Another inconvenient truth.

As a small boy in the late ’forties and early ’fifties I was an ardent imperialist, spending hours in the lending library devouring Arthur Mee’s Our Empire Story. Unfortunately, although Empire Day was still marked at my primary school, the institution it celebrated was rapidly joining Nineveh and Tyre. One thing puzzled me: why had the French labelled our nation ‘Perfidious Albion’? For Arthur Mee made it clear that England had heroically shouldered the burden of bringing enlightenment to the savage regions of the world.
When I was a sixth-former I discovered the answer. Together with a group of classmates I attended a meeting of the Council for Education in World Citizenship held at a local girls’ day-school. The draw, of course, was the girls not any desire to become a world citizen. As a sex-starved teenager incarcerated in a boys’ boarding school any opportunity to be in the same room as a girl was eagerly seized. The main business of the meeting was a talk on the White Highlands given by an indigenous Kenyan. The speaker was a quietly spoken man who steered clear of passionate denunciations of injustice. His case was the more compelling for it. I left the meeting a changed man.
At university I became aware of aspects of Our Island Story other than those highlighted by Mee: strapping Indian mutineers across the muzzles of cannon and then firing them; going to war with China because their Emperor tried to curb his people’s addiction to opium. Opium grown very profitably in the jewel in our empire’s crown.
Although the Empire, along with my youth, is long gone its attitude to ‘lesser breeds’ persists. Today’s Guardian carried the unbearably moving story of a severely injured 13 year old Iraqi boy ‘lost’ by the Army medical corps. After visiting the hospital for ten days, without being allowed to see his son, his father was told that he was becoming ‘annoying’ and banned from making further visits. A year later he was told that the boy had been moved to Kuwait and the army had lost track of him. Unbelievably two and a half years later the army's chief claims officer said he could not offer any compensation for negligence “since I have been unable to find any such evidence of negligence by the British forces in this matter”. The letter ends: “Please accept my sincere sympathy”.
And there you have it: we’re a decent civilised people, able to offer sincere sympathy even to an annoying Iraqi who’s unaccountably upset that his son has disappeared and has the impudence to accuse us of negligence.

Modern Times

The concluding sentence of an article by Katherine Whitehorn in today’s Observer puts its finger on the problem underlying the malaise affecting contemporary British society:
‘… what has actually been correct, politically in Britain from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair? Not an insistence on equality, just an insistence on the efficacy of profit and competition – not public service or honour or professionalism – to cure any failing or inefficiency in anything.’
Underlying this new political orthodoxy is the false belief that people are chiefly motivated by money. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell put it:
‘Of the infinite desires of man, the chief are the desires for power and glory…When a moderate degree
of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth : they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.’
Job-satisfaction has much more to do with an employee’s freedom to make his own decisions about the sensible way to carry out his role than with the size of his pay-packet. In other words, a degree of power over his own working life. And for most of us that’s enough. Some individuals, though, crave power over others which leads them to become - in the worst case scenarios - dictators, but in the majority of cases merely charge-hands, foremen, ward-sisters, managers, or chief executives. If Bob Diamond were given the choice of continuing in post at a tenth of his present salary or working as a counter-clerk with no loss of income (the option of transferring to another company being excluded ) can one doubt for a moment what his decision would be?
And yet our government is in thrall to the misconception that unless we pay senior executives silly sums of money no one would take the job, so leading to the situation that whilst the overwhelming majority of people’s incomes are falling in real terms those of the highest earners are increasing substantially.
It’s not only morally obscene, but utterly unnecessary.

Europe(an) matters

Read an interesting article in this month’s Red Pepper. It seemed to bear out what I’ve long suspected: behind their anti-European rhetoric British prime ministers, both Labour and Tory, know that European integration is essential if this country is to survive. Thatcher, seemingly the Daily Mail incarnate, signed up to the ERM, Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, and Brown the Lisbon Treaty.
Since Heath, there’s only been one overtly pro-European premier and he chickened out of joining the Euro, a policy in which he believed but was too frightened by Murdoch to carry out. Such a shame John Smith succumbed to a heart attack: according to Francis Beckett things might have been very different if he’d survived.
The Red Pepper article points out that the fact that ‘the EU has signed up for … centralisation under the aegis of Brussels of national budgetary decision making for all member states as of 2011’ has received very little coverage in the British tabloid press. Instead they rouse their readers to fury with stories of ‘how the EU allegedly wants to harmonise condom sizes, ban smoky bacon crisps because the woodsmoke seasoning may cause cancer, and rename chocolate “vegelate”.’
Red Pepper, like many on the left, deplores the way in which the inexorable growth in Brussel’s power is hidden from the public. So do I, but for rather different reasons. Unlike Red Pepper I think the EU is our future. But like Red Pepper, Ukip, the BNP and the Daily Mail I’m opposed to rule by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. And there’s a simple answer: give the real power to the European Parliament not the Commission. But that, of course, wouldn’t suit those running Westminster whether they’re Labour or Tory. Far better to continually carp about the EU to keep the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail onside whilst in reality supporting rule by unelected bureaucrats because it’s the national governments who put them in post.
There is an alternative vision: to rejoice in being European, to cherish that common culture, depicted in the map above, which gave us peace and prosperity for half a millennium. And to strive for the day when we once again have the political and economic union which might give us a chance of surviving in a world dominated by China, India and Brazil. As someone much more eloquent than I once put it:

“We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history…Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. Yet from our perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience… It is the record of nearly two thousand years of British involvement in Europe, cooperation with Europe and contribution to Europe, contribution which today is as valid and as strong as ever…
Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.” [Margaret Thatcher, September 20th, 1988]

… and darkness was upon the face of the deep

In the small hours of Tuesday morning a torrential downpour began which lasted until early evening. We read subsequently that it was the heaviest downpour Le Marche had experienced in 40 years: 18 cm in 24 hours. Not only did it produce a lake in the library, but it started coming down the kitchen chimney. When I took the dogs out last thing at night I found the rain had given way to deep snow. On Wednesday I woke up to find we were without electricity - judging from the Teasmade clock it had gone off at 12.35. We were eventually reconnected today at 3.40 in the afternoon, some 39 hours later.
As you can see from the picture we were not alone in our misery. And what misery it was. For starters the central heating and the hot water don’t function without the electric pump . The cordless phone wouldn’t work. And not only did the contents of the freezer thaw out but we realised how utterly dependent on electricity we are for our entertainment. Because the power had gone off at night when we charge up our iPhones they had very little juice left in them so they weren’t available to entertain us. There was no telly or radio and the candles didn’t really give enough light to read by. We’d eaten dinner early, for it needed to be prepared in daylight, and consequently had a vast expanse of evening with nothing to do. I did find a pack of cards and played patience for a bit but otherwise it was a dreary time. And we couldn’t just go to bed because I have to take the dogs out last thing at night. As a couple of Cambridge computer scientists have written, take down a country’s electricity supply and it ceases to function.
I guess with the decline of the West yesterday probably represents the future. Thank God I won’t be around to experience it for very long.

Smoke and mirrors

This morning, in the words of The Evening Standard, ‘George Osborne tightens squeeze on banks with £800m raid on profits’. In reality he's doing no such thing. As Robert Peston explained on the Today programme, £800 million is dwarfed by the sum the banks are paying out this year in bonuses: around five thousand million.
Unfortunately, Peston didn’t raise the issue of a very different tax change revealed by George Monbiot in today’s Guardian. This abolishes taxation on earnings from a bank’s overseas branches whilst at the same time allowing it to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. Far from causing the banks pain, the Posh-Boys’ squeeze resembles one given by an aged roué to his mistress’s thigh as he empties his wallet into her lap.
But it will no doubt convince the readers of the Daily Mail that tough action is being taken. In Monbiot’s words:

‘… this government … has learned the lesson that
Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country
into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in
unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go
to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't
lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody
Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then
you shaft us.’

Be very, very afraid

Listening to Radio 4 this morning I gather that the posh-boys have set up a new web-site enabling the hoi-polloi to access the crime figures within any given postcode. Apparently its had 70,000 hits a minute, causing it to crash.
John Humphrys comprehensively demolished Policing Minister Nick Herbert’s rationale for the site - giving the public the information needed to hold the police to account. As Humphrys said, if your street’s being terrorised by yobs you don’t need a website to inform you of the fact. If you’ve been burgled, as Humphrys had, you report it to the police as does every other victim of a crime, so the Old Bill don’t need a website to tell them what their crime stats are. If you urge the police to prioritise your case they will reply, not unreasonably, that they have many calls on their time - some, murder and rape for example, more urgent than yours. (And, as Humphrys didn’t point out, thanks to the posh-boys’ cuts there are fewer policemen to investigate your burglary or arrest the yobs.)
Unfortunately, Humphrys didn’t go on to suggest the real reason the site has been created: to increase paranoia among the general public. This will enable the government to add yet more authoritarian measures to those introduced by Blair and hasten the day when the ordinary citizen is treated with all the respect and dignity accorded a Ryan Air passenger.

Dark Forces

The most interesting aspect of the Andy Gray affair is the revelation that he was suing News Corp for alleged phone-tapping by the News of the World. The man’s opinions are deplorable but they were only intended to be shared with a fellow neanderthal, not - as a consequence of being secretly recorded by someone within Sky News and leaked to the Daily Mail - made public property.
His fate is just another example of the message we’ve seen delivered for years: don’t mess with Murdoch or something unpleasant will happen to you; co-operate, like the Metropolitan Police, and there’ll be a drink in it for you. Avoid promoting policies which you think might upset the Dirty Digger, however close to your heart, and his media empire will swing in behind your party whether you’re Labour under Blair or Tory under Cameron.
The revelation, though, is the extent to which Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into rival news organisations. Because it’s no more in the Mail’s interests for Murdoch, posing as a champion of women’s rights, to divert attention away from the threat posed by his taking complete control of BSkyB than it was in the Telegraph’s to have Vince Cable neutered. To be replaced by a man whose take on Sky’s boss - ‘We … wouldn’t be saying that British TV is the envy of the world if it hadn’t been for him’ - is so patently absurd that I’m surprised the Tea Party haven’t offered him honorary membership. If Walter Shandy was right about their names determining people’s character one can only conclude that Naughtie and Marr succeeded in finding the name Hunt had ‘Before the World Was Made’.