa, had developed various immunities, which they passed on to their descendants.
Adapting to the varying environmental conditions from the far north to the south of the planet, these four groups existed uniquely, although it’s possible more remain to be discovered. The lingering, unresolved mystery is why only Homo sapiens have survived until the present day.
Several theories have been proposed, including the possibility of one group’s aggression against another. Given our historical propensity for conflict, this seems plausible. It’s likely our ancestors would have viewed these other groups as lesser beings, possibly driving them to extinction, especially if territorial disputes were involved. We have a historical precedent of such behaviour, as observed in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. However, considering the global resources at the disposal of these small groups, competition was likely minimal. As their numbers increased, there may have been attempts to subjugate them, another unfortunate trait exhibited in human history. All these groups, however, shared an advanced level of intelligence compared to other mammals, providing them an edge in adapting to numerous and varied climatic changes.
Among the four groups, we seemed to be the fastest in developing technology like bows and arrows and intricate stone tools, suggesting a higher intellectual advancement. Possibly, our advanced language skills facilitated more effective communication and strategic planning. Our taller and more athletic physiques would also have made us faster. These abilities likely provided us an advantage in surviving harsher climatic conditions.
Anthropology is riddled with many unanswered questions, and it’s possible that we may never fully uncover some of them. As complex as the mysteries of the universe may be, we seem to have fewer answers to questions about our own origins, making anthropology an incredibly captivating field.
Our Queen impressed all humanity
One day in February 1952 when I was thirteen, a man came into my classroom and said that he had an important announcement to make. “The King is dead,” he said. I cannot remember what else he said before he left, but that day has been fixed in my memory all these seventy years. I had known death before, when my beloved foster father had died when I was three and that sorrowful memory was etched too in my memory, especially when we used to visit that sinking mound of earth which was his grave.
Remembered also was where I was – Fulham Road in London – when I saw the newspaper billboard that announced President Kennedy had been shot. Next was the moon landing during which, in the last frantic seconds before Neil Armstrong descended the ladder on to its surface, I was adjusting the aerial on my home’s roof (I made it in time). Fast forward then twenty-eight years to 1997 and you had my young son at 6.30am on a Sunday morning when I got up early to keep an eye on him telling me that Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead. Finally, you had that surreal image set against a bright blue September sky of the Twin Towers billowing out plumes of blackened smoke, and people leaping from great heights to avoid being burned alive.
Now, the whole world – and not just the British people – stand in shock at sudden death again; not this time of thousands, but of a single individual, our Queen. For almost all of everyone’s lives, she had been a constant presence, almost as though she was one of the stars in the firmament. Now that star had not just faded, but suddenly vanished from the night sky. For seven decades she had been head of a still significant country which even in her grandfather’s time had been the superpower of its age. Just five years earlier, and she would have been Empress of India – albeit briefly – had she come to the throne then. The hard power which it had once exercised had been seamlessly inherited by a former colony which shared identical ambitions. That power valued its old boss’s support in the application of the unavoidable nastiness of hard power.
But Elizabeth’s country then set about the accumulation of massive reserves of soft power, perceiving that to be the only power that works in today’s world and does not garner opprobrium. It had the perfect vehicle to achieve this in the Commonwealth. Three centuries now of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora, with its universal language, setting the world agenda and reordering its workings has brought us to where we are now. All this is not lost on humankind.
Queen Elizabeth II was a very homely person who happened to enjoy – if that’s the word – a very exalted position. She was a shy woman brought up with old-fashioned values. She liked nothing better than that everyone should keep the peace, and that included her own family. She was a gifted mimic who could see the funny side of much that was around her, including pompous people who made a fool of themselves in their efforts to do the right thing in her presence. All of us in doing our job, however much we like it, eventually become jaded, but she never did.
More Scottish than English by ethnicity, she loved the songs of Scotsman Harry Lauder. One of his best known and loved was Keep Right On to the End of the Road. And that is exactly what she did. And this simple fact impressed all humanity.
Soon we shall see the greatest assemblage of its high and mighty that the world has ever witnessed; not for an Alexander or a Nobel Prize Winner who saved humanity from cancer, but for a very ordinary human being with a kind heart. Unnervingly for many, especially the old, we live in a fast- moving world which accelerates by the year, but our Queen seemed to embody those aspects of a lost world which we still pine for and hanker after. Like a permanent fixture for all people everywhere.
Loss
I was on my way to Plymouth Hoe after finishing work for my proverbial cappuccino, feeling down on account of my wife leaving for Lithuania tomorrow. I noticed how the daffodils along the way had given way to the blossom, which is also beginning to give way to the bluebells – each following the other as though designed to keep our spirits up: a challenge for me at this time . A line of verse came into my head linking the two. Over my cappo, it developed into something more. I’d like to share it with you.
You went away at blossom time, The daffs had had their day, But blossom comes to fill the void, Though, briefly does it stay. And then the bluebells swarm about, Its trillions fill the land, Their fragrant scent in woodland parts, Completes this godlike hand. But I am sad beyond recall, For you are gone from me, With no set date for your return, To help me in my grief. I will endure and wait for you, To do what you must do, But beg you in that far off land, To think on me and you.
Whatever Putin’s game plan was, it cannot have been any of this
Recent events still playing out across the distant steppes of Europe are bringing about seismic changes in the geo-political landscape.
Russia, today, stands friendless in a way it has never before. Its leader has unleashed a war that has appalled the whole world and from which there is no easy way to row back without massive loss of face.
Vladimir Putin is a man riven with hatred for what he sees as Russia’s treatment by the West. Too long now in power, he sees enemies in every quarter and has undoubtedly developed a personality disorder which prevents him from acting rationally. So out of touch with reality is he that he actually believed his forces would be greeted as liberators, with flowers tossed on his tanks and armoured carriers. He has convinced himself that a country ruled by a Jewish prime minister and a Jewish president is a fascist state and he calls them Nazis. He invites his countrymen and women to share this outlook.
Galling to him the extreme is that his plans for a quick victory are unravelling and the Western allies uniting to funnel in weapons to enable a protracted struggle to develop.
His choices are stark. Only the application of overwhelming force stands a chance of breaking the logjam. But his soldiers – mainly conscripts – are unhappy. The people they are being asked to kill are what they have always called their little brothers. Unlike in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ Putin’s soldiers are not fighting for their homeland, but to gain possession of another’s. The people they are being asked to despoil are not the brutal, merciless, sadistic Nazis, who regarded them as a lower form of humanity (Untermensch), but fellow Slavs who speak their own language and share a common history.
This time it is not the Russians who are motivated, but their invaded brother nation who, like them in 1941, face an existential struggle for national survival.
Shockwaves have swept across the entire planet which had nurtured the fond belief that a no-holds war of this kind had been consigned to the annals of history. There is a very real risk that million-plus cities will be reduced to rubble. Remembered with melancholy is the fate of Aleppo in Syria and what these same Russians did to the world’s oldest inhabited city.
The entire enterprise has become very personal. Even Hitler did not dispatch death squads to take out his implacable, eventual nemesis, Stalin, as Putin has done with the Ukrainian leader. He is well versed in taking out anyone who seriously offends him, no matter what foreign capital they may live in. The single exception to this is Washington.
Putin’s mindset is one that cannot contemplate defeat, nor tolerate a protracted struggle in which he gets bogged down, nor see his economy wreaked by Western sanctions.
Also, he has unusually sinister plans for the disposal of the dead bodies of his young conscripts. In Afghanistan, even the Soviets returned them to their loved ones which, unfortunately for them, brought home the bitter and melancholy cost of war. Putin is reported to have arranged for mobile crematoriums to be sent to the battlefield. But unlike even the Japanese in WWII, who returned the ashes of their fallen to Tokyo, Putin’s incinerators are designed to vaporise the remains. This is a truly awful man we are talking about.
Notwithstanding the fearful range of weaponry that the Russian tyrant is prepared to use – much of which is banned under international law – this may yet be a war that he cannot win. But if he does, he will need a huge army of occupation since the Western third of Ukraine is ideal partisan country, and Ukraine is Europe’s largest nation – substantially larger in land than France.
Part of Putin’s problem, after twenty-two years in power, is that he is beyond listening to anyone. But there is one power in a position to impose mediation on him and force him to the conference table. That power is China. Apart from a handful of rogue regimes which can offer him nothing, China is the only one which can mitigate, to a degree, the effects of sanctions. It comes to something that he does not even enjoy the support of the mullahs in Tehran.
Such is Putin’s isolation, and so crippling the range of sanctions now deployed against him, that only China can keep him afloat. Putin cannot do without it. As a result, that country is the only one that can twist his arm into a climbdown that may magic up some sort of fig leaf to cover the humiliation involved. It could, perhaps, involve the United Nations.
It may well be that China asserts its power, for the very first time, on the continent which, two centuries ago, began the process of humbling it and bringing it into the modern world. It may broker a conference to bring a halt to the violence presently engulfing the cities and towns of Ukraine.
The truth is that China is appalled at the situation which Putin has brought about. It has an obsession, dating back millennia, in stability. Harmony is in its DNA (providing due respect is shown to its ancient lineage). That doesn’t stop it, however, gloating over the West’s recent disarray with its armies of naval-gazing bleeding hearts bemoaning its perceived sins of the past, as well as the present, and its legions of Woke social justice warriors. These are the kind of warriors that China would like to see more of. It couldn’t believe its luck when it saw the ignominious scuttle from Afghanistan, and the European half of the Western alliance question Uncle Sam’s commitment to Europe. It has revelled even at how its own home-grown virus has laid the Western world low and plunged it into unimaginable debt.
Now, overnight, its erstwhile neighbour, Russia, has inadvertently awoken the sleeping giant of the Free World and both NATO and the European Union are re-energised with the US beathing fire and smoke, and pledging to “defend every inch of NATO territory”. Even pacific Germany has seen the light. It has thrown its mighty engine into rearmament – a terrifying prospect for the Russians – and proposes to take its nuclear plants out of mothballs, fire up its coal-fired plants and free itself from dependency on Russian oil and gas. Nord Stream 2, with its £8 billion dollars of spent investment – much of it Russian – is now for the birds. The formerly proud neutrals of Sweden and Finland are also suddenly keen to join the alliance.
Whatever Putin’s game plan was it cannot have been any of this.
All this means for the Chinese that the long-sought-for seizure of Taiwan is once again off the agenda, for China now believes that it can longer be certain that Uncle Sam will scuttle a second time. Indeed, the landscape has so changed that it seems the entire democratic world is now on the march and its growing dream of a quiescent West standing by while it advances to world domination is now just that: a dream.
We won’t let Boris ruin another Christmas
Sales of Christmas lights have quadrupled this festive season. A message is being sent to Johnson and his coterie of doom-laden cohorts.
We are a happy, positive people, and we will not allow you to depress our spirits for another Christmas. We will illuminate the darkness with our message of hope and optimism. We are content to shield behind the ramparts of our brilliant scientists who, with their vaccines, have done what you are not doing: give us hope and inspiration to see this through.
Between 1939 and 1945, one went to prison for “spreading alarm and despondency” – exactly what our current leaders have been doing for almost two years now. Such activity was regarded as one step short of treason. Imagine if Churchill had gone on air predicting hundreds of thousands of deaths due to Nazi bombs, as he might very have done had he been lily-livered and flanked by the likes of Messrs Whitty, Vallance and the boffins of Sage. Instead, he raised the spirit of the nation into a can-do crusade.
I only give the prime minister credit by default for the ordering of massive doses of the Covid vaccines then under development. His mantra for all things is to spend, spend and spend again. Remember the Thames estuary Airport, the bridge to Ireland, the new Royal yacht, the long-forgotten water cannons to control protesters when he was mayor of London? These he had failed to clear with the Home Secretary, so had to be sold at a loss when she declared their use to be un-British.
The massive vaccine order was one project in which his normal financial incontinence and recklessness actually paid off. The truth of the matter is that the real heroes were the scientists and the woman put in charge of the rollout, Kate Bingham.
For almost two years now, we have been assailed and bludgeoned into a mindset of misery and despair and the nation has had enough. Hence the nationwide illuminations; a finger up to the doom-mongers if ever I saw one.
The trail of carnage which the handling of the pandemic has left ranges from suicides and child and domestic abuse to fatally late diagnoses of cancers, mental breakdowns and lost businesses. It is beyond quantifying and we will never know its full extent. Books will be written, but the collateral damage – and let’s not forget the horrifying debts we have incurred – may turn out to be worse than the disease itself. It has reached into every corner of life.
And this accounts for our brilliantly lit cities. It is a message of defiance and the belief that better times are coming. In the light of the spectacularly wrong stream of forecasts of deaths, you would have thought that the government would have shown a degree of caution about the latest 75k forecast and hold back from moving to fresh restrictions until firm evidence emerged to justify it. But, true to form, ministers panicked once again and lost their nerve. Not only did they move us to so-called Plan B, but they started leaking about a Plan C.
All the while, we are finding that all the evidence is pointing in the opposite direction and that the latest, more infectious variant in fact makes you much less ill and in the great majority of cases can be handled at home. Where hospitalisation is required, oxygen is rarely needed and patients are released much quicker. Much more is understood now about the disease and more effective treatments are being delivered.
In the end, this new variant may be doing us a favour by being more transmissible as it may quickly achieve that long-sought-after end, herd immunity, without killing us in the process or even making us seriously ill like the Alpha and Delta strains before it.
Basically, all we needed to do is protect the vulnerable, which we now have the means to do, and life can resume a more normal pattern. Of course, the truth is that the virus never did have an interest in killing us. It was only keen to spread as since killing its host defeats that end.
So where are we now? The government is getting ready to ruin another Christmas by moving to Plan C – which it has hurriedly cobble together – but lo, the angel of the Lord has intervened in the form of the ninety-nine MPs who said no. By their rebellion in the Commons, they have sent the most alarming of shots across the prime minister’s bows. They have made it virtually impossible for him to move beyond the restrictions he has already imposed. Those ninety-nine MPs who put principle before their careers are the true heroes of recent events.
Not only have they said thus far but no farther, but they have extracted a promise that no further measures will be enacted without parliament’s approval. Johnson knows that although he has got his panicky way yet again, it has only been achieved with the embarrassing support of the official opposition. Such a rebellion has made it next to impossible for him to pull off such a stunt again. If he got a bloody nose from his own side this time, he would receive a knockout uppercut if he tried it again. Those fifty-four disgruntled MPs needed to trigger a vote of no confidence in his leadership would become an avalanche.
Pity the new incumbent of Number 10 who would have to live with Carrie’s choice of bizarre furnishings and wallpaper. We might even forgive him or her in spending yet more money in reinstating John Lewis.
As Afghanistan suffers and slips back into darkness, America licks its entirely self-inflicted wounds and Europe stands aghast
America used to proudly boast that it never lost a war, but now Afghanistan joins Vietnam in destroying that claim.
As a ragbag force of 83,000 Taliban sweeps to final victory in a single week over a well-trained, highly equipped government army three times bigger, the US has suffered a humiliation every bit as great as that inflicted by the Vietnamese 45 years ago. Even that jaw-dropping scurry from the embassy roof has found a fresh equivalent.
A geopolitical catastrophe has been inflicted on the West as well as on NATO by a naïve, increasingly inept president and his predecessor. NATO had hitherto been seen as the longest, most successful military alliance in history and, indeed, it was. Now that hard earned credibility has been seriously jeopardised by its leading member. What is so galling is that the forces deployed before the collapse of its mission were minuscule compared to that it had deployed to bring relative order to the country. Yet this tiny force had been sufficient to encourage the Afghan army to do its job and stiffen poor decision making with its ranks. It also gave it state of the art equipment as well as training. Why, then, did the Afghan army fall apart so precipitously and succumb to a hugely inferior enemy?
It did so because of a terrible feeling of abandonment. Also, because its corrupt masters had stopped paying it – pocketing the huge funds its western backers were sending, when a foolish president set a date for withdrawal. The crooks in government knew that a day of reckoning was fast approaching with the austere men with long beards. Those funds went to myriad offshore accounts in the run-up to departure and before the crooks scurried off to their seaside mansions.
Over the course of twenty years, Afghanistan – and particularly its women – have come to engage with the modern world and enjoy its freedoms and opportunities. All this is about to be snatched away. Society will be plunged back into feudalism. Women, again, will become the playthings of men, suffering torment, cruelty and anguish with their Human Rights cut from under them along with education and job opportunities.
Although bringing overwhelming firepower to bear, once the heavy lifting had been done, the West only needed to maintain a fraction of that effort to hold things together. But its guiding light lacked the backbone to see the job through. Sadly, it stands to pay a heavy price for its pusillanimous. Had the Taliban, like the IRA, faced an enemy willing to stay the course, its stomach for a never ending fight would, eventually, have evaporated.
Afghanistan, more and more, would have moved into the modern world and there would have been no turning back. That kind of resolve, demonstrated by NATO over 45 years, eventually broke the back of the mighty Soviet Union. It will have to be summoned up once more to contain the assertive designs of a totalitarian China that binds the human spirit in chains of a sort never before available to tyrants.
Meantime, Afghanistan suffers and slips back into darkness. America licks its entirely self-inflicted wounds and Europe stands aghast. Has our stalwart ally and protector lost the plot, as well as its bottle? Can we rely on it as we always felt we could? We in Europe are half a billion people – rich people at that. Has the time come that we have to look to ourselves, while remaining in closest concert with our Atlantic neighbour? These are urgent questions, and they must be addressed. Meanwhile, laughing in the wings are China, Russia and Iran.
It seems too much to hope that the Taliban Mark 2 has seen the error of its former ways. Even if its now elderly leadership might wish to do things differently, its young foot soldiers out in the countryside can be expected to exact Quranic justice as per its 7th century origins. There are a lot of scores to be settled.
Afghanistan remains a tribal society with animosities that run as deep as did those between Scottish Highland clans. Perhaps one of its warlords will cobble together a challenge to the Taliban, much as the Northern Alliance did successfully. But then, again, perhaps we may all be wrong and it really is a changed Taliban. They certainly won’t want a fresh invasion, which is what they will get if they facilitate renewed terror attacks.
Above all, they crave international recognition for their renewed Emirate and only good – or at least better – behaviour can secure that. They have pledged to eradicate poppy production and appealed to the world to help them replace their narcotic dependency with alternative crops.
Afghanistan developed expectations as a result of thirty years of exposure to a fastmoving world – first the USSR and then NATO. It is just possible that the now weary old men can succeed in reigning in their hothead younger men and settle society down as has been achieved in our own backyard of Northern Ireland.
Heading into irrelevance
Margaret Thatcher’s successor, Sir John Major, has declared that however well we perform over the next half century, we will never again be a first-rate power. He says that, economically, we will be overtaken by other powers with much larger populations.
I find it astonishing that a man who has sat at the very centre of power can reveal himself as being so astonishingly myopic. Despite his seven years in power, he failed utterly to pick up on what his country was really all about. His lack of historical perspective is also equally baffling.
Size of economy and population do not in themselves confer on you front-rank power. Very soon, India’s economy will overtake our own and its population overtake China’s. Is anybody saying India becomes more significant than us at that point?
Let me list a few of the reasons why I believe Britain will remain a force to be reckoned with and very much a front-rank power. We are the founder member of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora, comprising ourselves, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. That diaspora formed the cornerstone of the post-war world order and the multitude of organisations and affiliates operating under the auspices of the United Nations – itself a body created by its two leading members. So close and trusting of each other are these five countries that the Five Eyes, as they call themselves, share intelligence to the very highest level and admit no others to their closed order.
The common language these countries share has become so ubiquitous and necessary in the world of international diplomacy, science, medicine, business, the web and the arts that, without any agreement between the world’s 195 nations, it has become the world’s lingua franca.
Britain is the inventor of the modern world. It is a tolerant, law-driven, property-owning, democratic society in which the executive is answerable to the collective will of individuals who maintain a constant watch on what it gets up to through a free media. It remains an incredibly innovative country with a greater number of Nobel laureates relative to its population. It has schools the rich worldwide like to send their kids to and universities that rank among the world’s best.
Also, John Major takes no account of that great empire that formerly straddled the world which has morphed into a free association of nations – fifty-four of them – and forms today such a magnet that some countries which were never part of that empire want to join. That association – or club, as it often likes to refer to itself – seeks to promote democracy and decency among all its members and will reject any state who egregiously fails to meet its standards. In many ways it is like a mini United Nations – though not one which will tolerate tyrants – and it has a touching, almost family aspect to it. All the Commonwealth’s members positively love to meet up every two years and party with no interpreters in sight.
Despite the aberration of the Trump presidency – one quite survivable, as we see, in a democratic society – the United States remains the most dynamic society on earth. The country most admired and trusted by that state enjoys, by definition, a special status as well as an advantage. It has the ear of its best pal as no one else does. Note that, despite a serious difference with Boris Johnson over Brexit and disparaging words spoken earlier about the British prime minister, he was still the first leader Biden picked up the phone to after his confirmation as the president elect.
Then there is our physical proximity, cultural and historical links with the great power which will one day be the United States of Europe. These ties will not go away. We will always need and want each other. Great Britain was just not a proper fit for the EU’s aspirations. Quite apart from this, it would never want to upset us too much for fear that we would retaliate by using our newly repatriated powers to seek economic advantage.
I do believe that Britain has the most polished and effective diplomatic service in the world. This is enhanced by the world’s most respected broadcaster, the BBC. Its World Service is the most trusted of any and listened to avidly even by its enemies. Its documentaries, dramas and period pieces entrance millions.
All these assets come under the heading of Soft Power. It is the only power, realistically, which can deployed in the 21st century. Unlike tanks, planes and warships, it passes under the radar and makes you friends – not enemies. Hard Power is a wasting asset; it is hugely expensive and ruinous to maintain. The ever-increasing restraints of an ever increasingly activist UN make it almost impossible today to go to war without UN authorisation. The war against Saddam Hussein may well have been the last in which that could be done without a mandate.
As for nuclear weapons, the only thing that can be said about them is that they free you from fear of invasion, which is almost certainly why North Korea has impoverished itself to acquire them and their delivery system. Otherwise, they are unusable – so being armed to the teeth is truly a drag anchor. Dynamic as it is, imagine how much more the United States would be capable of were it not burdened with supporting its colossal military-industrial complex. That is the foolish road that authoritarian China is presently going down. While it is true that we ourselves are not free from displaying military muscle – we have submarines that can deliver a nuclear strike anywhere in the world and two aircraft carriers of immeasurable power – we do not let ourselves be carried away.
John Major downplays the country that allowed him, the son of a circus man, to rise to the top – as well as a grocer’s daughter. But among so many other questions, he needs to ask himself what is the attraction of our nation that desperate people will borrow thousands from people traffickers to come and live among us? What makes a man willing to die to reach our shores?
The fact is that we are seen a tolerant nation as well as a successful one. The quality of our judicial rulings brings litigation to London from all over the world. In theatre, drama and music, Britain turns in a matchless performance. Many consider London the coolest city in the world with the City of London the beating heart of an enormous chunk of global financial transactions.
Even the shenanigans of our Royal Family are a source of endless fascination for the entire planet. And when it comes to a state visit, a royal wedding or a funeral, who can put on a show to match one of ours? Brexit may have driven us mad, but the theatre of it all in the mother of parliaments – especially that of its outrageously partisan speaker, Bercow, who so loved the sound of his own voice – made for riveting viewing worldwide. The complexities of the arguments deployed made even the US electoral process look straightforward.
So wake up John Major! You haven’t been right about very much these recent years and you’re certainly not right about this.
The British public are desperate for Boris to be the man we felt we knew
Not in living memory has the entire world been gripped by a fear as great as that which holds it in thrall at the present time.
In this COVID-19 crisis, it seems to me that what is needed more than anything is a sense of proportion. In the lifetime of people still walking the earth, a pandemic struck which killed fifty million of the planet’s inhabitants.
I refer, of course, to Spanish flu. It was a nasty, virulent strain which targeted the young – male and female children and those of military age. These were the ones it liked to sink its cellular teeth into. It wasn’t interested in the old.
Furthermore, you were over one hundred times more likely to die of Spanish flu than you are of the current malignancy. The saddest irony was that millions who had survived four years of shell and shrapnel in the trenches fell victim to this unseen killer wearing no uniform and against which they had no defence.
The ones who perished were the ones society could least afford to lose. Much less was known in those days of the nature of viral spread and reproduction and even less on how to combat it. In that much less regulated and interventionist world, no lockdowns took place.
With COVID-19, it was apparent early on that you were at risk – not just by being old, but if you were obese and/or with underlying health issues. The very young would often hardly know that it had come and gone with them.
Any sensible approach should, therefore, have taken these factors on board with targeted policy measures. People in a high-risk category should have had a protective shield thrown around them and the rest left to go about their business, mindful of the dangers while exercising due diligence. Test and Trace should have been an early priority.
Had this been done, it would not have been necessary to inflict such catastrophic economic harm and all the attendant collateral damage associated with these national lockdowns. Nor would we have mortgaged our children’s’ future with debt levels never before seen outside of world wars. It is likely, in the final reckoning, that as many will have died from delayed treatments for heart disease, cancer, strokes and a multitude of other conditions as have succumbed to this coronavirus.
The country in Europe which has come closest to what I regard as a measured and proportionate approach is Sweden. Their one obvious failure, which was joined by our own litany of failures, was not to have protected their care homes. But at least their economy will have emerged largely unscathed and treatments for other more numerous life-threatening conditions continue on track.
The Swedes are, by nature, a calm people – as once we were – and their appeal has been to people’s good sense. The instinct to stay alive has been sufficient to persuade their socially minded people to do the right thing, and they will reap a rich dividend as a result.
Britain’s own unenviable record of the highest death total in Europe can be largely explained by our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, dithering over lockdown and our appalling levels of obesity and associated poor health. It seems no coincidence that our even fatter cousins across the Atlantic lead the field in fatalities.
Our country’s latest catastrophic error was Boris allowing himself to be terrorised by alarmist and grossly exaggerated figures of likely fatalities. Four thousand daily were predicted by 20th December. If this was in anyway plausible, 1,000 daily should be dying at this time of writing. The figure is actually 167. Thus the country will be plunged, on the basis of pure scaremongering and out-of-date prognostications, back into an even more economic and mental misery, predicted by many to be even more damaging than before.
Our prime minister’s scientific advisers, Chris Witty and Patrick Vallance – not to mention the government’s myopic scientific advisory group, SAGE – have so much to answer for. Their blinkered, doom-laden tunnel vision would entertain no opinions other than their own.
The British public are desperate for Boris to be the Boris we elected. He can make a start by respecting the opinions of thousands of medics and Nobel laureates whose credentials are quite the equal to his current advisers in the form of the Great Barrington Declaration.
What is it with banks?
Banks are the only firms on high streets still consistently causing queues. Why are they continuing to operate short hours while other businesses are opening as normal? And why do they close on Saturdays and insist on cutting their high street presence even further, against huge public opposition?
A little over a decade ago, their scandalous activities drove the world almost to the point of meltdown, yet they have shown no contrition nor gratitude for what the taxpayer did for them nor rendered up any guilty scalps. And notice, please, how no Royal Commission was ever put to work to investigate that most monumental of scandals. Today, in this world of COVID, the banks continue on their merry way.
As a shopkeeper, I need change. I had to wait twenty minutes on my high street to gain entry yesterday and only one out of four counters was operational.
Part of the problem is that Brits are too polite. We stand in quiet acquiescence to the nonsense the banks are subjecting us to. It is not in our nature to make a fuss. Politicians will not come to our rescue because too many of them look to the banks for lucrative jobs when their days at Westminster are over.
One big mistake was not to let a couple of the big banks go down the Swanee as the US did with Lehman Bros. Considering banks ‘too big to fail’ made cowards of us. Now we must force them to accept their social responsibilities. Easy access to money should be a start and right. Abandonments of dreams to make us a cashless, at least for the foreseeable future, should be another. A little humility would also help.
A Poem to a Lost Sister
Yesterday, all your troubles seem so far away;
At last, release, and rescue from the endless fray.
A childhood lost to parents’ waring feuds;
Smart thoughts in afterlife so badly skewed.
Great lines and beauty, all to no avail.
My own unhappy start was yet redeemed.
You said I was the lucky of we three:
I think you right, for I was free to see.
Boris will face a harsh reckoning when the story of this crisis is finally written
There have been world wars, genocides, whole cities obliterated and great economic depressions. There has even been the Black Death. But we can never identify a period when the whole human race has been shut down in the face of an invisible foe with the potential to kill untold millions and perhaps wipe out half of our elderly mothers and fathers.
Had we not become a scientific species which had acquired a keen understanding of how viruses transmit, this may very well have happened. But today, in my country after three months of hiatus, the shops are permitted – under strict conditions – to resume business. This in itself is a first. There are so many of them. Never before have traders countrywide been prevented from plying their wares. But equally, never before had all human activity which involved close contact been forbidden and the entire population placed under what amounts to house arrest.
Because these constraints so obviously impinge on the ability to do business, economic activity has taken a hit greater than any since the arrival of the Black Death seven centuries ago. Billions of humans have been sent on enforced sabbaticals, and in many cases have lost the will to work. In this glorious spring and summer weather, they have actually enjoyed not having to report for work in the early morning and suffer the burden of having to constantly maintain output, work schedules and the annoyance of being bossed around by their superiors.
Society now faces the herculean task of firing up again all these beach-comers and new enjoyers of public spaces ever since they were permitted to exercise and take the air to maintain health and sanity. But just as daunting are the hitherto unheard levels of public debt incurred to keep as many businesses as possible on life support. Governments around the world knew that, despite breaking every record in the economic rulebook, millions of enterprises will never recover and untold millions will find themselves relying on the public purse to survive. This is particularly galling to those governments – including our own – which managed their affairs well and were looking to a golden future. No one knows what the consequences of so much public debt will be, but consequences there surely will be.
In handling this crisis, my own country has been found seriously wanting. While our freshly minted prime minister has won the first big test of his premiership – exiting the European Union – he has failed abysmally on the second, COVID-19. Failing to put the country in lockdown sooner cost tens of thousands of lives. Failure to test, track and trace added to the litany of woes, as did failure to provide personal protective equipment. But perhaps the most scandalous failure was that of not throwing a cordon sanitaire around the people most likely to die: those in care homes. Hospitals sending infected patients into care homes may be said to have reached the bar of criminal negligence, as was the failure to provide protection for those who look after them. But as if these failings were not enough, we must add four more: an insistence that two-metre social distancing be maintained; a mule-like refusal to accept that face masks can make it harder for the virus to jump from person to person; a tardiness in getting the least at risk back to school; and the lunacy of introducing travel quarantining after the horse has bolted.
But beyond these events, there is an important geo-political dimension. Where has the European Union been in all this? Nowhere, so far as anyone can see. Brussels has been criticised by virtually every member state for interfering in matters they say don’t concern it. But here was a life and death issue which affected all of them equally. Would any have complained were the Union to have taken the lead in protecting them? After all, health issues have always been a major concern of Brussels. It extends even to the much maligned bent or undersized banana.
It has been truly absurd that 27 member states ended up doing their own thing. This was never better illustrated than in our own small island, where devolution allowed for four different solutions to the same problem. We ended up in a Kafkaesque world where an Englishman for the first time in eight hundred years could be stopped from entering Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Various national leaders – and none more so than our own – will face a harsh reckoning when the story of this crisis is finally written up. Had the European Union taken responsibility for managing the crisis, those leaders would have avoided all the brickbats that will now come raining down on them in what many consider the great project of our time, the European Union. And had the EU, for its part, acquitted itself well, it would have provided a mighty fillip to those who have always lauded its creation and pine for a United States of Europe.
A Chinese export we could have done without
As we grapple with COVID-19, we are left wondering how we overnight got from a happy confluence of a strong government, a finally successful Brexit exit, a strong economy, a budget which promised to regenerate our country, into a downturn of unimaginable proportions.
A deadly virus had mutated in an ancient land which, despite being at the cutting edge of so many modern technologies, still hangs on to disgustingly unhygienic animal practices more worthy of witch doctor days.
Precious weeks were lost in a miasma of deceit, cover-up and punishment of those who sought to tell the truth. I am not saying that we in the West do not have our share of such practices, but they are the exception rather than the rule. And where our unfettered media ferret out such goings on, things change and frequently heads roll. Those in power – who can be held to account – know this and that is why such happenings are the exception. Democracy is what does it. As Churchill once said: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
No authoritarian, one party state, such as China, would tolerate for an instant the daily press briefings whereby the most powerful man in the land submits himself to a grilling in which he is obliged to answer unscripted questions. Nor would such a state allow its media to tear into its handling of any matter. Furthermore, all such dictatorial states insist on imposing their own narrative to events. They will brook no counterview and punish those who try, often by torture and all too frequently by death. All this makes it galling to the nth degree when the perpetrator of the terrible events which have gripped the world shows no contrition, but rather starts boasting how well it has handled it all. To add insult to injury, it sends hapless foreigners rushed supplies of PPE, much of which is defective.
If China wishes to be admired and respected by the rest of humanity, it must be honest and upfront on issues which affect the entire planet. This is particularly necessary where health and survival of the species is concerned. It has to be said that there was a certain inevitability – given ancient animal practices carried out in live wet animal markets in the Far East – that such outbreaks as coronavirus would be regular occurrences. A family member, not long ago, drew my attention to a YouTube expose of animals being skinned alive in China. It was so horrific that I quickly had to avert my gaze. In those parts of the world where human rights are given short shrift, it is not surprising that those of animals are virtually non-existent. Not until all of us treat each other humanely can we expect those who don’t to extend the same protection to our fellow creatures.
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – as the US Constitution has it – may even be said to be the right of animals too. As the only part of Creation blessed (some might say cursed) with a mind capable of understanding the issues, we should regard our role as that of a high steward – the ultimate protector of all that has evolved on this orbiting accretion of stardust.
We should regard the outbreak we are currently living through as a wakeup call for the next pandemic coming down the track. And down it most definitely will come. When it arrives, we may not be so lucky as we have been this time with a virus which kills, it is thought, one in a hundred and which largely leaves the young and the fit able to survive it with minimal discomfort. Pity, though, the old and those with health issues.
Deaths worldwide are likely to be under a million from a world population of 7.3 billion. The SARS coronavirus, only a few years ago (also from China), had a mortality rate ten times higher than the COVID-19 coronavirus, but it was somewhat harder to catch and showed symptoms earlier. Luckily it was contained. Spanish flu, on the other hand, one hundred years ago, spared the old and ravaged the young, killing in the region of fifty million out of a then world population of 1.8 billion – a fraction of today’s 7.6 billion. One third of humanity is thought to have contracted the disease. Woe betide us if the next pandemic has the killing power of the Black Death. Then, half the human race vanished.
It is a perennial worry of our species as to what its ultimate fate will be – an asteroid strike, Global Warming, a runaway population explosion (1.8bn to 7.3bn in one hundred years) the exhaustion of the Earth’s raw materials and nuclear annihilation – but pandemics are our biggest enemy. A new, incredibly murderess and fast-moving virus strain against which no antidote can be found before it kills half of humanity or even more.
People think that the world has only recently become interconnected, but the worlds of the middle ages and even antiquity were fully aware of each other’s existence and traded. Albeit their ships were smaller, slow-moving and the overland routes dangerous, but they still pulled it off. It took many months for the Black Death to move from the East to the West – and it never reached the Americas because there were no overland routes and we didn’t even know they were there. Now our coffin-shaped jets – acting like high-flying incubators – can bring it to us in hours. Had China included international air travel when it put a ban on movement in and out of Wuhan, there is every reason to believe the world would have been spared this health and economic catastrophe.
The lessons to be taken from our present travails are speed, transparency and isolation. Also, nations must be obliged to create war chests of PPE, test kits and ventilators, since the failure of any one of them puts the rest of us at risk. Primitive practices such as live, wet markets must be banned worldwide.
If all nations insist on maintaining military establishments with their horrendously expensive tanks, planes and warships, they surely can afford to protect themselves from a potentially greater enemy than any state poses by maintaining health service capability. After all, no neighbouring, hostile state ever enjoyed the advantage of invisibility.
The scale and horror of the Holocaust will haunt us to the end of time
Train tracks leading to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
As I write, world leaders are gathering in a European Union country to remember the arrival, 75 years ago, of the Red Army at the gates of Auschwitz to discover a horror unique in the annuls of our tortured species.
Using the tools which a newly industrialised world had created, one of its present member states had set about the extermination of an entire people.
It would be wrong to say that the state in question was unaware of the evil it was perpetrating, as it tried every means possible to hide what it was doing. What it did believe fervently was that, in the fullness of time, when the world woke up to the fact that the twelve million Jews of Europe had vanished, it would ‘applaud the courage’ of the country that had risen to the challenge and done the unthinkable.
What warped form of logic could ever make an otherwise cultured people harbour such thoughts? The answer is simple. If a criminal gang gains control of a country and spends two decades reigniting ancient hatreds using all the means of modern propaganda and pseudo-science, an entire people can be brought to the edge of madness.
Right up to the advent of Hitler, Germany was no more anti-Semitic than any other country in Europe (actually less so than many). Jews fought with distinction for the Kaiser, gaining hundreds of Iron Crosses. They considered themselves safe and at home and loved their Fatherland, the birthplace of Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller.
Had a similar criminal gang gained control of another European country – at a time of acute economic distress and political humiliation following the vengeful Versailles Treaty – and employed the same brainwashing techniques as did the Nazis, that country would have ended up the same. We have only to look at North Korea today to see what brainwashing can achieve.
Two things allowed Nazi Germany to take matters to their logical conclusion. The first was the astonishing rapidity and breadth of its conquests; the second was its industrial might and legendary efficiency.
Only a large and advanced state would have the means to embark on such a programme, and within every country there are people in a criminal class willing to do the really merciless work. So complete and fixated was the determination of the monsters who drove that programme that, even as their resources were stretched to the limit on the battlefield, they still were prepared to risk defeat than redeploy enormous Holocaust resources to the front and perhaps save the day.
Genocides have been a regular feature of our benighted species, but none have so scarred our conscience as that which ended seventy-five years ago. Thankfully, it can never happen again. Our 24/7 news cycle, cameras in every pocket and inability to prevent whistle-blowers and email leaks will make any such repeat effort impossible to conceal from the world.
How the world has changed for Britain in the eighty years since I was born
The United Kingdom was then a world superpower with, by far, the largest navy on the planet and the largest empire known to history. Within a year of my birth, it confronted, on its own, in a Thermopylae-like last stand, the Nazi tyranny which had enslaved all Europe and which was bent on world conquest. It seemed to all to have embarked on a suicide mission.
Roosevelt cabled its war leader in that darkest hour the words of Longfellow:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
In these troubled times we do not ask our fellow Europeans to repay this debt of blood and treasure, only to remember that when they needed us most, we were there for them.
Richard III is the victim of Tudor character assassination
It is now five years since King Richard III was re-interred: this time respectfully in Leicester Cathedral with honours appropriate to the last of a dynasty which had ruled England for 331 years. The discovery of his body under a car park proved a worldwide sensation. The confirmation of his terrible injuries as he stood, surrounded by his enemies – a small, spinally afflicted man – fighting like a Viking berserker, evoked pity as well as admiration. Notwithstanding Richard’s lifelong belief in leading from the front, history has judged him both a tyrant and, if Shakespeare is to be believed, a monster – England’s own Ivan the Terrible. It is my belief that this is a false judgement and that it is time to create a more balanced narrative.
The writing of history from the victor’s perspective began with Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars. Such was the genocidal brutality of that campaign that it is estimated a quarter of France’s then population was wiped out. Rather than Veni, Vidi, Vici, it should have read Veni, Vidi, Dedi – I came, I saw, I slaughtered. A thousand years later, William the Conqueror gave his own (literally) coloured justification for usurping the throne of England in the Bayeux tapestry, and on the way to another thousand years Napoleon portrayed his Egyptian campaign as a glorious success when in fact it was an abysmal failure. We must be careful, then, when we show ourselves willing to place undue credence on the winning side’s account.
The England Richard grew up in was convulsed in the domestic bloodletting of the Wars of the Roses. The twists and turns of that brutal struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster – both branches of the Plantagenet family – are immensely challenging, even for historians, who to this day still argue about events. Five kings came and went in the space of twenty-five years. Richard’s Yorkist, elder brother, Edward, gained the crown after the bloodiest and longest battle ever fought on English soil. Fighting the whole day long, on Palm Sunday in 1461 in a snowstorm, twenty-eight thousand perished. That represented almost a tenth of England’s then population.
Richard, therefore, grew to manhood not just in a time of unparalleled violence, but also of disconcertingly shifting alliances. Nobody knew who could be relied on. When we examine Richard’s record following the unexpected death at forty-one of his brother, the king, we really have to think hard on all these things. As well as betrayal from every quarter, much of the violence was gratuitous and mindless.
Richard’s was always with a purpose and that purpose, many would argue, was in the interest of his country as well as the preservation of his own, threatened, life and Yorkist line. As a third son, he never expected to be king and after the death of his brother gave no indication, initially, of a wish to become one. He enthusiastically backed preparations for his twelve-year-old nephew’s coronation. His brother, on his death bed, had appointed the ever-loyal Richard to act as the boy’s guardian during the years of his minority.
At the request of the king, eleven years earlier when he was nineteen, Richard had been sent to the troublesome north with vice-regal powers. He managed not just to pacify but gain the respect and even love of his northern charges. His campaigns against the marauding Scots gained England large tracts of land including the important border fortress of Berwick on Tweed, which has stayed English ever since. With his legalistic mind, Richard proved an able and just administrator which, added to his bravery on the battlefield, made him the ‘perfect prince’. These qualities, it should be noted, were exactly the ones his country needed if it were not to fall back into the miseries of renewed violence under a boy king. The nation wanted nothing more than a continuation of the much-valued peace from what was originally known as the Cousins’ War, which his brother’s stable rule had brought.
Ever mindful of a reversion to the bad old ways, Richard knew that only he had a chance of holding the country together and that it was essential, therefore, for him to carry out his brother’s wishes and govern the realm for the next several years. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that he would not be allowed to. His late brother’s non-aristocratic, but stunningly beautiful, wife with her immense family of hated and ambitious hangers-on gave every indication that they intended to take over. Were this to happen, the country would be plunged back into factionalism and warfare. Just as certain was Richard’s own fate. In those troubled times, he would have been a dead man walking. The low-born late Queen’s family had stirred up great resentment among the ruling magnates by the way they had inveigled their way into the king’s favour, gaining titles, lands as well as high offices of state. Everything that followed, which has been so much portrayed to Richard’s detriment, must be viewed in the light of these circumstances. Richard’s success during his long period of service and vice-royalty in the north had made a great impression on the country. Almost all right-thinking subjects would have preferred him to the upstart Woodvilles, the dowager queen’s family.
Another feature of Richard’s character was his decisiveness. In his present, life-threatening predicament, it would be much needed. He was, in today’s terms, a genuine action man. When he saw how heavily the dice were being loaded against him, he knew he had to act fast and he, being Richard, did exactly that. When he had cleared what was, admittedly, a very fraught path to taking up his duties as Lord Protector, a sermon was preached by the bishop of Wells and Somerset which claimed that both of his nephews – one of whom was the new king Edward V – were the illegitimate offspring of a bigamous marriage. This had been talked about in palace circles for some time. In addition to this, his own brother, the late king, had a questionable pedigree which was rumoured to be the result of a dalliance that his mother had had with a French archer during a period of estrangement from her husband, the king. Certainly, when Richard’s remains were forensically examined after that famous discovery under a Leicester car park, they bore absolutely no brotherly resemblance either in build, height, colouring or facial appearance to the strapping blond, Edward IV.
Richard was a known stickler for legality who, among other things, had long standing views on legitimacy so that when the estates of the realm started to press him to assume what they believed to be his right to the crown, and bring certainty and adult kingship to the realm, he may well have considered that he had a duty to listen to them. If church law held his nephews to be bastards, that made him the undoubted king and not a usurper. As a patriot at a pivotal moment in his country’s history, he would have felt a heavy burden of responsibility to save the realm and his Yorkist line from falling back into the hands of the Lancastrians. His lavish coronation, attended by high and low, bears testament to a will strongly felt generally, and by Londoners in particular, to see a continuation of the stable government that the country, under his brother, had enjoyed for years.
Richard was a hugely pious man. During the two years of his kingship, he enacted a string of measures that can only be described as enlightened, even by today’s standards. He encouraged widespread use of the newly invented printing press, which the powers of the day were highly suspicious of and which acted as a spur to translate the Latin monopoly of the Bible into English. Inevitably, that would have led to the churches’ monopoly of possession of the ‘Good Book’ being broken and the common people gaining their own copies and starting, perhaps, to place their own interpretation on holy writ.
Most incredibly, Richard would brook no censorship in what could be printed. All were encouraged to speak their mind. This hardly speaks of a man with dark secrets. He did away with the ability of the rich and powerful to lock a man up and keep him there awaiting trial, sometimes for years. Bail was introduced. Although a fluent French speaker – having spent part of his early life in Burgundy – Richard insisted that Parliament conduct its business in the vernacular and not Norman French. This same view applied to other agencies of the state. Another of his hates was corruption. Richard attacked and sought to do away with Indulgences, the practice which allowed the rich and powerful to purchase public offices. It was a landmark step towards a well-governed country. Richard, as we have noted, had a great interest in law and would sometime conduct a case in court himself. His passion for justice for the underprivileged may well have had its origins in his own experiences. Suffering, as is known, will often give a person greater empathy for the less fortunate.
Although – somewhat unkindly, I feel – it has been remarked the Richard had ice in his veins, he was observed to weep when his wife died and doubtless he did the same when his infant son – his only heir – did likewise. The calumny that was later put about by the Tudors, that he killed his wife so that he could marry his niece, we know to be false. His wife died of an illness, probably tuberculosis, and he was negotiating the marriage of his niece to the Portuguese royal house. Unlike his handsome, womanising elder brother, the king, Richard kept faith with Anne, his wife, after they married, something unusual for aristocrats right up to modern time.
There was much personal tragedy in Richard’s life. His father died on the battlefield when he was a boy, as did his uncle. His erstwhile older brother, Clarence, who had habitually rebelled once too often against his own older brother, the king, was condemned to death by Attainder. While the king upheld the verdict, Richard begged for clemency. The act is said to have been carried out by the bizarre method of drowning Clarence in a vat of malmsey wine in the Tower of London. Perhaps that’s because Clarence couldn’t stop imbibing on stuff that they held to be the culprit in sending him off the rails. They thought giving him a double dose would be a suitable punishment.
To add to the litany of misfortune which fell upon Richard, at around the age of eleven he was struck down with the debilitating and painful affliction of scoliosis – a warping of the spine. Little allowance has been made for these tragedies in Richard’s young life, but they must have caused him severe distress and had a profound effect on him. Furthermore, as a small man – around 5’6” – he must have felt hugely overshadowed by his magnificent, 6’6”, muscular, blond brother, the king, who to add to the mix was extremely handsome as well a gregarious. Perhaps these were very same attributes that a lonely queen, years before, had found irresistible in a French archer.
Richard must have felt a desperate need to do something to prove that he was a true Plantagenet. That led him – despite his growing disability and a skeletal frame revealed by recent forensic examinations to have female characteristics, particularly his pelvis – to take up battlefield training so that, with a superhuman effort, he eventually morphed into a warrior who could cope with sixty pounds of armour and wield a heavy mace.
In his final dash to cut down Henry Tudor, he came within feet of him, crashing through his bodyguards and taking down Henry’s standard bearer before he himself was surrounded and cut down in a fury of sword and Halbert thrusts. Ten wounds struck the battling Richard through to the bone: two of them lethal. There may have been many more flesh wounds. But most shocking of all, considering that he was an anointed king, there were a series of what are known as ‘humiliation wounds’ – struck after death. There were some to the head and one up through the posterior to the pelvis. Considering the closeness of Henry Tudor to the action, he must have watched this happen and that represents a shocking indictment of him that he permitted such desecration of a crowned monarch.
On the matter of his alleged killing of his nephews – the most damning of all the charges levelled against Richard and the deaths his enemies made the most capital of – it is universally agreed that no prosecutor would ever have gained a conviction against him. There is not a scrap of evidence linking him to their disappearance. Several suspects, beside Richard, are in the frame. My own prime suspect is his sidekick, the Duke of Buckingham, who, having charge of London in his master’s absence far away, may have felt he would do him a favour by carrying out an act which he knew Richard couldn’t. There had already been one attempt to spring the princes from the Tower and there were likely to be more. Buckingham knew that while they lived, they could act as a focus for Richard’s enemies. Their elimination would settle the matter once and for all. When the question is posed, why did Richard not denounce Buckingham on his return, he must have asked himself, who will believe me? Better to let sleeping dogs lie and the mystery of their disappearance remain unsolved.
Another reason why I find it difficult to believe that Richard was culpable is that it would have been profoundly abhorrent to such a devout man. He was an ascetic, almost in the mould of the puritans who would come two hundred years later. He forswore the wearing of gorgeous apparel, which was the mode amongst aristocrats of the time, preferring to dress simply, almost like the common man who was forbidden to wear clothes above his station. He endowed more monasteries and places of learning during his thirty-two years of life than any other monarch. But even if Richard did give the order – and it remains a big if – he would not be the first to kill close to home. History is littered with similar acts. His own brother, the king, had allowed his sibling, Clarence to be killed. Two of history’s ‘Greats’, Peter and Constantine, killed their own sons. Reasons of State, some hold, override everything. Is it not just such a reason as allows us today to square our consciences over the firebombing of German cities and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima?
Had Richard been victorious at Bosworth, as he would have been but for the treachery of the fence-sitting Lord Stanley and his 2,000 contingents, that would have been the last hope of the Lancastrians. Richard would have gone on to reign unopposed and, judged on past performance, particularly his rule of the north, we might be reading a very different account of him.
As an accomplished warrior, much in the mould of Henry V, I believe he would have taken up the challenge of the recently lost lands in France and won them back for England. The Hundred Years War might well have had a different ending.
When you consider the merits of the man who succeeded Richard, one finds it hard to mount a compelling narrative. It was an increasingly unhappy, even miserable reign. The penny-pinching, grasping and murderous Henry Tudor cannot stand against the principled, brave defender of the law and peoples’ champion, Richard. Henry is even said to have had an opportunity to sponsor Columbus’ voyage to the Americas, but turned it down as being too risky. If so, it was a blunder of titanic proportions. All of the continent, south as well as north, would have accrued to the English crown and the miser filled his boots with its mountains of silver and gold so that he would likely have gone mad at his miraculous good fortune.
The son who went on to succeed the ever-suspicious first Tudor, Henry VIII, would become known on the continent of Europe as Henry the tyrant. He would plunge England into two centuries of bloody conflict with the Catholic church. To fill his own boots with the sale of church lands during the dissolution of the monasteries, untold scores of beautiful Abbeys were destroyed. Had they survived, they would be the glory of our land today and be earning us untold tourist receipts. The wonder is that the second Henry’s butcher and vandal-in-chief, Thomas Cromwell, didn’t turn his attention next to the cathedrals. But he didn’t have time. His master had him begging for the headsman’s axe rather than suffer the fate Henry intended – the grisly end of a traitor. It is as well that the poor man’s mentor and former boss, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey – himself the son of a butcher – had previously died on-route also to face Henry’s vengeance.
So, I come back to the successful character assassination that the Tudors carried out. It has been the accepted version for five hundred years now. To this day, the royal website refers to Richard as the usurper. The first of the new Tudor dynasty’s claim to the throne was so nebulous that it is hardly worth detailing. A whole clutch of aristocrats were better placed in line of succession. Furthermore, what claim Henry Tudor did have came through the normally disallowed female line which was, itself, tainted with illegitimacy. Knowledge of this made both of the Henrys paranoiac; they murdered all the better claimants they could lay their hands on including the frail and saintly, 67-year-old Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, who was raised to sainthood in later centuries. Does Henry’s seizure of the crown by force of arms, and in these circumstances, not make him an undoubted usurper?
It is ironic that the second Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Moore – another to be beatified – bowed to the royal pressure and lent his much-respected support to the Tudor campaign of Richard vilification. His reward came later on the headsman’s bloc. Henry’s double-crossing of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the lethal vengeance taken afterwards represents yet another chapter in a bloody reign, which attracts nothing of the criticism levelled at Richard.
Finally, to complete the work of the victor writing the narrative the great bard, Shakespeare prostituted his otherwise gifted pen. Seeking to please Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, he wrote a favourable play concerning her father and a true stinker concerning Richard. Such a fantastic, crowd-pleasing horror story of a play is Richard III, that the world has preferred to believe that this is how it must have been. That tainted version of events included incest, gross deformity, ugliness, usurpation, infanticide and unwarranted, murderess violence. Dogs barked, according to Shakespeare, when Richard went by.
It has taken modern forensics half a millennium to demolish Shakespeare’s caricature of an ugly, limping, hunchback with a withered arm. Richard was not any of these things. Actually, after a reconstruction of the face according to his facial bone structure, he turned out to be quite pleasant looking. Why would the bard’s depiction of Richard’s character traits be any more accurate? It is now the job of historians to do their work; a task which should be evidence-based.
Shakespeare would have won no history prizes at school. Just as Scots are not taught about bad King Macbeth – he was, in fact, so safe on his throne during his 17-year reign that he went on pilgrimage – equally, there is no bad king Richard. We must start teaching something which more closely resembles the truth concerning Richard, not just give him a decent, final funeral.
A graveyard near my shop
Walking to my garage through my local church graveyard over the years, I have often pondered the poignancy of the hundreds of near identical slate headstones lined up row after row. Every one represented a life lived, with gripping tales to tell interspersed with heartache and joy.
Yesterday, on the eve of my 80th birthday, a line of verse came into my head which, when I got back to my shop, I developed into a full-blown poem. It brought my thoughts into focus. I hope you like it.
There is a graveyard near my shop jam-packed with myriad stones,
Lined up in serried ranks of slate to be their final homes.
They once had dreams like yours and mine of how they would succeed,
And win a place of some esteem to meet a deep-felt need.
They wanted not to slip away and none to speak their name,
As through the years of toil they sought their little share of fame.
They wanted friends and family to visit and recall
A life well-lived of joy and tears, in which they gave their all.
And so, perhaps, for several years their hopes would be fulfilled;
But time strikes down the left behind and they themselves are stilled.
The grass between the stones grows tall: no human foot is trod.
The wind blows cold between the slates, all vanish in the sod.
The rich and famous of our day, they too will pass from view;
Their fate no different from the rest as life begins anew.
We strut our hour upon the stage, then comes no more our sound;
Gone from our eyes, beneath our feet, a slowly sinking mound.
Only an intelligent and proactive response to the root causes of knife crime will work
Once regarded as an exemplar of decency and civilised living, parents in suburbs of Britain’s capital now fear for the lives of their children going out to meet their peers or even popping down to the nearest corner shop.
Week after week, the stabbings continue. Violent death stalks the young of our cities like a bacillus ready to strike at random. It is amazing that we have stood back and watched this wretched tide of misery rise with almost a detached equanimity. But something happened a few days ago which seemed to shake us out of our torpor. Last week, in quick succession, two seventeen dear old white children – a girl and a boy – died.
It is a terrible thing to suggest, but I believe society gave every impression of not wanting to over-exercise its concerns because the killings have very largely been confined to the non-white community. It was black on black, and mainly part of a gang culture which had developed. How mortifying that must seem to the families of all those other kids who have died to hear the alarm bells suddenly ring and note the attention which the two recent deaths have attracted. Were their children not as worthy of equal attention?
I do not think it fanciful to suggest that if this epidemic of stabbings were happening to white children, the army would be on the streets by now.
There was an echo in all this of the working class public’s justified rage at the efforts and astronomic sums dedicated to the search for the high profile and professional class’s child, Madeline McCann. Were their children not also going missing? Why was Madeline so special? And where was the fairness in a system that only took notice and opened its purse-strings when it happened to the favoured ones in society.
Now that the wider public have finally woken up to what is happening in its cities, we have to pose the question: what is to be done? First, we have to identify the drivers of knife crime. There is no single cause – there seldom ever is – but in my book, lack of prospects must feature highly. Any youngster not benefiting from a stable family life, a decent education and challenging/enjoyable extracurricular activities is fodder for the gang leaders.
No single factor contributes more to a youngster going off the rails than the lack of a father figure in family life. And no community in the country suffers more from this of this than people of Caribbean ethnicity. Sadly, people in this community are the very ones hardest hit by the killings.
If you do not accept this argument about the importance of a father figure, ask yourself this question: how many Jewish mothers are left to get on with it because papa has done a runner? And when was the last time you heard of a Jewish boy being arraigned in court for a knifing, or indeed for any anti-social activity? That is because family life is so cohesive and all-embracing. You could almost say suffocating. The sheer shame of letting down not just your family but your community is enough.
When there is a father figure, why doesn’t dad do his own Stop and Search before his boy steps out on to the street? I know that if I lived in one of the affected areas, I couldn’t live with the thought that my boy might be armed and dangerous. I would have to satisfy myself.
Then there is the matter of policing the streets. If a cast iron assurance were to be extracted from every one of the forty-three constabularies in England and Wales that those twenty thousand cuts in police numbers would be reinstated on condition that every last one went into front line service, we could expect something quite dramatic. Even the peddling of drugs would take a severe hammering. The new officers swamping the streets would come to be seen as the nation’s protectors. They could be expected in their role to accumulate from a grateful populace veritable mountains of evidence as to where the baddies were hanging out. When arrests came, they should be processed in double quick time instead of the hours each arraignment presently takes. That in itself puts a lot of officers off making arrests.
Then we must reinstate the youth clubs and all the related facilities, which were so ubiquitous in former times. When a young person at a loose end leaves the house knowing that his mates are just down the road at the youth club, rather than hanging about on the street corner, he is much less likely to see someone he can pick a fight with to impress his peers.
Of course, so much of the downward spiral begins with school exclusions. While a disruptive pupil cannot be allowed to erode the life chances of his classmates, equally he must not feel that society has washed its hands of him, like in so many cases the father has. Funds must be made available to schools to manage such pupils in a positive and inclusive way. Being chucked out of school and bumping into classmates on the streets later is almost certain to foster a burning resentment that can only lead to trouble, as well as humiliation, for the one that society regarded as a reject. If he cannot gain acceptance anywhere, he will seek it from the last redoubt of what we unkindly regard as the loser: the gang. There he will set about burnishing his credentials by doing something dramatic. A killing in that world would do very nicely. One way or another, a young person will seek the respect of their peers, even if has to be gained at the point of a knife.
What is needed on the part of society is an intelligent and proactive response to all the issues. Compassion for what has gone wrong in the lives of the perpetrators should lie at the heart of it.
Little Harbour is childcare at its finest
Grant has been visiting Little Harbour to teach Jacqui Sweet, Activities Co-ordinator, and children like Jake how to use their new 3D printer.
I recently visited the Little Harbour Children’s Hospice in Cornwall with my son, Grant, who has been giving his own time on weekends to teach staff and children how to use their new 3D printer.
Having spent my own childhood in care at the Foundling Hospital in more disciplinarian times, it was wonderful to see a real-life example of how childcare should be delivered. Unlike the children of my institution, who enjoyed good health in the main, tragically all of the young people passing through Little Harbour’s doors are afflicted with a range of life-limiting conditions. However, thanks to the love and dedication of the staff there, and the truly wonderful facilities and activities made available, these unfortunate children are enabled to live to the absolute full within the limitations of their conditions. The loving staff provide stimulating activities and organise daytrips for the children, and parents are able to stay there too for respite.
Little Harbour, along with many other children’s hospices, benefits from no state funding. The whole operation depends entirely on the generosity of members of the public. This generosity began at Little Harbour with a farmer who donated several of his precious acres to the cause of enhancing life-limited children’s quality of life.
I will be following this blog post up with a more in-depth look at the very fine work that takes place at Little Harbour, made possible by its many benefactors. In the meantime, if you are contemplating donating to a worthwhile cause, you really could do no better than Children’s Hospice South West.
Time’s up for Vaz
Now that the Parliamentary Standards Committee has concluded that the allegedly sick Keith Vaz is restored to health, we hope it can get a move on in investigating his predilection for rent boys. He has, after all, been happily, and by all accounts healthily, swanning around the world while his case has been put on hold.
There never was, with the possible exception of Cyril Smith, a grosser example of a parliamentarian letting that august institution, his constituents and most of all his wife and family, down. The jury in this case can hardly be said to be out when there is video evidence to confirm the whole squalid affair.
Here is a middle-aged man who was assiduous in cultivating a caring, wholly decent image of himself while habitually engaging with young men barely out of their teens for sex. It’s ironic that the young men captured in the recordings were from the same country, Romania, that Vaz rushed to welcome off the plane in 2014 in that much-publicised photo op.
Every aspect of the case appals. The sex was unprotected so that, in selfishly gratifying himself, Vaz put at risk of life-threatening disease his unsuspecting wife. He lied about who he was, passing himself off as Jim, an industrial washing machine salesman. Then, in what I believe to be a serious criminal offence, he encouraged the youngsters to obtain Class A drugs, even offering to pay for them – as long as they hurried up as he declared himself anxious in the recordings to “get the party started”. That, in my book, is known as aiding and abetting.
Most of us want to believe that our parliamentary representatives are high-minded and honourable people. Certainly they like to be addressed as such. But what are we to make of a situation when, against all expectations, following the shocking revelations concerning him that weekend, Vaz nonchalantly and brazenly waltzed into the chamber of the House of Commons the next working day as though nothing had happened. Equally shocking was the reception he received. Instead of a hushed, disbelieving House, there were words of consolation and even back-patting. Were these from understanding and perhaps like-minded colleagues?
Vaz’s smarmy, polished mode of delivery speaks of someone anxious to be thought a thoroughly establishment, Anglicised figure. Unusually for someone born into a Muslim family, his father chose a galaxy of non-Muslim first names. Did dad think that his little boy would more easily gain acceptance by being called Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz? It’s clear Keith never felt any embarrassment as he carried the pretentions and posturing to new heights with his obsessive grandstanding, networking and search for the photo op.
Vaz represents a constituency with one of the highest proportion of Muslims in Britain, Leicester East. In the light of this new scandal, how do his constituents square their faith with their unwillingness to deselect an MP who has betrayed them so outrageously?
And let’s not forget that, as Vaz was engaging in sordid, illegal activities, he was chairing the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs while it was considering changes to the law relating to prostitution and drugs. Was there ever a case more screaming for the Mother of Parliaments to divest itself of an individual who has brought it into such disrepute? Judging from the welcome Vaz received that Monday morning in the Commons, it seems not.
As for that not-small-matter of the police ignoring prima facie evidence of ‘Aiding and Abetting’ a crime, is it that they’re running scared of going after a high-profile figure, especially if he’s not white, a Muslim and an MP? Does Vaz enjoy the same kind of immunity that has served rogue elements of his fellow Muslims so well in the sex grooming scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford and Telford (and who knows where else)?
Amazingly, in view of all the many shenanigans of recent times starting with the expenses scandal, we still want to hold onto that long-standing belief that British parliamentarians are a cut above the rest: men and women with the highest of principles who believe in setting an example. But how can we hold onto these hopes when such a character as Vaz is still not only tolerated, but welcomed and indulged in parliament as “the Honourable Member for Leicester East”?
We are currently embarked on a route and branch investigation of sexual abuse in all its forms. We are also determined, once and for all, to deal with sexual exploitation of women and men in the workplace. One gets the impression that parliament would like, in its own case, for this nasty, criminal business concerning Vaz to go away. But we must not allow it. The man has taken us all for fools. We have allowed him to stretch the limits of our patience to an extraordinary extent. The time is long overdue to stop indulging him. The police should reopen its file, his Leicester East constituency party should examine itself and Parliament should get on with booting Vaz out.
For as long as politicians can guarantee the best for their own children, we will always have education inequality
Of all the great achievements of the post-war Labour government, the one, more than any other, which would have cemented its reputation as the greatest reforming government of all time would have been the abolition of privilege in education. If the rich and powerful knew that their sons and daughters depended on the state, they would pretty soon ensure that the same standards they themselves had enjoyed were established under the new dispensation. This would have been a major step in the direction of a more classless society.
That Labour failed to abolish private education following WWII – which many had begged it to do – is not a criticism of that heroic government. It was, quite simply, a bridge too far. All its other reforming zeal left it with insufficient headwind to tackle this greatest of all bastions of privilege. Had it done so, it should have included faith schools since education should only concern itself with empirical facts.
Britain will have to wait for its next cataclysmic event to enable it to deal with this most entrenched of all its inequalities. Only when the governing classes are themselves traumatised, along with the rest of us, will they yield this most precious of all their privileges. Then, and only then, will we be close to enjoying equal opportunities.
Meantime we must pray that the traumatic event required does not extend to another world war, such as before the great Labour government reforms, or a financial crash of the sort that 2008 threatened, which might very well have been 1929 all over again but for the great engine of Far East growth. But, just the same, it will have to be something quite dramatic.
While we wait, the political classes should make good on their constantly trumpeted willingness to send their own offspring to the country’s state schools. It is rank hypocrisy for the politicos of both the Right and Left to extol the virtues of state schooling, while at the same time lambasting the private sector in the process, and then go on to send their own children to fee-paying schools. Great numbers have done this, including one of Labour’s shrillest advocates for social justice, Diane Abbott. The fact she represents one of London’s most deprived boroughs, Hackney, didn’t stop her sending her son to a private school.
There is, too, something deeply troubling about the numbers who make it to the top, be it in politics, the military, the judiciary, the Civil Service, finance and business, who were once part of the Oxbridge set up. That needs also to be urgently examined. Elitism seems to be at the very heart of Britain’s privileged classes, almost as though it is in their DNA. It’s the ‘Old Boys’ network writ large. A closed shop par excellence.
The terrible debacle playing out in Syria appears to be nearing its end game
There was a time, in 2013, when Obama declared his red lines, and before Russia and Iran intervened, when western intervention could well have sent the then tottering Assad on his way. But an opportunistic British Labour leader, Ed Miliband, reneged on his promised support and the British Parliament gave Obama the excuse he was looking for not to intervene.
Instead of western planes commanding the skies over Syria, grounding Assad’s air force, Russian planes took to the air with the results which we now see. Had the pusillanimous Obama followed through, there would have been no need for western boots on the ground, apart from special forces. The land war against ISIS and Assad’s forces would have been wrapped up by the Kurds, massively assisted by a hugely encouraged opposition under the protection of western planes.
But that was then and this is now.
It looks as if now we’ll have to get used to the blood-soaked Assad winning this long war.
Where did it all go wrong, apart from that duplicitous Ed Miliband volte face? It first went wrong with that messianic, Saviour of the World former boss of Miliband, Tony Blair, and his sycophantic support for the American president, George W. Bush. That ill thought out intervention, with no exit strategy in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, began the unravelling of that powder keg of an area which can be likened in Europe to the Balkans for the complexities of the issues involved.
Now we see the three principal western allies punishing Assad for reintroducing chemical weapons against the opposition. So much for Russia promising to keep these internationally banned weapons out of the Syrian conflict.
The attack from the West will not tilt the strategic balance away from Assad, but it does have the potential to drag it further into the Syrian quagmire. That is not to say that retribution should not be taking place. For the West not to act – especially after the Trump tweets – would have held it up to ridicule and made it appear toothless. Putin would have loved every minute of it.
The reality of the situation is that is Putin who is toothless. He heads up an economy the size of Italy’s (half the size of California’s) and his military assets are Lilliputian compared to NATO’s. He may be a thug masquerading as a statesman, but he knows that a united West – and that’s exactly what he’s achieved – can wreak havoc with his fragile economy if it is provoked enough. He will, I believe, avoid putting it to the test. Moreover, if he were to allow things to get really nasty he would have to whistle goodbye to that cherished dream of his to host the world cup. That in itself would be a crushing humiliation. So many opportunities for self-aggrandisement are handed to whoever hosts that, second only to the Olympics extravaganza.
As for talk of military clashes involving Russian fatalities leading to a third world war, that is arrant nonsense. Anyone suggesting such a development reveals their lack of geopolitical understanding. Russia, and Iran in particular, need to start worrying about where their adventurism might very well soon lead them; and it isn’t just a question of a serious confrontation with the West, militarily as well as economically. A worried Israel, which has already launched one air strike into Syria, is close to being added to the volatile mix.
Netanyahu, perhaps the most hawkish prime minister that Israel has ever had, will find the prospect of Iran establishing itself militarily on its border an unbearable one. That country has sworn to wipe his state off the map. Only a short time ago two countries, Syria and Iraq, and a thousand miles of territory, separated the two hate-filled adversaries. Now the Iranians are at the foot of the Golan Heights and are eyeball to eyeball with the Israelis. It is one short step from there to a full-scale military clash. Israel itself, if that were to happen, could provide the decisive push which would finish Assad off and in the process send all the Iranians in Syria packing.
Putin has a very great deal on his plate right now. His economy is a mess and getting worse. His Syrian ally promised it would destroy all its chemical stocks and it did not, poking him in the eye by using the weapons again. Then there is the incredible backlash following Putin himself resorting to a similar illegal substance against one of his own enemies. He never for one moment imagined the odium that would rain down on him as a result and the massive worldwide support that would rally to what he saw as an isolated Brexit Britain.
All in all, it is a situation that must be giving him sleepless nights. Trump poured scorn on Obama for his weakness and, as a macho opposite, felt obliged to demonstrate his own virility. The missiles are coming, he said. With a carrier task force on its way to the Syrian coast, not to make good on that hasty tweet would have been a humiliation too far. For Trump and his image, it had to happen. So much for the love-in that he imagined he could achieve with the former KGB operative.
In my view, Trump’s willingness to confront Moscow must surely now dispose of that much talked about compromising bedroom material alleged to have been acquired when he paid a visit that once grim, but now glitzy gangster-run capital.
We should embrace Britain’s future with optimism
I voted to remain in the referendum of 2016. I did so because I believed that reform of the European Union would inevitably come and that, as a heavyweight insider, we would be one of its principal drivers. I believed that the world was moving towards bigger and bigger power blocks until all, in a distant future, morphed into a world government. I still consider, provided we manage not to self-destruct, that to be the likely outcome.
So why do I now believe that Brexit must be made the best of? First, it was the democratic will of the people. Second, for anyone with an understanding of history, there is no reason to believe that Brexit will be Britain’s undoing; indeed, it may very well achieve the reverse and force it to raise its game. Third, it is the one country in Europe which, because of the peculiarity of its circumstance, could take such a step with a better than reasonable chance of making a success of it. It may not seem so right now, but there is a self-confidence that exists nowhere else among its neighbours. Not one of them would dare contemplate a life beyond Mother Europe. Its perceived embrace smothers them to the extent that they will endure endless pain, à la Greece, and still cling to its coattails.
Why do I take this view? The reason is that Britain’s development has been significantly different. We are an island nation, much like Japan. While influenced hugely by what has happened on our adjacent continent – indeed, regularly interfering to prevent what we perceived as overmighty tyrants developing on our doorstep – we have insisted, nevertheless, on keeping our distance, once the business was done.
Europe’s strength, and its half-millennia dominance of the world, began when it broke the monopoly of the Silk Road’s route into and out of the continent to trade goods. It did this by acquiring maritime expertise and building ships which could withstand three-year voyages and the heaviest seas the natural world could throw against them. This allowed it to trade goods in bulk and without umpteen middlemen taking extortionate cuts along the way stations of the overland route. While this was going on, its fiercely competitive nation states benefited from an overarching and temporising religion, as well as a cultural and scientific breakout led by the city states of Italy which it called the Renaissance. Also, the creation of centres of learning in the universities along with their independence helped speed the process towards the Age of Reason. The rivalry between those city states held much in common with the rivalry that propelled the city states of classical Greece to greatness.
The race across the oceans to explore new riches and bring home old ones naturally favoured the countries with easy access to the Atlantic. That explains why the great maritime empires which came about consisted only of them: Portugal, Spain, England, Holland and France. The next race was to see which of them could become top-dog. In turn it was each. When the dust had finally settled it was England – now fortuitously called Great Britain because of its union with Scotland – which emerged triumphant.
With a revolution in both industry and commerce, a population explosion, vast trading networks and a navy which could see off all others, it is not surprising that Britons came to see themselves as a case apart. Because of their island protection, they had escaped the continental upheavals of rampaging armies and had become quite distinctive – again, much like Japan.
One of Britain’s great strengths is that it was always a pragmatic country. If it worked, adopt it; if it didn’t, ditch it. It was never much interested in dogma or political theorising. That is why it returned to monarchical government after the eleven miserable years of the Cromwell republic. But it made sure that the royal power knew, as a condition of its return, it could never again step out of line in the way the previously executed king had. The lesson was well learned.
Britain’s relative isolation, which fostered evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress – allied to its Protestant work ethic – was one of the reasons its efforts at establishing new countries was so much more successful than its Latin rivals. Compare, for instance, the outcomes for Spain and Portugal’s South American colonies to those of North America, Australia and New Zealand. Even when Britain went to work on existing countries, the institutions and infrastructure it left behind outclassed anything the Latins left in place, and that includes France.
Above all, Britain’s language had become ubiquitous, as had its ‘Beautiful Game’. That game, however, struggled in the heat of the Indian plains so another British game, cricket, is now played in many hotspots instead. Its playtime activities proved almost as alluring as the rest.
All of these and many more are reasons why we Britons should embrace our new future with optimism. Our forebears have sown an amazing legacy. Now is the time to harvest it.
Tom Jones is the antithesis of a father
Tom Jones’ estranged son is currently sleeping on the floor of a homeless hostel and is desperate to meet his father. What has Jonathan Berkery ever done to deserve the pain Tom Jones has cruelly inflicted on him?
What is there to be said about a terrible man like Tom Jones? To be blessed by great good luck, and the fortune that goes with it, and yet not lift a finger to help a child of his in distress is beyond contempt. Knowing that his child is reduced to sleeping rough on winter streets and yet still remaining indifferent beggars belief . It plumbs the depths of human callousness. How can he sleep at night?
When, despite everything, that child forgives all the years of needless suffering inflicted on him by the self-centred narcissist; writes letters and begs only for his father to extend a hand of warmth, friendship and recognition; yet is met only with icy indifference, then the contempt I feel is total.
Jones’ one night stand had the same consequence as Boris Becker’s, but how differently Boris faced up to his responsibilities. For Jones, his sense of responsibility is zilch. He poses as a warm-hearted, fatherly figure on the BBC’s The Voice when he is nothing of the kind. Indeed, he is the antithesis of a father.
It is time people like Tom Jones were exposed and cast into the wilderness of public esteem.
How negotiating peace with Hitler could have allowed Britain to win the war sooner
Following the award-winning movie on Dunkirk last summer, another blockbuster is to be released on 12th January concerning those testing days for Britain. Called ‘Darkest Hour’, it provides an account of the chaotic and emotional cabinet scenes that surrounded the calls for a negotiated peace with a triumphant, and seemingly unstoppable, Hitler.
In the long period of the 1930s, the appeasers had very largely held the floor. From the top echelons of the political establishment, only the siren warnings of Churchill had interrupted their narrative. Now, in the spring of 1940, Western Europe was ablaze with the British army in headlong retreat and its mighty French ally on the point of collapse. In all of Britain’s long history, no direr situation had ever confronted it. Both Philip II of Spain and Napoleon has posed just as great a risk of invasion, and historians are all agreed that, in both cases, their armies, once landed, would have been successful. But the regimes imposed would have been pussycats compared to the one which a Hitlerite Germany would have delivered, had it been obliged to fight its way into Britain.
Only one man stood out as having the credentials to lead the nation in a government of national unity. Churchill – for all his many flaws – had, since Hitler’s ascent to power seven year earlier, stridently warned of the ‘gathering storm’. He had called for rearmament and condemned the Munich Agreement it as an ‘unmitigated defeat’ for the democracies. It was now patently clear that he was right. Moreover, he alone had held ministerial rank during the previous war. As such, he was acceptable to both opposition parties whereas the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, were not. Neither were deemed credible as war leaders. What was not known – and this is what the movie seeks to make clear – was how very close Britain came to choosing a different path from the one it did. I want to argue that from Britain’s point of view, and indeed the world’s, it chose the wrong path.
Timing is everything. In May 1940, Churchill has luck on his side – even the weather. Fortuitously, as it turned out, he was right to argue passionately that his country should fight on. But he was only just right because, at that time, Britain stood in the gravest danger of losing its entire army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Without it and its French ally, it would almost certainly have been obliged to sue for peace. Even in those circumstances, as I have argued in previous writings, Hitler would have granted what the world would have perceived as an honourable peace. He had no quarrel with Britain and saw war with it as a distraction from his main purpose: the defeat of the Soviet Union. He even admired Britain’s conquests around the world.
Yet by fighting on at that stage, two stunning results were delivered and they strengthened Britain’s arm immeasurably. The first was the miraculous rescue of its all but doomed army, and the second was the defeat of the Luftwaffe over the skies of southern England. Together, they placed Britain in an altogether stronger position vis-à-vis the Nazi juggernaut. Its high command knew at that point that the option of defeating Britain in the short term had been lost. Remaining in its rear would be an enemy with a dagger always at its back. This was the opportunity Britain should have seized.
Britain’s best interests would undoubtedly have been served by negotiating a deal. It would have been a deal between equals, with Germany triumphant on land and Britain equal in the air and, as ever, triumphant at sea. Minus the air, almost an exact parallel could be drawn with Philip’s army in the Low Countries and Napoleon’s at Boulogne.
But with the passage of time – perhaps three years – Britain would have been able to defeat Hitler, and without even the entry of the United States into the war. Immense bloodshed would have been avoided as a result of a much earlier end to the war. Most of the killing outside of Russia took place in its final phases. During that time, of course, the Soviet Union would have been utterly defeated by the Nazis, who came within a whisker of total defeat anyway. With peace in his rear, Hitler would have felt safe to turn his whole war machine against the enemy in the East. Communism would have been destroyed and Central and Eastern Europe spared what happened to it during the years of the Cold War. China, too, would have been spared the horrors of Mao.
The means by which Britain could have defeated the Third Reich unaided was with the atomic bomb. In 1939, when the war broke out, Britain was the most advanced country in the world in nuclear physics. It even had its own atomic weapons programme, codenamed “Tube Alloys”, years before the American Manhattan Project. At this point, Britain was still an immensely rich country with vast overseas holdings, despite all the asset sales of the previous war against Germany.
People will argue that, despite our initial lead, Americans got there first with the atomic bomb. Yes, indeed! But that was because Britain chose to fight Hitler when it did. Had it conserved its wealth and industrial capacity – during what would have amounted to a phoney peace – it could have resumed and accelerated the Tube Alloys programme: a project even further removed from the prying eyes of the Reich than the Manhattan Project in the deserts of New Mexico. Australia would have been the perfect testing ground, as it proved later when Britain did eventually develop and test its own bomb in 1952.
It was principally the gigantic financial and industrial effort needed to create Britain’s vast bomber fleets, along with the warships, tanks and other paraphernalia of war, that robbed Britain of the capacity to take on another major project such as this. It was with government approval, given at the Quebec Conference between Britain and America, that its nuclear physicists decamped en masse to its ally to pursue the work there. Until quite late in the day, the US had shown little interest in the explosive potential of the atomic bomb. It cannot be denied that, had it prioritised the lead it had enjoyed pre-war, Britain would have got to the bomb first.
What would have been the benefit to Britain of a phoney peace of the sort Stalin made with Hitler while it raced ahead to be the sole possessor of the bomb? Well, it would have dictated the post-war peace. Communism would have been eradicated from the world and Britain’s status as a great power preserved or even enhanced. For a period, at least, Britain would have resumed its former position of top dog. It would have avoided bankruptcy and heavy military losses. Although its empire would, in the fullness of time, have been wound down, it would not have happened so precipitously. Its peoples would have had more opportunity to develop fully functioning civic and democratic processes.
During the phoney peace with Hitler, Britain would have been in a position to increase massively its military presence in the Far East and given Imperial Japan pause for thought before confronting it and the United States. Indeed, Japan has admitted that it was only the hugely successful raid by the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm on the Italian fleet, as it lay at anchor in Taranto, that emboldened it to believe that it could do much the same at Pearl Harbour. That raid is unlikely to have taken place under the scenario I have outlined. Although ultimately defeated, the humiliations which Japan heaped on Western powers during its six-month rampage through the Pacific destroyed the previous aura of white invincibility and brought about over-hasty rushes to independence. An informed guess would be that fifty- or seventy-five years might have passed before the colonial handovers eventually did take place. We might now be seeing Prince Charles or William globe-trotting the world performing the flag lowering ceremonies.
It is also fair to say that the Holocaust, itself, could well have been avoided. There were no plans to liquidate Jewry in its entirety while Hitler was winning the war. Other solutions were sought, such as shipment to Madagascar or resettlement beyond the Urals as slave labour. Only a mad belief that the power of international Jewry had brought about the war, and that if he was going to go down he would take Jewry with him, fuelled Hitler’s fanaticism into outright genocide. He never seems to have asked himself why, if international Jewry was so over-achingly powerful, it proved so utterly helpless to protect its own when he began his persecutions and eventual descent into genocide. Had the war ended sooner, and he been allowed meantime to conquer the whole of the Soviet Union before he himself faced sudden Armageddon, that terrible blot on humanity might never have happened.
It will be argued by some that there was no guarantee that the bomb would ever work. To that I would counter that a large majority of scientists, including Einstein, were confident it would. There was certainly more chance of it working than ever there was of Britain winning the war on its own without it, and that was the starkness of the choice faced by the war cabinet at that time. Perhaps, in the circumstances, and with the dice so heavily loaded against them, they were irresponsible to take the gamble they did. After all, it was a nation’s very existence they were there to consider. In the event, victory did eventually come, but it came at a terrible cost.
All in all, a powerful case can be made for the alternative narrative: the one which would have bought Britain time, rather than the one that actually did win the day during those heated and emotional exchanges in May 1940. The outcome, in my view, might now be a calmer, happier world than the one we see around us.
Cars reveal us for what we are
We wouldn’t find Mr Bean so funny if he actually shared the road with us.
Except in America, the state goes to considerable lengths to keep weapons under control – particularly those of mass destruction. It fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to that end. Yet each of us is weaponised in a user-friendly way that cannot be controlled.
The moment we slam the door shut on half a ton of metal and hurtle off at who-knows-what breakneck speed, we are weaponised to an extraordinary degree. Never was this more dramatically rammed home than at Nice last year when over eighty people were crushed to death and untold numbers of others crippled and scarred for life.
Suddenly both we, and our enemies, realised that all around us were ready means of destruction on a massive scale. Worse was the knowledge that the state was powerless in the situation and that you didn’t need bomb factories, ingredients and planning, all of which it did have a chance of monitoring. You simply could step out one morning and kill a hundred people if your vehicle was sufficiently beefy. It was a terrifying realisation.
The car has been a hugely liberating and empowering development in the human story. Up to the eighteenth century, people rarely travelled more than eight miles from the place they were born. Suddenly, their territory was covered in asphalted roads which enabled them to reach the furthest corner of their homeland in incredible time. Journeys of weeks were reduced to hours. Moreover, those freezing weeks of bone-shaking boredom in horse-drawn carriage on rutted, unmade roads were now reduced to hours of warmth and comfort in which people didn’t need to listen to the inane witterings of strangers. Within a short time, we could enrich the airwaves with the finest music our species has created or hear the intelligent musings of the more articulate and entertaining of our people.
Nothing, I suggest, of all the wondrous technological achievements of recent times, including television and the Internet, has been embraced with such enthusiasm. It does, however – as most things do – have a downside. It is partly responsible, I feel, for our failure to engage with our neighbours. Where once our walk to work or the shops brought us into contact, we now take five paces out from our front door into the car and race off. Another downside, which has taken us a hundred years to experience, is that in the hands of a sick fanatic a vehicle can be as devastating as a machine gun. Yet another, and one to which we blissfully give insufficient thought, is that among the myriad things we humans get up to – and in this I include adrenaline sports – nothing puts us at greater risk of killing ourselves. Those same said comforts lull us into a false sense of security. Our constant search for ergonomic improvements has led to ever quieter engines which, when combined with superior suspension systems, can find the car having magicked its speed up to 100 mph with us barely noticing. Not only does this ‘improvement’ bring greater danger to ourselves, but to pedestrians as well. The virtually noiseless electric car is already upon us.
It is a rare person who regards himself as being anything other than a good, safe driver. Most of us regard our skills to be greater than they are. Next to our home and, much more so than our workplace, the car excels as our number two comfort zone. That very factor should give us pause for thought. You are much more at risk of complacency when you’re relaxed in your comfort zone.
We set out each day confident in the belief that our skills will protect us and steadfastly imagine that our safety is almost wholly in our own hands. This, however, completely misses the elephant in the room. Our safety is actually in the hands of strangers. Every time we embark on a journey we rely utterly on every other driver to do the right thing. Hundreds – or even thousands on a long journey – of other drivers whiz by us; if just one of them makes a misjudgement or is distracted, particularly on a bend, we become another statistic – one of over 5,000 who die annually on our roads.
It is a sobering thought that while so many of us are scared of flying, we are many, many thousands of times more likely to die in your nice, comfortable runabout. Just as astonishing is the blind faith we place in strangers to ensure that this does not happen. But having said all this, and despite these undoubtedly serious caveats, the car remains a wonderful thing.
Getting around was once the preserve of the rich: those who had a horse. It stayed that way during the early years of motoring. Then along came Henry Ford with his Model T and the masses joined in the fun. Even a Caesar would have envied what was now available to the least of what would have been his subjects.
Crazy, over-confident drivers are not the only people we should fear on the road. There are those afraid of their own shadow. While we have gained protection to a degree by applying tests both to ourselves and our vehicles, we cannot shield ourselves from the motorist who insists on driving super-cautiously, often well below the permitted speed limit. He or she can so drive fellow motorists up the wall that even the most forgiving can do the unthinkable and precipitate an accident. Nonchalantly blind to the stress levels building up in the queue stretching away to their rear, the slow-coach Sunday driver is a true menace. But hope is on the horizon. Within a generation, most of our journeys will be driverless. Even the slow-coach will have been speeded up. Fatalities on the road will plummet. That should be welcome news to all of us, but think how that prospect will cheer the Greeks and, indeed, all the nations with horrendously worse records than our own. Worldwide, over a decade, millions will live to see old age.
It is often difficult to know what sort of person an individual is. But here again this chariot of the common man excels. Spend half an hour behind anyone, especially in an urban area, and you will have many of the answers which even daily concourse can fail to provide. The way we drive reveals so much about ourselves. Cars expose our true selves in a way so few activities can. They expose show-offs, bullies and chancers. They show whether you’re considerate and polite or, God forbid, indecisive like that slowcoach. And what about the personalised number plate man (as he almost always is a man)? Unthinkingly, he reveals to the world that he’s a narcissist, a man in love with himself. Life is a cabaret and people are supremely adept at hiding their true personality. But put them in charge of a car and all will be revealed, for better or worse.
Who is to blame for the India-Pakistan partition?
Pakistani Rangers (in Black) and Indian Border Security Force personnel (in Brown) perform the ‘flag off’ ceremony at the Pakistan-India Wagah Border Post.
The year that is now drawing to a close has been a special one for India and Pakistan. Seventy years have passed since they went their separate ways after independence. Few would have thought that they would not have settled their differences after such a period of time, much less fought three wars along the way. Many blame the former colonial power, saying that that a failure to prevent the 5,000 inter-communal deaths which took place in Calcutta a year before independence should have alerted it as to the possible consequences if it failed to deploy the military in the run-up to independence.
At this distance in time, is it possible to take an objective view of the British role of the good, the bad and the ugly of what took place? Perhaps not quite. There are still numbers living whose early lives were traumatised by the unexpectedly bloody partition insisted on by ambitious Hindu and Muslim politicians. Both the government in New Delhi and Gandhi did not want the sundering of a sub-continent, which through guile, able administration – and yes, from time to time, brute force – had worked cohesively for two-hundred years.
Had the colonial power been stronger, and not itself traumatised as well as impoverished by combating German militarism in two world wars, it could have refused those ambitious politicians independence, until such time as they agreed to work together. In other words, it could have said: “We will stay for as long as it takes. You have shown yourselves able to co-exist for two-hundred years and we will not see this good work thrown away.”
What a benefit that would have bestowed, had that been possible. The unified former British India would by now be far and away the world’s largest country. Instead of building up nuclear arsenals, and spending crippling amounts confronting each other, it could have deployed that money to place itself at the forefront of the world technologically. It is difficult to think of a single instance in history where such an opportunity was thrown away. The British had been a strange mix of arrogance, barbarity and enlightenment. Always determined to get their own way – because they considered they knew best – if you buckled down, and accepted what was on offer, they could be good and decent folk to deal with. If not, the consequences could be deadly, and they often were.
Did, then, the sub-continent benefit or suffer from the British experience? It is true that by the time Westerners arrived in any numbers it was enjoying a period of sheer brilliance and prosperity under its Moghul (Muslim) conquerors. Some have estimated that at its height it represented 25% of the world’s GDP. However, a few generations following the arrival of British merchants it had fallen into anarchy. In a remarkably short time, those merchant traders formed themselves into the world’s first multi-national company. Soon the company morphed into the most effective power in the land; it saw opportunities and riches which dazzled, and to protect its developing interests it formed an army (mostly of locals) but officered by its own people.
It had never been The Company’s intention to take over the land. Quite the reverse, such an enterprise seemed to it burdensome. But the alternative guaranteed only a continuance of anarchy, and that was not conducive to making money. In the end you had something unique in human history: a company, not a political power, ruling an entire country – one of the largest, most glittering and most populace lands in the entire world.
So, was the rule of The Company and later The Crown oppressive, even cruel? No more – and many would argue a lot less – than the terrible consequences of the breakdown of Moghul law and order and all that that entailed. So bad did things become that travel between towns became a dice with death. Murderous Thuggees (the term from which we derive the word thug) roamed the land. The new rulers made short shrift of such practices.
Many of the early British arrivals were rapacious chancers. Their sole aim was to get rich quick. Their duplicity broke all records in double-dealing. But, among the newcomers were also men of great integrity, such as Warren Hastings. Such men dressed like Indians, took Indian wives, adopted Indian customs and had no notions of racial superiority. They were hugely interested in India’s past civilisations including its ancient, almost lost, language of Sanskrit which they resurrected. Five universities were set up, one of which became the second largest in the world and the School of Oriental Studies began its work. Great institutions were established along with a free press. Some of the most gifted and dedicated young men ever to leave Britain’s shores were trained at a public school, Haileybury, specially set up to teach them Indian ways as well as languages. It was the alma mater of Clement Attlee himself, the prime minister at the time of independence.
I will not bore you with a full list of the engineering projects; the millions of acres brought under cultivation; the 40,000 miles each of railways and canals; a superior version of our own Common Law tailored specifically to meet Indian needs; the banning of widow burning; the restoration of crumbling architectural wonders, including the Taj Mahal, that took place over the next two centuries; also, the most incorruptible civil service in the world, the ICS, (Indian Civil Service), whose entrance examination equalled that of the Mandarin system in China.
Although a land run by a company for the first half of its existence, it was, undeniably, an empire – an empire in the days when empires were fashionable and, yes, like all empires it was created and ultimately sustained by force. The Indian Mutiny – known to locals as the first war of independence – was put down with a ruthlessness which surprised – and appalled – many back home. Abominations did take place even decades later, such as the almost 1,000 mercilessly gunned down by an out of control colonel at Amritsar in 1919 who feared a new Indian Mutiny. It led to a Commission of Inquiry, with Churchill calling the massacre “monstrous” and widespread British condemnation. But, having said all this, the question remains: could never more than 100,000 Europeans have sustained their position and administered 400 million people for 200 years without a huge amount of local participation and – dare it be said – consent? And what should history make of the 2 million who came to Britain’s aid in two World Wars? It was the largest volunteer army in history.
As empires go, the British version is often said to be one of the better ones. Why else, people argue, would the leaders of 53 countries travel from the ends of the earth every two years to enjoy Commonwealth gettogethers? (There are no such nostalgic gatherings, they point out, for the French, Spanish and Portugese former empires.) And why, with the two exceptions of Canada and Ireland, did they all adopt the British national game of cricket and make it their own? For many, these Test Match contests played around the globe are almost the most exciting item in their calendars.
Today we all accept that no one has the right to impose their systems – however elevated they believe it be – on someone else’s country, but that take is a relatively modern one and we see things now through different eyes. Neither the money-obsessed Georgians, who began it all, nor the Victorians, who believed they were doing God’s work, saw anything wrong in empire-building. That’s what you did in those days if you had the means. It had been going on since time immemorial. With the fall of the Soviet empire – which absurdly it refused to accept was an empire – that phase of human aggrandisement, thankfully, came to an end. Today, with all our international forums, it is safe to say we have seen the last of them.
Press freedom in Britain still cannot shake off the malign shadows of Max Mosley and other celebrities
Sir Brian Henry Leveson PC
Celebrities are unable to put behind them the exposure of their peccadillos – and worse – to a sometimes amused, but increasingly exasperated and angry public. Furious that government efforts to control the flow of information concerning them does not seem to be working, the Leveson-inspired Royal Commission on the Press comes back for another bite to the precious, 300-year-old cherry of press freedom.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), a genuinely independent press regulator set up and managed by the press itself, is making a perfectly good fist of the job it has taken on. A huge majority of dailies and periodicals support it; only a timorous, browbeaten rump tow the government and Mosley-financed line. However, this is not acceptable to the proponents of government-approved IMPRESS, whose very name smacks of coercion (that is what we called civilians press-ganged from the streets and impressed into the anti-Napoleonic Royal Navy). Perhaps someone in the government service is into black comedy and hopes we ignoramuses will not be smart enough to see how they mock us, nor recognise their superior wit in demonstrating it.
The discredited Royal Commission regulatory body refuses, absolutely, to go quietly into the night and let the press get on with it. It’s as if it is outraged that any non-governmental body should have the temerity to stand up for itself and, worse, insist that it can do the job better and at no cost to the taxpayer. This last, though, would be the least of its concerns. The latest strictures involve tabling an amendment to the Data Protection Bill currently going through parliament, whose effect will be to make it easier for the rich and powerful to avoid being held to account. For all its occasional slip-ups, the venerable, 160-year-old former News of the World remains sadly missed. How many were the truly outrageous scams, scandals and criminal conspiracies uncovered during its long pursuit of wrongdoers?
Something deeply incongruous lies in the fact that, while the governing class is determined to raise the press and broadcasting bar of exposure of wrongdoing higher and higher, the internet is allowed to go on its merry way unregulated. But here’s the rub! Nothing in today’s world of Internet communication can be covered up either by High Court gagging orders or anything else. One lowly, public-spirited, disgruntled or mischievous whistle-blower, anywhere in the world, can blow the lid off at any time. Within minutes the whole farrago goes viral. When will an out of touch governing class realise that muzzling the press simply redirects a desperate-to-know public elsewhere? That elsewhere is the Internet, where pretty much anything can be said.
Perhaps in the Internet there is hope for the press and the public generally. Truth, as they say, will out. Though in times past the rich and powerful often saw to it that it didn’t, that no longer holds true. With the Internet there is no hiding place. Since our world became reliant on this form of communication, no one can ever again feel safe in their dirty little secret.
So last year it was the Panama Papers. This year the Paradise ones. Even our poor Queen has been dragged into the off-Shore expose, though I don’t doubt for a second that she had the least knowledge of what her thoughtless financial advisors were up to. But someone like Bono is different. That haloed advisor to kings and presidents, gullible enough to believe him sincere with something worth listening to, now knows differently. Both the halo and the ubiquitous, trademark shades have slipped. Perhaps at last the movers and shakers will stop paying homage to the Bonos and Geldofs of this world and press them to get back to the only thing they’re good at: their music.
As for the press, we must pray it continues to stand fast. Once the towering beacon of hope to editors worldwide, it is today the most heavily regulated in the democratic world. How typical that in the relatively trivial matter of a few press excesses – almost all later dismissed in the courts – the government jumped in with the sledgehammer of a Royal Commission. Where is the Royal Commission for that vastly more damaging banking scandal that threw so many millions worldwide out of work and from which we are still suffering. Outright criminality was at the heart of it and it involved trillions of pounds. And as for Royal Commissions themselves? They are nothing more than a convenient leftover – handy for a government seeking to show it is doing something – from the undemocratic days of king power.
If these latest amendments to the bill from that paragon of democratic values, the House of Lords, are allowed to pass then Mosley and his crew will have won. Whether or not IPSO’s heroics keep it out of the clutches of the government-approved IMPRESS, the press will be effectively muzzled. Under the guise of Data Protection and personal privacy laws, they will have found the back door to achieve their purpose. This cannot be allowed to happen.
Two stories to share with my family and friends
The first story concerns me daydreaming and looking out of my shop window one beautiful summer’s day. A few lines of verse came into my head. Then I thought to myself: why don’t you put this in your window to lift other spirits as they have done your own? I grabbed for a pen before the words vanished.
Using our computer engraving system I did it on a piece of burgundy coloured laminate.
Some time later, a man came into the shop enquiring after something he had seen in the window. It turned out to be the poem I had written. “How much is that selling for?” he asked. Nonplussed, but thinking on my feet, I replied “£12.50”. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll have that for my static holiday caravan.”
Later, the thought occurred to me that that modest sale had, nonetheless, gained me admittance to one of the world’s most exclusive clubs: that of a poet whose work people will pay to read! The words of those few lines are as follows:
Our journey through this life is brief, very brief.
Enjoy the world for the beauty that it offers.
Be kind, show compassion. Be happy.
My second story concerns a veteran who stopped me outside the shop to tell me that a poem I had written to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War was to be read out that Sunday in church by a member of the British Legion. Apparently, it had been adopted by the Legion and was being read out each year. You can imagine how moved I was to learn of this. I think they may have picked up on the poem from the local paper.
I may have posted it on my blog at the time, but just in case I didn’t here is it:
A LAMENT TO WAR
A sea of time has passed us by and still we think of them:
The lives unlived, the dreams curtailed, the legions of our men.
We did not know, we could not tell, what horrors lay in store,
As year on year the mournful call went out for more and more.
Since early in the century past our power had waxed supreme
And kept large conflagrations low and made us start to preen.
We thought we could control events and stop war in its tracks,
With webs of close alliances, diplomacy and pacts.
A maelstrom poured upon our men of iron, steel and fire,
And sent a piteous wail of grief through every town and shire.
We must press on, we told ourselves, what now we had begun
For British pluck and doggedness would overcome the Hun.
Through mud and ice and poison gas the order was ‘stand fast’;
This trial of strength, between mortal foes, surely could not last.
For four long years we stood our ground and bravely would not yield,
Till battlegrounds ran red with blood through every poppy field.
How could men cause such numbing pain and suffering to their kind?
What thoughts of gain or equity were coursing through their minds?
How could they think to justify the carnage and the blood?
What rationale endured to turn their tears into a flood?
Delusions born of hubris ease had caused us to believe
This war could be no different from the rest we had conceived.
But science changes everything and chivalry was dead,
Midst fire and smoke and strafing planes and mustard gas and lead.
Oh God above, what did we do to vent our foolish spleen,
But sacrifice the best we had on altars of the keen?
How little did we think it through and cry aloud ‘enough’!
But yet preferred to stumble on with bloody blind man’s bluff.
What are the prospects for Britain outside the European Union?
The UK joined the Common Market, the predecessor of the European Union, from a position of weakness in the early seventies – the sick man of Europe, so the country was called at the time. The package sold to Britain was that of a trading arrangement. Beyond the inner circle of continental Europe’s political elites, there was little to no talk of the true direction of travel, which has always been a United States of Europe.
The first signs of where the so-called European Project was really headed was the Maastricht Treaty in British prime minister John Major’s premiership. The final curtain raiser, during that of Gordon Brown’s, was the Lisbon Treaty. (Who can forget the unedifying way he waited to be the last to sign and went through the back door so as not to be photographed signing away his nation’s rights?)
Since the Maastricht Treaty, Brits increasingly formed the opinion that they were losing control of their country. As a once trickle of Brussels directives – which took precedence over British law – turned into a flood, Brits began to question the whole concept of EU membership. It was the erosion of sovereignty which I believe formed the bedrock of the opposition which finally stunned the world last year with their decision to quit.
High among the concerns of the Brexiteers, as those seeking to leave the project have come to be known, was their inability to determine who should come to live among them and how many. It was like saying that you had a house but no say in who could pitch up to stay in it and in what numbers. Just like that flood of pettifogging Brussels directives came a new flood, but one that took jobs from the least skilled and most disadvantaged in society. Cheap, plentiful labour was great for the professional and governing classes and, of course, the bosses, but not so great for those struggling to make ends meet.
Then there was the concept that a group of jurists in the European Court of Justice – many with apparent questionable legal experience – could impose their foreign, codified set of laws on the UK’s English common law legal system. English common law, built up assiduously over a thousand years, has become the most common legal system in the world and today covers 30% of the world’s population in 27% of its 320 legal jurisdictions. It should be no surprise then that Brits, with no little justification, were proud of their legal system and took offence at the idea that the European Court of Justice knows best.
This, I believe, was at the heart of concerns over Europe. For sovereignty covers almost everything, including who comes to live among us and who makes our laws.
Much as the British feel free to criticise their own parliament, they still find it objectionable that others from outside their borders can order them around – especially when those others have never subjected themselves to a British ballot box. Where democratic, sovereign nations are concerned, citizens should have the chance to turf their politicians out if there is a failure to perform or if they wish to try something different. There must be accountability.
So can the UK prosper outside the European Union? Although I voted to remain because I believed we could better influence reform of the EU from the inside, I have taken the view nevertheless that we can prosper outside. If there is any nation whose DNA shrieks global trade, it is Britain. The world’s first multinational company was founded by the British in India, growing so prosperous that it had to create its own army to protect its interests. Even the great Napoleon acknowledged that we were a nation of traders (he used the word shopkeepers, but in essence it’s the same).
I can understand why the countries of mainland Europe cleave together with none daring to contemplate a future outside the bloc. Theirs has been a distinct experience from that of the British. All have suffered the horrors of defeat and occupation down the centuries. We have not.
Brits may not bestride the world with hard power in the way they did a hundred years ago. But hard power in today’s world, as our American cousins have come to realise, does not work in quite the way it used to. Soft power is a different matter, however, and Britain has oodles of that. It reaches into every corner of the globe and the widespread adoption of English in official business helps to grease the wheels. The Commonwealth, which represents 31% of the world’s population – united by language, history, culture and their shared values of democracy, free speech, human rights and the rule of law – never wanted Britain to join the European Union in the first place. So, yes, it is entirely possible that we can thrive outside.
The same bracing winds which once filled the sails of Britain’s ocean-going merchant fleets may be just the winds needed to force us to raise our already decent game to new levels. We must fervently hope that is the case, for Britain is the one country in Europe whose situation has allowed it to stick two fingers up to the oppressive EU elites with any hope of getting away with it.
Turkey should be embraced, not scorned
Kilis, a refugee camp in Turkey near the Syrian border.
I wrote some time ago that the EU was making a big mistake by playing hardball with Turkey’s application to become a member. They fear that the entry of a major Muslim country will have a destabilising effect.
They fear a possible Trojan Horse whose admission could immerse our continent in many of the horrors currently being visited on Turkey’s neighbours, Syria and Iraq. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Turkey is the obvious Muslim country which stands any chance of enabling Europe to gain acceptance throughout the Muslim world as a friend. As a member of the EU, it would send a signal to all Muslims that Europe is not irredeemably prejudiced and could happily work with them to build a better and more secure future. Once a member, you could be sure that Turkey would go after the nihilist maniacs with a sure-footedness that is not open to the rest of us.
Remember that Turkey single-handedly kept order throughout the Near East and North Africa for 500 years right up to modern times. Millions of Turks headed for Germany by invitation during the post-war years of the economic miracle to help rebuild that country’s shattered industries and infrastructure. They were known as ‘Guest Workers’ and the understanding was that, in due course, they would return to their homeland. They were not meant to stay.
So little did they offend their German hosts, however, that they were never asked to leave. Theirs proved to be the face of Islam that Europe never needed to fear. Even with the recent controversial admission of the huge refugee influx triggered by Chancellor Merkel’s off the cuff offer, there is not in Germany the festering resentment among Muslims and, indeed, Germans that exists in France. Two reasons account for this. In Germany, there is not the ghettoisation and lack of jobs as in France. Also, France’s Muslims are, for the most part, of Algerian origin and are the legacy of a bitterly savage colonial war of independence. Neither side fully forgave the other.
All of us can agree that Europe is at a crossroad in its relationship with the Muslim world. An implacable death cult has cast a shadow over all the continent’s urban conurbations and the crowd-gathering events which are staged there. Messaging each other in the new Wild West of the internet in an encryption form harder than Enigma to crack, they can operate in cells or as ‘lone wolves’ with manuals provided to allow them online to acquire and assemble deadly bombs. How the zealots of the IRA must regret that they never had such tools.
The result of it all is that people increasingly live in a fear they have never known before. They know the authorities have no answer, and never can, to the lone operator who can drive a truck or buy a knife across a supermarket counter. Even if we succeed, as we very well might, in taking back the land which Isis has claimed for its new Caliphate, its fighters will disperse throughout Muslim lands and perhaps our own and reappear hydra-headed to continue the mayhem. It is a depressing prospect and one to which we can envisage no end.
My own regular visits to London, its museums and places of interest, have lost their appeal. On a recent visit, I found that the dear old British Museum, an endless source of wonderment to me, had a half-hour long queue for semi airport-like security checks. I took one look and went on my way. In a long life, I had hitherto been able to wander up unmolested and pass through its hallowed portals unchallenged. That soon will become a distant memory. Security everywhere has become the order of the day.
We must resist. Turkey can help us for only it, as a Muslim nation closely allied to the West with NATO’s second largest army, can help us confront the threat ideologically. And that is the only way this death cult can be beaten.
Followers of their own faith must turn on them en masse. Their communities and their own families must place them beyond the pale.
The cowardly recruiters and dissemblers who encourage disaffected youngsters whose lives have gone off the rails to make an end of themselves and carry as many as they can into oblivion with them must be taken out of circulation and denied any platform to propagate their poison. Theirs should be a special place in perdition.
Turkey has already won the hearts, as well as plaudits, from the millions driven from their homes in Syria. Their efforts to provide a refuge from Assad’s killing machine dwarf those of any other nation, including Germany. The camps they have set up are a model of humanitarianism; they provide every conceivable facility and resemble more villages more than camps. Turkey receives scant recognition for her huge efforts and, needless to say, massive expense. And this from a nation which, unlike those in the West, cannot be described as rich.
For all the frequently ill-informed criticisms of Turkey’s president, he has proved himself a man with a heart which is more than can be said of many of the rest who weep crocodile tears. With 14 years of enlightened economic policies, he has also achieved growth rates the envy of all but China and India. In short, until these terrible troubles on his border, Turkey was booming.
My own message is clear: Turkey should be embraced, not scorned. If we continue to reject her overtures she will turn her back on us, and rightly so, with dire consequences for any last hope of getting back to normal and putting terrorism back in the malign box where it belongs.
Are the English guilty of language imperialism?
There is a new term I have stumbled upon which might be said to have sinister undertones. It is called ‘language imperialism’. For myself, I am hugely conflicted because the language in question is my own.
While our legions have long ago been withdrawn from around the world, our language has not. It is good that we have seen the back of imperialism, of course. No country has the right to run the affairs of another, much less to oppress its peoples in order to maintain its dominance. In that regard, this country has much to answer for – though I like to console myself by believing that my forebears seldom employed gratuitous violence to maintain their position.
The world does, however, stand in need of a universal language, one which will allow us to communicate not just information, but, our thoughts, fears emotions and everything between. When you face a person from another culture, almost all of whose habits are alien to your own, there is so much better a chance of reaching an understanding if you have no need of an interpreter and don’t end up lost in translation, as it were. I swear so many past conflicts could have been nipped in the bud had this been the case.
Rome’s reach, great as it was, never extended to giving all Europe – and the Near East – its wonderful language of Latin. Perhaps if it had, we may have avoided many of the miseries we have endured down the centuries and continue to endure to this day. Wouldn’t we be better placed to achieve harmony in the troubled Middle East if we could all talk to one another?
So while I deplore our part in the imperialism of the past – though I will not say no good ever came of it – I cannot deplore the fact that we have succeeded where Rome failed in leaving behind a language which in the fullness of time will play an important part in bringing together the whole human race.
But this second language is in danger of coming at a price. That price is the threat it poses to indigenous languages. Just as here in our small corner of Europe we have not allowed the Irish, Welsh and Scottish languages to die – sadly it appears Cornish is doomed – we must not allow the other home languages of the world to disappear. Imagine what treasure troves they hold of those often-captivating cultures. What would we know of ancient Egypt if we had not cracked hieroglyphics?
People are perfectly capable of continuing to use their home language while becoming totally fluent in another’s; witness French Canadians, Scandinavians and the Dutch. And let’s not forget the Swiss who somehow manage, for the most part, the four languages which make up their own country.
But in India, today, we see an oppression where their languages are concerned of a most worrying kind. So obsessed are the governing classes in pushing English that they refuse to feature local dialects in such things as prescriptions, menus. road warnings and street signs, driving licenses, government forms, medical instructions, ingredient labels or even movie tickets. How crippling is that for the hundreds of millions who do not form part of the elite. Imagine what it’s like not to be able to read your child’s medical instructions. It’s a bit like when Norman French pushed Saxon English into the shadows for 300 years and you had court cases decided in a language you couldn’t understand.
There are laudable reasons why the Indian elite promote English in the way they do. They believe it to be a unifying factor in a land with 150 languages, all with sizeable populations and a total of 1,650 altogether. They also see it as giving them an advantage in business and a world of still increasing globalisation. But it’s tough meantime out in the hundreds of thousands of villages and towns who cannot fathom the language.
There is one good thing about the language, however, which they and the world, by happy chance, have been landed with and which they will eventually master. It is blessed with a massive vocabulary, a rich literature, beautiful poetry, great flexibility and much else besides. Many reasons have contributed to this. It is a fusion of invading settlers, mainly Germanic and Scandinavian in origin. And adding to the mix are those 300 years of Norman French, from which 45% of our words are derived. They carry a high Latin content so perhaps Rome didn’t, after all, lose out completely. She remains with us still.
Talking with students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
A week ago I had a rendezvous with twenty students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The meeting had come about after a professor at the distinguished university, Maren Niehoff, who lectures in the humanities, had stumbled upon my book while visiting London’s renowned Foundling Museum last year. She enjoyed my story so much, and found it so relevant to her course, ‘The Individual and Society’, that she decided to make The Last Foundling required reading for her elite students in Jerusalem alongside the meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence. It goes without saying that I was utterly blown away when I learned of the company I was keeping as an author!
Professor Niehoff emailed me following her visit to the museum to ask if I would like to meet her students at the museum on 29th March, following a visit she had arranged to Oxford University, where Maren had studied in her youth, to talk about my experiences growing up in institutional care at the Foundling Hospital with reflections on my struggles adjusting to society after I left it at fifteen.
Known at its inception as the Foundling Hospital, Coram is still committed to improving the lives of the country’s most vulnerable children and young people after nearly 300 years of operation and is, in fact, the world’s oldest registered charity (it was renamed Coram after the institution’s closure). The original Foundling Hospital had been set up by a seafaring philanthropist called Captain Thomas Coram who obtained, after seventeen years of intense lobbying, a Royal Charter from King George II in 1739 to provide for the care and education of illegitimate and deserted children.
I thoroughly enjoyed answering the students’ questions about my story, relating a little of my life through those years of challenge and lovelessness, and I felt it to be a great privilege and honour to meet Professor Niehoff with her wonderful young students. Happily, I was among the very few foundlings who managed to locate their family and enjoy considerable success in the years that followed. I’ve uploaded a collection of photos taken by my younger son, Grant, of the visit below.
Don’t blame immigrants for our problems, blame the authorities
Where was the government’s strategic planning?
In the great debate about immigration, which at long last we are allowed to have, it comes down to a few basics. The grievances the public feel do not primarily concern where immigrants come from, the colour of their skin, their ethnicity or even their religion. It is about numbers.
When the Romans arrived two thousand years ago, it is thought that the population was a little under two million. It took 1,500 years for it to double. Since then – a period of five hundred years, beginning with the first Queen Elizabeth – it has risen sixteen-fold to 65 million. Just imagine if this were to go on. In the same relatively short period, it would have grown to a little over one billion, all packed on to this one small island. Apart from the absurdity of this idea, where would the resources come from to sustain such numbers when we cannot even resource the number we already have and are totally dependent on imports.
When Blair and his cohorts opened the floodgates to the whole world – not just Eastern Europe – he did so surreptitiously by branding anyone who dared to question what was going on a racist. He himself committed what his very own government had passed into law, a ‘hate crime’. Calling someone a racist who is not is just about as bad as it gets.
What, then, are we to do about the escalating numbers? Clearly we cannot continue admitting, annually, the equivalent of a city the size of Coventry or Leicester. Where will we find the money to provide for such numbers? There was never very much slack built into our public services. If we find ourselves struggling in so many areas, may that not be in large part because what slack there was has long since been used up?
Everyone needs access to hospitals, schools, public infrastructure and transport systems, and, yes, a roof over their head. If our young find it next to impossible to get on the housing ladder, it is largely because demand had outstripped supply and forced up prices to unaffordable levels.
I am a great believer in the benefits of immigration, as long as it is managed intelligently. I do not blame immigrants for our problems. I would certainly want to seek a better life for myself within this fortunate continent, especially if I were a member of the huddled, unskilled masses milling beyond Europe’s borders (their desire to come here actually stands as a huge compliment to what Europe has to offer). And isn’t that exactly what we did when we peopled so much of the world with our own, desperate millions?
Many insist that unless we admit large numbers of the young and fecund, we will rapidly have too small a workforce to provide for an aging population that is living longer than ever. There is also an argument to be made that immigrants help to address our refusal to have more babies and so fuel the drive to grow our economy.
But the answer to this must lie elsewhere, namely in raising our productivity. Ours, historically, has been very low and if we get to grips with this and are also selective in admitting clever, qualified people, then we will not need to crack the problem by importing ever more people. One way or another, the inflow has to be reduced. If we fail, then our quality of life will surely fail also. We absolutely have to go down the productivity route. Personally, I find it humiliating that so many abroad outproduce us. It was not always so.
One thing which may come out of this Brexit business is that the cold winds of standing alone again may release in us those forces which have served us so well in times past.
I still cannot get over the bravery it took to defy the massed ranks of the ‘experts’ who told us that we were about to commit the next best thing to suicide. The last time I can recall the experts getting it so horrendously wrong was when 365 economists wrote to Margaret Thatcher predicting doom for her policies. In fact, those very policies made it boom. May not Brexit do the same?
Had the Labour government of the day, when it took the decision to open the floodgates, embarked on a massive programme of infrastructure spending – at a time when we could afford it, 20 years ago – to accommodate the extra demands placed on the system then things would be very different today. But there should, first, have been a national debate to decide whether this was indeed what the nation wanted and whether it was prepared to see its national identity compromised. (There is also the small matter of whether a relatively small island was already crowded enough.) The fact is, the political classes were uncaring of what the public thought about these matters and, actually, were contemptuous of the answers they feared might come back. As always, they thought they knew best. But look at us now!
Gods, Princes and Priests explained
Justin Welby, a modern-day pharoah
Spain’s Seville is not considered one of the great metropolitan cities of Europe, though with almost 700,000 inhabitants it has much to fascinate and a climate you can only to dream of. But four centuries ago it was such a city and all Europe stood agog at its magnificence and, more particularly, at the stupendous wealth unloaded at its quaysides. For it was here that the treasure ships from the newly discovered Americas disgorged their plundered cargoes of gold, silver and precious gems.
To my great delight, I recently spent three days discovering the city and took a cruise down its river of former opulence, the Guadaíra. I am a man who likes his city breaks and I have visited scores of Europe’s great cathedrals, but none overwhelmed me in quite that way that Seville’s did. It was vast and held aloft by columns twice the width of mighty Karnak’s, the Egyptian temple at Luxor.
As I wandered round I was struck by the sheer quantity of gold, silver and precious stones displayed – so much more than any of the other cathedrals I had visited – and it got me thinking.
Though never a Marxist, I have long believed that that he was not so far wide of the mark when he opined that religion was the opiate of the masses. Humanity needed relief, not to say hope, against the terrible catastrophes which regularly decimated its numbers.
Almost certainly, that cathedral’s enormous structure and its accompanying wealth came courtesy of those grateful mariners and, in particular, their captains for surviving the perils of the deep and coming safely home. Ocean going in those days was enormously risky. Of the five ships that Ferdinand Magellan set out with on the first circumnavigation of the planet, only one, worm-eaten leaky vessel made it home with eighteen half-dead souls out of an original complement of 260. That number did not include its captain. Our own Francis Drake was the first commander to survive such a voyage but he, too, lost four of his five vessels. Fortuitously, among Magellan’s lucky survivors, was a man whose job it was to keep a journal of the incredible events and sufferings of that epic voyage.
So surviving mariners had much to be thankful for. They were also mindful of the appalling deeds inflicted on the indigenous peoples they encountered. Those early conquistadors would not only have been anxious to give thanks for their god’s protection, but also to seek his forgiveness for their cruelty. How better than to bestow a portion of that plundered wealth on his house, the great cathedrals. Its priests would have been only too happy to encourage such a belief and provide absolutions, along with an assurance that continuance of such largesse would secure a safe passage to the hereafter.
If the forces which play havoc with man’s safe existence – droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, lightening and tsunamis – had been absent from the early Earth and it had been a big, beautiful all-providing planet, I do not believe humans would have felt the need to come up with gods. As it was, we had no understanding of the dark forces (as we saw it) ranged against us, what created them and, more to the point, what abated them. In man’s view, those forces had to be the work of all powerful gods. When those gods vented their spleen, it had to be because they were angry with us.
It made sense, in those circumstances, to appease them. Sacrifices, even human ones, might seem the answer. An original multiplicity of gods was eventually honed down to one and, despite all of science’s unravelling of the mysteries which so terrified early man, that god is still with us.
Man’s first societies needed no rulers, but as they began organising and learned to work together cities came into existence which vied with other cities. Soon rivalry erupted into violence. The most dynamic of the citizenry thrust themselves forward to take control. The era of power politics had arrived along with kingdoms. But kingdoms had to be secured at the point of the sword. It was a case of “might made right”. If somebody came along later with more might – just like in the animal world – then the incumbent’s legitimacy was lost.
This was the point at which fresh players arrived on the scene. The Christian priesthood offered the pagan Roman emperor, Constantine, a deal: if he would take the cross and make it the official religion of the empire, they would lend their support to his regime and sanctify it. It would not henceforth be relying on brute force alone, but it would have the kingship legitimised by the god of the new faith. The priesthood would put together a service (coronation) and have the ruler anointed in God’s name. He and his heirs would then rule by divine right. Those seeking to unseat him by violence would be deemed usurpers. It was a brilliant arrangement and rulers everywhere after Constantine bought into it.
Even weak or useless rulers who, in earlier times, would have been quickly toppled, were often enabled to live out their reigns. Such was the mysticism of the coronation ceremony that the population was driven to accept the monarch as God’s anointed. And God was not to be taken lightly. Faith in the teachings of the church was all pervasive and ruled every aspect of daily life.
As for the church’s power and its own desire for riches, both of which ran counter to the founder’s tenets, its appetite grew exponentially. The mighty cathedrals, designed to overawe, represented its own rival palaces to those of the monarchs. Emulating royal pretensions, they even managed to get themselves officially declared ‘princes’ of the church. And in order to impress, and again copy the sovereigns, they designed for themselves rich vestments quite distinct from the laity. The elite – the bishops – fashioned crowns (mitres) modelled on those of the pharaohs, those most ancient and superior of all monarchs.
It was all a far cry from the open-air simplicity of their founders’ teachings, which abhorred the pursuit of wealth and needed no churches. It wasn’t long before the head of it all, the Pope, came to consider himself lord even to the sovereigns and that his authority outranked that of all the kings of Europe, whom he insisted drew their legitimacy from him.
The faith continues to attract widespread, though diminishing, support. In an age of incredible science, when we are close to revealing the Theory of Everything, kings still reign – though in fewer numbers – and priests still wave their incense and pronounce their benedictions. Though we understand now the origins of the forces which once were so inexplicable and destructive, certain of us still cannot bring ourselves to cut loose from the old superstitions – though Christendom is closer to it than Islam. In India, multiple gods still haunt the Hindu imagination.
As I walked away from the great cathedral, which housed Columbus’ tomb, I understood for the first time how this non-capital city held such riches. It was the first landfall of those treasure ships and the place where mind-blowing wealth was disgorged. My thoughts turned to those unkempt, near-naked mariners carrying armfuls of gems and bullion down the gangplanks and the overjoyed priests who would rush to greet them. Was ever a house of God better located?
Police aid Vaz and his MP chums to stick two fingers up to the rest of us
We deserve so much better than slippery Keith Vaz.
What are we to make of the police’s decision not to proceed against the former Minister of State for Europe and ex-chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee?
The police dropped their investigation into Labour MP Keith Vaz, known to his parliamentary colleagues and the wider public as “Vazeline” for his extraordinary ability to extricate himself from any hole, despite his behaviour clearly being reprehensible in the extreme and questionable as to its legality.
One of the things which most shocked us about the MPs’ expenses scandal was the sheer mean-spiritedness and hypocrisy of it all. Here were lawmakers happy to break the law even in the most mundane and petty of matters. All the time they wanted the rest of us to hold them in high esteem and believe them virtuous. That, indeed, is what we wanted to believe and the reason we were so shocked. We wanted to feel that they represented the best of our country: men and women whose examples we should strive to emulate.
All this is what draws me back to Keith Vaz, a man whose whole career has been mired in a succession of questionable activities. This last episode concerning rent boys is only the latest. Vaz is a man puffed up beyond belief who thinks nothing of intruding on private grief to gain publicity for himself or doing all manner of weird and wonderful things to get into our newspapers and onto our small screens (remember him turning up at Luton airport to welcome Romanian arrivals on the day they could seek work in Great Britain?). Yet for all his grandstanding, ingratiating behaviour – particularly to speaker Bercow whom he relies on to give him excessive Commons airtime – and smarmy talk he is held in the highest esteem by his parliamentary colleagues.
On the very first sitting of his Commons chums following those sensational disclosures concerning drugs and rent boys, he was warmly received when he waltzed in as though nothing had happened. Brazenness cannot begin to describe such an entrance. There were mutterings of sympathy and even back-slapping by various of his colleagues. Indeed, the whole atmosphere seemed resonant of a witch-hunt by a pitiless media out to destroy a good man.
One could almost be forgiven for thinking that many in that chamber may themselves have shared Vaz’s predilection for rent boys.
Few of us will ever have witnessed such a shameful and squalid performance by members who like to address one another other as “Honourable”. For all that, I do not believe that any one of the other 649 members would have had the effrontery to show themselves on that particular day. But this is Vaz. Having bare-facedly brazened it out in the Commons so soon after the story broke, it was to be expected that he would do the same a few weeks later at Labour’s annual party conference. And so he did. It will be interesting to see if his Leicester East constituents show their distaste for the way he has let them, and above all their faith, down by pricking his massive bubble of self-esteem and deselecting him.
As news of the scandal broke, Vaz was Chair of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee which recently had been deliberating on prostitution. That conflict of interest in his febrile moment of exposure was too much even for Vazeline to escape. He stood down.
But squalid and undignified as his exploitation of young, vulnerable rent boys was, something even worse was revealed. At the very time he was heading up the committee investigating harm caused by illegal Class A drugs, he solicited a Romanian prostitute to trot off and bring back some Class A drugs. He even offered to pay for them. Now, if that doesn’t constitute criminal activity I’d like to know what does. Isn’t “aiding and abetting” a crime? Vaz was complicit both before and after the fact. The whole affair was confirmed by video footage – prima facie evidence if ever there was. (Vaz’s wealth has long been a matter of public curiosity. He is rich beyond what his parliamentary stipend would suggest and it would be interesting to learn where his unaccounted for wealth comes from.)
Shameless Vaz, with amazing sangfroid, sees absolutely nothing untoward about what he has done to his family, the House of Commons and the wider public. Incredibly, within weeks of stepping down as Chair of the Home Affair Select Committee he put himself forward for the Justice Select Committee. Did this prove too much, or at least too soon, even for his normally indulgent parliamentary chums? You bet it didn’t. Now he’s back pontificating in his own inimical, self-important way on what is just and what is not. Pomposity begins and ends with Vaz. To use a clichéd but in this case totally justified phrase, you really couldn’t make it up.
Am I alone in thinking that Vaz’s parliamentary colleagues, by continuing to indulge his fantasies, display a huge contempt for what the rest of us think?
The police must re-examine the evidence. Are they afraid of the establishment? Do they need to be dead like Janner and Savile before they will act? Perhaps it is that same kind of reluctance which caused them to hold back for so long in the Rotherham grooming of young girls; maybe Vaz’s faith and ethnicity has acted as a protective shield. That, perhaps – and the establishment’s own efforts to defend one of their own – may explain why this most terrible of scandals has slipped below the radar.
Brexit, Cameron’s demise, Trump, Europe’s travails and, most of all, the terrible tragedy unfolding in Syria have all fortuitously come to Vaz’s aid by moving the spotlight away from him. No better time, from the police’s point of view, to bury bad news.
Are we to stand by and let Vazeline get away with it again? For all our sakes we must hope not. Our Mother of Parliaments deserves better than that. The one I feel most sorry for in all this is Vaz’s poor wife. He felt so little love for her that he thought nothing of endangering her life by having unprotected sex with a male prostitute.
Quite apart from the scandal of no police action, with all this and more known by his ‘honourable’ parliamentary colleagues and the institution of parliament being brought into disrepute in a serious infringement of its rulebook, how is it that he has not been suspended from the Commons?
Brexit and Trump are only the beginning
Best buddies looking forward to a golden future
I cannot move into another week without recording my thoughts concerning the one which has just passed. Something astounding happened.
A man was democratically elected to the most powerful job on the planet who defied all the norms of what is considered to be acceptable behaviour. This man made no concessions whatsoever to the sensibilities of the electorate he was appealing to and came right out to lay before it his brazen take on the world. In view of the outrage caused in so many quarters, how did such a man persuade that electorate to set aside the shock of his message and, most of all, the way it was delivered? He has now not only been handed the keys to all our futures, but he will be given the nuclear codes as well.
The story goes back a long way, perhaps half a century. At that time a world existed of nation states and of families within those states. Most had functioned for a long time – Germany was the exception – and people had grown surprisingly fond of them. They saw them as an extension of their own, close family and it gave them a strong sense of belonging. Almost without exception they were immensely proud of them. When troubled times came, it turned out they were prepared to die for them, much as a mother would die for her child.
Then came those two terrible world wars which, with the help of perverted science, made war deadly to the point of being suicidal. Humanity recoiled in horror and said never again. Agencies were put in place, starting with the United Nations and followed up by a multitude of other such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, various NGOs, NATO and many, many more, all designed to govern the conduct of man and his disputes in a peaceable manner.
The bogeyman identified as being behind past conflicts was the selfish, jingoistic nation state. That, along with its borders, had to be downgraded and erased, over time, into irrelevance. Europe began the charge with what morphed, with the utmost stealth, into the European Union.
Also a new, more humane way had to be found to deal with individual misfortune and the Welfare State was born. The old were to receive decent pensions and they, along with everybody else, were to be medically cared for. The four great plagues of want, idleness, poverty and disease identified in the Beveridge Report were to be tackled wholesale for the first time.
But this was not enough. The architects decided that they must complete the work with what became known as political correctness. They must criminalise beastliness towards minorities – all minorities – however obscure. Eventually this extended to the very utterances which people made. A revolution was in the making and, like all revolutions, it needed its cadre of zealots to force it through. Step forward to carry out this work the intellectuals, the academics, the lawyers, the industrialists, the politicos, the entertainment luvvies and eventually the bulk of the media itself. Oh, and don’t let’s ever forget, perhaps the most culpable of the lot, the bankers.
The EU proved the perfect vehicle for making this revolution possible. It also made it respectable even though, indeed, most of it was anyway. While noble in its concept, the EU began the process of subsuming its patchwork of nation states into a homogenised whole. Globalisation and multiculturalism became the new buzzwords and the developed world was urged to indulge in an orgy of consumerism. This had the effect of ratcheting up debt to unsustainable levels and soon the bubble burst with the financial crisis of 2008 – the worst in living memory. Luckily lessons had been learned from the last catastrophic crisis, the 1929 Wall Street crash, and a much more joined up world was able to climb out of it with a fraction of the misery of before.
But, like all things, it came at a price and that price is the one which propelled Trump to power and is propelling us out of the EU. The little man who had listened to his “betters” for fifty years had had enough. He had developed a deep and bitter antipathy for those whose greed had brought the misfortune upon him yet walked off smelling of roses and richer than ever. He had watched, with silent rage, the power brokers ship his jobs to sweatshops abroad and saw his warm and loving communities decimated and turned into wastelands. All the while the men who had done it grew richer by the billion while the poor bloody infantry saw their wages frozen and their living standards plummet. Adding salt to the wound, as the little man saw it, was the multiculturalism which the know-alls had forced on him.
What unites the two seismic events of Trump and Brexit is a deep disdain, felt by many ordinary people in the Western world, for a ruling class which, without consultation, sought to change forever the very nature of their societies. But it has not gone unnoticed that this privileged elite have never been an active or even visible part of the societies they are busily changing. Theirs is a cloistered world of high gates and security guards where the hoi polloi are well and truly kept at arm’s length.
Their insular world now trembles before the forces currently ranged against it. But watch this space: Trump and Brexit are only the beginning. Fresh earthquakes can be expected right across Europe in the months ahead.
Why we should not fear a Trump presidency
President Trump would be constrained by the Senate and House of Representatives.
The race for the US presidency is now coming into its final furlong and, against odds which would have seemed impossible even six months ago, Donald Trump is within a whisker of entering the Oval Office. It is therefore incumbent upon on us to ask what sort of presidency we would be looking at were this to happen.
First, let us be clear about one thing: this admittedly bizarre man is a man gifted with huge abilities. Yes, he is a showman of the most extraordinary kind; a loudmouth, many would argue, yet also thin skinned. He is capable of cruel invective and even crueller put-downs. He also espouses policies – his great wall and ban on Muslims – which would be sudden death to any conventional politician. But then again he isn’t a conventional politician. He is a businessman and a very successful one at that. He says things that are thought by many but are unsayable by the Washington elite. And it is that Washington elite that most fears his arrival in the White House.
“I’m going to drain the swamp,” is Trump’s colourful yet terrifying promise. In classical terms, that’s a vow to ‘clean the Augean Stables’, the definition of which is to ‘clear away corruption’ or to ‘perform a large and unpleasant task that has long called for attention’. Hercules is the one said to have carried it out so perhaps that’s where we get the term ‘the labours of Hercules’.
Anyway, Trump says that the little man is trodden underfoot and his interests are completely subordinated to those of the ruling classes. By these he means the politicians, the bankers, the captains of industry and, indeed, all the country’s decision makers – be they in the law, the military, the town or county halls, academia or even the church. There is, he says, a vast gang-up by all those he considers view themselves as superior, a cut above the common herd. We may have arrived, he argues, after centuries of struggle at a one person, one vote system of government in a system where the movers and shakers have contrived to make it seem otherwise.
Once upon a time, the people who put themselves forward for public office were high minded – or at least seemed so – and were driven by factors other than those of enriching themselves. More often than not they were worldly people, middle-aged and sometimes old who had already proved themselves in their chosen field and were esteemed by their peers. Among their successors, however, venality reigns supreme and you have the spectacle of presidents and prime ministers – Tony Blair is a case in point – using the prestige of their former office to tout for business among the world’s most unedifying rulers and all to join the ranks of the mega-rich themselves.
It is a moment of high irony that the dragon which threatens to slay this cabal of self-servers is as rich as Croesus himself. Yet he has never viewed himself as part of the mega-rich’s charmed circle and they, despite his riches, would never have admitted him to it. His brash vulgarity, no-holds-barred rhetoric and giant ego did not lend itself to their view of the world. That view might be one that tolerated all manner of low-life activities – business or otherwise – but they had to be masked in a veneer of respectability and kept from the public view. It was many of Trump’s sentiments which drove our own recent Brexit campaign.
So what are we to make of a looming Trump presidency? Should we fear this devil-may-care outsider, who threatens to hit the establishment like a tsunami? I think not. There are so many checks and balances in the world’s greatest democracy that, were he to run amok – which he has not done in business – he could be contained. And there is just a chance that he could succeed and ‘make America great again’. (Actually, in my view it has never ceased to be great.) In spectacular fashion with this latest Hillary FBI expose, a 10-point Clinton lead has narrowed in two days to one point.
This crazy election of two incredibly flawed candidates is now Trump’s to lose. If he stays on message for one week, avoids scandals of his own and puts a zip on his mouth he might just do it.
Hillary’s most dangerous stumble
Hillary can clearly be seen collapsing before being placed in the van at the 9/11 ceremony. Her head shaking and foot dragging point to a possible seizure. Could this be linked to her blood clot in 2012?
Trump has called Hillary many things in times past. He maintains she is ‘crooked’ and can never be straight with the American people, either in her business dealings or her period as Secretary of State. He believes, as we Brits like to say, that she is not a ‘fit and proper person’ to have charge of the destiny not just of her own nation, but that of the entire free world. He also holds that she represents the dark heart of the politico-economic system that he believes so oppresses the American nation. Now The Donald has found his ace in the hole: her very fitness to govern in the literal sense.
When called to the colours long ago as a humble National Serviceman, my countrymen proposed putting a gun in my hand with a license to use it against our country’s enemies – of which at that time there were many. But first they were going to ensure my competence, both mentally as well as physically. To that end I had to undergo a rigorous medical. They needed to know that I would be up to supporting my comrades, whose lives might depend on my actions. Any suspicion that I could fail at the crucial moment would have disqualified me.
The President of the United States operates on an altogether different plane. He or she, as Head of State as well as Commander-in-chief, has the lives and well-beings of countless millions as a responsibility. Physical as well as mental health is a crucial job requirement. The finger that hovers over the nuclear button must be up to it.
After this weekend, Hillary Clinton would be foolish to think that she can wave it all away with an unfunny joke, as she has done in the past over health issues. She is asking, on the strength of her say-so, that the American people trust her in the matter.
These are perilous times we are living through. The end of the imagined peace dividend that victory in the Cold War would bring us now seems a distant chimera. An ever more assertive Putin in the Kremlin is joined by an almost deranged Kim Jong-un in North Korea, who in quick succession last week loosed off three ballistic missiles, while Syria burns. Hillary has been gung-ho for years to impose a no-fly zone over that country. While that might have made sense three years ago, with Russian jets now crisscrossing its skies daily such an imposition at this time could unleash a big power conflagration. The stresses of such a build -up of tensions would almost certainly bring on one of Hillary’s fits.
The truth is that it is just not good enough that the Americans and all the rest of us should have such worries concerning one individual’s health and fitness for purpose. Hillary must be prevailed on to submit herself to an independent panel of health experts or, at the very least, make her very latest, up-to-date medical records available for inspection.
In my view it is an open question whether she can survive the next two incredibly gruelling months of presidential campaigning. I said as much back in May when I wrote about Hillary and her questionable health on my blog. Now it is out in the open. If she steps down, or is forced to do so, who will take her place? Would good ol’ Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President, step up to the plate to save the nation and possibly all the rest of us? Although there was talk of him throwing his hat into the ring during the primaries, I wouldn’t bet on that one. Bernie Sander’s devoted and almost messianic followers would be incandescent with rage were that to happen. Quite rightly, they would argue that, democratically, their man is the heir apparent. So Ultra-Left Bernie – the US’s own Jeremy Corbyn – would end in the ring against The Donald.
In that event would anyone care to place a bet against the world waking up one November morning, just a few weeks from now, to a President Donald Trump?
Brexit was a brave act by a brave nation
Stunned, gobsmacked, incredulous, horrified. All of these adjectives have been expressed around the world at Britain’s decision to quit the European Union. If Britons doubted that theirs was still a nation of consequence, they need only consider the world’s reaction to the referendum result last Friday.
I have to say that I can think of no braver an act of the working man since 1940 when, faced with what seemed like the overwhelmingly successful Nazi juggernaut, he chose to stand and fight rather than accept what many of his leaders considered to be an honourable and generous peace.
This time it was not military might that he defied, but the massed ranks of the political, business, banking and academic classes who told him that he would be committing economic suicide to quit the EU. Though he did not put his person at risk, he certainly – if they were to be believed – put his job and his family’s finances on the line.
But he is a stubborn creature, the British working man, and he is not easily cowed. Over the years he has developed an increasing distrust and deep antipathy to those who consider themselves his better. And as the fanciful figures were daily trotted out to warn of the doom which awaited him, he did not harken to their warnings but instead dug in his heels even further and effectively defied them to do their worst. Magnificent, I call it, even though I voted to remain. It reminds me of Churchill’s snorted response when he was invited to deplore a well-known military man’s alleged act of buggery: “In this weather! Good God, man, it makes you proud to be British!”
Not in over a hundred years has British politics been in such a state of turmoil. Civil war rages in the Labour Party while the Conservatives are in disarray with their leader, the prime minister, forced to quit fourteen months after winning a stunning electoral victory. In the other party, the leader has had two thirds of his shadow cabinet walk out and 170 of his MPs back a ‘No Confidence’ motion with him retaining the loyalty of a mere 40. A hundred-plus-year-old party is, as a result, on the brink of oblivion.
All this is taking place at a time when, like in 1940, it is us now against the world as a result of Brexit casting us adrift into uncharted waters. As if this isn’t enough mighty England has been ignominiously put out of the UEFA European Championship by the minnow, Iceland, playing for the very first time in the tournament.
What are we to do? What has become of us? First, let us remind ourselves of those many centuries when we operated as an independent, sovereign nation. Did we make a decent fist of it? I’ll say we did! We became the richest nation on the planet. We pioneered free trade, set up the first factory systems, launched the Industrial Revolution, carried our products to the far corners of the earth and along the way saved Europe from tyranny in two world wars which we could have stayed out of. It ill behoves, therefore, those ingrates across the water to forget this.
So it can fairly be said, in answer to my question, that we did pretty well for ourselves as Britain plc and we can do so again. My own feeling is that what we have done will encourage others to champion their rights, which are in danger of being subsumed in a Brussels despotism. Meantime, the shadow of an ever more assertive Germany hangs over Europe. Nothing, it now seems, can be done without first clearing it with Berlin.
I have no doubt that other nations will, as a result of Brexit, be encouraged to call for their own referendums. This will be the point at which Brussels will take a long hard look at itself. What it fails to recognise is the incredible pride and patriotism which exists in each of its member states. You only have to look at the flag waving at Eurovision and other such gatherings to catch a glimpse of this. Being subsumed and having their national identities eroded is not what they want.
When a new Europe emerges we may be prepared to look again at re-joining. There is no objection to Europe punching its weight in this emerging world of giants, but it must do so in a less intrusive, respectful and democratic way.
Whatever is decided on 23rd June, the show will go on
Referendums may seem like a good idea and, doubtless, they have their place in a working democracy, but they have a way of polarising society in a manner that general elections do not.
On both sides of the Atlantic there is a dangerous disconnect between the rulers and the ruled. That is why, I suspect, such unlikely characters as Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have confounded all expectations and caused us to believe that, in the current febrile atmosphere, virtually anything in politics can happen. The same disconnect can be said of the unelected and unaccountable gnomes of Brussels. At the moment we are cynically digesting the latest piece of hyperbole concerning the coming EU referendum and await with trepidation the next shocking apocalyptic revelation.
Genocide and war, they tell us, is a possible consequence if we make the wrong decision, as is a five-million rush to these crowded shores to swell our already ballooning numbers. The ten plagues of Egypt must surely be in the pipeline as the next possible item on the agenda. Which side will jump in with its own 21st century version of these horrors to scare the living daylights out of us is anybody’s guess. Is the public buying any of this nonsense? I suspect not.
Forecasts are notoriously unreliable. We spend billions worldwide trying to predict the weather and still we get it wrong. In the seventies, National Geographic featured scientists forecasting another ice age. In the 1920s, economists were convinced that a return to the gold standard would cure our economic woes. It made them worse. When Mrs Thatcher proposed her remedies, 364 leading economists signed a letter to say they would not work. They did. When the three party leaders, the entirety of the establishment and almost all the chattering classes said we should join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in the early 1990s, the ERM, they were wrong again. Many of the same group of know-alls also wanted us sign up to the euro and predicted doom if we did not. How lucky for us that we declined to listen to them. “We would be able to do our business in Afghanistan without loss of life,” said the defence minister. Nearly 500 died. 13,000 would come to us from Eastern Europe, said Labour. Over 1,000,000 did. When George Osborne proposed austerity, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, rushed in saying he was “playing with fire.” We ended up with the highest growth rate in the western world and over 2 million new jobs created. The governor of the Bank of England said it would be necessary to put up interest rates when employment fell below 7%. It was not.
So much for the “experts” knowing what will happen. Why should we take any of their forecast seriously?
Referendums may seem like a good idea and, doubtless, they have their place in a working democracy, but they have a way of polarising society in a manner that general elections do not. Perhaps it is because they concern huge and generational issues, the results of which cannot be unpicked five years down the line when you realise you got it wrong. Whatever the reason, they seem to generate a level of bitterness unique to themselves. Remember the nastiness of some of the SNP zealots in 2014? Had I been a unionist at that time, I certainly would have thought it prudent to keep my head down and definitely not put a poster in my Glasgow flat window.
The truth is that whatever is decided on 23rd June, the show will go on and the good ship Great Britain Plc. will plough on much as it did throughout all those centuries before the European Union was even heard of.
At this moment in history it cannot be denied that the EU is going through a rough patch. The euro may yet implode; even moneybags Germany has not enough to save beleaguered Spain, never mind troubled Italy if the markets call time on them. The single currency was certainly ill-conceived and has massive problems which have yet to be addressed. As for the Schengen Zone – that great leap of idealism – it poses a huge security risk in this volatile, post-9/11 world and it could be dynamite, literally. The EU’s policies are driving extremism in Europe leading to the rise of neo-Fascist parties. In terms of job creation, the EU is currently a disaster area and its growth rates is abysmal (on both of these counts we are an exception). A good case, you might argue for the Brexit. Why cling to a loser?
At the same time, you might equally argue that to cut ourselves loose might be to put ourselves on the wrong side of history. As well as staying at peace, a continent united is obviously going to be able to make its voice heard loudly in the world and its trade deals carry enormous clout.
Europe’s whole history since Rome fell apart has been to find a way of getting back together again. Various of its more powerful states have sought to do it under their own hegemony, but that has been unacceptable to the rest. Europe’s glory, and you have to say achievement, today is that it has found a way of doing so largely by consent rather than by coercion. Yet unfortunately in many important areas it has messed up and its democratic credentials are seriously flawed.
Perhaps a vote to leave might provide the system with the jolt it needs to make it acceptable, not just to us but to others who do not wish to see their identity subsumed in a monolithic super state which wishes to homogenise them all into a blandness and make all Europe seem the same. If Europe is to succeed a way must be found to preserve its charming idiosyncrasies as well as a meaningful level of sovereignty for its nation states.
Ken IS a Nazi apologist – Hitler wasn’t “mad,” he was evil
Amidst all the who-ha over Ken Livingstone’s assertions about Hitler being a Zionist, one thing seems to have escaped the commentariat: he appears to be absolving Hitler from responsibility for the crimes committed after his election success in 1932. He does so by claiming that “Hitler supported Zionism” in 1932 “before going mad” following his entirely legal and success pursuit of power. The clear implication here is that we must accept that Hitler didn’t know what he was doing when he launched World War II or secretly ordered the lethal eradication of European Jews.
Across the entire world it is accepted that an insane person cannot be held responsible for his or her actions, however heinous. To be culpable, humanity has long held the view that a person must know the distinction between right and wrong – goodness and evil. That is why, also, there is a limit in a child’s case of criminal responsibility (in our case 10 years of age). If Livingstone is to be believed, even if we had captured Hitler we could not have put him on trial because he was a victim of a diseased mind. He was crazy. Perhaps Livingstone has convinced himself that the enormity of what Hitler did is in itself proof positive that he was mad. If that yardstick were to be applied more generally, then we were wrong to put Serbia’s tyrant, Slobodan Milosevic, on trial. Such a yardstick would also have excused Pol Pot of Cambodia and just about any other tyrant who ever lived.
The fact is that Hitler was the leader of a criminal gang of misfits who knew perfectly well what they were doing. Look no further than their efforts to conceal their murder of the Jews. This tells you that they knew what they were doing was wrong. Indeed, not one single paper relating to the Holocaust bares Hitler’s signature. All was communicated to his underlings verbally. This great and meticulous nation of record keepers kept no record of the biggest crime in human history. Livingstone’s own crime is to act as an apologist for such a man as Hitler.
To Brexit or not to Brexit?
The Europe which we put our signature to almost two generations ago is not the Europe we are being asked to vote on in a few weeks’ time. Then it was all about trade, except that is wasn’t.
The European Common Market began its life as something of a confidence trick. The political classes knew from the very beginning that it was a political project designed to relegate the nation states of Europe to a subservient role. They had concluded that they were nothing but trouble and were the biggest single cause of its terrible wars.
Just the same they knew that the peoples of Europe were, almost without exception, lovers of the lands which bore them and felt a deep attachment to the cultures which had developed within their borders. Talk at that stage of a European Union might have frightened the horses and run the risk of it being still-born. So they had to tread carefully. A mighty trading bloc though? Well, who could object to that? We all want to improve our standard of living.
Thus was born the Common Market. Europe had always been strong on markets and the use of that word was perfectly designed to allay suspicions. They were content to play the long game. Stage one was to lock the lot in lucrative trade arrangements, recognising that nations doing the bulk of their business with each other could not, thereafter, easily break free.
Actually, the whole business had begun even before the Treaty of Rome with the creation of the Iron and Steel Community of France, Germany and the Benelux countries. The idea there was that you couldn’t go charging off with a secret re-armament programme, as Hitlerite Germany had done, if all your iron and steel came from a common source.
Europe had had enough of war and a system, so they reasoned, had to be created whereby future outbreaks would be next to impossible. Although there was nothing wrong about that, hadn’t the setting up of NATO nine years earlier achieved that? As Europe grew richer – helped in no small part by the generosity of Uncle Sam with his Marshall Aid programme – it became safe to move on to stage two of the project and chuck overboard that boring old, and grudgingly conceded title, Common Market. Now it became the European Community.
Still no feathers were ruffled, but the more discerning of us could see where the project was headed. Not long afterwards came the great European Union and all was plain to see. With that came the burgundy coloured passports that let us all know – in case naively, a few of us nursed any continuing illusions of national independence – that we were now part of a burgeoning superstate. The Euro was meant to be the final brick in the wall.
The reason all the member states, with the exception of Britain, had been so accepting of the project was that they believed that the nation state, through its inability to protect them from the ravages of war, had been discredited. Only Britain’s island status had saved it from occupation. It therefore had no reason to lose faith in the nation. It stood proud of its institutions and the fact that its Industrial Revolution had changed the face of humanity. Also its exalted former position as the world’s greatest empire made it harder for it to become just another brick in the wall.
But now we must decide: do we cut loose and regain that independence which has been lost, or do we stick with it and with the confidence of a major player work within the system to bring it to the democratic accountability which we Anglo Saxons insist on? We are far from being alone in wishing this.
The world is increasingly moving in favour of what may be called the Anglosphere with our language and business models reigning supreme. I do not doubt that Britain PLC could cut a swathe in the world, but do we want a mighty power on our doorstep which we are unable to influence?
Nevertheless, worries abound concerning immigration, which apart from putting all our public services under strain, has the power to change the character of our country forever. Much of the fury and distrust of the political class which drives the Trump presidential campaign in America is at work here in Britain. They never asked us, say the doubters, about immigration and they never asked us if we were willing to cede sovereignty. They seem only interested in looking after themselves. And as to what Europe was really all about that, well that too, was founded on a lie.
Although the EU was a work of the utmost deceit, we are where we are and we should not necessarily quit because of that. Perhaps the best reason to stay is a geopolitical one. Out of the EU, however brilliantly we handle our affairs, with a population of 64 million ours might end up being a forlorn voice crying in the wilderness.
It is not an easy choice to make. But then who ever said life was easy?
China must chastise its nuclear-armed neighbour
Beneath this polished veneer lies mass starvation and poverty.
At a time when the world is wrestling with perhaps it’s greatest humanitarian crisis since World War Two a scenario is developing in the Far East which has the potential to eclipse even the worst that Russian air strikes and President Assad are capable of. It concerns North Korea.
Just when we had managed to convince ourselves that we had reigned in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the ‘Hermit State’ with its mad boy-wonder brags to the world that he has exploded a hydrogen bomb. He then follows this up a short time later by firing a rocket into space demonstrating that he can deliver his terrible toy virtually anywhere in the world.
Quite how his bankrupt state ever got the wherewithal to finance so horrendously an expensive operation as a nuclear bomb programme is something of a mystery (although I suppose starving its people helps) as indeed it is a mystery where he got the techno/scientific expertise to pull it off. Pakistan, in this regard, has a lot to answer for as one of its scientists is said to have sold the essential start up information. If this is so, what a crime against humanity this was. Pakistan itself is highly unstable and many consider that it is only a matter of time before it falls to the Taliban who may then gain access to its own illicit nuclear arsenal.
The bald fact that now confronts the world is that a pitiless, paranoiac delinquent has been allowed to assemble the ultimate weapon of mass destruction as well as the means of delivery. In truth we should have been much less worried about the mad mullahs of Iran acquiring it than Kim Jong-un.
What sort of message does it send out to the world that we have allowed this to happen? There are other states far bigger and more significant than North Korea with its 25 million people who may judge that their status in the world, as well as their ability to intimidate their neighbours, will be mightily enhanced by their possession of the bomb too.
Only the long-established democracies – which have the necessary checks and balances – can properly be trusted to hold such weapons and even then it would be better if none of them held such awesome power. Short of a ground invasion of North Korea, there are only two options available to the world. One is for the United Nations to consider expelling North Korea as a member and applying comprehensive sanctions backed up by a naval blockade, if necessary, to ensure that its strictures are not breached. The other is to call on China to do its duty by the rest of humanity.
North Korea is impervious to the protests of the entire world so long as it has the support of its northern neighbour. The umbilical cord of China is what keeps it going. Without it, it must bend. China, for its part, is fearful that if it cuts this cord it will have a Syria-style rush across its border. It is also fearful that a collapsing North Korea will fall into the arms of its prosperous and powerful neighbour, South Korea, whose armies, alongside its long-standing ally America, will advance to the Yalu river, the boundary between it and North Korea. China must be assured that the latter will not happen.
As it happens, China is furious at Kim Jong-un’s brinkmanship as is North Korea’s other neighbour in the region, Russia. There is now talk of America providing a shield for its allies in the region called THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) – a new Star Wars – and this absolutely terrifies both China and Russia as they cannot match America in this technology and it threatens to render obsolete their own nuclear arsenals.
So now is the time to get tough, not just with North Korea but with its indulgent backer, China. Either it wishes to curtail nuclear proliferation, which will surely happen if North Korea gets away with it, or it does not. Failure to come on side will spark an arms race in East Asia. With tensions already high in the South China seas over the huge oil deposits contested by six nations, this is the last thing that China must want. It risks a Balkan-style powder keg situation such as led up to the First World War igniting.
We must stop flagellating ourselves over the sins of the past and learn to live with them
The man who wanted British rule from the Cape to Cairo.
Remember Blaire’s apology for the Irish potato famine? Or Brown’s apology for our treatment of the Bletchley Park codebreaker, Alan Turing? How about his apology to the families of the 306 executed ‘cowards’ of WWI? This furore over Cecil Rhode’s Oxford University statue is another prime example of our breast-beating tendencies today. What nonsense it is to maintain that because ethnic minority students walk past a high-up – and out of the way – statue of the arch empire builder they are suffering a form of violence. Let’s grow up a little; this surely is over-egging it.
I am not saying that we should not be aware of what was done by us long ago around the world and, indeed, that much of it was wrong. It was even sometimes brutal. But that is to see it through today’s prism. George Washington was a slave owner and Elizabeth II tortured Catholics. Churchill excoriated Gandhi and the whole notion of Indian independence. He positively gloried in the British Empire. Are all his statues, worldwide, to be taken down, including the one in Parliament Square?
I can list many examples of terrible things done by our nation. I can also quote you many more carried out by other nations. Of course, that doesn’t make any of them right. It is simply to contextualise them.
The retreat from empire in the British case was orderly and largely peaceable. In France’s it was bitter and bloody. The First World War brought about an upsurge of nationalism. The genie was partially put back in the bottle after that war, but it burst out with a vengeance following the Second World War and there was no putting it back. Bankruptcy and the need to rebuild Europe convinced us that the imperial game was up. Others were slower to realise it.
Those undergraduate agitators should pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that their privileged Oxford education came courtesy of one of the undoubtedly good things that Rhodes did with his life: he donated an immense sum to the university. I know his detractors will leap in and say that it was wealth accumulated on the backs of poor, benighted Africans, and to an extent, this is true. But we are where we are and numbers of them are at least seeing some of it coming back to them. The fact is we cannot undo the past.
Nowadays we are much taken to apologising for our forefathers’ misdeeds and though I see no great harm coming from that I have to ask myself where it ends. Should Rome apologise to us for its soldiers flogging our Queen Boudicca and raping her daughters? It may, for all I know, be that it makes a few of our ‘victims’ feel better for our having owned up and taken sack-clothe. Perhaps the idea is not that at all, but to make us feel better about ourselves. The question then is whether we are actually achieving anything meaningful at all. Does it help to rake over old coals and give ourselves an unhelpful guilt complex?
If we were such a shower of cruel oppressors, why are our former colonies so anxious to maintain their links with us? Why do they play an active part in the Commonwealth club and travel from the far corners of the earth for its bi-annual jamboree? It is telling that the French have not been able to form such a club.
It can be argued that while we took much – especially from India in the early years – we also gave much. We irrigated huge swathes of the country which hitherto had never been brought under the plough by constructing 40,000 miles of canals. We gave it, too, the largest railway system in all Asia (another 40,000 miles.) We also built and surfaced roads and constructed the 2,000-mile Grand Trunk Road east-west with trees either side to shield its travellers from the Indian sun. We gave our former subjects throughout the Empire the rule of law. We gave the Indian subcontinent parliamentary government. We also saved myriad constructs and temples, including the Taj Mahal, and its ancient language, Sanskrit, by setting up the School of Oriental Studies. We gave them an education system, which they maintain with all its rigours to this day, and we gave them a free press. Oh, and we also gave them the greatest love of their lives, cricket. It has become the poor boy’s hoped-for route out of poverty; their equivalent of our premier league.
In the last century of our rule there we developed a strong conscience so that, when we stood in mortal peril in the two World Wars, they martialled the largest volunteer armies the world has even known to help us win them.
As well as the profiteers and exploiters of the early years, we later sent the brightest and best that our country has ever produced to govern it. The special public school, Haileybury – set up to train those administrators in the languages and culture of the sub-continent – was second to none with, created in its wake, the Indian Civil Service, the most dedicated ‘sea-green incorruptible’ system ever devised. Its entry examination had no equal on earth.
Without exonerating Rhodes for his excesses, he, like many others of his time, believed fervently that they had a duty to mankind to spread British values across the world. It may seem presumptuous, even arrogant to us today, but because the Industrial Revolution had so changed the face of humanity they believed, with their strong Christian faith, that they were the elect of God, chosen to lead the world to a better future. It was an understandable enough trap to fall into and any country finding itself in that position might well have believed similarly. In truth they did mean well.
So let the callow hot-heads who will take away that priceless Oxford degree show a little humility themselves. They are young and, for the moment, know little of the world. For our part we are content to stand on the record and let history be the judge.
Troubled waters afoot
Despite a total mess surrounding us on all sides, a new opportunity presents itself in the Syrian quagmire.
What disordered times we are living though now. What a total mess surrounds us on all sides. You have Islamic terrorism stalking our cities; the European Union buckling under the weight of a tide of ‘refugees’ while at the same time grappling with bankrupt states on its periphery; our own referendum to decide whether we’re going to cut and run; an Opposition in total disarray; an America which refuses anymore to act as the world’s policeman; and failed states lapping Europe’s boundaries which have collapsed into anarchy. As if this all wasn’t enough, the world is still not through the consequences of the biggest financial crash in living memory. What are we to make of it all?
Not so long ago, we faced a foe on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was an implacable one who had the means to destroy us all. But he didn’t. There were ground rules which we both observed, since he knew that we had the power to destroy him, too. He wore a uniform and he had client states – a great many of them – which he kept in check, as we did ours. There would be stand-offs from time to time and localised bushfire wars, but they were handled within well understood rules which worked. All that is now history and no one knows any longer where they are.
I cannot help but think that a great mistake was made when Communism collapsed. The former enemy was prostrate and needed help, but he didn’t get it. He went through ten years of hell with robber barons (oligarchs) stripping the state of assets and operating a mafia-style regime. To curb it all, but without success, authoritarianism returned to Russia in the form of Vladimir Putin. But he did not see himself to be at odds with the European Union. Indeed, he sought to reach out to it and gain acceptance as a valued partner. He even wanted an accommodation with NATO on joint exercises.
But all these overtures fell on deaf ears and now you have a troublesome bear rampaging through the undergrowth, which has had to be put into the school-equivalent of ‘special measures’ with sanctions applied.
A new opportunity, however, presents itself in the Syrian quagmire to put right some of this damage. Russia is as anxious as we are to bring that murderous conflict to an end. It is equally understanding of the need to play its part in destroying Isis, the most malignant evil since the days of Pol Pot.
Just as important, it accepts that the Syrian dictator, Assad, cannot be part of any long-term solution and that, as long as a face-saving interim arrangement can be made, Putin will go along with it. Assad has, hitherto, always enjoyed their backing; this is because Assad, and before him his father, had allowed Russia to maintain a naval base on the Syrian coast and pretend to a Mediterranean presence.
Provided its interests are protected in any eventual settlement, Russia can be expected to cooperate and play its part in ending the civil war. In so doing and acting in concert with the West, the West can begin the process of undoing the damage which its former cold-shouldering of Russia brought about. The European Union, for its part, can begin to lock Russia into its embrace and give Putin the respectability and acceptance which he originally craved.
Turning to Uncle Sam, we are going to have to accept that he will never again be prepared to shoulder the burden of world peace alone. He made a terrible mistake in withdrawing the last ten thousand troops from Iraq. Had they stayed as an emergency, fire-fighting backup, Isis would never have been able to establish itself.
What is needed now is for the European Union to step up to the plate, militarily, for the purpose of burden-sharing. Were it to do so, Uncle Sam would happily abandon any thoughts of retreating back into isolationism which was a major contributor to World War Two.
It is morally and dangerously wrong for Europe to expect any longer a free ride where security is concerned. It has the wealth and it must use it, along with others, to bolster America. I am sure the United Nations, in the interests of world peace, would welcome such a development. Of course, the European powers would have to make it clear that they seek no territorial advantage and that this is not a fresh round of empire building by the back door. Even Iran must be allowed to play its part, along with neighbouring powers.
I doubt that even if peace, by such a combination of power, can be restored to Syria that in the short term a viable government can be made to work when there is such bitterness on all sides. In that event, a United Nations mandate should be imposed on the country for It has to be accepted that, just occasionally, only the application of overwhelming force can settle the argument. This, I believe, is just such a case
We did Xi Jinping proud
I am glad that we did Xi Jinping and his lovely wife proud. The splendour of his welcome will be noted and very well received in China.
There has been much ado about our kow-towing to the Chinese during the recent visit of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping and talk of our being a puppy in danger of being put on a leash. I believe these worries to be misplaced. China is a fact on the modern world stage with its second largest economy. What it does or does not do impacts all of us.
The first major western power to seriously engage with her will reap a rich reward. She has been unable to achieve this with the country she would most like to, namely the United States, so she turns to the country she regards as the next most significant.
The reason she can make no headway with the US is that Uncle Sam confronts her militarily in East Asia, being locked in a web of alliances with regional powers there. At the core of the dispute is our old friend, oil. Huge deposits have been found in the South China Sea bordering on five East Asian countries that are all insistent that they have rights there. Also, the clamour of protests about job losses to the Chinese and internet piracy is greater there, as is the human rights lobby. Of course, all of these things are important and we would be foolish to ignore them.
But take steel as the most recent example. Just as we cannot manipulate the price of oil, so we are unable to do so with steel. With world demand slowing down – yes, led by China – there is a glut of it. Dumping is an inevitable consequence and we must deal with it.
Steel production is strategic; we cannot therefore lose the industry completely. We must be in a position to fire up those coke furnaces at some point in the future if the situation requires it. China and the rest have to realise that they must take their share of the pain by reducing capacity. Furthermore, it must boost home demand by turning itself into much more of a consumer society. The steel issue is exactly the sort of case in which the clout of the EU could achieve the required result where we alone could not.
Our relationship with China is more longer-standing than that of any other Western nation. They understand that and this is one of reasons they have turned to us. We were the very first to engage with them and introduce them to Western ways all those years ago, when we sent Lord McCartney on a trade mission to the ‘Celestial Kingdom’ in 1793. Famously, he refused to kow-tow, as required, to the ‘Son of Heaven’. Then, 150 years of ruling Hong Kong gave us an understanding of the Chinese psyche not vouchsafed to any other Western power.
They are touchy, to put it mildly, about being lectured by outsiders on human rights or anything else for that matter. They still see themselves as unique among humans. Being crushed in two opium wars by McCartney’s heirs didn’t change that perception. And their conception of human rights has a different slant to ours; they argue that lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty whilst maintaining stability is very much paying attention to human rights. They wonder why the West pays so much attention to them while it sucks up to primitive, atavistic Arab regimes who publicly crucify and behead teenagers. If they are lambasted for the number of executions in their country, remember that they number 1.3 billion. It is a nonsense to say they execute more than Iran or Saudi Arabia when those countries number 70 and 28 million respectively. Proportionately, China is way below them.
I personally take the view that nothing will achieve success, as we would like it, in China than that she become richer. Rich people are not so easily pushed around. The human rights of our own people were once – and not so very long ago – severely circumscribed. But in a thirty-year period in the nineteenth century, per capita income in Britain grew by 500% – a growth rate never before seen in human history. Our people became freer than they had ever been with trades Union rights guaranteeing that the days of gross employer and landlord exploitation were over for ever.
China sees that the soft power that our country enjoys all around the world with its Commonwealth contacts, its EU membership, its command of the world’s number one language and its close, familial association with the US – still the dominant power on the planet – makes us the nation of choice to cultivate. Also not lost on them is the fact that we are now the fastest growing economy in the Western world, with more jobs created last year than the whole of the EU put together. All these things and more confirm our relevance in their eyes. Also our ‘open for business’ outlook on the world goes down very well with them, as do our elite schools, peerless universities and exciting cultural attractions. Even being the home of James Bond makes us more interesting.
My own view is that, if we play our cards right, we and China could have a very exciting future together. Our joining the recently created and Chinese-sponsored Asian Development Bank may have annoyed the US, but it makes a great deal of sense and demonstrates to the Chinese that we are capable of acting independently of our former colony.
Trade enriches the world. It’s what makes it go round. It breaks down barriers and improves our understanding of each other. It makes war less likely with there being too much to lose and it addresses perhaps mankind’s most pressing problem: its ballooning population. No rich country has a high birth rate any more than a poor record on human rights abuses. Trade is what got the West where it is today; truly it is king.
So I am glad that we did Xi Jinping and his lovely wife proud. The splendour of his welcome will be noted and very well received in China. Even Jeremy Corbyn behaved himself.
Soon we will be receiving the Prime Minister of India, in whose land two million of our forefathers lie buried. We can do no less for him. That exotic, cricket loving country has a very special place in our hearts. Because of the institutions we left it with, not least our language, law, and democratic ways, it has a head start on China. I wouldn’t be surprised if, one day, it were to outpace China.
Longing for a new Space Race
Dark narrow streaks called recurring slope lineae emanate out of the walls of Garni crater on Mars. The dark streaks here are up to few hundred meters in length. They are hypothesised to be formed by flow of briny liquid water on Mars.
What fantastic news it was that there is almost certainly seasonal running water on Mars. While there is a remote possibility of marine life under the ice cap that envelops Europa, one of Jupiter’s larger moons, it is Mars, our so-called sister planet, which is the celestial body in our solar system which has always fascinated us.
In Victorian times we were naive enough to believe in, shall I say, manmade canals on its surface. Just as well there were no men there; had they been anything like us, they might have fancied our planet rather than their own. With Martian surface temperatures rising to never more than freezing and plummeting as low as -139°C – against our lowest of -60°C – the temptation to take over our lovely, benign habitat, would have been great.
But, seriously, it is of huge significance that there seems to be flowing water on Mars. The reason it doesn’t freeze is because of its very high salt content, mixed with sodium and magnesium perchlorate. It is thirteen times saltier than Earth’s seas and flows freely during the Martian summer. It is enough to burn your skin; not too welcoming for a dip and certainly not the sort to get a mouthful of.
The greatest question that has exercised modern humans is whether we are alone in the universe. Just to complicate matters further, it is now thought that there may, actually, be many universes. So how rare is life? We know there must be a whole set of circumstances in place to give it even a chance. Venus – a misnamed planet if ever there was one – has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead and an incredibly dense and sulphuric atmosphere. It suffers from a runaway greenhouse effect. No chance of life there.
We know we are alone in our solar system – at least in the form of ourselves and the other life that surrounds us on Earth – but we also know that, clever as we are, we started as the lowest form of microbial life in the primordial ‘soup’ that once passed for oceans.
No one knows how that first single cell arrived or developed. Maybe it came to us riding on or in an asteroid, or comet. Or, perhaps, a chunk of another planet ricocheting off that heavenly body by an asteroid strike of its own and sent earthwards. And no one knows how that single cell divided into two and began its long journey to us. Perhaps it was a lightning strike into that primordial ‘soup’ that triggered it.
If we can establish that even microbial life once existed on a long ago, much warmer Mars, and is still there, dead or alive, then the probability is that we have companion peoples spread across the infinite reaches of the cosmos. Actually, I personally – for what it’s worth – have never doubted it. Notwithstanding how many the factors must come together to make advanced life possible, the sheer scale of the universe – and never mind the possibility of multiple universes – means that even if the odds were 10,000,000,000,000:1, it will have happened. And many times.
Our first microbial organisms began their evolutionary journey into us around 3 billion years ago. And there must be many habitable planets much older than our own which may have begun their journey into advanced life much earlier than ours. After all, the Big Bang took place nearly 14 billion years ago. If these civilisations managed to survive into maturity, they must be hugely more advanced than us. Imagine where a thousand years will take us from where we are now – and that is just a blink in space time. Then imagine a civilisation a million years ahead.
“So, where are they?” you ask. “Why haven’t we heard from them?” The answer may be that we have, but don’t know it. Or that such smart creature – dare we say considerate – hold to Star Trek’s Prime Directive of non-interference.
Then again, it may be that the sheer immensity of the distances which separate us confound even the most advanced civilisations. “Ah, but,” I hear you say, “what about warp speed and worm holes?” Yes, but they may only be part of our wild and ever-hopeful imaginings. The simple truth could be that even the cleverest of aliens cannot overturn the iron laws of physics. Perhaps one or more of those laws block our pathways to each other for ever.
What is undoubtedly true is that sooner or later SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) will hear from them in a form of encryption that we can understand. But we can never have conversations. Even at light speed, it would take far, far too long for a message to get back to the sender.
I well remember the incredible excitement which surrounded the Apollo missions and, in particular, those steps down the Luna module to make contact for the first time with the surface of an alien world. That was 1969. If only we had kept up that momentum, we would have been on Mars long ago. Instead, we chose to spend our precious resources on foreign wars, defense establishments and ever more fiendish ways of killing each other.
Having said that, I have to acknowledge that it was the Cold War and America’s refusal to be beaten to the moon that pulled off that stunning feat. NASA has shown that the final building block to possible life on Mars is there and that a permanent presence on that planet is possible. China’s interest in the Red Planet may be all that is needs to kick start a fresh race into space. I hope so. I would love to live long enough to relive a similar thrill to that which I enjoyed all those long years ago.
Well done Plympton Gardeners’ Association!
Grateful thanks to Plympton Gardeners’ Association, who dress out Ridgeway’s six concrete tubs (they’ve even painted them white). City parks department could learn a thing or two from this dedicated group, who even do what parks never did… keep it going throughout winter. Parks abandoned their post in their ill-chosen efforts to scrimp, but you’ve stepped into the breech with great panache. Thanks!
Lessons from our hunter-gather ancestors
Our digestive system didn’t evolve to work 24/7, which is what our present ‘three square meals + snacks’ regime forces it to.
Oh, dear, I must apply myself once more to curbing my spiralling weight. I haven’t got what it takes to knock out the delicacies of life nor reduce what is left to minuscule amounts so that my calorific intake matches the reduced output of calories which comes with getting older. Moreover, I won’t be forced into eating things I don’t like. So the alternative is my fasting regime (for a period) which readers may be familiar with.
It might seem a drastic solution to go without food for 36 hours – a friend once described it as the nuclear option – but for me it works. Funnily enough, once I’ve psyched myself up to get started it isn’t nearly as grim as you might think. The joy of getting on those scales the morning after my nil by mouth effort makes it all worthwhile. And what heaven it is to be back to normal eating the following day! Anyway, each to his own. I must suffer for my excesses and the hairshirt may be good for the soul. The system delivers for me, with results coming in at an astonishing rate. And that’s how I like it. I haven’t the patience for the long haul. On those days of fasting, though, I do make sure I keep up the fluids.
One or two of my friends have cautioned me on my fasting caper, but I won’t be put off. You see, I have a theory to counter their concerns and it goes like this…
Anthropologists will tell you that we are essentially the same animal we were 100,000 years ago. Our whole digestive system – indeed our whole being – was geared to an irregular supply of food. It was a feast or famine existence, literally. Our world in that long ago time was a hunter-gather world. The boys hunted and the girls gathered. Kills on the African savanna were few and far between and nuts, fruits and berries seasonal. So evolution had to come up with an answer which allowed a big brained creature, whose diet required regular protein (principally meat), to get through those extended periods between kills. It couldn’t afford our ancestors to become lethargic and less focused during those hungry days leading up to the next successful hunt; if that had happened they would never have been sharp enough to nail those elusive, fleet-footed gazelles. (This, perhaps, explains why on my fast days in the shop I fancy I perform better than usual and even problem solve more imaginatively. I do a lot more thinking outside the box too.)
I think it entirely possible, indeed, likely, that our systems, benefit from a complete clear-out. In those far off times our digestion wasn’t at work 24/7, which is what our present ‘three square meals + snacks’ regime forces it to be. Nor were our bowels carrying waste matter round the clock.
It may be interesting to note that fasting is important to several religions. Perhaps the ancients knew a thing or two that we have forgotten in our headlong rush into modernity. Abstinence – call it a rest-up – in a great many fields can work wonders. Who knows, sex may even be among the beneficiaries!
My chief point is that evolution works at a much slower pace than the breakneck changes which have taken place since the Industrial Revolution. A great deal of catching up is in the pipeline.
While we are subject to a host of the ailments of our early ancestors, we have added a huge range of new ones due to our modern life, which includes much less exercise than they were formerly obliged to engage in. I doubt, for instance, that our forebears had many diabetic sufferers in their ranks. And there was no room for fatties in their world – try running down a springbok with a fifty-inch waist!
Anyway, yours truly, has put his hairshirt on for the next little while and hopes for the best. I know I will get the most enormous buzz when I arrive at my destination and that, too, must be good.
‘Collective’ madness in the Labour Party
There is a complete absence in the Labour leadership contest of what we like to call the ‘big beasts’. They are all minnows.
How can we explain the ‘Collective’ madness that has taken over the Labour Party? I have just returned from lands of former Collectives (mega farms set up by the Communists) in Latvia and Lithuania, and I can tell you that Jeremy Corbyn’s much admired legacy to those once Communist countries is a nightmarish one.
The man might come across as a sincere idealist – not at all like the serried ranks of the career politicians so many disdain today – but the likes of Jeremy are the ones to fear the most. They are the zealots, cast in the mould of that ‘sea-green incorruptible’, Maximilien Robespierre, of the French Revolution. While on the subject of the quiet, softly spoken, hard-to-rile idealist, was not ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin exactly that sort of man? He, however had a term for the likes of sweet natured, but for us dangerous, men like Jeremy Corbyn; useful idiots.
And while an old geezer, myself, isn’t it a bit odd that so many young people appear so much in love with old geezer Corbyn? It’s all a little perplexing. If I were to make a guess as to part of the reason – and in life there are, more often than not, many reasons – I would say it is illustrative of the depth of public disenchantment with the political class. And when a man comes forward, however misguided, who is clearly a man of conviction and seems authentic, the young grab at him.
Another factor, surely, is the complete absence in the Labour leadership contest of what we like to call the ‘big beasts’. They’re all minnows. Alan Johnson might have qualified for that sobriquet, but he doesn’t want to know. Perhaps he’s canny enough not to risk losing his sanity in trying to bring together such a disparate band of brothers in what he might view as a poisoned chalice.
Then there’s that totally toxic Blair legacy. We won’t speak of the horrors of the Iraq war or the dodgy dossier that deceived us into sanctioning an illegal war, but there is such a litany of other failed measures that found their way on to the statute book that I might cause you to develop apoplexy half way through were I to attempt to list them all.
His favourite ‘Blair Babe’, Tessa Jowell, loves pontificating and acting as cheer leader for the Bambi project, but she would be better advised finding some stone to crawl under. It was she, who as Culture Secretary, allowed round-the-clock drinking, which has turned all of our city centres into no go areas for the majority of people at weekends. Worst of all the things she did was to promote online casino gambling – that egregious, family-wrecking Act which flies in the face of everything the titans of Old Labour stood for. These titans were high-minded men of probity, who among their other fine and compassionate qualities was a determination to uphold individual dignity and family life. Gambling was anathema to them.
Despite Corbyn’s phenomenal rise against the odds, one or other of his pigmy opponents may yet come through in the race to succeed disastrous Ed Miliband. But even if that were to happen, what does the whole business tell us about the present state of the Labour Party? Could a split prove terminal?
We have grown so used to a duopoly of political power that we could be forgiven for thinking that Tories and Labour are a permanent part of the political landscape. But even in the 20th century this was not the case. The party of Lloyd George seemed just as permanent on the eve of World War One. For much of the previous century, that Liberal giant of principled government, William Gladstone, bestrode the political firmament. Then, after Lloyd George, the party became an irrelevance. Following their brief re-appearance and engagement with power under the recent Coalition, they have again sunk back into irrelevance. Is it now, as a result, a return to business as usual? Not necessarily.
Whether Corbyn succeeds or not, what his extraordinary success has shown is the deep schism within the Labour Party. It may prove unbridgeable. Certainly it will take more than any of the lightweights on offer to heal the wounds of what is turning out to be a bitter, acrimonious fight. Tories may gloat over what is going on, but they would be wrong to do so. Any properly functioning democracy needs an effective Opposition. You cannot expect the media to perform this role alone, splendid though it is in exposing maladministration and wrongdoing. (How incredibly right it was to resist Leveson’s proposals to muzzle it. Do you seriously think the establishment would have allowed itself to be investigated for child abuse had those proposals gone through?)
There is now, as I see it, a chance for a regathering of the forces of the sensible Left to challenge an overweening government. Essentially the Liberal Democrats are a left-of-centre party. Were they to throw their lot in with similarly minded elements in the Labour Party, it could consign forever to the dustbin of history that Trotskyite wing of Labour that so bedevils its chances of regaining the trust of the British people.
It might, in the process, appeal to those many citizens north of the border and in Wales who still have faith in a Union which has shone so brightly for so long and raised us, a small people, so high among the nations of the earth.
Schäuble needs a history lesson
Poor, benighted Greece. Yes, it lived beyond its means, encouraged by greedy bankers all too willing to see it mortgage its future. And, yes, the Greek way of doing things seems decidedly un-Germanic.
What an unedifying carry-on that scrambled, weekend marathon was, called to decide Greece’s fate and preserve the integrity of the euro. A two days’ notice summons went out to the nine heads of government not in the euro who were told to attend that Sunday. Then they were told to stand down. They didn’t need a grand council of all twenty-eight EU members after all. Talk about an omnishambles and the Grand Old Duke of York.
It was always meant to be that, once enrolled, you were as locked in as all fifty states of the American union are to the dollar. But it turns out that that this is not the case. Former Foreign Secretary William Hague once made the mistake of saying that belonging to the euro was like being in a burning building in which all the exit doors are locked. Really! Wolfgang Schäuble, the hard-line German finance minister, had actually drawn up a plan to show Greece the exit door if it did not comply with EU terms.
There are many truths to this latter day Greek tragedy. Ironic it is that it should happen to Greece of all countries, which wrote the scripts of the very first tragedies concerning the foibles of human nature. Just as it was beginning to make progress under austerity – though there remained much to do, as the latest Brussels proposals made clear – a crazy, economically illiterate cabal of schoolboy lefties gained power. (They once believed that Communism was the answer.) Their silly promises of an end to austerity were seized on by a weary electorate. But how could they work that particular piece of economic sophistry? It was like asking someone to turn base metal into gold.
We are today in a situation in which a mere eleven million Greeks labour under a mountain of debt equal to what our sixty-four million people spend on the NHS in a year and a half. It was, and is, insupportable.
Once again the banks have a case to answer. It is a truism that a lender has as much of a responsibility as the borrower. What is abundantly clear is that the lenders did not exercise due diligence. They knew the Greek character and that once they enjoyed the security of the euro with its low borrowing costs would, likely as not, go on a spending spree and end up living high on the hog, enjoying a standard of living way beyond what their productivity justified.
But while the good times rolled the banks looked the other way and that fatally flawed conception – a currency (monetary) union without a fiscal and banking one was able to bumble along… just. But it was never going to avoid the attention of the speculators on the world’s money markets when the good times ended, as they always do. And boy, did they end! When the banks were exposed as having lent to millions of mainly Americans (but, yes, us too) on mortgages that they knew were likely to go belly-up, they then artfully – and I believe criminally – wrapped up those toxic, sub-prime debts in packages mixed in with sound debts and unloaded them to unsuspecting other banks all around the world. The consequence was that every bank viewed every other bank with suspicion and would not lend to them (an absolutely necessary requirement under the capitalist system) for fear that the other bank had saddled itself with lashings of toxic debt and may actually be insolvent.
When the giant Lehman Brothers bank went down and the Federal Reserve refused to save it, shock waves went round the world. It was a seismic event in that cloistered world of banking which everywhere shut down on lending. It sent the system into a tail spin. Thus we became familiar with a new term: the credit crunch.
Returning to Greece, the bailiffs of the big boys, (the Troika’s IMF, ECB (European Central Bank) and the European Commission) have effectively moved in. Proud, humiliated Greece is being told it must provide collateral for the monies advanced. It must sell off all it can of its public sector along with whatever else can raise hard cash. The next thing we’ll be hearing is that they’ve slapped a ‘For Sale’ notice on the Parthenon. What has been needed throughout, but which has been totally lacking, is a generosity of spirit. If the 520 million people of Europe cannot handle 11 million, admittedly errant, citizens, then something is seriously wrong.
The fact is it is perfectly possible to be a member of the European family (i.e. the EU) – after all, there are nine of us who are not using the euro – without being beholden and tied to that flawed currency. It is equally possible that if one day that currency proves itself by correcting its inbuilt defects and then goes on to become the world’s reserve currency, replacing the dollar, we may ourselves rethink our position and apply to join. But that day is a long way off.
Meantime what of Greece and its mountain of unrepayable debt? 92% of the monies advanced to Greece do not go to helping that country get back on its feet, but to servicing its debts. As a deadline for repayment looms, Greece is handed monies which it must immediately pay back. Thus, while for book-keeping purposes, the situation seems under control it is anything but. It is an altogether hopeless situation. In essence it’s no different from that of a person taking up ever more credit cards to pay off a loan from his bank.
Europe, and in particular Germany, should remember that when the Americans put together that incredibly generous Marshall Aid programme to rescue them from an even more dire situation than present day Greece’s at the end of World War II, there was a total forgiveness of debt. Without that there would have been no recovery of Europe for decades. It remains my hope where little Greece is concerned that our great continent will show a generosity of spirit similar to what the Americans showed with their Marshall Aid programme and declare a forgiveness of debt. Without it Greece has no hope.
A tragic consequence of the present situation which few have thought about is that we are in danger of losing, through neglect and vandalism, much of that peerless heritage we so like to visit and wonder at. The treasures of European antiquity, of which the Greeks are custodians, are already suffering terribly from thefts and shocking neglect. What with the destruction going on in Aleppo, the oldest inhabited city on earth, at Palmyra, Babylon and indeed throughout the Middle East – the very cradle of civilisation – the world will wake up one day and realise that it wasn’t just present day humans who paid the price, but the surviving evidence of what its distant ancestors achieved down the ages.
The latter day Greek tragedy continues
If the Greeks vote no, they face not just potential mayhem but a complete national shutdown. Yet the majority of economists actually believe this course would serve the country best.
What are we to make of the tragedy which is unfolding across the beautiful waters of the Aegean? Here in high summer when they should be enjoying the fruits of their glorious holiday season they are locked in a battle for their very survival with the giants of north Europe and their banking systems.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Greece has already paid a terrible price for its profligacy and easy living on the back of a strong currency of which it was never qualified to be part. Their economy has had been bludgeoned by the money men into shrinking by a horrendous 25% and their youth unemployment exceeds 60%.
Right at the beginning, the books appealing for entry into the euro were cooked, helped in no small part by that ‘Great Vampire Squid’, Goldman Sachs. But while the Germans and the rest knew very well how the Greeks went about their business and that they were not a suitable candidate, political Europe had to take precedence over economic Europe and they let them in.
With other weaker economies such those of the Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Italians allowed to join the party, the Germans ended up with a currency much less strong than their old Deutschmark would have been and that made it much easier for them to flog their BMWs and the like. Borrowing rates for these weaker economies became much lower than ever they would have been had they been using their own currencies so, of course, they were happy to buy north Europe’s products as well as treat themselves to a much higher standard of living than their economic performances warranted.
All was well throughout the goods times that preceded the financial crash of 2008. That ill-conceived monetary union – which lacked the also essential fiscal union – of the euro could bumble along so long as there were no headwinds. But, boy, it wasn’t so much headwinds that arrived but rather a hurricane. The Credit Crunch brought the Western world’s economies to the brink of meltdown.
Today the weakest of the dominoes stands in imminent danger of falling, with the risk that others will follow. And the country that benefited most during the good times, Germany, insists on playing hardball. It needs to show a bit of humility – as well as compassion – and realise that it must take its share of the blame for the plight that Greece finds itself in today.
Despite its own banks, along with French and others, being exposed to a possible Greek default of alarming proportions, it knows that a Greek economy that cannot grow because of acute austerity will never ever be able to pay off its debts. It needs relief and restructuring. Long before this present crisis broke they acknowledged this fact. But what now are the Troika’s proposals? Even deeper austerity. Can we be surprised that a government that was elected on a mandate to end austerity has thrown up its hands and said enough?
If Greece on Sunday, in its touching desire to remain at the heart of the European family – but also out of sheer terror at the thought of the consequences of being cast adrift – votes to accept the Troika’s diktats, it faces never-ending recession. If the Greek people vote no on Sunday, they will stay in the EU and possibly even the single currency, but mayhem could follow with a complete national shutdown. Could Brussels stand by and see this happen?
Actually the majority of economists believe that this seemingly bonkers course would serve it best (Argentina went down a similar road). Economists say there would be six months of hell, or possibly longer, but then a future would open up for Greece. With holiday costs cut to half their present level, we would cast aside that old warning to ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. Greece would become the continent’s playground as never before. Poor, suffering Hellas, the first of all Europe’s civilisations, would start to smile again.
Poem: Hubris at Waterloo
Unsparing of his soldiers killed,
Yet loved by them in every way.
Oppressed folk all around he thrilled
As Europe’s monarchies he flayed.
‘Upon their stomachs, armies march,’
Said Bonaparte the Corsican.
Europe and Asia, he almost grasped!
That ego said, ‘of course I can’.
A wild adventure drew him east
To fabled Sphynx’s quizzic stare;
But Horatio sank his fleet
And left his army stranded there.
Then east again to Moscow’s gates
With half a million of his best,
The great retreat was left too late:
With winter came that grimmest test.
An island race stood in his way
While others trembled at French might;
To field their armies it would pay
And lead them in a daunting fight.
Through two decades it fought it out;
Old liberties were put on hold.
To drive France from its last redoubt
It knew it must be hard and bold.
Prussians, Russians, Austrians, Dutch,
Belgians and Swedes joined in the cause;
No one thought of the future, much,
Just to survive those endless wars.
At Waterloo the dye was cast;
Sad soldiers penned their final wills.
Those British squares, they must stand fast,
And Frenchmen by the thousand kill.
Cavalry charged against the squares:
Sharp sabres aimed at British breasts.
How would those lines of redcoats fare?
How would they meet that fearsome test?
Volley on volley they must shoot,
‘The closest thing you ever saw…’
‘Hard pounding!’ balled the Iron Duke,
Till Boney’s men could take no more.
To save the day, an Army Corps!
The Emperor’s Imperial Guard:
Unbeaten in a foreign war,
The hardest of the very hard.
In silence and in fearless line
They bore down on their British foe;
But raked by fire ten thousand times,
They did yet make an awesome show.
At last the fates smiled on the reds;
Their musketry was so intense.
Sad doom came in a storm of lead:
‘Now was the game up,’ Boney sensed.
But Allied lines were fading fast,
Exhausted from the nine-hour fight,
When in the distance came at last
Old Marshal Blücher’s Prussian might.
The fearless Duke maintained morale,
Galloping round those battered squares;
They stood there fixed like Zulu kraals,
One and all did that peril share.
The day was clinched, at fearful cost,
With corpses measured by the ton.
‘The next worst thing to battles lost’
‘Is surely that of battles won.’
Was Napoleon murdered on St. Helena?
I personally believe that it was the power of money that defeated Napoleon. Britain dominated world trade. She was already a hundred years into the Industrial Revolution and these two provided her with the funds to build a truly colossal fleet to keep herself safe from invasion, safeguard all her worldwide trade routes and become the paymaster of all the European monarchies opposed to the ideals of Revolutionary France. French battlefield techniques remained superior to those of any other of the European powers, including ourselves, just as the Nazis were in World War Two; but just as in that war the underdogs got better so that their combined material and numerical numbers eventually proved decisive.
I think also there is a strong case for arguing that we made an end of Napoleon on the remote, South Atlantic island of St. Helena, his final place of exile. Crimes need three ingredients: means, opportunity and motive. We had all three. It was a healthy Napoleon who arrived at the island at the age of forty-seven. Six years later he was dead.
First, as our prisoner, we obviously had the means and opportunity. Finally – in my view the decisive factor – his incarceration was costing us a fortune. On that small island of ten miles by six we felt it necessary to garrison 2,000 troops. Second we also felt it necessary to maintain two ships of the line on permanent duty sailing round the island.
The final and perhaps decisive factor influencing the British government of the day was the nightmarish fear that France – which bounced back strongly after Waterloo – would mount a rescue operation to rescue their humiliated hero and begin the Napoleonic Wars all over again.
Please Hubris at Waterloo to read a poem I’ve written attempting to tell the story of Waterloo.
Poor, hapless Miliband and his Ed Stone
The Ed Stone must have been ordered weeks before it was unveiled, all 2.6 metres and £30,000 worth of it. And the monster wasn’t going to be installed at Labour party headquarters, but in the rose garden of Downing Street, for God’s sake.
How to explain last Thursday? Reading people’s minds is far from the exact science the pollsters would like to pretend they have made it. And reading British people’s intentions may be the toughest nut of them all to crack. G.K. Chesterton had it right when he wrote:
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet.
Hells bells, the people spoke alright last Thursday. They did it in the privacy of the polling booth. It was almost in the nature of a raised finger to those battalions of know-it-alls who told them how they were going to vote. There may also have been an element of bloody-mindedness in that decision which ended up stunning the world. Yet it wasn’t, in my view, an innate shyness to tell or an enjoyment of being a spoiler that was at work, but a cold hard appraisal of what was at stake.
Harold Wilson may have said that “a week is a long time in politics,” and so it is. But for all that, people weren’t readily going to forget an event of even six years before – when the cash points were within forty-eight hours of running dry and salary transfers could not have been made to banks. It was as dire a situation as it is possible to imagine. That same government of Gordon Brown had not long before given them an almighty fright by getting into a dispute with tanker drivers so that food, itself, was also within forty-eight hours of running out in the supermarkets. We got to realise, for the first time, how slender were the stocks they held and how utterly dependent they were on a fast turnaround.
Now they were being asked to give their trust to the same group of people who were at the helm at that time and who had gone on to display a level of fiscal incontinence unique in British politics. They thought about the man who was asking us to make him prime minister and the Damascene conversion he had made at the last minute to fiscal rectitude. The difficulty was that they had trouble believing him; he was still so purblind that, to the very end, he couldn’t bring himself to concede that the previous government, in which he had played an important part, had borrowed too much (it was all the fault of those damned foreigners he intoned ad nauseam… the worldwide credit crunch and all those wicked bankers). Every country had suffered, so he maintained.
The problem was that those countries which had not got themselves into debt were able, largely, to cope with the crisis without massive programmes of austerity. These and many other thoughts went through voters’ minds in the run up to the big day and even in the polling booth itself. A huge question mark hung over Miliband in particular as he just did not seem prime minister material – and certainly not when compared to the smooth, polished Cameron. This perception was reinforced by his opportunistic and silly decision to go and talk to Russell Brand. That garrulous, machinegun-like spouter of nonsense was the last person in the world calculated to reassure a worried public. And then there was that Ed Stone. ‘Oh, dear,’ thought the electorate. Where were the armies of special advisors that let that one go through?
It may have been some silly Yank’s idea, but gullible, unworldly Ed thought it a great one. What was he thinking? Talk about hubristic presumption. It must have been ordered weeks before it was unveiled, all 2.6 metres and £30,000 worth of it. And the monster wasn’t going to be installed at Labour party headquarters, but in the rose garden of Downing Street, for God’s sake.
Did he seriously think that future prime ministers – and, hell, we had not made him that yet – would want their lovely, sweet-smelling roses cast into perpetual shadow by such ‘monumental’ nonsense? And what about planning permission? Had he thought about that? After all, Downing Street is a listed building. Perhaps after he’d brow-beaten them into submission he intended to take it with him at the end of his long, glorious term of office and have it installed on the unused plinth at Trafalgar Square. How the episode plays to the blog post I once wrote 3 ½ years ago about the fall of Dominic Strauss Kahn titled ‘The Foolishness of Clever Men‘.
At the end of the day the great British public saw no sense in imperilling the undoubted progress that had been made in stabilising the economy, and they certainly didn’t want a cantankerous tartan army descending on London, gurning all the time about how hard done by they were and demanding ever more Danegeld. Nor did that public relish the thought of the slippery, cocksure Alex Salmond appearing once more out of the Scottish mists like the ghost of Banquo. It would have been unbearable were he to have ended up de facto deputy prime minister, slipping in and out of Downing Street at will and browbeating a hapless Miliband.
Finally, in an ever more competitive world people did not see that it made sense to drift back into left-wing policies that had been tried umpteen times and always found wanting. Not a single Labour administration had ever left office without the public finances being in an unholy mess. The people understood that, for the security of their jobs and the wellbeing of their country, a business-friendly mind-set was key.
So convinced was I, as well as another member of my family, that these ‘neck and neck’ polls were nonsense that we placed a £50 bet each on a clear Conservative majority (at 15:2 odds) and won a total of £830. Our mantra should always be to trust the people; they get it right most times, whether it be General Elections, Strictly Come Dancing or X-Factor.
The bomb saved us all
Though a quarter of a million Japanese would have to be sacrificed in the initial blast and its aftermath, it has been estimated that perhaps eight times that number would have perished on both sides before Japan could have been overcome by conventional means.
Amidst all the ballyhoo of this incredible election we are in danger of not giving proper thought to an event which has shaped all our lives. Seventy years ago today saw an end to what Churchill called ‘the German War’. It was a war in which 50 million died – 20 million, let us never forget, Russian.
I have never regarded the Second World War as anything other than a continuation of the First, but with a 21-year interregnum. On 8th May 1945 the world was still far from at peace. Not yet vanquished were the fanatical Japanese. If our soldiers feared the last ditch fanaticism of the Nazis as they stormed across the Rhine into the enemy heartland, their fears were multiplied several fold as they considered the horrors of what awaited them on the beaches of Japan. Their naval comrades had already experienced a foretaste of what they could expect with the Kamikaze death flights into their ships.
As the great armies of the Western allies celebrated with their Russian allies in the West, they knew that an even more fearful test of their resolve awaited them in the East. Bloodletting on a scale hitherto unknown seemed guaranteed as they briefly enjoyed their moment of triumph in Europe before their embarkation to the other side of the world and a fresh clash of arms.
Their foe in this encounter did not abide by Western concepts of warfare and could, especially in defending their homeland, be expected to die to the last man and perhaps even woman. At that very moment, while the celebrations were continuing, British Empire forces were locked in mortal combat in the steaming jungles of Burma and south east Asia while their American allies were island-hopping ever closer in the Pacific to the Japanese mainland.
But far away in the deserts of New Mexico a secret project was being furiously fast tracked to its terrifying completion. It was a bomb of such enormous potential that a single one could lay waste an entire city. Millions of lesser bombs had fallen on the cities of the Reich, but still there were whole districts of them relatively unscathed. If it worked then even the suicidal Japanese – who at that moment were preparing for a ‘twilight of the gods’ – would bear what their emperor would later broadcast ‘the unbearable’ and surrender, rather than see their 2000-year-old civilisation wiped from the face of the earth.
In all the long march of humankind towards a better world, the stakes had never been higher. Terrible as the new weapon was, it would save those fearful young Western men who were even then preparing to board their ships, as it would also, ironically, save the Japanese themselves. (Though a quarter of a million of them would have to be sacrificed in the initial blast and its aftermath, it has been estimated that perhaps eight times that number would have perished on both sides before Japan could have been overcome by conventional means.) So while we are right to commemorate the end of the war in Europe, we must not forget the true end of the war, three month later.
This ‘true end’, as I call it has, in my view, the greater significance. This is because it really did achieve what many had, mistakenly, believed in the First World War to be: ‘The War to End Wars’. From the detonation of those two nuclear devices over Hiroshima and Nagasaki came a belief – rightly – that global war was no longer an option as it would escalate, inevitably, into a nuclear conflagration and with that the end of all human civilisation. In such a scenario there could be no winners and it is my belief that that it is this appreciation during the Cold War that kept it from becoming a hot one.
As for the reason I do not believe the two European wars to be separate wars, it is because certain powerful elements in Germany considered the outcome of the First World War unfinished business. It took only a charismatic demagogue like Hitler to fan the embers for a re-run. Even then it would have been unlikely to happen, but for the Wall Street Crash and the impoverishment and mass unemployment which struck Germany. Of all the advanced economies, Germany suffered by far the worst because its situation was dramatically worsened by the huge reparations it was forced to pay under the Versailles treaty.
Why those powerful elements in Germany considered the war unfinished business was because the Western allies did not press home their advantage when they finally broke the four-year impasse on the Western Front and went on to smash the, by then, retreating German army which was surrendering in droves. Heeding Ludendorff, the German commander – who had a breakdown – and his call for a cessation of hostilities (Armistice) the allies allowed the Kaiser’s high command to maintain the fiction that it had not been defeated in the field. Hitler, of course, was all too ready to encourage them in this misplaced belief and, more to the point, provide them with the tools to try once more. The rest is history.
There is a clear choice in this election
It is a strange thing to reflect on the fact there were once people who would have killed me if they could and that as a young man I was shot at. It was the last lot of the ‘Troubles’ with the IRA before the final bout broke out which ended with the ‘Peace Process’. Then civilians were not targeted – just the police and the military – and I was a National Serviceman.
After that I returned to the cut-throat world of commerce (managed to get sacked three times) before, at twenty-seven, going into business on my own and remaining there to the grand old age of seventy-five whence I am still contributing my penny’s-worth. In that period before I struck out on my own, I worked for nine different employers.
What causes me to return to those times is what strikes me as the glaring contrast between my own round-the-block experience, shared in varying degrees by many (though not perhaps the shooting and sackings) and the utter lack of worldliness between us and the very many callow people who govern us. Apart from having, in so many cases, little to draw on, they come up with plans to spend umpteen billions of pounds in a manner that suggests our money is almost monopoly money. Few, if any, have any serious costing experience, much less have run large companies be it their own or other people’s.
In my ideal world no person should be able to put themselves forward for public office such as an MP below the age of thirty-five nor do so without experience of a genuine job outside the world of politics. No person could, for instance, become Minister of Defence without a military background, nor Chancellor of the Exchequer without accountancy skills, nor Health Minister without medical or health service expertise, nor take charge of education if he or she knows nothing of the world of academia. Strangely, the one area where we do apply such thinking is the law. Lord Chancellors, Attorney Generals and Justice Ministers have all had to be lawyers.
What I would never allow to happen is for a student of politics or any other university discipline to be parachuted straight into the Westminster bubble of a think tank, policy unit, special advisor or any other similar make-work prop. Most bizarrely, as many people thought at the time, we once had a transport minister (Barbara Castle) who didn’t know how to drive. I realise that such rarefied thinking may be thought by many to be unattainable, unrealistic and even naive, but it seems sensible to me to aim towards drafting people into a job who are already half way to understanding it and who have acquired hard-won expertise in the field.
If they come to the job with the right background, they should be left to get on with it. Constant reshuffles – which have been a feature of governments of all hues – is inimical to rapid progress. In this respect Cameron’s administration has been unusual. Real expertise has been built up in many important departments of state with ministers left in situ for an entire parliament. Look at the long-serving and successful Theresa May at the Home Office, long regarded as the graveyard of the aspirant politician. See, too, Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, and Ian Duncan Smith, the Minister of Work and Pensions. Then there is Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, and most famously the Chancellor, George Osborne. Even the controversial Michael Gove at education was left long enough to get on top of his brief and effect his own mini revolution.
Considering the constraints which coalition government by their nature impose, it is surprising how much has been achieved. Welfare, education and the economy – with the independent Office of Budgetary Responsibility – can be said to be entering a new era.
What do the government’s opponents have to offer? The latest is rent control. I am no friend of landlords, but I have to accept that we can’t do without them and that, in fact, rental forms an essential cog in our housing needs. Ed Miliband’s populist wheeze here is a busted flush. It’s been tried before and it doesn’t work. First it sets up a whole new expensive bureaucracy and all to no avail since his proposals can be easily circumvented. His interference in the market would, however, be guaranteed to worsen the situation of the very people he purports to help, in the same way as his capping of energy bills when oil and gas was at an all-time high. It was like when Gordon Brown sold off half our gold reserves only to see the price of gold double within months. Socialists, sad to say, are not strong on economics even if their hearts, in most cases, are in the right place.
As for Miliband himself, he daily reveals himself to be in the Michael Foot mould. Just look at the ridiculous stone monolith he plans to erect in the garden of Number 10, no doubt inspired by his new anti-capitalist pal Russell Brand. Perhaps it was all those years at the knee of his Marxist father who turned his house into a debating parlour for Communism, inviting the likes of Foot, Benn, Eric Hobsbawn as well as the traitorous – as it later turned out – union baron, Jack Jones, who was in the pay of the KGB.
David Cameron is lacking in many things, but he’s much less dangerous to the economic wellbeing of our country than the unreconstructed son of the LSE Marxist lecturer whom we rescued from the Nazis (he was Jewish) and who then went on to warp the thinking of a generation of young people including, it appears, his own son.
No one has better reason to hate the heartlessness, secrecy and institutionalised privileges of the ruling classes of this country than I do, but I’ll tell you this: if we place our future in the hands of such a master opportunist and dissembler as Ed Miliband then we will have taken leave of our senses. He refuses, even now, to concede that the government in which he played an important part borrowed too much. (I am not interested in how he looks or sounds; we have had great leaders who scored on neither front.)
My own business has been punished grievously and, after twenty-one years, I find myself holding on by the skin of my teeth. We do not want, nor can afford, left-wing experiments at a time like this, especially when we have so narrowly escaped a catastrophe which he and his master’s policies inflicted on us only five short years ago and which have been the cause of so much suffering.
I will finally, and unapologetically, make this observation: I do not think it was outrageous that a minister made reference recently to the younger Miliband’s behaviour towards his brother. It was what most people thought and the ‘appalled’ reaction of Labour apologists as well as certain sections of the media I consider was entirely contrived. There are not many brothers who would do to their sibling what he did to his. In my view it speaks of something I do not find edifying. It had a devastating effect on their aging mother and he must have known that would be the case.
Trust the evidence: flying is safe
One of the worst aspects of the recent Alps tragedy is that the grieving families of passengers have a next to impossible task in recovering their loved ones among so mixed and fragmented a jumble.
We have all been shocked to the core at the terrible tragedy which unfolded last week in the French Alps. It is the stuff of nightmares: a deranged madman propelling us forward to an inevitable and horrible death. While millions place their lives regularly in the hands of the airlines, a surprising number do so with the utmost reluctance. The reason they do so is that they recognise it is the only practical way of getting to distant, exotic places and that the urge manages to override their fears.
We heed, as best we can, the mass of statistical evidence which says that flying is safe. As I write, 9,000 passenger aircraft are in the skies of the world carrying a population the size of Manchester. All will arrive safely. When 9/11 struck and the order went out to ground all aircraft, private as well as civil, 5,000 aircraft were in the skies of North America.
The loss of two Malaysian aircraft, and this recent German one in what seems like quick succession, has evoked all our ancient, primeval fears of doing such unnatural things as soaring high in the sky. ‘That’s for the birds,’ we think. Evolution, after all, has hardwired us to fear heights as a terrestrial animal, and it takes a supreme effort of will to set such fears aside. I am myself full of irrational fears and contradictions. What do you make of a man who flew his own hang glider yet is anxious about trusting his lot to an airline pilot? The pilot’s machine is infinitely safer and better maintained, and his skills in the air immeasurable better, yet still I preferred to rely on myself.
We have come a long way since those first spluttering engines of World War One with their rickety airframes and fresh air environment. They were the true heroes of flying, not us. Accident by accident over these hundred years, we have investigated the causes of failures. And modification by modification, aircraft have been brought to the point where almost nothing remains to be discovered.
The machines we put into the air today are almost as safe as the birds which evolution perfected. In fact it is possible to argue that in some important respects they are safer. Birds regularly fall out of the sky with heart or other physiological failures. On long migrations, they fail through weariness or failure to anticipate the weather. Sometimes they fail to gain the height necessary to carry them over mountain ranges. Planes almost never fail on any of these counts. Moreover, aircraft are able to fly over 13 times the speed of the fastest birds, which, as it happens, nest on the cliffs of Cornwall. Even as long ago as World War Two we were well on our way. Look how many shot-up bombers were still able to limp home, so much were their aircrafts miracles of engineering.
It is a fact that if we are to fear anything today it is ourselves. By far the majority of accidents are human error. Electrical, structural, mechanical and computer, they are all a lot sounder than the frailty of human nature. We have pretty well guaranteed physical soundness, but this recent tragedy in the Alps has highlighted how far we are from understanding the vagaries of the mind.
Few air disasters have been more shocking than this one. When Pan American airlines was blown from the skies over Lockerbie, disaster came like a thief in the night but with no suffering. Death, or at least unconsciousness, was instant. The same is true of the recent Ukrainian tragedy. What unfolded over the Alps were minutes of utmost terror and a final few seconds of unimaginable horror.
This nightmarish scenario was compounded at ground level. When the bodies at Lockerbie and Ukraine fell from their destroyed aircraft, they travelled to earth at terminal velocity of a falling object (120 mph) and for the most part, remained intact. When the poor souls of Germanwings Flight 9525 impacted the ground, they did so at 330 mph and were shattered on impact. Even the metallic parts of the aircraft suffered a similar fate. It was next to impossible for a visitor to the scene to know that this mass of debris had once been an aircraft. A mountain of unidentifiable, desiccated body parts were scattered over a square mile of mountainside. Consequently, one of the worst aspects of this terrible tragedy is that the grieving families have a next to impossible task in recovering their loved ones among so mixed and fragmented a jumble.
Lufthansa will have much to answer for when the final reckoning takes place. It appears their vetting system was so inadequate that it allowed an individual with a long history of mental instability to slip the net and fly their aircraft.
While we all place great importance on patient confidentiality, it appears the Germans are almost paranoiac about it. This, where certain occupations are concerned, will have to change as I believe it will worldwide. A duty needs to be placed on all doctors, which has the force of law, requiring them to inform a patient’s employer the moment they believe their patient unfit to fly an aircraft. The same should apply to train and coach drivers.
At some point in the not too distant future, we are going to have to accept that ground control will get you to your destination and back, as it has long done on far more complicated missions into space. Already our drones daily take off, complete their missions and return safely to earth. Once again, it is an irrational, primitive belief that only a man up front can be given ultimate responsibility. When we have grown used to safely journeying in our cars by automated, driverless systems – which is coming sooner than we think – then we may start to believe that the same technology can be applied to the air. Such systems are already feasible in our towns and cities and will soon be trialled here in the UK. It is only human irrationality which is slowing the process. When accidents and fatalities are seen to have been driven down close to zero with machines in control, then perhaps we may summon up the courage to trust the machine more than the man.
The immigration debate
Gordon Brown clearly demonstrated the disconnect between politicians and the public when he labeled lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy a bigot for broaching the subject in 2010.
Among the forgetful Ed Miliband’s omissions at his party’s annual conference was any mention of immigration. Considering that it ranks currently as number two of the public’s national concerns and that finally it is deemed respectable to speak of it, that omission must be classed as a failure as lamentable as that other one of not referring in the same speech to the deficit. The recent brain shutdown of the Green Party’s leader, Natalie Bennett, in her Q&A sessions with Andrew Neil and Nick Ferrari can be forgiven since she has no prospect of taking charge of our ship of state, but for it to happen to Ed? Oh, dear.
Ed has a problem, so it seems, not just with his gormless appearance – which, admittedly, he can’t help – but worryingly with his little grey cells. Personally, I view it as regrettable that in today’s shallow world you have to be telegenic to have any chance of being elected your nation’s leader. That requirement seriously impacts your ability to draw on the full range of your nation’s talent. Had we been like this seventy years ago, we would have lost Churchill and probably with him the war. We certainly would have turned our backs on his mouse-like successor, the great Clement Attlee, and risked losing, in his case, the NHS and the Welfare State. Apart from being the antithesis of telegenic – one was fat and the other weedy – they both were terrible public speakers.
The same cannot be said of the present, glib PM who won his spurs with a single show-off party speech, disdaining the use of the autocue. He was lucky to get away with it because later with the US broadcasting anchor-man, David Letterman, the Eton and Oxford-educated whiz kid could not remember what either Magna nor Carta stood for. Being that this was on the eve of the 800th anniversary of that momentous event, and that neither of those august places of learning appear to have knocked it in to the young Cameron’s head, you’d have thought that he’d have done his homework first. Inexplicably, it was history he studied at Oxford and just as inexplicably they awarded him a First. How so many of us back home winced at the spectacle of our own prime minister displaying such appalling ignorance.
We have to ask ourselves whether his party made as monumental a mistake in selecting him on the strength of that single – admittedly virtuoso – performance as Labour made in allowing the unions to foist the Ed brother on the party over its much preferred other brother, David.
For the Conservative Party leadership the shoo-in, prior to the posh boy’s performance, was the one-parent, council estate, SAS veteran, David Davis. Are we seriously saying that the present perception of a cabinet of rich, privileged elite would have held true under a Davis leadership? And do you think that the present, lamentable state of Britain’s armed forces would have been allowed to happen on an SAS man’s watch?
It may be that the US made a similar mistake in preferring the cerebral Obama to the Vietnam, POW-tortured veteran, John McCain. McCain, the son of an admiral, had been offered his freedom by his Viet Kong captors, but he turned it down because they would not free his less-exalted comrades. Time has demonstrated that he is no swivel-eyed, Tea Party head banger, but a thoughtful, measured observer of the world scene. I do not see that McCain would ever have allowed the mess to develop in the Middle East as has, and I’m equally sure that he would have provided the leadership which would have kept Putin in his box.
In fact, with Davis in charge on this side of the pond – a friend remarked to me recently – perhaps something of the ‘magnificent’ (his words) partnership that grew between Reagan and Thatcher might have developed with McCain. He was firmly of the opinion that a different and more secure world would exist today. But that’s conjecture for you. And the world of what might have been. But it did get me thinking a little.
Returning to immigration, we have always been among the luckiest of nations in that respect. In a very real way, the world has been our oyster. Because of our historic engagement overseas our people have been free to flee these shores and settle almost anywhere they wished. Now the world is more tightly controlled, with independent states zealously guarding their borders. Yet still our options are vastly better than almost anyone else’s. So we should not be too hard on people who wish to do what we have been doing for centuries. At least we were not fleeing tyranny and brute barbarism.
A recent BBC programme discussing the urgent need to expand the number of school places referred only to a rapidly expanding population while disingenuously failing to mention what had brought about this expansion. The broadcaster was at this point free to mention, what previously had been the unmentionable, but still it chose not to.
Immigration has hugely benefited this country in years past and if handled astutely is likely to continue to do so. Huguenots fleeing catholic persecution in France, weavers from the Low Countries escaping Spanish oppression and Jews from the pogroms of eastern Europe all have brought valued skills and business acumen. Even banking, in its modern form, we learned from the Dutch. And what a success story the arrival of 20,000 Asians fleeing in the seventies, from the murderous Idi Amin’s Uganda, has been. Children of empire, carried by us from our Indian territories to Africa under contract as indentured labourers to help build the railways, they have truly prospered here. Their number boast an amazing clutch of millionaires. Most of them had opted to stay on in Africa after the railways had been completed and had become traders and shopkeepers. A jealous Amin could not wait to get his hands on their properties and businesses. Then there is the debt we owe the Irish. If we were first in the field with railways, as well as canals, that is because our networks were built with their brawn and sweat. Hundreds died in the process.
What we did not, however, need, was Tony Blair’s sly, unfocused rush of immigrants to these shores in numbers we could not properly handle. Hospitals, transport, houses, infrastructure and, yes, schools all have come under almost unbearable pressure.
Blair knew the people were entitled to be consulted in such a matter, yet, as with the Iraq war, he chose to deceive them. In order to shut down any discussion he encouraged a culture that linked any talk of immigration to racism, and he wanted to make perfectly decent people feel almost dirty in mentioning the subject. We saw that revealed graphically when a lifelong Labour supporter took up the matter with Gordon Brown, only to be labelled a bigot.
Blair also calculated that they would become grateful, client voters who would help maintain him in power. His mantra was ‘multiculturalism’. He was more than happy for the new arrivals to keep to themselves and form what amounted to ghettos. He saw no need to encourage them to become loyal Britons and was even content for them not to learn the language of their adopted country. Worst of all, he paid no heed to the ever present risk that his policies might erode the very character of his people. The whole exercise, and the way it was conducted, was almost criminal in its intent.
After years of being a non-subject to all parties and the media, immigration emerged into the sunlight as being a subject we could legitimately talk about. Now, it appears to have disappeared back into purdah. Despite being at the top of people’s concerns, David Cameron has joined with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg to make scant mention of it in their election stomping. Is it that they think us a mean-minded people who cannot be trusted to dip our toes into such contentious waters? I believe that we are bigger than any of the pygmies who think such thoughts and who clearly have such a low opinion of us. We are a just, tolerant and fair-minded people, grown up beyond what our rulers give us credit for. Perhaps they should do a bit more of what the TV panellists do these days on such programmes as X Factor and Britain Has Talent: trust the people to get it right.
The reburial of Richard III draws near
King Richard III’s bones will be placed in a tomb in a remodelled Leicester Cathedral.
I have written four articles on the ‘King under the Car Park’ – Richard III – and this must surely be my last. The juxtaposition between a car park and a medieval king is a strange one. In his wildest dreams the dead king could not have imagined such a scenario. For a start, neither he nor anyone else at that time could have got their heads round car parks, much less the horseless carriages which were stabled there. As for those carriages being able to hurtle forward at unimaginable speeds, it would all have been too much for him. Just as amazing would be the fact that almost all the future subjects of his realm would own one and would be able to travel in perfect comfort and quiet on surfaced roads from one end of his kingdom to the other in hours. His bumpety, bump, clacktity, clack journey would have taken weeks.
It was the longest of long shots that led Philippa Langley, the Scottish Secretary of the Richard III Society, to Leicester’s city centre car park. For years she had obsessed about finding the only English king with no known burial place. They knew he wasn’t buried on Bosworth Field, the battlefield where he was cut down following his Victoria Cross-like heroics. His body was stripped naked and slung over a horse and paraded the fifteen miles to Leicester. That much was known.
Rumour had it that he may have been interred in a long vanished monastery. Others said that his body had been thrown in the river Stour. Yet more, that it was a mystery which would never be solved.
Philippa Langley – the hero of our tale – backed the monastery theory. I imagined she reasoned that although they weren’t going to give him a king’s funeral – usurper and murderer of his child nephews as they alleged him to be – they were most likely to hand his brutalised remains over for burial in consecrated ground such as a monastery.
Furthermore, Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian winner of the battle that unseated him, knew that if he was going to keep his newly won crown he would need to reach an accommodation with the Yorkists. Denying one of their own, a Yorkist prince of the realm – and an anointed king at that – a Christian burial was going to make that next to impossible. There would have been outrage in the Yorkist camp. Even a sinner, if that is what he was, was entitled to the sacraments and Richard’s frenzied, pitiless killers knew that. And even the meanest in the land took their Catholic faith extremely seriously at that time. Hell and damnation awaited anyone who offended against God’s law in a matter like that.
So Philippa’s hunch had a good chance of being the right one. By great good fortune the whereabouts of the monastery – although it was entirely gone – was known to the city authorities. By equally great good fortune – since it was city centre – it had no buildings over the site. That would have totally scuppered any excavation.
Philippa set about raising the considerable sums needed for a major archaeological dig. She also set about rallying the support of city authority who owned the car park, as well as its university which had the disciplines in all the relevant fields to cover the extensive research needed if she was to succeed in finding and authenticating the missing king.
It was all not so much a ‘whodunit?’ as a ‘where is it?’ affair. Both Leicester City and the university realised that success would bring massive rewards in terms of PR and tourism and put both on the map worldwide like nothing they had ever done before.
Even so, a very big if hung over the whole enterprise and a fiasco seemed much the likeliest outcome. Heavy industrial plant moved in on the site ready for the opening day of the dig. All stood prepared to excavate the entire car park if necessary. Every square metre of ground material would have to be carefully sifted. No one expected a quick result. All were steeled for plentiful egg on their faces.
Step forward our hero. “Where shall we begin?” asked the foreman of works. “There, where it says R,” indicated Philippa, pointing her finger. She had months before said, “the first time I stood in that car park the strangest feeling washed over me. I thought I am standing on Richard’s grave.”
In a particular part of the car park was a bay with a big R for reserved marked on it and it seemed as good a place as any to begin. Minutes passed after the tarmac was lifted and the subsoil carefully brought up. And like something yanked straight out of fiction, that very spot yielded a result. At only about three feet down a femur came into view. Though gratifying, that in itself was not cause for jubilation. The evidence was strong that this was where the monastery had been and that this was the area where bodies most likely had been laid to rest.
Following the sighting of the femur, more earth was removed. This time not by plant but gingerly by trowel. Then more excitement as the spine came into view. As the troweling moved up the spine from its base, a shriek was heard. The spine was veering off to one side from the vertical. It carried all the hallmarks of scoliosis – a curvature of the spine – just like Richard was said to have.
This was all too good to be true, even though their hopes were tempered by the knowledge that scoliosis was not that rare. They had managed to establish that it was a man. But did this man die violently? Then the skull was reached and there was exultation. Clear, unmistakable signs revealed that the deceased had died in battle. It was a Eureka moment for everyone, but most of all for Philippa. Tears welled up in her eyes.
Much had yet to be done forensically to authenticate beyond all question, but she had no doubt that her long search was over. A man, born in Canada, would later prove through DNA that the skeleton was of Plantagenet origin. The rest is history. One of the greatest hunts in all of archaeology had come to an end.
Four days of ceremonies will begin on 22nd March. There will be an honour guard of mounted soldiers and a 21-Gun Salute at the battlefield; two hundred children will display medieval, pennants they’ve designed; and four horses will draw the brake on its final journey to the cathedral where it will go on display before the final laying to rest of a monarch who fell in battle 530 years before. How the Tudors would have hated it all.
As for the TV broadcaster covering the event, it has gone bonkers. It’s been said there will have been nothing quite like it since television hit the airwaves. Britain’s reputation for eccentric, yet moving, theatre will have received a mighty shot in the arm. Quite what the rest of the world will make of it no one knows. They’re gobsmacked at it all, yet captivated. And they’ll all be watching.
The present monarch should have attended the reinterment. That much will be very apparent when she sees how her people have risen to the occasion. Richard’s own vile treatment in death will at least have been washed away by a £2.5 million effort of repentance by a remorseful people.
Why is Labour doing so well in the polls?
Our own Laurel and Hardy are chasing your vote.
It seems to me that we have no other credible option but to return the current government to power in May. The alternative imperils the undoubted progress that has been made and just seems too much like a leap in the dark. As to whether we return the Conservatives with a working majority or oblige them to seek an accommodation with their present partners… that, for the moment, cannot be predicted. They may be forced – hold your breath on this one – to seek an accommodation with Labour if that party, as seems likely, is obliterated in Scotland. Oddly, for a coalition, it has been surprisingly radical in the hot potato issues it has tackled. The Liberal Democrats may have helped keep the more swivel-eyed Tories in check and were certainly right in making it a condition of signing up that the lower paid be taken out of tax altogether. It was always an affront to justice that tax was levied at such an obscenely low level of income. But now we learn that the fully converted Tories are planning to take the process a step further in the forthcoming budget and steal some of the Lib Dem’s clothes by taking the same people out of National Insurance contributions and paying for it by reducing concessions to better off pension contributors. That looks like a surprisingly egalitarian measure which will help allay the perception that the Tories only look after the rich.
If it is true that elections are decided first and foremost on the state of the economy, then we would be hard put to gainsay the achievements of the present incumbents. They came to office in about as dire a situation as it possible to imagine. In fact the country was teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe.
For years we had allowed ourselves to live beyond our means, forgetting that age-old truth that you cannot spend more than you have the guts to raise in taxation. A balanced budget was never, so to speak, a lifestyle choice and sound money should always have been at the heart of any government’s considerations. Once it has taken care of these then it should go hell for leather for an enterprise economy.
In thinking where we are to cast our vote in May, let’s take a look at some of the core issues and see if we can make a balanced judgement. Business is not everything, but it is something we have to get right if we are to become prosperous enough on a personal level and yet have enough left over to fund a compassionate society.
Recently the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – one of the world’s most respected forums – positively gushed at our efforts, lavishing praise on the economic turnabout we have enjoyed over the past five years. Far from being the basket case that our perilous situation seemed set to consign us to, we are, so it seems, a “textbook” example for economic success: the most go-ahead enterprise economy currently in the developed world.
Moreover, it isn’t just the OECD saying these things – it’s just about everybody, including the International Monetary Fund. Christine Lagarde, its CEO, has said that “Britain is an example to the world and is leading it in a very elegant and convincing way.” That’s praise indeed, especially coming from the woman who only two years ago trembled at the possible consequences of what the Chancellor was doing. So gutsy ‘Boy George’ has been vindicated and proved right all along. I don’t remember so many economic pundits getting it so wrong since 364 wrote to Mrs Thatcher predicting certain doom for her policies back in the early eighties.
And balancing the books? Well, we’ve got some way to go on that but the direction of travel is the right one and the deficit is on the way to being halved. With business confidence soaring and GDP expanding, tax receipts will balloon and we will find ourselves in a virtuous circle in which even paying down the national debt will become easy.
What about our currency? Well, it doesn’t get more trusted than when you have convinced the money markets that you are a “textbook” example and “leading the world both elegantly and convincingly”. In these circumstances your purchasing power remains strong and national borrowing costs nosedive, along with the dole queue. Against all received wisdom, job creation in the UK has leaped ahead during this recession, with jobs created running at twice the rate of lay-offs in the public sector. Here, again, Osborne’s prediction has confounded critics. Perhaps the most graphic proof that you now enjoy a strong currency is to be found when you next go abroad. Your money will go an unbelievably long way. Also, the imported goods you buy will mysteriously start getting cheaper as less and less of your precious dosh needs to be handed over to Johnny Foreigner. And all this hasn’t been brought about – as it usually has been – at the price of being forced by poor management of the economy to hike your interest rates. Indeed, the reverse is true: they are at an all-time low and likely to remain so for some time yet.
Then there’s the ever important matter of inflation. Like all the rest, we are in a very good place here. And while some people worry about the dangers of deflation, this seems unlikely to happen in our case. The reason is that pay rises are now running – thank goodness – well ahead of inflation (six times) and this will edge inflation up and so prevent a downward spiral of falling prices which cause people to hold back purchases in the belief that things will get cheaper still. In Europe, with growth remaining stagnant, only a minority in the efficient north is getting a pay rise (and then not much) and so there is not the pressure from this direction to force inflation to rise. While ours can be said to be a virtuous circle, theirs is a vicious one.
So, in all these extraordinary circumstances, why is the governing party not seeing the benefit in the polls? It is a very great mystery. On the face of it, getting re-elected should be a shoo-in. In normal circumstances, economic success translates into electoral victory. However, these are not normal circumstances and this is not an iron rule. Ask John Major. When he faced Tony Blair in 1997 we were doing so well we were even paying down the national debt and – until Gordon Brown sold off half at fire sale prices – our gold reserves stood almost at a post-war high. Gold, then, had hit rock bottom, but within no time had shot through the roof. What made the man do it? Nobody knows and Brown won’t tell us. Perhaps we should ask the would-be Chancellor, Ed. Balls. Ed was his hatchet man at the time. Anyway, the upshot of it all was this little exercise cost us billions.
Before that happened – and when New Labour took over – their inheritance was, in the truest sense of the word, a golden one. Blair and his surly, Heathcliff-like Chancellor, then proceeded to throw it all away. To reassure the country and the City to trust their fiscal rectitude, they pledged to keep to Tory spending plans for two years. When, later, New Labour called time on that irksome arrangement, Brown, together with his side-kick – who hopes to move into the Treasury again in May – went on an epic spending spree. Borrowing like never before, they displayed a level of fiscal incontinence rarely if ever seen in British politics.
With unmatched hubris, Brown – the man who doubled the size of the Revenue and Customs guide book so that only the largest and most expensive accountancy firms could fathom its complexities – shouted to the rafters, budget after budget, that he had solved one of the economic cycle’s greatest mysteries: how to avoid boom and bust. Later on he would let slip in the Commons how he had ‘Saved the World’ during the time of the credit crunch. The wonder is that some fool in Scandinavia didn’t find a Nobel Prize to award him… one as daft as that Save the Children award to Tony Blair, which was, actually, hugely insulting.
While we may find much to criticise in the ‘posh boys’ who make up much of the present cabinet, they have in most respects delivered. Quite apart from the economy, we all knew that the welfare system was a busted flush in desperate need of root and branch reform. It had encouraged a malaise of worklessness in which many had come to believe that they had a perfect right to live off their neighbour’s taxes if they were daft enough to get up on a cold winter’s morning and go off to graft for the stinking, exploitative capitalists. It also turned a goodly proportion of fundamentally honest people into cheats and fraudsters. Then, again, in education we each knew that our parents had enjoyed a sounder education in the basics than we had, and that all the certainties which had made that possible had been thrown out of the window by the fanciful, misguided notions of the teachers’ training colleges and their ilk. Discipline was also a casualty of all that trendy thinking. Meanwhile our kids slipped ever further down the international league table of academic excellence.
Another thing we all knew was that an insatiable public sector was not only looking after itself too well at the rest of the nation’s expense, but that it was gobbling up an unsustainable amount of its wealth.
It therefore is a puzzle that a government which has successfully bitten so many unpalatable bullets is struggling to get its message across. They were bullets so toxic that no government before had had the balls to bite on them. Perhaps the coalition was stiffened in its resolve to do so by the opportunities presented by the worst recession in 100 years.
Finally… what about fixed term parliaments? Another of the measures brought in by this unexpectedly reformist government. They may have many drawbacks, but one decided advantage is that there is ample time to examine the record and forensically explore the proposed alternatives. Springing a surprise election when things are temporarily looking good, but you know they are not going to stay that way was an old trick. A three-week campaign denies your opponents the time needed and allows you to work a flanker. That ruse is now firmly off the table.
The house shortage conspiracy
The chancellor talks about helping people get on the housing ladder, but other than helping them get into more debt he has done very little. He knows which side his bread is buttered.
Conspiracies abound and conspiracy theorists make a good living pandering to our natural suspicions. The vast majority, including those surrounding Marilyn’s and Diana’s deaths, are nonsense. They persist because we find it hard to accept that famous people are subject to the same chance, and often malign, forces as the rest of us.
But that there are out there a fair few I have no doubt. I believe them to be almost a part of the human condition – from the tiny trader, like myself, who might wish for a private arrangement with a fellow trader not to undercut each other to a mighty conglomerate who might wish to do the same. OPEC is a perfect example. It has also to be accepted that the great majority are successful and that, as a result, we never get to hear about them.
I am a natural born sceptic – which perhaps has something to do with being called Thomas – and while I try to maintain an open mind, I have to admit that some theories are outlandish to the point of being funny. A couple which immediately spring to mind are that the pyramids were built by aliens and that the photos of the moon landings were trick photography.
I do, however, believe that the universe is teeming with ETs. With 100,000 galaxies in this universe – and science is starting to believe that there may be many universes – it surely is down to numbers. However rare may be the incidence of all the important factors coming together to make life possible – the so-called Goldilocks Effect – I find it inconceivable, with such numbers, that it only happened once. Furthermore, I believe that when these factors do coalesce, sooner or later, life is the inevitable consequence.
But returning to Earth and our penchant for conspiracies, I believe I have cottoned on to one which may go a long way to explaining why, when there is a clear need for many more houses, it never seems to happen. It is because the politicos are terrified of bringing about a downward spiral in the value of houses. It is not a conspiracy in which a handful of people have got together, but rather an acknowledgement that one’s home is typically his only significant asset.
Meantime, millions languish in rented, overcrowded and often substandard accommodation, desperate to buy their own homes but unable to do so because house price inflation has advanced at three times the rate of general inflation and as a result the deposit required is beyond their reach.
No one can argue against our desperate need to build more houses. Unlike Japan with fewer divorces, a falling birth rate and zero immigration, we are high on all three; people splitting from their partners need separate homes, a rising birth rate requires more houses (down the line), and millions moving to your country will require places to live.
During the recession the construction industry was the hardest hit. Didn’t it strike you as odd that its legions of unemployed were not put to work building this extra accommodation? The 100k houses built last year was less than half of what was required. What would happen if supply at long last rose to meet demand? The iron law of economics says prices would fall. What pushed house prices up to their present level, racing ahead of general inflation at a crazy rate? Easy credit and too many would-be buyers chasing too few houses. The real question is: if all the political parties are agreed on the need for more houses, why doesn’t it happen? After all, builders would set-to with a gusto and buyers would have not just a house but one at a more affordable rate.
Cameron and Osborne promised a relaxation of planning laws in 2010 and pledged to free up more land for development, but this government has so far failed miserably to deliver. Why is this? The answer, I fear, is that present mortgage holders have an interest in not just maintaining prices but contriving to force them up still further. They love a situation in which they are getting richer by doing nothing. Many are making more on their house annually than they are getting paid, with the difference being that living eats into their salary while nothing eats into their unearned capital gains. So just let a politician come along who threatens this nice little arrangement. That greatest of all feel-good factors would disappear down the plughole. To prick that love affair with rising wealth would make them incandescent with rage.
But in many ways crazy house prices might be compared to fools’ gold. Unless you’re going to flee abroad to a cheaper domicile or downsize, which most don’t want to do, then there are no tangible benefits. So how do the politicos keep them happy in this delusional state and excuse themselves from doing their duty to the homeless? First they acquiesce in keeping planning laws fiendishly difficult and listening too much to the ‘not in my back yard’ arguments. Then they waffle on ad nauseam about converting brown field sites. Then they pedal the greatest fiction of all: that our island is in danger of being concreted over.
Next time you fly over our green and pleasant land, look down and see what proportion of our lovely acres remain green. The Office for National Statistics have produced some very interesting figures on this. I invite you to read a BBC News article titled ‘The great myth of urban Britain‘. You will be happily stunned by the stats provided. It turns out only 2.27% of England’s landscape is built on. Just look out of your airplane window if you’re in any doubt.
Gay schools aren’t the answer
If you remove certain sections of society from the mainstream you risk encouraging the majority to believe that they really don’t want to belong to the mainstream.
I was taken aback recently to learn of a serious proposal to set up a school for Gays. While a firm supporter of not stigmatising minorities – as a child of an unmarried mother at a time such things were scandalous, I know just what that means – I felt that this was simply a bridge too far. In fact I believe it could be counter-productive, harming the very people it was designed to protect; a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. Humans across the world belong to a single family. If you remove certain sections of society from the mainstream and create an environment in which they circulate for substantial and formative periods only among people of their own preferences you risk encouraging the majority to believe that they really don’t want to belong to the mainstream. We know the aims of Gays in making this proposal are laudable; they wish to experience and benefit from an education free from the slings and arrows of a taunting minority. But the answer, I fear, is not to remove them from the orbit of the bullies but to bear down and educate bullies into accepting that it is they – the bully – not their victim, who is the problem. It was never more clear to me than during my army service in Northern Ireland that if people are ghettoed from their fellows they will not relate to them and, as a consequence, would be capable of doing terrible things. And there, job discrimination was total – in schools, churches, policing, pubs, town halls, housing and just about anything else you could think of. The first question that any employer asked of you was, “are you Catholic or Protestant?” We saw in blood where that led.
Social attitudes can be turned full circle. We know this from things we have already achieved. Do you remember that ‘Carry On’ film in which a partying group of young medics came out and piled into an open-topped sports car and roared off? The noisy, raucous group were all the worse for drink. We thought, at the time, it very funny and so did the producer. Neither he nor we would think that now. In fact we are appalled that we ever thought it so. In similar vein was the ubiquitous glamorising of smoking on the silver screen. Also, look at our previous indifference to the disabled; we never bothered to put wheelchair access into anything. Then, just let a landlord – as happened when I first lived and worked in London – try putting in his window a sign reading ‘No Blacks, Irish or Dogs’. All hell would break loose. Women’s prospects have improved immeasurably from what they were and so have peoples’ of other races. I could go on. Indeed, some might argue that in today’s Britain your life chances might be improved if you were not of Caucasian stock. Racial, religious, gender and disabled abuse have all joined the bonfire of the unacceptable, as has hate language. Also that pernicious culture of being able to touch women up and, worse, and get away with it is thankfully at an end, though I do wonder if we are right in pursuing old men to the grave. But I acknowledge that justice must trump everything and you could argue that they were lucky to have got away with it for as long as they did before justice finally caught up with them. Finally, while we’re at it, let’s remember that poor unmarried mother whose family once turfed her out. That was not a million miles removed from stoning her.
My point in highlighting all this is to show that Europe in times past – often with us as flag-bearer – has had very backward attitudes. In addition to this we have been exceptionally cruel, physically as well as emotionally. It therefore ill behoves us, as we make progress, to lambast the Muslim world for its tardiness. The whole world hardly needs to take lessons from us in this area. There was a time, which lasted for seven hundred years, when Muslim Spain led the world in virtually all the sciences. While it was rescuing and translating almost all the Greek classics, we were transporting ourselves across the Mediterranean Sea and despoiling their prosperous, peaceable lands in Palestine. Our ‘great’ King Richard (The Lionheart) – who spoke no English and spent only a few months out of his eleven-year reign in England, bankrupting it in the process – wrought such cruelty on Crusade that even today Muslim mothers will quieten their little ones by saying “shhh… King Richard is coming”. He once decapitated 5,000 prisoners on the beach at Acre. Strange it is then that of all our many illustrious monarchs he is the only one honoured with a statue outside Parliament. An unfathomable people we are for making such a judgement. And in terms of cruelty, no Muslim country that I am aware of ever matched our grisly hanging, drawing and quartering routine, nor Bloody Mary’s 300+ burnings at the stake in a five year period, nor Vlad the Impailer’s bestial cruelties, nor the horrors of the 30 Years’ War.
It is very true that we have today a terrible problem – to put it mildly – with certain crazy Muslim men, but we have had our share of crazy men, even if they have not specialised in running wild on the streets with butchers’ knives and Kalashnikovs. The sheer magnitude and level of depraved brutality which our own continent has exhibited throughout the recent century should humble us considerably in our dealings with the rest of humanity. It certainly does not qualify us to hand out advice as though it is coming from on high, and as though we approach the world’s problems with clean hands. However, it is my belief that it is this very barbarism which has made Europe determined to do things differently in the future.
It may not seem so but we are moving into a kinder, more caring world. Not only have we such institutions now as the International Criminal Court, whereby previously unchecked rulers can be held to account, but we show concern and provide help when manmade or natural catastrophe overwhelms one of our brother countries. This is new. Every country now acknowledges that it has a duty to work towards some sort of a welfare state for its people. This, too, is new. Making war without United Nations authorisation is an option becoming increasingly difficult for sovereign states.
Social networking, Skype, emails and the instant availability of facts and information – as well as the next day delivery of goods on eBay and Amazon – makes ours a more joined-up world than it has ever been. And we are only at the beginning. Within three generations, virtually the entire human race will be able to communicate with each other in a universal language. What incredible good fortune that it happens to be our own which will be that medium – and what business opportunities that should present us with if we have the wit to seize them!
Meantime we must hold our nerve as we navigate through what undoubtedly will be treacherous waters, finding ways of containing and then rolling back the bone-headed fanatics who seek excitement on foreign battlefields as well as at home in the misplaced belief that their warped vision is the future. Yet we must do so without compromising our essential liberties and bring our Muslim brothers and sisters on board. Their thinking, young people, in particular, want all the same things we have, including democracy. We must find ways of getting them to prevail over their rogue elements and bring them on board too.
An exciting year awaits!
The ruling class have failed to grasp the sheer scale and magnitude of public anger at them. Image © Steve Bell.
The year is young, even if some of us are not. I thank my readers for showing interest in my musings over this past year and hope they will hang in there for another.
My feelings about 2015 are that it will fully live up to that old Chinese adage on parting from a friend or acquaintance, ‘May you live in interesting times’. Think about it: no pundit has ever approached an election with so little of an idea as to how it will all pan out. The stakes are incredibly high.
If we elect Red Ed, then the spectre of a departure from the EU recedes as he has no intention of holding a referendum. That should please the Europhiles. On the other hand, if he pursues the path of his hero François Hollande of France, whose policies he’s publicly endorsed, then he will jeopardise a recovery which is the envy of the world and which even the IMF itself said recently was unlikely to happen. To add to confusions and insecurities, it seems distinctly possible that the man who resoundingly lost the Scottish independence referendum and who slunk away with his tail between his legs is now set to bounce back as England’s ‘Kingmaker’ and become part of that same Westminster clique he so scathingly denounced throughout the referendum. But what if Cameron – while gaining the most seats – fails again to win an outright majority? Will he attempt once more to climb into bed with the much derided and ridiculed Clegg? Or will Theresa May’s day have come and the party turf our Dave out in favour of ‘kitten shoes’?
Maybe beer-swilling, cigar-chomping Nigel Farrage will make such a scenario a condition of his anticipated clutch of Ukip MPs joining with the Conservatives to keep Labour out, saying as he laid out his stall, that he couldn’t possibly ask his boys to support a man who once described them as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. Working with Theresa would be much more fun, particularly as it would demonstrate that our Nige and his cohorts were not against women per se. But they would point out they needed to be of the right type: the Thatcher/Boudicca variety. The then adolescent Nige still vividly remembers being powerfully affected by the leather-clad, jack-booted ‘Great She Elephant’ (Thatcher) as depicted in ‘Spitting Image’ and ‘Private Eye’. He even recalls frissons of sexual excitement at the way she liked bringing her riding crop down on any recalcitrant cabinet member. A favourite victim was poor, timid chancellor Geoffrey Howe. Not known for her sense of humour, even she saw the funny side when Labour’s former chancellor, Dennis Healey, said “being attacked by Geoffrey was like being savaged by a dead sheep”.
So now we are in an election run-up in which absolutely all bets are off. My own feelings tell me that there will be local deals between Ukip and Conservative candidates in which they agree not to split the right-of-centre vote if there is a chance of administering a good kicking to the incumbent Labour MP and giving him the old heave-ho. Such deals, I believe, will be made regardless of what the leadership wishes. So I predict a very messy and fractious bunch of new MPs arriving at Westminster. As well as the usual tired old band of re-treads, there will be loads of gurning, cantankerous Scottish Nationalists – specially authorised by their slippery leader to drive their English compatriots to distraction – as well as a band of screamingly politically incorrect Ukipers and a sad little rump of Lib Dems. I even think Wales – where it used to be said that even a donkey wearing a red rosette would get itself elected – may be ready to give that donkey’s party (Labour) a good hammering and have their own nationalists sent to Westminster in their place. And I wouldn’t put that past even the Cornish in the future – as a way of thanking ‘Calamity Clegg’ for giving them special status – by ridding the Duchy of his long-established Lib Dem MPs and installing their own brand of nationalists in their place.
What seems obvious to all but the Westminsterites is that the ruling class have failed properly to grasp the sheer scale and magnitude of public anger at them. With the possible exception of the military, the whole job lot have been found wanting. Even the Church has been shockingly compromised, with children’s homes being added to the time-honoured choirboy repertoire by predatory priests.
The Westminster Village clique are hated for their highhandedness – their unprincipled, venal use of taxpayers’ money and their lack of understanding of what this recession has done to the middle classes. Only last year they accepted a pay rise greater by far than they imposed on the rest of their public sector comrades and billed the five-year-long recession-crucified taxpayer an amount for expenses even bigger than the great expenses year scandal that so shattered their egos a few years ago. Many MPs have not forgiven the press for that excruciating public exposure.
Also hated by many are the police. A long list of terrible failures, from Hillsborough right through to Jimmy Savile, have doomed them. As I write this article it is reported that Cressida Dick, of the appalling, seven-shots-to-the-head Stockwell underground shooting of the innocent Brazilian Charles de Mendez, is to be honoured in the New Year’s Day Honours List. Since that terrible day she has gone from promotion to promotion. Are they intent on rubbing our noses in it to show how truly impotent we, the public, really are? And what about those theatrical, scandalous celebrity dawn raids on suspects’ homes? And their even more scandalous abuse of police bail, whereby they keep them under that career-destroying shadow for anything up to a year before, in most cases, releasing them?
The judiciary have fared little better. They are hated for their secret courts; their refusal to return murderers and rapists to their countries of origin; as well as its lawyers who, at vast public expense, fight for these criminals to stay here to the tune of £millions.
And let’s not forget either the town halls. Once the Town Clerk was a respected figure. Now his grandly titled successor, the CEO (they do love these self-important terms, don’t they, even having their own ‘Cabinets’) expects to be paid twice what the PM is paid, and their minions similarly rewarded. These obscenely paid jobsworths wouldn’t last one minute in the private sector. I doubt if more than a thimbleful of them would get shortlisted even for a job interview. While looking after themselves, they happily dispense with large numbers of their own, and as many of the more sensitive public services, as they can get away with. The idea being, of course, to discredit the whole notion of economies and getting value for money, as every household has had to do for years.
In similarly low esteem are the Revenue Collectors. The public despise them for their cowardly ‘sweetheart deals’, sucking-up-to and leniency towards the likes of Google, Starbucks and the rest while they mercilessly traduce the public. Even now they are laying plans to lift thousands out of individuals’ bank accounts without so much as a by-your-leave, never mind a court order.
But most of all the public hate the bankers, whom many believe brought us to this sorry pass. They blame them for leading this shameless descent into amorality and corrupt practices. These same miscreants still insist they are worth their obscene bonuses. Not a single one of the banks’ crooks is behind bars, and yet we know that criminality on an industrial scale was rife and that the sums involved ran to hundreds of billions. Compared to these Libor rate fixings, mis-sold PPI policies and companies deliberately driven into bankruptcy in order to asset strip them, anything that certain sections of the press did was trivial and small beer – regrettable though it was. Indeed, these banker boys never do or did anything at the petty level. It was they, after all, that managed the extraordinary feat of nearly crashing the entire global financial system. Millions went on the dole and the public was plunged into the misery of a five-year fightback right across the developed world to restore normality after having had hundreds of billions sequestered to prop up a bankrupt system which was judged ‘too big to fail’ and faced, in the process, a decade of falling living standards. How nice to be a bank and run a business where no matter what you do you never have to face the consequences. Even better is that when you make a cock-up and your criminality is exposed, you get away with it with barely a slap on the wrist and expect to be rescued and given another chance.
Not so lucky were the journos. While not for one minute did our Dave consider employing the majesty of the law to find out what went wrong with banking, name names and expose the culprits, the journos of the press – who had so embarrassed his Westminster chums – would have to face that majesty in their place. It was payback time. Into the frame stepped the infamous Leveson Inquiry. Andy Coulson and many of his associates went to Choky and continue to do so. Meanwhile those same banker chums continue to traipse in and out of Downing Street as though nothing ever happened, and in numbers greater than all the rest of British industry and commerce put together (which shows who’s got the ear of the ‘posh boys’, doesn’t it, and why they will never have to wear prison blue).
So, come May, don’t be surprised if this anti-establishment backlash assumes massive proportions and brings a dramatic reversal to years of falling voter turnout when ‘the plebs’ set out to overturn the establishment’s applecart. Either that or it will be close to a boycott if they decide en masse to stay away, taking the view that their votes will change nothing: ‘A plague on all your houses!’
Traditionally any leader presiding over such a climb-back from certain catastrophe, boasting 1.75 million new jobs and facing an opposition leader so utterly devoid of anything associated with leadership, could expect to be massively ahead in the polls. Yet Cameron is not. Something very strange is going on out there.
In all these musings I have said not a word about what is happening in the broader world, and surely they are terrible. No pundit either, in that confused and bloody mayhem, can point to a way out. That subject must be for another article. But for us, in the meantime, let’s raise our glasses for this New Year of 2015 and pray that answers will be found abroad too. We can take genuine pride in having overtaken France to be the world’s 5th largest economy, and they say that by 2030 we will have overtaken Germany as well. Glory be! The last time we were there was 1954, but that was because we destroyed most of her economy in WWII. She had originally overtaken us in 1894 and that’s when our troubles really began. Clever, industrious Fritz got too big for his jackboots.
Beijing is fighting the tide of history
A Tiananmen Square solution is no longer an option in this media savvy world.
I sometimes think that China believes it should receive special treatment and indulgences from the rest of the world. It seems to have got it into its head that it is a case apart, and that the rest of the world has no place in offering it advice, much less in criticising it. Take what is going on in Hong Kong at the moment. The people of that former colony of ours are asking no more than that China honour the agreement standing when we departed the colony in 1997 – including the ability to choose their own administrators. That seems fair enough, doesn’t it? Yet having a list of approved candidates presented to them by the Communist authorities in Beijing, which inform them that they can chose any one of these, is not quite what the rest of us understands as free choice. It’s like when Henry Ford quipped about his Model T that you can have any colour as long as it’s black. For Beijing, read red.
But Beijing dreads any move in the direction of opening up Chinese society, even though the drumbeat for change grows louder every day. The Central Committee remains fixated on what became of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev when he recognised the inevitable and began the process of cutting the people a bit of slack. Look where that got him, Beijing says to itself. The result of the ending of the Cold War is that there are three times the number of democracies in the world today as there were at that time.
Try as the Communist authorities might to control the flow of information, they know that with the advent of the computer and, even more so, the world wide web and social media, it becomes daily more difficult to keep people in the dark. A while back I heard that years passed and there were still people in China who did not know that the Americans had landed a man on the moon. It didn’t fit with Communist orthodoxy which held that capitalist science was inferior to their own, so they kept quiet about it. There are echoes here, too, of that chap who fought on in the jungles of Southeast Asia for twenty-seven years after war’s end because he did not know that the atomic bomb had been dropped and that it was all over. Such situations are inconceivable in today’s world. Incidentally, the man was feted on his return to Japan and said only that he was awaiting orders from his commanding officer. Some wait!
Beijing and its leaders know that the tide of history is against them. No doubt their hope is that they can put off the evil day beyond their own lifetime so that they can continue to bask in the aphrodisiacs of total power. They thought they had identified Gorbachev’s mistake – that of opening up society rather than delivering the goodies that mysteriously only capitalism seemed able to produce. So they abandoned the command economy and Marxist economics and plunged, pell-mell, into capitalism. That made a nonsense of everything that Mao and the Long March stood for, but that didn’t matter so long as it enabled them to hang on to power. The worrying thing for the rest of us is that, having performed that astonishing conjuring trick, they seem unable to realise that a wealthy man – and there are a great many in China today – is not so accepting of orders as a poor man. He may have been willing to forego liberties in pursuit of getting out of the gutter, but once out he wants to breath the sweet air of liberty. That is the Politburo’s dilemma and it is an impossible one to solve in a way that allows it to keep power. Trying to square that intractable circle is further complicated by a very dangerous legacy of history.
China, I fear, has something of a contempt for the rest of humanity. For so long it considered itself the centre of not just the world, but of the Universe – and in many respects it was (at least of the world that followed, Persia, Greece and Rome). Although imperially ruled, with the usual aristocratic class, it did have advancement for the plebs by examination – the Mandarin system. So convinced was it that it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world that it did a North Korea and sealed itself off from what it considered the contaminating influences of its fellow humans, deeming them “barbarian”.
Our own Lord McCartney’s high-powered, governmental trade mission to the Celestial Kingdom in the 18th century turned out to be a very strange affair, bearing in mind that he was a “barbarian”. While the emperor’s court was in awe of McCartney, his entourage and even more so of what he had brought with him, the great man himself was nonplussed and uncomprehending. He was even disdainful. Yet here before him was a pro-consul of the mightiest power on earth, whose nation was in the process of changing the face of humanity with its Industrial Revolution. He was laden with a vast array of the products of that revolution, several of which the emperor played with like a little child.
Yet in the end, the ‘Son of Heaven’ turned his back on them (the only thing he couldn’t resist were clocks). “Go back to your master, King George,” he said, “and thank him. Tell him that we have everything we need, but he is welcome to do homage to me as do all the other rulers of the earth.” And that was that. China, in the years following, paid a terrible price for such highhandedness. Two maritime wars with the new super power laid it prostrate and humbled with the Victorians seriously considering annexing it. In the process it was forced to engage with those products it had so scornfully rejected a hundred years before. It is only now recovering and turning out those same products itself.
Until recently, China refused to believe the ‘Out of Africa’ origins of the human race. It actually believed that they had quite separate beginnings to the rest of us. For a long time we all thought that Homo sapiens shared the world with only one other kindred species: Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal Man. Then on a small island called Flores in Indonesia, a new hominid was found. He was only a metre tall and was nicknamed Hobbit. Although from the east, China would have no truck with being related and, indeed, he wasn’t except in the wider Homo sense. Soon after, but this time on the mainland of Asia itself, quite close to China, was found a new but normal sized hominid which we called Denisovan Man (named after Denis, a Russian hermit who lived where the fossils were discovered in the 18th century). Still China insisted it was distinct.
Finally those illusions were shattered when a new science was brought to bear: DNA. It had no choice but to accept that ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis – that it was just like the rest of us and was once black with frizzy hair. China has now joined the comity of nations and needs all of us just as much as we need it. But its grievances at past humiliations and present ambitions will have to be contained, and that’s not going to be easy. It never, historically, interested itself in the world beyond Asia – except for one brief period in the 15th century when it built a gigantic fleet with ships four times larger than Europe’s, stuffed with presents for the ‘ignorant savages’ who did not have benefit of his imperial rule but who could, nonetheless, submit to the overlordship of the ‘Son of Heaven’. It reached as far as the east African coast. At that point in time it could have stopped Europe in its tracks, since it preempted Magellan’s circumnavigation by seventy years and been itself the great exploring power which opened up the world. But once again its insularity when a new, less enterprising emperor came to power was its undoing. He ordered the fleet destroyed and imposed death on anyone caught building a sea going vessel.
The nations which now have to band together to resist China’s present ambitions are those of Southeast Asia, particularly those around the South China Sea where large oil deposits have been found. Meantime it is preoccupied with its standoff with Hong Kong’s dissidents who, sooner or later, will prove the catalyst for opening up the whole of China. A Tiananmen Square solution is no longer an option in this media savvy world. And besides, it knows that should it apply such a method it can whistle goodbye to the people of Taiwan ever agreeing to reunite with the motherland. For that is its most cherished territorial ambition.
China’s long history makes it a country that thinks in centuries. Thankfully it is a nation which seldom acts hastily, and once it has been persuaded to come down from that pedestal it has perched on for so long it will become a good friend and contributor to the rest of humanity.
Viva Las Vegas
I’ve always viewed Las Vegas as a totally artificial construct – something dumped in the middle of the desert and catering to the most vulgar, hedonistic, licentious and tasteless leanings of human nature. In many ways it is these things, but in other important ways it is a great deal more.
I’m sitting here in our bedroom on the 28th floor (top) of the 3,626-bedroomed Flamingo hotel close to the 3,933-bedroomed Bellagio hotel as well as opposite the 3,960-bedroomed Caesar’s Palace hotel on Las Vegas’ famous ‘Strip’. What brings me to this exotic location is an invitation from an award-winning San Francisco broadcaster to talk about my recently released book. My wife and I thought it would be an opportunity lost if we didn’t see as many sights as possible of the western US, and Las Vegas is the jumping off place for the Grand Canyon. These three hotels alone, according to our tour driver, have more rooms than all of San Francisco’s put together. Vegas is awash with them and these three represent only the smaller part of an incredible total.
I’ve always viewed Las Vegas as a totally artificial construct – something dumped in the middle of the desert and catering to the most vulgar, hedonistic, licentious and tasteless leanings of human nature. In many ways it is these things, but in other important ways it is a great deal more. My wife and I are not gaming types (never having bought so much as a scratch card or a lottery ticket) and not a nickel slipped through these canny fingers of ours in the three days we have been here. But it is the jumping off place for the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, and it seemed churlish not to explore this ultimate symbol of western decadence and see if we could discover what makes it tick.
To begin at the beginning, I doubt I shall ever again be assigned a bedroom more palatial than the one we have; it has to be more than twice the size of any other we have stayed in. We showed interest in the receptionist who came from Hong Kong and had a little chat. She told us Hong Kongers yearned for the old days and determinedly kept as many symbols and aspects of their colonial past as the Beijing authorities were prepared to countenance (and actually, as it turns out, it’s quite a few). I think our interest and the fact that we were from the old colonial power was rewarded with this magnificent top floor bedroom with its spectacular views. Considering the amazing online deal my wife got, we were truly lucky.
America, as we all know, is a big country and it likes – wherever possible – to do things big. America also works; it’s rare you encounter anything with an ‘Out of Order’ sign on it or malfunctioning in any way. It also does things in style (the showman is never far away) and here you will find everything, absolutely everything: the good, bad and the ugly. The good – and truth to tell there are so many ‘goods’ – is that it is full of so many unexpected delights. One such is a wonderful water course… one is a fountain display in front of the Bellagio hotel the like of which I have never seen. It must be unequalled in the world. Also, no city on earth brings the wonders of electricity so brilliantly to life. An orbiting visitor from outer space would have to wonder what this incredible glow from the blackness of the surrounding desert was all about.
You might say that a fake volcanic eruption in the giant forecourt of one of the strip’s hotels would have to be tacky. But it is not. It is, in fact, a truly breathtaking spectacle and, like the water display, free. There is, of course, much that is vulgar and much that is kitsch, such as Little Venice, but it is a very superior kitsch. Every single structure is built to the highest order using the best materials and the finest craftsmanship. And everywhere is spotlessly clean. Pity the litter-bug Brit who indulges that particular vice of his: he will be jumped on from a very great height. But make no mistake, this place is about money – as much of the lovely stuff as they can legitimately extract, though I have to say they do not harass you. Prices, with some exceptions, are not extortionate. It took a whole half mile of walking to get through one hotel: MGM and its mall. The walk took us past thousands of games machines, umpteen roulette tables, shops, bars and cafes. Any visitor to Vegas needs first to get in training: the walking will test them to their limit, especially those parts under the blazing sun. What a relief that my two knee replacements had bedded in and that I walk the two-mile journey to my shop and back every day.
We visited in the autumn when temperatures are at their best (the high 20s (75F – 80F). But as states go, Nevada is a poor one – close to desperately poor. As a desert state, it has little or no arable land and precious few minerals. Something had to be done. Thankfully it had the mighty, 1,400-mile-long Colorado River, and on it bounty. Las Vegas became possible as did – 400 miles away – Los Angeles. In my own lifetime, Vegas has grown from a few thousand to 2.1m, and it is still growing apace. It is based almost entirely on the service industry. If our excursion driver to the canyon is to be believed, 90% of its workers are on the minimum wage and, irritatingly to those of us from Europe, he made what we would consider an unseemly powerful pitch to be tipped. It is sad that someone has to abase himself in this way to make a decent living, but probably he doesn’t see it that way as he has been doing it so long and has got used to it. The bogeyman in all this is the employer who, by improper means, gains a cheap workforce. But there’s another way of looking at it. America is famous for its service; everybody is keen to help you, to smile at you, to please you. To them we must extend thanks for causing our supermarket checkout girls and others to stop being surly, to engage with us, look us in the eye and smile at us. May this not in part be because their living is not guaranteed and they need your reward for looking after them?
On reflection, it is not so different in my own little shop. I cannot be indifferent to my customers. I must at all times engage with them and provide the service they are looking for. If I and my wife are now celebrating the 20th anniversary of the shop’s opening, may this not be because we have done this? This grim recession has taken its toll. Perhaps 25% of our takings have been lost, but we are still standing and signs are beginning to look up.
But returning to Las Vegas, and how it seeks to please and relieve you of a dime or two, everything operates on a huge scale. The buildings are ginormous with more shiny glass and steel skyscrapers than you are ever likely to see in one place, except perhaps the Gulf States and some newly built Chinese cities. Although much of Vegas is now 40 years old, it looks remarkably pristine and un-weathered. That’s down to the same desert conditions which helped preserves the pharaohs and their monuments. The place heaves with people, but somehow absorbs them so that they do not seem to be too many. There are masses of Malls so that you will still find wide, empty spaces. Las Vegas is America’s premier playground – it’s guilty secret. Running through the country’s psyche is a vein of Puritanism that includes a loathing of gambling. Even now, a majority of the states ban it. It all goes back to those pilgrims who left my own city of Plymouth almost 400 years ago to create a better England, a New England, in a far-off wilderness across the ocean.
Here in the desert, their descendants have conspired to offer a bit of light relief to those earnest hopes of yesteryear. In the process, they have gone a long way to rescuing their basket-case state. Rich widows come here – some regularly – to spend their husband’s fortunes in the cause of cheering themselves up. Ordinary Americans come here because it’s just one helluva place. Executives come here for conventions, naughtiness and show-time on the side. Outsiders like ourselves come to gawk, and newly-weds for the ‘quickie wedding’. From day one the Mafia made it their home and large dollops of their ill gotten gains have been laundered through it and financed its expansion. Hollywood too, along with its stars, once looked down their noses at Las Vegas, but now play court to it. And above it, all the sun shines down for 320 days of the year. It’s an amazing place, and like Muslims with their religious obligation to visit Mecca once in their life, consumerist Westerners should feel a similar obligation to visit this desert El Dorado: this hedonistic, earthly temple of pleasure.
Making the case for the Union
The countdown has begun on the biggest political issue to confront the British people in 307 years. 91.6% of those people, the English, Welsh and Northern Irish are mere bystanders in the great debate. Should the Scots go back to where they were in 1707?
All credit to the slick and answer-for-everything Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scots independence campaign. He has run rings round the dull, pedestrian Alastair Darling, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Characteristically, the ex-chancellor has based his campaign for staying in the Union on bread and butter issues: the pounds shillings and pence he no doubt obsessed about when he was at the Treasury. Those units of solvency are important, of course, but there is more to life than monetary issues. There is another narrative to be told; it was one of the heart, and on this, we have to ask ourselves whether the polite, unemotional, former small-town solicitor was the one to tell that story.
In all the long history of our time on earth there have been only two fundamental changes to the human condition: the move from hunter-gatherer to farming and the Industrial Revolution. Guess which two nations spearheaded that latter change, along with the other component nation of the British Isles? Our thinkers, scientists, engineers and administrators took the world by storm and changed it forever and the consequences are with us today. Every production line, every factory, every office administration, every hospital – even organised science itself with its insistence on empiricism and peer review – is the by-product of that coming together of our peoples.
If troubled areas of the world, like the Israelis and Arabs, wonder if it is ever going to be possible to live in harmony they need look no further than at the Scots and the English: they were forever at each other’s throats – literally – exhibiting a visceral hatred that today is almost impossible to imagine. Those martial qualities on both sides which made their borderlands a nightmarish place to live in were turned outwards and their armies proved unstoppable. Within a hundred years a quarter of the planet lay at their feet and they found themselves administering the greatest empire known to man. It was a benign empire, not at all like the cruel Conquistadors of Spain or the blood soaked hordes of Genghis Khan. It laid telegraph lines across the oceans of the world seeking to bring it together and railway lines everywhere, even in countries which were not part of its family of nations (South American railways owe their existence to British capital and engineering expertise). Their fingers were in every pie you can imagine. Theirs was a progressive, driven empire which had very elevated notions concerning its role in the world, which in fairness was not altogether fanciful. It saw itself as the heir to Rome, but on a vastly grander canvas. It was on a mission – so it thought – to civilise the world.
When danger threatened in the terrible form of Napoleon, the Kaiser and, most frighteningly of all, Hitler, the two nations stood foursquare in opposition to tyranny, never once arguing whose blood was being shed the most liberally to maintain the Union. No little man like Alex Salmond then lurked in the wings to undermine our joint resolve. We were as one in our determination to see it through. Now, under the guise of self-determination, such men – and women, too – have come out of the woodwork to tell their countrymen that they have all along been deceived, as though those proconsuls of Empire and great explorers like David Livingstone were, from the beginning, guileless dupes of the English. The Canadians know otherwise. They have a whole range of mountains named after a Scot – my own family name Mackenzie, as it happens – and the world is peppered with Scottish place names.
Scotsmen and women have been honoured and appreciated by the English throughout these three centuries of marriage and never was a Scotsman working in England made to feel unwelcome. Indeed, if anything the English grew to develop a respect for the Scots which in many ways made them want to emulate them. So what is this angry discourse which Salmond and his cohorts have whipped up in Scotland? I do not for a moment believe that he thinks his countrymen will be better off without the English. No thoughtful person could ever truly believe that and that includes a Nobel economics prize winner, Paul Krugman, who states that Salmond’s proposals are a “recipe for disaster”.
For all their faults, the English are an easy-going lot. Who else would see only their own young people incur thousands in university debts, allow only Scots free prescriptions, and cover all their care home costs whereas the English have to sell the family home? The English also pay £1,400 more per head under the Barnet Formula. All of this and much more is denied to their own people. They even let Scots have many more Members of Parliament than their population warrants and vote on purely English matters, when the English have no say in most matters relating to them. No, Salmond would happily risk impoverishing his own people so long as he and his lackies can enjoy la dolce vita, swanning around the world attending head of state junkets with his retinue of ministers as well as being chauffeured everywhere around their new fiefdom.
If the English are so terrible a people to be in harness with, why is it that half the world – or so it seems – is knocking at their door, with Calais under siege and young men willing to risk life and limb to gain entry?
Cameron will have history to answer to if our country falls apart. He could not possibly survive any more than Lord North did after the loss of the American colonies. Scots needed to know from the beginning that the English valued them, even loved and in many respects envied them. As canny people they are, they did not need reminding ad nauseam which side their bread was buttered on. I say this as a person of Scots parentage who through long years has grown to love and appreciate the English. This failed and abysmal campaign to save the Union should have been first and foremost an appeal to the heart. The Scots are a sentimental people. They would have listened. If only, at this time of national peril, we had the eloquence of a Churchill to plead the cause of the Union. When the arguments are done and dusted in a few days’ time, and should the Scots decide to listen to the better angels of their nature and save the Union, it will be no thanks to Cameron. It will be because they know, in their heart, that much of what I have said here is true.
Ashya King and a heavy-handed state
We must hope now that the little boy wins through and is able once again to regain health and happiness.
How extraordinary that plod, in pursuit of what he thought was criminality, obtained a search warrant to raid and look for clues in the flat of the grandmother of the littler brain tumour boy who had been carted off to a Spanish hospital where he lay all alone with a policeman at his door.
If there was criminality at work it is that of the British and Spanish states in sanctioning the separation of a desperately ill five-year-old from the only people in a position to provide comfort and love. While his siblings, too, were included in the no contact ban his parents languished in a Spanish gaol three hundred miles away in Madrid whence they were whisked from Malaga at dead of night.
Sounds like a modern day horror story, doesn’t it? But this is the reality when a heavy-handed, insensitive, all-powerful state apparatus gets to work when it believes its aims are being thwarted. Just think for a moment. Here is a five-year-old child in the grip of a life-threatening condition who has never for a moment been without the comfort of his loving family. Suddenly they are ripped apart and he is adrift in a world of foreign voices which he does not understand. What is he to make of it except to feel blind terror and abandonment? This, in my view, is where the true criminality lies.
As for his grandmother’s flat, how very incredible – and stupid, I might add – that plod should think he had a good chance of coming upon incriminating evidence there. What this case illustrates so perfectly is the excessive use of state power and the mindless, blundering way it often goes about exercising that power. We saw it in action with Cliff Richard recently. In the process grieves and sometimes irreparable damage can be done. Which of us can forget that dawn descent on a Scottish island in 1991 when nine children were taken into care on a false abuse premise (satanic rites were mentioned) and kept separated from their parents for years, in one case five?
With regard to today’s Hampshire couple, it looks very much as though no law was broken. The parents had custody of the child and had a perfect right to take him back into their care – just as that daughter recently was minded to remove her father from the unhappiness of a care home. What does come across in all this is the arrogance of a medical profession furious that its judgement should be called into questioned and, even worse, defied. For long years it has enjoyed operating in an unquestioning world of miasma in which the patient often has little understanding of what is going on and feels compelled to bow to their expertise and superior intellect.
But now an enormously valuable communications tool has come to the patient’s rescue – the Internet – and they don’t like it. Patients can now consult world-renowned, leading authorities in the field and often find that they have been misdiagnosed or that there are other solutions to their problems out there. In other words, for the first time in history the patient has been empowered. It is no longer possible to bamboozle him in quite the way they had grown accustomed. Now the frustrated medics, who see themselves as authority figures, turn to another arm of the oppressive state – the police – who are only too respectfully eager to spring into action on their behalf. They, in turn, turn to another arm – the judiciary – who tell them to involve another arm – the town hall who can get a custody order from one of its judges who will then get yet another arm – the Crown Prosecution Service – to issue a European Arrest Warrant.
What chance does the little man have in the face of such an accumulation of state power? Only a free press – which that same power would dearly like to muzzle – can cause an outraged public, whose vote the man at the top will shortly need in the coming election, stand a chance of getting him to call off the hounds.
Thankfully common sense and human kindness have finally prevailed and these terrible events have now been resolved. We must hope now that the little boy wins through and is able once again to regain health and happiness.
Europe must act as a much-needed adrenalin shot to a weary Uncle Sam
While we all luxuriate in the afterglow of a fabulous summer and await the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum – as well ponder the rise of Ukip and how it will all pan out at the coming General Election – a much more terrible set of conundrums lap at Europe’s borders. Far to its east, the post-war settlement is under threat.
Already an annexation has taken place. On Europe’s southern flank a militia banditry reigns in the land we helped free from Gadhafi. Across the desert sands of the Sahara the black flag of Muslim extremism makes many of the states there close to ungovernable. Sweep east and the heroes of Tahir Square have seen a military dictatorship annul all their efforts and seize power in Egypt to stop that pivotal Arab state falling to the excesses of the Muslim Brotherhood. Go south into the land of the former Queen of Sheba (Yemen) and more turmoil reigns. Across the narrow straits from our former colony of Aden and into Somalia more of the same flourishes, not just on land but at sea, where a scourge which our navy had long ago cleansed the world of has broken out again: piracy. Travel north into the desert fastnesses which Lawrence once traversed and you are upon Gaza and Syria. Again, more chaos. Go east and you have reached Iraq where the most bestial activities of all are currently taking place. Further east and you are upon the hapless land of Afghanistan where we await the outcome of our ten-year effort when we leave next year. The signs are not good. If a new Iraq breaks out there it may very well take down a nuclear armed Pakistan with it.
While all this is going on, we in the West fret about our petty goings on – though certain goings on, such as splitting our country apart and leaving the EU are not, admittedly, petty – and we worry about what our responses should be to these ugly canvasses which are unfolding all around us. It is my concerned belief that we are about to see years, if not decades, of strife before an exhausted Islam settles down to enjoy the sort of order which descended over Europe with the 17th century ‘Peace of Westphalia’ following the terrible bloodletting of the Thirty Years War. That, too, was about religion – the Protestant/Catholic schism which has echoes of the present Sunni/Shia split.
But things could have been different if the US had had a partner as militarily powerful as itself with whom it could have shared the burden. It would have made it possible for us to save our Muslim brothers from themselves and spare them the miseries we endured in that long-ago conflict. That partner should have been us, the Europeans. We have no longer any interest in colonising anybody, but we do have an interest in maintaining stability, especially when it is on our doorstep.
Just as the victorious Western Allies were able to work the miracle of creating and sustaining a democratic and peaceable West Germany after the horrors of Nazism, so we could have rendered the same service to the fractious Muslim world if we in Europe had pulled our weight in world affairs and not left it all to an ever more fed up and weary Uncle Sam.
But even now it is not perhaps too late. First of all we must stop distracting ourselves by fragmentation – starting with ourselves. If Scotland separates, it will send Spain into paroxysms of worry as its most prosperous region, Catalonia, ups the ante for independence. Then the Basques, another – prosperous area – will do the same. Belgium, itself – the heart of the European Union – may very well split in two, with the French-speaking south and Dutch-speaking north going their own ways. There is plenty more potential for further fragmentation in the always volatile Balkans. And who’s to say that Wales and Northern Ireland might not catch the contagion.
Cameron’s job – in which, as far as I can see, he has done mighty little that is visible and hence Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip – is to get busy on those re-negotiations with Europe and make them meaningful. Europe needs reform, and most of its members know it. If he can get it into their thick heads that they really are in danger of losing one of their biggest players then I think there is a chance that he may come home with a package that most of us can accept. Meantime, he should go public and tell them (and the country) that unless this is so he will have to recommend our departure.
If Europe can weather this British-made storm which lies ahead and stop attempting to reduce its nation states to regional entities, then it can forge ahead and exert the kind of muscle on the world stage – both diplomatically and militarily – as will act as an adrenalin shot to Uncle Sam. No longer will he feel alone. He and his new partner will dispose of such power as will make all others think twice, including Putin with his old-world adventures in the east. Europe will have come into its own and will have demonstrated to the world that its interests lie not only in enriching itself but in helping an increasingly impotent United Nations maintain a stable and just world.
It’s time to rewrite the history books
Time and science have laid bare the truth and now it should be spoken loud and clear.
It is not often you get to bury a king of England. The last time we did so was sixty two years ago. The next one will be in seven months’ time when the whole world’s eyes will be on Leicester cathedral. Then we will be burying, in befitting manner, a monarch who died 530 years ago – the only one with no known resting place; who was the last true English king; the last to lead his soldiers from the front and die as a consequence; the last of a 330-year dynasty and the last king of the Middle Ages. We speak, of course, of Richard III, Shakespeare’s ‘crookback Dick’.
More controversy has swirled around this king than perhaps any in our island’s long history. When he was originally buried by monks, they were so frightened and intimidated by the people who had killed him – and under such compulsion to get a move on – that they had no time even to find a coffin. Imagine that. A king of England who, earlier that day, had been their anointed sovereign dumped naked in an unmarked grave like so much flotsam. Minutes before, the badly hacked about, naked body had arrived on a donkey after a fifteen-mile journey from the battlefield of Bosworth and the populace had been invited to abuse it as it went by. One had even driven a dagger deep into an exposed buttock, striking the pelvic bone.
Richard died in 1485 in what we regard as the last of the many battles of the thirty-year dynastic struggle known to us as the Wars of the Roses. He was thirty-two years old. No monarch in all of English history has been so thoroughly traduced and demonised. What has led to this? We know he was utterly loyal to his brother Edward IV – a Yorkist – fighting his battles fearlessly and with great distinction. So trusted was he that at the age of nineteen he was asked to govern the turbulent north of England as a virtual Vice-Roy, which he did so successfully for the next eleven years that they came to love him and regard him as one of their own, hence York Minster’s own fierce battle to have him interred amidst its ancient cloisters.
That total trust of his brother, the king, even extended, when he was dying, to asking Richard to look after his two infant sons rather than their mother. The princes were housed in what was then a royal palace, the Tower of London, and it is their later disappearance which has landed Richard with the heinous charge, even for those brutal times, of murdering his own nephews, aged nine and twelve, in order to usurp their right to the throne. This has been the justification for the victor of Bosworth to set about vilifying Richard for posterity. But what are the facts?
Unfortunately for Richard’s detractors there is not one scrap of evidence to show that their deeply religious and loyal uncle killed them. Yes, he had the opportunity, but then so did several others. What if when Henry Tudor, after killing Richard, had arrived at the Tower to find the boys still alive? He would have been appalled. Rumour had it that they were dead and Henry would certainly have wished it so. Their continued existence would have posed a terrible threat to his rule, in fact it would have removed all legitimacy. May it not be that, when he made a show of looking for the bodies, he knew that they were not there but felt it necessary to make it look as if he believed they were by digging around? Murder, later of the princes, would have been his only option. Strange it was, if Richard was the killer, that Henry never did find the decomposed bodies. That would have damned Richard for all time and been perfect justification for Henry taking the throne. As it happened they were later discovered under a staircase, one of the first places to look, one would have thought. It would have suited Richard’s successor, Henry Tudor, very well on taking over to have found the decomposed bodies as it would have totally validated his killing of the king.
The fact of the matter is that Henry Tudor had a much stronger motive for disposing of the boys than their uncle. While they lived there was no way he could rightfully claim the kingship. His closeness in the line of succession was so remote it was almost laughable. One genealogist has placed him 16th in line.
Now comes the reason why Richard had no great reason to kill the boys. Rumour had widely circulated for years that they were illegitimate – that the king had married bigamously. Then, after he had died, the bishop of Bath and Wells came right out and, like another bishop would do, hundreds of years later, concerning the Duke of Windsor’s affair with Wallace Simpson, he blew the whistle and preached this openly in a sermon. The evidence was that strong for him to do so. The upshot was that Richard, as a consequence, was the rightful heir.
The entire nobility as well as the church rallied behind Richard. Apart from anything else they wanted no boy king. They had the good of the nation to think about. After thirty years of turbulent bloodletting they wanted a wise and proven administrator, a man of action to settle the affairs of state. England had been torn apart during those years and the aristocracy decimated. In one battle alone, Towton – fought during a blizzard – 28,000 men had been slain, the greatest number ever to fall on English soil. It represented 8% of the country’s population, as high a percentage in a single day as four years of World War l clocked up. No wonder there was enthusiasm for Richard. His coronation was the best attended in the whole of the Middle Ages.
The Tudors, after their victory at Bosworth, knew they had an uphill struggle to gain legitimacy in the face of Richard’s watertight claim to the 330-year Plantagenet line. History, as we know, gets largely written by the victors and finally, after a hundred years, the Tudors had the Bard, no less, to finish the job for them; and my, how he did it with his Richard III! ‘Crookback Dick’ became England’s true devil incarnate – and a twisted and deformed one at that; one even dogs barked at as he went by.
Unfortunately for the propagandists, after five hundred years, the wheel has come full circle and the truth is out. He was not a hunchback and he had no withered arm. He did have curvature of the spine (scoliosis), but people would have barely noticed the condition – just a slight stoop to one side. But what forensic science has also shown with this incredible find of the king under the car park is that Richard battled a painful infirmity just as heroically as he fought his brother opponents in battle. It is truly remarkable that he was able to function well under the weight of over sixty pounds of armour and wield a massive broadsword. His slight frame conformed more to that of a woman and his height was barely 5’5”. In today’s world, we would have nothing but praise for such magnificent stoicism. He would at all times have been in acute arthritic pain and, because of compressed lungs, only capable of short bursts of maximum energy before he became breathless.
When he finally succumbed in battle to his enemies, he did so in such a manner – and with so many witnesses – that even the great Tudor propaganda machine could not hide the truth of his incredible bravery. It was Victoria Cross stuff. He came within inches of killing Henry Tudor, having charged him from a thousand yards away, hacking his way to the pretender and cutting down his standard bearer, England’s leading jouster, a massive beast of a man. No English king in history ever led such a heroic charge – not even the magnificent Henry V or Richard the Lionheart – but even in this his detractors still had to have a dig, saying that it was really the mad frenzy of the defeated devil at work. But now time and science have laid bare the truth and it should be spoken loud and clear. Perhaps the Bard’s work should not be performed in future without a disclaimer along the lines of ‘Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely co-incidental…’ Certainly we must rewrite our history books.
There is, however, one note of puzzlement to me in all this. In view of the massive interest both here and abroad, how is it that we have not, to my knowledge, heard a single word from any of the royals? Are they not in the slightest interested? He was, after all, one of their own and an anointed head of state. Is it their intention to boycott the internment? We must hope not. That would be an act of the crassest folly. A proper response would be for the present sovereign to pay her respects and acknowledge that a terrible wrong has been done to her ancestor. It would be a way of saying sorry on behalf of all of us.
Oh, for the certainties of the Cold War
Europe has shirked its responsibilities and find itself powerless to intervene with overwhelming force when a bunch of wild jihadists – too wild even for Al Qaeda – set up a terrorist state in the most volatile region of the world, from which we gain most of our energy supplies.
Today we long for the certainties of the Cold War, when the prospect of nuclear Armageddon kept us all in order and expulsions from embassies of so-called ‘trade envoys’ and exchanges of spies at Checkpoint Charlie was pretty much all there was to get excited about. The enemy lay over there, just behind the Iron Curtain and he wore a uniform.
He had got as much of the world as he could persuade to side with him and we did the same. Those who cried ‘a plague on both your houses’ liked to call themselves the non-aligned. Among our cheer leaders, we had some real bastards (outright tyrants like Saddam Hussein during the Iran/Iraq war) but – as one American famously said – they were, at least, our bastards.
In that halcyon, far-off time, an old man like me could pass through airport controls without being ritually humiliated and he had no fear of being blown out of the skies by a Ukrainian nutter or taken on a one way flight into the Shard. These, I am sure, are the thoughts of many people – and some of these same people will even think further back to a time when the whole world was kept in a form of order by the great European empires.
“What fool,” they are now asking themselves, “said at the collapse of Communism that it was the ‘end of history’”? But foolishness was not confined to him. The so called ‘Peace Dividend’ was lauded by almost all and caused developed nations around the world to think that they could safely slash their defence budgets. Now those same nations find themselves powerless to intervene with overwhelming force when a bunch of wild jihadists – too wild even for Al Qaeda – set up a terrorist state in the most volatile region of the world, from which we gain most of our energy supplies. They even taunt us with their social networking and media skills by flashing up images of their barbarities, virtually in real time.
The truth of the matter is that the ‘good guy’ always needed to keep up his guard, As President Theodore (‘Teddy’ of Teddy bear fame) Roosevelt said: “Walk softly but carry a big stick”. My complaint is not that Uncle Sam is not pulling his weight, but that his collectively richer European partners are not pulling theirs. Had they not scrambled to save pennies on their defence budgets – preferring, self-indulgently, to leave it all to him – they would have been in a position to buttress him and not leave him the lone, isolated figure he is today, carrying the burdens of the world. We, more than anyone, know how thankless and onerous a task it is being the world’s policeman. No wonder, after Korea (which he still shoulders), Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan he is now weary of it all and contemplates increasingly withdrawing into isolationism. God helps us all if he does.
My argument is that if you are rich you carry responsibilities. Europe, in my view, shirks its. This is an area where the EU really could do something useful. That something is to get all member states to agree a percentage of their GDP to defence and hold them to it. Furthermore, it could make a portion of that defence capability available to the UN to give it teeth to deploy forces to troubled areas as and when the need arises. Peace keeping may then move forward to peace making so that, eventually, when enough other countries have pledged similar support, the world’s only legitimate superpower will be the UN.
Right now an arc of terror embraces huge swathes of Africa – right on Europe’s doorstep – and extends thousands of miles eastwards to the major oil producing countries of the world. It may soon extend thousands more if Afghanistan, as seems likely, falls once more into terrorism when NATO leaves next year. Adjacent Pakistan – always a perennially unstable country – may quickly follow suit and that is a state with a nuclear armoury which may very well fall into hostile hands.
To say that the unfolding situation is worrying is to put it mildly. The very first step is to give the well organised and heroic Kurds the capability to smash the ten thousand or so ISIS fanatics. If the new government of Iraq can get its act together, so much the batter. It too can help, so long as they don’t run away again and leave more state-of-the-art stockpiles of weapons to their opponents.
After that, Palestine – the kernel of all Middle East problems – must be addressed. Israel, the one shining light of openness and democracy in a darkening region, must shine that light throughout the troubled Middle East. Unlike the Red Indians, the Maoris, the Incas, Aztecs and so many others, Israelis have at least got their ancestral land back. The rest never will, even though they lost them just a few hundred years ago, never mind two thousand. They should be happy for that and we can take some credit for that happening with our 1917 Balfour Declaration.
But Israel should avoid the deadly sin of greed by being thirsty for more land, personified by the never-ending building of fresh settlements on land they acknowledge not to be theirs. They should show pity for the dispossessed as they themselves were so mercilessly dispossessed down the centuries. The price the Palestinians have paid for Israel regaining its historic land which had been Palestinian for two millennia has been a heart-breaking one. Surely Israel, of all countries, can see that.
Only the victor is in a position to show magnanimity and in all the terrible circumstances now prevailing let Israel show just that. It might be surprised at the response such action elicits. Included in any settlement must be the lifting of the awful siege of Gaza. If a settlement can be achieved between Jew and Arab – who are, after all, ethnically the same people and who both through their holy books revere the same prophets – then much of the ground will have been cut from beneath the feet of the Muslim extremists. Gaza has shown what the alternative is: a legacy of bitterness and hatred which will fester into a new generation.
What we’ve seen these last few days has not been pretty. It has been the very antithesis of the bible story in which little Israel in the form of the boyish David took on the monstrous brute, Goliath. Now in the most disheartening of role reversals, Goliath has become the mighty, clanking war machine which is Israel and David, little, smashed-up Gaza. Interestingly, Goliath did actually come from Gaza, then known as Phoenicia.
A Lament to War
A sea of time has passed us by and still we think of them:
The lives unlived, the dreams curtailed, the legions of our men.
We did not know, we could not tell, what terror lay in store,
As year on year the butcher’s cry demanded more and more.
For full a hundred years and more our power had waxed supreme
And kept large conflagrations low and made us start to preen.
We thought we could control events and stop war in its tracks
With webs of close alliances, diplomacy and pacts.
A maelstrom poured upon our men of iron, steel and fire,
And sent a piteous wail of grief through every town and shire.
We must press on, we told ourselves what now we have begun,
Till British pluck and doggedness did triumph o’er the Hun.
Through mud and ice and poison gas the order was ‘stand fast’;
This trial of strength twixt mortal foes, it surely could not last.
For four long years we stood our ground and bravely would not yield,
Till northern France ran red with blood through every poppy field.
Delusions born of hubris ease had caused us to believe
This war could be no different from the rest we had conceived,
But science changes everything and chivalry was dead,
Midst fire and smoke and strafing planes and mustard gas and lead.
Oh God above, what did we do to vent our foolish spleen,
But sacrifice the best we had on altars of the keen?
How little did we think it through and cry aloud ‘enough’!
But yet preferred to stumble on with bloody blind man’s bluff.
Ensuring a sustainable economic recovery
Are we really out of the mess we got ourselves into six years ago? Can it be true that we are the fastest growing economy in the developed world? It would seem so, according to the statistics. But how are we achieving this? It is certainly not coming from the manufacturing sector, an area which Mrs Thatcher as well as her successors neglected in favour of the keep-your-hands-clean service economy. It’s coming from two quarters. First is an increase in investment from business.
At the height of the recession, when there was no money for anything, medium and large businesses were sitting on £75 billion of liquidity – twice the defence budget – which in the right climate they were ready to release. That climate, which is principally one of confidence, has finally come. The second factor which was depressing the whole of the economy was a moribund housing market. When houses start moving again it has a tremendous knock-on effect right across the board. Tired old carpets are thrown out; new kitchens and bathrooms installed; more stylish furniture acquired; dodgy roofs repaired; gardens landscaped and solar panels ordered; double glazing resumed; painting and decorating starts; the DIY stores hum; the list goes on and on.
But important as houses are, we mustn’t obsess about them. There are other things – like the ones which would earn us shed loads of foreign exchange, i.e. manufactured items. We were once so good at manufacturing and can be again. But if there is one area where there is huge room for improvement it is productivity: it is our Achilles’ heel. Why we are so sluggish here beats me. If we can get this up this summer of rejoicing – weather-wise and economy-wise – may open the sluice gates and propel us into a new era of prosperity.
That high risk policy of quantitative easing – essentially printing money – appears to have worked for us, but it didn’t work for the Japanese. They left it too late to begin and as a result entered what has been called the ‘lost decade’ of the nineties. In fact it has been more like two lost decades. They’ve never recovered their old elan. Our own emergency package to survive the financial crisis was more deftly handled, first by Mervyn King (though he was somewhat late dropping interests rates) and then by Mark Carney, both governors of the Bank of England. Perhaps our success has been part due to the City of London’s historic financial expertise
But alongside this, and despite their other cataclysmic failings, we must give credit to Gordon Brown and his chancellor, Alastair Darling. Once they realised the enormity of the crisis – on the Monday following that dire weekend when it struck and the ATMs would have dried up – they moved quickly and decisively to recapitalise the banks. As Wellington said after Waterloo: ‘It was the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’.
Brown’s successor in Downing Street was on a steep learning curve after his chancellor’s earlier silly mantra of ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’, and when he eventually wised up the results were there for all to see. But interest rates cannot stay as they are – it is so unjust to the prudent saver who for years has been bailing out the feckless spender. They must rise, and soon. When it comes it must be small and incremental, like a quarter of a per cent every couple of months; a policy of slowly, slowly catchy monkey, so to speak. This will help cool the overheating housing market.
We don’t have to worry too much about irresponsible lending as in the past, leading to wholesale repossessions, because the criteria today to get a loan and the deposit required has been massively tightened. Some complain that the hoops you have to jump through are as many as to adopt a child.
But two things, above all, are needed to sustain the recovery: first, a massive house-building programme to meet the demand that years of unrestricted immigration have imposed. This, too, will cool house price inflation and re-balancing our economy by boosting manufacturing; and second, markets should then be found for those goods beyond the still Doldrums-plagued Euro area. The obvious target ought to be that vast zone of good will to us, the former empire. With our shared history, common institutions and legals systems and, of course, language, it is calculated that we have a 21% financial advantage over our competitors.
We have introduced a virus into the body politic of China
A state-sponsored collective amnesia has blanketed the Chinese people.
In this world of falsehoods, duplicitous behaviour and double dealing the one thing we must all strive for above all others is truth. My wife grew up in a world heavy with the former and very little of the latter – the Soviet Union. The worst of it was that those negatives were state-sponsored, with a challenger facing the prospect of a bullet in the back of the head, the Gulag or in the later years after Stalin’s death being assigned to the madhouse, there to be medicated with mind-bending drugs which effectively turned them into a zombie.
The thinking was that if you couldn’t see the benefits of Communism you must, indeed, be mad. In true Kafkaesque, they even named the regime’s leading newspaper ‘Pravda’, which in Russian means truth. Yet for all the suffocating and malign effects of government policy, people did know much of the truth. Today’s N. Korea is an out-on-its-own, bizarre exception. Nothing in all human experience quite compares with what they do there. However, in order to get a decent job and stay out of trouble with the Soviet version, the bulk of the people chose to play the system and not challenge it. Only in the anonymity of the kitchen did they dare to speak their true thoughts.
Thankfully that system has been consigned to the dustbin of history and my wife’s once occupied people, the Lithuanians, can breathe the sweet air of Liberty – guaranteed, I’m proud to say, by our own RAF (among others) jets which daily sweep their skies. We in Europe congratulated ourselves that our own steadfastness – mightily reinforced, I have to say, by Uncle Sam – has seen off the dead hand of tyranny in our own continent. Only the single, anomalous state of Belarus remains to remind us of the awfulness of the system which prevailed for so long.
But far away, across the other side of the world, an eastern version staggers on. Full of absurd contradictions, it has loosened the economic purse-strings to such an extent that to pretend it reflects the thoughts of Marx and Engels is to put us back once more into the realms of Kafka. However, in terms of the suppression of liberties it is still very much in the mould of the old masters. I refer, of course, to Communist China.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in which, after much prevarication, the regime shot and crushed beneath tank tracks hundreds, perhaps over a thousand young people. All mention of that terrible atrocity has throughout this quarter century been forbidden in the Chinese media. A state-sponsored collective amnesia has blanketed the Chinese people. It is a non-event to be airbrushed from memory – except that it hasn’t, at least in a normally tranquil and prosperous part of the Middle Kingdom, which is what China liked to call itself when it considered it was the centre of the world. That corner of mainland China – where 100,000 people took to the streets in remembrance of the students – is Hong Kong. To the fury of the regime, the people there took no notice of Beijing’s ban on gatherings.
Who does the regime blame for that blatant act of defiance? Why, of course, we the British. Nearly two centuries ago we took over a little fishing village in a remote backwater and turned it into one of the great mega cities of the world. We gave it good governance and introduced the rule of law. It became a magnet for Chinese to flock to for a better life as well as jobs and prosperity. We taught them not to accept unfairness and now they turn these attitudes against their new masters in Beijing.
It may have been possible a quarter century ago before the age of social media, instant news and mobiles with millions of cameras to commit atrocities and get away with it, but not now. You may gun down a thousand people but can you gun down a hundred thousand? It is my belief that we have introduced a virus into the body politic of China, which in the fullness of time will sweep out of Hong Kong and infect the whole of China. If that is the case then we shall have done something of which we can be really proud.
Incivility in the 21st century
A strange thing happened to me the other day, but on reflection perhaps not so strange. I went to say hi to the chairman of my old tennis club as I was travelling close by his house. We were never close but for ten years we were both active participants and would talk between matches . That was twenty five years ago. About five years back he dropped into my shop, not to buy anything but to renew acquaintances, or so I thought. Now I believe it more out of curiosity than anything.
Expecting a civilised reception I was kept on his doorstep just long enough for him to make a factitious remark and for him to say that his wife, Joan, who was also a club member, was doing something on the computer. Here was one old man of long-time acquaintance, reaching out to another old man, only to be given the brush off. Why I say this bleak reception was not so strange is that it speaks perhaps of our inability to relate to each other as we should.
The old club chairman was always given to the patronising put-down, so I was not unduly perturbed that he remained the old unreformed Dave. But, just the same, it got me thinking about the level of incivility that our country so often exhibits in this the 21st century. Once upon a time, each of us knew the names of our close neighbours – surname as well as Christian. As for those mutual visits for ‘cuppas’, they went out of the window eons ago. We really did make an effort to be friends. Gossip used to be rife in those days, most of it harmless stuff but the fact is that it helped to grease the wheels. In truth, people were genuinely interested in their neighbours. It is hard to imagine that so many of these awful present day cases of child abuse as well as neglect would have passed unnoticed. Perhaps another reason we don’t get to know our neighbours is that we don’t bump into them on our walks to the shops. We simply exit our houses at high speed, leap into our car and race off at even higher speed. Rarely a wave do we trouble ourselves with.
So what is it that makes us so distant and seemingly uninterested in those about us? I suspect it has a lot to do with the independence which rising prosperity has given us. It is both a blessing and a curse. The fact is we don’t need each other as once we did, or at least we imagine we don’t. It is interesting to note that the poorer a society is, the closer people are with each other. It is as though adversity brings them together. People of a certain age will often tell you how great the camaraderie was in the years of war and how everybody was everybody else’s friend. Even social class distinctions came close to vanishing. All at that time stood in mortal peril – at least in the cities – and shortages of everything were acute. Even in the years following, when there were only the shortages to deal with, people still went to each other’s help where they could.
But gradually the consumer society took over. In the old days, acquisitiveness was virtually non-existent and ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ unheard of. Today, the green eyed monster looms over every neighbourhood and further divides people. My wife, who endured many more years of deprivation (under Communism) than we did in the West, tells me that one of the saving graces – and there were not many – of the old USSR was that right to the end people helped one another. They knew their problems and provided that most essential of palliatives: a shoulder to cry on.
If possessions and acquisitiveness is part of the problem – perhaps the major part – it is hard to see things getting better any time soon. It is a fact that the larger the city, the lonelier you can feel. In that case more is very much less. Perhaps we in Plymouth should take comfort from the fact that we are not too big and blessed with a great mix of attractions both natural and manmade. For my own part, I have never regretted picking Plymouth from 25 other cities in 1967 to set up my health club. All of the cities I shortlisted had populations over 200,000 and, at that time, had no health club. I felt certain that that sort of number would guarantee me a good living and so it proved. You should have seen some of those other grim industrial abodes that were on that list. I’m so glad I gave them a miss!
Finally, a grateful thanks to the kind and civic-minded person who, following my most recent column in The Plymouth Herald gave us back those lamented flowers in Ridgeway’s five tubs.
Must the axe fall on our flowers?
Our five large council plant tubs on Plympton Ridgeway have remained undressed as late as 1st July. A few weeks ago they came and cleared the weeds and sprinkled pellets preparatory to their usual floral display, but bare earth remains and the season grows late. I rang the parks manager querying the lateness. “Ah,” says he, “it’s the cuts. It isn’t just Plympton, it’s all the suburbs.” I came away saddened, before anger took over.
Here we are, the fastest growing economy in the Western world, now at the end of a long recession during which we have kept up our spirits as well as the flowers which brighten our lives. But Joe Council comes along and says he must make cuts. I could have part understood it had he said this five years ago, when we knew we were going to have to tighten our belt. But now?
He will make the usual excuses. We’ve heard it all before. It will go something like this: He has spent these five years trimming in every direction until all that is left are the the flowers. What nonsense. Every one of us could identify areas in which there is disgraceful waste as well as inefficiency. I give you one tiny example. Each evening a man and his equally expensive van goes round the Hoe area locking up toilets. Doubtless they do this in other areas of the city too. Why don’t they slip a few bob to one of the householders living close by to do the job? That way the toilets could stay open longer. It is farcical that in the city’s prime tourist area they close at such a ridiculously early hour.
Is it not possible – with a bye-law or something – to make householders responsible for cutting the grass verges fronting their properties? In Germany they are fined if they do not clear the snow from the pavement fronting theirs. Think of the money this would save. I well remember, just a few years ago when they came along and concreted over a lovely flower bed that fronted where cars parked at West Hoe. Stupidly they had built a wall just high enough to block out the driver’s view of our splendid Plymouth Sound, but at least they compensated somewhat with a beautiful display of begonias. Then in the name of cuts they took even that away. Now you sit there staring at a wall (why they spent precious money building it in the first place is beyond me) when just beyond that wall is one of the most spectacular views in the world. First prize to the dunderhead who thought that one up.
I remember also what I wrote of at the time as ‘civic vandalism‘, when they demolished the Hoe diving boards which our kids for generations had such fun on – and safely on the whole, I might add. Our city fathers had spent a lot of money on that facility for youngsters. All they had to do was maintain them, but they couldn’t even be bothered to do that. What would those fathers have thought of their successors’ treatment of their legacy? No, the headsman’s axe was the easier option. Always, always it’s the soft, ill-thought-through option. So, how now do the kids have their fun – for they will, and indeed must have ways of getting rid of their youthful exuberance. They move a few yards up the road and go in for the highly dangerous ‘tombstoning’. As if to complete their killjoy vandalism, the department responsible then went on to concrete over a couple of pools which also the kids had fun in. As well as the kids letting off steam the promenading public also had the pleasure of watching the younger generation enjoying themselves and remembering their own childhood.
Better Together should appeal to the heart as well as the head
I watched a very interesting documentary recently on Scotland’s greatest victory over the English at Bannockburn. The English were unlucky having the hopeless Edward II conducting the battle. Had it been his father, the mighty and illustrious Edward I – the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ – things might have turned out very differently, despite us having our equally illustrious Robert the Bruce. It would have been an interesting contest. Alex Salmond might have hoped that his newly enfranchised sixteen-year-olds might have felt a bit of angst and voted his way in the coming referendum but my gut feeling, as a Scot, tells me that he is going to be disappointed in what Scots generally will decide to do. Untangling a marriage which has last 300 years will prove unbelievably difficult, not to say expensive. And for what? The 53m English with their City of London could probably bear the cost, but could the 6m Scots?
What saddens me is that all the arguments which have been bandied back and forth have been on nuts and bolts issues. But what about the appeal to the heart? We have bled together across a thousand battlefields, blood brothers in the ruest sense of the world; we have built together an empire greater than all others which went before; our scientists and engineers have fashioned the world in which we live with their Industrial Revolution and our poets and writers have thrilled it with a language which is set to be the lingua franca of all mankind. Are we to walk away from all this?
It seems to me that it is low and base motives which are the drivers for Scottish independence, though Alex Salmond likes, with his weasel words, to dress it up as otherwise. But Prime Minister Salmond sounds good, doesn’t it… ? And soon it would be President, once the dust has settled. That would sound even better. And let’s not forget all the baubles he would be handing down to his minions from the Palace of Holyrood House. God would be in His heaven and smarmy Alex would end up making ever more implausible excuses to his people as the years went by for the rotten outcome of it all and the likely penury he had plunged them into. Meantime the English, with their rejuvenated economy, their break with welfarism, their highly educated kids and their fracking bonanza would be heading off into the sunset, but sad nonetheless.
Have the years in Downing Street addled the PM’s brain?
I am glad the government has banned that sinister-looking council vehicle going round with a camera on the top. We all had deep misgivings about Google trundling round photographing everything in sight, but at least that wasn’t a means of filching money out of our ever more depleted pockets and there were many clear positives to the whole operation.
Ours is the most spied on country in the whole world and, to our shame, that includes N. Korea. What is it about those in authority over us that they treat us as they do? Is it that they don’t trust us? They’ll have plausible answers of course – they always do. Not the least of them is that catch-all one of ‘combating terrorism’. But we combated IRA terrorism for thirty years without compromising our essential liberties.
We have to be very careful about going down the path of the surveillance state. The powers-that-be, including the town halls, seem to relish lording it over us – watching our every move, socially engineering us, politically correcting us, and nannying us with a patronising ‘you know it’s all for your own good… don’t get yourself worked up’ sort of attitude. The fact is we are right not to trust them; all the time they are taking liberties with our liberties.
The Cameron government promised more openness. ‘Transparency’ was the word. And all the while the Court of Protection – another Blairite invention – continues on its merry way (except that it isn’t at all merry). Terrible injustices are daily taking place behind closed doors with social workers being treated as if they are expert witnesses and who, in too many cases, are themselves operating behind closed minds. Even the President of the Family Court has expressed his extreme disquiet and called for less secrecy, but still the injustices go on.
David Cameron has called for Magna Carta to be taught to every kid. Is this the same David Cameron who wanted recently, for the very first time in English jurisprudence, to hold a trial so secret that even the very fact that there was to be a trial at all was not to be disclosed? Magna Carta, indeed. Who can forget that cringe-making, toe-curling interview with America’s most famous interviewer, David Letterman, in which the British PM didn’t know what Carta stood for. Eton educated, was he? With a first-class honours degree from Oxford thrown in for good measure? Something went badly wrong there. Even little old me, educated in the Foundling Hospital and at work at fifteen, knew that. Perhaps it is the years in Downing Street that have addled his brain. That hothouse of intrigue and backstabbing must take its toll.
But don’t think me ungracious to our Dave. For all his many deficiencies, he has turned the economy round and we must give him credit for that mighty achievement. There is also a real chance that our kids will stop sliding down the international education league tables and begin the climb northwards. Then there’s that pernicious client state of welfarism that Gordon Brown positively pushed which is being dismantled and a sensible one – such as the Welfare State’s founder, William Beveridge, wanted – being reinstated (but still in a far more generous form than ever he envisaged). So each of these important areas which will determine our nation’s future we must give the present incumbent of Down Street credit for.
Putin is no a fool
A great opportunity was thrown away by the West when Putin first came to power.
What are we to make of developments in Eastern Europe? It is one thing to have a squabbling clutch of Balkan countries at each others’ throats, as we saw in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, but quite another to have the Russian bear stomping around with what looks like a very sore head. Europe, historically, never expected anything sensible coming out of the powder keg of the Balkans. After all – at its worst – it gave us the First World War, but since then Europe has never had to worry too much about that region disturbing the peace of the continent as a whole – only its own.
The chief reason for its instability were those many hundreds of years that it lay under the yoke of the Turkish sultan who did his best to turn as many of them as he could into Muslims. So in that corner of Europe you have not just a religious divide, such as we still have between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Sunni and Shia in Syria, but a divide of Faiths itself: Islam and Christianity.
But none of this exists where the bear is concerned. He belongs to the Christian community of the West. His trouble is that, unlike us, he has not yet come to terms with the loss of empire. It is, after all, only twenty years since the Soviet republics – there were thirteen of them – gained their independence. Russia still believes, deep down, that those countries rightfully should belong to it or at the very least should be under its sway.
Putin, the Russian leader, knows that the warm water ports of the three Baltic republics will never be his again; they are too close to the West and with long historical ties to it. But, more to the point, they now enjoy the protection of NATO – the best life insurance policy they could have taken out. Even now NATO planes, including our own, are sweeping Baltic skies daily. The message there is ‘thus far and no further’.
A great opportunity was thrown away when Putin first came to power. He wanted desperately to gain acceptance from the West, but foolishly his overtures were spurned. Even as late as his second presidency he offered to open up his vast country into a free trade area which would extend from Lisbon in the extreme west to Vladivostok in the far east. Instead of looking seriously at this, what did the West do? It pooh, poohed the notion and even provocatively poked the bear by offering deals to Russia’s former vassal states, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia – the latter two far from Europe’s heartland.
Undoubtedly, down the ages, Russia has been Europe’s perennial headache – and I’m not just talking about the seventy years of the Communist era. For almost all of its history it has been a delinquent state and now resembles something of a corrupt gangster state. But it needn’t have been this way. An understanding tutelage by the West after the failed experiment of Communism would almost certainly have worked wonders.
When Russia lost the Crimean war in the middle of the 19th century and the Russo/Japanese war in 1905 it came to a full appreciation of how backward it was, politically and economically. It set about changing this at a fast and furious pace and, by the outbreak, a hundred years ago, of the First World War, it had very largely succeeded. Only the curtailing of the Tzar’s autocratic powers remained.
It was the foolish mobilisation by Tzar Nicholas II of his army – much like what Putin is doing today on Ukraine’s border – which brought the whole process of modernisation to a halt. It gave Germany the excuse she sought to smash her militarily before she became too powerful for even the Prussian-led German army to defeat easily. But for the Tzar’s crazy action in plunging Russia into WWI and losing it there would never have been a Bolshevik revolution and no wasted seventy years pursuing the fantasy of a workers’ paradise under Communism.
The Duma – Russia’s parliament – would have long since clipped the Tzar’s powers and turned him into a constitutional monarch, much like our own. She would by now have genuine democratic institutions and, probably, with all her vast natural resources, be the world’s leading economic power instead of running an economy smaller than Italy’s.
Putin, although a bully, is not a fool. He is in fact an intelligent man. He knows that in the long-term his 145 million people cannot hope to get the better of the European Union’s 485 million. He also knows that his armed forces are miniscule compared to NATO’s.
It must be made plain to him that the postwar borders of Europe are sacrosanct and if he insists on challenging them there will be consequences – damaging and unpleasant ones. Chancellor Merkel of Germany is the one best placed to talk turkey to him. He learned fluent German during his years as a KGB operative (a colonel) in East Germany.
Then, when he quietens down, she must tell him that his gifted people – great in the sciences, literature, sport and music – will not be spurned and belittled anymore but will be embraced by the West and led into the comity of nations, so completing the mission which Peter the Great began all those years ago.
Better the devil you know
Bombings continue in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial hub, which has become a key battleground in the country’s protracted civil war.
It begins to look as if the dreadful Assad may yet go on to win the Syrian civil war. Why is this? The quagmire which is Syria is about as complicated as ever it gets in politics and religion, and with the latter playing the dominant part I will not attempt to explain – even if I were up to it – all the competing factors at work in that benighted area. Suffice it to say that it was and is a devil’s brew which we were wise not to get drawn into, even though our prime minister was up for it. Parliament said no and that was the end of it.
It was this vote, I believe, which saved an always-cagey Obama from being swept into the affair and commencing air strikes. Incautiously (if he never meant what he said) he spoke of ‘Red Lines’. Luckily the Commons vote caused Congress to take stock. It values its British ally’s diplomatic cover around the world as it demonstrates that it is not a bully acting alone in the world; there are two of us. This cover it considers more important than its military contribution, welcome as that nevertheless is. They are not anxious to stand alone nowadays and feel much more comfortable when their old mate is there to take its share (if needs be) of the flak. Although France indicated that it would join them – perhaps anxious to lay President George W. Bush’s “Surrender Monkeys” insult from the Iraq war to rest – it was not the same as having reliable old Blighty. You could at least go into a huddle with him and talk to him in your own lingo.
Would that intervention have changed things on the ground and stopped Assad gaining the upper hand as he has now? I believe not. So long as Hezbollah – the bain of Israel – was willing to throw its considerable military weight behind Assad and as long as Iran kept training its operatives and providing them with hardware and the Russians replacing Assad’s equipment losses there was never going to be an easy or quick solution. And even if the West – assuming it had begun bombing – then proceeded to up the ante to the point where Assad could take no more, what then?
Were we going to allow a fragmented, at-each-other’s-throats band of brothers with no clear agenda of what to do with their newly liberated country take control? I think not. Especially when their ranks had been hugely swollen by fanatical Jihadists, many of them affiliated to Al Qaeda.
All of this now brings us to the most cynical piece of realpolitik since America armed Saddam Hussein to help him stave off defeat by Iran during the Iraq-Iran war during the early ’80s. Have you noticed that government pronouncements, and even media reporting on the Syrian civil war, have gone strangely quiet compared with what it was – and this despite the horrendous losses now put at over 150,000 dead?
It is my belief that, so worried is the West as to who would take over in the event of the fall of Assad, it has decided that the ‘man of blood’ who gassed hundreds of his own people is now preferable to those who would take over and plunge Syria – the cockpit of the Arab world – into even an even greater mess than that which the former London dentist, Assad, has plunged it into.
The nightmare which the West’s security forces face in a pivotal land – one which hates and shares a common border with Israel – is a country that becomes a hotbed of fanatical Jihadists with perhaps Al Qaeda taking the lead. Because of these terrible concerns I fear we are now willing – even preferring – Assad to consolidate his recent considerable gains and go on to win the civil war.
It seems almost inconceivable that a man we have so recently labeled a war criminal and threatened to send to the International Criminal Court at The Haguemay now be let off the hook. ‘Better the devil you know’ now seems to go the thinking. An ordered Syria – even one soaked in innocent blood – is now held to be a better solution than one defying a solution.
So get ready, all of us! Assad may yet triumph against a divided opposition and a befuddled, humiliated West may feel its only course is to settle down to a business as usual arrangement. Given the passage of time, and bearing in mind his own and his wife’s former London connections, the Syrian despot might even be asked, like the executed Romanian dictator, to pay a state visit to London and sup with her Maj.
So here, in a nutshell, is the world we are compelled to live in: a complicated, compromised, infinitely bewildering world in which there are few easy answers nor many quick fixes and certainly no ethical foreign policy such as the late, naïve foreign secretary, Robin Cook, thought he could operate.
China’s debt-fueled turbo growth will end in tears
The old ‘Yellow Peril’ with its racist undertones and vision of the ‘Golden Horde’ sweeping towards Europe may have been a thing of the past, but a new one is taking it place. This one is a debt crisis which threatens to take China down.
China’s hypocrisy in abandoning Marxist economics to gain the fruits of the super-abundant capitalist table is breathtaking.
We have all marveled at the economic miracle which has taken place in formerly backward China during the last thirty years. It is now the world’s second largest economy, and if its double-digit growth continues for one more decade it will overtake the mighty United States. But a very big if hangs over that prospect.
The phenomenal growth that China has enjoyed in recent years has been based on debt – astonishing and unsustainable debt. To make matters worse, it is mired in corruption on an equally gargantuan scale.
One of the prices we in the West have had to pay for China’s breakneck progress is to see many of our traditional industries relocate to the low-wage, low-overheads Far East. The flood of cheap consumer goods helped the West keep inflation down – at the price of seeing its own unemployment rise.
Yet all was apparently well until the banking crisis struck in 2008 and the West stopped buying – at least in the quantities it had. China faced ruin. It had two options: it could either invest heavily in infrastructure and property (it had millions to house who had flooded into the cities) or it could turn its people into a consumerist society modeled on the West and sell to itself – God knows there are enough of them. It chose overwhelmingly the first.
Unfortunately no one knows how to get the Chinese to spend on themselves. It may be this is because there is no safety net of a welfare state to sustain people either in old age or in sickness, so they have to do it themselves and save a much higher proportion of their earnings to make good this shortcoming. They decided not to put their savings under their beds but to invest it in property and to a lesser extent in factories. Unfortunately this launched a runaway property boom. Stupidly this was at the higher end of property market so that the average apartment came out at £300k – 70 times what the average factory worker earned. Consequently, while there are scores of millions in the cities desperately wanting to get out of sub-standard and crowded accommodation, they cannot afford to buy. A similar glut of unwanted factory units has taken place.
This was at the time the Chinese government had ordered its state run banks to open their wallets wide and lend. And, boy, did they obey orders. The result is a debt crisis of unimaginable proportions and one which is set to grow exponentially. The Communist government is at a loss to know what to do about it and still maintain power in a one party state.
It has long been thought an anomaly that a Marxist state can stay communist while operating a capitalist system. The reason the Chinese have so far pulled it off is they have markedly raised the standard of living in the cities – though they have neglected the countryside. This has bought the party time in a country which elevates stability above everything and avoided people taking to the streets demanding more political freedoms. The hypocrisy of the party in abandoning Marxist economics to gain the fruits of the super-abundant capitalist table is breathtaking. China’s volte-face has allowed the party to stay in power while the USSR collapsed. It has delivered materially where the Soviets did not. But the capitalist system which Beijing let rip has none of the constraints and rule of law which developed over centuries in the West.
The ‘entrepreneurs’ which it put in place to run its factories and the like did not earn their spurs through the fierce blast of competition; they were placemen and apparatchiks who had no experience of business. They set about lining their pockets with shady deals and kickbacks which would cause Marx to turn in his grave. And because the system is run by the party faithful right across the country, from the very top all the way down to the lowest jobsworth, there is no chance of reforming it.
The party bosses in Beijing are waking up not just to the enormity of the task ahead of them to address this but to their debt crisis. They are telling their factory managers that the centre can longer subsidise their inefficiencies. They are going to have to lay off tens of millions who will be forced to return to their poverty-stricken countryside homes, many of which have been forcibly taken over by the state for land development. It is a recipe for insurrection.
Already the West is seeing many of the jobs which went to the Far East being repatriated because the economics have changed: Chinese workers have demanded, and got, big pay increases as well as better working conditions. All this costs money and the result is that the Chinese competitive edge is being eroded year by year.
When the West’s financial crisis struck in 2008, we were all enormously relieved that the world economy, chiefly driven by China, kept on growing, albeit it at a smaller pace. Now China must hope that the West’s efforts to restore order in its own financial house will be completed in time to alleviate its own coming time of distress. One pundit opined the Chinese are where we were in 2005-6, so there’s not much time. However, we must never forget that China remains a totalitarian state.
In seeking to restore its finances it has none of the experience and sophisticated tools at its disposal which Wall Street and the City have. If things go wrong, it is liable to lash out in frustration and seek a foreign adventure to rally the people and take their minds off their troubles at home. Galtieri did it over the Falkland Islands and China may well do it over those oil rich islands in the South China Sea.
A city close to my heart
Although Plymouth has been my home – by choice – now for forty-seven years, there is and will always be another city close to my heart. It is that great throbbing metropolis of London.
I was born there on Grays Inn Road which, on a quiet Sunday, may still be within sound of Bow Bells. If so, that would make me a true Cockney – a born, though not bred, one. Unfortunately the not-bred part renders me incapable of fathoming most of those strange yet endearing Cockney terms.
When I was born in May 1939, London stood on the edge of a cataclysm which would test its metal as much as the plague, the great fire or that earlier fire when Boudicca’s enraged followers torched the Roman city in AD 60. Luckily, when the bombers came, I was safely ensconced forty miles north in the lovely little Essex market town of Saffron Walden. From that area would be assembled the mighty armada of bombers which make good on Churchill’s promise to repay the Luftwaffe with interest tenfold.
When I returned to the city as a sixteen-year-old in 1955 to find a job, it was a sad place. It was not long since its skies had been darkened by Hitler’s bombers. My job was to take news photographs to the art editors of all the leading periodicals and newspapers of the day to see if they were interested in featuring them. The agency was based in Fleet Street. When I stepped out on my rounds I could see the massive structure of St. Paul’s cathedral 500 yards away on the top of Ludgate Hill. To the right and left as you walked up that famous hill was a wasteland of bombed out buildings. Feral cats and other creatures had made the ruins their home. All over Central London, which was my stomping ground, were similar sad sights. I could never quite understand how, amidst such destruction, Wren’s masterpiece had survived. (Later I learned that, apart from an element of luck – which some might prefer to regard as divine intervention – this was because orders had gone out from on high (not that high) that, whatever happened elsewhere, the great cathedral must be saved. The firefighters, therefore, made it their business to prioritise it.)
When I was born, London was the largest city in the world which, perhaps, befitted the world’s largest empire ever. Though today thirty one other cities have overtaken it in numbers, it is still Europe’s largest if you exclude Moscow, which is a Johnny-come-lately having ballooned since the fall of Communism. Before this it was only half London’s size and you needed a permit to go and live there.
When I took up my job, a pall of gloom hung over the city. It was only a decade before that the doodlebugs and V2 rockets had come visiting. We talk of austerity today, but those times knew the real thing: a biting hard period of real deprivation which makes today’s talk sound something of a joke. There was simply not the money to give people a decent life, never mind make good all that bomb damage.
It was a dirty city, too. Those building which had survived were encrusted with a thick, black layer of industrial grime. And the grime was still coming down. Once, I had to get off a bus in Harrow and take my turn to walk in front with a torch to help the driver to avoid mounting the kerb. The smog was so thick you could barely see your feet from a standing position. It was actually quite scary. The dear old Thames, which today is alive with every kind of fish and aquatic creature, was then a dead river.
Unlike Berlin and so many other shattered cities of Europe, London, despite everything, still had a pulse – even a beating heart. But it was weak and its population shrank as so many of its citizens migrated to the leafy suburbs and the new garden cities erected close by. And while all this was going on, the great empire, whose imperial will had reached out from the city across the world, was being disbanded. Truly, it seemed, London’s glory days were over. It would have been a brave pundit who would say it would ever rise again to its former pre-eminence.
Yet hey, that is exactly what has happened. Few would say it was exaggerating to call it the coolest city on the planet. In 2012, with the Olympics, it had the chance to showcase itself like never before in its history. And what a success it made of it. Athletes and visitors alike were stunned at how well that most challenging and complex of events was managed and how beautiful the city had become. Even the sun made a brief appearance, as though to bless our endeavours. London may not exercise hard power to the extent it once did, but it projects soft power by the shedload.
When I treat myself to a visit, as I like to do every three months or so, I look around and marvel at the transformation that has taken place since I trod it walkways as a youth. As its skyline grows ever more interesting, it remains the financial centre of the world, beating New York, Hong Kong and Singapore to the spot. And its many great parks and myriad little squares have grown even more beautiful. Racial bigotry has all but gone, with no more signs to be seen in landlords’ windows saying ‘No Dogs, Irish or Blacks’. Couples of mixed race walk hand in hand and its streets echo to the sound of dozens of languages. Street cafes are everywhere and British cuisine has been turned on its head. It is now right up there with the best. The city has a multiplicity of world-class chefs.
It is at last a truly cosmopolitan place. Not only is the shopping the best to be had anywhere in the world, but, glory be, London now hosts its best fashion houses. Now there’s a surprise for all of us. Perhaps that all began long ago in a non-descript place called Carnaby Street.
So there we have it, my second favourite city. One which, along with our hopefully-reviving economy, we can all celebrate.
May we live in interesting times
New Year after New Year for half a decade now we have entered it with a sense of deep foreboding. There has been no joy anywhere. We clung together in families during the Christmas festivities hoping against hope that our jobs would still be there in a year’s time. But this year we seem to have had a festive period in which much gloom has been banished.
Sooner or later, our fast-expanding economy will start feeding through into pay packets.
Just six short months ago, the pointers were still showing southwards. Now, they tell us we are on an upward trajectory unmatched almost anywhere in the Western world.
The French, who five years ago were pouring scorn on our economic model, extolling their own socialist variant, are now having to eat their words. Theirs is the model that isn’t working. Indeed, they are increasingly being described as ‘the sick man of Europe’ – and that’s saying something when you consider all those other sick bailout EU states. The Economist recently branded them the ‘ticking time bomb’ of Europe.
Whatever you say about the Cameron government, with all its cock-ups and string of bad calls in terms of the prime minister’s personal lack of judgment which continue apace, it bit that most necessary of bullets in setting about rebalancing the books and shrinking the ballooning government payroll. The world looked on and approved. Credit rating agencies backed off downgrading our prospects while they continued to downgrade those of our neighbours à la France.
Sooner or later, our fast-expanding economy will start feeding through into pay packets and people will start feeling better off. Inflation is low and likely to stay close to target, so even modest pay rises above it should be felt. My own great fear, however, is of what will happen when interest rates start to rise, as surely they must. They have never been so low or for so long. Will we see huge numbers unable to keep up payments on those previously cheap mortgages and masses of repossessions? Hopefully those inevitable pay rises and the continuing downward costs of filling up at the pump will help to bridge the gap. The more enterprising, growth-orientated new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, will also play a useful part helping us to find a way through.
The main thing is that we have growth again. Without it you are sunk. Government receipts are rising, government outgoings are falling and a virtuous circle is now being created.
The growth is mainly in the service sector in which we as a country have always excelled. Not for nothing did Napoleon describe us as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’. But services does not only cover retail; it covers insurance, banking, shipping and a host of others which we used to call ‘invisible earnings’. And what would be the cherry on the top is if we could boost our engineering capabilities. It was once what we did better than anyone else at, and we have not lost our skills: look at how well auto manufacturing is doing. We have jettisoned – painfully, I know – old and clapped out industries, preferring to let them go to low cost, low skilled economies while we concentrated on the clever stuff like aerospace, architecture, biomedicine, computer science and pushing pioneering research into all of the above via our world renowned academic institutes. So alone in Europe we have every reason to be optimistic. Trade outside the Eurozone is expanding, and if we can better rebalance our economy by engineering our way back to excellence, so much the better.
Fracking will help since there will be a lot of jobs there, but we, with our stricter environmental laws, will avoid the undue damage to the countryside that Uncle Sam has suffered. We will, however, share with him a dramatic fall in energy prices as well as enjoy security of supply and see less of our precious earnings going to undeserving, corrupt states in the gulf region.
And close to that region is poor benighted Syria and its suffering people. While we worry about ourselves, shouldn’t we move heaven and earth to relieve their terrible distress?
The Chinese have a very good saying: ‘may you live in interesting times’. Well, the period ahead is certainly going to be interesting. Are hoards of Bulgarians and Romanians going to pour over our frontiers this year and ‘do a Poland’ on us, blowing a massive hold in Cameron’s pledge to reduce incomers to the tens of thousands? Funnily enough, I’m sure our people would actually welcome making an exception for a quota of genuinely wretched Syrians, as UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, is betting. And how Europe’s credentials would soar among Muslims if all 28 EU members agreed their own quotas! We should press the issue.
Is UKIP going to sweep the board in the May Euro elections? Are the Scots going to take the high road back to Scotland in September? Are the Lib Dems and Tories going to turn on each other in their efforts to get back to normal politics before the election and render government business impossible? Is Red Ed going to find himself in Downing Street with one of the chief architects of our misfortunes as his chancellor, because so many Tories have deserted to UKIP? Is dreadful Clegg going to remain as deputy prime minister, having thrown in his fair-weather lot with Labour? All of these conundrums and more will be revealed in the next few months, and not too long after that the question of whether we stay in Europe, should the Tories win a majority. I suspect the bookies will be tearing their hair out giving odds on any of these vexatious questions.
On a different and more tragic key, how many of the celebrities now arraigned and set for trial will go down to long prison terms? For those who do, what a sad end to otherwise illustrious careers. What will be the fate in this forthcoming year of public figures such as Ken Barlow, Max Clifford, Freddy Starr, Rolf Harris, Dave Lee Travis, Gary Glitter, Jimmy Tarbuck, Paul Gambaccini, Stuart Hall (again)? What a can of worms the monstrous Jimmy Savile opened up. Truth to tell, there can’t be a surviving pop idol – and think how many and distinguished they are – who didn’t succumb to the allures of those legions of groupies who threw themselves at them over the years. And did they ask to see a birth certificate in each case?
Having failed to do his duty half a century ago, plod seeks to exonerate himself by doing it now. But what about those NHS managers who failed to protect the innocents in those hospitals such as the one who gave Savile the keys to Broadmoor? And what about all those BBC bigwigs who we know turned a blind eye? Are they all to be let off the hook?
But back to our own prospects, there remains one very black cloud which can still rain on all our parades: we have not seen the end of the Eurozone crisis. Yet a great positive should give us cause for hope; the one country which has the capability of resolving it is now in a position to do so. Angela Merkel is now safely back in office having won the September election. She is now free to take whatever decisive action is called for to stabilise and reform the European juggernaut.
So in these ‘interesting times’, let’s hold our nerve and hope 2014 comes up rosy. I certainly hope my readers take heart, hold onto their hats and enjoy the ride. I know I will. Happy New Year.
What if WWI never happened?
How might the world have looked but for that cataclysmic conflict which began almost a hundred years ago? Mighty different, I can tell you. It is highly unlikely we would have a United Nations since only a catastrophe on a planet-wide scale could have caused countries to submit themselves in the future to a supra-national authority.
How might the world look today but for that cataclysmic conflict which began almost a hundred years ago?
There would be no Arab-Israeli conflict and, as a result of that, no 9/11. We would be boarding aircraft in pretty much the relaxed way we used to, with none of the demeaning scrutiny and security measures we have now. There would have been no Cold War and as a consequence of that no mad rush to be the first to land a man on the moon. Because the Second World War was the unfinished business of the first, rocketry was given priority by the Germans as a possible war-winning technology and without that impetus space technology would be way, way behind where it is today. We might not even have those satellites circling the earth which give us GPS, satellite television and so much else. Computer technology – also hastened by war – would still be in its infancy and the World Wide Web would be non-existent. The whole business of electrical miniaturization on which just about everything today depends received a major shot in the arm by the space effort. Of course we would have got there in the end but it would have been at a much more leisurely pace.
In geopolitical terms, the landscape would be just as dramatically different. There would be no European Union since it was only the trauma of the two World Wars which caused Europeans to think there had to be a better way. We would probably still rule India and most of the other European empires would be staggering on, though under rising pressure for emancipation along with us. Russia would have evolved from a tsarist autocracy into a fully fledged democratic state. All the fallen monarchies of Europe – the Hapsburgs of Austria/Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, he Tsar of Russia and even the Sultan of Turkey would still be in place along with a clutch of Balkan princlings. It is likely, though, that most of them would have had their wings clipped democratically.
But the Emperor of China would still be gone. He went three years before the Great War started, discredited by his inability to prevent China’s humiliations by the European colonial powers. But the new China would have had a Japanese experience; it would have taken the Japanese approach of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and industrialised like mad. Today, most probably, it would be the top economic as well as military power in the world with Uncle Sam as No. 2. It would have avoided the trauma of the Mao experience and be like Japan, a democratic state. Britain’s colossal overseas investments – all lost to war – along with her staggering land holdings around the world would have been deployed to who knows what ends. They might even have allowed her to stay top dog.
All in all it would have been an utterly different landscape from the one we see around us today. It would not necessarily have been a better world since many of the less salubrious features of the old world would not have been swept away and there would have been umpteen disputes leading to what may be described as bush-fire wars.
As for no conflict with the Muslim world, that is because there would be no state of Israel. If there was any conflict it would be with their Ottoman overlords – it would be them, not us, taking the flak. It was Britain’s seizure of Palestine and the destruction of the Ottoman Empire along with its foreign secretary’s promise to allow a home for Jews in the Holy Land which made the creation of Israel possible. He had no idea it would lead to the dispossession of millions of Arabs from their ancestral lands. This, above all else, is what drives the Jihadists today along with Western military intervention in Muslim affairs. They take the view that it was not a kind-hearted act on the part of Britain regarding Jews – which in fact it was – but a calculated move to plant a Trojan Horse in their midst which would do the West’s bidding and help it keep control of them.
One of the consequences of the two World Wars was to so weaken and discredit the European powers that it hastened the end of their empires. Had the people of the various empires gained their freedom at a more leisurely pace – perhaps as much as a century later – there would have been more time to prepare cadres of their people and put institutions in place which could have avoided the shambles we saw following the rush to independence after the war. Africa, today, with its boundless resources, might perhaps be a well-governed and prosperous continent
But war did hasten the end of deference – à la Downton Abbey – and dispose, in the process, of autocratic monarchies. Only in the victor or neutral states did they survive. Interestingly, not a single state which abolished its monarchy has had a change of heart and reinstated it. I suppose that is our fate when something cataclysmic comes along one day to discredit our own monarchy.
Apart from the most obvious ones – the advancement of science, the UN and the EU – the other major beneficiary of war has been the emancipation of women. Oddly, it was not the dictatorships with their powers of compulsion (the USSR was an exception) which were the earliest and most successful in harnessing the abilities of the fair sex, but the elective dictatorships of the West. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, was always bemoaning the Reich’s slowness in this crucial field to his boss.
The Germany-UK axis and the long-awaited rescue of Europe
The long awaited rescue of Europe, along with its badly put together single currency, gets under way now that the German chancellor no longer has the distraction of an election to worry about.
Angela Merkel aspires to a business-minded Europe
Angela Merkel, the pastor’s daughter from the former Communist east, will get down to a lot of serious business. Her mission, no less, is to save the continent from imploding. In doing this she will seek help from her new best friend, David Cameron. Many of us here at home have gone off him, particularly the women, but he makes a good impression abroad. Even neo socialist Barack Obama gets on well with the ‘posh boy’ from Chipping Norton. He is mannerly, brimming with self-confidence and knows how to talk the talk. What else would one expect from an Old Etonian, that breed of Brits who once believed that they were born to rule. Incredibly, it seems that even in 21st century Britain they still have grounds to believe this.
Angela Merkel aspires to a business-minded Europe: caring but frugal; hard working, but at ease with itself. The last thing she wants is a Europe in tatters. Whether or not it was wise to create the euro in the form they did, we have to accept it is a fact of life. It certainly has benefitted German exporters, whose massive sales to the rest of Europe is part of the reason they are in such debt. If Germany were to go back to the deutschmark its exports would be so incredibly expensive that their export dependent economy would be in danger of crashing. So save the euro they must. But they must also save it for another reason: if it collapses, or even fragments, the whole European Project will as likely as not come off the rails and Germany will take the blame. For the third time in a century, people will say Germany has left Europe in ruins.
The simple truth is that the political and financial establishment have too much at stake to allow their dream project to collapse. The consequences would be seismic and coming at this time, when recovery seems underway, it would be unthinkable. Only Germany has the financial clout to save the Euro.
But Fritz does not want to open up his coffers – especially to what he perceives as lazy and corrupt southerners – but neither does he want to become Europe’s baddy all over again. He will drive a hard bargain which will involve some pretty nasty medicine when he takes responsibility for all that toxic debt and he will seek a powerful, respectable ally to share the howls of protest with. France is no longer willing to be that ally. She seems not to understand the scale of the problem. Perhaps that’s because she is herself part of the problem. That leaves only one ally available to Germany and it is not even in the euro. That ally is us.
Germany views Britain as a business-minded country, like herself, and it makes sense, in her view, to get Britain onside in her chancellor’s drive for reform because Cameron wants reform too. But his reform is not just in monetary matters. As it happens, Germany, as well as others, doesn’t much like a lot of what is coming out of Brussels so he could find himself pushing at an open door.
I am convinced Germany will do all that it can, within reason, to give Cameron what he needs from Europe rather than lose a necessary and valued ally. Merkel is said to be ready to discuss anything, so long as Cameron does not ask her to chose between Britain and Europe. She knows that if he cannot repatriate powers then Britain is a goner from the EU. That would be a body blow to the whole European Project and it would set a most unwelcome precedent. It would send shock waves throughout Europe and indeed the world.
Even before her re-election, when she had to be careful, she began her courtship of David Cameron. That weekend soiree to her country home in which Samantha and the kids were invited, was in my view, extraordinary. It spoke volumes. She has never asked any other political leader to visit her at home, never mind bringing the whole family. So even if the women on Dave’s home patch have abandoned him in droves, Angela most certainly has not. She thinks he’s lovely – ‘My naughty nephew’, she calls him, and can’t wait to team up with him in sorting out Europe. In all the photo shoots of recent times she makes a point of standing next to him, and the body language is very telling.
All in all, it causes me to think that we are in the early stages of seeing a new, powerful axis being formed… a resurgent Britain alongside its fellow Teutonic power Germany. That axis will be an outward-looking one keen to harness the enormous potential of half a billion Europeans, but moving to direct their energies to the world beyond Europe. Britain, for its part, is already travelling very successfully down that road and with its vast connections worldwide, its goodwill from its former empire and its universal language, it is peculiarly well placed to profit from it all.
Uncle Sam worries about the threat posed by the emergent Eastern economies – we all do – but he does not worry about Europe. Rather he wants to team up with it in a North Atlantic trade partnership. Such a partnership is a very real prospect; it will hugely benefit all of us and give the whole world a tremendous fillip.
I do not subscribe to the view that this century will necessarily be the Asian century. Yes, it will do well, but all the countries concerned have tremendous structural and political problems which the West overcame long ago. Endemic corruption and a lack of trustworthy institutions will also act as a break. Human Rights issues will plague them because justice, as we know it, does not exist. They have got a lot of work to do and are not in a position to give their undivided attention to coining a buck, as the West is. For a start, they are going to have to take better care of their people and that means creating something of a welfare state – and we know how ruinously expensive that will be.
As for Cameron, he has a great opportunity, but if he does not put forward some female friendly policies and quickly, he won’t be there after the election to take advantage.
A turbulent Islam
What is happening in Egypt and, indeed, through much of the Muslim world is sad beyond belief.
The cradle of civilisation is being reduced to barbarism with no end in sight for an equitable solution.
For two and a half years now we have seen the Syrian people tearing themselves apart. Before that it was Tunisia, then Libya, then Yemen, then Bahrain and now back again to Egypt. We even saw riots in normally peaceable Turkey. What is happening in these lands which once spawned one of the world’s most tolerant religions – lands which form Europe’s nearest abroad?
I believe it is all down to aspirations and two classes of people which live cheek by jowl with each other but yet have totally divergent views on how life should be lived. They have co-existed for many years now, but what is different today from what has gone before is the advent of the Internet, the mobile phone – which is able to tap into it – and the spread of literacy, which even the most authoritarian of regimes has proved unable to resist.
From the point of view of totalitarian regimes which find themselves unable to stop the free flow of information and the millions now able to liaise and call up street protests in an instant it is a total disaster – a truly toxic mix. It is what I call empowerment of the masses.
The two worlds of which I speak are the world of the cities and the largely unchanged world of the hinterland beyond. Across the broad expanses of the countryside – where the majority of the population still live – life goes on in much the same way as it has done for hundreds of years. Yet in the cities things are very different. The educated and young people are in revolt. Their outlook is not so very different from that of their fellow city dwellers just across the Mediterranean Sea. They want the same jobs, opportunities and freedoms as they see in the West.
In times past, their authoritarian rulers have been able to keep them ignorant of what is happening in the rest of the world, but thanks to people like Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, those times are over. They are now fully aware of the venal corruption and murderous cruelty which holds them back and they are no longer prepared to put up with it. Good on them, I say.
Turkey is an interesting example to look at. Here is a not in-your-face Muslim state which has fully embraced development without compromising its Muslim faith. It has one of the highest GDP growth rates in the world.
But again the educated classes and young people were having none of it and they pulled him up sharp. This was the true reason for the recent riots.
We can take some credit for Turkey’s emergence as a secular state. It was our defeat of the old Ottoman Empire in World War One which ended the Caliphate and set Turkey on the path to modernity.
(On this note we can also take some pride too in the emergence of democracy throughout South America since it was our defeat of the Argentine military junta in the Falklands War which saw democracy restored there and umpteen other Latin American military dictatorships discredited and overthrown.)
But the great worry in Egypt and elsewhere in the troubled Muslim lands is that democracy is hijacked and used as a tool to impose Iranian-style rule by the Mullahs. At that point democracy ends.
It would be a bit like our Parliament having to seek the approval of the Arch Bishop of Canterbury before any act could pass into law.
That, effectively, is what you have got in Iran, and soon its Ayatollah hopes to have his finger on the trigger of a nuclear bomb. When the masses protested vote rigging during their 2009 election they were shot down like dogs for daring to question the Mullahs. People on the Iranian street do not like it and neither do those on the Arab street, whether it be in Cairo, Alexandria or any of the other large Egyptian cities.
The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood – largely made up of the masses from the countryside – pressed its strict Islamic agenda too hard for the city dwellers. It did not understand that democracy only works by compromise. Morsi, the Brotherhood president, felt that it was enough that he had a democratic mandate. But urban Egypt wasn’t having it, particularly the women who saw their recent hard won liberties under threat again. The highly westernised army agreed with them.
Democracy is a fragile thing which took the West many decades to refine and make workable. It involves a great deal of give and take and a willingness to put up with the other side – in Egypt’s case the Muslim Brotherhood – but it has to learn not to push it luck too far with the opposition. Think how it sticks in the craw of right wingers in the West to put up with years of left wing policies and vice versa.
Complicating everything right now in the Muslim world is not just the stand-off between city dwellers and the countryside, but the schism between Shia and Sunni. It reminds me of the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, and in particular the Thirty Years War in the early 17th century which brutalised and lay waste so much of central Europe. We must hope and pray that Islam is not heading down that terrible rad.
For all its many fine qualities, Islam’s greatest failing, it seems to me, is its attitude to women. It is going to have to address that. But we must remember that it was not so very long ago that a husband in the West had the legal right to beat his wife and gain all her property on marriage. It ill behoves us to forget these things when we get on our high horse about what is happening in our neighbour’s world.
Meanwhile we must hope that things do not get out of hand in these two pivotal Arab states of Syria and Egypt so that the whole region goes up in smoke. Syria’s neighbour, Iraq is already teetering on the edge. Meantime the West must mount a monumental effort to relieve the suffering presently going on there.
The future of law enforcement?
As I wrote recently, there are many things happening on many fronts at this time. And considering that most people are in a continual gripe about the Coalition Government, believing that it is next to impossible to get anything done for fear of offending the other partner, it is surprising how many serious issues are being tackled.
The clear-up rate in the last 50 years has fallen from 47 per cent to 28 per cent. Why did we waste all that money on gadgetry?
In no particular order there is social security, education, immigration, the NHS and, above all, the state of the nation’s finances. We cannot know at this point if all, or indeed any, of these will come good by the time of the next election in a little under two years from now, but early indications are that we may be in for some pleasant surprises.
But one great agency of the state has largely escaped scrutiny: the police. It was hoped by the Government that here, too, serious change could be effected by the election of the new police commissioners who would oversee police budgets and other matters. The commissioners, it was believed, would look to the public for guidance as to what it wanted rather than the hierarchy of the police and its 43 chief constables. If they failed to fulfill these hopes then they would be thrown out at the next election for their post. That, at least, was the thinking behind it all and it seemed not unreasonable.
The voters, however, were totally hacked off by this time with the whole political establishment. Memories were still fresh in their minds over the expenses scandal and the thought of another tier of bureaucracy did not much appeal. The result was that only 15 per cent bothered to vote the new commissioners in. That, I believe, was a great pity. While some good people made it through, so did a lot of tired old retreads and chancers. Fortunately, the greatest of these, that discredited old buffoon, John Prescott, who thought it would be a shoe-in, was not one of these. But overall the commissioners have proved a disappointment. These are, however, early days and at some point the hope remains the new system will prove its worth.
For good and fearless policing that does not kow-tow to political or any other power, we have always judged it essential to grant the various chief constables full operational independence. Only in extremis can the Home Secretary dictate to them or sack them. The independence of police constables appears to have gone to the various chiefs’ heads.
‘Plod’ has got too big for the boots Joe public issued him with. For instance, he knows that the public highly values its almost unique unarmed method of policing and yet, more and more, chiefs ignore this fact and go on spending vast sums on gadgetry – much of it of a lethal nature – and are close to looking plain silly. ‘Plod’ seeks no approval for any of this and there has been no discussion in Parliament about it. Chiefs now dress their officers in intimidating Robocop fashion so that the gap between him and the public he is meant to serve grows daily wider. It has reached the point whereby they are almost unapproachable. You certainly wouldn’t think to ask such a weirdly dressed creature into your house for a cuppa so that you can give him an update on what is going on in your neighbourhood and where all the baddies are.
Instead of listening to the public’s concerns – like boots on the ground – he prefers to listen to what his own officers want and pander to their convenience. When things go wrong, ‘Plod’ springs to their defence like a she-wolf protecting its cubs.
In the last ten years, 74 people have died in police custody but not a single officer has been found culpable. Time and again ‘Plod’ was told about children being abused – including Savile’s hundreds – but he did nothing. ‘Plod’ cocked up at Hillsborough football stadium where nearly 100 died and tried for 25 years to put the blame on the public. That responsible chief constable was allowed to retire, keep his handsome pension as well as his knighthood: scandalous is not the word for it!
Faced with multiple unsolved crimes, England’s worst performing force, Nottinghamshire, adopted a policy of wholesale roundups and arrests of ‘the usual suspects’ with not a scintilla of evidence to justify bringing them in. They spent time under arrest and had unlawful conditions of bail imposed on them before they were released without charge.
Now it transpires that Cleveland police have spent ten years – yes, ten years – and millions of pounds trying to fit-up a distinguished solicitor who was rather better than they would have wished at getting people off. They were ordered by the High Court to pay £550,000 compensation. But should we be surprised that if they would go for a solicitor – distinguished or otherwise – they also tried to fit-up a cabinet minister? I could go on. There is so much.
In 100 years crime has grown 30-fold, even allowing for population growth.
The clear-up rate in the last 50 years has fallen from 47 per cent to 28 per cent.
Why did we waste all that money on gadgetry?
But, listen, you’ll enjoy this: Plod’s latest wheeze is to fit himself out with CCTV somewhere among all that paraphernalia, if he can find the space, so that every minute of every day he can photograph and record people he comes into contact with. Now, that definitely does it!
Mrs. Ramsbottom, who’d gone off him anyway, will never, ever, now ask him in for that cuppa. He might, after all, be photographing her bloomers on the clothes horse so that he and his mates can have a good laugh later, down at the station.
But, joking apart, there is, as we can see, much to be done where the police are concerned. They are in serious danger of becoming a law unto themselves and they must be reined in. Since it is still important that they remain free of political and other interference, we must hope that the new commissioners rapidly get their act together and do the job we have called them in existence to do. Only they can offer hope of a solution.
It’s time to home in on a recovery
Are we seeing the first signs of confidence returning? We must earnestly hope so. Even that prophet of doom, Sir Mervyn King – the newly retired Governor of the Bank of England – is getting excited.
Our housing stock has greatly to be increased.
Houses prices, which never quite went into the tailspin of the US, are starting to rise again and mortgages are increasing. On balance, I think it was right to kick-start the badly hit building industry by government underwriting of mortgages. But this must be of limited duration. The last thing we need is for another bubble to start inflating. Hopefully the painful lessons of what happened before will act as a cautionary tale.
The fact is that our housing stock has greatly to be increased. The reason why house prices grew to such levels was that a fundamentally sound economic model of price determination was broken: supply was hugely below demand. And when that is put into reverse, the opposite price movement will happen: prices will fall. Last year we built 100,000 new houses, when most experts said it should have been 250,000. And it should have been at this level for years.
Those millions of immigrants that Tony Blair ‘sent out his search parties’ for have to live somewhere, as do the increasing number of people needing to be separately housed due to divorce and other factors. The point to remember is that when you build a house, you not only put builders, plumbers and electricians back to work but you create orders for carpets, furnishings, double glazing, electrical goods, furniture and much else besides. The knock-on effect is tremendous. Big infrastructure projects are all very well, but they are few in number, take years to process and are localised anyway. Huge swathes of the country see no obvious activity and don’t much benefit – if at all. But houses popping up from Lands End to John O’Groats do get noticed.
People’s income has been squeezed these past five years almost like never before. They have been subject to pay freezes, cuts, short time working and even lay-offs. And throughout all this time, the relentless march of inflation has eroded their disposable income. Even their taxes were going up. And while all this was going on, people desperately sought to pay down their horrendous debt levels. No wonder confidence went out the window and they felt unable to spend. When they looked around the world, the picture was just as grim – and in some cases much worse. Fear begets retrenchment and that, until this moment, is where we have been.
But now, with the stock market reaching its highest level since the turn of the century, banks being brought under control and being required to rebuilt their balance sheets (albeit at the expense of lending), medium and large size companies sitting on £70 billion and ready to go, houses shifting, mortgages easier to get and hundreds of thousands of new jobs being created, things are changing. Those straining-at-the-bit companies will feel encouraged to invest. Now the final – and critical – part of the jigsaw to be put in place is for people to get out there and start spending. And if they start to feel that the worst is over, they will. The rest will take care of itself. People, after all, do like to spend.
We have learned one hell of a lesson these past five years, and hopefully both government and people will act more responsibly next time round. But some real good will have come out of it all – as it always does: we are emerging leaner and meaner. The recession has forced us to address issues which we all knew had to be addressed, but which, while the good times rolled, we found excuses for putting off. We, individually, have been forced to examine every item of our domestic expenditure – but so too has the public sector. Now, at last, we are cutting away the fat which we allowed to accumulate in the public sector and, boy, was there a lot of it. Everything has to be justified. Any firm will tell you that, if it had to, in order to survive it could effect colossal savings. I, myself, have seen my shop takings drop by 25%, but I am still here. I cannot take much more, but my customers have not suffered. If anything, they are getting a better deal than ever and I am doing my level best to be even sweeter to them. But when central and local government were asked to do the same thing – very belatedly I might add – they squealed like stuffed pigs. And they had vastly more fat on them in the first place.
But, as they say, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. Soon, hopefully, we will have schoolchildren entering the job market with an education which can compare favourably with those hungry tigers in the East which are seeking to steal our thunder. Also we will have a workforce that knows and appreciates the necessity of becoming more competitive. Exports have already shown strong signs of picking up – although this has been mostly due to a weakened pound rather than anything else. Maybe, too, we will have put an effective break on those vast numbers of unskilled workers flooding into our little country who have put, unwittingly, such a strain on all our services. Even the NHS reforms may start to deliver, for as much as we love it, it cannot stay forever a holy cow which cannot be touched. We spend, now, as much as the European average, but we have nowhere like their standard of care. Where did all those scores of billions disappear? We doubled its budget in real terms in a decade. Perhaps it will improve now that it is to be under new management and not under the baleful control of that unrepentant apparatchik who presided over those scandalous deaths in North Staffordshire and who knows where else. And, finally, there is that lumbering giant, the Welfare State, who so many took for a ride. That, too, is being brought under control. Perhaps now we can get back to helping the genuinely needy, even alleviating their suffering more than we have previously been able. That would be good. So we do, very much, have positive things on the horizon. We must hope now that the Germans will continue to hold the eurozone together and stop the continent from imploding. That will give us even greater reasons to be hopeful.
We are busily re-orientating our services and export drive toward the still booming East – something which we should have done years ago. Even formerly-basket-case Africa is on a powerful upward trajectory. Uncle Sam, too, is showing distinct promise and is growing again at a healthy 2% with rising employment. He does, however, have some big problems which he has not addressed and only gets away with it, for the moment, because he stewards the world’s reserve currency – as we once did for so very, very long.
But, for our part, we must continue to hold our nerve with our own reforms. Only the police, it seems to me, remain a loose cannon among the great institutions of state. Though they have had cuts forced upon them, like almost everybody else, they still behave as though they a law unto themselves. More about that later.
Britain’s most spectacular WWII op
DAMBUSTERS
On the mighty dam men guarding it knew
That a reckoning was coming by air;
The hum, it grew, as the terrified crew
Followed the bomber with which it was paired;
Never was a venture as bold as this,
To blow up a thing so massive and strong;
Only a plan with a devilish twist,
At the centre of which was a bouncing bomb;
Flyers were needed with critical skills,
Matched with a bravery few could muster;
Then with much luck they could go for the kill,
Bestowing on them well-deserved luster;
Ruhr workshops were on the hit-list that day:
Much ordinance for the war they did make;
Across factory floors would floodwaters lay:
German war efforts would falter and shake;
Destruction was wrought on a frightening scale:
Nigh half the flyers would never come home;
’Twas a mission beside which others would pale:
Their glory written on tablets of stone.
The fast way to lose weight
Today I want to write about something I wrote on nearly a year ago. It concerns getting our bodies in the shape and condition that we would be happy with.
A lot of people – probably the majority – have got it into their heads that there is nothing they can do about middle age spread – that it is an inevitable consequence of getting older.
This is not so. It is totally within our gift as to what weight and shape we are.
My method – and it has worked for me – is to fast one day and eat the next, with two days eating at the weekend. In just four weeks I got my weight down from 14st 1lb to 12 stone 7lbs (21lbs). There are many incredibly good aspects to this method… if only I had thought about it during my twenty five years of running health clubs!
The first is the breathtaking speed at which the weight fell away; there was no agonising for months and months as you nibble away at the pounds. The second is that you can carry on eating the things you like and in the same quantities you are used to. There is no having to fork out for expensive dietary lines, many of which I don’t like and forsaking the wonderful things that you do. Third, you’re getting a regular detox. Normally our digestive and bowel systems are working 24/7, with never a let-up. Now they have a rest and a thorough flush out. Fourth, while you’re pursuing your goal, you’re massively reducing your supermarket bill as a result of the 40 per cent calories you are no longer consuming.
This inspirational thought which came to me out of the blue allowed me to go into this summer and the last unencumbered with all that useless and damaging baggage. To ensure that it never came back after I reached my goal I could have cut my calorific intake for the future, but I prefer to eat what I want to in the quantities I want.
Every so often – usually every week or ten days – I nuke it with a day of fasting in which I can easily knock off two whole pounds or more. Wonderful, I think to myself. I’m back to ground zero!
Now, I know your reaction to all this is: ‘Great! But those days of fasting must be sheer purgatory.’ This is not so. Like you, I thought they would be, but they were amazingly easy to get through. Yes, I had odd moments when I could have stuffed myself, but they soon passed. I thought of the joy I would feel the following morning when I got on the scales.
Amazingly, I felt so alive and focused on those days of fasting. Why was that? I believe it goes back to our hunter gatherer days, which after all is only ten thousand years ago. Then it was a life of feast and famine. When you and your family had gorged itself on your latest kill you had to think about the next meal. Days might pass before you could bag that fleet of foot antelope for your next feast.
Nature equipped you to get through those days of hunger without feeling below par. You had, if anything, to be even sharper and more focused than normal to run your next kill to ground, certainly not lethargic and off key.
Evolution does not fundamentally change our digestive or any other system in a short time span like 10,000 years. To evolution, it is a mere blink of the eye.
My plan, I will freely admit, is not rocket science, but it is radical and it does work. And the speed at which it works is phenomenal and that is what makes it so exciting.
So why haven’t we heard of this in all the years we’ve been regaled about dieting? There is so much ballyhoo about losing weight one could be forgiven for thinking that it is complicated when it isn’t. I believe it’s all down to calories; the number going in versus the number going out.
But could it be that money is the reason we haven’t heard of it?
The dietary industry is worth billions and the supermarkets even more. Imagine if millions of people start consuming 40 per cent less food each week and abandon dietary products altogether. I’m not, by nature, a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe it would tantamount to suicide for those two mammoth industries ever to allow such thinking to take hold.
Of course, exercise can and should play its part, though its greatest contribution is its benefit to the cardio vascular system and general all round health. It also aids your immune levels to stay high and so ward of attacks of this or that. But to burn up the excess number of calories that Western man is piling on each day by exercise alone would take an effort beyond anything that all but the most heroic could endure.
As in so many things, we tend to follow in Uncle Sam’s footsteps and are usually the first in Europe to do so. Most of them are beneficial, but over indulgence is certainly not one of them. We are now officially the fattest nation in Europe. No single thing could aid our aging and increasingly overweight population than to take obesity seriously – and it should start with our children. As the best form of preventative medicine, it would massively reduce the spiralling burden and costs of our health service.
Friends that we holiday with from Sweden from time to time were telling my wife last week, via Skype, that a new craze is sweeping the country… fasting your weight off, one day on and one day off, with two days of eating at the weekend. Ausra, my wife’s friend, said that the word is that the scheme came from England.
I wonder if Yours Truly began it all with that article nearly a year ago in this paper? The blog version of it went out on the World Wide Web. Something of a thought isn’t it? I’d love to think that is what happened.
All power, I say, to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the web. Now, there’s a man who really does merit the Turing Award, the Nobel prize of computing. Think just of one benefit alone: the alleviation – through Skype and other instant messaging services – of the loneliness of people whose loved ones have gone abroad. The call, no matter what its duration, is cost free and the whole thing is totally brilliant.
We have fallen short on honour
As a country which abhors state sponsored killing and the grisly process of snuffing out a human life, I find it perplexing and distressing that the British Government will not lift a finger to save a British grandmother facing death by firing squad in Indonesia. I will not get into the details (she was a drugs mule) of why she finds herself in her present situation. But she acknowledges her foolishness and offered full co-operation to the authorities.
British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford lost her appeal last month over the British Government’s refusal to fund her legal challenge against a death sentence.
As for the men who put her up to it, they have received light sentences. Many aspects of the trial were deeply flawed so that any examination will show that a death sentence was totally uncalled for. An appeal funded by legal aid would almost certainly highlight this, but our own authorities will not grant this.
They are more than willing to provide legal aid to umpteen tycoons – millionaire Asil Nadir springs to mind, as does that property developer reputably worth £400m who is hiding his money from his ex wife. And, of course, there is unlimited funding at taxpayers’ expense for any number of foreign nationals who wish us harm and for their never ending appeals under the Human Rights Act for permission to stay amongst us.
Ours is a nation they despise, whose culture and laws they wish to overthrow. Yet they are happy to take advantage of its lifestyle and the benefits system which makes that possible. The reason why these expensive appeals by self-proclaimed Jihadists so often succeed is that we are unwilling to send them back to their homeland in case they are mistreated there. Yet here is the ultimate case of mistreatment – death by firing squad – and it is happening to a British born woman who has lived most of her life here.
There may well be millions living in our country who have no legal right to be here. Any one of them, before they could be deported, would be able to throw themselves on the mercy of our courts and run us up huge legal costs before we could send them home. Where, I ask myself, is the logic or consistency which allows us to say no to a British grandmother and yes to one of them?
All this reminds me of the cold-hearted, honourless attitude of the Gordon Brown government when it would not allow Gurkhas, who had frequently put their lives on the line for us, to settle in our country at the end of their service lives. It took the redoubtable Joanna Lumley to help that government change its mind.
But right now there is another ongoing scandal which this time concerns the Cameron government. It relates to interpreters in Afghanistan. Two hundred or so who have risked their lives working for us in that benighted country are to be abandoned as next year begins the drawdown of our presence in that country and thus our need for linguists. They are fearful of what will become of them and their families once we are no longer there to protect them. The answer seems a simple one: let them come back with us. But shamefully that is not the response of our authorities. The interpreters are being told they must remain and take their chances. How truly inhuman is that? When the presently contained Taliban presence in Afghanistan is augmented by floods more coming in from Pakistan, once we are gone these interpreters are dead men walking. The Jihadists will take a terrible revenge. They will not care a hoot that the whole Afghan operation was authorised by the UN. Anyone who assisted, as they see it, the foreign invaders, can expect their special brand of punishment. What is at issue here is not just the saving of lives of people who have risked all for us, but the very honour of our country. The idea that we can happily grant asylum to countless others who have no claim on us is beyond comprehension.
Present day Russia is very much a gangster society led by an authoritarian government claiming to be democratic. But in one important area it puts us to shame. That is where honour is concerned. My Lithuanian wife’s father was a colonel in the Russian military. When the thirteen countries which formed the Russian empire – which it chose to call the USSR – broke away and gained their independence the Russian state could quite easily have washed its hands of obligations to the nationals of those newly independent states who had served it for their pensions and other rights. But it did not. My wife’s father receives a full and generous pension from Moscow.
How did we handle a similar situation when our own legions and public servants came home from our far flung colonies? We abdicated the duty to pay their pensions. We turned to the new rulers of India, Burmah, Ghana, Malaysia and the rest and said to them: “It’s up to you, old boy. You must pay their pensions”. If later they reneged or found they couldn’t afford it or felt they had been blackmailed to get their independence and stopped payments then that was that. Our attitude was tough. “Your quarrel,” we said to the poor man who had sweated all his life under the tropical sun, “is with the new rulers”.
Honour is a noble thing and it grieves me to think that my country has been short on it in so many instances. I hope Cameron will do the right thing where those brave Afghan interpreters are concerned and that he will intervene, before it is too late, over that wretched grandmother.
A shift of power in EU corridors
It seems clear to me that a major link-up between the two top Teutonic powers of Europe – Britain and Germany – along with lesser like-minded powers to the north and east is taking place. The tectonic plates of Europe are on the move in a way that may prove irreversible. This will certainly be viewed with horror in Paris.
Merkel’s whole philosophy of life gels with that of the foreign leader she is said to have once described as her “naughty, but charming, nephew”.
That invitation from Angela Merkel for David Cameron to come and visit her at her home north of Berlin a few weeks ago and to bring his wife and children has, I believe, great implications. She even wheeled out her hermit husband for the weekend soiree.
It had all the characteristics of a love-in. No other European leader has had such an invitation or been accorded such warmth and hospitality. It is known that the pastor’s daughter holds Cameron in the highest esteem – perhaps that Eton grooming helps – and it will have been reinforced, I’m sure, by the shy, but charming, Sam Cam – and her equally delightful children. Such personal chemistry and bonhomie really does matter. The invite, in my opinion, speaks volumes.
But equally importantly her whole philosophy of life gels with that of the foreign leader she is said to have once described as her “naughty, but charming, nephew”. Naughty because, at a time of huge difficulty for her beloved Euro Project, he has rocked the boat by demanding fundamental changes to the way the EU goes about its business.
It is not as if she disagrees with much of what he committed to put before the British people in a 2017 Referendum, should he retain power, but because it’s complicated and will take a lot of what she does not have: time. As it happens, most of her fellow countrymen agree with David Cameron. They, too, dislike much of what is coming out of Brussels and would like to see things done differently. But she wants to keep her eye on the Euro ball, whose solution – if there is one – is also complicated. She feels she cannot afford the distraction of a major renegotiation of EU treaties at this time. There is also the added factor that she is up for re-election in September and has all that circus ballyhoo to worry about. Cool and detached, as Angela famously is, she is in danger of becoming stressed and Davy boy, right now, isn’t helping.
What with France’s weak and hopelessly left-leaning ‘leader’ – distracted as he is with woman problems and who cannot see the necessity for tough measures in France – she is at her wits’ end. The Franco-German axis, which has been the engine of the EU since its beginning, is unravelling.
France, under Hollande, seems destined to be the flag-bearer of a southern rim of EU countries which will put up with no more belt-tightening. Merkel admires little Ireland’s heroic acceptance of the need to pay off its debts, but she is fast losing patience with the other PIGS (Portugal, Greece and Spain, that is). She is full of praise for Cameron’s recognition that sound money and balancing the books is central to everything. Also his open trading outlook and market philosophy equates exactly with her own. She has no truck with spending your way out of debt. She sees David Cameron as an economic soul mate.
Germany herself has still not shaken off the terrible legacy of WWII and she is unwilling to take the lead in Europe on her own for fear of cries of a Fourth Reich being hurled about. She feels she has to have a partner who is ‘respectable’ and can front up everything diplomatically while she can make the running economically. France, for fifty years, has been that partner. Yet now the dice have rolled in another direction and an alignment of Teutonic powers seems in the offing. Is this a good thing? It certainly will not seem so in Paris, which will be outraged at its relegation and see the hand of perfidious Albion at work all over again. As virtually the creator of the EU, which she saw primarily as a means of controlling German ambitions, she has seen her dominance slide inexorably. That is why, originally, she was so keen to keep ‘interfering’ Britain out. But this proved impossible in the end, especially when you had a British leader, in Edward Heath, who was prepared to sell the pass and demean himself as a wretched supplicant, to get in.
Now, more and more countries have been allowed to join the original Club of Six – chiefly at the instigation of Britain – and France’s position has weakened with each new entrant. Most infuriating of all, they seem to want to use English in preference to French in the corridors of Brussels power! Once you could not get a job anywhere – even a lowly one – if you were not fluent in French, but now the point had been reached in which the Brussels power brokers actually had the audacity to appoint a Union foreign minister who spoke no other language but English. That was the ultimate insult.
I have no doubt that Europe has the capability to become the dominant power in the world if only it can get its act together. Its GDP is already way ahead of Uncle Sam’s and it will only widen. In terms of any numbers you care to look at, it is perfectly within its reach to see off competition from the east for the rest of this century. I look to the day when Russia itself comes knocking at the EU door. It is essentially a European country.
Europe’s cultural dominance is already unassailable: its music; its art; its literature; its universities; its history; its multiplicity of matchless ancient cities. Even its science is on a par with the US. I see no reason for us to be downcast. All things come to an end, including this wretched recession.
So will David Cameron get his deal, which will persuade enough Britons to back him in the referendum? I think he will. Angela will see to that, one way or another, and she will be assisted by Britain’s many other friends in Europe. France will be incandescent. Germany does not wish to lose a country which she sees as pivotal to Europe’s future; one that has played so crucial a role in its past. America will be delighted, for she will feel that in the coming difficult world, where after 500 years a resurgent east threatens to displace a weary west, a half a billion people, all speaking its own language – as a back up – and mentored by his closest ally and friend, will be there to stiffen its own resolve. And that same Europe may well be a Europe fashioned after the Anglo Saxon model – one very much to the US liking. Rest assured, too, that Uncle Sam himself is far from finished. He will come bouncing back, I am sure, with all that energy we are so familiar with. Together with Europe, it will be a bloc more than capable of looking after itself in a fast-changing world.
Our greatest 20th century premier
Yesterday we buried a titan and she was a woman. Not since Churchill’s bravery when he took the awful decision to sink his French ally’s fleet in WWII, rather than let it fall into enemy hands, have we seen such a brave leader. I even think that Churchill might have blanched at the idea of sending the hugely depleted Fleet that Margaret Thatcher had at her disposal to rescue the Falkland Islands, 8,000 miles away.
Thatcher has for all time proved – with her competence, drive, bravery and vision – that women are truly the equal of men.
But her bravery extended well beyond the battlefield – something that Churchill’s did not. She took on and defeated ‘the enemy within’, as she called them: the Arthur Scargills, Derek Hattons and Ken Livingstones of this world. ‘Union Barons’, one by one, fell upon her lance until the wheel had turned full circle and we had the fewest strikes in all Europe.
Churchill had his own bitter enemies among the working classes as well as the establishment, but somehow their vehemence had faded under the glow of his magnificent conduct of the war and the glory of his rhetoric in its early days, urging his countrymen to stand fast and not be seduced by peace ‘with honour’ offer which he knew would turn out to be humiliating. But Margaret Thatcher’s enemies never left her in peace, not even in death. Whole swathes of industrial England, Scotland and Wales died on her watch. Most of them were dying anyway (as they had been under Labour), but she did nothing to slow the process.
Yet much the same was happening all over the industrialised West. Mines were closing and shipyards were losing out to cheap labour in the East; steel was being produced in the same areas at Mickey Mouse prices. Long-established and close communities who had come to rely on a single industry became a wasteland. Standing guardian over these nationalised and loss-making industries was a union hierarchy more powerful, many argued, than the state itself. It was said that no law could be enacted without their approval.
Thatcher believed herself to be on a mission to restore Britain’s governance, finances and greatness. She believed she saw a very sick patient whom only surgery could cure. The medicine, she knew, would be bitter and the recuperation hard. But she insisted it would be all be worth it. Some said she was stubborn, and she was. But she could be flexible when she needed to be; she could duck and dive with the best of them in politics, but on core issues, as she saw them, she would not budge. You don’t stay on the way to twelve years at the top (almost as long as Hitler’s Reich) without heavy doses of pragmatism.
Also she was not above using her sex either to get her way. Flirtatious Mitterrand, the French president, thought her coquettish and remarked that she had “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” He fell in love with her ballroom dancing skills. In another world he would have had her – or at least tried.
For all this, Thatcher was an earnest woman, almost devoid of humour (jokes had to be explained to her). She had an almost childlike certainty that she knew what to do to lift the economy out of the pit of despondency into which it had fallen. When 360 of the country’s leading economists signed a letter to tell her that her policies were doomed, she ignored them. Once she was the boss she would brook no backsliders. She was dictatorial, but luckily she was compelled to operate within the constraints of a liberal democracy. But she got the essentials right and, remarkably, that army of doomsayers were proved wrong.
Personally, she was very kind to her staff and to the little people, the ones without power – but she could be brutal to those who wielded it. However, her all-consuming ambition made it impossible for her to be a hands-on mother; perhaps that wasn’t her style anyway. But in her extreme old age she did feel pangs of guilt. She shed more tears over her lost boys in the South Atlantic than ever she did for her own children. It is said that she never went to bed during the three months of the Falklands conflict, dozing instead on a chair, waiting to hear the telephone ring to tell her of more boys lost in the latest sinking. She took it all very personally. Churchill seldom did. An eyewitness told of her sobbing for 40 minutes non-stop when news reached her that another ship had been hit by a missile. When her own torpedo slammed into the cruiser Belgrano and sent Argentina’s sailors to the bottom of the icy south Atlantic, I have no doubt that her mother’s heart felt for those other mothers in far away Argentina. But if ‘cruel necessity’ – Cromwell’s justification for cutting off his own king’s head – called for its sinking to save her own precious boys, she would not hold back.
She was tough beyond belief – far tougher than any of the men who surrounded her. She would not yield to IRA hunger strikers, no matter what. It was a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. It took ten emaciated corpses before the IRA conceded defeat. They repaid her by destroying her hotel and almost her.
Her toughness and certainty of the correctness of her policies followed through to the economic woes which beset the country; her monetarist measures brought record inflation to low levels; her privatisation of loss-making, nationalised industries stopped the haemorrhaging and put shares into millions of pockets, becoming a model for virtually the whole world; her sell-off of council houses made property owners of millions; her ‘Big Bang’ financial liberalisation in the City made London the world’s leading capital market; and her curbing of restrictive union practises such as flying pickets and the closed shop brought order to the factory floor. It is an impressive list and there is more.
But she made mistakes. She believed too much in the service economy and failed to realise sufficiently the importance of manufacturing. She was plain stupid in doing a dry run of the Poll Tax in, of all places, prickly Scotland – even though its principals were sound. (She never had any admirers in that part of the kingdom and still doesn’t.) And she should never have allowed herself to be talked into signing up to the ERM at a rate that shadowed the Deutschmark. Her earlier signing of the Single European Act cost her many of her cherished powers of veto. Also her closure of Grammar Schools exceeded even that of her Labour predecessors. It infuriated great numbers of her own followers.
Too long in power, and with the inevitable hubris setting in she finally gave the game away when she used the ‘royal we’ to announce the birth of a grandchild. Her patronising treatment and her public put-downs of her loyal chancellor and foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, were not pretty to watch and her hectoring style got worse the longer she remained in office.
But for all her faults and mistakes, she was nevertheless a force of nature that moved the economic firmament. There was no going back, even for an incoming Labour government. She also moved the political centre ground. It might be said that if you seek her monument, as Sir Christopher Wren once famously stated, “look around you”.
Nothing is the same. She was not interested in spin doctors, focus groups, think tanks, legions of special advisers or even the nasty things the papers said about her. She had a job to do and she would do it come what may. There is a certain courage here also. But if we still have difficulty in recognising her greatness then we have to cast our eyes around the world. All of its leaders are in awe of her achievements. They know a colossus when they see one. They were not distracted by the smoke and din of battle as we were here at home. They could see more clearly where she was headed. Their universal opinion was that Great Britain was a more respected nation than it had been at the start of her reign. Flags flew in many countries at half mast when her death was announced and most of all across the broad expanses of North America. There her name, alongside Ronald Reagan, is revered – as it is too across Eastern Europe, as the liberator from Communism. It was she who brought Gorbachev in from the cold and told her friend, the president, “this is a man we can do business with”. Together, their steely resolve and willingness to do whatever it took, brought the Cold War to a triumphant end. It might justly be said that had she accomplished nothing else, that alone would stand as a fitting testament.
Finally there is the no small matter of a grocer’s daughter – a woman – scaling the heights of a man’s world to achieve the highest office in the land. Women everywhere, and that encompasses the whole world, owe it to her that she has for all time proved – with her competence, drive, bravery and vision – that women are truly the equal of men and that there is no office of state that they cannot handle. In the great scheme of things I do believe that history will place her before Churchill – who, after all, was born to privilege – as our greatest 20th century premier.
Philpott represents all that is despicable about our species
With the approach of the weekend I fret about what topic I can try to interest the reader in next week. But it seems the answer is clear: the Philpott case. A bit like the immigration issue, if you mentioned it you were in immediate danger of being labelled a closet racist, but now we can have an open and honest discussion. So it was too with Welfare.
Did it ever occur to Philpott that fire is not so easily controlled as the hapless women who came into his orbit?
In that case you were a stony-hearted – boot on the neck – oppressor of the poor. In both cases the bleeding hearts hoped by such calumnies to shut down the discussion and for generations they succeeded. Now Philpott has breached the dyke in magnificent fashion and the second of these taboo subjects has fallen to the dictates of rational argument.
If Philpott has done nothing else positive in his whole miserable, outrageous life he has, at least, opened the floodgates for a full scale debate on the whole meaning of Welfare. Now, let us be clear from the beginning: all right minded people pity the poor and disadvantaged and are prepared to move heaven and earth to ease their plight. But just as vehemently we feel a mighty anger at those who pretend to be in that category.
Long ago (1988) the British Shoe Corporation closed on me after years of pursuit for the back rent and balance of a 14-year lease for a business whose premises they rented to me. I had sold it in Glasgow six years before. You see, in legal parlance, I was ‘The Leasee of Last Resort’. It is a practice now banned by Parliament. What had happened was that the man I had sold my health club to had got into business and matrimonial difficulties and had done a runner to Australia. Muggins, here, was left to pick up the pieces. The Shoe Corp was finally advised by its sharp lawyers in London that the best way to force my hand was to take out an order in bankruptcy. At that time I was coming to the end of my 21-year lease for my Plymouth city centre health club and was making preparations for a new line of business – the ski centre – and I knew that if they made me bankrupt that was never going to happen. I was forced, as a result, to liquidate all my assets and that included two houses.
As a now homeless person with three children I ended up in a housing association property, but I was enabled, with the help of investors, to continue the ski project and drive it forward to completion.
The reason I tell you all this is that I saw at close quarters the benefits system in action – or at least two significant parts of it. My neighbour on one side was on disability benefit. There was a brand new disability car on the driveway. You can imagine my shock when later I saw that same person’s photo in a local newspaper, having completed a half marathon. My neighbour on the other side used to get up at 5.30am for his six o’clock work start. He told me that out of about 60 housing association properties only three were paying the rent. He felt a deep rage at this. The rest were claiming either to be one-parent families, disabled or unemployed. There were a few pensioners. Daily we could see the so-called unemployed going off to their cash-in-hand jobs or the fellas of the so called one-parent families parking their cars down the road and sneaking in through the back door to spend the night. So let’s not pretend that there is not widespread abuse.
The burden, especially during the longest recession in 200 years, has become intolerable as well as unsupportable and its effects are deeply pernicious.
Next year is a special year for me: I will have been at work for 60 – yes, 60 – years. I did not celebrate my 70th birthday – particularly, as I felt that in today’s world, unless you are unlucky, 70 is no big deal. But the thought has recently occurred to me that next year is different: it represents my own little Diamond Jubilee. You see, I am old school; I am deeply proud of not being a burden to my country and blessed with health that allows me to continue contributing my penny’s worth to its well being. I get up in the morning and walk the mile to work and there I meet the public – to whom I must continue to be nice and disavow what some would say is a normal right to be a grumpy old man. I set to, repairing shoes, cutting keys, servicing watches, engraving trophies, making wooden house and other signs and framing pictures. None of these things could I do before the age of 55, so I think I may have disproved that old dictum that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.
When I was about to leave school at 15, the idea of not working was not on the radar. There weren’t benefits as we know them today. My foster parents took the view they had done their bit and it was up to me to do mine. Three years after starting I got hauled off to the Army to do my bit there for two years as a National Serviceman and I managed to get shot at by the IRA. Quite sobering it was. But the point of all this is about being useful to society if you can. I was 21 when I heard President Kennedy’s famous line in his inaugural speech when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. Did Philpott ever think such thoughts? I think not. Nor, unfortunately, do multitudes of others. That is the trouble. It was right that William Beveridge, in his famous report, sought to abolish the evils of want, hunger, idleness, ignorance and disease. It was wrong that noble concept was hijacked by scroungers and the workshy. We – all of us – are culpable for the stupidity we displayed when we allowed it to happen. Naively we believed in peoples’ essential goodness and probity. Yet it has turned otherwise honest folk, who saw their neighbours getting away with it, into dishonest scroungers themselves. Now, perhaps, the party is coming to an end and we can begin the long climb back to our core values. We may, in the process, start to balance the national books.
As for Philpott himself, he represents all that is despicable in our species. He was a bombastic, narcissistic bully with a deeply cruel streak who even imagined he was fast becoming a celebrity, perhaps eventually a national treasure. He thought he could lead the media by the ears believing it to be something else he could control. He was also very stupid. Did it never occur to him that fire is not so easily controlled as the hapless women who came into his orbit? He may continue to try to play the big man as he has done all his life, particularly with women, but that won’t last five minutes under the rigours of the prison system. I shudder to think what might happen if his fellow inmates gain access to him. Prisoners are infamous for exacting their own kind of primitive justice, especially where crimes against children are concerned. A speedy visit to that same eternity to which his lunatic actions consigned his six innocent children might well end up being a much sought after escape.
Cypriot Euro raid proves banks cannot be trusted
Banks are not to be trusted. That is the shocking message the Troika of the European Central Bank, the EU and the IMF have sent out when they seized up to 60 per cent of the deposits of their wealthier customers in tiny Cyprus.
The actions of Cyprus’ powerful masters to curb the country’s excesses has sent shock waves not just across Europe, but the entire world.
Governments have attempted to get themselves out of holes in years past by raising money in all sorts of unlikely places, some of them truly bizarre. But never, until now, had they felt themselves entitled to raid peoples’ bank accounts and plunder them. That island state of 1.2m people may only represent 0.02% of Euroland’s GDP, but the action of its powerful masters to curb Cypriot excesses has sent shock waves not just across Europe, but the entire world. The reason is simple: if you can’t lodge your money in a bank account without feeling that it is safe, where on earth can you put it? Under the bed, perhaps, or in a biscuit tin? For all the derisory interest savings have attracted in recent years, that might not seem such a bad idea. The trouble is that almost no one has a pay packet anymore – it has to go straight into the bank – and we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the convenience of the hole in the wall that we can no longer contemplate anything else.
What has happened to Cyprus, however, should make all of us take stock. It has breached what hitherto has been held as a sacred principal: that you cannot help yourself to something which has been placed in your safekeeping.
People have believed that in an uncertain world their humble bank deposit was at least safe from predators. Just the same, what is to be done with a bank which has got itself into a mess? Is it fair that people – i.e. taxpayers – who did not even sign up to that bank should be compelled to ride to its rescue? Those taxpayers are even more innocent (if you want to use that emotive term) than the lowly deposit holders who did sign up.
What is clear is that we can never again allow ourselves to be held to ransom as we were with the 2008 rescue of British Banks. We have suffered as a result of that rescue for coming on five years now and there is no end in sight to the misery that it has inflicted. High Street banks – the ones we need most to trust implicitly – must be ring fenced against the sometimes crazy risk takers in their investment arms.
In view of the banking industry’s unique capacity to bring the whole system down – even discrediting capitalism itself – they must all be closely monitored. Had this been done it is arguable the catastrophe which has overwhelmed us could have been avoided, or at least mitigated. In addition to all this we must enact laws that permit us to send bankers to jail, where reckless conduct and dodgy practices puts all our livelihoods at risk. Amazingly, there was no law in place that could hold ‘Fred the Shred’, to account: he broke no laws. This must change.
What really sticks in the public craw is that not a single banker is behind bars. Even members of the political class including peers, have ended up sporting prison blue. Their crimes, by comparison with the enormity of what the bankers did and are still doing, is of no consequence. Soon, no doubt, those numbers will be swelled by overzealous newspaper hacks and policemen who have had the temerity to keep them in the picture, even where no money has changed hands. Everybody – ministers included – it seems, can be jailed except ‘fat cat’ bankers. But even before consideration is given to criminalising certain banking activities, the Libor manipulation was an actionable crime. Why then is there no move to bring those fraudsters to justice? Their scams involved tens of billions of pounds worldwide. That question is doubtless answered by recently released figures which showed that access to Downing Street by bankers was of an order of ten times greater than that of anyone else – captains of industry and their like. Meantime the bonus culture continues on its lucrative way rubbing salt into our wounds and insulting us. These ‘gentlemen’ really are laughing all the way to the bank.
It has to be said that the Germans were unfairly treated by the hot-headed Greek Cypriots when they lampooned them as Nazis. The Germans had not wished for deposits to be seized from small depositors: that was a decision by their own Cypriot ruling class. They were fearful of upsetting all that hot money – much of it illegally acquired in Russia and stashed in Cypriot banks. It now seems that a benchmark has been set that only big investors and that, regrettably – since not all are crooks – is how it should be. If you have big holdings you should have the sense to see that when banks are offering returns out of kilter with banks generally there is likely to be a catch somewhere. If still you are prepared to take that risk, then so be it. You cannot look to others to save you from your own folly. Also you should not expect careful Fritz, who does pay his taxes and beavers away in a cold climate, along with other diligent north Europeans, to bail you out. At least the so called PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) have the inestimable luxury and consolation of making a living under the Mediterranean sun. It tells you everything you need to know – that whereas Germans over the last two decades have voted themselves a 20% pay rise, the French have voted 90%.
Apart from anything else it was an affront to north European taxpayers that they should be expected to protect the ill-gotten gains of Russian oligarchs and the like and that a Euro country was being used to launder money. But you could say much the same about Luxembourg except that with more rigorous stewardship its banks have not gone belly up.
As for the future of the Euro itself, on which our own recovery is so heavily dependent, the storm clouds refuse to go away. This is because of the disparities between the economies of the north and south and the huge differences in competitiveness between them. It is so great that it has built up debt levels in the Club Med countries that are unsustainable. My belief is that the Euro will survive, but the weaker members, which never qualified for entry in the first place, will be let go. If only those rules of entry had been applied, so much of the pain currently being felt could have been avoided. But, as is so often the case, politics triumphed over sound money and we are all left with the consequences.
Canny Scots should see through Salmond’s humbug
Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, has now entered the final leg of his seven-year effort to destroy the British Union.
Alex Salmond is not a man of high principal, but rather one who fancies a grander title than that of First Minister.
In September of next year he will throw the most almighty spanner into the works of our 300-year-old marriage. If he is successful the English and Scottish nations will be back to where they were in 1707 and the universally acknowledged happiest coming together of two former foes will be over.
Without a single Sassenach anywhere in my bloodline that I am aware of, I very much value things Scottish and have a natural urge to wish her well. On the other hand, having been sheltered by the English for much the greater part of my life I have come to an appreciation of the many fine qualities which reside in that nation. As a consequence I choose to regard myself as an Anglo-Scot. Both nations, before they joined, had boundless potential, but it could never be fully realised while they spent their time and energy, bickering, eyeing each other reproachfully and often leaping at each other’s throat.
When, finally we made a deal to end the lunacy the results were truly astonishing. An industrial revolution was unleashed upon the world and an empire created the like of which had never been seen in the whole of human history. While maintaining their distinctiveness both nations have cut a dash in just about everything they have put their hand to and, along with Wales, have made a wonderfully harmonious union.
Mr Salmond will also find that separation, if he achieves it, will come at an eye-watering cost. All the institutions which form the modern state will have to be disentangled and new ones re-created north of the border, including (absurdly) fresh armed forces. The Scots should not assume that they will gain automatic entry to the EU as, by their own admission, they will be the resurrection of an old state that had never applied to Brussels to join. It is difficult to see how customs barriers and other niggling absurdities could be avoided were Scotland to go its separate way.
We are in the midst of the longest recession since the Napoleonic wars and Scotland would be unwise to take for granted continued English goodwill if she goes ahead. She should be mindful of the fact that it was English money that saved her from implosion during the Royal Bank of Scotland banking crises presided over by Scotsman ‘Fred the Shred’. The Libor manipulation of interest rates, for instance, was pure criminality. Scotland would also do well to remember that when she was poorer than England during the 70s the ‘Barnet Formula’ was invented to balance out incomes. Scotland has long since ceased to be poorer, but the annual payments go on.
They amount to £1,600 more per head of population than England. Justice suggests this arrangement be ended, but the English are not anxious to pick a quarrel with what some believe is their cantankerous neighbour, who can be counted on to resist fiercely. Many will take the view that the ungrateful Scots are biting the hand which feeds them and when exasperation sets in they might start to say that they would be better off without them anyway; at least financially. They do not forget that Scotland is greatly over-represented in Parliament and that it is the Scottish socialist vote that has kept Labour in power for so many years in England and look where that got us all. They will point out that the public sector in Scotland is hugely greater proportionately than in England and more social benefits are handed out there. In addition they get free university education and prescriptions along with free care in old age. I just hope that these salient facts are not too much to the fore as the arguments rage back and forth during the coming months and that insults do not begin to be traded.
My own view is that Alex Salmond is not a man of high principal, but rather one who fancies a grander title than that of First Minister; one like Prime Minister. For the moment, he proposes to keep the Queen as head of state, but then soon might not hubris drive him on to displace her and become president?
In order to whip up anti-English sentiment Salmond has timed his referendum with the 700th anniversary of Scotland’s greatest military triumph over the English at the Bannock Burn. Also he hopes to benefit from the afterglow of chauvinism following the Commonwealth games in Glasgow a few weeks earlier. Lowest and most desperate of all, in my view, is his insistence that 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote. Clearly he believes that these immature minds are easy fodder for his manipulation and will be swayed by all his nationalistic angst. But does anyone, including Salmond, seriously believe that such weighty issues, which have the potential to change our political landscape forever, be properly understood by people with so little experience of the world? As one Scotsman to another I say to Mr Salmond you are a humbug. Now there’s a good old-fashioned word, but one that in my eyes sums him up perfectly.
Those who have not rumbled him already will surely do so when all the arguments are laid before them and they will send him packing. I know, like Tony Blair, he has the gift of the gab and has an answer for everything, but his people have something much more valuable and big going for them: they are CANNY.
Queen Elizabeth II must set the seal on this final verdict of history
The bones of King Richard III are now awaiting disposal. When permission was sought for the highly speculative dig to uncover them from the Leicester city car park – where they had lain undisturbed for 528 years – the Ministry of Justice gave the nod and indicated that, if authenticated, they should be reinterred in the city’s cathedral.
A reconstruction of King Richard III based on his skeletal remains.
First of all, I have to ask: who has rights over a monarch’s remains? I doubt very much if the Ministry of Justice, or indeed any of the secular authorities, have such rights. Were they to exist anywhere – excepting a ‘finders, keepers’ argument – I would have thought they rested with the monarch of the day, under perhaps advice from the ecclesiastical authorities. So, prime minister, please butt out!
Richard III, we now know, was a genuinely good king. Apart from being anointed, and therefore a totally bona fide one with a genuine claim to the throne – unlike his successor – he carried out a whole range of enlightened measures during his two short years as monarch. And forensic examination of the skeleton has told us a great deal – much of it extraordinary. He was neither a freak, as Shakespeare wrote, nor was he ugly (or ‘evil-looking’) as the Bard also insisted. He certainly died violently, but in view of his very slight – almost female-like – frame and physical disabilities, his final sortie into a melee of armoured knights to cut down his usurper rival would have won him a posthumous Victoria Cross in today’s world. So, a hero too!
Let us look at his personality and character – again, hugely disparaged by Shakespeare. Shrinks have examined his whole conduct throughout the thirty two year of his life and they paint a most sympathetic profile. They point to a sad and difficult childhood which, nevertheless, led to an empathetic man with loyal instincts who most certainly knew the difference between right and wrong – and who was extremely pious. Goodbye, we have to say, to the idea that such a man could have murdered his two young nephews, the ‘princes in the tower’.
Nowadays Richard’s disability – his scoliosis and sideways-bent spine – would have evoked great sympathy. Then, however, poor Richard would have been regarded as a pitiable object of scorn rejected by God. But his disability would only have been known to his family – and doubtless the aristocracy (people like to titter) – but not, I suspect, to the general public. Medieval attire of the time, with its raised and puffed-up shoulders, would easily have camouflaged the lower-than-other shoulder. The deeds attributed to this “accursed of God” Richard have him to be a schizophrenic psychopath, yet modern medics insist he was nothing of the sort. Clearly we are going to have to re-write our history books.
We may continue to enjoy Shakespeare’s play for its powerful drama but dismiss its history content. We should do exactly the same with Scotland’s much maligned king, Macbeth. But at least the Bard proved himself even-handed in rubbishing the kings of both kingdoms. (History, we have to acknowledge, was not Shakespeare’s forte.)
As for Richard’s treatment after his heroic death in action, on that occasion the victor, Henry Tudor, let himself down very badly. No chivalric generosity from him to his fallen foe brought down by treachery, but vilification and humiliation. When was ever a king of England stripped naked and slung over an ass for all to see on a fifteen-mile journey from the battlefield to the nearest town, in this case Leicester? Along the way, ignorant locals were encouraged to insult the former king and one went so far as to plunge his dagger so deep into the king’s buttock that it went right through and damaged the pelvis. And when was a king of England was dumped unceremoniously into a hastily dug hole without so much as a shroud to cover his nakedness, much less a coffin? I am sure that the friars who attended had never seen a burial quite like it in their friary – or anywhere else for that matter – and would have wished it otherwise. But they would have been scared stiff of the mailed ruffians who dumped the body on them and of showing the proper respect which was due. They obviously were told to get rid of it quickly and were not minded to disobey or show any form of reverence. Just a few whispered words of the sacraments would have been permitted. Only such a scenario could account for the utter disrespect of it all.
We have much to apologise for to that fallen monarch whose character we then went on to impugn for a full five hundred years with a litany of the most dreadful lies. But now we have a God-given opportunity to make amends, and the eyes of the world are on us.
The dig’s success has excited a worldwide level of interest, with some saying it is among the greatest archaeological finds in the last hundred years. No English king since Richard the Lionheart is better known abroad, and unlike the alleged wickedness of the third Richard, the first (Lionheart) really did do terrible things – like massacre hundreds of Muslim children. There’s an element of black comedy here: one is seen as a hero (he’s even got a statue outside Parliament) and the other as a villain. Yet the truth is that the Lionheart cared little for his English kingdom and preferring his French realm. He didn’t even speak English, and out of his eleven-year reign he spent only months in England. On the other hand, Plantagenet Richard was a first-class administrator who set to with gusto in making England a much more agreeable place for the common man to live.
It seems to me that our Queen is the one best placed to set the seal on this final verdict of history. She is, after all, his successor, and a devout Christian, like him. It will not do for a lesser royal than her to attend the re-interment. To do so would be to suggest that she does not accept the forensic and psychiatric evidence which has exonerated Richard. That would be ungracious, to say the least – even unwise. I feel she is duty-bound to close this final chapter with the dignity it deserves. 538 years is a long time for her ancestor to stand falsely accused.
When the murdered Tsar’s remains were found, the Russian state decided to do right by him by ceremoniously re-interring the bones in the St. Petersburg home of Russian Tsars and the then president, Boris Yeltsin, attended. England can do no less for the last of the Plantagenets, its longest reigning dynasty. This great saga of English kingship can only be brought to a fitting conclusion, in my view, by burial in Westminster Abbey – the most ancient and hallowed resting place of England’s kings and where most of Richard’s ancestors lie. A final, powerful argument for the Abbey is the fact that his beloved wife and Queen – Anne Neville – whose loss he is said to have caused him to cry at her funeral (strange behaviour for a psychopath!) is buried there.
Our Queen is said to have not much liked the Duchess of Windsor, and her mother positively loathed her. But neither denied her right to have her body brought back from exile and laid to rest beside that of her husband, the former Edward VIII. Richard has that right, too.
Finally, the Richard III Society are to be congratulated for their steadfastness over the generations in believing that England never had such a wicked king and that Richard was a good man with the right instincts. Most of all, the young woman who spearheaded the efforts to find Richard, Philippa Langley, is the true heroin of it all.
Mid Staffs is a man-made scandal
I have not written about anything that causes me so much pain as this article does. This is because as a Briton, proud of what my country has achieved down the ages, I am ashamed of the shocking scandal unfolding in what was meant to be our pride and joy: the NHS. Nothing in my experience begins to compare with the sheer magnitude of it all; the needless deaths, through wanton neglect, of almost certainly thousands of people in our hospitals.
SIR DAVID NICHOLSON: Fish rot from the head
Fish rot from the head and any man – and we speak of Sir David Nicholson – who believed that the totalitarian system that was once the USSR was a good thing should never have been put in charge of such an organisation as the NHS. Apparently his hero was the gruesome Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. It shocked me how readily and swiftly the PM and Heath Secretary sprang to his defence. Perhaps it was because Nicholson had a reputation, when ordered to do things, of carrying out those orders. While that may be so, the consequences, as whistleblowers made clear to Nicholson, was an unfolding tragedy of epic proportions. But orders are orders and Nicholson ploughed on, heedless of the human misery he was unleashing. In order to achieve his purpose and and keep to his ‘good’ name as a man who could be relied on to deliver, a climate of fear was created throughout the NHS. How very USSR-like.
I will not detail the horror stories which have emerged: you are all familiar with them. But instead of being reassured, looked after and returned to health, where possible, people died in their hundreds, indeed – across the NHS – in their thousands. A single hospital stands accused of up to 1,200 deaths.
We all remember the unconscionable time we often waited for routine operations and A&E. The last government decided to do something about it. Everything was done with the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. When it became apparent that their action plan was not working out, another well known maxim kicked in: the law of unintended consequences. At that point Nicholson and his Labour masters should have paused and taken stock. But they did not.
So what has become of us that we have failed in almost the most fundamental of all our duties, the care of our old? When our troops burst in on Belson concentration camp they found a level of horror – of man’s inhumanity to man – not known in the whole of human experience. We put the perpetrators on trial and hanged them. At their trial they pleaded that they were obeying orders. What they did not plead – though they might have done – was that they had been conditioned for years to see their victims not as human beings, but as the lowest of the low – a sub-species – not worthy of using up precious resources. I fear that when our old people – be they in care homes or hospitals – fall into frailty, incontinence or dementia, something of a similar attitude takes hold in disquieting numbers among those charged with looking after them. Yet in their case they do not even have the excuse of saying that their government had told them their charges were worthless. So, what is it that allows lethal, criminal neglect, which were it directed at a child or even a dog would send us into paroxysms of fury ending in stiff prison sentences but does not do so with our old and helpless? I truly do not understand it!
What is incredible is that the unfeeling apparatchik who presided over it all was not only not held to account, but promoted to the top job in the NHS. How very public sector-like. And this man – would you believe – is judged by himself (and Cameron) to be the best person to sort it all out even though he admitted to a Commons Select Committee that he had no idea what was going on in the wards. Well, it’s a funny kind of CEO – in whom 90 per cent of his own workforce have no faith – that hasn’t a clue what the troops are up to. And even funnier that such a level of incompetence should inspire the political leadership to think that in this broad land of 63 million there is none better.
The Francis Report into the failings of the Mid Staffordshire Hospital Trust wanted to name names, but using, as ever, our money – just like the BBC – the ‘fingered’ individuals engaged the sharpest, most expensive lawyers in the business to threaten Robert Francis with law suits. After three months of arguments and delay, he buckled. It all, thereafter, magically became the fault of ‘the system’. Nothing, said the chastened Francis, was to be gained by ‘scapegoating’. Sorry, Robert, but people did this thing and people must answer. Start with David Nicholson and move down to ward level. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the whole farrago involves multiple, pitiless deaths which on a head count makes the Harold Shipman outrage look like a trifling matter. And at least Shipman’s victims were despatched painlessly and their road to Calvary travelled with great expedition.
A chief characteristic that distinguishes our species from every other in the animal kingdom is our sense of dignity. From the moment we get up in the morning to the moment we go to bed, we carefully nurture the image of how we wish the world to perceive us. Take that away and you have inflicted the cruelest of hurts. So being careless of people’s nakedness and forcing them into adult nappies because it is too much trouble to help them to the toilet is unforgivable; to leave them in soiled, cold, soaking sheets covered in their own dried excrement caked in overgrown nails which nurse graduates feel too grand to cut is beyond my powers of description; to force them to struggle to reach for water and food which is beyond reach is totally criminal.
Death is the single most difficult event that any of us will have to handle. To meet it in squalor, neglect and suffering over a protracted period with all dignity stripped away is impossible to equate with a civilised society. In my view we are all guilty, every last one of us – just as the entire German nation was guilty of the Holocaust. In both cases we allowed it to happen on our watch. We strut the world stage fixated on our favourite hobby horse, Human Rights, lecturing anyone unfortunate enough to cross our path on the virtues of compassion, yet we show nothing of it on too many of our wards. Shouldn’t Charity begin at home?
Those charged with looking after the fathers and mothers who fought two World Wars for us, and whose sacrifices in the years following brought us social security and prosperity, have a sacred duty to perform. They should remember that they were not always the sad, helpless individuals they see before them, but once vibrant men and women who held down jobs and brought up children. If it would help them to understand this, let a photo be affixed to the head of every bed to show their carers how they looked in their glory days and let a caption tell the story of who they were and what they did.
Can the planet sustain 14 billion people?
Managing human population growth will be one of the biggest challenges of this century. Two years ago, I remember being alarmed to learn that, somewhere, the seventh billion human being had been born.
Climate change is going to hit the world’s poorest hardest
When we are struggling to provide work and homes – even in this still rich country – for our own British young people, how are we going to provide similarly for such numbers in its poorest regions? Even more worrying is that some pundits estimate the planet’s population will not level off until 14 billion has been reached (even in the best scenario, it is said to level off at around nine to 10 billion in the 2060s). Even David Attenborough has expressed his concern in a recent interview, describing the human race as “a plague” on the planet.
Ukip’s 2nd place finish in the recent Eastleigh by-election has been attributed by many to the party’s focus on immigration. And with the expected influx of Romanian and Bulgarian workers next year certain to add pressure to our already stretched public services, the British public has a right to be concerned.
Our own island serves very well as a microcosm of what is happening beyond our shores. When the Romans arrived here 2,000 years ago, it is thought that between 1.5 and 2 million people lived here. It took the whole fifteen-hundred-year period, right up to the reign of Elizabeth I, for that number to double. Yet in just the next 500 years it grew fifteen fold. If we already have a housing problem with strains on public services such as hospitals, schools, transport, only a person in denial would dispute that the expected influx of Eastern Europeans would not further exacerbate it greatly.
Like other developed countries around the world, the UK has a demographic time bomb about to explode; many would argue that a smaller and smaller workforce supporting a larger and larger retired sector is an even more alarming problem than that posed by rising immigration. Yet if Britons’ birth rate is insufficient, they say, we must bolster it with fecund young people from abroad. This, we have to admit, is a cogent argument.
What was needed (and still is) was a national debate in which all these issues could be thoroughly aired. But we didn’t get it. What we got from the Blair government instead was a sly and silent opening of the floodgates, which resulted in a totally unfocused rush towards this country of people with minimal skills and often a hostile outlook towards us. The flood was greater than any known in our history before. It was, in fact, a scandal, perhaps even a crime. What was actually needed was a measured import of those high in skills of the sort this country could have benefited from economically. What was not needed was what amounted to an assault on the working classes by importing people who would work for next to nothing and take the jobs which otherwise would have been theirs. The crime, as I see it, is here.
Yet I believe there was also another crime in pursuing a policy which has the capability, perhaps, of changing the character of our nation forever without securing the consent of the people.
I believe in being open and accommodating to people of all races. After all, no people on the planet have had greater experience of rubbing along with people from other cultures. Ours was the most benign, dynamic and just of all the European empires. Indeed, a local Algerian shopkeeper once told me he saw his own father shot dead before him by the French during their war for independence. Better, he said, had Algeria belonged to the British Empire. “Why? I asked. “Well, they were gentlemen,” he replied.
I’m not saying we never did terrible things: consider Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919, when Ghurkhas under a rogue British brigadier shot dead 400 people at an illegal protest gathering. But at least there was a hell of a public hullabaloo, and a court of inquiry afterwards.
Yet despite such isolated incidents, none of the other former empires have been able to inspire such warmth and a feeling of togetherness. We therefore have no need to take lessons from anyone in how to treat people from other lands. Except, perhaps, from that other former colony of ours which feels the greatest warmth of all to us, but which, strangely, does not belong to the Commonwealth: the United States. There, if you want to make that country your home you have to accept all its values; citizenship comes as a complete package. You must be an American first, and a Hispanic, Japanese or Pakistani second. The U.S. does, however, have problems with its own burgeoning population. But at least it enjoys the luxury of having 32 times more space than we have.
It seems certain that whatever measures the world takes, it cannot hope to stop that seven billionth baby being joined by another three billion others before this century is halfway through. But I believe that human resilience will win through in the end. This has to be by raising living standards in the Third World. Only by spreading prosperity will you put effective brakes on population growth. Show me a First World country with an out of control birth rate (except, that is, where out of control immigration has been allowed).
The greatest service we could do for Africa is to get rid of the protectionist and cruel Common Agricultural Policy. Our chance to do that is coming soon when the Euro nations need our agreement for treaty amendments in the years ahead. Plus, we must bite the bullet where GM foods are concerned. Contrary to what Prince Charles may believe, only with vastly increased yields will we have any hope of filling all those extra hungry mouths.
A poisonous legacy
History will not be kind to Tony Blair. He found Britain a prosperous place – having recovered spectacularly from the ERM disaster – and left it virtually bankrupt and mired in two unwinnable wars.
History will not be kind to Tony Blair
Some might say this is a strange thing to claim concerning a prime minister who won three successive elections and even today is held in sufficient international regard to be appointed by the quartet of EU, USA, Russia and Britain to act as Middle East peace envoy. So why do I take issue with these two salient facts? It is my belief that our former prime minister succeeded in taking in not only ourselves, but a great part of the world beyond.
Blair took little old me in back in 1997. Indeed, if we cast our minds back to that now distant time it seems extraordinary that a government should be thrown out of office when it has got the economy into a rock solid position (so solid, as I recall, that it was starting to pay down the national debt).
Received wisdom tells us that it is the state of national finances that decides elections, yet the ‘grey man’, John Major, went down to a resounding defeat. Why was this? Partly because he was that ‘grey man’ and lacked charisma, whereas his opponent had oodles of it and was young as well as good-looking. And there had also been a series of huge embarrassments for the Conservative government: ‘cash-for-questions’; the armed forces procurement minister having his Paris hotel bill paid by a Arab Sheik; the gaoling of Jeffrey Archer; sexual shenanigans from a government that preached ‘back to basics’ (nobody knew at the time that the PM himself had had a dalliance with Edwina Currie); and then there was the mighty cock up of our ejection from the ERM which did so much to destroy the Tory’s reputation for economic competence.
Often forgotten is the fact that all three parties, along with the CBI, the Institute of Directors and just about everybody else was gung-ho for entry to the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was therefore rank hypocrisy later for the opposition to use this as a stick with which to beat the government.
But I believe the biggest of all factors in Tony Blair coming to power was the national weariness of seeing the same old faces in place for 18 years. Blair seemed like a breath of fresh air; and how could we know that we were about to embrace the Nigel Havers of politics? But the one factor which still made the nation hesitate was Labour’s own reputation for fiscal incontinence. Indeed, every one of its administrations had gone down in a welter of financial mismanagement. To allay these last remaining doubts, Tony and his glowering, thwarted would-be leader Gordon Brown pledged faithfully to hold to Tory spending plans for the next two years.
So the die was cast and ‘Call me Tony’ took up residency in Downing Street. We used to call him ‘Bambi’ early on as he seemed to have no enemies, promising all things to all men with the most winning smile that had ever beamed out to the nation from Downing Street.
My own doubts began with the squalid Bernie Ecclestone affair very early on when all cigarette advertising was banned from sporting events except – mysteriously – from Bernie’s Formula One. For me it was downhill ever after as sleaze piled upon more sleaze, and all from the man who promised a government that would be ‘whiter than white’.
When the two years of financial rectitude was up, a spending splurge of awesome proportions was announced. There was to be no more ‘fixing the roof while the sun was shining’: it was to be spend, spend, spend.
The national debt went through the roof and no attempt was made to ensure taxpayers got value for money. It was just assumed that if you threw enough dosh at a problem it would go away. Instead, it went largely into the pay packets and pension pots of the new elite – the public sector, which was allowed to expand dramatically.
The upshot of it all is that we find ourselves today in the most dire condition that it is possible to imagine. Even private debt has gone through the roof. The spendthrift ‘Prudence’ Brown at the treasury seemed almost relieved to have someone else join him in the bankruptcy stakes. The growing credit bubble – which Gordon called growth – seemed like a never ending jolly, but like the puppet master in Downing Street it was a cruel illusion – all smoke and mirrors. Every pound Gordon borrowed he insisted was an ‘investment in the future’. Some future!
When he was in Brussels, he liked to turn off his headset so he couldn’t listen to what his peers had to say. But when it was his turn, he couldn’t resist lecturing them – in particular the Germans – on sound economics. All the while his bête noir boss left him to it so he could swan around the world offering his own advice and attempting to nation-build with armed forces Gordon constantly denuded of the equipment necessary to carry out his grandiose schemes. It was all very frustrating for the man who ‘felt the hand of history on his shoulder’.
While it’s fair to say the mess that the world finds itself in today would still be there, even without the contribution of Blair and his Chancellor, it is also fair to say that for us in the UK it would be manageable – as it is for Germany, Canada and others who handled their affairs with Gordon Brown’s once favourite word, prudence.
Bill Clinton, another out of the charisma stable of politicians, started it all back in 1998 when he urged Alan Greenspan, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to help poor Americans become home owners – even those with no obvious means of repaying their debt. Thus began the sub-prime tragedy which spread around the world in concealed financial packages. But what did it for us and turned a problem into a disaster was that wild, decade-long spending jamboree.
As for our Tony, he doesn’t see or acknowledge any of this. He’s lost now in his own little bubble. He wanted to be President of Europe, but instead has settled – uniquely and rather unedifyingly for a Labour leader – on becoming stinkingly rich as well as continuing to offer pearls of wisdom to anyone who’ll listen. It worries me that his current successor in Downing Street is one who will. It worries me also that he has always been one of Tony’s fans, and despite everything remains so. What does this tell us about Cameron? Is this yet another judgement issue of his?
As an avowed Christian, it seemed for a while that faith might intrude on the Blair business of governance. There seemed often to be a touch of messianic fervour to his pronouncements. But his spin master, Alastair Campbell, slapped him down on this one, insisting that New Labour ‘didn’t do God’. Some might argue that Tony’s present ambition (he owns seven homes and counting) to join the mega rich club hinders his ultimate passage to celestial regions, and that he should remember his master’s admonition of how it is ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’.
Are you a dog, Irish or black?
Two things caught my attention this week and led me to think that I must write about them. First, we have recently noticed that more females are being aborted in this country than males and, second, that homosexuals want their own Olympics. They are widely disparate subjects, but they have one thing in common: both groups, down the ages, have been victims of discrimination.
If you were going to be born human it has historically always been better for you to be born male. Even in the more enlightened, liberal societies of the West this is still the case – though clearly less so than in times past. We are working hard on the few remaining unaddressed areas of inequality. They tend to be now of the less obvious kind, being more of a subtle nature. But they are there.
That greatest pinnacle of inequality, the aristocracy, is on the threshold of yielding primogeniture – led by the monarch, who has let it be known that she has no objection to a female inheriting the throne, even where there are younger brothers. Why, indeed, should she when she herself is the lucky beneficiary of discrimination on account of the accident of her father having no sons? You might say she became monarch by default. However, history has amply demonstrated that female monarchs can do every bit as good a job as can males; witness Victoria, Elizabeth I and, indeed, the present incumbent.
So if we have learned to value females as much as males, how come we have more females currently being aborted than males? The answer, clearly, must lie with our immigrant population, large swathes of which have brought the malign baggage of boy favouritism with them. (Scans, of course, allow for early identification of gender.)
Burqa-clad Afghan women show identification cards as they wait to cast their votes at a school converted to a polling centre in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
It seems to me there is only one way to address this issue. We must discourage the ghetto mentality in our immigrant communities and insist on adopting mainstream values, as the Americans do. The burqa and niqab, for example, strike me as no more than prisons of dark drapes – and like a prison there is no escape. Their sentence is one of life. They must learn to live with it. There is no place in 21st century Britain for medieval mindsets which demean and devalue women, even to the extent of dictating what clothes they wear.
It is economics which dictate why many Muslim men think as they do; they believe that male children have greater earning power and are better able to look after them in their old age. When we have educated and seduced them into wishing for the delights of Western consumerism, which after all produces jobs, they will realise that the only way they will acquire the goodies is by putting their women out to work. And since we are well on the way to equal pay for both sexes, we must hope that economics and self-interest will play a large part in overcoming their medieval mindsets.
It is my belief that, notwithstanding these aberrations brought in from abroad, we live in a kindlier, fairer and more forgiving world in the West than we have ever done. Discrimination, bigotry, prejudice and violence in all their ugly forms are on the run – and rightly so. When I was a boy in the fifties, no one thought it odd, much less outrageous, for a landlord to put up a sign in his window saying ‘No Dogs, Irish or Blacks’. If a wife got beaten at home by her husband, the police would rarely intervene. It was, in the common parlance of the time, ‘a domestic’. Now all of these are criminal matters and rightly so. Who would argue otherwise?
As for landlords not welcoming homosexuals, no notice in the window would be thought necessary. The then generally accepted, ‘disgusting’ nature of the relationship was considered to make their exclusion obvious. And besides, such debauched subjects were best not touched on and certainly not spoken of in print by putting a notice in the window; rather children seeing it would be their worried concern.
Then there was the huge discrimination against disabled people. That too is being addressed. The recent Paralympics has taught us much in this regard, and was a giant step towards goodness and equality. As a nation we can rightly take pride in what was achieved. It can fairly be said that we have set a benchmark for others to follow – a Gold Standard, if you like.
Yet one of the last great prejudices that we have to overcome is our attitude to mental illness. We still do not give it anything like the sympathy and attention it deserves, and millions – yes, millions – suffer as a result, usually in silence and quiet desperation.
However, in our laudable efforts to come to grips with all of these things and undo the wrongs of the past, we are in danger of creating absurdities. This call of Boris Johnson’s – backed by David Cameron, no less – for London to host the 2018 Gay Olympics seems to me a game too far. All it does is suggest that homosexuals are, indeed, different – which surely is not what they intend.
Positive discrimination in jobs and other areas is also something we need to watch carefully. If not, we may be in danger of creating a backlash from the mainstream population. I sometimes think that we have travelled so far in that direction that – with the right qualifications – your life chances in Britain today may be better if you are not Caucasian.
In formulating my thoughts for this article, it came to me that long ago I was myself a victim of a quite pernicious form of discrimination. I grew up in a school which was purpose built for illegitimate children: there were six hundred of us. Society had once been prepared to let such children die on its streets before one day it would come to their rescue. On his visits from the docks to Central London, a merchant sea captain called Thomas Coram would be distressed by the sight of abandoned and dead babies. He decided to make it his life’s crowning achievement to do something about it, and seventeen years of incessant lobbying finally brought him in 1739 a Royal Charter to set up Britain’s first Children’s home for the ‘Abandoned & Destitute’ which he called the Foundling Hospital. It was Britain’s first charity.
But while we children had to be eternally grateful to men like him – and a hundred and thirty-five years later, to Dr. Bernardo – we in the Foundling Hospital had a particular cross to bear. We were the children born in sin – the ‘Untouchables’ of our particular culture. And so it remained until as late as the nineteen fifties, when a foundling girl was dismissed from her job because her boss found out about her origins and would not allow her staff to work with her. One of the consequences of this sad and cruel outlook was that all of us felt the need to hide the circumstances of our birth and upbringing and keep it as our own dark secret; it fostered a sense of inferiority and shame. In one sense we were on a par with the dogs and Irish in those ‘No Dogs or Irish’ signs. We were considered not welcome, even dirty.
Of course, as ever, hypocrisy reigned – in this case literally. The one who should have set an example – the king – could have as many bastard sons as he wished and all doors would be open to them. They would even be ennobled and likely as not receive a Dukedom. The Duke of Monmouth even made a bid for the crown itself before he was defeated in 1685 and executed by his uncle, James II. So I suppose in my own way, deep down, I must have been affected, perhaps even scarred by it all. Of course, unlike those with physical handicaps it was not there for all the world to see, but the emotional and mental damage must have been considerable – especially since we were allowed no contact with our mothers (we had been given different names as babies so that we could never search them out). Equally, the mother could never steal back and reclaim her child.
I have often wondered what a shrink would make of me, though I have endeavoured, despite my many failings, to be a good father and husband. The fact is that we are all born in the same messy way, and king or not, we will all shed this mortal coil in the fullness of time. There is a great justice and equality here. What matters is the period between the two events. All efforts should be directed towards achieving equality here also; a level playing field for all.
Today, when almost half the children being born are illegitimate, looking down on them as second-class citizens is both impractical as well as nonsensical. Personally, I regret the numbers being born out of wedlock since evidence shows that children thrive best in a committed family environment. Just the same, we will not force the non-married mothers into an economic cul-de-sac, as once we did, where they cannot afford to provide for their children. Neither will we saddle those children with a cruel burden of undeserved shame. Mothers and fathers will even escape prison if it felt that their absence would seriously impact on their children.
We are a better society than once we were, of that I am convinced. We may not be frequent Christian church-goers anymore, but we have an infinitely stronger Christian conscience. And we do not hang people. We have ‘listened’, at last, to what that great American president, Abraham Lincoln, once said when he appealed to the “better angels of our nature”.
Buried Spitfires in Burma
Something exciting is happening among the paddy fields and jungles of distant Burma, that land of ‘On the Road to Mandalay’ and the hilarious sitcom ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ – with its bewhiskered sergeant major, played so memorably by Windsor Davis. Some say that in its own way it is as thrilling as the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, the greatest archaeological dig since that momentous discovery of Howard Carter’s in the Egyptian desert in 1922.
Whereas the treasures of the boy Pharaoh were of unknown quantity and value, this archaeological dig promises thirty-six items, each valued at £1.5m each and there are another twenty-four between two other locations, making a potential treasure trove of £60m. We are talking about sixty, boxed and never been opened, brand new Spitfires – that legendary victor of the Battle of Britain, the Mk XIV – the very latest version of the 20,000 built with their 2,000hp Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.
What, I hear you say, are they doing there in the sodden soil of equatorial Burma? And why, after 68 years in that steaming land, is it thought possible that they might take to the skies again rather than be rusted and corroded out and fit only for the knacker’s yard? Well, it is a tale of imperial endeavour, both heroic and resolute.
The war to expel the Japanese from Burma was entering its final phase after the bloody last effort of the Japanese to crash through the borders of India at Imphal and Kohima had failed. Sixty spanking new Spitfires had been sent to reinforce XIV Army Corps’ last push under its brilliant commander, Field Marshal Bill Slim, Britain’s finest general of WWII. The Forgotten Army’s thousand-mile slog southwards through the jungles, from the borders of India to Rangoon, the Burmese capital, was over. Now it was southwards again through more jungles for another thousand miles to Singapore for the liberation of Malaya – except it wasn’t necessary. The atom bomb brought a sudden end to the war in the Far East. The advent of this devastating weapon convinced even the fanatical Japanese that the game was up.
So what to do with the Spitfires? It might have been sensible to bring them home to face the growing Cold War threat of the communists in Europe. But the decision was taken to leave them in Burma. Why was this? And why do so strange a thing as to bury them? Planes – even small ones – take some burying. And besides, they would be useless in that climate when they were disinterred. Why not hanger them?
It all goes back to the decision to wind down the empire. But it was to be a tidy, gracious end – not like the French, Dutch Belgium and Portuguese who chose, unsuccessfully, to fight. We were determined to leave regimes in place which were well disposed to us – regimes we could bolster if the need arose. How better than to leave a stash of state-of-the-art fighters that we could come back and fly for them. But don’t tell the locals they are there or where they are located: they might be tempted to have fun with them after we are gone. The temptation would be great. Hangers are obvious; graves are not.
We were deeply worried at that time that the whole of the East would fall to communism. Chairman Mao was close to victory in his war in China and Ho Chi Minh was close to evicting the French from Indo-China. Communism, worldwide, seemed to be on a roll.
The fighters had arrived in Burma in kit form, ready for assembly. Strange as it may seem, I know a little about these crated fighters because my father, a major in The Royal West African Frontier Force based in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), was responsible for receiving crated fighters bound for Egypt and the Eighth Army – the Desert Rats – in its desperate battle to keep Rommel’s Afrika Korp from taking the Suez canal. The fighters were assembled, flown eastward to British Nigeria, refuelled and flown further east to British Sudan. There, after further refuelling, they headed north towards threatened Cairo. (The reason they were sent round the great bulge of Africa and not on the much shorter route through the Mediterranean straight to Egypt was because German and Italian submarines were inflicting heavy losses at that time.)
My father told me of his amazement when pretty girl pilots turned up to ferry the fighters on their long and hazardous route to Egypt. Britain was well ahead of her enemies in recognising the value of the fair sex in making total war possible and aiding the war effort. The process had begun twenty-one years earlier in the Great War when Britain’s womanhood – the genteel types we saw in Downton Abbey – manned the munitions factories, drove the buses and did just about everything while their men were away at the front. This, more than anything, made their case unanswerable when at war’s end they demanded equal rights.
But returning to the Burma dig, the £60 million question remains: will the extraordinary measures taken to protect the delicate aero engines and other parts from the fetid climate of that region have been sufficient? They were wrapped in special greaseproof paper and the whole lot greased up to the eyeballs. Then the crates, made from some of the toughest woods known to man (jungle hardwood) were close to hermetically sealed. Finally, it was decided to bury them at the extraordinary depth of forty-feet – beyond, it was hoped, anything that the elements could throw against them, and that included monsoon rains. Amazingly, not only was the whole operation conducted on a strictly
‘need to know’ basis of secrecy, so that not a single Burmese knew of the burials, but precious few Brits did either and all of these have died. The net result is that no one knows for sure where the precious cargo is hidden. The information – kept always on a highly restricted basis – has been lost now in the mists of time of a departing empire. But the word is that the locations are former British airfields and the firm which has secured a deal with the Burmese government to search and excavate has employed special hi-tech earth penetrating gear to pinpoint the cache. We must hope they are successful and that one day we may see a mass formation of Spitfires swoop down the Mall over Buckingham Palace and amaze the crowds. What a sight that would be.
***
While on the subject of digs it will not be long before we know the results of forensic tests on the ‘king under the car park’. If it proves to be Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, we will know if Shakespeare has poisoned Richard’s reputation over a five-hundred-year period. The record shows that Richard did many enlightened things during his short two-year reign, and if the skeleton shows only a mild deformity, as initial observations have indicated, then the Bard will have been shown to be a liar – a propagandist for the usurping Tudors. He has given the game away by that extraordinary and bizarre claim in his play Richard III that dogs barked when Richard passed by. A wonderful playwright, we will readily admit – arguably the world’s greatest – but a lousy historian.
Don’t be a Little Englander
It is likely that I’m going to ruffle a few feathers here, but before I do I would like to say sincerely that I hope my readers have enjoyed their Christmas. The good news is that there is more celebration to come as New Year looms.
We cannot hope to control which direction the Union moves in from the sidelines.
None of us can say whether there will be more good news as the year progresses, however. We know there is unpleasant belt-tightening up ahead. But will our sacrifices start to pay off? I believe they will. We, unlike Uncle Sam, are pressing most of the right buttons, though more on growth is necessary. What we have to do is hold our nerve on shrinking the state’s share of GDP.
An economy cannot take off if the state grabs too much. The great imponderable, apart from said Uncle Sam’s actions – or inactions, which might push him over the fiscal cliff with who knows what consequences for us all – is Europe. Will its terrible economic travails rain seriously on our, hopefully, improving parade? Again, no one can say.
Europe has been sticking its nose in our affairs for a very long time now. It started with the Romans; then it was the Angles, Saxons and Jutes; then the Vikings; and then the Normans (who weren’t actually French at all, but a gang of settled down Vikings). It ended there – at least where foreign occupation was concerned. After that it was our turn; the boot was on the other foot. Indeed, we have been sticking our nose in their affairs now for almost a thousand years – much strengthened, I have to admit, by this mongrel-mixing that we had to endure – and most effective our interference has been.
It has been our cardinal aim never to allow a single dominant country to conquer and overawe the rest, and so present us with an accumulation of power to which, notwithstanding our island status, we would have no answer. Many times we came close to disaster. Philip of Spain – with his Armada – almost overwhelmed us. Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, nearly pulled it off but Churchill’s famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, did for the Sun King and smashed his hopes at Blenheim in Austria. Then came the terrible Napoleon; but Herculean efforts – aided by our burgeoning Industrial Revolution – spread over twenty years, which almost bankrupted us, finally brought him to ruin at Waterloo.
For a hundred years after no power on earth could threaten our supremacy and we went on to build the greatest empire known to man. But nothing lasts forever. A powerful rival in the form of the Kaiser’s Germany came up on us and the accumulated wealth of two hundred years and a bloodletting on a scale never before experienced had to be deployed to frustrate his hopes. Twenty-one years later, what was left of that once incredible wealth, plus more blood, was expended to crush Germany’s revanchist ambitions once and for all. And that is where we are today. We have no more treasure to deploy and we will not send our young men to their doom anymore in such numbers. Luckily, neither will any of the others. All of us have had enough; hence the European Union.
We all wish to prosper in a continent of harmony. We wish to concentrate our energies on getting richer as well as fairer and more compassionate. And as with Japan, the appetite for large-scale war has been successfully eradicated. So far so good.
We on this island, with some understandable difficulty, have come to accept that we cannot any longer play the world’s diva. We are, as a consequence, prepared to join forces with our European neighbours to resurrect Europe’s power and prosperity in the world which it foolishly threw away. But this is conditional on this great union being fully democratic, truly accountable and non intrusive in sensitive areas best handled at home. That is not what we see. This octopus which operates out of Brussels seeks to spread it tentacles into every nook and cranny of our national life. Its servants run a gravy train of quite stupendous generosity and corruption seems to be endemic. For eighteen years its auditors have refused to sign off its accounts. And the worst of it all is that we seem unable to control it. A reckoning is overdue.
Proud nations cannot be dictated to in matters which properly should be decided at national level. In this take on the Union’s shortcomings, we are not alone. We have natural allies in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, most of all, moneybags Germany. They are desperate for us to stay. Our problem is that with our frustration we allow ourselves to flounce off, with all the terrible risks attendant on being out of the loop.
Outside of the Union, we cannot hope to control which direction it moves in. With such an accumulation of population, wealth and power, its development could be inimical to our interests; and it could even end up threatening us. As the most successful, internationally, of all the European powers, we must have confidence to know that our voice will be heard. Things cannot go on as they are. We have, for instance, finally brought sense to the Common Fisheries Policy which was decimating our fish stocks. Forward now to the Common Agricultural Policy which so harms the poor nations of the world and keeps food prices at home higher than they need be. Forward also with repatriating those many powers which should never have left these shores.
I glory in the diversity of our continent and am confident it will never go away. Italy will always be Italy and France, France. If I mix with the boisterous crowd wearing lederhosen at the Munich Beer Festival, they look (lederhosen excepted) just like me. Our church-driven culture down the centuries has made us – despite our fascinating differences – one civilisation with a single European culture and we cannot, indeed must not, marginalise ourselves and walk away into the sunset. And how gratifying it should be to us that the multilingual family of nations we are fashioning our future with have looked to our language to be their language of choice in order to make our latter day tower of Babel function smoothly. What an advantage that gives us.
So my plea is this: have confidence and believe in yourself. Just as through your earth-shattering Industrial Revolution you touched the face of humanity and left an indelible mark, go out and do the same in Europe. Only please, please don’t be a ‘Little Englander’. It doesn’t become you.
Plymouth is weathering the storm
A taxi driver friend of mine and I were talking recently about the terrible haemorrhaging of jobs which had taken place in Plymouth since we arrived. He had written down a list of the vanished enterprises, which I’m sure is by no means exhaustive. Glancing down the melancholy column I wondered how it was possible for any city to survive such a culling. The roll-call made for depressing reading.
- Aggie Weston’s
- Clarks
- Comet
- Derry’s Cross Co-op
- Gaumont Palace Cinema
- HM Dockyard
- Hoe Theatre
- Jaeger
- Ladybird Factory
- Millbay railway station
- Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
- Odeon Cinema
- Plymouth Airport
- Popham’s
- Robert Daniel’s Cash and Carry
- Royal Naval Engineering College
- Royal Naval Gunnery School
- Royal Naval Hospital
- Seaton Barracks
- Texas Instruments
- Toshiba
- Woolworths
We talk about austerity times, but if someone with a crystal ball had predicted the certain eclipse of all these enterprises and had been believed, there would have been a mass exodus from what would have been perceived as a doomed city. No one would have thought it possible to survive such a cataclysm.
So how fares the good ship Plymouth after this protracted bloodletting? Not bad! Not bad at all. Amazingly, the city which looks down on us today is little short of a stunning reincarnation. I will not say there are jobs a plenty, but its employment level compares favourably with most of the rest of the country. In my suburb of Plympton it stands at 3 per cent. In five short years much of the city centre was transformed, just in time to beat the credit crunch which brought development to a grinding halt. I have a strong feeling, however, that if you visited many another city a similar list could have been drawn up. But Plymouth, as a garrison city, suffered unduly harshly because of defence cuts due to the rundown of Empire.
Capitalism and the market do work. One way or another, jobs come to fill the void. The doomsayers are seldom right. How prescient that in the one area of the economy which has not been affected by the recession – the world of the super rich – Plymouth has found a response in Princess Yachts.
Princess Yachts has proven to be recession-proof
But apart from the acres of luxury, seafront apartments created out of clapped out warehouse and the sparkling, gigantic Drake Circus development, the most stunningly successful of all Plymouth’s new enterprises has been the transformation of its previously lacklustre, old polytechnic. Only a very few of the many polytechnics magicked overnight – to the scorn of many – into universities can aspire to a place at the top table of the long established universities. But Plymouth University is undoubtedly one of them. Its student numbers are vast and are a testament to the high regard in which it is held. It is architecturally new and striking; plum in the centre of the city giving it a real buzz which it has never had before, and much of its student accommodation is second to none. And its academic rigour is impressive. If its onward and upward march continues, I predict it will earn itself one day a place in that select pantheon of the elite universities in the Russell Group (I will write more of this in a later article).
So well done Plymouth. You have looked adversity in the face and have prospered against the odds. You have survived a storm, different in kind, but every bit as furious as any your illustrious seafarers ever met on the oceans of the world. They would be proud of you.
Children need love, not red tape
What are we to do with agencies employed by us to carry out a specific task yet which give every appearance of simply refusing or being incapable of carrying out that task? I have a pretty good idea what industry or commerce would do. In America they would say they’d need to kick ass. This particular task is so important that the Prime Minister himself has joined the fray.
Here I refer to those agencies responsible for getting children out of the care system and into loving and supportive homes.
Black and coloured children are often the hardest of all to place.
Last week OFSTED published some truly shocking statistics. Among the many figures which made such depressing reading was the fact that only one in eight of the people who wished to adopt were approved by social services. From a total of 20,000 adoptions in the mid 1970s, the figure has fallen to a fraction over 3,000 today.
Nobody, apart from that closed circle of social services, knows the breakdown of reasons why so many were rejected and they won’t tell us. What is known is that many of the reasons are varied and extraordinary. So much concerning children these days is conveniently hidden behind a veil of secrecy. That veil permits intolerable things to happen in our name.
Take the latest: the virtual kidnapping of the two orphans of the Alpine murders in France. The dead mother’s sister wants to take care of them, but oh no, social workers say they must be taken into care. Their disdain of the children’s surviving family is so great that they will not even answer their emails or other enquiries. Shocking tragedy is compounded by gratuitous additional tragedy.
UNICEF revealed in a recent report that 60 per cent of children brought up in our national childcare system end up either criminals, homeless or suicidal. How bad is that terrible statistic? It should make us all feel ashamed. So finding children homes and getting them out of care is of the utmost importance.
Unfortunately we live in a box-ticking age. You wouldn’t want to know the number of boxes which have to be ticked before you are given the green light to adopt. Like the driving test it has got harder and harder, though in this case exponentially so. So hard, in fact, that another report said that most of us wouldn’t be able to adopt our own kids. It therefore seems nonsensical for the Government to announce a National Adoption Week calling for thousands more people to apply to adopt. Last year 25,380 did just that, but only a measly 3,048 made it through the multiple hoops and mile-high hurdles that were put in their way. Not exactly an encouragement for more to come forward.
My own advice to Social Services (and this is from someone who spent 15 years in care) is to take your hat off to a person who will take on somebody else’s child. There is no pecuniary incentive to do so, unlike fostering. And they will spend a river of love and treasure over the years in making that child their own. In fact, this should be the default position in of Social Services. In my view it takes a very special kind of person who will set aside the ties of blood.
Evolution makes it easy for the natural parent to bond. To do so in other circumstances is laudable in the highest degree and we should stand in awe of those many who choose to do so. With the way things have developed you could almost be forgiven for thinking they are treated with suspicion by Social Services, as though they must prove themselves first. Yes, of course there has to be proper vetting, but is it right that the bar should be set at such a height that most of us parents would not clear it?
You might say it was great good fortune that because of lucky biology we didn’t have to take the test. Pity the poor would-be parents who were not so lucky. Why should they be double punished by being put through the mill in quite the way they are? And what are the reasons they are rejected?
As I say, Social Services will not give us a straight answer; indeed, they give us no answer at all. But we do know that if one of the applicants smokes that will count against them. Or if they are of a certain age, that too, or if in not-so-good health, or too fat, too poor, too stupid or too messy or too much of anything (a member of UKIP, perhaps); all will be weighed in the balance. Most contentious of all is if they are not of the same race. Black and coloured children, as it happens, are the hardest of all to place. Of course it would be ideal if children could all look the same as their adoptive parents, but are we to take the view that a black or coloured child would be better off staying in care if we cannot find an ethnically perfect match? Again my hat comes off to those couples who will happily take a child from another race, and there are more of those than you would think. And I’ll tell you what! All decent people – who despite the litany of horror stories in the papers still form the great majority – will have nothing but admiration for those who do.
More must be allowed to adopt across the race divide because, in truth there is no divide, as Social Services would have you believe. If there were, black and coloured contestants on the likes of X Factor wouldn’t stand a chance. In fact, so far have we come in race relations that I have actually come to believe that your life chances in Britain PLC may be better today if you are not Caucasian.
The other great scandal is the length of time it takes the authorities to process an adoption – anything up to three years (the average time is 636 days). That is a lifetime to a child.
So not only have the barriers to come down but the speed must be greatly accelerated. Never mind looking for the perfect match racially as though you were looking for the perfect kidney. The fact is that we live in an imperfect world and getting those kids out of care pronto and into the warm embrace of a loving family must be the overriding priority. Remember the wretched outcome of those sad 60 per cent who never made it out of care and what became of them.
Only a free press holds the powerful to account
Today the Leveson Report on press behaviour and ethics is published. Seldom has a particular report – from among the seemingly endless stream which emanate from government these days – been so awaited.
SOURCE: REUTERS
Its commissioning was a knee-jerk response of the PM to admittedly disgusting lawbreaking by certain sections of the press. But that is the point – certain sections and lawbreaking. Apart from the little man who cannot afford, like Lord McAlpine, to sue (and a way for justice for him must be found) the rest are covered by existing law.
It was the duty of the police to act, still less to be found complicit in the whole sorry racket themselves. It didn’t need an inquiry costing millions of pounds – which we can ill afford at this time of austerity – to deal with the matter. And it jarred that it provided a platform for the likes of sad Hugh Grant to strut the stage as though he was whiter than white as well as pretend that all he was interested in was the public good. It is true that many who have reported to Leveson had genuine and sometimes heartbreaking reasons to feel aggrieved, but Grant and his ilk were not among them. Nowadays when some scandal or other is breaking news there is this childish response… ‘we need legislation’.
We have been passing laws for hundreds of years and almost every conceivable thing that human beings can get up to has been provided for. A few have slipped the net and need closing off, like stalking, but by and large, if you look hard enough, there is a law which will cover it. All that is required is that the police stay clean and do their job. Everything that Savile did was against the law, as well as the North Wales children’s home abuses, the sex grooming of underage girls and the sick activities of Cyril Smith. What else is out there that we don’t know about? We have to have authorities in charge who are beholden to no one and will not cover up for the rich and powerful.
So what are we to do about Leveson? There is no God-given law written on tablets of stone saying his wisdom is so great that we must all be bound by his strictures. In fact, there is the understandable fear that the whole Leveson imbroglio is one of simple revenge on the part of the political establishment; payback time, in other words, for the press exposing their own scandalous shenanigans over expenses and the slurry of humiliation that poured over their heads as a consequence.
For my part, I have said it before and I’ll say it again: only a free press stands between us and the rich and powerful doing as they please. Only in the fear of their salacious and corrupt activities being laid open to public view is there a chance of holding them to account. If we are admired around the world for our media being willing and free to speak truth to power that is because for three hundred years – ever since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ when James II, the last of the autocratic Stuart kings, was sent packing – we have insisted on being told the truth.
Just as the current furore over secret trials, which seek to overthrow an even more ancient liberty, open justice, we cannot allow a clique of puffed-up, self-interested individuals to hide their shameful doings from us. That way lies the emasculation of what has been called the Fourth Estate of the Realm.
In the US, freedom of expression has been elevated to an even higher level. It forms the 2nd Amendment of the American Constitution and as such is untouchable. Leveson would not have been possible in that land of the free. So it should be here.
Cameron is now between a rock and a hard place. If he ignores the findings of a report that he himself commissioned and promised to abide by he will be accused of wasting vast amounts of public money in staging a media and celebrity circus as well as breaking his promise. On the other hand, if for the first time in centuries he succeeds in cowing the media by putting a political straitjacket on it, it will be a retrograde step whose end consequences we cannot even begin to imagine. Also, he will have made a bitter enemy of the media and that will not help his re-election chances.
Even under the freedoms we presently enjoy, which have allowed the press to go after wrongdoers fearlessly, dreadful things still happen. Imagine what slime will gather under future stones if you can no longer dislodge them and turn them over because the press is too afraid. Governments are famous for kicking inconvenient reports into the long grass. It should do that in this case.
Is it time for real change in the police force?
Last week’s police commissioners’ election was the biggest non-event in a very long time. In terms of voter turnout it was truly abysmal. Were it not for the court jester’s candidacy – John Prescott – it would have been even worse.
Two Jags’ supporters couldn’t be bothered to stir themselves from the warmth of their slumbers on that cold November day
This lack of interest is a pity because crime in a recent poll was right up there almost on a par with benefits and pensions as an issue of great concern to the public. Why then this lack of voter turnout when it has been given a chance to do something about it?
First, unlike general elections and referendums, there was a marked lack of information and hype. It all seemed like one big yawn; we didn’t even know who was standing nor where we were expected to vote and what’s more, no one bothered to tell us. In my own case, on the day itself, I had to ring up the town hall to find out where to vote and ask for a list of candidates. It took them ages to find out. Then I had to Google each one to find out what he or she stood for and what their track record was. Who, apart from a few nerds like me, was going to go to all that trouble? I tell you, I was on the line all of ten minutes waiting for an answer – and then they gave me the wrong place to go and vote.
What then was so important about this particular election? First, law and order is something that impinges on the life of every one of us. We have more contact with plod, by far, than we do with our local MPs. And the person who heads up our constabulary is responsible for an area and population hugely greater than our MP – in my case the whole of Devon and Cornwall, where there are many MPs.
We have all for many years been feeling that our friendly neighbourhood policeman has been slipping away from us: his presence on our streets declines daily, his appearance grows more intimidating, and his friendly nick closed – except by appointment in increasing numbers. He cannot, as a matter of course, have guns because on this one we dig in our heels, but he says ‘in that case then let us have tasers’. He seems unwilling to listen to our pleadings and determined to go his own way.
We have always judged it important that, operationally, the police should be free from political interference. And while this has to be right, it is equally right that ultimate control of policy should rest with civilians. In theory this is the case, but every Home Secretary has found it next to impossible either to impose their will on a Chief Constable or sack him when it becomes necessary. The reality is that the police have many of the characteristics of an army: they learn to march in formation and salute; they are trained to obey orders; and they can hold you against your will; they have armouries; are licensed to kill; and they wear uniforms, even body armour. But we do not allow an army commander – even the chief of staff – to decide policy, much less to determine the magnitude of the lethal force to be used. If we did, then General MacArthur – admittedly an American but bound by the same military ethos – would have atom-bombed the Chinese in Korea. His insistence caused him to be sacked by the president.
Because the new police commissioners have hire-and-fire powers over chief constables, as well as budgetary control, we can now reasonably expect police priorities to move in the direction we would all like. What was important in this recent election was that we didn’t get a load of puffed up, power-hungry chancers make it through to these crucial positions. Nor did we want them to be over politicised. In the event, the public (at least that small part of it that voted) thought this too and the Independents, as a result, made a very good showing.
In a perverse sort of way the pathetically low voter turnout may have aided (this first time round) a good outcome. Elections are normally held during the better weather of the summer, and what with the lack of information and hype, Two Jags’ supporters couldn’t be bothered to stir themselves from the warmth of their slumbers on that cold November day. Yet the Polly Peck, compromised Michael Mates for the Tories couldn’t get his loyal followers out either so the field was left clear for that little band of determined, civic-minded individuals who saw the potential and understood what was at stake to make the effort. So, for the second time, Two Jags had egg on his face, but on this occasion managed to restrain himself from throwing a punch at his adversary.
May these elected police chiefs not be seen as part of the much touted ‘Big Society’ so beloved of the PM? David Cameron may not have planned it this way – that would have been too Machiavellian; too clever for him – but the fates conspired to keep the famous ‘plebs’ at home and leave it to the more dedicated. He may, as a result, have got himself some very good police commissioners. If the commissioners they do a good job, they can reasonably expect a new term with re-election.
For all the present government’s shortcomings, there is at last the prospect that many areas of public life will be the better for police commissioners having been brought into existence, albeit again – like the recent election – in an unplanned for way.
The coalition is hellbent on making us solvent again, although weaker on promoting growth; it is tackling welfare abuse and shrinking the bloated state; it promises a revolution in raising educational standards and it is not giving up on immigration. Only the police stand unreformed – a law virtually unto themselves with some horrendous practises coming to light. Now, at last, we may see some real changes there too.
If the economy starts to recover it would be a mean person who would not give the government on whose watch it all happened some credit.
The BBC deserves better than ‘five jobs’ Chris Patten
The BBC, perhaps the world’s greatest broadcaster, is much in the news these days. The trouble is that it’s for all the wrong reasons.
PATTEN PENDING
All the major countries began broadcasting at about the same time, so how, historically, it got to its hitherto august position in the world is hard to say. But undoubtedly the BBC’s founder, Lord Reith, had a lot to do with it. He set a bar for standards of truth and impartiality at an almost impossibly high level. Reith’s credo was to inform, educate and entertain. His stern, Scottish countenance, looking down from office walls all over the Beeb, struck terror into the hearts of those who were minded to transgress.
All countries felt the temptation to use broadcasting, once it was invented, as an arm of propaganda; none more so than the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. His guiding mantra was that if you told a lie often enough and loud enough it would assume, eventually, the attributes of truth. But while he was broadcasting his lies, half truths and sly innuendos, the majestic BBC ploughed on, keeping faith with its Reithian traditions.
Even during the darkest days of the war when defeat followed defeat it told it as it was. Sometimes Churchill was furious with it and berated the organisation for giving succour to the enemy and spreading doom and despondency. Despite his draconian wartime powers it was all to no avail. The result was that the world, and most of all the downtrodden peoples of occupied Europe, turned to the BBC for the ungarnered truth.
Round their forbidden radios all over Europe they huddled together in darkened rooms, fearful of the sound of approaching jackboots. But they were prepared to take those heart-stopping risks, so much did they crave the reassuring chimes of Big Ben and the sentient words which followed: ‘This is London. Here is the 9 o’clock news.’ It is true to say that the BBC in its single self kept the flame of hope burning throughout those terrible times. It became almost a ‘light unto the nations’.
In the years that followed, the BBC World Service became the most trusted broadcaster on the planet speaking truth unto power fearlessly. Even today among our enemies in the badlands of northern Waziristan in Pakistan, it is listened to in their own language with respect – even, dare one say it, with affection.
This then is the organisation which currently faces the worst crisis since it began its work 90 years ago. We should all feel alarmed.
I am a great believer in the maxim that the buck stops at the top. Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington took it over the Falklands and was much admired for it. In my view it was a great mistake to appoint a man who had five other jobs. It was an insult to a body of such august pedigree, and indeed size, as the BBC. A part timer for such a massive organisation? What were they thinking about.
What of the man himself, Chris Patten? This is a man who purports to have a keen appreciation of the working world we all operate in, offering his services left right and centre, but who has never held a non-political job in his life. He began his ascent of the ‘greasy pole’ straight after leaving Oxford.
One of our complaints about modern politicians is that too few of them have any real experience of life outside the Westminster bubble. That could not be said of previous generations, but it can be said of Patten. He’s as smooth and smarmy an operator as it is possible to imagine. Even now, when he has at last woken from his slumber, he is busy mouthing the smooth platitudes expected of such a man trying to extricate himself from trouble.
For all the multitude of jobs that Patten has had he has not made a success of a single one of them. So why does such a man keep on getting these lucrative sinecures? What made David Cameron appoint him to head up the troubled organisation? Do we have yet another example of the PM’s own lack of judgement? I suspect we do.
As for Patten’s judgement, he was the man who thought it proper to appoint Entwistle to the post of Director General and then, when the heat started to move in, hung him out to dry. Patten arrogantly and high-mindedly berated the Culture Secretary, whose remit covers the BBC, for sticking her genuinely worried nose in to his fiefdom. Now he admits that although he knew of the impending, devastating assault on poor Lord McAlpine’s reputation, he didn’t think it necessary to warn poor Entwistle of the coming storm so that the Director General could check his facts before going on air.
The BBC is at a watershed. Its current amateur level of journalistic rigour is truly astonishing. Especially for an organisation with a budget of some £4.4bn.
Its left-leaning stance makes a joke of impartiality. This desperately needs sorting out. But can a man as ineffective and compromised as Patten be the right man to do it? I think not.
As was said of Charles I, the hopeless king who lost his head so magnificently: ‘Nothing in his life so became him as the manner of his leaving it.’ “Never mind,” Mr Patten declares, “heads may well have to roll in the BBC too.” He should start with his own.
He’d be doing us all a great favour and just for once we’d have something to truly thank him for.
We must get our railways back on track
We had better all pray that it will neither be a wet nor cold winter. That’s asking rather a lot seeing as it is the perverse British climate we’re talking about.
The reason for not being wet is that the water table from being alarmingly low at the start of the summer is now alarmingly high. Just a small amount of the liquid stuff and it will have nowhere to go except lie on the surface. Floods will then be inevitable and widespread, perhaps more than we have known in living memory.
As for not being too cold that is because we are a million miles from having repaired the pothole damage of the recent severe winters. To make matters worse the cost of keeping warm is going to be more than many people can bear, especially the old. We have had enormous hikes in energy bills – twice the level of general inflation.
This leads me to question of whether the wholesale privatisation of the utilities was a wise thing to do, especially where we have allowed so many of them to fall into foreign hands.
Apart from strategic aspects which we should always have an eye to, foreign companies care little if the British play up over being ripped off and obliged to pay more than the same company is charging in their own country. Naturally these companies are more sensitive to home criticism and will seek to minimise it there. The foreigner is seen as fair game.
Part of the problem is that there are only six or so major players – a similar number to the banks – and there is not genuine competition. Without a doubt real competition makes for efficiency and puts a brake on exploitative charges. It was right, as a consequence, to divest the taxpayer of as many of the lame-duck industries as possible – provided genuine competition could be introduced. I well remember how it was normal to wait for up to six weeks for a phone to be put in.
However, if we are sensible, we must accept that certain industries – and water is a good example – do not lend themselves to competition. Governments of all hues have known this, but were all so rapacious in getting their hands on the massive sums which the utilities could generate that they have been willing to sacrifice the national interest to do so.
And why, apart from common greed at the thought of all this lovely lolly, were they so anxious to do this? First, they had been so monumentally inept at balancing the national books that an infusion on this scale would camouflage their hopelessness; and second, they each had their own pet projects – mostly social engineering – which they were mad-keen to indulge.
Such indiscriminate privatisation as took place was not in the national interest. What was needed was an open-minded, selective approach and not one driven by short-term economic advantage nor an ideological zeal such as ‘privatise the lot’ or ‘nationalise all the commanding heights of industry’.
One very sad aspect of what has taken place is that the industry which this country pioneered, and as a result changed the world forever – the railways – is now a national disgrace, even a joke (albeit one in very low taste).
I almost wept when the last carriage-making facility in Leeds lost out to the Germans and this great industry, in the land of its birth, died. How sad that is.
A person could urge the prime minister in all earnestness to wade in over the railways. He would earn more brownie points than all his silly PR stunts like ‘hug a hoodie’, husky driving and riding a bike to the Commons put together. A recent poll has shown that 70 per cent of the nation would like to take the railways back into public ownership. As things stand, our ticket prices are almost the highest in Europe – four time that of Slovenia and three times that of Spain and Italy. The pricing structure is a nightmare of Byzantium complexity and the overcrowding of passengers an utter disgrace. At the same time umpteen 1st Class carriages lie almost empty. Speaking of this term – 1st Class – is unfortunate in itself, especially in this still most class-ridden of societies. Far better it be called Premium Rate.
Communications are at the heart of any country’s success or failure. It was the railways which opened up the world. The American west was won more by the iron horse than by Wild Bill Hickok and the vast riches of the Russian east by the Trans-Siberian Railway. We absolutely must get our railways back on track.
We have vilified a progressive and enlightened English king for long enough
I have been pondering the proper course that should be adopted should the ‘king under the car park’ (Richard III) be validated by DNA tests. Assuming that the tests are positive, which seems likely, the find is of great significance.
Richard is one of the few English kings known around the world thanks to the story told about him by the world’s greatest playwright. Shakespeare undoubtedly has earned his place as a playwright of genius, but the same cannot be said of his powers as an historian. When the facts are examined his depiction of Richard lll can be argued to be nothing less than a character assassination. In two short years as king Richard performed an astonishing array of good works, some of which, such as the Bail system and the standardisation of weights and measures remain with us today. We know also that he was extremely pious, and endowed many monasteries and colleges of learning as well as ending the practise of buying public office. For him, merit alone counted. None of Richard’s achievements are acknowledged by Shakespeare; instead we have the depiction of a murdering ogre of grotesque physical appearance.
Were Shakespeare to be right then Richard’s dethronement would have been fully justified, even perhaps by someone with as thin a claim to the throne as Henry Tudor, the victor of the battle of Bosworth. But was Shakespeare right? We know what the record says about Richard’s achievements. Soon we may know what forensics say about the bones. Was it a hunchback with a withered arm, as Shakespeare said? It is known that Richard, after a heroic dash to cut down Henry Tudor, was himself cut down after being surrounded and that the butchery that took place against his person was truly dreadful. He was even stripped naked – no way to treat a king – and slung over a horse before being paraded for all to see to the nearby city of Leicester. Interestingly, the body under the car park did die violently. There is an arrow in the back and the skull has been impacted twice with an axe or a sword. Further examination may reveal more injuries.
As fascinating as these battlefield injuries undoubtedly are, what will be the clincher will be the integrity or otherwise of the spine and arm. You see, Shakespeare was adamant that Richard was grossly deformed; a hunchback, no less with a withered arm. Early examination suggests no such thing – just a slight curvature of the spine (certainly not a hunchback) and a perfectly normal arm. We cannot know whether he was of evil look mien as again suggested by the Bard, but portraits of the time show a perfectly normal countenance. Laughably, our Will said that even dogs barked when they saw him.
The person chosen to provide DNA evidence is a man who lives in Canada. He is of Plantagenet ancestry – the bloodline of the 300-year-old dynasty of English kings of which Richard was the last. Always assuming that the tests prove positive, then Shakespeare will stand exposed as a liar. He told porkies also about Macbeth. Let us be kind – in view of his colossal eminence – and call him an arch propagandist for the Tudors. It was, after all, under their patronage that he wrote and they insisted on nothing good ever being said concerning Richard, except that he died bravely. And in that matter there were too many witnesses to pretend otherwise.
But the fact will remain that because of him we and the world for five hundred years have vilified a progressive and enlightened English king. It surely must be right to do our best to make recompense. Justice dictates that the remains be treated with the respect and receive full honours as an English monarch – the last as it happens of truly English stock and the last to die in battle. After Richard came monarchs from Wales, Scotland and Germany. He should be laid to rest where many of his ancestors lie, in Westminster Abbey. This particular monarch’s end marks not only the end of the dynastic, thirty years bloodbath of the Wars of the Roses, but even more significantly the end of the Middle Ages and the start of modern times. So for all these reasons and many more Richard was an important king.
In ordinary circumstances fallen warriors of distinction were buried in the cathedral nearest the scene of battle, in this case Leicester. Then my thoughts turned to York – the Minster there – where his most devoted followers were located. He was a prince of the House of York and its famous white rose he many times carried into battle fearlessly against the red rose of Lancaster. Finally I plumbed for Westminster. Why? Because these are not ordinary circumstances. We have a major player in the great saga of English kingship and one, who I am convinced, has been grievously wronged. His interment, with due ceremony, in the home of English kings where he was crowned would be a way of saying sorry. It should be attended by the present monarch. It cannot make up for the generations who have lived and died believing Richard to be England’s most villainous king, but it would, at a stroke, set the record straight and be the right thing to do. Incidentally, I would hazard a guess that just about all the world’s media would be there to record the event. Westminster Abbey would be more on the tourist trail than ever. Most of all we would be able to take quiet satisfaction from the knowledge that after half a millennium truth has finally triumphed.
Get down to the gym boys, and don’t bother bringing your body armour
Very soon now we are going to be asked to vote for civilian police commissioners – a controversial proposal not much liked by plod.
SOURCE: Rex Features
It has got off to a bad start because of the calibre of some of the applicants, many of whom one suspects view it as an excellent chance to climb aboard the gravy train as well as throw their weight around. One of these applicants, the clownish buffoon and former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, has indeed a lot of that to throw around. Nonetheless, I believe that the concept is sound and as the years pass we will get genuine public-spirited men and women of stature and proven track record to oversee their force.
The reason I feel that the concept is good is that I believe that certain elements of the police are close to being out of control and act as though they are a law unto themselves: look at the incredible Hillsborough cover-up; the striking down of that poor man Ian Tomlinson who died in London and was going about his business with no thought of joining a demonstration. Then there was the shooting dead of a young, deeply disturbed barrister Mark Saunders, also in London, and the seven-bullets-to-the-head execution of the hapless Brazilian young man, Charles de Menezes on the underground – as well as many, many other incidents which have caused deep disquiet among the public. Accusations of thuggish behaviour on an increasing scale are levelled at the police.
The advent of jihadist terrorism appears to have provided an unarguable cover for the issue of more and more firearms and a tipping point seems not far off where every Bobby will have a pistol at his hip. More guns will, inevitably, lead to a greater use of them. Terrorism seems to have provided a ‘catch all’ excuse to usher in a whole range of repressive measures. Tony Blair, as with so many things which came back to bite him – such as devolution – embraced the whole scaremongering agenda. And yet, more than anyone, we were familiar with terrorism – a very competent form. We had thirty years of it with the IRA but yet, despite all the carnage such as the Brighton bombing which almost killed Margaret Thatcher and much more, we kept our nerve. We did not move towards arming our police.
Since Robert Peel set up the police, one of the glories of our country – one that has amazed the rest of the world – is that we have been able to maintain law and order without recourse to firearms. So the police know there is deep disquiet at the way things are developing.
‘If we cannot have guns’, seems to be their new mantra, ‘then let us have tasers’. And what do we see? A 43 per cent rise in their use in one year. We see a blind 61-year-old architect, who has already had a stroke, felled with 50,000 volts of excruciating pain.
In all the many instances of police malpractice there are precious few instances of officers going to gaol. They investigate themselves and produce what – predictably and in too many cases – the public perceive as a less than fair outcome. One of the useful actions that the new commissioners could address themselves to is to civilianise these investigations. That is a much needed measure and one that should be applied to each and every professional body. By all means let them have representation on that body, but not enough to determine an investigation’s outcome.
Once upon a time the police would go about their business – as the military is wont to say – in shirt sleeve order during the summer. Today they parade like Robocop, festooned with all manner of silly gadgets. Every new device that comes on the market they are fair game for; it rapidly becomes must-have. Soon they will be weighted down to such an extent that it becomes impossible for them to give chase. In any case, too many of them are out of condition and overweight that it would be impossible anyway. That too is a subject that the new commissioners could address: annual fitness checkups.(By the way, I don’t recall seeing many overweight soldiers locking horns with the Taliban. As an ex-health club owner I would be happy to advise on what needs to be done. Get down to the gym boys! I’ll meet you there, but don’t bother bringing your body armour.)
N.B. I was stopped by the police the other day after collecting my son from the railway station as I forgot to put my lights on. My car was given the once over; I was breathalysed; the works. They were a couple of fine young men – polite, fit and a credit to the force. All is not lost.
Where does the blame lie for WWI?
No one doubts that the war against the Nazis was a necessary war – the closest thing there has ever been to a just war – but argument still rages as to responsibility for World War One.
Our prime minister wishes that all state school children should not be allowed to forget that 100-year-old conflict which took nearly a million of our brightest and best and scarred the psyche of the generations which followed, including our own. He wishes all of them to visit the battlefields of Flanders and is putting up £50 million to commemorate the tragedy.
Was this a war that could have been avoided – at least by us? In my view absolutely not.
It all began with an assassination in distant Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital besieged in the recent Balkan wars. That pistol shot triggered a chain of events very like a line of dominoes, the first of which that assassination had pushed over. Each domino represented a Treaty which bound this country to that. All Europe was locked into a web of alliances of immense complexity. It was quite unlike the simple NATO v Warsaw Pact confrontation of the Cold War.
We alone of the great European powers had wriggle room enough not to get involved. Our sole commitment was to tiny Belgium which we had been instrumental in setting up a hundred years before, after the defeat of Napoleon. So why did we do it? Why did we risk not only our own defeat but the survival of our worldwide empire? The answer lies, I believe, in the threat which we believed militaristic Prussia posed to the entire world order. Prussian-led Germany was not like any ordinary state. Its closest historical parallel was to be found in ancient Sparta. The whole state revolved around the military.
Statehood had come late to Germany and it was militant Prussia which led the drive for unification of the patchwork of German principalities. Once this had been achieved it launched itself on tiny Denmark, then Austria and finally on France on which it inflicted a crushing defeat in the Franco Prussian war of 1870. Strange as it might now seem, Prussia’s greatest friend and ally had been Britain. She had stood with us on the field of Waterloo and had never stopped admiring us. Then she set about copying our industrial success and this she achieved brilliantly. So now you had a militarily powerful Germany allied to a mighty industrial machine and the largest, by far population and land mass in non Russian Europe. ‘Time for an empire’, thought the Germans. Trouble was that because of the lateness of Germany’s arrival on the international scene and despite her now great power status, she had missed the bus; the world had been carved up between all the other European states. Even tiny Belgium had a great empire in Africa. Germany was left with the scraps.
Huge resentment festered in the German body politic. Their deserved place in the sun had been denied them. But the Prussian military were more upbeat. If the world could not become their oyster then Europe certainly could. They reckoned that if they struck hard and early they could deliver a knock out blow. So Germany would have its empire, after all: the whole of continental Europe. France, Germany’s arch enemy, would certainly have gone down to defeat without us. Russia did. And what would Europe have looked like under a Kaiser jackboot?… an army barracks with occupying Teutons from the Atlantic to the Urals. Next in line would have been Britain and its empire.
Apart from an obsession with all things military, what other aspects of a German-dominated world should we have had to worry about? In a far off corner of Africa – a part which none of the other colonising powers were interested in (Namibia) – they were already practising genocide against the gentle, hapless Herero people. It was a grim precursor of what was to come 21 years later against European Jews. Interestingly, the German governor of the colony responsible for the genocide was none other than the father of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s No.2, and founder of the Luftwaffe and dreaded Gestapo.
So while argument continues to rage as to who was responsible for the Great War, I personally have no doubt that it must be laid squarely at the door of militaristic Prussian-led Germany. It was gagging for a fight. None of the participants had any idea of the horrors which the first war of science was about to unleash. They all marched off with gay abandon and trumpets blaring into a maelstrom of bullets, machine guns, barbed wire, poison gas, incredibly big gunned artillery, tanks and strafing aircraft. And they dug a line of trenches 600 miles long from the English Channel to the Swiss border and hunkered down for four terrible years amidst the vermin, lice, lashing rain, mud and freezing ice. Time after time they were ordered out of those trenches into a withering fire that killed them on an industrial scale.
No one knew what they were letting themselves in for, least of all the supremely confident Brits. Their attitude could be summed up by their recently dead Queen Victoria who when questioned about the possibility of defeat by the South African Boers, replied “It does not exist”. We thought we would be in Berlin by Christmas, four months away. It took four years. Germany’s second attempt at European conquest, 21 years later, was because Hitler managed to convince it that they had not been soundly beaten, first time round, which in fact they had. A more fanatic, ideologically driven effort backed by even better weaponry, he considered, would change the verdict of WWI. He was almost right. So toxic and malign was the very idea of Prussia considered to be by the victorious Allies after WWII that, at the stroke of a pen they abolished it – the only state ever to be so dealt with.
British weather? Don’t knock it!
Two Saturday afternoons ago I parked my bottom on the window sill of the Sir Joshua Reynolds pub opposite my shop basking in the hot sunshine of that early October afternoon (between customers, of course). It caused me to reflect on the vagaries of our famous – or should I say infamous – climate. During that week we had had some truly miserable weather, even the day before. It struck me as not surprising that weather is so often our opener in engaging with a friend or acquaintance whom we might bump into. All four seasons can be hand in a single day. I remember in August being astonished to see hailstones.
When I lived in South Africa during the early 70s, I used to make a point in the early days of walking the streets in the blazing sunshine, avoiding protective canopies that most shops offered. I was truly a Noel Coward’s ‘ go out in the midday sun’ wally. It didn’t last. In no time I found myself dodging from one bit of shade to the next. I remember clearly one day cursing the unremitting blaze and thinking how wonderful it would be to have leaden skies and even a gentle drizzle. The point about all this is that, as with almost everything, you can have too much of a good thing. It is not that we don’t enjoy our share of sunshine; it’s just that we don’t get as much as some. But the upside of this is that when sunshine days do arrive we fully appreciate them and know how to make the most of them.
Endlessly sunny days cause them eventually to pass unnoticed. There is little point in studying the weather since it is almost always the same. This was the case here in the UK during that freakish summer of 1976; there was no sense then even remarking on it to a friend as it would be tiresome. How many mornings can you say ‘lovely day, isn’t it?’ when perhaps you’ve had the better part of a hundred of them.
Ours is a gentle, no-extremes climate. Winters are mild and summers don’t cause you to drip sweat. How my own Lithuanian wife loves having turned her back on a climate where for months on end the stat. stays below zero, often many digits below. We may have had a pretty ropey summer, but hey, we had a sunshine Olympics, didn’t we? And who would exchange what we had for the blistering scorcher that laid waste two thirds of the United States, turning it into a dust bowl and utterly destroying their food crops? And who wants the bush fires currently raging in New South Wales on the other side of the world? We don’t have earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, whiteouts or indeed anything that smacks of disaster. Even our floods are small beer compared with what Australia (Queensland), Pakistan and Bangladesh had recently. Instead we have our gentle, reliable, temperate climate that allows us to grow just about anything.
Dreamers among the old folk, ready to retire, fantasise about the grass being greener in the other field and head for the ‘Club Med’ countries. But apart from economic mismanagement making them a disaster area, with their properties plummeting in value, the grass is most decidedly not greener, but parched for much of the year. Those glorious, verdant landscapes of the British Isles must seem like a distant memory, and that much thirsted after sun nothing but a boring, skin-destroying nuisance that won’t give you a break. And what a risk they take health wise. At the very time in life when good health cannot be taken for granted and maladies pile up, they put themselves beyond the protective reach of the NHS.
As for having a good old yap with the locals as you go about your business, forget it. That too is not so easy when they speak their language and not yours. And participating in their world by learning their lingo is also not so easy when you’ve got a tired old brain to do it with. For me, I’m happy to settle for this beautiful island which the whole world admired so much during this festive year. When those glorious sunshine days, like that one two Saturdays ago, come I grab them with both hands and look forward to the next. And if from time to time you feel cheated and feel that you haven’t had quite enough of them? Well, there’s always those package holidays that can whisk you away to sunnier climes for not a lot more than it would cost you to stay at home.
For the longer term, if global warming heats us by a degree or two extra I won’t be complaining. They say that olive trees and vineyards will prosper again as they did in Roman Britain. Whoopee! Pity though that I won’t be around to see it. But if future generations are constrained economically and have to live in a world of making do with less and can never again enjoy the boom times of yesteryear, then a hotter Britain – freak weather phenomena notwithstanding – may at least be some small compensation.
Richard deserves justice
We are going to have to decide what to do with the remains of Richard III, should they prove genuine as seems likely. Richard was the last truly English king and the skeletal injuries confirm what even the Tudors could not deny: that he died bravely in battle – the last English king to do so.
SOURCE: Encyclopædia Britannica
As the Battle of Bosworth neared its conclusion, with Richard having been betrayed by his leading commander switching sides with his large force, he was now outnumbered. Yet having caught a glimpse of Henry in the distance, he decided on an all or nothing dash to cut him down. Henry was surrounded by his supporters and his chief body guard was a huge man – England’s leading jouster – but Richard, like the Furies, crashed through enemy ranks and unhorsed him. He then cut down Henry’s standard-bearer to bring himself within a sword’s length of Henry, before he himself was cut down. We see the grievous injuries on the skeleton: an arrow in the back and his skull cleft through. The autopsy may reveal more.
Now, I am no apologist for Richard. He may well have murdered his nephews in the tower, but then so equally could others – including the victor of Bosworth whose claim to the throne was extremely weak. Richard’s claim was not, however. He was the last in a 300-year line of Plantagenets. In ordinary circumstances the princes had prior claim over Richard, being sons of the late king. But these were not ordinary circumstances.
The evidence is strong that Richard’s brother, the late king, had made a bigamist marriage. In high circles this was talked about, though never, of course, in the king’s presence. Then the Bishop of Bath & Wells waded in after he had died with an open address, making it public knowledge. The two princes were declared bastards and not entitled to succeed. Parliament and the nobility concurred and Richard was duly crowned. So Richard had no need to kill the princes, his nephews; merely to keep them locked up and out of harm’s way. But potentially they were a rallying point that disaffected opponents of Richard might seek to use.
It is entirely possible that Richard’s dilemma was solved behind his back, unilaterally, by close supporters in the same way that Henry II’s was solved when knights dashed off to Canterbury Cathedral to make an end of Thomas Beckett who had become a thorn in Henry’s side. It is acknowledged that Richard took his catholic faith extremely seriously, and it takes some believing that he would kill the children of the brother he loved so dearly and served so faithfully.
So what about the things Shakespeare had to say about Richard? Well, Shakespeare was a very poor historian. His depiction of Macbeth is very wide of the mark. We Scots have a very good opinion of him, and we should know; he was one of the very few medieval monarchs secure enough in his people’s affections to be able to absent himself for a year on pilgrimage. He had no worries about plotters conniving behind his back. What’s more, he kept his throne for 17 years.
The Tudors knew that they were not legitimate claimants and spent their time trying to boost their credentials in any way they could, discrediting Richard in the process. Possible claimants, however remote, were ruthlessly – some say paranoiacally – murdered.
When Shakespeare came along they had found themselves the world’s greatest propagandist. He truly was manner from heaven. His depiction of Richard is so grotesque that even if his usurper had little right to the throne, history would have endorsed his takeover. In Richard was made manifest the devil himself, Shakespeare implies. He had to be got rid of.
But what does the record show? No foreign ambassador ever reported back home of a hunchback sitting on the English throne with an evil countenance and a withered arm – the same arm that served Richard so well in battle. In fact, they all spoke well of him with some saying he was of fair countenance. Richard, by 30, had had an exemplary career, being utterly loyal to his brother and fighting his battles with great valour. On his estates in the north of England people actually loved him.
In two short years as king he proved himself progressive and an able administrator. To him we owe the Bail system, which continues to this day both here and around the world; the standardisation of weights and measures – an immensely complicated project; the banning of rich people buying public office (in Richard’s world, merit alone counted); the common man being able to understand what was going on in court (he banned Norman French and elevated, after 300 years, our own wonderful language to be supreme in the land). And he was extremely pious, endowing many colleges and monasteries. None of this adds up to a monster. Would that our present Prime Minister had done as much in his two years.
Cruel things were done in the Wars of the Roses (it was a cruel age) and Richard was no crueller than his peers. Even if he was responsible for his nephews’ deaths – and remember, that is a very big if – what about another Richard, the much revered Lionheart, England’s only king with a statue outside Parliament? He killed not two, but perhaps thousands of Muslim children. His legacy is so toxic that even today mothers quieten their small children by whispering to them ‘hush, hush, King Richard is coming’.
‘Crookback Dick’, I pray, will soon get justice. He was a brave, enlightened and legitimate king. The Queen should recognise that and do penance for us all. And congratulations I hope are in order for that dogged society The Friends of Richard III who have sought justice for their hero for so long. I hope your time has come.
So let’s give Richard his due after 527 years of lies and calumnies. Truth matters, and if the big furore of the ‘king under the car park’ making headlines around the world serves no other purpose but to set the record straight then it will have been a worthwhile exercise. The tyrant Tsar, Nicholas II, who did no good and was murdered by the Communists and whose bones were found 20 years, ago was given a decent burial. We can do no less. The Queen should go to Leicester Cathedral – the likely burial place – to pay proper respects to a much maligned ancestor.
Mind those plebs, Thrasher!
Concerning ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell, the Chief Whip, we seem to have moved backwards in electing ourselves governments of all talents. I am not saying we should discriminate against public school boys, yet at seven per cent of total school population they are grossly over-represented in government comprising over 50 per cent of the cabinet. Sixty years ago the Attlee cabinet was much more representative of the people it governed. But here we are today, all these years on, with one which would not have looked out of place in Downton Abbey days.
Although Cameron is a personable enough chap himself – one you perhaps wouldn’t mind having a pint with – he seems not to have the wit to see any of this. He understands that the nation’s finances are in dire need of sorting out, along with welfare dependency and educational shortcomings, but he seems to think that only a cabinet stuffed full of stinkingly rich public school boys can be relied on to see it through. The irony is that the two crucial success stories of his administration are likely to be the very ones not piloted by his public school chums: welfare reform and education.
The display of petulance, arrogance, threats and not to say downright abuse that the Chief Whip showed his police guardians – in the very week of grief, would you believe, for fallen comrades – opened a window into the mindset of these privileged individuals who really do believe that we are here to serve them, not they us. Theirs, it would seem, is a god-given right to rule and we should get used to it. The public does not like what it sees.
All of this is disastrous to the man who spent years trying to massage the image of the Tory party into a kindlier, voter-friendly mode. In a little over two years’ time he is going to have to asks the ‘plebs’ if they will give him and his pals a fresh run. It is lucky in the extreme that he faces such a deeply unattractive and discredited Opposition, but that won’t necessarily save him. If there is visceral hatred for his class, fanned by the likes of the ‘Thrasher’, that might be enough to sink him.
In addition to all this, Tory foot soldiers have neither forgotten nor forgiven for the fact that Cameron failed to win an outright majority against the most disastrous government of modern times led by the most unpopular prime minister ever. The fact that he failed in these circumstances and was obliged to put himself in hock to a party that hates his own and spends its time sabotaging so many of its most cherished policies rankles still further. And then there are the multiple instances of poor judgement in his appointments. It ill behoves Cameron, therefore, to adopt all too often a high-handed approach with his backbenchers which can be taken a a sign of perceived class superiority. Dollops of humble pie and signs of genuine contrition should be more the order of the day.
But Cameron’s troubles don’t even stop with those outlined; women (half the electorate) have gone off him too. They have concluded that – Samcam excepted – he doesn’t much like them and that Bullingdon attitudes still lurk beneath the surface. There is real anger that he has shortchanged them, having promised them a third of cabinet seats. The recent reshuffle was his last chance to make good on that promise and he failed miserably.
So for the prime minister there is much to do and little time to do it in. It worries me also that he doesn’t seem much concerned at the drip, drip hemorrhaging of his party to UKIP. Had disaffection not driven so many into their camp he may well have had that precious majority at the last election and the process continues apace. As I see it only one thing stands a chance of bringing large numbers of them back into the fold: he must give them an unequivocal pledge, written in blood, that there will be an in/out EU referendum immediately after the election. Then he must make it clear to them that if they do not respond they will have only themselves to blame for a fresh dose of Labour, but with even more of a Leftish lean. That, together with a hopefully recovering economy, troops home from Afghanistan, robust law and order policies and falling immigration should be enough. Welfare and Education success would be the clincher.
In the meantime he must get all his appointments carefully scrutinised beforehand, stop patronising women (or anyone else for that matter) and put the equivalent of a chastity belt on the mouths of certain of his ministers. As for the ‘Thrasher’ himself, he must go – but not before he has has received a damn good thrashing himself, to encourage les autres.
It was always delicious irony that Rugby School (of Tom Brown’s Schooldays fame) should spawn a character who would go on to be known as the ‘Thrasher’ and that that same character would go on to be awarded the Chief Whip’s job in government. That same whip must now be used on him. ‘Flashman’ Cameron is just the man to wield it. He’s got the perfect credentials.
Cinema is winning the fight against piracy
Cinema still exercises a powerful influence in the world today. There are the A-listers and the B-listers (terms I was never familiar with) along with all the time-honoured film festivals. Although youngsters still flock to see a blockbuster, I wonder if that influence is as all pervasive as it once was.
For a long time it seemed that cinema was on a slippery slope with the rise of internet piracy and competition from every conceivable quarter, but at long last it has found its proper niche of operating a service and not just selling a product.
What motivates people to going to the cinema? May it be because watching a movie in the company of hundreds of others, with a giant screen dominating and the wrap around surround sound, is an experience that people are willing to pay a premium for?
In the Golden Age of cinema (the post-war years) the attendances were truly vast. Hardly a person in the land did not go to the cinema at least once a week, and many twice – as I did. The competing modes of entertainment were so few that the ‘flicks’, as we knew it, had almost a free run. Today, however, life is very different.
Certainly the technology has advanced, with incredible special effects, digital and 3D all adding an extra dimension. The stars in my day became role models we all aspired to and were expected to behave well, even if privately they matched any of today’s shenanigans. When someone broke rank and was in danger of being caught out, the studios would go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their squeaky clean image. Winona Ryder would never have been allowed to go down the swanny over shoplifting; unquestionably, studio power was absolute.
Adults, and in particular youngsters, are almost overwhelmed by choice nowadays. Go to any high street and it seems that almost half of people are engaged with their mobiles, while at home the youngsters disappear almost immediately to their bedrooms to play video games. It is easy in these circumstances to see why cinema felt itself to be up against it. Modern cinema has met this lethal challenge by upping its game mightily by improving the ‘experience’: bigger than ever screens and better than ever sound and 3D (for those who fancy it).
Yet all these innovations are only available to those wanting to see new releases. That vast body of movies which so influenced the lives of all those over 55 is now relegated either to dusty archives or the small screen – an altogether inferior experience. Vue and the like are not interested in featuring these classics from the Golden Age.
But all is not lost! After 25 years as a projectionist (many of them spent at Plymouth city centre cinemas) covering both traditional and digital film showing techniques, David Huxham wants to bring back that great experience which the older generation so pines for. David has come up with the great idea of Plymouth Film Shows, where he will be hiring a screen at the Reel Cinema at Derry’s Cross every Wednesday morning. The doors will be opening for the first time at 10:15am on 26th September, when David will be showing that great silver screen classic, Singin’ In The Rain, staring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Conner and Debbie Reynolds.
Tickets are priced at £4 each and the Plymouth Film Shows’ website can be found at www.plymouthfilmshows.co.uk, which includes details about what’s on, how to purchase tickets and much more. David has also put together a competition on the site giving away several pairs of free tickets, so give it a try!
I was delighted to meet David a couple of weeks ago when he came into my shop on the Ridgeway to have his shoes repaired. He explained to me how his working life has been almost a love affair; always thrilled at putting on a show for hundreds, sometimes thousands, he started as a projectionist at 17. But much as he admires present advances in cinema techniques, he laments that lost ‘experience’ which was so central to his early life.
I, for one, look forward to a trip down memory lane to see some of the great classics on the BIG screen again, with many benefitting from being digitally enhanced, potentially providing an even greater level of enjoyment than could be experienced in that Golden Age.
Unfortunately David doesn’t propose bringing back the organist or the pretty, titillatingly clad ice cream sellers who walked up and down the aisles flogging their wares in their precursor minis; nor does he require the audience to all rise at the end of the performance and belt out the National Anthem. Woe betide those who tried to slink off early, anticipating the movie’s end. Destainful looks would accompany their hurried retreat.
A lovely little footnote to David’s story is that his Mum & Dad met while standing in a cinema queue at the Gaumont, Union Street, cinema in 1954. “Do you want to go in as a double?” inquired cheeky-chappy dad of the strange young woman close by. The rest is history.
Good luck, David. Let’s hope that Plymouth gets behind you.
Olympic legacy should re-ignite British pride
What a game-changer the Olympics have been. When I was born, London was the largest city in the world. Now there are 30 larger – though it is still the largest in Europe and North America.
We agonised as to whether we had made the right decision to host the games in the first place, though we felt a frisson of excitement at the challenge and dared to hope that we could pull it off. We knew we were a prime and juicy target for a terrorist attack and felt it next to impossible to guarantee that there would be no chinks in our armour.
We fretted over a gridlocked city, militant train drivers going on strike, and whether we could hold our nerve at stage managing such a colossally intricate extravaganza before the focused gaze of the whole world. Most of all – amidst the gloom and despondency of the longest recession in living memory – we worried about the sheer cost of it all. Yet every anxiety has been laid to rest in magnificent style.
The world will long remember these 2012 games and Britain has been showcased as it has never been in its long, long history. It was a project of immense and overarching complexity and we could have been forgiven for our worries as to whether we were any longer up to such a challenge. But that too has been laid to rest. We may not be the titan that bestrode the world when I was born – the only one to look Hitler straight in the eye and not blink – but we remain the repository of immense skills, artistry and organisational powers. The challenges that lie before us are daunting, to say the least, but we have proved to ourselves that however big and complicated they may be, we can cope.
In the past we have acquired something of a reputation for being always able to muddle through, but that can hardly be said of the way we have handled these games. It augers well for great projects like the Thames Estuary Airport; the Bristol Channel tidal energy scheme; the high speed rail link and perhaps anything else we might wish to put our mind to like the extraction of our massive reserves of shale gas.
We have been enthused with a renewed spirit of “can do”. Far from being a nation in decline, we can start to believe that we may be a nation on the cusp of great things again. With our massive reserves of oil around the Falklands, we can become energy-independent again and make ourselves indispensable to our European partners by supplying their needs too – no bad thing in the tough negotiations which lie ahead to repatriate many of the powers we have lost.
As we are all well aware, finance rules the world and the City of London rules finance. Of all metropolises, London seems to be the one that the “movers and shakers” most rave about, buying up real estate wholesale. It is cosmopolitan; tolerant; open; a good place to do business; is perfectly placed – time wise – to transact on the same day with both east and west; boasts an unrivalled theatre-land, along with – at last – good restaurants; and as if all this were not enough, it speaks the world’s lingua franca.
Empire gave us links and goodwill that no other country can match. We have our cosy little Commonwealth Club, spread all over the planet, and we play against each other in our cosy little world of cricket. What fools we have been not to maintain the great trading links we developed over centuries with those who were always best disposed towards us. Had we done so we would not now be so exposed to events on the continent as we are today. Even now it is not too late to reverse this shortsightedness. We should be putting together trade missions with the same zeal and fervour as the missionaries of old who carried the Gospel and opened the way for trade.
Having landed ourselves with the Olympics, we knew that we would be watched as never before for our competence and flair (if there was any) and we surprised the world, not least ourselves.
As for the Paralympics, we even set a new benchmark, having pioneered it – like so much else – in the first place. Disabled people have never in all history felt better about themselves and that is wonderful. In so many respects they took our breath away. Their feats would have outperformed most able-bodied people and they showed guts beyond belief.
In my own humble way I too am bionic – like so many of them – with two knee replacements. I’d be happy – even proud – to stand alongside them, if they would have me. Maybe future organisers should think about a 100m sprint for the over 70s with knee replacements. I’d be up for it in an instant, shouting, “Rio here I come!” The training, I promise, would start at once.
Like many of you (I suspect) I am sad that I could not see all of this wonderful jamboree. But I intend to buy a DVD of the highlights. And there you go! There are some of my Christmas presents taken care of already. For once I wont have to rack my brains for something that will not disappoint.
Doomed to mediocrity
As Zero Hour approaches with regard to Plymouth airport we have to ask ourselves some very important questions.
Are present communications by road and rail so good and secure that we can still thrive by relying on them alone?
Are we confident that Captains of Industry thinking of establishing great centres of work will not dismiss us instantly because they cannot access us in the shortest time possible; maybe even think that because we have no air link there is something odd about us?
Are we confident that in a rapidly changing world nobody in the future will step forward with a plan which will work?
Is the prospect of foreclosing on an option which can never be reversed something that we can live with?
In today’s world large numbers of tuppenny ha’penny places have airports. They are regarded almost as a mark of the community’s virility. For myself it is a resounding NO to every one of these questions and I will tell you why.
Plymouth is the only big city in a peninsula 200 miles long, which commands the Western Approaches and with the largest naval dockyard in Europe is an important regional centre.
Are we not peculiarly at risk by rail and by road? When the Victorians drove through their rail link they were anxious to make the journey (experience) a memorable one; quite rightly so.
In some places they did brave things, like when they challenged the ocean waves by running so perilously close to them as they did in places like Dawlish.
They could not be expected to know that man made emissions would alter the world’s climate so that extremes of weather would become a regular feature of life.
It is entirely possible that, as a result, that line may be broken if not washed away at some point in the future. What then do we do?
That marvel for its time, the almost 170 year old Brunel suspension rail bridge must surely be coming to the end of its life so that Cornwall becomes no longer accessible by rail.
May not the private operator, faced also with a storm lashed, perilous and collapsing Dawlish line, then decide to cut his losses and end the rail link at Exeter?
I remember well the storm of protest that met the decision to end the M5 at Exeter. Nothing would move them.
It was almost as though they’d got it in for Plymouth. They gave us a quite superior A 38 for the remaining 40 miles and tried to console us by calling it the Devon Expressway.
But nobody was fooled. At the end of the day it remained at best a dual carriage way. When accidents, resurfacing and other repairs happen we are doomed to single lane traffic. Imagine your Captain of Industry who on being told he could not fly then asking for a first Class rail ticket only to be told that isn’t possible either.
He then takes to the road and ends up in nose to tail single lane traffic. Nice one Plymouth City! This may all sound bizarre and it is. But it entirely within the bounds of possibility. These thoughts and other should be pressing on the minds of those who are charged with looking to the future of our city.
No one blames Sutton Harbour Development Company for seeking to coin a buck – millions of them by off-loading non profitable airport land to make themselves a fortune – with all sorts of other developments. Their duty is to their shareholders not the people of Plymouth.
I do blame a desperate city, though, for granting them such a preposterous lease as 150 years. They may as well have sold it to them freehold, but perhaps as well they didn’t, they might have let it go for silly money.
So strongly do I believe many people view this issue that it would not surprise me in the least to see protesters sitting on the runway on the day the bulldozers were told to move in.
Our city seems obsessed with short term considerations. Of course it is right not to burden itself with loss making operations, but its priorities seem very skewed when it rushes off to build theatres, Pavilions, Domes, Life Centres and even Aquariums.
Some may say this is all very wonderful while others might to say it is self indulgent.
All I know is that Plymouth must keep its lungs and arteries open while being ready at the same time to receive the world. Business should trump all other considerations. From that comes the wherewithal to do all these other no doubt commendable things.
It is not, even now, too late to hold back from an irrevocable decision. While it is impossible to predict what the future holds, what seems foolhardy in the extreme is to do this thing; like close down the argument forever.
Who would want to be the man or council who very possibly doomed this city to permanent mediocrity? What a sad epitaph to have to say that it happened on my watch.
We’ve bin let down by our council
It has always upset me that our people are considered the litterbugs of Europe and that our streets are disfigured in the way they are.
Long ago Mrs Thatcher displayed what many of us at the time considered the eccentric trait of picking up rubbish strewn along her line of walk and disposing of it. She recommended that more of us should do the same to make Britain a tidier place. I have to confess that I share that eccentric habit.
Walking with my son the other day our local Tesco Express – a distance of three quarters of a mile – we commented on how litter was lying around, even in one of Plymouth’s more affluent districts. But then it hit me whose fault it principally was: it was the local authority’s.
In all that distance there was not a single bin. What right, we both asked ourselves, have the powers that be to criticise people when they themselves fail in such a basic function as providing receptacles? Do they seriously expect young people – the principal offenders – to carry their rubbish for untold distances? They even have the effrontery to believe they have the right to punish the miscreants when they have failed in their own duty. It is ludicrous and completely unreasonable.
I have a suggestion for Plymouth City Council; indeed, it might make it the cleanest, tidiest council in the Kingdom. Give us the bins and then you can consider yourselves entitled to go after us if we do not use them. In fact, it is a suggestion which might usefully be taken up at government level. Were it to legislate that every council in the land put out bins commensurate with the size of its population (X number of bins for Y number of people) we might, at last, move away from that less than flattering sobriquet, ‘Europe’s Litterbugs’.
While we are on the subject of councils failing in their duty, why is that they are so inconsiderate in the hours that public loos are open? It is nothing short of scandalous that an entire city centre is devoid of them during much of the 24-hour day. The same could be said of our world famous Plymouth Hoe.
Before the former Derry’s Cross filling station and car park was sold off to coin a buck, there was a 24/7 facility there. My own suburb of Plympton, with a population of 35,000, has its one and only loo locked up from three in the afternoon.
Such callous disregard for people in distress – particularly older people with bladder problems – is quite unfathomable. Would they win a case were they to prosecute a person caught peeing in a public place? I think not. Particularly when they themselves had transgressed in such an important Human Right – a truly genuine one for once. Cherie Blair, in her chambers, would love to fight their corner.
Having said all this, it is only fair to give credit where it is due: well done Plymouth City Council for its recent ‘Best Run Council’ award. It is clearly doing some things right, like collecting rubbish once weekly.
On a less critical theme, the afterglow of the Olympics will stay with us for some time I hope. And let’s not forget that we still have the Paralympics to look forward to. Around the world, disabled people have a hard time and none more so than in the Third World. When we look at someone afflicted with a physical – or mental – disability we should all say silently to ourselves, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ and act accordingly.
It is heart-warming that even in a country like China, wherefrom time immemorial the state felt no obligation to intervene, things are changing. Having had charge of the previous Olympics – with its now obligatory Paralympics – has brought home to them what is the right and noble thing to do.
That afterglow of which I spoke should encourage us in the harsh years that lie ahead. Projects don’t come bigger than the Olympics, and even if we say so ourselves: we made a thundering great success of it. All the world was impressed, even enthralled.
In my entire life (73 years) no single feat of organisational brilliance of ours has come anywhere near it for scope, efficiency and aplomb.
Those blues that have dogged us through all the years of the rundown of Empire and beyond have finally been laid to rest; now, at last, we know that we still have what it takes and can compete with the best – even beat them. So now let’s apply that spirit of ‘can do’ to get out of the hole we’re in and fashion a bright new future for ourselves.
Our bankers can learn a lot from Team GB
Well done Team GB. You have not just chalked up wonderful results, but you have avoided tub-thumping triumphalism and shown the world that there is a facet of Great Britain that is most appealing: our ability to self-deprecate and laugh at ourselves. Would that we could say the same about some ‘gentlemen’ in finance.
As we all know, some disastrous things have been taking place there. It truly makes MPs grubbing around for small change in the expenses scandal look quite inconsequential. These guys can sink us all; they almost did, and might yet do so.
I believe the time has come for drastic action, starting with the criminalisation of excessive and irresponsible risk-taking. Had we done so at an earlier date, ‘Fred the Shred’, and others like him, would almost certainly have thought twice before doing what they did.
Nothing concentrates the mind like a good hanging – only, in this case, we’ll settle for a lengthy prison term. Yet for some reason the powers-that-be are strangely reluctant to come down on white collar crime in anything like the way they do on blue collar. Do I detect privilege looking after its own? Is there an ‘old boys’ network in operation? David Cameron says we should not encourage banker bashing. May it not be that what he is really saying is: “leave my friends alone”? The Americans are far more willing to send financial miscreants to prison than we are. Why is this?
The whole western world is suffering to an extraordinary extent because of the misdeeds of the financiers; likely to be protracted, and life destroying to many millions of people who have done nothing wrong, the Great Recession has already been dragging on for four years now and no end can be discerned. In truth, it is likely to get much worse. Not a pundit on the planet has a clue where it is all going and when it will end.
The people who have done this to us have not only got away with it scot-free, but seem unable to grasp the enormity of what they have done. Nothing better illustrates this than the continuance of the iniquitous bonus culture they have built around their activities. Where else do such incredible sums get thrown at people with such gay abandon? How did it all start? Its insidious effect has even moved over to the public sector, where managers also now look to extra awards for merely doing their job. Getting money from Joe Public has never been easier; plastic cards by the hundred thousand now help grease the wheels.
Almost uniquely, banking is in a position to bring the whole system crashing down. That is why the innocents have been successfully compelled into saving the guilty. Only the stiffest penalties we can devise will do to punish those who have set the financial crisis in train. We must never allow ourselves to be put in a position like this again.
What a scandal that people who saved up all their lives, forgoing foreign holidays and the like, must see their savings decimated to prop up the feckless, as well as profiteering, bankers who were lending – where they care to do so – at sometimes twenty times what they are charged.
It is unfortunate that no economic model other than capitalism has been shown to deliver growth and prosperity, and it will always be down to the cleverest and best educated in our midst to operate it. But that very fact is what makes it so reprehensible that they have done this thing to the trusting billions around the world. Apart from the wicked greed they have displayed, they have provided priceless ammunition to the misguided enemies of capitalism who, even now, would drag us back into discredited and dangerous other models such as communism. (Incidentally, these Occupy protesters are confusing capitalism with corporatism, but that is not the point.)
There are four measures I believe could save us from a re-run of this saga. The first, as I have already detailed, involves banging up bankers. The second is the protection of whistleblowers. Once again here, Uncle Sam leads the way; he does not put his trust so much in setting up expensive regulatory agencies and quangos, staffed, in so many cases, by second-raters who dance to the tune of the Bob Diamonds of this world. Instead, Uncle Sam goes for insider information which makes it all the easier to secure convictions. And he gets it by rewarding the whistleblower with a percentage of any fines levied on the corporation for its misdeeds.
Right across the board, the whistleblower performs a valuable and often courageous service – often without reward. He or she is frequently someone who has witnessed scandalous activities which affront their conscience. In this country, however, whistleblowers are treated like pariahs. The people exposed – be they in the health or civil service – close ranks and sack the whistleblower. Once again the good man or women is made to pay for doing the right thing.
The third suggestion concerns our regulators. Since there will always be a need for close scrutiny of important financial activities, these agencies must be staffed by the very best – people who are cleverer than the people they are scrutinising (and not, as at present, the other way round). To secure these clever clogs, we are going to have to pay them top rates; that way, the dullards will find it next to impossible to bamboozle the cleverer man.
My fourth and final suggestion is a proper clear out of the top echelons of the Civil Service when a new government takes office. Often these civil servants are appointees who, if they disagree with the new government’s policies, will foot-drag as only the Civil Service knows how – ‘Yes Minister’ style. The clear out should take the form of the various head of departments being obliged to offer their resignation; if the incoming government feels they are not ideologically opposed to their manifesto, are on top of their brief and unlikely to be obstructive, then it could choose to keep them in their post.
The cruel betrayal of a lost generation
Last week I went with a friend to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. It was very good, with spectacular special effects and some surprisingly mature themes for a movie based on a comic book superhero.
Among the many ads before the movie, there was an Olympic-themed one which promised the world to the Batman audience. It blared out that old mantra – with which we are all regaled today – that each of us is possessed of “amazing abilities”.
The media pumping out of the London Olympics hint at much the same thing – that the contestants are ordinary people, who through dedication and hard work have turned themselves into godlike Olympians. Well, maybe some have, but the vast majority are gifted with that something extra: the ‘X Factor’, let’s call it.
Perhaps the worst offenders of this insidious rubbish of ‘prizes for all’ – that we each have got what it takes and that we are all winners – are the teachers’ training colleges, pushing their skewed and fanciful notions of education and throwing out so many of the tried and tested old certainties. And let’s not forget the politicians who, as always, have let them get away with it.
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but most of us are ordinary. We are not winners, born with great intellects or reservoirs of Olympic-winning genes. We plod along making the best of what we’ve got, paying the bills – though even that gets ever harder these days – and not nurturing any illusions as to our ‘amazing abilities’.
Propagating this cruel myth was that disastrous charlatan Tony Blair, who, along with his many other sins, set out to raise university entries to wholly unrealistic levels. He and his political and academic cohorts insisted that no fewer than half of us had the ability to benefit from a university education, when the truth was that by far the majority would have suited vocational qualifications. In order to achieve their purpose, they dumbed down and degraded qualifications year after year while, all the time (surprise, surprise), trumpeting the ever rising number of passes.
Employers saw it differently, though, as did even the universities. They complained that the entrants reaching them were not fit for purpose, that they lacked even the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, and that they had to spend precious time and resources in getting them over this initial hurdle before they could even begin to put them to work.
Our society today not only faces economic meltdown, but it is peopled with individuals with wholly unrealistic expectations. Wives expect perfect husbands and husbands expect perfect wives; the magazines tell them so. Divorce is easier than ever! If you’ve fouled up, try someone else. Why bother seeing if you can identify what’s gone wrong? Worry about the kids later!
School leavers – little emperors and empresses to their parents – are shocked that their teachers, who promised them so much and waxed lyrical about their abilities, have lied to them. These unfortunates, who were conned into spending precious years chasing Mickey Mouse degrees due to their lack of ability, are shocked all over again when they find that the world of work is not the least impressed that they are a graduate in achieved a BA in Golf Management, Surf Science or Third World Development.
Unable to get jobs, in so many cases, and certainly not ones commensurate with what they were told their degree would bring them, they look with horror and depression at the mountain of debt they were encouraged to build up while they were chasing moonbeams. Half their working life will be spent paying off those worthless degrees. This has to be the cruellest deception of them all.
Realism is the thing most lacking in our young people today. It is not their fault; parenting skills, the ability to discipline along with standards of probity have all evaporated. With, in so many cases, couch potato, disinterested parents who bought them off from troubling them, what role models did they have? Bad tempered expletives were, everywhere, the order of the day. And those who should have known better outside the house made a bad situation worse by further indulging them and encouraging false expectations.
Then along came the lottery millionaires followed in quick succession by Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor, Big Brother and the ‘Victoria Beckham factor’ (i.e., marry someone rich). Anyone can strike it lucky! Fame is the name of the game. Just look at what happened to Victoria, Jade Goody and Jordan! Why bother with the hassle of applying yourself to your studies when you can achieve it all and more by a lucky and lucrative break into the dream world of Celebrity?
Victoria – who admitted to never having read a book (though, would you believe, she’s currently into Fifty Shades of Grey. Watch out, ‘Goldenballs’, she’ll be coming with the cuffs next!) – couldn’t even sing, and poor Jade couldn’t string a coherent sentence together.
Tragically, there is not a lot that can be done for the present, lost generation, so cruelly betrayed by the left-leaning liberal establishment. But hope is on the horizon for the next. Reforms are in train which may well turn things round. We must pray that they will, for a chill wind is blowing from the East, which promises only to get chillier.
One thing only will save us: a knowledge-based, productive and hard-working workforce, as it alone has any hope of competing. The cosy world of an easy, unopposed living which the West has enjoyed for half a millennium is coming to an end. May the best man (or woman) as they are saying this very day at the London Olympics, win.
Child abuse takes many forms
Any society purporting to call itself civilised has one duty above all others: the protection of its most vulnerable, the young and the old. Even armies on the rampage have generally respected these two imperatives.
We are, however, failing to protect our young in an area that is increasingly coming to the fore: allowing our children to become obese.
The truth is that overfeeding is every bit as damaging as underfeeding, yet a malnourished child turning up at school would pretty soon attract the attention of the authorities.
So let’s look for a moment at the consequences for a child of allowing them to become obese. First, the whole of their school experience becomes a misery; they are be picked on mercilessly, and utterly useless on the sports field; groups would likely shun them and the obese child would become the perpetual outsider; and any consequent emotional scaring would likely be carried into adulthood.
The irony of it all is that they are being set up by those who most protest their love for them for a whole range of illnesses in later life, and condemned to what is almost certainly an early grave.
If this is not abuse, I would very much like to know what is. What form of love is it that a parent would do such a thing to its child?
If we can agree that rescue for the child trumps all other considerations, then what are we to do? It seems elementary that we must work for a solution through the parents. But if, despite all our efforts, a satisfactory outcome cannot be reached, then we should be prepared to remove the child and find a dedicated foster parent.
Moving on to another form of child abuse, the recent ruling of a German court found that circumcision, due to cultural conventions, is a criminal breach of a child’s bodily integrity and of its human rights. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the ruling had to come, from of all countries, Germany. Had it come from a British or American court – both largely free of modern anti-Semitism – there would still have been a howl of protest, but it would have been much muted.
We all abhor FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), and quite rightly it carries a heavy prison sentence. Yet it seems there are over a 100,000 women in our country who have had this procedure done to them and there has not been a single prosecution. Scandalous hardly seems sufficient an adjective.
If we deplore this act of barbarism for young girls, why do we take such a different attitude for young boys? Both involve pain and suffering to no medical end. How can an adult have the right to violate a child’s body?
Surely it is right to take a stand against such primitive and barbaric practices which should have no place in the modern world. If it is deemed important for religious purposes, why could the procedure not be put on hold until the child is of a sufficient age to make an informed decision? If their faith is strong enough, then doubtless they will comply in the fullness of time. But at least the decision would be theirs to make and not one that has been imposed on them.
Muslims as well as Jews will, I have no doubt, be up in arms at what I am suggesting because they too insist on the procedure. But neither faith could succeed in painting me as a bigot since I consider myself a true internationalist. I believe in the oneness and brotherhood of man. There are so many Muslims that I admire, just as there are Jews.
Lawrence of Arabia loved the Arabs and saw great nobility in their culture, and there has always been a strong Arabist lobby in the foreign office. We failed tragically to get a lasting solution that did justice to the Arab cause when we overthrew the Turkish Ottoman yoke in World War One, though all acknowledge that there was no easy solution either then or now.
As for the Jews, I glory in the fact that it was British arms and blood that made possible the state of Israel. So many millions exiled and persecuted around the world deserved a homeland of their own. I only wish we could have achieved the same for the many millions of Kurds as, indeed, we could have done.
I am saddened at how things have turned out, but Israel should heed the wise words of Winston Churchill when he said “in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity.”
No people in history have suffered in the way the Jewish people have, and no people know better what it is to be dispossessed and scattered to the winds. Pain and suffering puts you in a unique position to understand what it is like to be at the receiving end.
All reasonable Arabs now accept the permanence of the Jewish state – particularly now that, in extremis, it can defend itself with nuclear weapons.
Now is the time for Churchill’s exhortation of ‘magnanimity’ to come into play. Let the children of Zion pick up their winnings and leave the table. They can then go on to be a powerhouse for a resurgence of success and prosperity throughout the benighted Middle East which so fuels the Jihadists’ nihilist dreams. It should not let its fear plunge the area and the world’s fragile economy into chaos with a strike against Iran.
Iran knows perfectly well that it, rather than Israel, that would be “wiped from the map” in the event of a conflagration. The self same pressures which kept the Cold War from becoming hot would come into play were Iran to acquire the bomb.
The irony of it all is that the Jews and Arabs are ethnically the same people: they revere the same prophets and regards each other, along with Christians, as ‘People of the Book’.
What is needed now are cool heads and wise leadership, which could lead to a flowering of a lot of very talented people on both sides of the divide.
The Greatest Show on Earth
It may be said that the gods have punished us these many wet summer months for some misdemeanour of which we are unaware. But it appears they may have stayed their hand in ruining the most spectacular sporting jamboree on the planet.
By this time of year the country’s lush foliage is normally beginning to wilt a little. Sometimes even our abundant and lovely grasslands are looking a bit browned off. But with the way it has all panned out it has made this summer, of all summers, the lushest it has ever been. Truly, if the sun shines on all this, our sceptred isle will look like no other place on earth. The nations of our planet will return to their homelands realising, perhaps for the first time, what a beautiful place we inhabit.
With its cosmopolitan and multicultural dynamism they are unlikely to deny they have been privileged to spend a fortnight in the coolest city in the world, and the closest thing to an earthly paradise beyond its city boundaries.
Danny Boyle’s evocation of the Britain he cherishes I hope will do us proud. Someone once said that “it is not what you are, but what you would be”. I believe that to be true and beautifully put.
No event provides such an opportunity to showcase yourself as does the Olympics, and what a sporting year this is already proving to be. We came within a whisker of carrying off the Wimbledon title and Bradley Wiggins has triumphed in the mighty Tour de France in what is surely the greatest single sporting achievement in any of our lifetimes.
We cannot know how many medals we will carry off, but I am sure we will acquit ourselves well. We are, after all, fielding two and a half times as many contestants as we did in Athens. And we are on our own home turf.
What an inspirational overture to all the contestants about to mount the podium to listen to the melody of the Chariots of Fire. We made that film and with it we made the world’s heart beat faster.
We are a little nation, but the footprint we have left on the world is that of a giant. It is small wonder that the author of ‘Jerusalem’, the gifted but delusional William Blake writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, believed that we were a chosen people favoured by god to be a light to the nations. Only that explanation, he considered, could account for such extraordinary and overwhelming success in the world.
Reticence and understatement are in our genes, but the world looks to, and expects, the host nation to lay out its wares. What are those wares? We have sent out our sons and daughters to every corner of the planet in the greatest diaspora in human history; we created the greatest empire ever known to man and seeded it with justice, law, democracy and the world’s first – and likely to be its only – universal language; and our scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers catapulted the world into the Industrial Revolution: the only true change in the human condition since hunter-gathers turned to farming. It is not too much to say that we have invented the modern world.
And let’s not forget, during this great celebration of human physical prowess, our own contribution to sport. Just listen to the roll call of competitive sports we invented: football, golf, rugby, cricket; baseball, tennis, polo, modern boxing, darts, eventing/horse trials, billiards, badminton, squash, hockey, snooker, sailing, motor racing and Formula One, table tennis, cycling, rowing, ice hockey; bowls, ten-pin bowling, some forms of skiing, mountaineering and curling. It doesn’t appear we left very much for anyone else, does it?
So as tomorrow you enter this great festival of human endeavour be proud of who you are and of what your ancestors have achieved. Try to live up to them – not easy, I know – but remember, too, those many, still alive, who bought in blood and treasure the liberties that we and the world enjoy today.
Recessions come and go, but in the great pantheon of the gods, you – a little people living on less than 1 per cent of the world’s land surface – occupy a special place. You have done wondrous things. For all our many and grievous faults, I remain convinced that history will be kind to us.
Now go out to get some gold and lay on the greatest show on Earth!
Our PR-obsessed leaders today don’t cut the mustard
Last week was a disastrous week for the Cameron government, not because of anything the opposition did to it, but what it did to itself. An issue was presented to parliament of such importance that ninety-one of the Prime Minister’s normally loyal supporters could not, in all conscience, back the government line.
The rebellion concerned reform of the House of Lords. Should we get this wrong – as ‘devolution’ has so tragically shown – and all sorts of genies would be out of the bottle which could never be put back. The Lib Dem’s proposed reforms would land us with an unworkable setup between the two legislative houses and a second chamber, stuffed full of third-rate has-beens who couldn’t cut the mustard in the first house: the Commons. Patronage – itself one of our crippling ills – would, as a result, have been reinforced even further.
No one argues that the House of Lords (which, we should not forget, does a surprisingly effective job) does not need sorting out to make it more democratic. But the great conundrum is how, and we have been pondering that question for a hundred years. All we know is that if we get it wrong there will be the most grievous consequences, as we now realise with devolution, which threatens the very integrity of our country.
The Liberal Democrats want the reformed House of Lords to adopt the very system of proportional representation which was so soundly rejected by the public a year ago with – you may not be surprised to learn – beneficial results for themselves.
We would end up with two forms of democracy in our country, with the new one claiming a more genuine mandate. It seems a given that there would be serious clashes between the two house with each claiming the greater legitimacy; we would end up with the same sort of paralysis which so blights the life of Congress and the Senate in the US today.
Why does the PM test his party in the way he does? Why does he not realise that in a matter of such monumental importance he cannot expect party loyalty to override what so many in his party are convinced is for the greater good of the country? Is keeping the Lib Dems onside worth splitting his party for?
Little by little the evidence piles up that our leader – despite his good intentions – is not over-blessed with sound judgement. And the same applies to his chancellor, his deputy and so many more of his appointees. Remember Andy Coulson, the Downing Street photographer, and Liam Fox’s antics?
For a start, it was foolish – when people were feeling incredibly angry at what the moneyed classes had done to them – to stuff his cabinet with millionaires and public schoolboys, some from his own alma mater Eton College. It was Bullingdon brought to Whitehall, as many perceived. Didn’t he realise that his own privileged background raised eyebrows for some, and that to surround himself in cabinet with more of the same sent out the wrong signals? To reinforce this whole perception of privilege was crass in the extreme.
The government we have today is the most out of touch with ordinary concerns since Palmerston was sending out his gunboats. I’d put money on half the cabinet not knowing within 30 per cent the price of a loaf of bread, a pint of milk or a litre of petrol. Indeed, the Deputy Prime Minister was over 50 per cent adrift as to what a pensioner got. What a shower!
The trouble is that hardly any of them have first-hand knowledge of the workaday world the rest of us inhabit. They move seamlessly from Russell Group universities into think tanks and policy institutes before beginning their journey up the greasy pole. Once ensconced in the Westminster bubble they purport to know and understand the issues that concern the rest of us.
They disburse gargantuan sums of public money without suitable qualifications and experience, with none ever having headed up a public company; and they legislate on matters of which, in so many cases, they have no real experience. They live in the British equivalent of walled communities and don’t know within a million miles what it is to live on a sink estate.
On top of these shortcomings, they are too young. Occasionally, a boy like Alexander the Great or Pitt the Younger can confound the norm, but history is exceedingly short on such prodigies. (Both, as a matter of interest, had incredible fathers.) What is needed in our rulers is men of proven ability who have made their mark in the world.
Here, in our neck of the woods, we have such a man in Gary Streeter: son of a farmer, former solicitor and once Chair of Plymouth City housing. In defence of what he saw as an overriding public interest (rejecting the proposed Lords reform) he waved goodbye to any preferment in the Cameron government, which he could reasonably have expected as a senior MP and former Shadow Minister. That’s what I call guts. It is also high-minded and noble.
Everything today is so shallow. We even require our leaders to look telegenic, be bubbly and have a Tony Blair perma-smile, if possible. Say goodbye to ever getting a Churchill or an Attlee again, the miserable sods. May the Lord preserve us! How will we ever get out of the sort of crises they got us through? We could do with one such right now. But remember: he can’t be ugly, fat or have a speech impediment – like Churchill – or a clipped, staccato delivery like Attlee. No, no, they must be of the sort that can entertain us on breakfast television.
My sure-fire weight loss plan
There is a silver bullet in the fight against flab that the diet industry does not want you to know about. In fact, they are doing their utmost to hide from us the fact that there is a quick, simple and – dare I say it – easy way to ensure that nobody is heavier than they would like to be.
My interest is these matters has been an enduring one; I suppose it is the legacy of running health clubs for 25 years. A big part of my job was helping my customers lose weight; I used to hold annual weight loss awards in my Plymouth health club, Physique & Figurama, to celebrate my star slimmers’ achievements (pictured).
But unlike the fitness industry, the enormous $100 billion diet industry has a vested interest in keeping its customers overweight for as long as possible, seducing us with a bewildering array of dubious products and services. After all, what kind of business wants to lose customers as quickly as possible?
Before the day arrives when that other behemoth, the pharmaceutical industry, develops a magic pill which renders the diet industry’s so-called experts’ products and services redundant, I propose there is a natural solution.
My wife and I used to have to watch the calories very closely while maintaining a healthy diet. But despite our best efforts, the pounds crept on. We were never obese, but we knew we could so easily have become so.
At my own peak (I am 5’11”) I reached 14st 1lb and my waist had expanded from 32″ to 38″. Yet after 20 years of wishing each spring that I could enter the summer looking trim, I have finally succeeded. I have lost 21lbs in four weeks.
How has this been achieved? The answer is that I have fasted my flab off. Some days, 2 ¼ lbs would vanish.
The regime I followed goes like this: Monday, fast; Tuesday, eat (but only the amount I would eat normally); Wednesday, fast; Thursday, eat; Friday, fast; and, glory be, I would eat both days of the weekend. But during those days of fasting, I still enjoyed my cappuccinos after work and drank plenty of milkless green tea as well as Oxo cube drinks. Keeping up the fluids is crucial.
So there you have it: a regime which will deliver weight loss beyond your wildest dreams. And unlike these paid-for diets, my regime didn’t cost me a penny. In fact, I saved 40 per cent of my typical supermarket food bill on those intensive weeks.
The fasting regime worked for me, and in spectacular fashion. Nothing else had. I have to stress that I am not a man of incredible willpower; I still have not been able to break with my ten fags a day as so many of you have. If you can do that too then congratulations.
Exercise is always important, regardless of how many calories you’re consuming, so I also continued my long-established practice of having two 1½-mile walks each day. I don’t amble along, but try to walk at a brisk enough pace so as to compel me after a short time to draw breath through my mouth. So successful have my knee replacements been that I could even jog if I wanted to. Well done NHS! You’ve probably saved me from a wheelchair.
Now, I think I know your next question. Did I feel wretched on those days of fasting? Not at all. I suffered absolutely no adverse effects: no hunger pangs, no nothing. What I did notice, however, was that on those days of fasting I was considerably sharper and much more alert.
The beauty of this system – which would have made my health club boom as never before had I thought of it in those days – is that stick is followed by carrot in double-quick time.
The diet industry wants you to believe that results take time – while they make money – and considerable effort on your part – which, of course, they can help alleviate. But by fasting, I have reached my target weight rapidly with minimal effort. Every second day I would get back to eating before I plunged in again. And the weekends were simply heaven: two whole days of normal (not excessive) eating.
Another great boon you will enjoy is that, on those days of fasting, your body – which is normally clogged and at work 24/7 – is flushed out with stomach and bowels rested up; it is given a detox, if you like. And unlike those few successful dieters who mostly see it all come back on again, my method is truly sure-fire.
When I get on the scales in the morning following the previous day’s fast, it is a moment of drama. But it isn’t a question of whether I have lost weight, but rather one of how much.
Now that I have reached my goal of 12st 4lbs, which equates to a reduction of six belt notches, I am only fasting one day a week. I know that, should my weight start creeping up again, I have the means to nuke the flab.
Fasting one day a week represents a weekly drop in calories of around 15 per cent, and hopefully that should be sufficient for me. If your body naturally stores little excess fat, you may only need to fast once a fortnight to keep the weight down; but if you’re obese, you may instead be better off fasting two days a week. It’s really a case of trial and error.
Another beauty of my regime is that I shall not be condemned to eating things which are prescribed to me, many of which I don’t particularly like, at the expense of foods I do enjoy.
It is interesting to ponder why, if there are negative health side-effects of fasting, so many of the world’s religions insist on it. And remember that early man was never guaranteed three square meals a day; he regularly fasted between kills and his system evolved accordingly. Evolution works slowly and we all still have that ability. Did you ever see an overweight bushman?
Good luck to anyone who may be inspired to try this sure-fire method of losing weight. Keep me posted and let me know how you’re doing.
A triumph for mankind
I cannot let this day pass without mention of the Large Hadron Collider’s incredible achievement in validating Peter Higgs’ prediction of the so-called ‘God Particle’, which he made almost half a century ago in 1964.
The discovery, announced at CERN today, stands up there with Einstein’s theories of relativity and the discovery of DNA in its implications for how we understand ourselves and the universe we live in.
The importance of the Higgs boson’s discovery should not be underestimated. It is vindication of the Standard Model of particle physics, which in recent decades has come under fire by more exotic theories such as String Theory due to a hole in the model which today’s discovery now fills.
But spare a thought for the many physicists and others who bought into these bizarre theories. Having spent many years pursuing them, they are now totally discredited. Years of research have gone down the Swanee.
At last we have recognised our brave bomber boys
I am delighted that after 67 years the nation has finally honoured the brave young men of Bomber Command who did their country’s bidding and died in such horrific numbers in the blackness of the night over occupied Europe. My own mother was made a widow in that campaign of hitting back at the enemy.
What must be remembered is that, after the evacuation at Dunkirk, we faced years of being marooned on our island with no way of being able to engage the enemy on the mainland of Europe while we rebuilt our army and readied ourselves to assault Hitler’s formidable Atlantic Wall.
What were we to do in this time? Allow Hitler to consolidate his hold over all the captured nations or disrupt it as best we could?
He had showed no qualms about using that new form of warfare – aerial warfare – to bomb our cities, and the jury was still out at that time as to whether it was possible to win a war entirely from the air. So it was not, in my view, immoral to send out our air fleets to see if this surgical solution was indeed possible. If we had won the war from the air, we certainly would have saved many of our soldiers’ lives from a bloody land campaign.
Although events later revealed that, until the arrival of the atomic bomb, you could not win a war without boots on the ground, the bombing campaign brought massive disruption to the German war machine; over a million men were tied down on home defense who would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern Front and huge quantities of ordnance were similarly kept at home which also would have gone east. Indeed, 70% of their fighters alone had to stay to engage our bombers. It made the difference between Russia staying in the war or losing it, which it very nearly did anyway.
It can be convincingly argued, therefore, that the air campaign indirectly won the war by preventing the full might of Germany ever reaching Russia.
As well as having only 30% of its fighter force to engage the Russians, it had 50,000 fewer artillery pieces and much else besides. And then there was that massive morale booster: a symphony in the night skies played out over occupied Europe. In the eyes of its downtrodden peoples it beat anything Beethoven ever wrote; it was the sound of our bombers droning their way to the oppressor’s heartland. It was the one thing that gave them hope. It reminded them that a free people on the Atlantic seaboard of their continent remained unbowed and would one day bring them deliverance.
So when the establishment turned its shameless back on those brave young men (average age of 22) who were carrying out their orders so selflessly and stood a one in two chance of dying, it did a terrible thing.
The otherwise great Churchill must take a considerable share of the blame. In his speech after victory, when he lavished praise on every branch of the Armed Forces, he pointedly made no mention of those 55,000 dead bomber boys.
Now, at last, thanks to the pops stars Jim Dooley and Robin Gibb – bless them – the people, with their humble subscriptions, have had their say. The Ministry of Defence would not contribute a penny, nor has it to this day issued a campaign medal to this arm of the services who took by far, proportionately, the highest number of fatalities. Shameless, in fact, does not even begin to describe how they have behaved.
What, I have to ask myself, is the matter with our ministry? It refused also, through all those same years, to issue a medal to those heroes of the Arctic convoys who made what Churchill described as “the worst journey in the world” – worse even than that terrrible slog through the jungles of Burma to retake that country from the Japanese.
Our Ministry of Defence does not deserve such fighting men. Though it is penny pinching in looking after our boys – not even giving their families decent housing, and sending them into battle ill-equipped – it even argues the toss over piddlingly inexpensive medals.
And it can’t even get its procurement policies right, recently ratchetting up a black hole of debt that was almost as great as the annual defence budget.
The Ministry of Defence should be disbanded and started again with the top 10% of its echelon lopped off and not allowed to re-apply for their jobs.
Acts of civic vandalism
Parents hold their children in trust. They do not own them; we only own ourselves.
Until we are old enough, that duty of care is vested in those who brought them into the world. If they fail in that monumental task then society’s duty is to step in. And it failed lamentably in the case of the British woman in Spain who snuffed out the life of her two young children.
Once again we have Social Services frantically buck-passing and failing to measure up. Exercising always due diligence, we must not be afraid of being more interventionist. I said as much last week when I supported Sir Michael Wilshaw’s efforts to give deprived children a chance by sending them to boarding school. But provision for our young people extends far beyond the remit of Social Services. Our town halls have a part to play also.
Most days, after I close my shop, I like to round off the day with a cappuccino on the Hoe seafront. One of the pleasures I have enjoyed – along with myriad tourists – is to watch the young people having fun on the diving boards and rock pools of the foreshore. Not anymore.
The powers-that-be in the town hall had other ideas. Aided and abetted, no doubt, by ‘Elf ‘n’ Safety’ they closed it all down and demolished the lot. Even after two years I still feel cold fury at what they did.
It was, in my view, an act of civic vandalism. I never saw an accident in all the years visiting, much less a fatality. What I do know is that the kids loved it and it didn’t cost them a penny.
Did the dunderheads of the dept. involved reason, in their twisted logic, that the kids would turn their attention to the newly revamped and expensive-to-use Tinside Lido and spend their pennies there? No way!
They were, for the most part, poor kids who didn’t have many pennies. But thanks to the city’s forefathers they did have a lot of fun. At huge expense, Plymouth’s forefathers had created something that generations of Plymouth youngsters had enjoyed. It had become part of their childhood memories – even folk law.
What I want to know is: who gave the vandals the right to nullify all this and spend huge extra funds to do so?
Their predecessors had dug deep into their pockets to create a leisure facility because they recognised that they had a duty to provide for young people and in so doing help to keep them out of mischief. All that expense of yesteryear, however, was over. All their successors had to do was maintain it, but even this was too much.
Young people have a need for exciting and challenging things to do, and so in fulfilment of that need they took themselves a couple of hundred yards down the road and hurled themselves into the sea from a rocky cliff face in what is known as ‘tombstoning’. There, the dangers were real if not always apparent. If the tide was not out far enough, they could easily kill themselves.
So when the decision was taken to cull their previous, marvellous facility, did the numbskulls responsible not take this into account? I think not.
You see, they fail to think these things through, and so the law of unintended consequences comes along and hits them over the head.
Whether it’s exhorting kids to wear goggles when they play conkers; preventing little old ladies setting flower arrangement in cathedrals unless they have criminal-record checks; not allowing hanging baskets in seaside resorts in case they fall on someone’s head; or not allowing the emergency services to go in to three feet of water to save a life; they seek to wrap us all in cotton wool and take the risk out of each and every sport and situation.
They do not realise that measuring risk and pitting ourselves against the odds is part of the human experience.
A large part of the fun of sports is knowing that there is an element of risk. Take it away and you have neutered most of the fun.
Our kiddies’ play parks today may be full of colourful plastics and rubberised flooring, but they are sanitised affairs and do not hold a fraction of the thrill of the play parks their parents enjoyed.
Kids need to learn how far they can go and arm themselves for the future in the school of hard knocks.
Look at the pathetically short-chained swings they insist on today, and compare them with the mighty chains of yesteryear that allowed you to soar almost to the heavens.
Yes, the duty of care is multi-layered; town halls should remember that as well as others. They almost forgot it at Mount Wise when those marvellous facilities which the poorer kinds of Devonport enjoyed so much were almost swept away. Only a public outcry stopped the axe from falling.
It was the same sad story with our precious lido. Hands off, I say, please.
A hard core of dysfunctional families
A hard core exists within our country of seriously dysfunctional families: around 130,000 or so according to a recent government-commissioned report.
Children from these families can best be described as ‘feral’, and they account for a disproportionate amount of the crime in their communities.
Their parents are simply not cut out for the hugely responsible job of care and parenting, with all the sacrifice and commitment which this entails. The truth is they cannot even manage their own lives, never mind those of their often many offspring. As a consequence, these children receive no parental guidance and in many cases no love either. Their lives are doomed from the very start, and it is difficult to know what can be done in such a situation.
A suggestion has been put forward by the head of Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) to pluck these children from their hopeless home environments and bestow on them the very considerable benefits of a boarding school education.
Although nothing can compensate for an abusive and loveless setup at home, what could go a long way to giving these unfortunate children a chance in life is to give them a first-class education – something to which their own parents attach no importance.
Regardless of what has gone on at home, a mind that has been stretched, educated and, yes, disciplined, can still break free from a hopeless family and go on to better things. Such a cultivated mind might return to their families during term breaks and talk some sense into their feckless, couldn’t-care-less parents.
At the very least, if they did not succeed in this – although some might – they would be later able to present themselves to the world of work as potentially valuable assets to their company of choice.
The newly appointed head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, deserves to be praised for being prepared to address this difficult issue.
Britain has always been admired around the world for the quality of its boarding school ethos. They turned out to be the elite that made it possible for us to hold our worldwide empire together. It was very much the model on which Plato himself said would make for an ideal education.
Not long ago, the children’s charity UNICEF released figures concerning the life chances of British children who passed through Britain’s current care system; they were truly shocking and dispiriting. Based on historical evidence, the figures stated that 30% would likely grow up to become criminals, 20% homeless and 10% suicidal.
Such statistics caused me to wonder why it was that such a large majority of my own peers in the Foundling Hospital made happy and successful lives for themselves. They had, after all, been very much in ‘the care system’, and in their case did not even know who their own parents were.
But the new school which replaced their 200-year-old one in central London was a truly splendid affair with top-draw facilities; it occupied around a hundred acres and had its own farm which provided fresh produce for the children. The teachers and housemasters were, for the most part, kindly and sympathetic people who had themselves been well educated. But there were red lines and they were crossed at your peril.
Children developed a respect for authority along with a love for their country and were sound in the three Rs. There was an emotional deficit, just as there is in today’s troubled children, but the ordered life, three square meals a day and sound, if basic, education allowed them to overcome their other difficulties.
Why I am so convinced that Sir Michael Wilshaw’s has got it right is that the removal for a large part of the year from the mayhem and inadequacies of their home life will introduce them to another world. They would be free to realise their full potential, learn to treat others with respect and eventually step out into the world as cultured, educated human beings. What is not an option is that in the face of such appalling figures from UNICEF we do nothing. The whole situation shames us.
Sir Michael Wilshaw is to be lauded, not vilified, for his brave intervention in this perilous field of what to do with our problem children. If he is successful, the country will owe him a debt beyond measure. Pilot schemes must be set up without delay and the results carefully monitored.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
The state of our roads is very much a concern of everybody.
Currently motorists are trying to dodge – dangerously, I might add – millions of car-damaging potholes which severe winter temperatures have inflicted on us. Yet the government tells us that in these straightened time there is not the money to tackle them as we might wish.
It is possible that we might buy this line were it not for the fact that the highways department still seems to have ample funds to continue with changes to our existing road infrastructure.
For many years now we have had to put up with an endless succession of tinkering changes, all under the guise of protecting us from harming ourselves. I’m largely talking here of traffic lights where none had been previously thought necessary – even on roundabouts, the sole purpose of which is to keep the traffic flowing.
A few, I must concede, have been beneficial – especially improvements to known accident black spots. But then there is the senseless turning of so many streets into one way; the chicanes; the road bumps; the bus and cycle lanes (where grossly underused pavements could have been developed to accommodate the bicycles); traffic islands; and so many more instances of so-called ‘improvements’ which are actually little more than attempts of social engineering.
The fact is that for some long time now we have enjoyed one of the best road systems in the world, used by some of the safest drivers in Europe. So why, I keep asking myself, are we constantly wondering – and worrying – what ‘safety measure’ the road planners will think up next?
My own guiding principal is that old axiom ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
When the present government began the desperate task of finding savings why did it not turn its attention to the huge expenditure that these so-called improvements represented? We are talking billions here!
At a stroke it could have announced that we can perfectly well manage with what we’ve got and spend nothing more for the duration of one whole parliament. The savings would have been truly enormous, and can we seriously argue that we would have been any worse off?
During this time the traffic would have enjoyed the rare luxury of continuing to flow freely, spared the maddening delays which such ‘improvements’ entail.
I well remember a recent example of wasted effort and money in my own neck of the woods, where Plympton motorists join the A38 at the top of Chaddlewood. It was a spot where you had to keep your wits about you – but knowing the consequences of not doing so, people did. After all, you had a clear view of everything that was going on.
But Highways Harry knew better; he was not content with allowing motorists to trust the evidence of our own eyes, nor our own desire to stay alive. So at vast expense and months of roadworks and delays, he reconfigured things and, yes, you guessed it – traffic lights were part of his solution.
The upshot of it all is that, in my view, we are worse off than we were before and most certainly a lot poorer. I cannot think there could have been much change out of a million pounds for such a project.
The Department for Transport also pays little regard to the enjoyment of driving. When the Victorians developed their railways system, it was very much part of their game plan to drive the line through as scenic and pleasurable a route as it was possible to do – as long as doing so would not add too many more miles to the journey. You see, they wanted you to enjoy the trip.
As a result, we have some truly magnificent rail journeys all over our lovely island. They compare with some of the best in the world. One of them is right on our doorstep: the journey through Dawlish to Exeter. They could have saved a bob or two by a different, shorter, route, but they wanted you to enjoy your journey.
How differently the authorities view things today. They know how much the car means to us, but they are not the least bit interested in making the experience as pleasurable as they can.
Again, right on our doorstep: it used to be enjoyable to drive the Madeira Road route from the Barbican round the Hoe foreshore, with its world-beatingly spectacular views. Perversely, it would seem, they give every appearance of wanting to spoil it for us; they’ve peppered the road with poorly designed humps which deny you admiring the view at all.
Their answer, no doubt, is boy racers (I was never aware of it being an accident black spot). Well, police it properly, as you used to. Don’t rob us of one of our delights.
This highlights an area in which David Cameron’s vision of the Big Society could come into play.
The roads belong to us; it is we who have to live with the consequences of them getting things wrong, and we who have to foot the bills.
Seldom will the authorities admit a mistake, even when it is staring them in the face, much less make restitution. When it’s done, it’s done. “Tough,” is their attitude, “you must learn to live with it.”
It should not be enough for jobsworth Highways Harry, sitting in his office, to dream up ever new and bizarre schemes and then foist them on us. There should be much more democratisation where these matters are concerned, and in my view local people should have the final say.
Also, before our man in his office comes forward with his next bright idea – such as chicanes, road bumps and speed cameras – he should be obliged to prove his case and have done his homework. By this I mean that he should be able to convince us that there is a problem (i.e., by way of deaths, accidents or undue delays).
Every single decision which involves public money, dislocation or change should be evidence-based. In other words: bring us the proof.
If the government had put roads on a ‘care and maintenance’ basis at the start of its term of office, not only would there have been more than enough in the kitty to take care of every one of these scandalous potholes which so blight our driving today and damage our cars, but we might have been able to avoid some of the more contentious cuts altogether.
But before anyone takes me to task about the massive rise in unemployment we would see in our already hard-hit construction industry that a cessation of all road ‘improvements’ would entail, my answer is to get your priorities right.
Start building those much needed houses – social and otherwise – that our burgeoning population and young people need. Spain may have too many, but we most certainly have too few.
It must be truly depressing to see no prospect of ever being able to afford your own home. How can we bang on about family values when you cannot even find a pad to put down roots and raise your children?
You have to feel sorry for our young people. Not only can they not get their own roof over their head, but they cannot get a job either – even in many cases where they’ve toiled to get a degree. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’ve hit them with a double financial whammy: debt to pay off for what may well turn out to be a useless degree (if and when they do get a job), never mind a mountain of public debt to pay off as well.
All of this will make it next to impossible for them to pay into a pension plan for their old age. What a great legacy to leave our children. We should hang our heads in shame.
A train crash in slow motion
The euro crisis rolls on like a train crash in slow motion.
The fact is, you cannot bend economics to your will. The forces which say you cannot do this are almost as immutable as the laws of gravity. Yet that is what the founding fathers of the euro set out to do.
They sought to bind nations with wildly disparate national traits, and equally disparate levels of competitiveness, into one whole. But they did it for political reasons not economic.
It might have worked if all involved had applied the original, sensible rules of entry and submitted their annual budgets to a Brussels power of veto, but they did not.
A monetary union not backed by a fiscal one is actually a no brainer. It cannot work. Even those American founding fathers of nearly 250 years ago understood this.
The success of the American union had a lot to do with the template drawn from a single gene pool with a single historical experience, put in place by the original thirteen colonies who decreed a single language for all.
Now ‘cruel necessity’ – as Cromwell is said to have described the decision to cut off the king’s head – is pushing Europe to cut off the head of the errant Greek state and force it back to the Drachma, Europe’s oldest currency. It is also going to force those who remain within the single currency to give up forever sole control of their countries’ spending policies.
Having done that, then you might at last have a system which actually worked. Within that system would undoubtedly develop a super strong currency with the potential to displace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
It all hangs on what the Greeks vote for at the forthcoming election. Despite all the serious pain they are going through a surprising number of them (over 70%) still want to stay in the euro. But, being the hot-headed Greeks that they are, they cannot help but wear their pain on their sleeves.
If this shows itself by a massive protest vote for the party which promises to bucket a lot of austerity promises – as seems likely – then Greece’s days as a euro member are numbered.
The young and inexperienced party leader in question has convinced himself that the Germans, right now, need Greece more than the Greeks need the Germans. The logic of his argument is that the loss of Greece will begin the unravelling of the euro and quite possibly the whole ‘European Project’. He will simply refuse to implement austerity and defy the Germans and north Europeans to do their worst. He’s convinced they will blink first. I fear he and his nation are in for a terrible shock.
It has to be said that no one has benefited more from the euro than the Germans.
If they have huge reserves of savings that is because for a decade they have been marketing their products in a hugely (for them) undervalued currency. Their former chancellor, Helmut Kohl, has admitted – albeit belatedly – that at the time the political elite dared not ask the German people if they would surrender their beloved deutschmark in favour of the new currency because they knew that they would get a big fat nein.
Yet if the euro were to break up, their deutschmark would be back again – only this time with a vengeance; it would become so expensive that few could afford to buy their products. Exports would plummet.
So yes, the Germans are terrified that a Greek exit will set off an unstoppable chain reaction causing the weaker southern economies to drop out, threatening to destroy the whole single currency. But the Germans are equally terrified at seeing their hard earned savings and pensions going down a bottomless ‘Club Med’ plughole and an endless future of propping up lame duck economies.
So now the previously unthinkable is being touted in Berlin and the other chancelleries of Europe: Greece can go if it will not comply with its undertakings. It will serve as a salutary lesson to other possible backsliders, say some. Provided they do not show similar defiance as Greece, then I believe that Fritz will give the European Central Bank the powers it needs to act as the lender of last resort like the American Federal Reserve or the Bank of England.
Both for narrow self-interest and deep psychological reasons Germany does not wish the European Project to fail, much less be blamed for its failure. It wants desperately to be seen as a good European and lay forever the ghosts of its troubled past. So my own belief is that Germany will do all in it power to hold the eurozone together.
IIf the markets go on to attack the other weaker economies once Greece has gone, who knows where it will all end. Even German savings may not be enough to save the euro, so big are the debts of Italy and Spain, the 7th and 9th largest economies in the world.
George Soros, the man who bet against Britain staying in the ERM in 1992 and won a billion pounds in the process, says the euro train has three months before it hits the buffers. While he is not always right, we should worry. He is 60% of the time.
It is my firm belief, however, that the euro, in one form or another, will survive. And as strange – even weird – as it may seem, given present circumstances, there are still many countries waiting in the wings to join such as Poland, the Baltic states, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia and even perhaps Sweden and Denmark.
Had the original rules of entry been adhered to then none of the present PIIGS would have qualified to join in the first place and this nightmare would never have happened. For that, Germany must take its share of the blame; it does no good for it to get on its high horse over-much.
But a reformed euro, even if it has shed a whole swath of weaker members, may yet be something to behold. It’s been a long time in Europe since anyone has been able to boast of sound money. If it did not entail so great a loss of sovereignty, it might be a door that we ourselves might one day find ourselves greatly tempted to knock on.
Growing ourselves out of a hole
There is no better way to get yourself out of the kind of hole we find ourselves in today than to grow your way out.
All the emphasis to date has been on the debt which hangs round our neck like an albatross. But while it was right to worry about this and to take measures to bring it under control, now we must get an engine fired up whose sole purpose is growth.
Where can this growth come from? It is easier first to identify areas where it cannot and should not come from; namely the self-indulgent areas such as we had known for the decade before the credit crunch hit us in 2008.
More than any other sector, the construction industry has taken the brunt of the recession. Once, it was commonplace to see giant cranes at work in every city centre, out of town shopping development and business park. Not anymore.
All is quiet on the Western Front, yet at the same time we have a crisis in housing. Millions of newcomers have flooded into our country and they all need accommodation. And while this moribund industry is virtually at a standstill, millions of our young people cannot get on to the housing ladder because prices are still too high.
Nothing is more likely to bring these prices down than a massive programme of building which closes the gap between supply and demand.
More housing means more carpets to be fitted; more furniture and electrical appliances to be bought; more soft furnishings; more blinds; more kitchen utensils; more visits to DIY stores – the list goes on and on. So here is one area crying out for a massive growth strategy.
With interest rates at an historic low there was never a better time to take out a mortgage, if only the product was there at an affordable price.
What about infrastructure projects to which we are already committed? Surely these could be fast-tracked. The Olympic project has shown us what can be slung up in a remarkably short time frame.
And then there’s Boris Johnson’s pet project: the Thames Estuary Airport to complement Heathrow. The estuary project would not only send a powerful signal to the world that Britain is determined to get ahead of the curve business-wise and continue to host the world’s number one airport; it would also be a faith restoring project as well as, hopefully, the world’s most exciting and, perhaps even beautiful, airport. Even the green lobby would have to have all its boxes ticked.
In our efforts to get energy prices down – a very necessary prerequisite for growth – why don’t we and the rest of the struggling West release a large part of those strategic reserves of oil we all built up to fight the Cold War in the event that it became hot? And why, for that matter, are we pussyfooting about getting up the massive reserves of oil which lie all around the Falkland Islands? At a stroke it would make us oil self-sufficient and even allow us to make the European Union independent of Russian or any other single country’s oil. Imagine what clout that would give us in Brussels!
We could set up ‘Enterprise Zones’ in depressed areas with special tax breaks. There could also be NI exemptions for new start-ups as well as firms employing fewer than 50 who take on new employees.
Yet underpinning it all should be massive, irresistible pressure on the banks to make it all possible. And funnily enough, quite apart from the massive liquidity injected into the banking sector via quantitative easing (money printing), Britain’s big and medium-sized companies are sitting on a huge stash of cash, too frightened to spend it. Rather than wasting political capital debating House of Lords reform or gay marriage, the government must develop a more coherent business strategy to inspire confidence in the business community.
With the pound so much more competitive than before the crisis and historically low interest rates provided by our recapitalised banks, we are in so much better a place than our continental rivals who have yet to bite this most difficult of bullets. Altogether we have very much going for us, if only we could be brought to see it.
Growth can also come from the world beyond Europe which occupies 60% of our export market – some of which in the developing world is not in recession at all. In this regard we have a competitive advantage since much of what we have kept of our once mighty industrial capacity is now at the cutting edge – and consequently difficult for foreigners to poach – such as Rolls Royce aeroplane engines and other high-tech earners such as our renowned computer software sector.
While we do not exercise that hard power that we once deployed around the world any longer, we still deploy plenty of soft power. We punch far above our weight everywhere.
There is a huge amount of warmth and goodwill to be found towards us in the world. You have only to look at that great gathering of the Commonwealth of Nations every four years to see that. Nowadays you even have countries which were never part of the empire applying to join the grouping.
I do not see it as fanciful that one day Uncle Sam himself will wonder why he has not re-joined his original family. Perhaps there is some truth in what George Santayana, the famous Spanish-born American philosopher, poet, and humanist, said when he opined in the nineteenth century: ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece was the world ruled by such a sweet, just, boyish master’.
We are mad not to capitalise on all this. And the wheels have been greased for us by the world choosing to speak our language before any other. We don’t even have to take an interpreter with us.
Skivers won’t turn around our fortunes
It is natural that workers in the public sector seek to weaken the law of the jungle in their state-funded workplace as best they can, but it must be remembered that the jungle is still where wealth is created.
It cannot be allowed to open up a gulf in remuneration, security and work conditions which causes resentment in that part of the economy that must produce the wealth to keep things going. It is unimaginable that any private business should say to its workforce, ‘don’t bother attending the office for the seven weeks before, during and after the Olympics. Do it all from home!’ But that is what is proposed for no less than 400,000 civil servants working in Central London.
This kind of disconnect with reality speaks volumes. Not even communist Chinese economics came up with such a ludicrous suggestion at their own Olympics.
There are two worlds which exist within our country: one of them is the closeted world of the public sector and the other is the brutal world of the private sector .
The Victorians had two guiding principles: sound money and a small, non-intrusive state. They ran the civil service with 4,000 against today’s 500,000.
They ran India with 1,000, spent 2% of GDP on Armed Forces which controlled half the world and all its oceans. Such was their power that they imposed the Pax Britannica which lasted a hundred years. It was only the second universal peace since Rome’s famous Pax Roma. They were stunningly successful in almost all their endeavours – except for one: they did not care sufficiently for the poor and disadvantaged. But even here, they began to develop a conscience.
Prompted by the evangelicals and people like Dickens, they began to mend their ways and see that their Christian beliefs did not sit properly with the squalor to be seen on their streets. So little by little, welfare became an issue.
By 1945 it became the lodestar which governed all state thinking. Armies of bureaucrats came forward to administer the new system (armies of what, when I was doing national service, were known as malingerers) also came forward with their hard-luck stories.
So at the very time that wealth creation was being relegated, the welfare state was being elevated. In the end, the welfare state became insupportable.
If this recession has served no other purpose but finally to get us to see all this then it will not have been in vain.
Of course, we must continue to do our duty by the disadvantaged, but we face a hard task in winkling out the malingerers.
Almost all of the third world countries must go down the road we went in taking better care of their people – but if they are wise they will learn from our mistakes.
As it is, at the moment, they enjoy a huge advantage over us competitively in that they do not carry the huge expense of even a limited welfare state. That, together with much lower wages, makes it next to impossible for the West to compete.
But their peoples are already demanding – and getting – increased pay packets; they are also demanding better work conditions and welfare for the disadvantaged – all of which will cost money.
When we have eventually completed the much harder task of convincing all our able-bodied people who presently feel no conscience about not working to work, there will be a meeting point at which we will all be competing on a substantially more level playing field.
This scenario has already been played out in several former third world countries such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. They were all once undercutting us wholesale, and it will be the same with China, India and Brazil.
There are penalties with being an innovator – the first in the field in any activity. Inevitably you make lots of mistakes; but those coming later can take advantage of what you got wrong as well as the much greater number of things you got right. Once of the reasons Germany created the as successful an industrial model as it did was because it was able to avoid making the same mistakes we did.
One of those was with its technical colleges and apprenticeships. They elevated distinction on the factory floor; doctors of engineering and the sciences were as highly regarded as doctors of medicine in Britain and the landed gentry. There was not the same prejudice against those who got their hands dirty as opposed to those who kept them clean, as there was in Britain. Your smart boy was as likely to head for the factory as he was for the professions.
It is easy to forget that as little as 10 years ago Germany was being talked about as the sick man of Europe, having taken our place pre-Thatcher. But then she set about freeing up her labour markets and keeping down costs, including labour. Result: Germany über alles. And we must do the same.
The newly released Beecroft Report must be acted on. If we want jobs, we must make it as easy as possible for firms to hire, and that has to include the right to fire. No employer gets rid of a worker who is an asset to their company, and workers must know that their best protection is to be so. Only the skiver needs to fear, and why shouldn’t he? He won’t turn around our fortunes.
Leading by example
For society to work we must have people whom we can respect and admire.
Every now and then we need a titan, and if the Nobel prize is any measure we’ve had them in disproportionate numbers. In former times, such people were to be found in the sciences, academia, the Civil Service, town halls, the Westminster village, hospitals, the military, the legal profession, the utilities – and yes, of course, the banks.
Of all of these – and there are still many more – only the military today continues to inspire our admiration. But today even our famed ‘James Bond’ Secret Service has been found seriously wanting (i.e. the spook in the bag scandal).
It is a sad state of affairs when we have come to conclude that they are all in it for themselves and are letting us down in the process. At the heart of it all is a me-me culture leading to the devil take the hindmost outlook. Is it not surprising, therefore, that there is a cynicism about such as we have not known before. The turnout at the recent by-elections does no more than reflect that.
Proposals for elected city mayors and police chiefs – which in ordinary circumstances ought to promise so much – have been greeted by a sceptical public as little more than another devious ploy to distract us and deflect our anger. We are not in a mood for more tinkering, and prefer to leave well alone rather than risk additional mayhem from people whose motives we have come to suspect.
Had these proposals come from leaders we had come to admire and trust, does anyone doubt that they would have been received differently? It would have been more a case of ‘well, if this is what they believe is for the best, then we ought at least to consider it seriously’.
Returning to the subject I covered last week – the continuing offensive behaviour of bankers – we are being forced to watch perfectly good businesses being allowed to go down the swanny because banks won’t help. Refusing to use taxpayers’ money – with which we’ve stuffed their gullets so full they are in danger of constipation – to fulfil their moral obligation to save small businesses from the recession they created, they insist on using it to recover from their gambling-induced hangover to begin another binge anew.
We have gone from the sublime to the gawd blimey. One minute they were throwing money at us as though it was of going out of fashion – we all remember the credit cards once raining down on us like confetti – and the next they are sitting on it like mother hens nursing their eggs. Such extreme gyrations were never going to be anything other than disastrous for the general public.
If business activity and growth are now in a trough of despondency, this is because people have finally wised up to reality and are now anxious to pay down the debts that the banks have profited on so greatly. But now that the party has stopped, the banks are being allowed to have their cake and eat it, too.
Having said all this about the banks, we should not forget our own shortcomings; how eagerly and irresponsibly did we succumb to their blandishments to ratchet up our own personal debt levels by taking out second mortgages and spending much more than we earned. And although many have come to realise they cannot continue living beyond their means, we can only hope and pray that once personal debts have been paid off people will not have lost the habit of spending!
But human nature being what it is – and the average chap being no match for these whizz kids of finance – it is not difficult to see who was going to win the argument of persuasion. This is where the government, and in particular the Bank of England and FSA, should have stepped in.
With personal debt levels higher as a proportion of GDP than any country in the developed world, and house prices rising at a rate much greater than wages, the signals were all on red alert.
With all the gloating over Labour’s local election successes this week, the public must not forget that the last government bears a great deal of responsibility for our present woes. How could ministers warn Joe Public against the dangers of excessive debt when they themselves were the standard bearer of borrowing to the hilt? Had they shown ‘prudence’ – Gordon Brown’s now pricelessly ironic sobriquet – then they could have warned against the dangers and taken measures to restrain it.
But as well as borrowing like there was no tomorrow, the last government increased the burden of the public sector payroll by no less than 64% during its time in office.
All we can say is that these hard times are teaching us some very hard truths. History, however, does show us one encouraging thing: there never was a recession that sooner or later did not yield to better days.
The financial crisis has all given us no end of a reality check. Let’s hope that in so doing it has taught us no end of a lesson.
Shameless bankers still don’t get it
Ordinarily it is not a healthy thing to look for scapegoats in any and every bad situation, but neither is it sensible to ignore blatant wrongdoing.
Bankers have done terrible things to the peoples of the western world.
What has to be understood by the banking community is that they are in a position of trust. People deposit their precious savings in what, until recent times, was the certainty that when they needed them they would be safe and available. In old age, it would be there to ameliorate the sadder downside of being old.
The funds which the banks hold are, quite obviously, not their money; and they have certainly not earned a right to keep it. If they see it as part of their proper function to grow depositors’ money, then they are only entitled to do so in ways that are totally safe. But this is no longer their priority.
They have also have come to see themselves differently, almost as though they are the elect of god. Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive of that wicked empire, Goldman Sachs, certainly didn’t seem to be in any doubt when he declared in a 2009 interview that he was “doing God’s work”.
They traded financial instruments so fiendishly complex that only the former NASA scientists that created them understood them. Collateralised debt obligations? They might as well be speaking another language.
Viewing themselves as godlike Olympians with the power to move mountains, they set about gambling on a scale never before known in human history. In the run-up to the financial crisis, investment bankers annually exchanged financial derivatives to the value of one quadrillion dollars in international financial markets. To put that figure into perspective, by 2007 financial institutions were annually exchanging 10 times the inflation-adjusted value of the entire planet’s manufactured goods over the previous century.
Theirs, in their world view, was not a job to be compared to any other. The sheer scale of their operations proved that. They revelled in the sobriquet awarded them: ‘Masters of the Universe’.
Buying into the bankers’ warped take on life were the politicians, ever greedy for the crumbs which were dropping wholesale off this beneficent table into their coffers. As with the make-or-break power of the Murdochs, the politician – when asked to jump – would only reply: how high?
Now events have conspired to puncture the hubristic dreams of these lords of creation. We, the blameless, have been obliged to mortgage our and our children’s future to save the rotten system and, in the process, their necks.
The hole they have dug for us is pitiably deep. And meantime, we learn of hungry children being bought meals at their schools by their teachers.
Do we see contrition for the misery they have inflicted on so many millions, or gratitude for what has been done to keep them in work while so many others have been laid off? Do we indeed!
That shameless bonus escalator is again in full swing and everything as far as they are concerned is again business as usual. For the rest of us it is deep anxiety, joblessness, falling living standards, savings returns decimated, and no guarantee that we’ll ever get out of it.
The question therefore arises of why there should not be a system in place, as there is partially in the US, that allows for prosecutions and prison terms. Would ‘Fred the Shred’ be luxuriating today on his £400,000 a year pension were he to have been operating on the other side of the pond?
Malpractice which impacts so horrendously on people’s lives, and the very survival of the system that keeps the world afloat, should not be without the severest sanctions where it can be shown that wrongdoing has taken place.
Footballers cannot operate except within a strict framework of rules, and yet a system which can bring down the world is allowed to do virtually as it pleases. The trouble is that the people we would have to rely on as the enforcers are too much involved and in hoc to the people they are being asked to police.
Four years into this banker-driven recession we are entitled to ask why nothing meaningful has been done. Would they be so ready to destroy our livelihoods if they knew that they would face prison terms for bad and criminal practice?
That senior executives of Barclays Bank this week have awarded themselves two-thirds of their company’s profits, leaving the remaining third to the shareholders, strikes me as little more than corporate theft… or grand larceny, for want of a better term.
One way or another we have to find ways of cutting these unrepentant Masters of the Universe down to size.
Gordon Gekko, of the 1987 Wall Street movie starring Michael Douglas, would have been proud indeed that his “greed is good” message to the world had been so thoroughly absorbed and acted on by his successors.
We have recently learned that the executives of the top 100 FTSE companies will have collared 205 times the pay of their average workers within the next ten years. Fifty years ago, it was considered acceptable for the man at the top to earn twenty times that of the man on the shop floor.
Yet the FTSE barons have been awarding themselves an increase that averages 13% for each of the past twenty years. And this is from the very people who have been laying off thousands of their workers during these years of recession. They don’t even feel obliged to look after their own.
There is a shamelessness to be seen that sets no limits on greed.
Even performance does not come into the equation; failure will attract reward to almost the same degree as success.
Just like the politicians with their fraudulent expenses, the bankers in their casino madness just don’t get it. They feel themselves to be unjustifiably picked on: the hapless victims of a wicked witch hunt.
The virus has spread to the Civil Service, the Town Halls, the Utilities and others paid from the public purse. They too have seen the chance to enrich themselves: they too have joined this pernicious business of ratcheting up the pay differentials.
Is there no limit to the shamelessness on display? Would a differential of a thousand times satisfy their ravenous appetites?
Desperate to plug the glaring hole in the country’s finances, the Chancellor of the Exchequer must wait to get the better part of half a billion pounds that Goldman Sachs owes all of us. Despite a £1.5bn profit from its British operations, they have found a way of delaying payment which they readily admit is due. Shame on them.
That bank truly represents what a former British Prime Minister once memorably described as the “unacceptable face of capitalism”. No bank in history has had so many fines levied on it for scams and bad practice.
As for the American CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, he truly does live up to his name. That £26.4m package of his would buy an awful lot of the sparklers. Never mind diamonds being a girl’s best friend. They’re Bob’s, too.
The demise of titans
We are about, I think, to witness the fall of two imagined titans: one from the world of showbiz and the other from the world of politics.
The first is Simon Cowell – a latter day phenomenon of the small screen – and the second is Nicholas Sarkozy – the man who promised a Thatcherite revolution and who dreamed of being a little emperor like that other interloper from Corsica, Napoleon.
Cowell, who I will concede has admitted making serious mistakes in the past, has now got himself into a mindset in which he believes he can do no wrong and that everything he touches today will, inevitably, turn to gold.
But many now argue that he showed very poor judgement in jettisoning Sharon Osbourne in favour of Dannii Minogue – I’ve asked why, myself, many times – and that Sharon would have been a much more feisty and entertaining judge.
Now we come to his greatest error of judgement: the decision to co-operate with Tom Bower in the production of a biography.
Had he troubled himself enough to read just one of that distinguished biographer’s works, he would have realised in an instant what little good to his carefully crafted image he would do him.
Long ago I read his expose on the publisher, Robert Maxwell. What an annihilation of that monster it turned out to be! Although I haven’t read his recent work on Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss, it was so unflattering that Bernie came to believe that if only he had co-operated with the writer, Bower couldn’t have helped but to have come to an appreciation of what a truly wonderful man his subject really was: and so he advised Simon accordingly.
Suffice it to say that Bernie is not any longer flavour of the month with Simon.
The truth is that if you’re going to submit yourself to the laser-like investigative eye of Tom Bower, you’d better be as normal and squeaky clean as it’s possible to be. It turns out that Simon, as many of us suspected, is neither of these things.
He has offended that largest constituency of his – his legion of adoring women fans. Even his often cruel put-downs of X-Factor contestants were forgiven because they were viewed by many as no more than the truth, and were seen as the honest response of a man who abhorred humbug and insisted on telling it as it was.
They managed to convince themselves that inside his callous exterior he was a pussycat; one even with a heart of gold. It was, after all, well known that he was crazy about dogs. What was less well known was that he had a huge problem with humans.
Many of Simon’s female admirers wanted nothing so much as for him to find the woman of his dreams who would help him settle down and produce lots of little Simons. But they didn’t know that he was in the grip of myriads of the strangest habits; that he was afflicted with a degree of narcissism that would have made Narcissus himself blanch; and that he saw women, even a wife, as nothing more than appendices to his overweening lust for power and wealth.
Poor Mezhgan Hussainy, who ecstatically agreed to become his wife, was on a hiding to nothing and would suffer only humiliation before – like so many others – she was cast aside.
Women, it seems to Simon, are seen as trophy objects to be used and discarded at the will of the great showbiz Don Juan. But what they must never do is come between him and that drive for dominance on the small screen.
Will it be the big screen next? The much hyped tie-up with the deeply unattractive Sir Phillip Green was meant to sweep all before it. Whatever happened to that?
Worrying developments for Simon recently must be the fiasco game show ‘Black & Red’. But worst of all is dear old sclerotic Auntie BBC stealing a ratings march on him with its hugely successful show ‘The Voice’. Has Simon finally peaked?
As for the little emperor Sarkozy, who delights in lambasting all things British and playing the sulky schoolboy by insulting our own prime minister: he too seems in danger of getting his comeuppance.
The pity of it is that in demonstrating its contempt of its coarse, bling-loving president, the French electorate are about to plunge the eurozone into its worst crisis yet.
Even Sarkozy’s lovely trophy wife, Carla Bruni, doesn’t seem able to help as she is held in almost as much contempt as is her husband.
In ordinary circumstances, presenting the French nation with a little baby emperor would have earned a few Brownie points – the loving family, doting father and all that – but even baby Sarko hasn’t seemed to have helped. Even our own Wicked Witch of the West, Cherie Blair, did achieve a slight, if temporary, softening of her image when baby Leo came along.
Why the socialist, François Hollande, will rock – perhaps even sink – the eurozone boat is because he wants to prescribe for France more of the doctrinaire spending madness that got us all into this mess in the first place.
No chance under him of cutting loose from that ridiculously uncompetitive 35-hour week! And his pursuit and confiscatory tax policies on high earners is certain to unleash an exodus of the very people that France needs most to pull her out of her largely unacknowledged quagmire.
It says it all that the man cannot even recognise the demographic time bomb of a low birth rate, an ageing population and longer life expectancy that is forcing the rest of the developed world into raising its retirement age.
One of the few, modest achievements of the would-be new broom that Sarkozy promised for France – increasing retirement age to 62 – is to be struck down and go back to where it was.
Mon dieu !
A heavy price for insurrection
Everyone will have heaved a sigh of relief that the preacher of death, Abu Hamza, and four of his associates have failed in their bid to avoid extradition to the US.
Of course, the European Court of Human Rights would have caused outrage had they failed to bring in any other verdict. It would have been saying our closest ally was no different than the likes of Jordan, Morocco or Pakistan and that it could not be trusted not to torture or apply inhumane conditions – when in fact the conditions are likely to be even more over the top than our own 3.5-star gaols.
So the result, in truth, was a foregone conclusion and would, had it been otherwise, have represented a gross insult to the world’s greatest democracy.
Interestingly, the extradition is of exactly the kind that the controversial UK-US Extradition Treaty was designed to cover (i.e. terrorism). Had we reminded the US of this in many of the disputed cases where a clear terrorism link could not be established, we could have avoided much of the acrimony that has been thrown up.
But the fact remains that the treaty is flawed: the legal requirements in each case are not the same, making it easier for Uncle Sam to get his hands on our people than for us to get our hands on his. What incompetent treaty drafter thought it was in order to produce a document of this kind? He should be kicked sideways into oblivion as should the several other jobsworths who must have perused it before it was enacted into law.
This refusal to punish people who make monumental cock ups in the public sector is an affront to all of us; I believe it is at the root of so many of the outrages about which we throw up our arms and say ‘never again’ or ‘lessons will be learned’, but where they never seem to be.
In industry or commerce, it is clearly understood that either you do the job for which you are being paid or you will go. Only an equal sanction for those paid from the public purse is likely to do the trick.
Nothing, as they say, concentrates the mind like a good hanging.
What enrages the public so much is that salt is so often rubbed into the wound by either rewarding the miscreant with a promotion or allowing early retirement with the most mouth-watering of financial packages.
Police, for instance, can often avoid investigation into alleged irregularities by the simple expedient of taking early retirement. And that brings me to the ex-policeman, Brian Paddick, the no-hoper would-be mayor of London.
What a lovely set-up – naturally facilitated by money-bags Joe Public – that allows a perfectly fit and able copper to retire at the age of 49 on a pension of £65,000 a year!
This nice little nugget of information was thrown up as a result of the recent live BBC Newsnight debate between the mayoral contestants when, unwittingly, they stumbled into a pledge of total transparency in financial matters.
The issue has snowballed to the point where every senior holder of public office can now expect to be required to come clean. Get ready for more revelations about where all our money is going and how much.
But I started this article on prisons, and it seems right to finish on the same note.
The eleven and a half year sentence meted out to the London riot arsonist may have struck some as a bit over the top. But remember this: it was so very nearly murder and the offender gave not a thought to the fact that there could well have been many people trapped on an upstairs level.
As it was, a woman had to leap for her life to avoid being incinerated.
The law has always taken a very hard line where arson is concerned, and not just because it concerns property. Whole cities have been destroyed by conflagrations, including our own capital and large numbers of lives are lost to this day in fires. It is, perhaps, the most terrible way for a life to end.
Remember also that the authorities felt, rightly or wrongly – and, in this case, I think rightly – that they had to dish our exemplary sentences where the authority of the state was under threat.
For a moment during those terrible scenes of last August there was a widespread feeling that Armageddon had arrived: that if it escalates, the next thing we’ll see is the Prime Minister’s head being paraded down Whitehall on a pike, and that the dark underbelly of the disaffected underclass was taking over and was about to take revenge on the ‘haves’.
A message had to go out that if you indulge in acts of what amounted to insurrection, you can expect to pay a heavy price.
In those particular circumstances it would have seemed nonsensical to apply the normal slap-on-the-wrist for a bit of shoplifting.
And as for the recipient of the eleven and a half year sentence, also remember this: he turned out to be a career criminal with violence a part of his repertoire; and that the eleven and a half years is something of a joke anyway since he will be back on the streets in 2016 having served only half of his sentence.
A Marshall Plan for PIGS
I recently watched a BBC interview with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor – a very rare event since she has only once before given an interview to the foreign media.
The interview represented a considerable feather in the cap of the BBC, further confirming its status as the world’s premier broadcaster.
The interviewer, Newsnight’s Gavin Esler, wanted to get inside the head of the person who will largely determine the future of the eurozone and, to some degree, the rest of the world.
The visual aspect of TV makes it very difficult for an interviewee to ‘fake it’; to pass himself off as someone else. His body language and emotions are often plain to see; and when his face occupies most of a 42″ screen in your living room, you feel you can almost look into his soul. TV greatly assists in our quest to sort out the wheat from the chav.
Merkel came over as a pleasant, but no-nonsense, woman – interested more in getting the job done than in sound bites. Astute as she was with thoughtful responses, she seemed genuine.
And there was more than a little guile there too (but you don’t get to lead the most powerful economy in Europe without a level of that).
It was not difficult to understand why she had taken a shine to our own prime minister – the polished, well-mannered product of England’s leading public school. She may even have fancied the younger man a little, or perhaps felt a tad motherly, seeing him as the archetypal English gentleman as opposed to the coarse, bling-loving French president who wants to smother her at every opportunity with Gallic kisses. The contrast is stark.
Cameron is a most courtly emissary from a fellow Teutonic power which, from early childhood, she had come to respect. Yet despite its bombing of large areas of her beloved homeland almost back to the Stone Age only a generation or two before, it is apparent that – in economic terms at least – Merkel regards Britain as a natural ally and one she is most unwilling either to offend or marginalise.
The BBC was right in picking Gavin Esler as the interviewer, since Paxo might have been too adversarial by adopting his characteristic ‘master inquisitor’ approach.
But what I really gleaned from the interview is an appreciation of the lengths to which Germany will go to save the single currency.
Up to now, Angela Merkel has, understandably, played hardball. The German taxpayer is not going to throw his money at profligate nations which show an unsatisfactory willingness to change their ways.
The Germans want a new economic order in Europe so that nations act responsibly in the future; and to this end they want robust systems in place in the form of a fiscal union.
Germany is not interested in imposing a German jackboot, but wants the whole exercise to be seen as a pan-European affair – even though a fiscal union would result in all 17 eurozone nations’ budgets being overseen by EU officials: a fact masked by a Byzantium-level of cunningness or ingenuity (call it what you will).
I came away from that interview convinced that the German political elite do not want a single member – not even Greece – to drop out of the eurozone. And when push comes to shove, they will do everything in their power to see that this does not happen. They see the loss of a single country as the trigger that will begin the unravelling of the entire single currency and, more than that, of the whole ‘European Project’ to which it is so utterly and irredeemably committed.
So now, it would seem, it is down to the individual eurozone member states to do what is necessary. Only time will tell whether the eurozone’s peripheral countries’ impoverished citizens will – or even can – stay the course.
Pain levels in Greece – and now, more alarmingly, Spain – are at breaking point. A pistol shot to the head outside the Greek Parliament of a 77-year-old retired pharmacist has a terrible resonance with that pistol shot long ago at Sarajevo which set in motion the chain of events which led to the First World War.
Germany has to understand that PIGS’ (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) citizens can take little more pain. While it was necessary to start the austerity drive and change PIGS’ spending habits, it is clear that austerity alone is fast becoming counter-productive.
If Germany wishes them to hold on, she must give them hope – and this can only mean a plan not just for cuts, but for growth. She must put together and spearhead a new Marshall Plan of aid – such as saved Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Germany does not wish to be cast as the villain all over again; the one who did wrong by Europe for a third time, only now by economic, rather than military, might.
Now that we have all come to understand that we must stop living beyond our means, and that the social model we have developed is unsustainable, we are in a position to go forward.
Only by means of growth and a smaller state sector have we a chance of paying down our debt.
Fearful and envious as we may be of the developing countries – and that includes the oil producers – they are as one in wanting us to succeed; for if we go down the pan, we are as likely as not to drag them down with us – and they know this.
They might even feel that it is in their interest to involve themselves in such a rescue plan. But they will not do so if they see north Europe, and in particular the Germans, sitting on a pot of gold but refusing to use it to kick start their own salvation.
God, as they say, helps those who help themselves.
Why are the Argentines so obsessed?
This was a dismal week thirty years ago.
A very nasty military junta, which had already killed over 20,000 of its own people – many thrown out of helicopters over the open ocean – had seized a far away British territory and made it its own. We were in shock.
And so the Falkland Islands burst upon the world scene and became a cause celebre – at least for the British nation.
Of all the many campaigns our assertive little country has ever fought, this had to be the bravest of them all… some said almost suicidally so; certainly foolhardy in the extreme, said others.
Our connections with the south polar regions have always been very great. Cook sailed into them in his search for the great ‘southern continent’ before he became almost ice locked and was forced to turn tail. The intrepid Ernest Shackleton almost made it to the pole and our very own Plymouth hero Captain Scott was mourned again this very week on the 100th anniversary of his poignant and tragic death.
It has always been a very great puzzle to me as to why Argentina obsesses, as it does, about the Falkland Islands and why it believes it has a better legal claim to them than we do.
It was, after all, the English navigator John Davis who first discovered them in 1592. And the British first established a permanent settlement as long ago as 1765 – over seventy years before Argentina came into existence.
In today’s world, the United Nations makes the wishes of the inhabitants of a disputed territory the deciding factor. Does anybody doubt for a second what those wishes would be?
Iceland is not a great deal more distant from Britain than are the Falklands from Argentina. What would the world say were we to state that Iceland should rightfully belong to us?
And what about the Channel Islands, only 10 miles from France and 90 miles from us? I don’t hear the French playing up about them.
My thoughts on the Falklands are simple: history is on our side, as well as that little matter of possession being nine-tenths of the law. What’s more, we’ve paid in blood to overturn Argentine aggression.
They stay ours until the inhabitants decide otherwise.
While blood can never be redeemed, expenses can; and to secure them against future aggression, they have been huge. So get up that oil and quickly!
Our balance of payments deficit can be mightily relieved by a bonanza hugely greater than the north sea.
Should Argentina be so foolish as to try to intimidate the oil companies already operating there then the British Government should state unequivocally to underwrite any risks that such silly threats are thought to pose to those operations.
Long ago – thirty years in fact – I made an attempt to summarise that heroic conflict in verse. This might seem a good moment to share the thoughts I had at that time with my readers.
The last of the colonial wars
Was strangely in a noble cause:
A far off people, few but strong,
Knew in their hearts where they belonged;
Their island home to most unknown
Would tug at Albion like a bone:
Assaulted for its wind-lashed bogs,
Its distant owners viewed as dogs;
Sad days for Argentina, these:
How could its despots seek to please
A tortured land in Fascist claws?
But rouse them in a long-lost cause,
The British state seemed not to care:
Its woes so great its chest would bare;
Now was the time to strike and win,
And quell its people’s clamorous din!
The world awoke that April day
To find that Spain’s child now held sway;
A stunned and humbled Britain gasped:
Depression reigned but would not last;
A steely thought ran through the land
That such an outrage must not stand;
The empire’s day it knew was done,
But never did its soldiers run;
The islanders sought firm redress;
Their injured pleas brought dire distress:
They were not Latin folk in chains,
But free-born Brits they stoutly claimed;
At any other time but this,
The men in London would resist
A rescue from across the world;
But now was firm defiance hurled:
A Boudicca was come to power,
Though some around would only cower;
At lightning speed her ships set forth,
To 50 South from 50 North;
Long years of cringing fell away
As Britons cheered them on their way;
Then silence fell as weeks progressed,
With fearful thoughts and risks assessed;
Its one-time child, the USA,
Could only look on in dismay:
A war between its two allies
Could rupture one of these two ties;
How hard she tried to arbitrate,
Then left the despots to their fate;
For Latin pride stood in the way
And now was come the time to pay!
Ships at length reached southern waters:
Skull and Crossbones meant no quarter;
The pride of Argentina’s fleet
Went plunging to the icy deep;
Now did the blood begin to flow
As combat raged with woe on woe;
For freedom comes at heavy price:
The toll is death when fools play dice;
Malvinas?… now read Falkland Isles:
The settlers there could once more smile;
In Latin parts more despots fell:
Their foul regimes consigned to hell.
Defusing the ticking NHS timebomb
Immigration is a matter of very great concern to us as it has placed huge pressures on all of our public services.
It has even, some would argue, started to erode some of our core British values.
When numbers equivalent to a city the size of Plymouth come into our country each year, it is natural that people tend to become alarmed. Yet I have had an experience this week which has opened my eyes to one important aspect of it.
Having hammered my knees over a lifetime, I needed to get them replaced. The first to receive the treatment was done twenty months ago (successfully, I might add). Ever the glutton for punishment, I pressed on.
It’s a big op, I have to admit, and the aftermath is painful; but what’s a bit of short-term suffering against a very great and long-term gain? Thus I tried to persuade myself, for I knew what I was letting myself in for the second time round.
Everyone will have to cope with clapped out and painful joints as they grow older. The lucky ones, in my view, are the ones where this happens early as they get them replaced. The less fortunate soldier on with their dodgy parts until it is too late… they are too old.
They have to watch the sprightly oldies – with their joints replaced – enjoying full and pain-free mobility while they struggle on with sticks and, if they can afford them, mobility scooters.
I opted to go to the Peninsula Treatment Centre. There, I was surrounded by a mini United Nations.
There were Filipinos, South Africans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Zambians, Polish, Romanians, Germans, French, Zimbabweans, Bulgarians – oh, and yes, one or two Brits. They all spoke excellent English and the service that I received was top-draw.
As a team they were magnificent. If only the UN, away in New York, could perform so harmoniously. Even the building and the standard of cleanliness were beyond compare.
Altogether it was a great experience. It makes you think, doesn’t it? It would not be over-egging it to say that if you’d kept these people out of our country then we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.
In the higher echelon skills at Peninsula, East Europe seemed to have excelled itself. The Communists got many things wrong, but education was not one of them.
I have reason to know this at first-hand. My Lithuanian, university-educated wife (fluent in three languages) is a constant reminder. She even helps me with my crosswords – would that I could do the same with hers – and she sometimes assists with a point of grammar. English was her subject at uni, you see.
It would be no exaggeration to say that if all these superb people were removed from Peninsula it would have to shut down. Who then would be the loser?
Of course, you will have noticed that they all spoke good English and for the most part were highly skilled. This is the road we must go down: cherry-picking the best who want to join us.
As it happens we are the destination of first choice to these people because of our language, law-driven society and tolerance; they are not the sort of people who want to be holed up in some kind of ghetto, insulated from the rest of us.
It was a very big mistake to allow the mantra of diversity to shut down discussion as to how we could best integrate newcomers to these shores, and in this respect there is much the Americans could teach us.
Last week I bumped into a fellow shopkeeper and he too had had both knees renewed. They had been done the better part of twenty years ago and he wasn’t even using a stick. He is 91.
Instead of feeling that he had been put out to pasture, he has been allowed to remain a vibrant member of, and contributor to, our local community.
This has to be the future… keeping as many of us as possible active into old age. But it has to start much earlier than our 91-year-old shopkeeper, that’s for sure.
The wonderful new £41.5m Life Centre, opened this week in Plymouth, is certainly a step in the right direction.
All of us must take charge of our own well being, wherever possible, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in so doing. But those of us who are not prepared to invest in a healthier, happier future must be brought to see how very foolish this is.
We know we can successfully influence people’s life choices. Look what we did in turning attitudes around with regard to smoking and drink driving.
The ticking NHS time bomb of an ageing population could, in large measure, be defused if we could all be persuaded to get off our derrieres and get moving. Preventative medicine has the potential to free up possibly a quarter of all our hospital beds and allow us, in the process, to lead happier, healthier and more productive lives.
If the recession causes us to cut our supermarket food bills, so much the better, say I.
Instead of so many old people feeling surplus to requirements, they would become a valued and much needed part of society.
We British usually appreciate being the first recipients of most things coming over ‘the pond’. But I did not appreciate learning that, after the Americans, we are the next most obese people in the developed world. As it happened, not long after learning that, I watched newsreel footage of our people in the 1940s and 50s. Do you know, I couldn’t see a fatty among them?
Food rationing had done its work and made us the healthiest we had ever been; they all looked leaner, fitter and, I have to say, altogether merrier.
Although the treatments available to them, at that time, were primitive by our standards, at least they weren’t imposing a burden on their fellow citizens, because of their super indulgent, lazy lifestyle. They were all pulling their weight – just not so much of it.
Time, may I suggest, to turn our guns on the fatties amongst us!
Words can hurt more than sticks and stones
I knew a man once, a very dear friend, who was in a horrendously abusive marriage.
The abuse came in the form of the language which was deployed against him by his wife. To be sure, it wasn’t only that; there was violence too, but it was the language that was the most alarming.
I know this because he felt that no one could possibly believe how depraved and evil it was unless they could actually hear a recording, and that he duly made; several of them. I was stunned.
The recordings were full of the vilest language our otherwise beautiful tongue has yet conjured up. Truly, soldiers and sailors in their billets or berths couldn’t have ‘bettered’ it.
I asked him why he didn’t get out of it and he replied that he didn’t want to lose his children. What could I say to that? He was of the opinion that there is a gap in the law which fails to recognise verbal violence as being as damaging, in many respects, as physical.
As a boy we got used to the corny old saying ‘sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me’. Yet, as we grew older we came to see this for the absolute nonsense it was.
It was perfectly possible not so many years ago to say just about anything you wanted to say: it was called Freedom of Speech, and that ‘holy cow’ allowed us to call people spastics, coons, yids, mental retards, Nancy boys, cripples and an endless repertoire of other demeaning terms.
Look, for example, at what passed for entertainment on the television. Alf Garnett at bay in Till Death Do Us Part or the ‘funny’ man Bernard Manning in full flow.
It took us a long time, but we came to realise that such bigoted, verbal diarrhoea could not be tolerated in a civilised society. Freedom of Speech had to have some limits. It could not be used to pillory and degrade minorities. We actually had long before come to recognise that when we created the law of blasphemy.
To say that words cannot hurt is to state the purest form of rubbish possible. Words can scar (for life); they can destroy self esteem; humiliate and degrade; crush the spirit; and can even drive a person mad.
Although referring to language’s written form, its message holds true even in the spoken form. ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword.’
Language is the most powerful weapon we can ever deploy against a person.
Not before time, society set about addressing this very real problem in its midst. And so a whole new industry was born: it is called ‘political correctness’, although in many of its aspects it might, more accurately, be described as ‘behavioural correctness’.
Few would deny that we were right to tackle this cruel form of abuse and are the better for having done so.
Only verbal abuse of the elderly is still permitted and I worry at what it says about us that we have allowed this most vulnerable sector of our society – the one to which we owe everything we have – to remain almost the last to receive such protection.
Like all new industries, the people whose jobs depend on it feel they have to keep up the momentum; justify, if you like, their existence. They spread the net wider and wider and probe into the most unlikely and deepest of recesses looking for that ever more elusive injustice.
If things go on as they are we may arrive at a situation where we are afraid to open our mouths lest we commit a felony.
The free flow of conversation itself may end up being imperilled as we put ourselves on mental override before we release our thoughts to a live audience.
I feel the time has come to put a brake on this whole burgeoning industry of political correctness.
Yes, we were right to look at all aspects of how we do things and what we say. Fairness and equality, along with tolerance, must always remain central to our way of thinking. But we are in danger, as always, of allowing the locomotive to run out of control.
It is interesting to note that we are not alone in wrestling with these thorny problems. The French are about to abolish the term ‘mademoiselle’ at the very time we are about to ban ‘Mrs’ on all government documents. Should the quaint term ‘Spinster’, still featured at every Registry Office, also be consigned to the dustbin of history?
While a very necessary transformation has taken place, it is important that we don’t end up making fools of ourselves and creating a lawyers’ paradise where all concerned argue, ad nauseam, as to whether offense was intended and the law breached.
Things are getting sillier by the minute.
Is it sensible to ban wolf whistles? Who will know which navvy among the many was the culprit? In any case, where’s the offence? My ex used to love it when she walked past a building site. She was guaranteed one every time.
Whilst not ordinarily in favour of any governmental expansion (in fact I am in favour of the reverse) I might be prepared to consider one exception: a new Ministry of Common Sense.
Degrade the Taliban to the max
More tears for our brave boys in Afghanistan last week. The sorrow was exacerbated by the knowledge that the ‘soft underbelly’ problem in armoured vehicles was identified more than four years ago and remains unfixed. We fought World War One in that time span.
Had our boys been in an American vehicle, there is every likelihood they would be alive today.
On a cost-benefit basis, both Afghanistan and Iraq have been a disaster. The Romans were more savvy when they built Hadrian’s Wall. They could have crushed the Scots had they wished. But what did Scotland have to offer them? A miserable climate – especially for an Italian – a constantly restive and warlike people (just like some others on the north bank of the Rhine – the Germans) and next to no natural resources.
As a pragmatic people they decided to leave them both to stew. So both missed out on a whole range of benefits which a more advanced civilisation had to offer. The whole of this can be said to apply to Afghanistan today.
Much of America’s financial woes can be traced back to the horrendous cost of the Vietnam war. After all, it was then that it was forced off the Gold Standard. Does anybody doubt that if the untold billions spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars had been sitting in the US treasury today that things would be looking very different? Yet exactly the same could be said about us.
Wars are expensive. From a position of incredible wealth as a country, it took just two of them to ruin us and rob us of our leading position in the world by 1945.
Afghanistan was always said to be the ‘graveyard of empires’, and no one knew this better than we did. We launched no fewer than three ill-fated forays into that country in the days of the Raj. In one of them, an entire column of 16,000 perished in the snows of the Hindu Kush on the retreat back from Kabul to the Indian frontier.
Prime Minister David Cameron would spend a long time reading out their names in the Commons. So, more than anyone else, we should have known better.
Of course it was right to go into that country to flush out Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for harbouring them, but having done so we should have got out and stayed out. We, in our heyday, were never defeated in the field by the Afghans any more than NATO has been, or, for that matter, the Russians.
But the Afghans do not heed good advice to mend their medieval ways (especially when that advice comes from foreigners) so they must be left to marinate. Just be thankful that you are not a woman in that benighted country.
It is unlikely that if the Taliban return to power after NATO’s exit – which is probable – they will ever again allow Al Qaeda to set up training camps. They are canny enough not to go down that road a second time, helped by Bin Laden’s death. While he was their guest, there was never a snowball’s chance that they would have handed him over, even when we threatened to invade. Muslim law on hospitality absolutely forbade that.
It is always important to have an exit strategy. But it is equally important to keep the date of exit to yourself. Had we held to our original statements that ‘we are here until the job is done’ – even if you had a date in mind – then there is every likelihood that the same weariness which brought the IRA to the negotiating table would have done so in the case of the Taliban.
Why hold on, they would have said to themselves, and stay a fugitive forever and as likely not die in the struggle? Let’s do a deal.
The Afghans have always been known as the world’s greatest wheeler-dealers. Now they are going around saying ‘the West have the watches, but we have the time’. So now that we have revealed our hand, we must make every effort to equip and train the home-grown Afghan forces to look after themselves when we are gone.
Who knows, they might even pull it off, despite everything. And our boys, in the interim, must degrade the Taliban to the maximum extent possible. A weakened force might just be more amenable to a greatly strengthened home army. But the deeply corrupt Afghan government will make this an uphill struggle. We can only hope our fears are misplaced.
Accused without charge
I was astonished recently to learn that Ken Clarke, the Justice Minister whom I always thought of as something of a libertarian, should seek to clamp on the land of Magna Carta a Bill of wholesale restrictions on open justice.
He wants a special body of lawyers to sit behind closed doors conducting cases in which the accused cannot defend himself in time-honoured fashion. Incredibly, the accused will not even know with what he is charged nor have the right to face his accuser. He will be defended by a government-appointed lawyer he will never meet or speak with. And a Minister of the Crown, who may well be trying to protect himself or his department from well justified exposure, gets to decide whether the case in question merits this very special treatment.
Now, if this isn’t the very purest form of Kafka, then I’d like to know what is. Certainly every tinpot dictator of modern times would love it.
As you may have guessed from previous writings, the preservation of our ancient liberties is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. As I see it, we didn’t create, over centuries, the great edifice of The Common Law – admired around the world and used by over a quarter of it – only to see it dismantled in many of its essentials by a latter day band of political pygmies.
It is not as though I believe that it should be set in aspic, never to be changed. Some years ago I had deep misgivings when New Labour proposed to change the law of Double Jeopardy, whereby an acquitted person could never be tried on the same charge twice.
I came to believe that if science (DNA) could prove incontrovertibly at a later date that a guilty man had been acquitted then it would not be natural justice to let him continue to get away with it. There were, I considered, many good reasons for my earlier misgivings.
If, for instance, an oppressive government or police force were determined on a guilty verdict then it could keep on coming back for another bite of the cherry until it got the result it wanted.
Also, were the police to know that they could always have another try, they would not feel under the same compulsion to go that extra mile to ferret out all the available evidence the first time round. It would also be unfair on the acquitted person – who might believe that the powers-that-be were out to get him – to ask him to live under such a cloud of deferred retribution. But amendments were put in place that held to the double jeopardy principal except in the most serious of cases, so I was satisfied.
I have long felt that New Labour were cavalier in its attitude to the protections which The Common Law bestowed on us. When terrorism reared its ugly head in the aftermath of 9/11 they leaped to panic stations. They seemed to have forgotten that we, as a nation, had long experience of dealing with that particular sick and murderous element in society – thirty years, no less.
The IRA, of whom we are speaking, were, moreover, far more accomplished practitioners of the dark and terrible arts of mass murder than the Johnny-come-lately Jihadists who had grown up in our midst. Sadly, their bombs went off first time on nearly every occasion. The result was that, on a head count of victims, the IRA were light years ahead of their successors.
But New Labour saw it differently. They rushed through a whole range of measures which began the long assault on things we held dear: which had taken centuries of struggle to achieve. Now we have a new government of a different political hue, but it, too – inexplicably – continues the assault and even carries it into realms hitherto unthought-of. It has to be stopped.
Luckily, these new proposals have raised a great hue and cry from almost every quarter, including 57 of the 69 specially appointed lawyers who want nothing to do with it: bless their courage and probity.
Yet Cameron is supportive of the tragically misguided Clarke. No doubt the police and the security services would like – where they chose – to dispense secret ‘justice’ along with the hospital authorities, coroners’ courts, government Ministers and the Ministry of Defence – all of whom, it is proposed, at the minister’s discretion, can impose in camera hearings.
Were they to have had these powers, we would never had learned the truth with regard to the seven shots to the head, underground shooting of poor Charles de Mendez, mistaken for a terrorist; nor the lack of body armour and helicopters and the use of thin skinned vehicles which led to the death of so many of our brave soldiers; nor the lamentable toll of scandalous hospital deaths and shocking mistreatment of our old people; nor the truth about Princess Diana’s death; nor that of Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter; nor even, who knows, of the former Energy Secretary’s alleged wrongdoings. All of them bring acute embarrassment to the people and agencies involved and they would rather we knew nothing of their incompetence or couldn’t-care-less attitude.
Truth and openness, in my view, trumps every other consideration. Only in the most clear-cut threats to national security are we entitled to consider secrecy.
If David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ means a smaller, less intrusive state and more power to the people then I am all for it. Power, inevitably, seeks more power. But I am not concerned how much power accrues to the people; the more the better: they can be trusted. But individuals and agencies must always be constrained, and a free press is there to help us to achieve that.
Servants of the state must also be held to account and answer for serious shortcomings. In industry, commerce and even sport, heads roll regularly: not so in the public sector. This must change. How often is abject failure rewarded not with the sack, but with promotion. This truly incenses the public.
Everybody knows what a failure the head of the Borders Agency has made of her job. And not just that, but the one before. Yet she gets promoted to head up HM Revenue & Customs, an agency failing almost as badly as her own and which desperately needs real and proven talent not failure.
What a way to do business. But that’s big government for you! Spitting in the eye of its paymasters at every turn.
Death by a million mouse clicks
First it was death by a thousand cuts; then it was death by a million mouse clicks.
It will take more than the retail Superwoman, Mary Portas, to save our high streets. Now, with people running scared at national and personal debt levels, there is a refusal to spend on all but the bare necessities.
Just a few years ago, the shopping ‘experience’ of going into town on a Saturday was something that all the family (except perhaps dad) looked forward to. That, I fear, will never come again. And councils have certainly helped to put the boot in by levying extortionate parking charges and granting all those out of town shopping centres where, of course, the parking is free. It is easy to forget that we are now in the fifth year of the recession
They tell us that it is not a recession until two quarters have passed with negative growth. By that yardstick, then, these four and a half years have not been a recession at all. Indeed, we have only qualified for six months by that definition and have seen flat-lining, marginally increasing, growth ever since. But tell that to the marines. For if this is not a recession, then they need to invent another word.
Calling it a downturn is to insult what people are going through. The whole scenario has been made worse by the constant diet of bad news which has fed into people’s psyche, inducing a ‘doom and gloom’ outlook. This, in turn, has helped reinforce people’s perceived need to batten down the hatches where spending is concerned.
It is difficult to believe that three and a half years have passed since Northern Rock became the first bank ever to seek help from its country’s central bank in September 2007. A bank in trouble? That was something new. Though it was relatively small beer in world banking terms, it represented the first significant shock to the global financial system. The collapse of a monster bank, Lehman Brothers, in America proved seismic and many have argued since that it was that much-touted phrase ‘too big to fail’ and should have been saved.
Throughout the autumn of 2007, we, in Britain, maintained an air of business as usual, even optimism, following the long stretch of apparent success that we had enjoyed since the Millennium began and in the few years before that. After all, had not our own prime minister told us that he had cracked the politician’s equivalent of the alchemist’s age-old dream of turning base metal into gold by ending ‘boom and bust’?
But four months after Northern Rock sought rescue from the Bank of England came the truly scary sight, just before Christmas that year, of depositors trying to get their money out of the bank. And it has been downhill ever since.
I have my own small shop on Plympton Ridgeway and for the first year of the recession (I insist on calling it that) I didn’t notice a thing, though many others did. I lulled myself into a false sense of security by saying that I was trading in necessities such as repairing shoes, cutting keys, fixing watches – things that even the Internet could not threaten.
Yet I felt immense sorrow for those businesses which did not enjoy my level of perceived protection, such as restaurants, builders, kitchen and bathroom fitters, furniture and carpet suppliers, taxi firms, fast food outlets and countless others including professionals.
But then came 2009, and I was brutally disabused of any notions of immunity; I had to take my share of the pain. During that year I took an enormous hit. I took a similarly big hit the following year. I prayed that it would not continue into another, for if it did I knew I would be up against it. Mercifully, the revenue decline bottomed out and the takings for 2011 matched those of the year before.
Now I am waiting on baited breath as the results for 2012 start accumulating. It’s very nerve racking, I can tell you. And right across this fair land of ours, retailers and so many others are suffering the same kind of anxieties.
But there is hope. America – that early invention of ours which bears a lot of the initial blame for our current woes with its reckless sub-prime lending – is showing real signs of recovery. That great can-do nation may yet lead us all out of this mess.
Only Europe – and it’s a very big ‘only’ – continues to cast a pall over future prospects, and that conundrum of the ‘one size fits all’ euro has yet to be resolved. If your biggest customer, by far, is in trouble then so are you: another good reason why we should diversify and market ourselves more effectively in the world beyond Europe.
We have such a huge advantage over all the others with our universal language, our Commonwealth connections and our all round understanding of the world that we cannot help but succeed, if we try hard enough.
We, for our part, are doing all the right things and this is reflected in our AAA credit rating. Despite our trillion-pound national debt, the markets still believe in us. We are, they consider, a safe haven for other people’s money. (As a point of interest, we are the only major nation – along with the US – never to have defaulted on our debts. They do not forget this.)
It will be an irony of the highest order if our European partners, who were so smug, even scornful, of the Anglo-Saxon economic model at the beginning of the crisis, have to sit back and watch us surge ahead while they continue to flounder in the swamp of the failed euro experiment.
And that may not be so fanciful a notion as you might think; the OECD, no less, has predicted that by the year 2050 we will be the third richest per capita nation in the world, beating Germany and just about everybody else. Whoopy!
The weighty matter of elected police chiefs
Nothing has filled me with despair recently so much as the news that that tired old retread John Prescott is to throw his hat into the ring to become the new Sheriff of Uddersfield. You come up with a good idea, and who leaps in to ruin the whole concept but the man we all thought had been finally put out to pasture: the former prize fighter/deputy prime minister.
The idea of elected police chiefs is for us to get a form of payment by results. That is to say, the chief increases the clear up rate of crime, brings order to our streets and thus enables us to sleep easier in our beds. And in return for performing this valuable service, he or she is awarded (and paid) with a fresh mandate and a continuance of his (or her) £70,000 stipend. It does sound like a good arrangement to me to me! So let’s look at this particular applicant’s CV.
He’s certainly been a busy boy during his long career – although, at 72, I worry a bit that that it’s just too long. His cheeky-chappie approach would undoubtedly go down well with the binge drinkers of a Friday night (the same people he’s promised to sort out). And his beer belly should also appeal to many, allowing him to empathise – always a most important consideration in this touchy-feelie age. But against this there’s the risk that if he’s provoked he might strike out. After all, he has got form in this department and a GBH charge is not something that would sit well on a police commissioner’s record.
But let’s get serious for a moment and look at Two Jags’ actual record. It is acknowledged that he was appointed deputy prime minister not just as a sop to the unions, but in order to keep peace between the warring prime minister and his chancellor… a sort of honest broker. Ten years of backstabbing and plotting between the two made a mockery of that and proved even beyond Prezza’s giant abilities.
Ever resourceful, and looking for something meaningful to do, he came up with the idea of regional authorities. What an ineffectual and horrendously expensive exercise in futility that turned out to be. But not to be deterred, he pressed on.
His next idea was to knock down street upon street of houses right across the land which his office deemed not fit for human habitation. It later emerged that they could have been renovated for a fraction of the cost of replacements and kept vibrant communities from disintegrating. But Two Jags, as he will freely acknowledge himself, was never very good at sums in school.
He wanted more development, so his next ‘Big Idea’ was to allow rejected planning applications (often sent back for good reasons) to be sent to his office where his expert eye could peruse them and tell whether the planners had got it wrong. As a result, large numbers of outrageous appeals were sent back to the planners with instructions to allow the development. Prescott could never leave it – nor for that matter some of his office staff – alone. He could never accept that he was, in fact, a man of limited talents.
It adds to the gaiety of nations for every administration to have its own court jester, and ‘Prezza’ was happy to fulfil that role for New Labour – although he never fully understood how much they were all taking the you-know-what.his own side included.
His opposite number in the Tory Party is Boris Johnson. But there is one very big difference between the two of them: Boris is superbly educated. Plus he comes up with ideas like getting rid of London’s hated bendy buses and returning to the much-loved jump on/jump off version. Then there’s freezing of congestion charges and, best of all, the world-beating, environmentally friendly replacement for Heathrow: the Estuary Airport. Most of his ideas make a lot of sense and are in accord with the public opinion. I’m personally looking forward to Boris stepping forward as Master of Ceremony for the London Olympics. Quite what Johnny Foreigner will make of him I wouldn’t like to guess, but I think there’s a good chance that, like so many of us, they’ll love him. At the very least we can be sure that he’ll create a sensation of some sort.
But returning to the hoped-for revolution in policing: this is a once in a lifetime chance to get the system sorted. The last thing we need is for a plethora of failed has-beens to prove all over again how useless they are; it is desperately important that we have people of proven track record and of the highest calibre if we are to have any chance of success.
We have strayed so far from policing as we would like it to be, and in many respects the Force no longer commands the respect which should be its due. We spent well over a million pounds on a state of the art police station in my suburb of Plymouth just a few years ago and it’s not any longer open to the public. You can only visit by appointment. Many officers, sad to say, couldn’t even give chase to a baddie. With all their Inspector Gadget accessories and body-armour weighing them down – not to mention their Prescott-style waists which so many seem to be developing – it’s small wonder police chiefs recently dismissed a move to introduce compulsory annual fitness tests for serving officers.
The new Plympton library
After the devastating fire at Plympton library four years ago, a phoenix of a new library has arisen: 50% bigger and incorporating all the latest must-haves in a modern library. At a time when libraries across the land are being closed due to austerity cutbacks, this is serendipity of the highest order.
All this week there are events, and on Thursday it is authors’ day. I have been much privileged to be asked to contribute on that day. But what shall I speak about? My book, of course, but I shall also speak about children’s issues since it is much of what the book is about.
In researching the book, I came across a startling set of statistics; they relate to a recent UNICEF report. It stated that 60% of children passing through the present childcare system grow up to be either criminals, homeless or suicidal. And we must not assume that the other 40% have made successful lives for themselves; more probably they have muddled through and simply don’t qualify for a place in that terrible roll-call of tragedy.
These figures caused me to consider the fate of the Foundling Hospital children of which I was one. They were taken into care as weeks’ old babies, fostered out for their first five years and then sent to the hospital for their next ten.
The hospital, now called Coram after its 17th century founder, Captain Thomas Coram, has an association called the Old Coram Association (OCA) which encourages old boys and girls to keep in touch with each other. It publishes a twice-annual magazine and stages umpteen gatherings each year at its central London headquarters.
What emerges through all this communication is that, for all its faults, the hospital’s children made infinitely more successful lives for themselves than is the case with today’s deprived children. So what is going on?
Foundling children were institutionalised at a very tender age; they were subject to the harshest and most disciplinarian of regimes – although, it has to be said, no harsher than many of the country’s top public schools of the time – and should, therefore, be prime candidates for a failed life. They didn’t even know who their mother and father were, or even what their real name was (a new one was given them by the hospital). Yet despite all these things they have become, for the most part, loving parents and successful people.
The only conclusion that I and other ‘old boys’ can reach is that the hospital’s policy of fostering them out for their first five years saved the day. Children are tougher and more resilient than we often give them credit for. Having been surrounded by love and security since babyhood, they were able to survive the rigours of what was to become. But what they cannot survive is a messed up, abusive early start to life: nothing and nobody can undo such damage inflicted so early. If this is true – and all the evidence points to this being the case – then it seems to me that we have to move fast and adopt a much more hands-on approach where babies at risk are concerned.
The rights of parents absolutely have to come secondary to those of the child. It is well known that social services will bend over backwards and go to incredible lengths to keep mother and child together. And by the time they wake up to the reality of the relationship it is, in almost all cases, too late. The child is irredeemably scarred.
If it becomes apparent that the parent, or parents, for whatever reason cannot provide stability, love and a decent standard of care then I believe the baby should be removed as a matter of urgency and placed in an environment where it has all of these things. Intervention at the earliest point – once the facts have been established – is of the absolute essence. Who would deny that if such a policy had been in place for poor Baby P, he would not be alive today?
I would not even be averse to sending them, during term time, to a school such as the Foundling Hospital – ran with all its stunning facilities. There, in today’s world, they could be guaranteed a standard of education second to none. Think of the pressure cooking excellence that a live-in school bestows. And don’t say ‘yes, but it would be cruel to send them off from their home during term time’. Isn’t this exactly what the elite of our country have done for centuries and continue to spend thousands of pounds doing? Sending them at the tender age of eight from the far flung outposts of empire in times past, not to see their parents for years, never mind every school holiday?
Armed with this very superior education, wouldn’t society have gone a very long way not just in saving them, but off-setting the sadness of the loss of their own inadequate parents?
If you can spare some time to join with me, we can discuss some of these very important issues. I can also answer any of your questions with regard to my book. The opportunity comes at 2.30pm at Plympton Library on Thursday 9th February. Another local writer, John White, who writes military and political thrillers, will also be there.
The war on motorists is far from over
Few things impact on our lives more than the car. It is our friend, our refuge, almost our starship. So when Philip Hammond, the newly appointed coalition transport secretary, declared that ‘the war on motorists is over’ we all heaved a collective sigh of relief. Here, at last, was recognition of what the car meant to us.
For years we motorists had felt ourselves a beleaguered section of society: milked for all we were worth; told that we were anti-social for not using public transport; told we were a menace to life and limb; and told also that we were polluters of the planet. Never once did the-powers-that-be recognise what the car meant to the public and how we found them such a marvellous means of conveyance – and how we valued that it kept so many of us in work. So twenty months into this government, we are entitled to ask of the evidence that it intends to make good on its welcomed promise of a cessation of hostilities.
Motoring back from my Burns Night supper near Lincoln this weekend, I was struck by the number of newly installed average speed cameras: dozens and dozens of them. We were told that the whole matter of cameras and much else besides was going to be looked at, and that they were going to be confined to genuine accident blackspots – as was their original intention.
Nothing discredits a government more than broken promises. They do, after all, form the basis on which our elected politicians got their jobs in the first place, so it is little different from lying in a job interview.
Almost immediately on my arrival back in Plymouth I learned that Hush Puppy-booted Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, is to raise spot motoring fines by 66% to £100. What a kick in the teeth that represents. And what a duplicitous example of government two-timing its electors. What’s more, it demonstrates a total disregard for the financial pain people are suffering right now and only provides further evidence of how utterly out of touch with reality the political elite really are.
We deserve better than this. As I have said before in this blog, our motorists are among the most considerate in the world and our death rate reflects this fact. But here in Plymouth I continue to feel quiet fury at the way the transport authorities behave.
Take the Cattedown roundabout East End Development as an example. Long drawn-out and hugely over-budget, it has recently been completed. They have, however, built a superb slip road bypassing the Embankment shopping thoroughfare. It is smooth and congestion-free, without a single house flanking it, nor cross road or pedestrian crossing. Yet it is not fast. Absurdly, they have applied a thirty-mile speed limit and, just in case you are inclined to ignore this piece of nonsense and travel at forty, they have installed average speed cameras.
In the approach to this development coming from the city centre along Exeter Street, there was a road which allowed motorists to safely escape a hundred yards of nose to tail traffic leading up to Cattedown roundabout. Motorists have been taking this exit for years to no ill effect, but with the great benefit that it reduces the tailback of traffic leading to the roundabout. Now they are suddenly banned from this because it has been made one way.
How many streets, I ask myself, across the city have suffered a similar fate? Were the people who live in these streets asked for their thoughts on the matter? Were there accidents or fatalities that forced the planners into action?
I have spoken to people living in the street mentioned above, and they are furious that they cannot enter it any more from both directions. Yet all over the city things have been done to the annoyance of the people who have to suffer the inconvenience. And why? Because some pencil-pushing jobsworth thinks it’s a good idea, I imagine.
It was once possible to save time and relieve traffic on the busy Plymouth Road by passing through the Woodford estate. But now vast numbers of road bumps – which are exceedingly difficult to be taken properly and are often taken dangerously because of parked cars – make this route a nightmare. Again, locals say their views counted for nothing. It was imposed on them from on high – from our masters who know best.
I can only suppose that all over the city, and indeed all over the land, you would hear similar stories of ‘solutions’ foisted on communities with neither proper consideration of their feelings nor proper consultation with them. After all, they are the ones having to live on a daily basis with these foolish, not to say costly, changes. And when mistakes are plain for all to see there is invariably an arrogant refusal on their part to acknowledge them as such, much less to make restitution.
Far away in their ivory towers they hold to the view that the man in the town hall knows best.
A black box in every car
A letter recently unearthed during a house clearout dated 1925 read as follows: ‘Dear Mr. Grainger, We respectfully draw your attention to an under-payment of fifteen pounds, eight shillings and four pence made on your recent income tax remittance. We are sure this is an oversight. May we suggest the 31st of next month as being a suitable date for settlement of the balance. If you require clarification as to how we arrived at this figure we would be most happy for you to call at this office where we will endeavour to explain. In the meantime we remain your Most Obedient Servant’. How very polite and considerate this all is. No doubt here who the boss is.
The signing off tells you all you need to know: the state in those days knew its place. It was, of course, nonsense to suggest that its agents regarded themselves as anybody’s servants, but the then powers-that-be thought it important to continue to emphasise what the proper relationship should be. Today it is all different; government is in the driving seat.
With 4 million CCTV cameras in place (by far the highest number of any country in the world – North Korea included) and the planet’s largest DNA database and every conceivable detail of our lives – both personal and financial – logged, we are well and truly skewered and corralled. The East German Stasi (secret police) would have been proud.
Only the media stand between us and total subservience. That is why almost the first act of any authoritarian regime is to muzzle it. What people need to understand is that authority, be it central or local, has an insatiable urge to accumulate power – to regulate and control. It cannot help itself. It is in the nature of the beast. Only our ability to scrutinise it through the media and force it to submit itself for re-election has any hope of controlling its growth.
We like to preen ourselves as being almost the freest society on earth. But does this really stand up? We are bossed around to an extraordinary degree. Gone is the fanciful notion that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. Hundreds of agencies have the power to barge into them and they don’t need a scaling ladder to do it either – just the local plod to intimidate any would-be heroes.
Our government recently wanted the power to lock us up without charge for 90 days and only the most extraordinary of efforts got that figure down to 28. And that is still one of the longest in the civilised world.
I cannot help believing that the age of terrorism has been a godsend to those most zealous in their urge to control us. It has given them the perfect cover to push through a range of measures under the mantra ‘Do you really want to get blown up?’ Well, the IRA were blowing us up for thirty years and were much more competent with explosives than the Jihadist buffoons – and just as ruthless. Yet we resisted bringing in all these special measures on the mainland so beloved of New Labour. They even talked of putting aircraft-like black boxes under every car bonnet until this was laughed out of court. But in truth it was no laughing matter.
They talked also of having all 62 million of us DNA tested – naturally, of course, so that they could catch more criminals. Townhalls were authorised to conduct certain types of surveillance on its citizens, and that ended up checking out people who were trying to get their kids into a decent school. Let’s not forget either the recent national census. Look at the ridiculous scope of the information it sought. And if you were unwilling to provide it, look out! You would be bludgeoned into submission.
But all is not yet lost. We appear to have a government (glory be!) which actually says it wants to devolve power from the centre to the regions. I never thought to hear it, but it says ‘Whitehall does not always know best’. It wants schools that answer to parents; elected police chiefs who have to clock up results or be thrown out; Mayors who have to run their cities competently or face the same fate; and even a social security network that protects the truly vulnerable, but not the army of scroungers.
The attitude of entitlement which so many display is truly marvellous to behold. What gives a person the idea that he or she is entitled to lie in their bed of a cold winter morning while their neighbour must get up and go off to work? And then, as if to rub salt into the wound, hold out their hand for large chunks of their neighbour’s earnings so that they can enjoy a not-much-different lifestyle. It’s actually all very bizarre. But the fact is that so many do really believe that they have that right. There’s no accounting for folk!
Nobody wants a return to certain of the bad old days. But not all of them were bad. We ought to cherry-pick what was best. Among them was neighbourliness, self-reliance (of the fit and able) and straight dealing – honesty if you like. Even today, members of the older generation are so imbued with this ethos of self-reliance that their pride will not allow them to take benefits that we would like them to take.
The Scots are bigger than Salmond supposes
Scotland deserves better than the opportunistic, smarmy Alex Salmond. He may be hard to pin down on television and have an answer for everything, but he is deceitful and disingenuous.
You do not lightly throw away something which took 300 years to build. And for what? A bunch of self-serving wide boys (and girls) bent on power, privilege and self-aggrandisement; people who care little for the greater good of the people living in these islands.
It is true to say that the take-off point for Great Britain was the union of the crowns followed, a century later, by the union of the parliaments. It set aside animosity and warfare that stretched back to Roman times and seriously weakened both countries. Under the new dispensation, and together with Wales and Ireland, it burst upon the world scene in a frenzy of technological, cultural, inventive and, yes, military/maritime brilliance. It changed the world forever ensuring that the language we all spoke became the lingua franca of the whole globe.
It was disgraceful that under history-lite New Labour the 300th Anniversary of that Union – the most successful ever established – was allowed to pass without national celebrations of any kind, not even a national holiday. So much for Gordon Brown banging on about the virtues of Britishness. He even suggested that more of us should take up the American liking for flying the flag in our gardens. How little New Labour knew about us. That kind of showy patriotism is not the British way. Our love of country runs deeper than they could ever imagine: it is almost spiritual in depth.
Politicians today seldom look to the big picture. They concentrate on short-term advantage, mainly economic. Very well then, let us go down that myopic road a little distance. In 2008 an independent Scotland would have found itself in the position of Iceland: bankrupt and humiliated. Bailing out The Royal Bank of Scotland alone would have been beyond their capabilities, never mind HBOS as well. Only the combined financial power of the United Kingdom saved it from the mad follies of Fred the Shred. Alex Salmond’s silly talk of an arc of ‘Tiger Economies’ stretching from Ireland through Scotland to Iceland would have been shown to be the ludicrous nonsense that it was.
I feel myself to be in a good position to see the merits of both sides. My Scottish mother turned to an English charity to care for her illegitimate baby when Presbyterian bigotry would offer her no shelter in her own country. For fifteen years that charity cared for me, and its influence – along with the many years spent living in England – have turned me into what might be described as an Anglo-Scot.
I see the English as a tolerant, fair-minded people who will resist to the utmost their hackles being forcibly raised. How else do you account for their tolerance of the Barnett Formula which allocates annually £1,624 more per head to the Scots than the English? It was introduced to balance out poorer regions over the more affluent ones. But Scotland today has moved up-scale and no longer qualifies, though England continues to nod through the payment with little more than a sigh. It does not wish to cause an argument with its sometimes feisty neighbour. And how else also do you explain England’s tolerance of free Scottish university places which are even extended to foreigners but not to the English? Or free prescriptions or free care home provision? All that, and much else besides, is courtesy of the 85% of tax payers who are English (yet feel they cannot afford these desirable benefits for themselves).
Slippery Alex Salmond’s sinister game is to ratchet up the ante, slyly and incessantly, so as to provoke the English and set them against their northern neighbour. He is even intent on using the squalid device of timing the referendum to coincide with Scotland’s most famous victory over the English at the Bannockburn 700 years ago so that he can whip up sentiment against the ‘auld enemy’. Imagine if England were to do the same in an argument with the French by resurrecting Agincourt, or in the case of the Scots the Battle of Dunbar! It is all so juvenile, but dangerous nonetheless. Some might regard Salmond as a traitor and it would be easy to sympathise with that view.
The British state is now a venerable institution and its Scottish sons were happy to serve in its glory days in disproportionate numbers as pro-consuls and even prime ministers. Do they feel no affection for the long journey we have made together, nor care for the blood we have jointly shed? Is Britain’s diminished state no longer appealing to them? Did they only want to belong to it while the world was in awe of it?
I think the Scots are bigger than Salmond supposes. He uses a precious gift – an articulate tongue – to low and unworthy ends. And the worst of it all is that he knows perfectly well what he is summoning up: it is called nationalism. And among that scourge’s many defects (some terrible) is his doubtless desire to create lucrative jobs for the boys: Scottish Prime Minister, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, you name it – a carbon copy of the entire Westminster set-up. But let us not forgot that nationalism has been the curse of Europe and indeed much of the world. It has propelled us into the two most destructive wars in human history and is what the European Union was designed to eradicate forever. In this the EU has been triumphantly successful and I, for one, am mighty grateful that my generation has been spared the blood-letting of the recent past. So in this regard, too, we need to think carefully before we go down the separatist road.
In two weeks time my wife and I will travel north to Newark to attend a Burns Night Supper. After pestering me for years for me to join him, my brother has finally got me to make the effort. I am sure I will have a good time, though with my English accent and no kilt I worry about looking a tad conspicuous – despite being more of a Scot (my father was also of the tartan) than any of the be-kilted Sassenachs pretending to Scottish antecedents. My brother and brother-in-law have lived and worked in England for many years and have never felt disadvantaged or witnessed prejudice. I wish I could say the same about Englishmen working in Scotland.
The English will always root for the Scots in any sporting event in which they themselves have been knocked out, but oh how I wince when the Scots root for the foreigner, even when, during the Cold War, that foreigner was a communist. I understand how minorities have to make rather more noise than their numbers would justify in order to be heard above the din in a union. But the truth is that most Englishmen would actually quite like to be able to boast some Scottish ancestry. When will my fellow Scots stop girning, knock away that chip from their shoulder and acknowledge that they, almost more than anyone, have done quite well out of the union, and continue to do so. They are renowned for being canny. Let them show this admirable trait in the coming referendum.
Two-pronged way to lose weight
We are now into the serious business of the New Year, what we will make of it and what it will make of us.
Huge issues confront us. Will we climb out of this trough of despondency? Will we keep our jobs? Will our biggest market implode? Will America put its sub-prime market disaster behind it and start getting back to work? Will Israel bomb Iran and so plunge us into another oil crisis? Will the Arab spring end up landing us with a clutch of fanatical fundamentalist states? Will the Arab world’s most pivotal state, Syria, descend into civil war?
On not one of these issues can the most gifted political pundit give any guidance as to the likely outcome. So for myself I am going to sit tight, wait on events and try not worry too much. I suggest you do the same.
On the home front, for 25 years (particularly the later 21 in which I ran my own health club), January was the most frantic month of the year for me.
People were looking to the summer. They had been pigging out for a solid two weeks. They wanted to go into it looking better – slimmer – than they currently did. Two thirds of my entire year’s advertising budget for new members was spent in the first quarter of the year, since in that short time, if I was lucky, I could expect to enrol three quarters of my annual members.
It would cost me no less than £19,500: money spent in this very newspaper.
From time to time we managed to get some truly spectacular results (see inset pictures of one of our successes of 30 years ago).
The legacy of those Physique & Figurama health club days continues to endure for me.
Every Monday before I set out for work in my shop on Plympton Ridgeway, I, along with my wife, get on the scales and have a weekly weigh-in, writing it down along with the date.
Keeping our eye on the ball is the name of the game. This week, along I suspect with many of you, I had a terrible shock.
Of course, at 72, I could not run to pumping the iron, fast and furious. Instead I walk three miles a day at a brisk enough pace as to force me to breathe through my mouth. So yes, in its more modest form, exercise still continues to play a part.
I have always taken the view that three elements determine our future. One of these – our genetic inheritance – we can do nothing about (for the moment), but the other two, diet and lifestyle are entirely within our gift to control.
One of the reasons we enjoyed success over so many years in the health club was that it was never an either/or approach – dieting or exercise: it was both.
That way it did not require a superhuman effort as if you were relying on one only. Since for most people the problem was, and is, insufficient exercise and too many calories then it made perfect sense to pursue both. That way you only had to work half as hard than if you were relying on one.
So much of the success in fighting the flab is in the mind, and it does not do to ask too much of yourself. Willpower has been made extra difficult to raise in our super indulgent, lazy age and the less of that rare commodity you have to summon up the better. So the two-pronged approach was best.
You had a better chance of enjoying yourself; staying the course and seeing it though to the end.
Our great city hero, Sir Francis Drake, had it exactly right. Of course he was commenting on something entirely different, the three-year first circumnavigation of the world in which the captain survived to see it through.
But what he said still holds true for so much else. He said: “There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.”
It would be silly to equate anything we have done with Drake’s stupendous achievement, but the message is clear. It was what drove me on during the also three-year slog to complete my book, The Last Foundling. It ran to 409 pages and there were so many times I felt myself running out of steam as well as willpower, but I pressed on.
Now I must apply myself to losing a considerable amount of weight and having done that, keep it off. That last bit, keeping it off, must be the “until it be thoroughly finished” part of what Drake was referring to.
Not so fast, Huhne
It is unusual for the police to press the Crown Prosecution Service to go ahead and charge a Minister of the Crown. But this is what they have done with the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne. It is encouraging, too, that they insist they have enough evidence also to proceed against his wife who, allegedly, took his speeding points. I have no doubt that were the matter not to concern two high profile figures – Vicky Pryce, Huhne’s estranged wife and a leading media economist – a decision would have been made many months ago.
What the people of our fair-minded country have always insisted on down the centuries is even-handed justice. I venture to suggest that if the CPS do not decide to press charges there will be a storm of protest. In that event David Cameron could expect a very rough ride at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons.
One could begin to understand the government’s reticence if Chris Huhne were a popular figure, doing a good job at his ministry – as Dr Liam Fox was at Defence – but Huhne is widely despised at Westminster and beyond. He gains no brownie points either by insisting that the country has 3,500 wind turbines foisted on it at huge public expense, in denial in the face of the mountain of evidence which shows that they are not cost effective. Desecrating some of our prettiest landscapes seems of no account to him.
The country has not forgotten, either, that here is a man who spent his life rubbishing nuclear power, only to experience a Damascene conversion all of a sudden when he gets his ministerial chauffeur-driven car and realises that there is no way the country can keep the lights on as well as meet its environmental commitments without it.
As for the police recommending that Huhne be brought to book, the government – which might not wish for a third ministerial resignation since, in Oscar Wilde’s immortal words, it will start to look ‘careless’ – should tread carefully. After all, it certainly did itself no favours by refusing to comply with the law of the land by denying an inquest into the suspicious death of Dr David Kelly, the arms inspector. When 19 eminent medics say that Kelly could not have died in the way the government claims he did, then we should be worried – especially when they point out that the inquiry into his death failed to address a series of important unanswered questions. The public smelled a rat most definitely when it later learned that a 70-year gagging order had been slapped on the proceedings. It was the first time in British jurisprudence that an inquest was refused.
This matter has not gone away, so if the government/CPS thinks it can again, within months, insult the intelligence of the British people by saying that there is not enough evidence to prosecute the Energy Secretary, then it had better think again.
***
Hey, look to!
What a turnabout from last year! In the Christmas week of 2010 we were in the deep freeze, with snow and ice which had bedeviled us since late November and would not yield till January. But replacing the rigours of the weather that year have been worries and gloom concerning the economy and global instability. What has given the whole business an extra edge of frustration is that we had started to believe the worst was over.
But the Autumn Statement put us right on that. To add to the three we’ve already had, we have six years more of belt tightening – a period as long as the Second World War – before we can expect to see the ‘sunny uplands’. Seldom have we looked at a future so bleak and protracted.
And compounding it all is the worry that, despite all our best endeavours, the whole Europe house, and with it very possibly the world economy, will come crashing down about our ears. We can, however, take some comfort from the fact that we have battened down the hatches in good time and so can hope to weather the storm better than most.
Yet hard times encourage new, or should I say resurrected, values to take hold again. What passes today as hardship would be regarded as luxury living by those who lived through the late ’40s and early ’50s. So perhaps we should not feel too sorry for ourselves. Earlier generations knew much worse. Today we have an overarching, cradle-to-the-grave Welfare State which has, in my opinion, got out of hand and is now arguably very much part of the problem. No one needs to go to bed hungry, have no roof over their head or worry about medical bills.
But at least we have upon us that special time of year which is sure to bring some cheer! As I write this the weather is supremely benign – with primroses coming out – and Christmas only a few days away.
I personally have been amazed at how people have been determined to cock a snoot at the recession by putting out their Christmas lights, with certain regulars still trying to outdo the Vegas Strip. Some will have done so because, although they are suffering financially, their pride will not allow them to advertise the fact to their neighbours. But most will have done it because they love a good display, perhaps accompanied by a harmless desire for a bit of showing off.
All in their own way, including those of us who have put a modest wreath on our door or a little display of lights on our shrubs or windows, we are sending out a message of good cheer. And sad, indeed, it is to walk past a string of houses where not one has made any concession to this very special time.
We would all like to be better than we are: less selfish, more caring and forgiving. Christmas appeals to our better angels and for a few precious days we declare an armistice and genuinely feel a greater warmth toward our fellow man than we do in the rat-race that passes for normal living. It is a spirit wholly to be commended and encouraged.
The fact that it is a Christian festival is almost beside the point; whether you are from another faith, Agnostic or an Atheist, I defy you not to be swept up a little in the euphoria of the celebrations to come. Even most of the criminal classes desist, I suspect, from many of their activities.
What is important in this great coming together of people and families is that we do not forget that there are a great many people out there who, for whatever reason, are alone. The very nature of the goodwill directed everywhere except to them serves only to reinforce their sense of loneliness.
We cannot know what 2012 will bring; no forthcoming year in living memory has had so many questions marks hanging over it.
The ‘Arab Spring’ which promised so much may yet turn into a nightmare: Syria is already that. Iran’s pursuit of the bomb can only be galvanised by the attention paid by the world to the tuppenny-halfpenny basket-case of a state of twenty-two million which is North Korea. The Iranians will say to themselves: ‘Look what respect you get if you’ve got the bomb!’ But Israel is unlikely to stand idly by while the final touches are put to a bomb which could enable the barmy Ahmajinedad to carry out his threat to ‘wipe it off the map’. And if they do strike first, then the Iranians will close down the Straits of Hormuz through which 25pc of the world’s oil passes.
Nuclear-armed N. Korea is now in the hands of an inexperienced boy ruler who only last year ordered the unprovoked sinking of a S. Korean warship and the equally unprovoked shelling of S. Korean installations, all with substantial loss of life.
And as if all this is not enough, the West faces economic meltdown if the euro crisis achieves critical mass.
But hey, look to! Humankind will always bounce back: we’re hardwired to do that. It has even been suggested this year that our very intelligence came about entirely due to climate change which forced us to seek out solutions to survive. So who knows, maybe a little climate change will stimulate our little grey cells some more. But meantime, let’s all party and remind ourselves that there is much that is decent and uplifting in our aspirations.
Finally, to my readers: my heartfelt thanks for allowing me the privilege of sharing my thoughts with you here and in The Herald.
Merry Christmas!
Oldies, arise!
Like most Oldies, I have been reluctant to embrace new technology – especially electronics such as the mobile and the computer. But I have benefited in combating my reluctance with the aid of those more in the know: my children.
The first of my four came when I was twenty-nine and the last when I was forty-eight. I don’t think my last missed out too much by having a middle-aged dad though, since I was running the Physique & Figurama gym at Derry’s Cross and so was much more physically active than most men my age. I even think he may have gained a little by having a dad whose temper had been calmed by the years. But still, he wouldn’t let me move towards that ‘dark night’ of old age gracefully. He would tell me if my sartorial tastes let him down and he pressed me in matters hi-tech.
While writing my book I used to write the first draft each day in longhand before I turned to typing it in the second draft. My youngest was aghast at such an antiquarian approach, reproaching me by saying that he wouldn’t be surprised to find me at it one day with a quill! So the laptop it had to be, and the last two thirds of the book saw the longhand disappear.
What made my initial approach so nonsensical was that, having worked in journalism in my early life, I knew how to touch-type. But it mustn’t seem that the boy was always having a go at me, for there was always a point to his complaints. And another of his moans was the way I refused to take advantage of new technologies like the mobile.
I only used it for its most basic functions; I didn’t even know how to add new phone entries! I will admit that I was cross at myself for being such a shrinking violet in coming to grips with its many possibilities. But by the time my third upgrade came along I decided to do something about it. I would make it my toy, and every time I had a few minutes to kill I would use them to try to get to grips with it. In no time at all I had got my head round its more complex functions, such as its calendar and camera. It wasn’t so difficult and I got to understand why all the youngsters (numbers of whom I suspected were denser even than myself!) managed so well.
Another ‘hi-tech’ area my boy encouraged me to get into was digitisation: converting all my old analogue memories, including my increasingly tatty 50-year-old scrapbook, into digital files and folders on a computer.
It saddened me to see how faded and scruffy my scrapbook pages and images had become; but by digitising them – which even included restoring images to their former glory – I had preserved them for eternity. And what’s more, my youngest uploaded the digital scrapbook to the internet so now all my friends and family can access it via this blog – another fine 21st century communication tool he has encouraged me to embrace.
VHS tapes, cassettes, photos and other analogue mementos are just as vulnerable to age as you and I. But while our shift from analogue to digital technologies certainly isn’t good news for E.T. (since digital TV signals are much weaker and aerials broadcasting them are typically pointed towards Earth rather than outer space), we Earthlings are now able to preserve our precious family memories as though they were set in aspic.
So all you oldies out there – who managed so well in your day with such a bewildering range of challenging electronics – should know that you can still cut the mustard, if you’re minded to. It’s just a state of mind. All you have to do is go for it! You might even surprise yourself as I did.
Man’s best friend
If man’s natural best friend is his dog, then his material best friend must be his car. I have long considered this a given. Men, in particular, obsess about this mechanical marvel. What else can explain the phenomenal worldwide success of the BBC’s Top Gear? Every Sunday these myriads of aficionados can be seen lovingly caressing cars’ lines with their polishing cloths, devoting a level of tender loving care which often puts that devoted to their children to shame. I actually believe there are men out there who, given the choice between their wife and their car, would chose the latter. Mind you, I think the same could be said about not a few of the wives!
I once knew a woman for whom the family car was all that seemed to matter. When, for instance, she split with her husband the only item she chose to keep was the brand new car which her husband had recently paid cash for. Anxious for an amicable separation, she didn’t ask for half the house or its contents, nor for half of her husband’s valuable share portfolio; only the car.
What can explain the otherwise inexplicable? I think I know the answer. Our species was originally a wanderer, a hunter-gatherer. When it gave up following the game and settled instead for a stationary, farming existence it didn’t lose its love of the outdoors nor of travelling. Going back further in time the same could be said of his continuing, ape-like love of climbing trees. We all, as kids, couldn’t resist a good climbable tree any more than we could resist walking along the top of a wall as though it were the bough of a tree. That too, it seems to me, is an echo from our ape like past.
For millennia most of us lived and died in an area no more than eight miles from where we were born. But then came the train, glory be! And then the car, halleluiah! The free spirit in us was liberated in a way not known even to our distant ancestors; it was as though we had sprouted wings. We were able to get places even faster than a bird! But unlike them we didn’t even have to work hard to do it. We could accomplish it effortlessly, in warmth and perfect comfort, surrounded by an amazing range of gizmos to amuse us, all the while listening to our favourite melodies. Here, surely, is the extraordinary appeal of the car. We have even made it beautiful to look at.
But who has come along seeking to spoil all our fun? Yes, you’ve got it: big brother. Despite providing jobs for millions, the state almost sees drivers as public enemy no.1. It tells us the car is a killer and a polluter, and it’s selfish to journey to work in a car made for five with only one in it. And as for getting places faster than a bird? “Well, we’ll soon sort that!” it thinks.
Up go the speed cameras and, when the public learn how to deal with them, up go the average speed cameras. The name of the game, you see, is to knock his speed back to such an extent that he’ll eventually opt for a bike. Meantime, let’s give him a taste of what stage coach travel was like with potted roads to contend with! In go millions of speed bumps along with chicanes to make him swerve violently.
Loving it, our transport masters sit in their swanky offices dreaming up what new road schemes they can inflict on us and what roads they can stop us using by making one way. But the bit they love the most is the way they are empowered to pick our pockets shamelessly with their fines and almost the most expensive fuel in all Europe.
All of which brings me to my final point. Didn’t a certain government, when it came to power recently, promise us that ‘the war on motorists is over’? Well, eighteen months on, I’m still waiting.
Germany: hero of the hour?
It used to be said that when America sneezed, Europe caught a cold. Now it’s the other way round, except that Europe has done a great deal more than sneezed; it’s almost taken to its bed. The reason for this is that Europe today is, despite appearances – the world’s economic powerhouse. It has on the way to twice America’s population and accounts for well over 40% of the world’s trade. But it has mismanaged its affairs to the point where the markets have had enough.
We must not blame the markets; they are only a reflection of how the guardians of our pension funds and insurance companies view future prospects. It is their job to identify risk and so protect people’s savings. They do not worry about the Scandinavians, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, or even us (now that we are in the process of balancing our budget and bringing our deficit under control). What they look for are not fine words and good intent – welcome as they are – but action.
They have seen it from us, but they have not been getting it in any meaningful way from Europe. From bestriding the world like a colossus in the lifetime of people still alive (not many, admittedly), Europe has seen its position twice destroyed by the two German wars.
The European Project was designed to ensure that this never happened again. For 50 years, Europe has painstakingly climbed back on its feet. Its people realised that old style nationalism was not the way forward, and today it is a beacon of cooperation and prosperity admired around the world. But all this is now threatened. Ruin, recrimination and bad – if not spilt – blood faces the continent unless it acts fast and decisively
It is to Europe’s great good fortune that it has one economy big enough and strong enough to silence the markets. But the leaders of that economy must step up to the plate. While we all understand why Germany is so paranoiac about printing money, no extra notes are actually printed – it’s just an electronic exercise in today’s world. And that is the point.
Today’s world is very different from the financial circumstances which brought Hitler to power. First, we now know that beggar thy neighbour, protectionist policies are counterproductive. Second, we are a much more joined up, globalised world, with powerful computers assisting our fragile brain capacities. Third, there are the great institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, G20, and many, many more which were not in place when Germany’s Weimar Republic wrestled with its horrendous problems. (Not the least of these were the foolish and ruinous Reparations imposed by the victorious Allies in the Versailles Treaty). So Germany can take a more relaxed view today.
While it is important to learn the lessons of history, it is equally important not to be spooked by them. Germany has an historic opportunity to save Europe which its previous militarism helped to destroy. Germany must realise that if its fears and parsimoniousness allow the Euro to collapse, it will be among the greatest losers; its export-dependent economy would reel under the weight of a super valued Deutschmark. Nobody would be able to afford its goods. And that’s another thing! Nobody has benefited more from the reasonably priced Euro than have the Germans.
Poor, benighted Greece, (along, I might add, with the rest of us) has indulged itself on German products and that’s part of the reason it owes so much. There’s an irony in there somewhere, surely. Another irony is that this crisis has ended a British foreign policy which has been central to it for 500 years – even propelling it into any number of pre-emptive wars – never to allow a continental power bloc to develop which would overshadow us.
When our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer urge Germany forward into a fiscal union, of which we will not be part, they are doing just that: putting the final building blocks in place which will lead to a united Europe.
It is a measure of the extraordinary trust which has built up that they feel safe to do so. So Fritz now has his chance to be the hero of the hour. Let him look at the big picture and rise to the challenge. Europe will be forever in his debt (literally). The European Central Bank must be the vehicle of his largess. It must be beefed up to the point where it can act like the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England – the lender of last resort.
The consequence of Germany opening up the coffers on all its hard earned dosh will not be without benefit in other ways. Systems will be put in place to ensure that such a drama never happens again; the feckless will be compelled into good housekeeping; corruption will be rooted out; Spanish practices in the workplace will be curtailed and Europe will have the fiscal union which, but for the crisis, it would never have had.
South Europe, despite all these measures, will always need a little forbearance, much like the poorer regions of Britain. We northerners will have to accept that with all that heat you will never get the Club Med countries to beaver away quite like us. But if they are unable to implement the austerity requirements – and they should not be too draconian (remember Versailles) – then they should be let go.
One thing, though, is certain. Either we all do our best to all hang together or we will surely all hang separately.
Prince of hypocrites
So, Hugh Grant’s at it again! His supporters’ club must be dwindling by the minute. But none of it would matter too much were it not for the fact that he insists on lecturing us on matters which have a distinct whiff of humbug about it.
Nothing irritates the British public so much as hypocrisy. While Grant’s latest antics seem only a short step from the broom cupboard episode of poor Boris Becker, at least Becker showed genuine humility at how he had let himself and his fans down. But the self-obsessed, narcissistic Hugh Grant shows none. What’s more, Becker has demonstrated over the year a touching regard for his child, shock as it was and totally unplanned for, and knowing as he did what opprobrium that incident brought down on his otherwise lustrous head. He has nonetheless shown himself to be a marvellous father and totally, in my eyes, redeemed himself for that moment of madness.
Forgive my scepticism in Grant’s case (notwithstanding a few fine words from him), but looking at his track record I shall be very surprised if fine words translate into reality ten years down the line. Yet I hope, for his child’s sake, that I am proved wrong.
Grant has had a lot to say recently about press intrusion, and it does worry me tremendously that this inquiry into the Press Complaints Commission has so many people on it that seem ill disposed towards the press (including people who, for want of a better term, have been caught out at one time or another: Keith Vaz is one who immediately springs to mind). The political establishment will find it difficult to forgive the humiliations of being exposed as venal and self serving in the expenses scandal. It is a running sore which some politicos believe cries out for vengeance. I hope the majority are public spirited and big enough to acknowledge that the press were doing no more than their job – indeed their duty – in bringing it to the attention of the public.
But let me be quite clear about one thing. We are talking about the most vibrant and fearless national press in the whole world; an institution of which we should all be proud. And while in pursuit of stories, some of its people have been over zealous and crossed the line in to criminality, we have perfectly good laws which could have dealt with these matters, if only the Met had been doing its job.
It cannot be repeated too often that it was the press which blew the whistle on itself over phone hacking. I never subscribed to the venerable (in age) News of the World, but how I grieve for its demise. It’s a bit like that old saying ‘the death of any man diminishes us all’. Well, the death of the NoW has diminished us. It was offered up as a sacrificial lamb in the hope that it would silence the baying hounds, when in truth it should have been James Murdoch and his band of miscreants who were offered up. The paper had by then been cleaned up (Rebekah Brooks excepted), but as usual it was the ‘poor bloody infantry’ that was laid on the altar.
While watching BBC2 recently, who popped up lamenting the invasion of people’s privacy? Yes, you’ve guessed it: our old friend Hugh. It was truly nauseating listening to him. Equally vociferous in the cause of muzzling the press has been Max Moseley (caught out by the News of the World). For all its sometimes sanctimoniousness, and often own hypocrisy as well sleaziness, the News of the World could still boast a proud record of expose. How many, many were the stories down the years – which the public had every right to know about – did it break in its 168 years of publishing? Sad, sad that it has gone. Even the sleaziness – or most of it – can be forgiven. Experience has shown that an element of tittilation is required to spice up sales. I would argue that it is a small price to pay to help in the battle for survival. Sad, sad that it has gone.
It is uniquely difficult in today’s high speed, digital world to maintain a financially viable press, and many regional papers are having tremendous difficulty competing for readers’ attention. Many are closing. They will never return. We risk, at our peril, taking away their necessary freedoms (which in any case are subject to strict laws of defamation).
When I was in the States recently, I had an object lesson in how very good our press is by comparison. Theirs was boring, parochial and expensive. The BBC’s founder, Lord Reith, spelled out what he saw was the Corporation’s duty to the public: it was “to inform, educate and entertain.” Our press does that in bucket fulls. Let’s keep it that way.
Where open justice is meaningless
One of the worst afflictions our country suffers from is a culture of secrecy.
Where it all began is difficult to say. It certainly became more virulent in the period leading up to the First World War, when the country became paranoiac about our naval secrets being stolen by the dreaded Hun. Then, in 1989, came that draconian, catch all, Official Secrets Act, which ended up making it possible for the number of paper clips Whitehall used being classified as a state secret.
But nowhere is this culture of secrecy more evident than in the family courts. Terrible things are being done in our name behind closed doors, and always the excuse is the same: the need to protect the vulnerable. I suspect, however, that a very large part of its application is for a quite different reasons, including miscarriages of justice, botch-ups, executive incompetence and little-Hitler power structures which brook no interference.
The Blair government got so many, many things wrong, but one thing it did get right was the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act. But, true to form, and in typically British fashion, it was hedged about with so many exclusions and let outs that most of its teeth were drawn before it ever reached the statute books. That is why when you put a simple question, as was done recently, to 90-odd town halls, barely half of them reply. You cannot draw any conclusions from the half which did answer since they are almost certainly the ones who have the least to hide, surely.
Say what you like about the Americans, Australians and the rest, but they are much more open and upfront; not devious and condescending like our lot. Here, there is a patronising ‘don’t bother your little heads, leave it to the experts, we have your best interests at heart’ attitude.
But returning to my bête noire, the family courts, there is almost a conspiracy of silence where they are concerned. Children, in numerous cases, are being legally abducted on the flimsiest of social worker say-so. These little demigods are instrumental in breaking up families so that the child is separated from its parents. Put up for adoption, these children are never to be seen by their parents again. The heartache is unbearable. All this is agreed in closed sessions, and woe betides anyone who in their anguish lets slip a name, for they will go to prison.
Open justice is a meaningless concept to these upstart, dangerous jobsworths. And their skewed attitudes are also at work in the adoption agencies. So politically correct are they, that they will not allow couples to adopt across racial divides (yet one of the great glories of our people is how accommodating they are to people of other races. We would feel nothing but admiration for a couple who opened their door, as well as hearts, to a child of another race). Neither will they if one of them smokes, nor if they are too old, nor if they are this or if they are that.
Two years and seven months it takes on average for them to process a child: an eternity in the life of any kid. And so many are the hoops to be jumped through that it is difficult for any loving couple to be optimistic about their chances (which might – who knows in this topsy-turvy world – actually be improved were they to be gay or lesbian). Indeed, a recently commissioned report stated that the criteria is so strict, the box-ticking so extensive, that most people would not be able to adopt their own children!
Sixty children under the age of one were adopted last year. Yes, 60, in this nation of 62 million. Meanwhile, some 65,000 children languish in care with their childhoods slipping away, and with them their life chances. Shining light on our grossly inadequate care system, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, recently published a set of very disturbing statistics, indicated that 60% of those poor children end up to be either homeless, criminals or suicidal.
Only one other duty – our care for our elderly – equals that of our duty towards our children. Just as the old gave us our past and present, our children are our future. If we do a good job by them – love them, educate them, nurture them – then you can empty out half our prisons in the future and keep our streets free of rioters.
I am one of the very lucky few, after having spent my first 15 years as a foundling in institutionalised child care. My heart bleeds for the ones less lucky – the huge majority – who will suffer all their lives for their screwed up childhoods. Yet the Sharon Shoesmiths of this world feel free to shrug off their culpability and pocket their million pound compensation/pension packages. Scandelous.
The foolishness of clever men
I never cease to be amazed by the foolishness of clever men. And I’m not only talking about Conservative posterboy Dr. Liam Fox, the ex Defence Secretary. I could equally be talking about the previous head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss Kahn, and so many, many more public figures.
Our own Prime Minister – a public relations man, would you believe – is not above his own share of foolishness: cycling to work to show his green credentials with the ministerial car carrying his papers following; trying, in these immensely straightened times, to get his personal photographer on to the public payroll; and taking on the editor of the now defunct News of the World against all the advice of people who knew better. These, and other things, perhaps, explain his tolerance of the bizarre goings on of a man he was not particularly fond of.
Are we not entitled, therefore, to suspect that throughout the Westminster Village there is so much foolishness and taking-the-public-for-a-ride-is-OK-as-long-as-you-don’t-get-caught that were we to know the full extent of it all we would throw up our arms in horror and think the expenses scandal a small matter? My own feeling is that while there are still many good and true men in politics and the public service, the dross which rises to the surface is only the tip of a very nasty and deep iceberg.
And in this matter of getting to hear about what we do, imagine how little we would know were it not for an untrammelled press. If this knee-jerk demand of Cameron’s for an inquiry into the press results in the shackles being applied, we will all be the poorer and frighteningly exposed. The rich and powerful will be licensed to do virtually as they please.
The Prime Minister wasn’t so keen on an inquiry into MPs’ expenses (in fact we didn’t get one) and many suspect that the political class see this as payback time since it was the press which rumbled them and took them to task. There is a tremendous urge to protect their own and this crosses party divides.
Why, when 19 distinguished doctors declared their dissatisfaction with the findings of the weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly’s mysterious death did we not get a proper post mortem as the law says we should have done? It took a decade of never ending pressure to get one for Diana. But this ‘transparency, transparency, transparency’ government will still not match its words with deeds where Dr. Kelly is concerned. Are they protecting someone or something? But that unusual gagging order does at least mean that we will eventually get answers. Pity though we have to wait 70 years when everyone concerned is dead. Nice one, don’t you think?
And while we’re talking about protecting their own, why is it that the CPS is taking so very long to decide whether there is a case to answer in the matter of whether the Energy Secretary got his wife to take his speeding points? I would have thought that what with her not having wings to get her to the place where the incident occurred, and a telephone recording of their own son allegedly urging his father to come clean – plus all the other circumstantial evidence – makes for what should be an easy and quick case for the CPS to decide.
The surprising thing is that the immensely unlikeable and oily Chris Huhne is widely hated across all classes, political included. But it may be that a second ministerial resignation from the LibDems (remember David Laws?) would rock the Coalition boat too much. And now with Fox gone, that would be a third cabinet member gone in only 17 months. Not good! Watch this space! We will see if the CPS is truly independent or is prepared to do its master’s bidding. Don’t forget if they charge Hughne they must also charge his two timed, angrily estranged Greek economist wife for aiding and abetting as well as perjury. What a mess! But at least is has the potential, briefly, to distract us from our present woes.
Moving on from the subject of our esteemed rulers, I think the thing that concerns all of us most is what is going to become of our economy and jobs. OK, the years of New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’, throwing away a golden economic inheritance, are, happily, now behind us. However, the malign hole that it dug for us is still deep. But at least we’ve chucked out the diggers and have stopped mining. And we’re trying our damnedest to climb out of it.
We’ve already done a lot of the necessary things, including recapitalised – at horrifying public expense – the banks and we’re now the Market’s good boy with stars to prove it. They see us as the one and only reformed sinner and predict a happy ending for us. But how do we see ourselves? All the signs are that we’ve talked ourselves into such a doom and gloom mindset that the prognosis is in danger of becoming self-fulfilling.
So much of life and business is perception. In fact, there are as many, if not more, positive signs as there are negative, unlike in most of the rest of the developed world. But you wouldn’t think so listening to the Jeremiahs all around us.
Unemployment at 7.1 % is two whole percentage points below the US and light-years below poor Spain’s 20%. And it is below the EU’s average. Big business is awash with cash if only it could be persuaded to invest it. But there’s the rub: it won’t if it believes that people are too frightened to spend.
All this talk comparing the situation to that of the 1930s must be shown to be the nonsense that it is. Just look at the condition of the Jarrow Marchers. The poorest in the land live like kings compared to them! We must chill out, as the young people say, and start to believe in ourselves. And start spending! If you don’t spend, the bosses will hold back their investments until you do. And if you still refuse then you can whistle goodbye to any growth to pay down our debt and create new jobs. We’ll be flat lining till the end of time. And we might even push things into deflation as the bosses seek to maintain profits with ever greater productivity (i.e. even fewer jobs). Then we’d really have something to complain about, like owning house having halved in value in less than a decade and still stuck with the original mortgage!
After nothing but a succession of body blows, casino banking, mountainous debts and corruption in high places, we can be forgiven for not being in the jolliest of moods. But cheer up! Next year the feel good factor will return big time, at least for Great Britain. We will be truly great again, if only fleetingly, with the double whammy of the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee. Perhaps then we will start spending.
Celebrity
Most children today have such a cosseted, undemanding life at home. In too many cases their every whim is pandered to. They become little Emperors, missing out only on the imperial purple. Instead they get designer clothes as a substitute. Naturally, they expect this child centred mollycoddling to continue when the day comes to begin their education, and in so many ways it does. If you have a cushy, spoiled, indolent life at home and school you are likely to carry this forward into the workplace.
The very first of life’s many disciplines is getting to school on time. Failure, only a little while ago, was almost unthinkable: it was hugely embarrassing and carried a substantial penalty. This sowed the first seeds of being a good timekeeper.
A few years back it was voguish to deride the Victorians and use them as a way of insulting people. Not anymore. We have come to an appreciation of their towering achievements; they had a work ethic that inspired the world and powered the Industrial Revolution. Recently I read a letter which had come to light from a 17-year-old Durham miner in the trenches of the western front in WWI. I was quite blown away by the literacy of the lad. Not only that, but the handwriting was almost a work of art: beautiful calligraphy. The poor lad almost certainly suffered from trench foot and would have had an army of lice crawling over him as he wrote that letter.
Then, on another occasion, I saw a paper of 20 questions which 11-year-olds, a little earlier, were expected to answer. Three of them were beyond me.
Right now in Singapore, India and China that very same sort of rigour is being applied in schooling. Go into an Indian classroom and you will think you have passed through a time warp. It is the very model of the classroom of their former rulers. They may have said their goodbyes to us, but they are not too proud to cherry pick the best we had to offer, including our wonderful language.
What great societies have to guard against is the soft living and compromised standards that their very success induces. The Greeks despised the Persians for their effete ways and the barbarians the Romans for their dissolute lifestyle. And we know who came out on top in those standoffs.
No one is saying that we should not enjoy the fruits of our success, but we must maintain our core values and the essential disciplines which go with them. Otherwise we will go the way of Nineveh and Tyre.
Not helping in this struggle to maintain standards is the West’s current obsession with celebrity. It has reached farcical proportions. Time was that to be a celebrity you had to have done something; something pretty amazing. And you had not to blot your copybook along the way. Yet today we shower adulation and honours on former drug and sex addicts, philanderers, rotten bankers, shady party funders, time servers, spin doctors, failed politicos, useless Met chiefs and not so brilliant actor/showbiz types who, in many cases, deny the country who made and furnished them with their great wealth a small part of it to fund its necessary expenses.
Young people are mesmerised by the lure of fame. They are being seduced by the idea that their life chances are unaffected by not taking their studies seriously. Why endure the tedium of swatting when you can nab a mega-rich footballer, try your luck on the lottery, win the X Factor or be a Page 3 girl? There’s always something out there. And if all else fails there’s always that soft-touch dozy lot down Social. And if you prefer not to work, well that’s a lifestyle option, innit. And no worries either about having no points on the social housing list! No prob… just have a baby or two… or three… or four.
It is truly a sad spectacle to see all those delusional wannabes packing out the car park of The X Factor waiting for the call. And what does it say about us that the producers serve up for our edification and ridicule the most hopeless, cringe-making losers. There is almost a gladiatorial games feel about it all when they step out in front of 5,000 people to demean and make fools of themselves and, inevitably, be hissed and booed. Many are genuinely puzzled, even furious, that others cannot see the enormity of their talent. Some, undoubtedly, have mental health problems and it is hard to believe that the producers do not know that.
The truth is we have to be realistic and accept that few of us have that sort of shining talent which will leave our peers breathless. Equally, we must accept that the odds against us winning the lottery or The X Factor, or bagging a Wayne Rooney, are slim to the point of vanishing.
So what is the alternative? A humble acceptance of not being a super nova, but being ordinary. Normal, if you like. Being normal is not such a bad thing. Great nations are not built by the glitterati, but by the quality of their ordinary people. It was those ordinary people who Wellington, by the way, described as “the scum of the earth” who handed him his victory at Waterloo after a daylong pounding by the best that the French could throw against them. Hallelujah, I say, for the common man; more properly termed ‘the salt of the earth’. His loves and lives beat nine out of ten of the never satisfied divas.
Taming Brussels
For a brief moment we thought we had got on top of the financial woes of the Credit Crunch and our personal and governmental debts which put all our livelihoods at risk.
At incredible potential cost, we had recapitalised our banks and put them on a sound footing. And then we began the painful long haul task of bringing our deficit under firm control. So far so good; the markets were impressed. The heat was off Britain.
But then the markets turned their gaze on the warring Europeans and their troubled, ill conceived euro.
The sovereign debt levels of the periphery countries quite spooked them. A slanging match had developed between the thrifty north and the spendthrift south. The Germans, in particular, were furious at the feckless and economically illiterate way the south Europeans had behaved, and the talk was that they had had enough of the haemorrhaging of their hard earned dosh. The whole future of the euro – and with it the European Union – hung in the balance.
Greece was the domino likely to go down first and very likely to carry a string of others with them. It was never an easy country to govern, and lovely people though they are, one of their irredeemable failings is that they make almost a national sport of not paying their taxes.
Yet at the same time, because they were part of the wonderful European Union, they expected to enjoy all the social benefits of the conscientious taxpaying north. How do you square a circle like that? After all, the north only got all those benefits because it was willing to cough up.
Greece’s public sector is bloated to the extent that it makes our own flawed product look like a sleekly toned race horse. What’s more, it only turns up for work when it feels like it and its appalling levels of absenteeism pass with just the Greek equivalent of a Gallic shrug. Then, after a semi-detached life of half work they insist on retiring ten years before the rest of us. No wonder the boys in their lederhosen are hacked off.
Yet despite what he and his other diligent north European comrades feel, he will not get his pride and joy deutschmark back. The ruling elite will see to that! The political classes have invested too much political and other capital in the so called ‘European project’ to let it founder. But after terrible dithering and lack of leadership which has propelled them to the wire, they have drawn back from what they see as the abyss of a collapsed Europe.
They are now determined, at last, to get ahead of the curve. They are putting together a package of such breathtaking proportions – three trillion (or 3,000,000,000,000) euros, no less – that even the money markets will recognise that they are putting their money where their mouth is and back off.
Yet the package will need approval of all 17 members of the eurozone and all 27 members of the Union for treaty amendments. Part of the deal, I’m sure, is that the people who underwrite the deal – principally the Germans – will insist on a future level of fiscal rectitude which will make it nigh on impossible for such a situation to arise again. There will be an oversight of all 17 member states’ budgets with a majority power of veto.
It will be, effectively, the final part of the jigsaw towards a united Europe: for all intents and purposes a fiscal union, which along with the existing monitory union will finally give the European single currency credibility. Politically, it couldn’t have happened at the beginning or at any point along the way, but dire necessity has forced the issue. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The new Europe will not be such a bad place to belong so long as all that nonsense of an interfering Brussels is dealt with.
This is a heaven sent opportunity which will not come again. And because they need our signature on the treaty, we can insist on repatriation of those matters we all know to be flawed, such as the Working Times Directive, border controls, fisheries protection, and even that horney old chestnut: the Common Agricultural Policy.
Way back when we were haggling over the Maarstricht Treaty, they came up with that amazing word “subsidiarity”. What ever happened to it? It was adopted by the Union and was specifically designed to constrain Brussels.
If we seize the moment, we can then settle down to becoming the good Europeans we were always willing to be, instead of the perpetual awkward squad.
The world of tomorrow is going to be one of the big battalions, and Europe is a very big battalion indeed; one more than capable of stopping itself being pushed around by a resurgent China or anyone else.
The Battle of Britain spelt Hitler’s demise
We have just concluded the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Today we enter its 71st. I believe that of all the titanic battles of WWII, this was the one which determined its outcome. Though tiny in terms of the numbers of combatants involved, it was massive in high-tech: it did not get more massive in this regard for those times. Brilliant machines and brilliant fliers – on both sides – and a ground-breaking British structure of command and control. Without this system, which was put in place during the year which the much-maligned Chamberlain gained us after the Munich Pact, we would have lost the battle.
Churchill said that upon its outcome depended the survival of Christian civilisation and, indeed, the whole world. Lose it and we would all descend into “a new dark age made more sinister and protracted by the lights of perverted science”. He was surely right.
After the fall of France, Hitler sought peace with Britain. The war which his invasion of Poland had precipitated had been the one gamble which misfired. All the others – the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss (union) with Austria, and the annexation of Czechoslovakia – had all succeeded, bloodlessly. He did not realise we had, at last, rumbled him and hereon would fight him. Hitler entertained the fanciful notion that Britain, a fellow Teutonic power he greatly admired, would join his crusade against Bolshevik Russia.
His plan to invade us was born of the lover’s pangs of anger and frustration: unrequited love, they call it. Some in the Royal Navy have said that even if we’d lost the Battle of Britain they could still have sunk Hitler’s landing barges.
But we saw time and again as the war progressed how vulnerable surface ships were to air attack. After all, we crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto as did the Japanese the American at Pearl Harbour.
Interestingly, the Japanese commander said that they would never have thought of it but for what we did at Taranto. Then there was the loss of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales off Malaysia and the Bismarck in the Atlantic.
Tirpitz also succumbed to aerial assault. No one doubts that had the Wehrmacht been able to make a landing in force it would have been game over for Britain.
After the debacle at Dunkirk, three months earlier, the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) survivors were without vehicles, heavy ordnance, and even the majority of their small arms. Britain would have been forced to give in to its own powerful ‘peace party’. What then would have been the result of Britain’s withdrawal from the war? A free run for the Nazi juggernaut. Hitler would have been able to hurl his entire armed might against Soviet Russia. The many divisions locked up facing a still belligerent Britain would have been released to powerfully augment that effort in the east.
As it was he came within a whisker of success. Death would have then been guaranteed to Stalin’s regime. Master, then, of the entire Eurasian landmass, Hitler’s dream of world conquest would have been complete. Only success in the race to develop the atomic bomb could have reversed that verdict. But the US Manhattan Project would have been impossible without the help of British scientists who were well ahead of their US counterparts in their understanding of the physics involved.
These are the reasons which cause me to believe that the battle which kept Britain in the war was the one which spelt Hitler’s ultimate defeat. On the 50th Anniversary, I wrote a poem to commemorate that extraordinary feat of arms and I am greatly honoured that it has found a home in the Battle of Britain museum. I hope the reader feels that I have done justice to those wonderful, boyish heroes of “our finest hour”.
SALUTE TO THE FEW
You were young and you were brave:
You a nation had to save;
Scrambled from your aerodrome,
Test those skills so freshly honed;
Whirling in your fighter high,
Fought your duels across the sky;
Like the famous knights of old,
You were fearless, keen and bold;
Never did a fate so grim
Threaten all with mortal sin;
Never did so very few
Save so great a multitude;
Spurn a deal that would have saved
All that men of empire made.
Chose the path of blood and debt;
Know that honour’s fully met;
Far beyond your nation’s shores,
All humanity took pause:
For it knew that you alone
Could for misspent time atone;
Be the first to best the Hun:
Yours a famous victory won;
Boyish banter in the sky,
Where you were so soon to die;
Almost out of school you came,
There to die in battle’s flame;
Fire and smoke and cannon’s roar,
Trapped within your cockpit door:
Feel the searing heat around;
See the fast approaching ground:
Time to dwell but fleetingly
On that love on mother’s knee.
Bought you time that others might
Join you in that fateful fight;
Lift the terror, set men free:
Save them from base tyranny!
Plod under caution
A searching spotlight has been directed on to police in recent weeks as a result of the recent riots. It is true to say they are all that stands between us and anarchy, since we are not a militarised state with a large standing army. (We have always found work for the latter to do far from our shores.) But anarchy did, indeed, descend on us 4 weeks ago and for a while the nation trembled at the thought that it was running out of control. What disturbed it most was not the perception, funnily enough, that rioters were on the rampage, but that the police were powerless to stop them. Let us be clear about one thing: it was not lack of numbers which created the difficulty; at 143,000 officers the police are 50,000 greater in numbers than when they faced down the miners. What it all comes down to is how those numbers were deployed. I was shocked to learn the other day that the time of greatest police deployment was on a Monday morning and the time of least was on a Friday or Saturday night. What is going on? It seems to me that the police are working themselves into an office mindset whereby they see themselves as a basically 9am to 5pm operation with overtime paid for unsocial hours. I was even more shocked to learn that in one constabulary almost half of all officers make no arrests in a whole year. And other constabularies perform in similarly dismal fashion.
What the public craves above everything is a visible presence on the streets and it has begged for this for years. But Plod wishes not to plod any more. It’s highly unglamorous and a little demeaning. Much better a high speed chase, lights a flashing and siren screaming. Now that’s glamour! In between times there’s cruising the streets in their costly, often alloy-wheeled cars (preferably with a pretty young thing for company) and seeing not a lot as they pass. The public wishes to see the money which is extracted from it under duress spent responsibly. It does not regard two officers ‘patrolling’ safe areas while they chat away to each other not noticing much as money well spent.
We know that gang culture blights our larger cities, but what do the police do when the Prime Minister wants to engage the services of a proven gang buster from the States and put him in charge of the rudderless Met? They throw up their arms and say ‘we’re not having a foreigner coming over and telling us what to do’. They know a game changer when they see it; he would be jumping on their Spanish Practices and spoiling everything. Indeed, a few years ago a South African policeman came to work at one of the constabularies. He took his job seriously and his arrest rate was light years ahead of his colleagues. What happened? He was sidelined and virtually sent to Coventry. He left in disgust. We have 43 Constabularies in Britain and the crime clear up rate in some are, again, light years better than others. Were this to be the case in a company, the CEO would descend like the Furies on the laggards: heads would roll and things would change. Nothing less than a rout-and-branch shake-up of the police is required.
But it is certainly not all their own fault. They have been blown this way and that way by the armies of bleeding hearts, health & safety directives, race & equality demands, box-ticking requirements, political correctness and courts who make their bringing to trial efforts a joke by handing down laughably lenient sentences. Even their dropping of the term Force in favour of Police Service tells you how confused they are. They cannot any longer be seen to project an image of firmness. They are ‘At Your Service’, if you please! But there is one area of law enforcement in which the police do show genuine zeal. That is their pursuit of the motorist. A hugely disproportionate level of resources are devoted to motoring offenses. Is it, I wonder, because they are easy pickings? Like shooting pop-up ducks at a fairground. The British motorist is the perfect customer: he goes quietly, is not abusive, and best of all never violent. What is never recognised is that he is the most considerate driver in the entire world with a death rate which reflects this. My Baltic wife, when we married ten years ago and she came to live here, remarked how willingly people gave way on our roads and even gave a little return wave when they were thanked for their kindness. She said such gentlemanly behaviour would be unthinkable in her country. An elected head of each constabulary – answerable for his or her own performance, with real powers of hire and fire in the top echelons – would be a good start and could work wonders. And a Home Secretary who would stand up to the vested interests within the Force and say to them that the vacant post of head of the Met was open to all, foreigners included, would also help. What does it say of David Cameron that he meekly acquiesced in his Home Secretary’s refusal to look for the best wherever it could be found? I doubt that Mrs. Thatcher would have tolerated that sort of cheek from her Home Secretary, or even Gordon Brown for that matter.
The mad dog
As President Reagan once noted, there was always something of the ‘mad dog’ about Libya’s deposed despot. He entertained the most grandiose of illusions, prancing about as he did in his Gilbert and Sullivan uniforms. He imagined he could unify all Africa under his benign rule (before that it was the entire Arab world). He couldn’t understand why Egypt’s then ruler, Nasser, didn’t want to make a start by unifying their two countries. Using his country’s vast oil wealth, he sought to enlist (buy) all the friends he could instead of spreading it around his tiny, impoverished population. Many succumbed, including, to our eternal shame, our own Tony Blair.
Gadaffi was evil beyond belief. Once, when 1,200 prisoners in one of his many squalid gaols protested their conditions, he had them all murdered. He had no qualms about blowing people out of the skies nor bombing them in nightclubs. He was quartermaster of the IRA, sending them shipments of deadly ordnance to help them maximise the number they could kill; Semtex, arguably the deadliest of all explosives, helped mightily in those endeavours. He was prepared to kill an unarmed police woman in broad daylight on the streets of London along with opponents of his regime. All around the world he made himself available to sow terror and death. So crazed did he become that one by one his bought ‘friends’ distanced themselves from him. Even his fellow Muslims and the Arab League concluded that it did their cause no good to be seen to be associated with him, and this is what made it possible for the very first time to get the Arab League onside and stop that Bengazi massacre. At one of the meetings of the Arab League, he insulted the King of Saudi Arabia to the point that even that long-suffering, mild mannered autocrat, gave him a mouthful and walked out. Eventually, without anyone left to listen to his barmy, rambling discourses he was prevailed on by his Western educated sons, principally Saif, to come in from the cold by announcing that he had seen the light and would no more sponsor terrorism. He also grandly announced that he was no longer intent on assembling an atomic bomb.
Our own Prime Minister, Tony Blair (eyes a twinkle at the thought of the juicy contracts on offer), rushed into the tyrant’s spooky embrace – literally. Gone, it appears, were all thoughts of what this man had done to Blair’s (our) country and indeed the world. And now that Gadaffi’s own people can take no more of him – 42 years is an awfully long time – what are Tony’s excuses? “Well, I stopped his nuclear programme, didn’t I? Think what he could have done with that.” Come on, Tony, liberator of oppressed people everywhere. You know perfectly well that an atom bomb was decades over the horizon for Libya. If 70m people in Iran are struggling to the extent that they are, what chance have a desert people of 6m? Gadaffi would have long since died of natural causes before his eyes streamed tears of joy at that magic mushroom cloud rising over the Sahara.
Gadaffi’s capture alive would be much better than dead: he would be denied the chance to don the martyr’s crown; rather he would add to the other sadist leaders who have been arraigned at humanity’s court of ultimate justice. We would have the chance to catalogue at least some of his numberless crimes. Little by little, as the tyrants are made to answer for their abuses of their fellow man, we will have built up a body of case law and strengthened the International Criminal Court. The message will surely go out and be understood that the days of sovereign immunity whereby you can murder your own people at will are over. Tyrants everywhere beware!
So far as the prospects in post-Gadaffi Libya and all the peoples of liberated North Africa, I am not so gloomy as other pundits. Yet I know there is the potential for things to go badly wrong; decades of personalised rule by despots do not bequeath enlightened, functioning institutions. And Libya is awash with guns. Let them all be collected up and shipped to Syria’s hard-pressed heroes. Of course it will be hard, but they are determined. They have seen what tyranny brings. They are young and they are better educated than their parents. They are also internet savvy: they have seen the jobless wasteland their cruel and venal oppressors have created. Through TV they can see how much better are the lives just across the Mediterranean. In interviews and via their tweets they are at pains to tells us we have nothing to fear. But perhaps they do not realise the perils ahead (a little naive, perhaps)? Let us at least do all in our power to ease their passage to a better life, and let them know we have no designs on them beyond wishing them happiness and success. God knows, after their astonishing bravery they deserve that!
If we can play our part in helping to create prosperous and stable societies in what might be called our own backyard, think what that can do for our own struggling industries. 300m new consumers, willing and wanting – and now at last able – to buy our goods and services. Enlightened self-interest it may be called. Designed, not just to make a better world, but to lift our own spirits. Then there is the no-small-matter of Christian/Islamic relations. Imagine how prosperity, open, friendly and democratic societies will take the sting out of the Jihadists. What a prize! At that point, Israel’s own fears would be allayed and we would almost certainly have the comprehensive middle east settlement that has eluded us all this time. It would also go a long way to healing Europe’s own troubled relationship with its Muslim minority. We might even become friends.
What a distance we have fallen
In the ongoing debate about the UK riots it is important to explore further its causes as well as possible remedies. A great mystery for many is why by no means all of the rioters were from deprived, ill-educated backgrounds. What we have to recognise is that below the veneer of civilised life there lurks an anarchic streak which needs only a few factors to coalesce to release mayhem. (St. Petersburg was the most civilised of cities until its people started to eat one another under the pressures of the German seige.)
One of the factors, I suggest, which let the anarchic genie out of the bottle was the images of the early rioters getting away with stealing much sought after goods with impunity, with the police seeming to be impassive bystanders. The many rioters not normally associated with the lawless underclass saw their acquisitive instincts rise to the fore; they felt powerfully envious and jealous that others were acquiring the things which they themselves valued highly and were doing so unimpeded and without risk, so it seemed, of consequences. Ours, as we are all very well aware, is an extremely acquisitive and materialistic society and the temptation was very great. And so adding to all the other tragedies of the last few days is that of bright young people throwing their futures away. For obvious reasons, and to maintain that veneer of civilised conduct, we must come down hard on rioting. There was a time when rampaging, destructive rioters were shot on sight. As for arson, the law has always bracketed it very close with murder because in so many cases it ended up with just that. Of course those days have gone, although the arson view remains.
Many have drawn a parallel with the blatant and offensive greed we see at the top of society. They are not unconnected, though they are not the same: these people have said that a climate right across society of the devil take the hindmost and every man for himself has had a corrosive effect and they are right; they have further pointed out that the sums involved in what might be called Grand Larceny by the upper classes make their hapless imitators in the lower orders look like pathetic amateurs; perhaps more disgracefully, the big practitioners have used their superior wits and education to mask the wickedness of what they are doing. For the fact is they do know what they have been doing and are still doing. But they have been rumbled (highlighting the need for a free and untramelled press). There is, as a result, a very great anger out there among the public.
Not one of the agencies which shape our lives sets an example of probity, save perhaps the military: not the town halls with their obscene rewards for second rate executives; not the parliamentarians who frame our laws; not the police who receive payment for information; not the press with its eagerness to get an expose; not our financial institutions; nor even the House of Lords who are meant to be above it all, packed full as it meant to be with people we are asked to admire as a result of their lives of supposed selfless service in whatever field they have specialised in. But what of the professions? Have they performed better? Don’t believe it! We have doctors conning a witless government into paying them 30% more for less cover and work. We have ambulance chasing lawyers rubbing their hands with glee as they pursue what should be hopeless Human Rights cases at huge expense to the taxpayer (step forward Cherie Blair). And we have accountants stretching the law to breaking point as they seek ever more ingenious dodges and tax havens for their rich clients. Why do people in corporations such as Sir Philip Green along with the likes of philanderers and ex-drug users such as Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney as well as clean (as far as we know) Cliff Richard and actors such as Sean Connery and Roger Moore, all of whom along with Rod Stewart short-change their country’s treasury get honoured? They are not patriots, they are cheating scoundrels. Sanctimonious Bono’s U2 cheats even poor benighted Ireland of its desperately needed dues. All of these people and bodies have been found wanting and intent only on feathering their own nasty little nests at the public expense.
Corruption, fraud, dissembling all are alive and well in the British state. Oh, for that magnificent body that we once created in distant India – the ICS (Indian Civil Service) – which in over a hundred years of dedicated and selfless service never found one of its servants corrupt. They were chosen after perhaps the stiffest examination ever known to man (the Mandarin exam being a possible exception) and they were expected to be fluent in the language of the area they were seconded to. Setting example, leading from the front, taking the rap that is what all of us look to in our leaders. When did the last politician (David Davis excepted) resign his post on a point of principal or even when a monumental cock-up has been made in their department? Yet funnily enough, Enoch Powell was one of those to do so. Indeed, the last one that I can think of was Lord Carrington over the Falklands and that was nearly thirty years ago. Even lying to Parliament seems not a resigning matter any more. And we have a Speaker who appears little better than a clown (the previous one was no better, being both ignorant and corrupt). What a distance we have fallen. Where oh where, by the way, was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the terrible events of last week? A few words concerning Christian values would surely have not gone amiss.
Not until we show that we will not tolerate reprehensible conduct can we, with justice, expect what used to be called ‘the lower orders’ to respect the law. But meantime we must hold the line on the streets. Let the work begin. Perhaps we can now see a little of that ‘Big Society’ that David Cameron is so keen on. They were there with their clean up operation the morning after the riot.
Police must lose Robocop image
How humiliating that perhaps the greatest city in the world, known to everyone since the very first Caesar, has fallen to the latest incarnation of the Vandals. What happened last week has been headline news all around the world to what should be the huge embarrassment of every person living in these islands.
How did it happen? It happened because a group of amoral young people saw an opportunity to unleash their feral instincts and have what was to them some real fun. Underpinning this was a unique chance to help themselves to items that their state handouts would not allow them to buy. They did not set out to harm anybody, but that was the inevitable consequence. They just wanted everyone to get out of their way so they could do as they pleased. Where did the forces of law and order feature in all this? First they were caught asleep on their watch with the only two senior officers who might have made a difference pushed out of their job because of pettifogging nonsense over phone hacking. So the ‘Great Met’ was rudderless. They should have been monitoring the Twitters and realised that in today’s joined-up world they can get advanced warning of what is likely to happen. Wake up Met, the Internet is here! Then when they did spring into action they stood back, looking like RoboCops, and stared out from behind their shields. Were they afraid?
There is a terrible disconnect between the police and the lawless underclass, who view them as the despised enemy; someone, who in their take on the world, can be to blame for the boring pointlessness of their lives. But who, we have to ask ourselves, is truly to blame? Back we have to come as I said in my last spiel to the lack of values inculcated at family level. And who encouraged that? Why, the ‘bleeding hearts’ who said that discipline at all levels – be it at home, school, the policeman on the beat – should be eased. Reasons must be sought for bad behaviour. We must try not to be so judgemental. And as if we were not storing up enough trouble for the future with such policies, we failed to give these luckless kids a decent education.
A few decades ago there was one arm of the state which might still have saved these sad cases of hopelessness: the military. Two years before the mast (National Service) would have knocked some real sense into them and taught them many real and valuable skills. They might even have come to take some pride in their country’s military prowess down the centuries and come to love her. But, alas, we must deal with the situation as we find it now. First of all we must get behind the Education Secretary’s revolution in the classroom. Then we must support the policies which encourage people into work and penalise the workshy and the malingerers. But most all we must do everything we can to reinforce the family and ditch the silly notion that a father isn’t altogether necessary.
I am pleased that we did not rush into using water cannon, rubber bullets and tear gas. The foreigner may be shocked at the images coming out of London and elsewhere, but he should not get supercilious and start tittering. Germany, France, Greece and others have all resorted to these but, except for Northern Ireland, we never have. And our policemen are virtually alone in the world in not being seen to strut the streets with a pistol at their hip. Such is the British way and the foreigner stands in awe at such law enforcement. We have ethnic groups who do not yet understand these things, but in time they will.
Meantime, it would help if our police stopped dressing up like Robocops. If they are to connect with these feral young people they should look as casual as possible, not like someone who has leaped straight out of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ or some computer game they have been playing… someone they have just zapped into oblivion. Even our ‘Bobbies’ on the beat are padded out to an absurd degree and no longer look normal. Mrs. Thatcher’s police faced worse violence during the miners’ strike without these scary looking outfits, but yet they managed to contain the situation. But the difference is that they got stuck in; they didn’t cower behind their shields and allow the collieries to be torched. It was just the same when the print unions took on Rupert Murdoch at Wapping. All done without a lot of show-off, expensive paraphernalia, but with a determination to oppose lawlessness at any cost, even to themselves. I bet the boys presently in Helmand Province would laugh their socks off (or perhaps weep) at such pusillanimous as we have seen on the streets of London recently.
Ian Blair, the former head of the Metropolitan Police, has so much to answer for with his politicising of the police and his insistence on political correctness. What a disgrace that we must now refer to him as Lord Blair! But in all this sad litany of woe there is a very great silver lining: we can now be sure that the police will not allow themselves to be caught again with their pants down at the London Olympics next year.
The Perfect Storm
It is alarming that the markets have given a thumbs down to the Obama/Congress deal. And now we hear that they are seriously doubtful of Italy’s ability to grow its way out of the enormous debt it holds.
What with Spain teetering on the brink, and Greece, Portugal and Ireland considered lost causes, we have what amounts to ‘the perfect storm’. Yet we British have retained the market’s confidence; our willingness to bite the bullet allows us to borrow at the same rate as the Germans. But sadly that won’t save us. We absolutely have to sell our goods and services to the New World as well as the old.
43% alone of our output goes to the European Union, and another huge chunk to North America. The US Republicans – led by the Tea Party – refuse to aid a deficit cutting programme by including tax increases, even though the Federal Government’s tax take is barely half the European average. What right-minded system in today’s world allows Western drivers to fill up at not much more than half of the EU average?
Alas, Americans (and to be fair we) have been living high on the hog for too long. We in the West – especially the Americans with their consumption-driven economy – have been sating ourselves on China’s cheap goods, fueling its mind-blowing year-on-year 10% growth at the expence of increasing their own competetiveness. Industries have gone down like ninepins and jobs exported; they have allowed China to get away with a grossly undervalued currency and not to conform to World Trade Organisation rules. Perhaps most alarming of all, China stands accused of commercial and military espionage on a industrial scale by hacking into the West’s computer systems. This amounts to war by other means. So either the US treats balancing its budget almost as though it were a wartime priority, or it can say goodbye to being the world’s leading economy. Hello, China. Hello, India.
We may have been sold the idea that somethings are too big to fail, but believe me: a whole nation can fail – even the US if it hasn’t the stomach to put its house in order. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have done for the United States what the Kaiser and Hitler wars did for us… nigh bankrupted it. The difference is that in our case it was a noble struggle that simply had to be faced; a militaristic Germany bent on world conquest was a cause worth sacrificing even the British Empire for.
As far as the Euro is concerned, no matter how many sticking plasters they try to put over the crisis, nothing can hide the fact that the patient neeeds surgery. Greece and the others – the so called PIIGS – can’t service the debts they already have and provide for growth. And how does it help to foist more loans on them and push their service charges even higher? It’s the economics of the madhouse. They must all be cut loose; free to set their interest rates at the appropriate level; free to make a mess of things if they can’t get their act together without dragging everyone else down with them and also free to rejoin if they get their house in order and meet the strict criteria of membership, which they were meant to meet in the first place but never did.
The only alternative is for the sound economies of the north to take fiscal control of the hopeless cases in the south. In other words, a Fiscal Union to add to the unworkable existing Monetary Union. In the long run the PIIGS would all be better off. But would they stand for it? Proud, broken Greece would find it exceedingly hard to take the teutonic medicine that Frankfurt would insist they swallow.
As for poor old Britain, we are left dangling in the wind, waiting on events over which we have no control, but which are certain to turn all our lives upside down. I would hazard a guess, however, that if the Euro is reformed so that only successful economies can belong, then perhaps a very good case could then be made for us to join
There are huge advantages to be had in belonging to a truly powerful currancy bloc that might well take over as the world’s Reserve Currency. I fear the dollar’s day may be done, but I wouldn’t underestimate Uncle Sam’s recuperative powers and his legendary can-do approach when fired up. But please, please don’t let the Reserve Currency be the Yuan if Uncle Sam can’t make it.
Norwegian killings
The recent shocking events in Norway have affected us in a particularly unusual way, as we have long come to view the Scandinavian family in a special light. Although they may once have been among the most violent people ever to walk the earth, that was a very long time ago; like so many others whose characteristics have changed beyond all recognition – think Romans, Germans, Japanese – we now regard the Norsemen as paragons of virtuous and peaceful living. If such an event can occur in such a region then it can occur anywhere. But perhaps I miss a vital factor here; perhaps I should restrict my comments to the developed world. Why do I say this? I say it because we have not yet heard of an outrage of this sort in Africa, Latin America or the East. And we have not heard of it in the countries of the Mediterranean basin.
A common feature of all the perpertrators of these crimes is that they are loners. They do not come from integrated and loving families; they have chips on their shoulders because they feel themselves neglected and unwanted. Their parents, in pursuit of notions of equality and a right to continue the hedonistic lifestyle of youth, even after they have ‘committed’ and produced children, do not want to be burdened with the sacrifices of parenthood. Forget the cover which hatred of the outsider provides – in this case Muslims. If they didn’t exist it would be the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, or other such minority groups. The loner has to have something to hang his grievances on.
One factor which distinguishes this atrocity from the others is that the killer had no wish to kill himself. For a start – with his warped thinking – he believes he is acting in a righteous cause and need have no bad conscience. To him, the end justifies the means or, as Stalin put it: ‘A single death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.’ And in that respect he is no different from the Jehadists. What’s more, he is young and will, due to Norway’s 21-year maximum jail term, be walking the streets again in his early fifties (during this time he will be enjoying some of the cushiest prison conditions in the entire world). Also what is different is that he has left us a veritable mountain of his private thoughts via the internet. He has spent years cataloguing everything. His ‘manifesto’ alone runs to an astonishing 1,430 pages, the majority of which will no doubt be rambling nonsense. We shall further have a chance to analyse his twisted logic in minute detail in one-to-ones during the months and years ahead.
What this sad and tragic tale seems to say to me is that government policies throughout the developed world must be skewed to resurrect the values associated with strong and stable families. Parents must be brought to understand that if they produce children they must stand by them; that they must make sacrifices to ensure that they have happy memories of their childhood to draw on and to know that they were loved and cherished. It is a bitter harvest indeed that we are reaping as a result of the decades following the fifties, when adults were free to be as promiscuous as they pleased – thank you, pill – and to pursue a ‘me, me lifestyle’. And don’t tell these people about duties; they only want to hear about rights.
The euro
How could Greece’s economy, which makes up only 2% of the Eurozone, potentially bring the whole house of cards crashing down? It is down to what the jittery markets make of it all. If they believe that the new bailout’s austerity demands (the second tranche) are unenforceable on a people who are now close to ungovernable, then they will panic, and a panicking bond market cannot be resisted. Indeed, we British had firsthand experience of this on ‘Black Wednesday’. And besides, the Greeks don’t have the stomach for more austerity: they would rather default on their debts and tell north Europe to get stuffed; they see only a future of unending misery as things stand.
As for the still fragile and barely recovering banks, there would inevitably be huge shockwaves all over again. But it’s the thought of a domino eftect on the other tottering economies of south Europe (Britain in extremis will save Ireland from going under) which is the stuff of sleepless nights. No body (neither the ECB nor IMF) can raise the sort of money needed to save the likes of Spain or Italy: it is truly a doomsday scenario which, amazingly, has got even China and India thinking they might have to step in.
The Euro is going to have to go back to the format which it originally drafted; that’s to say that only economies which can meet the five strict criteria laid down can be members. Alas, it was the failure to adhere to these requirements and the mad rush to admit anybody and everybody – and all the fudging that took place besides – which has led to the present situation. In that sense, north Europe has only itself to blame for not insisting on admission rules being sacrosanct. It is perfectly understandable that the hardworking, tax-paying, late-retiring North resents the happy-go-lucky, tax-avoiding and lets-play-the-Euro-system-with-its-cheap-loans South, which told a string of porkies about its indebtedness and then, to cap it all, wants to put its feet up early. But the South did only what most would do in the circumstances, given half a chance. Any thinking person could have seen it coming.
Watch this space!
A Mysterious Death
There is a deep public perception that not all is as it should be with the mysterious death of of Dr. David Kelly, the internationally respected arms inspector. The Prime Minister needs to understand that there will be public outrage if his government refuses the inquest that should have been held in the first place.
I am not by nature a conspiracy theorist, believing as I do that most things have a perfectly rational explanation. Yet in this case there are far too many unresolved questions to which the public has a right to seek answers. Three additional factors strenghten me in my belief that the government will do itself no favours by quashing any further investigation: first, no fewer than 19 medical experts have banded together to question the inquiries findings; second, why was a 70-year gagging order placed over the whole affair? And third, if David Cameron wishes us to believe he is sincere in his constant pleas about transparancy, he’d better demonstrate it in this most disturbing of cases.
The Strauss-Kahn affair
The Strauss-Kahn affair highlights the amazing disconnect between a clever man of vaulting ambition and the predatory forces of sexuality. We see it again and again across all nations. How, we ask ourselves, do the individuals concerned not see the enormity of the risks they run? Strauss-Kahn was favourite to be the next president of France. His fall from grace is epic, with the dimensions of a Shakespearian or even Greek tragedy. Is it that hubris, driven by a sense of power or wealth, causes these people to think that lesser mortals would not dare to challenge their God-like status? What is important is that we the people show them that justice is blind to such considerations. Equally, we cannot allow those who encourage us to believe in their probity and often use it to advance their career, then run off to the judiciary crying foul and get that over-mighty body to issue a gagging order when, of their own stupidity, things go wrong.
If you want to be placed on a pedestal and be seen as a role model, then you must not disappoint the legions—of the young in particular—by being seen to have feet of clay and be a hypocrite. You have to lead by example. We must act urgently to prevent judges drawing a veil of secrecy over the activities of the rich and famous who wish to have it both ways. Those loosely drafted provisions of the Human Rights Act which have allowed judges, who themselves have been shown to be not above sexual indiscretions, to interpret it in the way they wish.
Bin Laden is no more
A decade of waiting has finally yielded a result: Osama bin Laden is no more. A trial, while superficially appealing, would have been a nightmare for a whole host of reasons. The Muslim world must accept that the level of wickedness Bin Laden was responsible for could only have merited one just outcome.
Saddam Hussein went to the gallows following a trial by his own people; it would have been altogether differently perceived if the trial had been arranged by the Christian West. There would have been no trial like it since Oliver Cromwell arraigned his own king in 1649, and like Charles, Osama would have ended up—at least among his own people—a martyr.
This outcome will not see the end of Muslim terror by its unbalanced, extremist wing, but it has decapitated its loudest, most sinister proponent. To quote Churchill, after the long awaited victory in the Egyptian desert: ‘Now this is not the end; it is not even be beginning of the end; but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning’.
Although a necessary task has been accomplished, there should be no gloating from the West. A few more years of evading his pursuers would have turned Bin Laden into a latter-day Robin Hood, and if he’d never been run to ground the West would have seemed supine as well as hopelessly incompetent.
The Royal Wedding
The truly beautiful spring we’re enjoying here in Great Britain sets the scene, we must hope, for a truly beautiful wedding in just under a week’s time. The bride is certain to look stunning; she is already a gift to the camera, being tall and slim with a nice dress sense. Indeed, she seems certain to give the late lamented Diana a run for her money in all these departments.
Diana’s imprint must lie heavily on William. He had, after all, reached 15 when he suffered that terrible tragedy. She had gone to extraordinary lengths to be a different sort of royal mother. Having suffered heartache as a child, she wanted her sons to appreciate how much of that there is out there beyond the privileged and cloistered world of the royals. Marrying into a solid, successful, loving middleclass English family, I hope William remembers this and delivers to us in the fullness of time a monarchy different from that which the palace courtiers are so keen on today.
The royal wedding will lift spirits and bring a bit of cheer to millions worldwide, especially in these straitened times. Then in July comes the wedding of the Queen’s down-to-earth and vivacious granddaughter, Zara Phillips. And then it’s all aboard for the really big one: the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year—such a momentous occasion that you would have to go back to Queen Victoria to find another such celebration. Queen Elizabeth II seems on course to become the longest reigning monarch in human history. But poor old Charles! He seems on course to set his own record: the oldest person ever to ascend a throne.
Welcome to my blog!
I appreciate that in today’s world it is important to get connected. Moreover it is truly wonderful to be able to share thoughts, not just with your own people, but with people across the entire planet. And at this time my thoughts – apart from wondering anxiously how my tome will be received – are with the struggling, heroic people of the Islamic world. Despite everything I am optimistic. History is on their side. They have had enough of tyrants who behave as though their country is their private property. They have had enough of the tyrants’ families obscenely siphoning off the limited wealth of their lands to feather their own nasty little nests. And they have certainly had enough of the murderous cruelties which they have inflicted on their own peoples.
They see the West, and while cherishing their own faith, wish for the freedoms and the vastly better life opportunities which its tolerant and open society offers. Of course, it is natural that the West should fear a lurch into Islamic extremism, but my hopes rest with the better educated young people. They form a majority bloc throughout the Islamic world, and above all they want jobs and the opportunities which these will bring. Thanks to the twin innovations of the mobile phone and the internet they are all in touch with one another and with us. Their oppressors can no longer hide things, nor shut them up. And they know stuff. They will not willingly exchange the miseries they and their parents have endured for so long only for a fresh set of miseries from new despots or a set of mad mullahs. All power, I say, to their elbows. They want what we have. And why not?
The Last Foundling 