Jim Greenhalf

The Artist

2012-01-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

Just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, be wary of judging a film by its trailer, as I did.

I had almost made up my mind that The Artist was not my kind of film. It seemed too happy, clappy for me, a period piece with women in silly flapper hats and dresses. Newspaper accolades and ten Oscar nominations did nothing to persuade me otherwise. In spite of the praise I agreed to see it.

I'm told that some people in Liverpool asked for their money back because they did not realise The Artist was a silent film. What did they think they were going to watch, an interview with Rembrandt? More fool them, for Michel Hazanavcius' film ranks as one of the best I have ever seen, up there with Les Enfants du Paradis and Pierre le Fou - all French films, notice. French movie-makers love American films with the passion that French politicians pretend to despise American politicians.

Such is this film's artistry, I thought it had been shot on location in Los Angeles. Only at the end did I realise it was French. Only today was I told that a good deal of it had been shot in Belgium. You could have fooled me twice round the block. Happily, the where and how of it don't matter a damn. This is a wondrous piece of uplifting movie-making.

If like me you are not aware of the track record of director Michel Hazanavcius', who nursed this project for ten years, or the track record of the leading man Jean Dujardin - a big star on French TV and film - The Artist will come at you like a miracle. You won't even mind the scene-stealing Jack Russell Terrier, Uggie - a nice take on films-with-cute-animals-in-them. Even Clint Eastwood tried that; remember Clyde the ape in Any Which Way But Loose?

Movies about movie-making are nothing new. Doubtless the point has already been made elsewhere about the similarities to Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds song and dance comedy about Hollywood in the days of silent movies and the trial and error transition to sound. I was even willing to believe that part of The Artist had been filmed on the studio backlot that features in Sunset Boulevard, the 1950 Billy Wilder take on Hollywood central to which is Gloria Swanson as the reclusive star from the silent movie era. The studio backlot scene is where the two would-be screen writers played by William Holden and Nancy Olsen walk and talk.

The Artist artfully employs the corny techniques of film-making in Hollywood circa 1927-1929. There is a driving scene towards the end, for example, in which obvious back projection is used to play up the melodrama, while at the same time your emotions are intensified by the music which quotes Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo, his 1958 film about obsessive love, manipulation and deception.

Referentially splicing together things seen and heard before in American movies is part of the wonder of this film, as is its humour, pathos and vitality. As is Jean Dujardin's expressive eyebrows, his flashing devil-may-care Douglas Fairbanks smiles (he plays Hollywood silent movie supestar George Valentin). He is the epitome of the Corinthian, manly ideal of the 1920s, even down to the pencil-thin moustache and slicked back hair. Add to that Berenice Bejo's vivacity as rising starlet Peppy Miller, the superb period motors, costumes, LA-style locations and the cleverly judged intermittent use of sound.

To paraphrase Greg Wallace on Master Chef, film-making doesn't get any better than this. Go and see for yourself.

In the words of Tony Hancock: You're Doomed, All of You

2012-01-26T06:58:00.000-08:00

Firing a few home truths at the world as reported by the media in contrast to the world he actually encounters on his travels, broadcaster and rough rider foreign correspondent Andy Kershaw said he felt...

"A certain amount of irritation with what other people prioritise as newsworthy. We have a preponderence of news experts telling us what needs to be done, but they haven't a clue about how the economy works...It does leave you with a different sense of perspective, priorities and perceptions."

An example of this dichotomy between ignorance and experience is to be found in his report from earthquake-hit Haiti, published by The Independent in January 2010, in which he takes to task aid agencies, the military and the BBC's Matt Frei:-

The alarmingly unanimous priorities of the spokesmen and women of aid organisations and the military, have been with "issues" (for they love that word) of "security", "procedures" and "logistics" (what we used to call "transport" or "trucks"). These obsessions indicate not only a self-serving and self-important carrerist culture among some, though not all, aid workers (although wide experience of the profession in Haiti and across Africa tells me it is more common than donors would like to think), but the magnitude of the crisis has paralysed them into gibbering force of box-tickers. Most worryingly, it reveals that many - even selfless - NGO workers on the ground haven't a clue about the country and its people...

An unbelievable 10,000 charities were already working in Haiti when the earthquake rocked the island, most of them tiny independent organisations. Humanitarian aid is, almost by definition, never where it is needed when natural disasters strike. But, in Haiti, what's been needed has ben flown in with impressive speed. Yet the combined concern of all those organisations - many of them regarding fellow charities as professional rivals - has so far been unable to get that assistance a ride from the airport. Too much energy in the last week has been expended on bickering about procedure and the fetish about "security".

The assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up "security", "unrest" and "violence" when all the available evidence would indicate anything but.

Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC's Matt Frie. An incongruously amply figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about "security" and the almost non-existent state of "violence"...

My intention is not to malign at second-hand the journalistic reputation of Matt Frie, whose two-part television documentary about Berlin I eagerly bought, but to draw attention to the reality disparity between life as we know it and life as it is reported.

Look at the news today. Britain, we are told as though for the very first time, may be closer to double-dip recession than anyone allowed. Germany may actually let Greece default on its debt repayments. Cor blimey, gov, who'd 'ave thought it!!!!????

In response to all the bad news coming at us from Aix to Ghent, as it were, the FTSE100 quietly zonks up by 70-odd points, Subway announces the creation of 600 new UK outlets and 6,000 new jobs in the coming year, and graduate pay is about to rise by four per cent for the first time since God knows when.

Although I do not wander among the rubble of my country, unlike the Haitians Andy Kershaw saw two years ago, I sometimes feel that the doom-mongers, the Apocalypso Now prophets, as I once described them, won't be truly fulfilled until the highest tower falls - but not on them, of course.

As for the tottering state of euroland, the collapse of that political misconception is probably necessary although I am under no illusion that the defenders of this man-made disaster will learn anything from it. As the author of the Horrible History series, Terry Deary, said to me recently: "I think what underlies Horrible Histories is the goodness of ordinary people as opposed to the evil and stupidity of people in power."

Kapital...

2012-01-22T04:38:00.001-08:00

"It's a Kodak world!" declared Gene Simmons in January 2008. The self-made millionaire KISS bass guitarist and businessman was one of a team on Celebrity Apprentice USA. The task was to devise a promotional campaign for a new brand of Kodak colour printer.

The company, trying to diversify from cameras, film and developing paper into the brave new digital world of Microsoft and Apple, was not impressed. They gave his slogan the kiss off, and Donald Trump reluctantly fired the man with the interesting hair from the show.

Long afterwards Mr Simmons maintained he had been right, as Kodak would come to see. Now that Kodak has filed for protective bankruptcy, with debts reportedly of $6.8 billion, perhaps the ingenious Gene feels vindicated. Who knows what might have happened had the Kodachrome kids thought to ask him how they could develop the Kodak world idea.

One commentator in the British papers said Kodak was the victim of its own spectacular success. The board had become monolithic, top heavy, too slow to adapt and change to the world being made over in the image of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Technology does not go backwards. Monolithic corporations, like monolithic corporate states, are bound to fall if they do not adapt and change. Just as the old USSR was undermined by the fax machine, embedded dictators in the Middle East were unable to resist the iPhones and iPads in the hands of the people they oppressed.

The ruthless versatility of capitalism was not mentioned by the protagonists taking part in a recent Newsnight squabble, following David Cameron's speech calling for a more sharing, caring kind of capitalism. They were still picking over the remnants of old either/or arguments - capitalism versus socialism, profit-making versus money-making, individualism versus state regulation - as though capitalists are a class united by a single drive, to make money, and a single philosophy, Fuck you Jack, I'm all right.

'Twas ever thus, you may say. But was it? Recollecting two essays about capitalism by the BBC's Robert Peston and the billionaire financier and speculator George Soros, I revisited them and found that these two men, from different points of view, touched upon simililar concerns, including the changing culture of money-making.

Peston's The New Capitalism was written in 2008, as credit was crunching and the pillars of capitalism appeared to be crumbling.

In 2006 and 2007, I had long conversations with ministers, officials and regulators about how the hedge-fund and private-equity booms - the mind-bogglingly huge rewards available to the stars of those industries - were symptomatic of a mulfunctioning in the markets. I saw the frenetic activity of these young financial firms as a manifestation that too much debt was available on ludicrously cheap terms that didn't remotely reflect the risks - and this seemed to me to be worrying. The standard response from those who now know better was that it would all come out in the wask in a painless way, that these firms were a great asset to the UK, and I was fussing about nothing."

Ten years before the Credit Crunch, in 1997, George Soros's essay The Capitalist Threat warned that individualism taken to an extreme was a great danger to the stability of the West's open societies. He likened the application of economic theory in modern times to social Darwinism, based on an outmoded idea of the survival of the fittest.

Traditionally, capitalism was a way of making things and selling them, making money has taken over from the need to make a profit. In some minds, making a profit and making money are two sides of the same coin. Soros is saying they are distinctly different.

There has been an ongoing conflict between market values and other, more traditional value systems, which has aroused strong passions and antagonisms. As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of nonmarket values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them.

Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationships postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into business. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor...Anthing goes, as long as you can get away with it.

Robert Peston's new capitalism, then, is what?

For many the New Capitalism may well seem fairer and less alienating than the model of the past 30 years, in that the system's salvation may require it to be kinder, gentler, less divisive, less of a casino in which the winner takes all.

There is a conflict between two aspects of capitalism: the deregulated money markets, in which making money is the sole value, and the over-regulated market for manufactures. Collectives and co-operatives motivated by Christian Socialism or its modern equivalent may be an alternative to the creed of greed espoused by capitalism's Gordon Geckos. However, that world view assumes a marketplace without the constraints and restrictive practices spun out of the Brussels web of the European Union. Technocratic corporatism was scarcely touched on by the Prime Minister.

This is no longer a Kodak world imagined by Gene Simmons. It is a bear market, more of a Kodiak world, in which people still try to make a difference.

Self-made millionaire and musician Sir Ernest Hall, born poor in Bolton, believes in practical utopias, not an idealised Utopia for all. In his book How to be a Failure and Succeed he says:-

You are never too old to learn something new, never too late to try something new. People try to tell us from the outset that we're powerless, that we have failed in some way. But the only failure is to stop trying.

"Fail better", said Samuel Beckett, or, in the words of the late Steve Jobs, "Be hungry, stay foolish."

A Bigger Picture...

2012-01-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

The launch of David Hockney's bigger exhibition at London's Royal Academy - 150 paintings in all 12 rooms - occurred on my birthday, January 17.

My 63rd.

This year happens to be Hockney's 75th, which was why the Queen made the Bradford lad a member of the select Order of Merit.

It being a meritocracy, here are some pictures of Hockney, in words, by me.

DEAF LANDSCAPE

In deaf Hockney's landscapes of East Riding's stooky Wolds
not an animal munches, moos or bleats; no larks in hot summer fields,
without beaters or retrievers; branch roads shaded by trees
lead to unpeopled streets. The wartime sky of his boyhood eyes
empty of Wellingtons, Lancasters and Flying Forts;
neither aero-engine, birdsong nor wind-strumming cables;
everything with a blood circulation has fallen asleep.
Among humanless acres remembered peace.
Were a passing Icarus to fall from a Hockney sky,
hitting the striped awning of a harvested field,
not a soul would turn at the poor sod's cry.

1954 SELF PORTRAIT

Strange bird in a gilded cage,
staring uncertainly at the world
beyond a fringe.
Perry Como and Princess Margaret
were all the rage
when I pushed a pram about Bradford's streets,
my dolls fat silver piglets of paint.
Artists were respected
only if they looked like something else,
so I affected
the clothes of an accountant.
T S Eliot, William Burroughs, Rene Magritte
dressed like that if the Fifties.
In all that pinstripe get-up
I looked like a lesbian librarian
disguised as Peter Sellers.
You had to keep the bastards guessing.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S OLD MAN

My father never liked the look of doors;
he emulsioned ochre sunsets on ours.
Clerking most of his working life,
he painted posters for cinemas
and signs for shops that wanted them.
He peddled recycled bicycles, and
wheeled an armchair to the corner call-box.
Ideas like that came naturally,
besides, we were a family of seven.
Things dad did looked dotty only to folk
who couldn't see the wonder, logic or necessity.

ABRACADAVER - IT'S ONLY ME

I learned more about life painting
in the dead room of the Infirmary
than in the studios of the Royal College.
They didn't know what to make of me:
Northern working class but evidently queer,
John Ogdon glasses, gold jacket and golden hair.
Watch them eyeing the Dog Paintings now,
wondering privately if deaf Hockney -
miniature hair-driers in each ear -
is barking or laughing at them.
Some people like to be offended:
I learned that in my very first year.

That Sinking Feeling

2012-01-15T04:23:00.000-08:00

If a vast enterprise worth trillions of dollars, namely the European Union's eurozone, is capable of capsizing, why should anyone be surprised by the fate of the Costa Concordia?

This high-rise cruise ship costing a reported $300m, with all its electronic safety and fail-safe devices, was no match for a few rocks, some of which can be seen sticking through the keel.

The accident on Friday (the 13th incidentally), occurred on the day that the credit rating of la belle France and other EU members went tits up. The fate of the ship and the fate of the eurozone symbolise the propensity for hubris in overblown human enterprises. There is an obvious parallel with the unsinkable Titanic which went down on its maiden voyage.

Inadequate bulkheads and too few lifeboats made April 14, 1912, a night to forget for the P & O line. Design faults, faulty assumptions and presumptuousness made Titanic an accident waiting to happen. The mighty ship's unimaginable doom was a precursor of human error and faulty political alliances that resulted in the 9/11 implosion of the European house of cards in 1914, although I came to think of Titanic as symbolic of the fate of Ireland - broken in two in unfathomable depths (see Raising the Titanic in The Dog's Not Laughing).

However, a more apposite analogy for the fate of the Costa Concordia is the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Townsend Thorensen roll on roll off ferry which capsized just outside Zeebrugge on another Friday evening 35 years ago, killing 193 people.

Comparisons are only as odious as the glibness with which they are made, but in the spring of March 1987 what struck me most forcibly was the coincidence of the ship's name with the spirit of the times in England, when free enterprise was highly favoured by Margaret Thatcher, months away from winning her third consecutive general election.

The capsizing of the ship, due to human error rather than an act of God or nature, heralded the collapse of the spirit of free enterprise in Britain at the end of the 1980s, which was also the end of the Iron Lady. Confidence collapsed and we had to abandon the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Then, as now, recesssion rolled in like the ride at Dover beach. Then, as now, Brussels was busily building its monstrous ship of state which was to be launched at Maastricht. Now water is seeping in and the officers on the bridge are fighting among themselves. By all accounts the ship is rolling over like the Herald of Free Enterprise.

But unlike that disaster, there won't be any medals given out for selfless acts of bravery.

Thou Shalt Not Kill...

2012-01-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive...wrote the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

This line from The Last Decalogue came to mind when I was pounding out a few thoughts on the subject of euthanasia. A blogger had challenged the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Rev Nick Baines, to quote scriptural authority for outlawing assisted suicide.

The blogger either knew his Bible or was bluffing. It's a risky stratagem to publicly challenge a bishop, especially one as experienced in the media two-step as old Nick.

Even so, the blogger's challenge seemed to me flawed on two counts. Firstly, though the Bible informs our body of law, it does not form the letter of it. The country is not a theocracy, not yet at any rate. If Christians adhered to the letter of the commandments in the Old Testament, homicide, stealing, lying and coveting would be non-existent.

Secondly, there is no evidence that the Bible is the undisputed word of God. All religious books, the Koran included, evolved from what had gone before in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic. All culture develops and is transmitted that way. If there is a first truth, we don't know what it is. Neither did Einstein. So why should anyone's view about assisted suicide be ruled by a book that has been revised, translated and edited many times?

On the whole, most people are on the side of life. Abortion and euthanasia are not matters for post-prandial prattling among coffee and After Eights. Those who have experience of either remain scalded by it. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Nobody I know would willingly spectate on pain and suffering. Cats and dogs are put out of their misery because society deems it humane not to let animals suffer. Some believe that animals have souls. Strange, then, that human beings must gasp their last, incontinent and helpless, lest the law of the land or the law of God on Mount Sinai be offended. Does not God change His mind?

We are not born in pain. The pain inflicted by birth happens to the mother, rarely the baby. It's only when the poor little sod opens its eyes that it has an inkling of what it's in for. So if we are not born in pain, why should we die in pain?

For most, dealing with the idea of ultimate death and oblivion day-to-day is enough. Until it becomes personal, death is an abstraction; even when it happens to one of your own, it is him, it is her, not you, whose eyes won't see sunset turn into sunrise.

So long as society permits the clinical ending of life at the beginning, what moral basis does it have for forbidding its termination at the end?

It all boils down to ensuring that a future Beverley Allitt, the baby-killing nurse or Harold Shipton, the mass-murdering GP, don't have a license to kill.

The Iron Lady...

2012-01-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

The late Conservative MP Alan Clark looked at her ankles and thought her sexy. The late French President Francois Mitterand said she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula.

Many in this country wish Margaret Thatcher's father had strangled her at birth. A friend of mine blames the policies of her three administrations exclusively for encouraging the 'me' society at the expense of the 'we' society of the welfare state democracy he grew up with.

The clue to Phyllida Lloyd's biopic of the Iron Lady, as she became known, is the title. The film is a portrait of the former Prime Minister, long before she became leader of the Tory Party and then the nation, and long after she was ousted from both positions by men she had raised to high office.

It depicts her determination to put her life to some purpose and to do it against the odds in a society dominated by entrenched male interests. Ted Heath came from the same lower-class background; but he was from the South East. Margaret Roberts, the grocer's daughter, was from Grantham, one of those little places you pass by going north on the East Coast line between London and Leeds.

But this is not a film only about party conflict, parliamentary ambitions and historical events; if it was, Milton Friedman and other Monetarist shapers of the economic policies of her first administration would have played a part in it. Nor does the film refashion old Thatcherisms such as, "You turn if you want to, the lady's not for turning", "One of us", or the usually misquoted, "There is no such thing as society". You do not get what you perhaps expect.

I was led to expect a fine performance from Meryl Streep. It is out of this world, marvellously nuanced in look, expression and speech. At times I thought the American actress was Margaret Thatcher, just as I had thought Cate Blanchett was Bob Dylan during I'm Not There. It just goes to prove, once again, the power of art and artifice. Truth may be revealed by lies, or in this case a film.

I was led to expect a film which, though sympathetic to its subject, had its moments of caricature. It struck me as a profoundly serious and beautifully executed piece of work by all concerned, not Spitting Image without the latex. Jim Broadbent plays Denis Thatcher as a bit of a clown, but not to the extent of Private Eye's Dear Bill or the theatrical satire Anyone For Denis? While it is not a searing indictment, nor is it hagiography. The film does not set out to be either of those things.

Like a Shakespearian character, or even a figure out of Beckett, the elderly old lady formerly feared and admired for her indomitable leadership, tries to banish the ghost of her long-dead husband by bagging up his things for a charity shop. As she does so, scenes from the past come back to her - private scenes, personal scenes, family scenes, political scenes; and as she remembers, her dead husband talks to her. At one point she clasps her hands to her head and turns on every electrical appliance in her claustrophobic apartment to obliterate the sound of his voice. "I am not mad, I am not mad", she says. She falls asleep in the bedroom surrounded by bin bags stuffed with Denis' clothes, shoes and toiletries, including a bottle labelled Windcheater. The scene counterpoints the one of the Winter of Discontent, with a mountain of black refuse bags piled up outside Parliament.

Last scene of all, she washes up her solitary coffee cup, dodders slowly out of the kitchen to the top of the stairs, looks down as though somebody is there, realises there isn't, pauses and turns to the camera. Nothing is rushed or spun out. Nor is the scene accompanied by emotive piano music. How I have grown to mistrust piano films. I was touched by the beauty of Streep's performance, the judgement of the director and the skill of the writer. Often people are touched not just by the emotion in a piece of work but by the presence of art in it, the way a thing is done. So my first words as the credits rolled were: That is a magnificent piece of work. I would gladly watch it again.

There are those who will judge the film against the background of realities - the miners' strike, the Falklands War, the Cabinet battles over Europe, the Poll Tax, the relationship with Ronald Reagan. They will love it or hate it according to their politics. Then there are those who, knowing more of the inside story, will find the film simplistic. I can only say again, this is not a film primarily about political events. Nevertheless, the scenes in the House of Commons, in Cabinet and in the Falklands war-room at the time of the Belgrano - "Sink it!" - are extraordinarily well done. Michael Pennington as Labour leader Michael Foot is a fine cameo performance.

I once saw Margaret Thatcher at a Conservative Party conference, the one held after the 1979 General Election, I think it was. I watched her glad-handing her way through a throng of elated Tories. I had been told how good she was at remembering the names of people whom she had met only briefly. What struck me, though, was her physical smallness. Television, I realised, magnifies. The Mrs T on telly was not the Mrs T in real life.

I would do well to remember that; but then again, I no longer pay much attention to politicians on the telly or on the radio. The Iron Lady is a valedictory, I suppose, to the years when politics was more than mere theatre or celebrity drama, when the likes of Michael Foot and Margaret Thatcher wanted to make a difference. As she says in the film: "These days people want to be somebody instead of wanting to do something."

The Old Guy at Shakespeare & Co...

2011-12-21T00:57:00.000-08:00

George Whitman has died, two days after his 98th. An American in Paris, he ran a bookshop and offered poets whose work he took a fancy to an opportunity.

I met him in March, 1999. The writer David Tipton and I walked into Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank on a wet Sunday afternoon to sell him some books. He looked through them. "You're unusual, lively," he said, and offered us some readings and to put us up in his apartment above the bookstore for a few days, maybe a week.

But we were only there for another day and were too dumb to make the most of the opportunity - have to get back, to work, to the cats, to the usual bill of goods we sell ourselves.

Now Tipton sits in his bare front room in a Bradford backstreet staring out of the window, baby-sitting eight or nine cats, his eyes getting bigger, his body shrinking. My job, it seems, is to chronicle the passing of people who made a difference; to bear witness.

No one gives a fuck any more. All the more reason to be a sonofabitch. Don't give up.

Take me back to the Quai de Montebello
where the old guy at Shakespeare & Co
says Howdy and offers writers he takes
to be Irish or reckons lively
free lodgings and at least one opportunity
to read for money and keep what they make.

No shit. No sodomy. No quid pro quo.
Just an old guy left from the Libertion,
on whose flakey green book depository
rain drifts from Notre Dame's grey stalagmites
as it did in the days of Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti and other city acolytes.

On that penultimate afternoon we met
a poet called Burns; and gas-burners
flamed under wet cafe canopies;
and the old guy at Shakespeare & Co
gave us his name, Whitman, and asked us to stay.
Take me back, take me, back to that day.

(from Following the Seine, 2000)

Unlike Neville Chamberlain...

2011-12-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

David Cameron did not return from Europe waving a piece of paper. The only paper that anyone has seen is the seven-page statement of intent issued after the European Council, which made no mention of Britain, let alone a veto.

What is a veto? Is it a disinclination to agree with a course of action or a brake block which prevents further movement? I thought it was the latter. Our valiant PM has simply fed journos a line, letting them think that a disagreement with a proposed course of action is a veto.

I wonder if any of his staff has thought of likening him to the Duke of Wellington (the only other Brit to return from Brussels claiming victory over the French, though he was helped by the Prussians).

When General De Gaulle famously said "Non!" to Harold Macmillan's request to joing the EEC, that was a veto because it prevented any further movement in that direction. Edward Heath had to reapply.

Arguably the Prime Minister has achieved two things, one to his short-term advantage, the other to Britain's future disadvantage.

He has regained ground he was losing to Tory Party Euro-sceptics in the House of Commons - for the time being. Longer term he has placed Britain outside the meeting next year when European Union heads of state come together to discuss amendments to the Lisbon Treaty, outlined in their collective statement of intent.

What good this will do us I cannot conceive, because until the 1972 European Communities Act is repealed on the floor of the House of Commons Britain remains a paying member of the EU, second only to Germany in contributions to the budget.

Better to have been inside the tent doing the business than outside while the others snigger and get on with remaking the rules that we will be obliged to follow.

Tin Tin, I fear, has scored an own goal.

Statements of Intent...

2011-11-29T08:35:00.000-08:00

Well, the stock markets haven't plunged following George Osborne's autumn statement - public sector unemployment up, growth expectations down.

Nor did they plummet upon the latest forecast of doom from the OECD, on the contrary, they zoomed upwards.

I know that stock markets are far from the measure of real economic activity - Omaha billionaire investor Warren Buffett prefers to look at a company's long-term performance rather than short-term fluctuations on the DOW's temperature chart - but they are sympomatic of mood and confidence.

So what are we to make of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's prediction of recession? Being a bear of astonishingly little brain - if I had any I would long ago have found a comfy niche on a European quango such as the OECD - I can only ask a rhetorical question: What does the OECD actually make; what does it manufacture; what does it trade in to make a real difference to the lives of others?

Having heard Shirley Williams defer to the OECD numerous times over the years, I thought the time had come to find out a bit about it. My source was The Great Deception, Richard North and Christopher Booker's epic chronicle of the history of the European Union. There I discovered, to my disappointment I must say, that the OECD is yet another tentacle of the bloody EU.

This Paris-based branch of the Brussels octopus wets its beak with a budget for this financial year of 342 million euros, of which the UK coughs up £6.3m. Of the other 33 member states, the US lobs in 22.21 million euros, Japan 12.22 million and Germany 8.38 million. At the other end of the scale, Iceland contributes 230,000 euros, Luxembourg 290,000 and Ireland 820,000.

Interestingly, North and Booker describe how this organisation, the brainchild of Jean Monnet, in 1961 supplanted the OEEC, the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation, created in 1948 to distribute American Marshall Plan dollars to war-shattered Europe. The OEEC was intergovernmental whereas the OECD was, is, supragovernmental - just like the EU.

Bearing in mind the bloody mess the EU has come to be, was always likely to be, why should we pay any more mind let alone money to its Paris Org? Tell me, tell me, for the world is surely full Casandras and Pandoras smarter than I am.

Were Mr Osborne to lose his mind and actually ask me what he should do to help revive the country, I would say: No more money for the OECD; no more money for the EU; no more money for climate change and its associated subsidised industries; no more money for bail-outs of banks in corrupt EU states; no more universal benefits of any kind. These measures would of course mean real cuts in borrowing and real cuts in spending, not the reduction in borrowing that has passed for cuts to date.

The corporate state can be comforting, providing you don't ask where the money's coming from. During Labour's 13 years in office, government borrowing and personal debt were like over-inflated hot air balloons. If the OECD warned what would happen when the balloons burst, nobody has reminded me when they did it. I'm probably wrong, but I have a feeling that the world went to hell in a handcart in spite of all the economics brainiacs in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt and London. Indeed, you could argue that it was partly because of them and their pals in the money markets, that the crash happened.

The other part of the "partly" belongs, of course, to Joe Public. Nobody forced them to borrow more than they could afford to repay. Nobody forced them to spend now and perhaps pay back later. Nobody forced them to accept unsolicited offers of gold and platinum credit cards. And the politicians traded on this. They will, if you're fool enough to let them.

'More pain to come!' say the television journos, working up the shock horror. As though symptomatic of our great unexpectations, Harry Ramsden's fish and chip restaurant at Guiseley - between Bradford and Leeds - is to close after a millions years. Quelle surprise! Not really. For the past two or three years or more, wherenever I have passed that place the car-park had more empty spaces than Nicholas Parson's last one-man show. There are better chippies, much better chippes, in Leeds, Skipton, Shipley and Baildon.

Overall, every failing business with, for example, poor man-management practices, low staff morale and indifferent products, will be blaming the down-turn for their declining market share. What a god-send a damn-good depression is for useless managers, crappy politicians, meddling technocrats and policy wonks at the OECD.

Turbulent Priests

2011-10-31T08:39:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago yesterday (Sunday) the body of missing Polish priest Father Popieluszko was pulled out of a canal outside Warsaw, where it had been dumped by Communist security police.

The 37-year-old priest and his demonstrable sympathy for Gdansk shipyard workers of the trades union Solidarity made him a target of the fearful Polish Communist state. Murdering him did not change the course that history was taking; if anything, it added to the current which swept away the regime within a few years of Father Popieluszko's assassination.

The part played by churches in the political events of the late 1980s among the members of the Warsaw Pact appears to have been obscured in this country by the dust kicked up over the anti-capitalism protest outside St Paul's Cathedral - admission £14.50.

The dust is likely to get thicker following today's resignation of the Dean, the Very Reverend Graeme Knowles, with the threat of bailiffs looming larger.

By and large the English prefer their priests to remain good shepherds watching over their flocks. The likes of Trevor Huddlestone, Donald Soper and the former Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend David Jenkins, were the exception rather than the rule.

We don't like to see men of the cloth (let alone women of the cloth) getting arrested outside nuclear submarine bases, commissioning reports about poverty or taking on elected governments - leave that to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was alright for the Archbishop of York, Dr David Sentamu, to rail against Robert Mugabe because hardly anybody here liked Zimbawe's dictator.

A priest who offends against the conservative expectations of the silent (agnostic) majority, especially if he seems to be acting out of faith, is likely to end up as a caricature trendy vicar in an Alan Bennett story, as in A Bed Among the Lentils.

Elsewhere, expectations are different. Just after October 9, 1989, the Lutheran church of St Nicholas in Leipzig became the centre of a Monday evening peace demonstration against the Communist East German Government. The state was still celebrating its 40th anniversary when an estimated 50,000 people gathered.

In the weeks that followed, those Monday evening church-based demos grew to 120,000 and then more than 300,000. Reportedly, they continued in Leipzig (and in other cities) until March 1990 - long after the GDR had been tossed into the dustbin of history.

I daresay there are would-be turbulent priests in this country who would love to play a part, probably a central part, in stirring up history-shaping change. You would have thought the goings on at St Paul's was their opportunity; but, as far as I know, the outspoken ones have remained silent, preferring instead to moralise about events in Libya.

Irritable Vowel Syndrome

2011-10-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

The vowels in question being EU, of course.

I don't take the view that yesterday's Commons vote (111 for 372 against) was about as valid as the notion that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays. If nothing else it gave the likes of Shipley Conservative MP Philip Davies the opportunity to state publicly:-

Our future prosperity lies in trade with China, India, South America and emerging economies in Africa, not being part of a backward-facing, inward-looking protection racket which is what the EU is.

In the movie As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson, an irascible author, tells an admiring female his definition of a woman: I think of a man and take away reason and accountability. That sums up what I feel about the EU - not Europe the place, but the EU, the Irritable Vowel Syndrome, with its unelected presidents and commissioners; its ever-growing budget which has not been sanctioned by auditors for nearly a quarter of a century.

We were deceived into joining the EEC by political liars. The same stripe of people are using the same blandishments to mummy us into nodding quiescence...build alliances, repatriate some of our powers, renegotiate in Britain's favour. Oh puleeeeeeaaase! Bruxelles and its eurozone sycophants have repeatedly said that the way out of the current financial crisis is even more centralisation - a European Union foreign ministry, a European Union Treasury: not more of the same, but much more of the same.

More and more our Prime Minister resembles Tin Tin, a character if I remember rightly created by a Belgian.

Living in the Material World...

2011-10-21T05:49:00.000-07:00

On my way to the National Media Museum to clock Martin Scorsese's biopic of George Harrison, I saw people by the War Memorial waving green black and red flags and chanting: "Gaddafi's dead! Gaddafi's dead!"

All things must pass. In the material world, the world of illusion in Krishna consciousness, tyrants are emanations of ignorance.

Splicing together talking heads, home movie clips and judiciously chosen TV and newsreel footage, Scorsese portrays Harrison's rise to fame and fortune and his subsequent struggle to reconcile his spiritual quest with his personal abundance of the material world's things.

The man who championed Eastern spirituality at a time when Indian restaurants were a comparative novelty in London suburbs and few had heard of Lysergicacid diethylamide or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, also mortgaged his mansion to pay for the allegedly blasphemous movie The Life of Brian: the man who bought a mansion in Surrey, organised the Concert for Bangladesh - following the war with West Pakistan and a series of natural disasters: the man who wanted out of the squabbling Beatles to go solo persuaded famous musical pals to join him in the ad hoc Travelling Wilburys.

I thought Scorsese explored these dichotomies pretty seamlessly; the four hours we were in the cinema flew by, as they do when you are enjoyably focused. Apart from some of Patti Boyd's romantic reminicenses - 'Layla was all about meeee! - the film certainly struck a chord, to paraphrase what the Maharishi told an earnestly inquiring David Frost in black and white - before the 1960s evolved into colour.

My first thought was that material security afforded Harrison world enough and time to devote to meditation at sunrise and gardening at midnight. No grudge there, though. The kid from Wavertree and Speke had earned what he had; he had taken the risks and made good.

But my second thought was that The Beatles were only possible because the early 1960s were a time of low unemployment - about 300,000 when I started secondary school in 1960 - and high expectations. Within a few years of John, Paul, George and Ringo's return from Hamburg, young Brits were hitch-hiking all over the world. Some went in the hope of dope and a few easy lays in exotic places; some were prompted by the spirit of adventure; others went hoping for enlightenment.

My third thought was that the explosion of interest in the East - the sounds of the sitar and tabla, colourful kaftans, the aroma of joss sticks, Transcendental Meditation, Hare Krishna and all the rest - was not so much a rocket trip into the future but a float downstream to the past. All that Sergeant Pepper paraphenalia - the droopy moustaches, the long hair, the uniforms and Pablo Fanque's Fair - was not modern but Victorian. The Beatles unwittingly plugged the country back into the dreams of Empire and the love affair with India. The movement inward was also outward and expansive.

In backwater bookshops you could buy copies of the Bhagavad Gita and a wide range of world literature, philosophy and politics. The big book conglomerates had not rolled over these shops with their supermarket selling techniques: there was space for all and room to breathe. Conscription and capital punishment were abolished. University was still a place of self-discovery rather than a conveyer belt for the materially ambitious. With all its self-indulgence, egoism and political blundering, the Sixties was a golden time of opportunity - at least for those with the wit to cop on.

Highlights included Phil Spector in wig and make-up talking about the making of All Things Must Pass andThe Concert For Bangladesh - 'I had to go and get Dylan from his apartment'; footage of The Beatles doing their stuff and the Travelling Wilburys recording Handle With Care in Bob Dylan's garage; and Eric Clapton talking about John Lennon's suggestion that he join the Fab Four - at that time the Fab Three.

George Harrison had a lot of friends and knew many people in music, films and motor racing - Jackie Stewart, seemingly sitting in a chair with a neck support - said George's death had made the deepest impact on him. George Harrison, however, appeared to have no fear of dying or, as he put it, leaving his body. 'What would I miss? Apart from my son (Dhani) who needs a father, there's not much,' he said calmly. I supposed that his second wife Olivia was used to that. At the end she said when George died the room became suffused with light. 'You wouldn't need to turn on a light for your camera'.

As I went away from the cinema, I think I said a quiet thank you to George Harrison for the good things that he and the other three corners of the square known as The Beatles brought into being. On reflection I'd like to add another thank you very much - to Martin Scorsese.

Thin Spite OK, Vi...

2011-10-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

That's an anagram of THINK POSITIVE, the inspirational exclamation that is the watchword of Bradford's ninth or tenth attempt since 1986 at a community cheer up campaign, to encourage the sceptical among its long-suffering citizenry to always look on the bright side.

Count me among them. When marketing chuggers and politicians bang on earnestly about the importance of being positive, corporate, collective, my instinct is to lift up a corner of the carpet to see what they've been sweeping under it.

I tend to feel the same way whenever English film critics are universal in their praise. I thought No Country For Old Men, which most of them adored, was tedious and incomprehensible. The book wasn't much better. Virtually everyone else I know who has seen it think the film's a masterpiece I saw it again recently, partly to test my own opinion; alas, it was even worse. The villain with his gas tank and 1970s Leonard Cohen hairstyle looked like a sleepwalking dentist. I'd rather watch Hombre. Now that is a masterpiece, dealing with the same themes of nihilism, greed and violence, but much more coherently.

The remake of True Grit, lauded as truer to the spirit of the novel than the John Wayne film, was wordy, worthy, but tiresome, in spite of the best efforts of Jeff Bridges. I suppose I am not a fan of the Cohen Brothers.

Having read some four and five-star reviews of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy I hurried along to see it, in anticipation of a great evening in the cinema. Within five minutes the thing struck me as misconceived. Gary Oldman, who had gained widespread acclaim as George Smiley, was miscast. Not out of his depth but in the wrong part. At the end I knew it was a film I would not want to watch again. Friends, however, thought it was superb.

Peter Hitchens, I have just discovered, felt even more let down than I did. He knows Le Carre's novel, which I don't, and remembers the BBC television serial with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, which I didn't see. Some of his readers found the film too slow and left before the end. For me the telling of the tale was slow but the technique of telling it, fast choppy cuts across time, was confusing. At the end I had no idea how Smiley had discovered that Bill Hayden was the Russian double agent. The film deterred me from buying the book, whereas Hombre had me grabbing for Elmore Leonard's slim novel the first time I saw it.

An old woman with sly sniper's eyes once remarked that I had a closed mind. Not being particularly quick on the verbal come-back, I didn't tell her that people who know me have little trouble finding the equivlalent of 'Open Sesame' to engage my attention. In my defence I went to see The King's Speech simply because a shred of it had been filmed in Bradford. The critics loved it, so I was sceptical. I came away thinking it a fine film, centring on the unlikely friendship between two very different characters.

I have no problem with emotionalism or 'love interest' except where, Hollywood style, it is added in for commercial interest, which I think of as slop. Men and women with perfect teeth, impeccable personal hygiene and untroubled by the imperatives of hunger, thirst, belly and bowel movements, declare their undying love as the world goes up in flames or their trains leave the station in opposite directions. THINK POSITIVE! I hear the deceitful voice of my bad angel say, until the voice of my good angel says BOLLOCKS!

My tendency is to move, after due consideration, from a negative to a positive. That's not how it is for everybody, merely how the key seems to fit my lock.

Bad Timing, Prime Minister

2011-07-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

On the very day that Southern Cross, the UK's largest care homes operator, announced plans to shut down, leaving the future running of 500 of its 750 care homes in doubt, what does the Prime Minister do?

He announces that virtually everything in the country's public sector will be flogged off, including health, education, social care and housing. This, we are told, is yet another giant step towards ever more choice, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To protect the public from the kind of enormities currently exercised by the gas and electricity producers there will be an all-powerful Ombudsman. There. Takes your breath away, doesn't it?

Reasonably charitable people will wonder at David Cameron's unfelicitous sense of timing. To more critical spirits this piece of PR ineptitude merely confirms their view of the Prime Minister as a serial incompetent.

Interestingly, last week I was talking to a multi-millionaire engineer and highly esteemed academic, a man who turned his love of microwave technology into sales, jobs and money for everyone in his employ - about 15,000 on four continents at one time. His newest company of just 20 is engaged in pioneering work, developing computerised deep-sea cutting and welding equipment for gas and oil pipelines.

When asked why gas and electricity charges were so high - reportedly 50 per cent higher than in 2007 - he guffawed a big bearish laugh and replied, "Because the companies operate a cartel...I'd nationalise the lot of them."

He's well aware that the cost of energy has been vastly inflated by central government's multi-billion pound commitment to EU energy policies.

This man, who worked his way up from a grammar-school scholarship and now drives a caviar-coloured Jaguar, looks back on most of the big privatisations, from Margaret Thatcher onwards, with a disdain equalled only by his exasperation at the education system's abject failure to produce a regular supply of home-grown electrical engineers.

China, he said, was run by trained engineers and China was in the process of rehousing 70m people a year.

Our millionaire Prime Minister wants us to believe that salvation lies in selling everything we own or know in the hope of renting it back at an economical rate.

Remember that when you sell your children into slavery to pay your next energy bill.

The Hacker...

2011-07-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

There is a scene in the movie The Lives of Others where a writer, a loyal support of the East German state, indignantly asks the former head of the state security police why the Stasi had not considered him dangerous enough to place under surveillance.

"Oh but you were, constantly," the slug-like secret policeman tells him, nodding ironically at the writer's revealed conceit.

As one of life's refusniks, who refuses to subject himself to a mobile phone's ring-tone and the idiot prattling that usually follows, I am unlikely to be one of the gallant 4,000 hacked into by former News of the World journos.

Unlike Hugh Grant who, I thought, probably accurately described the Metropolitan Police, News International, 10 Downing Street cartel as a "protection racket". The higher-ups move in the same social circles thinking they are immune to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences - what goes around eventually comes around. The Prime Minister is discovering that.

Anyone who has glanced at books such as Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Propagandist From Crimea to Kosovo and John Simpson's Unrealiable Sources, will be aware that 'rat fucking', a phrase coined by President Richard Nixon's henchmen, has a long history. He was brought down by his association with people arrested, charged and indicted for organising the Watergate building burglary, including his special counsel Charles Colson.

For Colson read Coulson?

About the only new thing in the latest revelations about how some members of the press operate (more than 300 of them according to Newsnight) is the technology.

This bear of staggeringly inadequate brain power is neither shocked nor appalled. Those epithets of moral outrage, so righteously voiced by most of yesterday's old Question Timers remind me of the protestations of those public notables who, not so long ago, used their economic power to take out Super Injunctions to prevent hacks from revealing the truth about their extra-curricular activities.

In The Lives of Others the writer does his best work in spite of the sanctions of the state, stung into risking his liberty because of the suicide of a despairing black-listed friend.

To do it, however, he has to resort to subterfuge; in effect he has to break the law of the German Democratic Republic. His adherence to truth rather than party loyalty is tested. But any feeling of moral superiority he feels is crushed by the death of his lover, a woman blackmailed by the Stasi into betraying him.

I'd like to be able to say with conviction that as long as the rich and powerful are free to use the law to protect their dirty little secrets and maintain their public image, the media will be obliged to use whatever means deemed necessary by unscrupulous news executives to get at the truth.

But it's not that simple. Just as the poor usually prey on the poor rather than the rich, the press gangs up on insignificant celebrities and the victims of crime and war to keep us boobies, to use George Bernard Shaw's expression of contempt, distracted from what's really going on.

With all eyes on Downing Street and News International's Wapping HQ, British Gas slyly chose to announce it was jacking up energy prices next month. After Sunday The News of the World won't be able to screw you; but there are plenty of other organs that will.

As for Rupert Murdoch, I wouldn't be surprised if he is awarded the BSkyB contract - after he has got rid of red-top Rebekah Brooks, kicked son James up the arse and issued a public mea culpa. He has too many friends in high places, probably has an oil-field of dirt on all of them including past and present incumbents of Number 10.

In spite of his promised inquiries, David Cameron's position is far more precarious than the Dirty Digger's. DC may be BC before the year is out.

The Green Thing...

2011-07-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

Following Panorama's piece about junk mail and the costs of disposing of it (at least £700,000 as in-fill in Cornwall), I decided to post the following item, passed on to me by my friend David Knight:-

In the queue at the shop, the young cashier told the old woman that she should bring her own bags in future because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The old lady apologised, explaining to the young man: "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The cashier said sententiously: "That's our problem today. The former generation did not care enough to save our planet's environment."

He was right: that generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, people returned their milk bottles. They got money back for pop bottles and beer bottles (a practice still in place in Sweden). The shop sent them back to the plant to be washed, sterilized and refilled; the same bottles were used over and over. So they were recycled.

But they didn't have the green thing back in that customer's day.

In her day they walked up stairs because they didn't have escalators in every shop and office building. They walked to the shops and didn't climb into 300-horsepower machines every time they had to go a mile or two for milk or bread.

Because they didn't have the green thing.

Back then, they washed nappies because they didn't have the disposable kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry the washing.

The green thing was sadly lacking.

Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers and sisters. There was one radio or television in the house, and the TV had a small screen not one the size of Wales. In the kitchen they blended and stirred by hand because they didn't have electrical appliances to do everything for them.

When they packaged a fragile item to send by post they used screwed-up newspaper not polystrene or plastic bubble wrap.

Back in the dark old days they didn't burn petrol just to cut the grass, they pushed a mower that ran on human muscle. They exercised, played games, so they didn't need to go to a health club to run on an electric-powered treadmill.

But, as the lady said, they didn't have the green thing then.

People took the tram or bus and kids rode their bikes to school or rode on the school bus instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical socket in a rtoom, not an entire bank of them to power a dozen appliances. Nor did they need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest Pizza Hut.

What sad buggers they were, without the self-satisfying green thing to make them feel good about themselves.

The Circus Animals Desertion

2011-06-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

While we wait for the next instalment of Greece, here's a suggestion.

Move all the 39 or so circus animals left in the UK into the House of Commons and put the 650 MPs under canvas in an EU 'occupied field' - virtually anywhere in Western Europe.

For a modest admission fee the public could watch them balancing balls, jumping through hoops and sitting up to beg as the ringmaster - Herman van Rompuy - cracks his whip and chants haikus, while Baroness Ashton dances pointlessly about on her toes.

Dying to Save Greece

2011-06-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace, -
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!...

Wrote a rapturous Lord Byron. Every year since his death at fly-blown Missolonghi in April 1824, fitting out a military unit to fight the Turks, grateful Greeks have rung church bells in remembrance of the English lord who

...dream'd that Greece might yet be free.
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Is it not ironic that 187 years later the debt-ridden isles of Greece are once again bound hand and foot to another tyranny, the European Union and its single currency. But I can't see another English poet (Byron was, admittedly, part Scottish), Simon Armitage say, who dramatised Homer's Odyssey for BBC radio, venturing forth in support of "the hero's harp" and "the lover's lute".

More than a lute and a crate of Harp would be necessary to deflect the Molotov Cocktails, tear gas and rubber bullets in Athens. But I wonder, did Byron, whose poetry is, at its best, both personal and public, have a visionary moment when he wrote:-

Trust not for freedom to the Franks -
They have a king who buys and sells:
In native swords and native ranks,
The only hope of courage dwells:
But Turkish force and Latin fraud
Would break your shield, however broad.

I read that and straight away thought of Herman Van Rompuy, the sinister-looking unelected President of the European Council who, today in Ireland, declared that the Greeks, at war with themselves once again, would have to come to an agreement over the country's Olympian debts.

There was a time when red-blooded English poets like Lord B., could dash off crowd-arousing sentiments such as:-

A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine -
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!

That is no longer possible because, thanks to Edward Heath and his scurvy successors, England has become a land of slaves. The truly ironic thing about the EU laying down the law to Greece is that it too is debt-ridden: for the past, what, 23 years, its budget has not been signed off by auditors.

Timothy Garton Ash uses the simile of an overladen container lorry labouring up a steep hill to convey his fear that the European project is close to stalling...even the emergency brake may not stop it running back down the hill, out of control, until it jackknifes the road.

Experience teaches that when rulers ignore the fact that the improbable has become untenable, it usually takes a catastrophe to make them see the error of their ways. Thus World War II can be seen as a necessary consequence of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, when crushing Prussian war reparations so embittered the French they got their own back with the Versailles Treaty in 1919.

The French inadvertently created Hitler, just as Hitler inadvertently created Israel. God knows what the EU is about to unleash on the world, inadvertently of course.

The Cost of Democracy

2011-05-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

The other day I stumbled upon a web entry written in praise of the late Militant Tendency supporter and Bradford North MP, Pat Wall.

What struck me was the fact that he and other MT supporters in Parliament - Dave Nellist being among them - reportedly took from their MP's salary the average pay of a working man.

However risible you may think that as a gesture, compare and contrast that with the greed of Lord Hanningfield, former Tory transport spokesman; Tory peer Lord Taylor of Warwick; Elliot Morley, former labour environment minister; Labour MP David Chaytor; former Labour MP Jim Devine and former Labour MP Eric Illsley.

The infamous five were found guilty in courts of law of falsely claiming more than £77,000 in expenses and mortgage payments. There were others who left Parliament before last year's General Election; there will be others whose cases have yet to come to court, I dare say.

The point is, no one is surprised any more by the culpable cupidity of the people's representatives. And to think that I used to defend the Mother of Parliaments against attacks by Muslim fundamentalists who declaimed: "Democracy is hypocrisy!" I'll take a little bit of political corruption any time over a theocratic dictatorship, I used to say, thinking of the odd backhander, free lunch or fact-finding mission to the Seychelles. Systematic fraud by the well-paid and the privileged, however, is something else.

Henry VIII and his daughter, old Gloriana, had a short way with erring courtiers: they cut their heads off - in public. Rather than return to that Saudi Arabian-style solution, I think MPs should be made to pay their own travel expenses and mortgage payments, just like the people they supposedly represent.

There are 650 MPs in the Commons and 792 Peers in the Lords. There used to be far fewer Lords a-leaping, but David Cameron has reportedly ennobled 117 new ones so far this year. Parliament costs Joe Public nearly £500m a year to run. MPs' salaries and pensions cost £157.2m in 2009. That year they also claimed £90.7m in all types of expenses.

However, these figures look slight compared to the cost of the 751 MEPs, sashaying between luxury buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg. These foreign bodies reportedly cost the European Union's tax-paying fodder at least £1.61 billion, including in the region of £220m for expenses, £161m for assistants and £108m for 'other staff'.

These costs exclude the civils servants who service them - more than 524,000 in Britain's Home Civil Service alone. To that figure must be added the Carlton-Brownes' in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the johnnies in the Northern Ireland Office.

No matter that four or five members of the Eurozone are bankrupt or nearly bankrupt, the gravy train rattles on with ever-bigger budget claims. There may come a time when 'blood on the tracks' is more than the title of a Bob Dylan album.

Fakers

2011-05-11T05:42:00.001-07:00

Richard North, who is forever banging on about the stupidity, laziness and gullibility of the Main Stream Media (MSM), will find vindication in the case of Germany's Tom Kummer - highlighted in one of North's pet hates, The Guardian.

For years this man successfully deluded publishing groups such as the Axel Springer organisation in Berlin, persuading them to buy interviews with celebrities that were in fact fictions of Kummer's vivid imagination - Mike Tyson talking about Nietzsche, Pamela Anderson discussing William Gibson's Necromancer, Bruce Willis on human development:-

I understood pretty early on that we do not advance through morality, but immorality, vices, cynicism.

Kummer, now the subject of a documentary called Bad Boy Kummer, says he got away with it for so long because everybody involved loved what he invented:-

I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars talk like I made them talk. They all loved it and wanted more: readers, movie distribution people, advertisers and editors.
I was convinced that editors knew everything - nobody asked for tapes, nobody asked for any kind of proof for more than six years - but they refused to admit it...

I can almost hear Richard North rolling about the floor in laughter. Kummer, of course, isn't the first bright bad boy to expose the media's greed and stupidity. In the spring of 1983 West Germany's Stern magazine announced the publishing coup of the century: the personal handwritten diaries of Adolf Hitler.

I remember going through pages of the stuff reproduced in The Sunday Times in spite of doubts cast on the authenticity of the diaries - dozens of them - by revisionist historian David Irving. The likes of mighty Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of several experts who examined the documents and announced them kosher.

The publishing coup of the century turned out to be the publishing hoax of the century. The diaries and their contents were created by a bent genius called Konrad Kujau. For years he had been making a nice living from selling forged Nazi artefacts, feeding the nostalgic wishful thinking of people such as Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann, who persuaded his editors that fantasy was reality.

But for Kajau's attempt to make his hero Hitler a more affable historical figure, more concerned with getting tickets for himself and Eva Braun to the 1936 Berlin Olympics than annihilating the Jews, he could be considered an exposer of enormity, like another German bad boy Gunter Wallraff.

I first came across Wallraff's daring brand of investigative journalism in the late 1970s. Unlike Woodwood and Bernstein on The Washington Post, trying to get to the bottom of the Nixon administration's culpability in Watergate by asking questions and double-checking, Wallraff went undercover to get at the truth.

In a recent project Wallraff disguised himself as a black man to explore racial discrimination in the new Germany. He described his exploits in a book, Black on White, and in a film, Out of the Beautiful New World, which came out a couple of years ago.

The late journalist William Donaldson was a gifted wastrel with a talent for exposing the conceit of celebrity. Pretending to be Henry Root, a bigoted London wet fish merchant, he wrote a series of letters on a range of matters to the great and the good, eliciting their sympathy and support.

The results may be read in The Letters of Henry Root. Sir James Goldsmith and James Anderton, then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, were among those who thought the correspondence was genuine. Ity only goes to show that you can fool some of the people all of the time.

My favourite faker Tom Keating proved that. A technically accomplished painter but unrated by critics and connoiseurs, he got his own back by painting some 2,000 'old masters', duping the experts with his "Sexton Blakes" - fakes.

Titians, Turners, Czezannes - it was all the same to Keating, a Captain Birdseye figure. After his exposure in The Guardian he redeemed himself by taking part in a series of television programmes showing how fakes were made but, more importantly, how great artists created their paintings.

American writer Clifford Irving showed that while money isn't the root of all evil, excessive love of it is. He conned publisher McGraw Hill out of $750,000 for a biography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes using forged documents, including Hughes' forged signature.

As Hughes was without doubt one of the most extraordinary men of the Twentieth Century, the publisher's commercial interest was understandable. Whether by accident or design Irving's scam, driven by the desire for money, showed up the cupidity of the establishment.

Last Saturday I walked away from the Manet exhibition in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, feeling that I had been conned by the art experts and art critics. Was this painter of sober men in ducktail coats and top hats really "the inventor of the modern"?

Great poet though Baudelaire was, he wrote about Manet in that fashion to suit his own purposes, I concluded. No one will convince me that he was a more original contributor to Western art than, say, Caravaggio, El Greco (the true father of Cubism) and Goya. One bent lamp post by Van Gogh says more to me than Manet's accomplished salon pictures.

Who decides what is real, what is authentic? Picasso, who knew more about this question than most, said that to get at the truth (in art) one had to lie.

On Thinking Well of Yourself

2011-04-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

Anyone who doesn't have the wit to think well of himself is a fool; but anyone who is foolish enough to think too well of himself is a conceited ass.

This aphoristic profundity passed through my brain after reading an article in a 1958 edition of Encounter, the Anglo-American cultural magazine (1953-1991) by up-and-coming Bradford novelist John Braine. It was an account of a post-prandial Q&A between the author of Room at the Top and J B Priestley, Bradford-born author of numerous novels, plays, essays, newspaper articles and radio broadcasts.

Braine was clearly of a mind to think well of himself in the company of the creator of works as various as The Good Companions, An Inspector Calls, English Journey and Postcript. Priestley, born in 1894, the year the Independent Labour Party was founded in his home town, was the grand old man of English letters even if the dons of Oxbridge didn't think him worthy of a footnote in their fabricated great traditions: he was beyond thinking well or badly of himself.

Braine's self-imposed mission was to explore his mixed feelings about the legend of "Jolly Jack, the successful Bradford businessman who dealt in words instead of wool."

After a "very good lunch" at Priestley's apartment in the Albany, Braine fired his opening shot. Priestley had been on the Western Front during the 1914-18 War; why hadn't he used his experiences in his writing? Priestley ducked the shot, saying by the time he had accumulated the necessary experience as a novelist a number of very good books about the War had appeared; then he fired back: "Incidentally, I wonder if you remember my account of the battalion reunion in English Journey? If you don't know the book, you might take a look at that chapter sometime. You'll find your War there."

First blow to Priestley. Braine then changes tack, raising the subject of the the snobby division of literature into popular best sellers and serious novels. "...haven't you suffered from it?" he concludes.

"Yes," says Priestley. 'Best-seller' is a trade term and should not be used by critics as if it had some literary significance. Some bad books have been best-sellers, but then so have all the world's best books too...The books I published before The Good Companions were generally praised in the weekly reviews. Then by accident - for what I wanted to do was to write a long picaresque novel and neither my publishers nor the booksellers, who only subscribed three thousand copies, thought it would be popular - I brought out a novel that everybody's aunt wanted to buy and read, so that six months after publication it was selling five thousand copies a day - and in the sight of the weekly reviews I stopped being a promising literary man and became an adroit Bradford businessman...If I'm left out of those solemn lists and assessments of contemporary English authors, it serves me right, partly for doing so many different things and also for not caring a damn."

Room at the Top was on its way to first-year sales of 35,000 copies. Braine would be receiving royalty cheques for anywhere between £12,000 and £15,000: riches that, in 1958, would have turned almost anyone's head, let alone the creator of Joe Lampton, who lusted after his own Aston Martin.

As though to establish his bone fides as a serious man of letters, Braine asserts that Bright Day is Priestley's "very best novel". Priestley counter-punches: "Well, that's what you say. Somebody else would say Angel Pavement...I've been told so often that only some particular book or play has justified my existence, that I've lost interest in the subject."

Braine tries to recover ground by including Priestley's observation. "As long as a lot of people all like different ones among your books or plays, that seems to me quite a satisfactory state of affairs." He goes on to ask the great man if writing should always be a full-time job and receives what could be a back-handed complement.

"I think you ought to make it a full-time job - you have the right temperament, the right attitude," says JB. "But I also think that a great many young writers, by no means without talent, would be happier not trying to earn a living with their writing. Delicate temperaments and talents are better off as amateurs. A professional writer should be tough and copious."

Braine had started out delicate - he had been in a TB sanitorium for more than a year - but after many rejections, had learned to be tough - and unpleasant with it. As though to demonstrate his toughness he tries again to take Priestley on.

"...You've never done anything better than An Inspector Calls...But They Came to a City, to my mind, is a classic of how not to do it. In the first, real people expressed a universal truth; in the second, abstract ideas were stated by puppets."

Priestley, rather like a literary Matt Busby, responds benignly, apparently. "They Came to a City was a play written for a specific period - the middle of the war. It said something that needed to be said at that time, when, by the way, it was enormously successful. I try to discourage people from producing it now. Incidentally, aren't you in danger of being rather negative in your criticism, or worrying too much about work you don't like?"

There is more, but this exchange gives a flavour of what I mean by thinking well of one's self. John Braine, whose debut novel I both like and admire - Priestley did too, although he said it wasn't "big enough" - concluded by saying he had to his own satisfaction exploded the legend of Priestley as "Jolly Jack, the Hard headed Yorkshireman". Priestley's reputation in England as a serious writer was far below what it deserved to be.

Want to Change the World? Then Change Your Life

2011-03-03T04:32:00.000-08:00

"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief," Mrs Betty Williams told school children at Brisbane City Hall in 2006. "It is our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."

Since winning the honour with Mairead Corrigan in 1977 (for the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize), her career has become the embodiment of the truth that if you want change to come you have to be prepared to change your life first, even at the risk of being disowned by those who claim to love you.

The former Belfast receptionist changed her life in more ways than simply divorcing husband Ralph and marrying James Perkins. She persuaded Protestants and Catholics alike to come out on to the streets in their thousands and protest against sectarian violence. The IRA said she was a "dupe of the British".

She travels the world lecturing on the subjects of peace, justice and equality, a trinity of values some find as hard to swallow as atheists would the Eucharist. Justice and equality before the law are still widely subjugated to cultural values more in keeping with nomadic desert tribes than the urban reality of 21st century Western life.

For instance, forced marriage (for males and females) and honour killings. Here are some statistics from Jaswinder Sanghera, whose charity Karma Nirvana campaigns on these issues in the north of the UK.

. At least 12 so-called honour killings occur every year although the Crown Prosecution Service thinks there may be many more.

. The Home Office's Forced Marriage Unit deals with 5,000 calls for support annually and 400 cases of repatriation a year, a third of which are for under-16s.

. South Asian women aged 16 to 24 are two to three times more likely to commit suicide or self-harm.

Jaswinda told me recently: "I am perceived as a threat by people who have a mindset, who operate in an honour code, who don't want their children to integrate or have choices. They see me as a cultural threat.

"What I deem culturally unacceptable is when they abuse their child to maintain their own idea of what's right and what's wrong...Professionals know what's happening, but have been disarmed when dealing with other communities. They fear getting it wrong and being called 'racist'.

"The perpetrators of forced marriage and honour killings are gaining power through using the race card."

There is still much work for the likes of Jaswinder Sanghera and Betty Williams to do.

The Last Train to Clarksville - or Anywhere...

2011-02-14T08:07:00.000-08:00

Those old enough to remember the days of train travel, before the triumph of privatisation, may recall the television commercial featuring Sir Jimmy Savile in which the public were encouraged to take the strain out of long-distance journeys by taking a British Rail train.

If, unlike me, you own a car and like your own company, the only reason you might choose public over private transport is likely to be for the purpose of helping the environment. Take issue with that as you may, lots of ordinary people do that because they believe, in good faith, that care of the environment is their responsibility. Some of them even listen to earnest eco advocates like Prince Charles.

Having given up driving in 1989 - my car kept getting stolen - I used buses and trains ever since. On Saturday, in a burst of pre-Valentine's Day passion, I was due to meet the woman of my dreams at Kings Cross in London at round about 9.45am. We used to go out when we were 17, had recently fallen in love, but had not met for 44 years.

That's why I got out of bed at 4.15 on Saturday morning, to make sure I caught the 6.20am Grand Central from Bradford to King's Cross. I trusted the train to get me there at the appointed, time-tabled time. Having made this journey in late October to visit my sister, I had no reason to suspect things might be different.

I arrived at 6am. No train in sight. Alarmed, I made inquiries, to be told that the train had been cancelled due to engineering works at Doncaster. There was one at about 8.30am, which got to King's Cross at 1.15pm. That was no good. I was advised by an apologetic station staff man to take the next train to Leeds and buy a ticket for the 7am East Coast service to London. Which I did, at a cost of £89.50 for a return.

At Leeds I was told that, due to engineering works at Doncaster, the 7am was cancelled. The one at 8.05am stopped at Huntingdon where a bus would take me to another station for a local through train. That was no good. I was directed through the barrier to the information office, where four people in uniform were having a natter. Only when I banged by bag down on the counter did one of them look up.

My best option, apparently, was to go to Doncaster and wait for a London train from York or Edinburgh. By this time I was in a state of near panic. Not having a mobile phone (my fault entirely), I couldn't alert my true love to the chaos on the railways.

On the Doncaster platform, a large woman with ginger hair asked if I would mind taking part in a 'customer survey'. Although I was the very kind of person she should have questioned, she retreated when I intimated that my day was being ruined by the railways.

By chance I glanced at the electronic information board to see there was a 7.34am East Midlands train to St Pancras, next door to King's Cross. None of the rail staff I had spoken to had suggested this alternative, in spite of their computers and radio links. I boarded this train and got to London at about 11.20am in a state of extreme anxiety. I had to do breathing exercises on the way in to calm down.

Fortunately, the light of my life had had the bottle to wait, trusting me to turn up. I collapsed into her arms and was virtually speechless for a minute or more, as the tension eased. But for her I think I might have had a turn for the worse.

We had a happy time together until the time came for us to go our separate ways. Eventually, I and several thousand others, lots of them England supporters who had been to Twickenham, stuffed on board the 6.55pm East Coast train to Leeds. Standing room only. It was quite alarming. The 5pm and 6pm trains North had been cancelled, presumably due to engineering works at Doncaster, in spite of the fact that at least 150,000 people had converged on the capital for matches at Arsenal and Twickenham.

Departure time came and went and still the train hadn't moved. A voice over the pa system told us in broken English that departure would be delayed by at least 30 minutes, due to the late arrival of the guard. We were given regular updates on his estimated time of arrival. Turned out he was travelling south on another East Coast train that had been delayed two hours at Doncaster, due to a householder who had thoughtlessly chopped a tree down in his garden that had fallen across power lines and across the railway track.

Forty-five minutes late, our train got moving, only to stop before Stevenage, after Stevenage and several points between right up to Doncaster, where it stopped for about 30 minutes or more. The attitude of passengers around me was remarkable, especially the group of England rugby fans from Newark. They chatted and laughed, cheerfully taking the tension out of a stressful situation. They bought strangers drinks and, all in all, kept up the spirits of all within earshot. They performed the job that the train crew were being paid to do and didn't.

One or two people for whom the situation evidently proved too much had a sneaky smoke in the toilets. The official reaction was to announce that anyone caught smoking would be reported to British Transport Police. Meanwhile, just after Peterborough, we were told the bar was out of beer.

We got into Leeds at midnight, after all connecting services had stopped. Passengers who had missed trains were directed to approach station staff for help. No one met us off the train. About 50 of us went to the customer services office to inquire, politely, what was happening. A squat man declared it was nothing to do with him. Someone from East Coast would be along to sort it out, although he couldn't say when. After receiving a rather civilised bollocking from a man waiting to get back to Hornby, this Jobsworth simply buggered off, leaving us to it.

A decent chap in a red East Coast cap did arrive and sorted out taxis for us. It took a while, but what impressed me was the kindness of these people to one another. We all did our best to be helpful rather than irate. Even the chap in the cap was thanked for doing his best. I got home at 1am, exhausted from the emotions of the day and the stress of the journey.

If a train is an hour late you can claim for your ticket money back. I've done that. But supposing my day had been completely wrecked by the mixture of official incompetence and indifference that I experienced: how was that damage going to be repaired?

During the big snows, thousands of people had even worse problems at British airports. I gather passengers are regarded as "self-loading baggage" by airport staff. The rugby fans were saying that next time they ventured South to support England they would be going by car. Can you blame them?

Of course the rail companies would say that updated information about delays and cancellations had been put up on their website, implying it was the fault of ticket-holding passengers for failing to check this information before setting out. This is known as passing the buck - having already taken the bucks from trusting fools like me.

If this was a microcosm of the true state of this nation, God help us. It was clear to me that the majority of people paid to run things efficiently weren't bothered, while a stream of useless or patronising information was constantly relayed over tannoy systems to frustrated passengers. In spite of being entangled in a nightmare of regulations, warnings and idiotic announcements, most people remained robust and resilient, laughing at officials who, bound by more rules and regulations, were unable to adapt flexibly to a bad situation.

Every day we are lectured by the likes of Prince Charles on how we must lower our standard of living to benefit others in the Third World. The last time I saw HRH in person, he was making his way through Bradford's Forster Square station with a handful of officials, en route to his rather large private train. He made a joke to commuter passengers being held back from theirs until his train had left.

I very much doubt that His Royal Highness will ever find himself in the predicament of his future long-suffering, train-travelling subjects.

A Riposte to Andrew Marr

2010-10-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

What the BBC's Andrew Marr said about bloggers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival - "A lot of bloggers appear to be socially inadequate, sitting in their mother's basement ranting...spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night" - could have come out of Private Eye's Street of Shame.

Socially inadequate Lunchtime O'Booze spewing and ranting late at night outside the Lamb and Flag...no wonder the late, lamented Jeffrey Bernard was so often unwell.

Andrew Marr should know from John Simpson's book Unreliable Sources how badly the public has been misled by the MSM in its reporting of wars and political upheavals, particularly from foreign parts.

He should also know from Andrew Neil's well-visited political blog that MSM journalism is not incompatible with informative, serious blogging. Therefore to Marr all bloggers with the same tarry brush is as ill-considered as talking about Lunchtime O'Boozers in the same breath as Christopher Booker, Andrew Rawnsley and Jeremy Paxman.

As a mainstream media hack of long-standing and a blogger since April 2008, I know the strengths and weaknesses of blogger-rhythms and journalism.

Journalism is neither objective nor impartial. Items collated by news editors for news pages are selected. News, like time, is man-made; unlike the quality of mercy it droppeth not from the sky like gentle rain. Often news stories are angled, sometimes to reflect an argument or point of view, but more often to get the thing going. Journalists are constrained by deadlines, space and the success or failure of their ability to assimilate at speed disparate pieces of information. The quality of the questions they ask depends on that. Journalists have to interview people they do not like. But good or bad, a journalist has to stand by what is published under his by-line, even if it has been messed up by indifferent subbing. Occasionally he'll be praised. More often he'll be damned - especially when least expecting it.

Bloggers don't have to suffer personal ridicule or death threats, as I have. They can publish more or less what they like without disclosing their identity. They can pick and choose their subjects whereas journalists are asked to chase a story in which they may have no interest. They do not have to interview or question people they do not like. There is nobody subbing their copy or reminding them of C P Scott's dictum: Comments is free but facts are sacred. Within the laws of defamation they are free to be as vituperative or unfair as they like: balance is not a prerequisite as it usually is, certainly in regional journalism.

Andrew Marr should know that our privately-owned MSM, with its self-proclaimed credo to educate, entertain and enlighten, historically evolved from squibs, pasquinades, courants and samizdat pamplets such as the one penned by Jonathan Swift in 1729 - A Modest Proposal for the Preventing of Poor People in Ireland, From being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them beneficial to the Publick. These represented a form of blogging, if you will, in that debunking, damning and mocking often appeared anonymously or under a false name.

Some bloggers are raging nocturnal ranters. But nutters aside - and there are just as many green ink letter-writers to newspapers - there are plenty of others, digging into matters of controversy the MSM is too timid to mine. Irascible buggers such as Richard North - in another life an 18th century pamphleteer - challenge conventional wisdom and accepted opinion on man-made global warming and other scare stories, the European Union and the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These bloggers offer an uncompromising alternative to official policy, editorial bias, MSM ignorance, the cult of celebrity and blandness.

What a pity the celebrated Andrew marred his case the way he did. Meanwhile, the world waits for the appearance of the 33 Chilean miners, buried alive for more than two months. What place will this story get on the news list of Mr Marr's next Sunday morning television show, I wonder.

Oil, Oil Everywhere, er, I Don't Think

2010-07-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

From the sublime - Paul Lewis playing Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto at the Proms - to the ridiculous - that environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that never was.

'twould appear that BP got it right after all. One hundred days after Deepwater Horizon blew up, sank and ruptured the pipeline a mile under the ocean, the daily disaster being played out on national television - reporters specially flown over for in-situ to camera pieces - has turned out to be the product of environmentalist hype and politicking by President Obama.

Ever since BP managed the impossible feat of capping the leak a couple of weeks ago, news interest in eco Armageddon disappeared almost as fast as the oil slicks from the surface of the Pacific. The latter partly due to remedial action, and opartly due to natural causes according to a boffin at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton.

He told the Daily Telegraph: "People think of 'oil spill' and think 'disaster'. But it is not always the case. It is not all about the size of the leak. It is the type of oil and where it happens that matter. People don't realise that one tonne in a mangrove is more damaging than 100 tonnes on a beach, which is more damaging than 10,000 tonnes in open ocean.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a bit like the River Tyne. There is a lot of industry and boat traffic along it, as well as the oil industry, which has minor leaks all the time. When Tony Hayward (BP CEO who has announced his resignation) said it was a drop in the ocean, it might have been the wrong thing to say at the time, but it was the truth."

He said the spill, in the region of 200 million tonnes, was "equivalent to less than a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. For all but a tiny bit of the Gulf, it will be back to normal within a year."

Gospel truth or more spin doctoring? Make up your own mind. But the speed with which the media went into apocalypso mode at the time of the leak reminded me of Saddam Hussein's oil fires in Kuwait. I well remember Jeremiahs forecasting eco doom for 'decades to come'. Red Adair put out the fires within six months.

Unhappy eco bunnies abounded. They had to wait for global warming to heat up and frighten gullible governments into wasting billions on quixotic windmills and carbon trading scams.

This nonsense will continue until either the money runs out or the lights go out. Obssessives who try to fill that hole within with belief in imminent man-made annihilation should stop listening to themselves once in a while and listen instead to Beethoven.

Afghanistan: The End Game?

2010-06-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

The Army Game used to be a popular weekly comedy on British television. In the early 1960s the British Army wasn't striving to combat foreign insurgencies.

Unlike today. The cost of that effort in Afghanistan has registered 307 on the meter. The cost of dying, as David Cameron has already said, is likely to rise through the summer.

But for how much longer? Less than two years, thinks Professor Paul Rogers from Bradford University's Peace Studies department and a contributor to the Oxford Research Group independent think tank, which specialises in issues of national and international security.

He said: "I think the death of the 300th soldier will remind people of the continuing losses in Afghanistan. Sympathy for the Army across the country does not translate into support for the war. I think there is widespread dismay about why we are still there.

"There is some pretty serious re-thinking going on behind the scenes. The Strategic Defence Review of the whole armed services will look at Afghanistan. They cannot keep 9,000 to 10,000 troops there for another ten years.

"Scaling down is likely to happen all the faster because there is a new Government and, more significantly, because domestic politics in the United States dictates that American tropps have to be withdrawn before the 2012 presidential election. That's the plan; if it works, the British will happily go along with that.

"I meet quite a few soldiers, including squaddies. They will acknowledge that the rate of training of the Afghan Army is very slow and they do not trust the Afghan police - they're too corrupt.

"Although they see themselves as proving themselves to the country, because fighting is what an army is all about, there are mixed feelings about the future. Very sharp intelligence officers I have spoken with know they - the army - cannot win.

"The more troops that go in the more they are seen by locals as occupiers and resistance rockets. In the first four months of 2010 the number of roadside bombs doubled over the same period for 2009. For a larger percentage of Afghans they are occupiers.

"I will be very surprised to see the same number of troops out there in the next two years.

"Had a large peace-keeping force been put in place after the Americans defeated the Taliban in 2001, the situation in Afghanistan might have been different."

Prof., Rogers has consistently argued that the US made an error of judgement after 9/11. Instead of treating Al Qaida as a "trans-national force of criminals" and sending in small specialist forces to bring them back for trial as criminals, it treated Bin Laden's men as members of a terrorist army.

So it looks as though the fate of the British Army in Afghanistan depends upon the election strategy of President Barack Obama. Is that what is known as a 'special relationship'?

Richard North warned in Ministry of Defeat that the British, in a state of denial about Iraq, ran the risk of making the same military and political mistakes made in Afghanistan.

"This is a politicians' war - it has nothing to do with the people. The people did not ask the soldiers to 'invade' Afghanistan, know little about the country and are indifferent to the aims of this Government, even if they are aware of them," he said.

More than 1,800 NATO soliders have now been sent home in boxes, more than 1,000 of them Americans - hence the significance of the US presidential election.

Can anybody without a vested interested seriously doubt that what has happened to Defence Chief Jock Stirrup and now General Stanley McChrystal are but two moves on the chess board of Afghanistan towards the end game?

Cutting the Obvious

2010-06-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

The first cut is the deepest, says the hit pop song. Angela Merkel has made the first swipe with her axe, announcing cuts of 80 billion euros in Germany by the year 2014.

Laugh that one off Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The Germans expect the southern member states of the EU to be no less ruthless. They won't, of course. Where's there's a euro there's usually a wangle. Claiming for bogus olive oil production used to be a favourite scam. Probably still is.

Now Europe waits to see how good a head's man David Cameron is. He says everybody in the country is going to be affected.

Until events prove otherwise I shall take the Prime Minister at his word and assume that this means...

. Abolishing universal child benefits and winter fuel payments to pensioners. In future no British Government will pay women to have babies irrespective of social background, marital status, and record as a good citizen - ie not a screeching neighbourhood drunk or junkie. Universal benefits of every description will be means tested.

. Ending free drugs and needles for junkies. All junkies will be obliged to undertake supervised cold turkey until free of addiction. Ditto alcoholics.

. Cutting payments to quangos - about £43 billion - by at least half.

. Saving approximately £21 billion annually by giving Scotland independence and withdrawing its £13 billion subsidy - that will really give the Scots something to moan about. Similarly suspending the UK's annual payment to the EU of about £7 billion until the EU's books are signed off by auditors. Neil Kinnock, sorry, Lord Kinnock, should be able to advise David Cameron about that matter.

. Scrapping all payments for climate change projects immediately. That alone should tot up to something in the region of £18 billion a year.

. Slashing Overseas Aid Payments, which largely maintain the status quo because its not in the interest of government agencies to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

. Stripping out managerial layers from the NHS, education and social welfare.

. Reducing defence spending. The only way to prevent the boys at the Ministry of Defence wasting mega millions on expensive toys unsuitable for the type of warfare going on in Afghanistan.

. Slashing the numbers of councillors and MPs. Bradford Metropolitan District Council has 90 councillors and five MPs. The cost of the councillors alone is £1.8m a year and rising. All of them get a basic salary of £12,700. Others get extra responsibility allowances ranging from £12,500 to £35,000. Those who don't enjoy ERAs merely have to turn up twice a year to guarantee their money. Nice non-work if you can get it. As things stand this country is a satrapy of the Greater European Empire of the EU, therefore we don't need 650 MPs in the House of Commons as well as European Members of Parliament. Playacting at democracy costs us at least £4 billion a year, maybe a lot more. Get rid Mr Axeman. Public service is just that: providing the public with services they need. It is not a job creation scheme for graduates, political activists and women who think they have a right to a career rather than a desire to serve.

Of course, little or none of the above will actually happen. The Ugly Kingdom, the UK, can rest easy in the grease and gravy of its dependency. But I'm not bitter.

That Picture on the Labour Manifesto...

2010-04-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

It conjures up the days of Flanders and Swann, before the Beeching cuts, when Britain was networked with state-owned railways and families could take a steam train into the country, find a sunlit hill, and look towards the future optimistically.

Richard North says it reminds him of railway posters of 50 years ago. It reminds me of the kind of Communist art, call it social unrealism, favoured by Joseph Stalin: bright, sunny landscapes with smiling peasants in collectively-owned rippling wheatfields; the strong arms of bronzed industrial workers; the excitement of electricity pylons.

Only, in the picture on the cover of Labour's manifesto the cosy Beatrix Potter fields are unmarked by either electricity pylons or wind turbines. There they stand: the ideal white nuclear family, without an iPhone between them: mum holding the baby, dad standing with son, gazing into what looks like a nuclear explosion of a sunrise. In the far distance the silhouette of a city on a hill. The caption is: A Future/ Fair for all.

Wait a minute...isn't this picture of an England on which the sun does not set reminiscent of the picture Winston Churchill painted in his Finest Hour speech of June 18, 1940, just before the Battle of Britain?

...If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world move forward into broad, sunlit uplands...

It's a picture of the future in the guise of the imagined past, how things used to be before Windrush docked, before Yorkshire's mill owners imported all that cheap labour from North West Pakistan, before the egregious European Union opened its borders and opened up Blair's Britain to the wondrous benefits of over-population, religious intolerance and cultural diversity.

It's a future devoid of the social anxieties of the present. In short it's a picture of Peter Pan's Never Never land, where no one grows old, needs emergency hospital treatment or the assistance of the police or social workers. A future where youngsters are not abused and killed, where families are functional, crime is low, the weather is always sunny and the trains run on time.

The subliminal message of this piece of kitsch is, of course:- if you, the voters, can withstand the blandishments of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, then we, the Labour Party and you, can look forward to a sunny future.

This must have been the sort of picture that the Ministry Health, under Enoch Powell, showed round the townships of Jamaica in the mid-1950s, when London was short of nurses and bus conductors. While I didn't expect Labour to be honest and publish a picture of a wasteland, nor did I expect them to treat the public like foreigners, although in one sense I suppose we are.

Even people unable to read can see through this picture. Just because they can't spell subliminal or discuss semiotics in their pilates class, they know when they are being sold a pup. Think of all the people who have come back from a shit holiday in Spain, having mistaken the picture on the holiday brochure for reality.

For Labour's dream to be reality Gordon Brown and his merry chairpersons would have to stop immigration, restore marriage as the only basis of family life, withdraw all planned spending on climate change schemes - wind farms, again - and abandon John Prescott's scheme to fill greenfield sites with 300,000 new homes.

The boy in that idyllic picture can grow up sure in the knowledge that he won't be called upon to get his legs blown off in some doubtful foreign war. The baby, assume it's a girl, in the interests of balance, won't grow up hiding her face under a veil.

A future, fair for all: if you can forget the Australian national anthem - Arise, Australia fair - it's almost a line from a party marching song.

A future fair for all

A future fair for all...

From 'Dorian Gray' to Auschwitz

2010-02-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Two years hard labour picking Oakum in Reading Jail may have helped Oscar Wilde to a less supercilious view of life and art; he certainly needed it. The extract quoted above is from the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890 when Wilde was 36 and approaching the peak of his celebrity. Public disgrace and personal humiliation were five years away.

Wilde's preface is a manifesto in which he proclaims that art has but one purpose: the creation of beauty. He does not say what beauty is, merely that its apprehension is not for everybody. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. These are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. Arguments about art and morality are fruitless. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. In the words of Ben Jonson: "Sententious Numps!" The finality of Wilde's assertion is as preposterous as the rhetorical flourish with which Keats winds up Ode to a Grecian Urn:-

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Physical beauty may be a mask for moral ugliness: cruelty, egotism, conceit. Physical ugliness, however, may conceal moral beauty, as in The Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. If poets were, as Shelley imagined, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened; the population of these islands would have remained in rural squalor like the people of Ireland, romanticised by poets and painters living on unearned income. Keats and Wilde assume that only bad art produces ugliness. Whether aesthetic ugliness - the Great Western Railway, for argument's sake - encourages moral deformity, Wilde does not say; but from his contention that hope is the preserve of the cultivated, we may infer that his credo excludes the possibility of one of the beautiful people harbouring an idea or intention that is ugly, soul destroying, homicidal.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky's great, dark human comedy, one of his charcaters exclaims that the world will be saved by beauty. I do not for a second believe that the beauty Dostoyevsky had in mind corresponded with the beauty celebrated by Wilde and his fellow aesthetes - the Pre-Raphaelites among them. For the Russian writer, beauty without ethical sympathy is unthinkable. In Wilde's credo, beauty is simply itself, free and transitory. The beauty so admired by Dorian Gray has more to do with cold perfection than the reality of life. Wilde was at one with the writer Huysmans whose novel Against Nature is a clever, world-weary fanfare in support of all that is contrived and artificial. One of Wilde's witty paradoxes was that life imitates art. An artful arrangement of exotic flowers in a choice vase is superior to a field of wind-blown wheat or waywardly growing garden. Artifice will always be preferred by the discriminating sensibility to the genetic chaos spawned by Mother Nature. A rose is a rose is a rose, declared that old bore Gertrude Stein. Wilde would have none of that. His buttonhole was a green carnation.

The beauty that Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelites raised on a pedastal, the obsession with perfection, carries the stink of the tomb. The Picture of Dorian Gray is replete with imagery denoting the paleness of objects; his favourite simile is the coolness of ivory. The women painted by Edward Burne-Jones represent death's perfection after the solemn mortician has done his work. In death, human beings are stripped of necessity and action: death objectifies us. The Pre-Raphaelites liked their women to be pale and languid. The epitome of perfection was Orphelia - a corpse. The medievalism of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites are tapers at a time of electricity. After Blake, after Cotman, after Turner and Constable, English painting drifted into an Arthurian backwater and got stuck among the reeds. While the Pre-Raphaelites worked out their twin obsessions with a mythic past and Morris's langurous wife Janey, artists across the English Channel were painting the very objects that Wilde and his friends would have found disastrously commonplace. I want to stun Paris with an apple! Cezanne declared. Wilde sought to stun London with his version of Helen of Troy - Salome.

Wilde's obsession with perfumes and sensory experience was imported from the Paris of the 1840s, principally from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Personally, I prefer Baudelaire's last poems written between 1859 and 1863, the great prose poems that anticipate the worldy despair of Existentialism. Baudelaire was, to my mind, an incomparably greater poet than his Victorian counterparts; his dandyism did not get in the way of his best work. French writing, like French painting, moved on. Compare Wilde's languorous lilies with the adolescent Rimbaud's wild and sardonic strictures regarding flowers in his poem to Theodore Banville - To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers -

See! it's the Century of hell! and the telegeraph poles,
the iron-voiced lyre, are going to adorn your magnificent shoulders!
Above all, though, give us a rhymed account of the potato
blight! -!

English poetry dallied at the border of the forbidden waving a perfumed silk handerchief, whereas French poetry tore across it in search of the unknown. The nearest that Wilde got to publicly stepping across the bounds of propriety was in the tedious The Importance of Being Earnest, with its abundance of arch references to bun-burrying. How his chums must have laughed. How contrived it all is now. Writing in late Victorian England assumed the shape of a ponderous bathysphere, washed up on the shingle of Dover beach. But French writing was a rocket. Is it any surprise that cinema, painting with light, was invented in France?

England looks back to the past, as any nation does when it has no confidence in the future. The England of the Pre-Raphaelites was less sure of itself, less smug perhaps, than modern critics allow. There is a dark thread of despair in Tennyson. Arthur Hugh Clough personified what the Austrian Arthur Snitzler came to imagine at a later date as the man with no values. In architecture, John Ruskin espoused the Gothic. He hated the adoption of Renaissance designs by Bradford's industrial tycoons for the Town Hall, the Wool Exchange and Salts Mill. Even the celebrated modernism of Robert Browning - My Last Duchess - comes off a poor second to the best of Baudelaire. The English intelligentsia, like their monarch, were in mourning for the past; they could neither see nor feel wonder or beauty in the things produced by the Industrial Revolution, the advances in so many fields simultaneously. How ironic that Wilde, of all people, was blind to the marvels of scientific and industrial artifice, to the age that was coming.

Dostsoyevsky's vision of beauty - ethical and transcendent - as personified by his heroine Sonia in Crime and Punishment, is neither transitory nor unearthly. Art for art's sake meant nothing to the Russian. Ultimately, this credo came to mean nothing to Oscar Wilde, as can be seen in the second part of De Profundis, his post-Reading Jail testimony. Wilde died in exile: another Irish writer, unwise but witty, dying in a country less foreign than his own. Dorian Gray, amoral, bereft of ethical sympathy, concerned only with the physically beautiful, is the Aryan ideal, Adolf Hitler's National Socialist man. Hitler so believed in this ideal of physical perfection that he systematically murdered everybody who was disfigured, ugly, socially useless, politically dangerous and ethically undesirable. Yet the uplifting art he espoused was commonplace; Wilde would have mocked it mercilessly - until he was taken away by the herrenvolk. Dorian Gray would have been an ardent Nazi - as so many of the English upper-class were. England had its Black Shirts, just as Germany had its Brown Shirts, and Wilde's native Ireland its Blue Shirts. At a time of economic uncertainty Fascism has an understandable appeal: that is its danger.

Victims of political tyranny may object, saying that Wilde was anticipating the ideological barbarities of the Twentieth Century's murderous 'isms' - Communism, Naziism, Maoism, Year Zeroism. The writing of one era may indeed anticipate events of one to come, think of Franz Kafka's Joseph K, arrested, tried and convicted without ever knowing what he's supposed to have done. But I think Wilde's preoccupation with the aesthetic of beauty was intended as a shocking antithesis to the social, political and religious orthodoxies, hypocrisies, of his day, which he found morally deforming and ugly. Fair enough, but art without ethical sympathy, without what Walt Whitman called eternal tendencies, may result in Reinhard Heydrich: a man of moral and artistic accomplishment and a committed Jew-exterminator. It is perfectly possible to love the music of Beethoven in the evening and mastermind the Final Solution in the morning: Heydrich is the historical proof. Jews on their way to the gas chamber in Treblinka, the 'Road to Heaven' the path they took was called, were accompanied by an uplifting selection from the classics played by an orchestra.

Wildean aesthetes are able to pursue perfection because somebody else must work to provide their income. They can afford boredom and world-weariness because the effort costs them nothing but stylishly Romantic ennui. Only in the symbolism of death do they find what they are seeking. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the ultimate manifestation of the ideal of physical beauty, dedicated, as it was, to the annihilation of anyone deemed unworthy of the elect, the master race.

Rose Cottage

2009-08-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

You will not see ivy clinging to brick walls,
nor the cross-hatching of trellises.
On summer evenings the aroma of honeysuckle
does not feather the abdomen.
Out of blueness that hurts irises and pupils,
helicopters hovering like humming birds and bees,
drop out of the desert,
bringing them back in twos and threes.
They are taken to Rose Cottage,
tagged, bagged, ready for inspection.
While far away in houses with trellises and ivy,
and honeysuckle redolent of memory and heart's ease,
families hedge the roads from dawn,
awaiting the arrival of dead sons.

Johnny Remember Me - Revisited

2009-06-26T12:46:00.001-07:00

Gordon Brown is a jammy sod. On the day he finally commits political suicide, urging the credit-crunched West to cough up £60 billion A YEAR to help Third World countries with dubious climate change, news of this foolishness is virtually obliterated from broadcast news by the death of Michael Jackson.

As I write surgeons in Los Angeles are carving up the singer's body and poking about in his innards, looking for clues to explain why his heart arrested. The operation wouldn't look out of place on the video of Thriller.

In the past hour or so I've heard an awful lot of emotional tosh spoken about MJ, principally that he was the first black singer to put black singing/dancing on the world map. Er, anyone ever heard of Sammy Davies Junior? That man was a brilliant singer, dancer, musician, comedian and a reasonable movie actor.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly did more for popular dance back in the 1940s and 1950s; they could sing and act as well. Mr Astaire gave it elegance, Mr Kelly gave it power and energy. They were, respectivly, the John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier of dance.

As for music, I would say that Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry were much more important historically and musically; they didn't just galvanise fellow black musicians, their influence was trans-Atlantic. Without them no Beatles, no Rolling Stones.

And don't forget a certain James Marshall Hendrix, former US paratrooper and the first Ziggy Stardust who played guitar left-hand and was, reportedly, well hung.

From 20 to about 30, Michael Jackson put out great songs and exciting dance videos. He was a thriller on stage and he knew it. Millions of people got a lot of happiness from his creativity. He had a lot of good people to help him to make the impact credited to him on MTV - Quincy Jones, Martin Scorsese. The increased budgets for his videos were commensurate with his rising fame - from $50,000 for the first to $7,000,000 for Scream. That helped too.

He was a considerable artist the best of whose work will live on. Right now, the dollar possibilities of his demise are being calculated. When Elvis Presley keeled over in 1977, he unwittingly resuscitated his career. He went from mortality to myth overnight, with the media cashing in every anniversary. It's an ill wind.

I wouldn't be surprised if negotiations are underway for the movie rights. Michael Jackson's albums will dance up the charts. Millions of greenbacks will change hands. And Elizabeth Taylor will make a public appearance to express her grief.

In death, Michael Jackson is going to be bigger business than ever. That is neither a jealous nor a cynical assessment. It is what happens in a world where celebrity and entertainment matter more to the media than truth and justice. His death is not a greater tragedy than the murder of Veronica Guerin and the killing of Neda Soltan in Iran.

But I do feel saddened. A shooting star has fallen. When people die, unless they were exceptionally wicked, the good they did far outweighs their human frailties. That's how it should be. I never thought Michael Jackson was a child abuser; but I did foresee that the court case brought against him following the television interview with Martin Bashir would bring him endless trouble.

This afternoon I saw Nick Moran's engrossing film Telstar - The Joe Meek Story. I came away with the Sermon on the Mount plagiarisation going through my head, 'Joe Meek will inherit the earth'. That man created two pieces of music that formed part of the soundtrack of my youth: Johnny Remember Me, and Telstar.

Until a few years ago I had no idea who Joe Meek was, let alone that he recorded those evocative, stirring sounds in rooms above a handbag shop on a North London high street. Three weeks after he killed himself in 1967, a French court released his royalties for Telstar. Like Michael Jackson, he died broke, in a certain amount of torment

At such times the best we can do is take Eric Cantona's advice in Ken Loach's fine film Looking For Eric. "Say non! From your balls!". Non to the bullshit, hypocrisy and sentimentality that inevitably follow the death of a star.

And Michael Jackson's legacy? His video Black and White should be played all over Tehran, throughout Iran, by the opposition to President Dinnerjacket and his turbanned jackasses. Now that would be something.

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Since posting this blog on Friday evening, I have seen, heard and read quite a lot about MJ, his life and music.

I would only like to add the following. James Brown should have been mentioned as an influence on the young Michael's idea of stage-craft. So should the BeeGees, perhaps. They created the disco dance music craze, with that distinctive style of falsetto singing, in the1970s.

The notion that MJ was a one-hit wonder with Thriller is an opinion, but an ill-judged one. Of all the songs I have heard repeatedly this weekend the ones that stand out for me are:- Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough; Billie Jean; Rock With You; Black and White; that rain song from Invincible; I Want You Back, from his time with the Jacksons; You Are Not Alone. I also like the Earth Song.

You'd have to be brain dead to fail to get a buzz from the opening riff of Black and White. I saw Slash from Guns 'n' Roses play it on stage with MJ. We have lift off.

Childhood is an adult idea. You only have a view of your own in retrospect. Children are too busy in their eternal present. I think MJ was happy enough as a child while he was performing, but if the story is true that his father and brothers ridiculed him about the size of his nose, no wonder he did something about it when he was rich enough to do so.

Children need to be loved, disciplined, encouraged and put right when they go wrong; one thing they don't need is ridicule. The humiliation that attends ridicule is never forgotten; it is felt as a physical hurt.

As for Michael Jackson's eccentricities, he wasn't the first famous public figure to act oddly.

Howard Hughes, multi-talented genius though he was, had a phobia about germs that got worse with age. William Gladstone chopped trees and consorted with prostitutes to offer them moral correction. Yorkshire textile magnate and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt had a partality for crows and liked to grow pineapples in his greenhouses. Michael Jackson had a pet monkey. Lord Byron had a pet bear. Alice Cooper loves playing golf.

White Lightning, Black Thunder

2009-04-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Watching black and white footage of Wilson and Keppel's famous Sand Dance routine - Google it up and enjoy - I saw what could have been the origin of Chuck Berry's duck walk.

They could not have copied him, they were shuffling about on sanded stages in the 1930s and 1940s, long before Johnny B Goode. Chuck Berry, though, might have seen them because their Egyptian-style vaudeville dance was internationally famous.

Chuck Berry was the Edson Arantes du Nasciemento of Rock 'n' Roll, the Pele, the Black Pearl who, along with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf and other significant bad ass mothers (Huddy Leadbetter, Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Memphis Minnie) came out of the hot blues of the segregated South.

Those who got to the electrified heartbeat of Chicago in the North changed the world in more ways than one. I'm not airing second and third hand knowledge, simply describing the plot of Cadillac Records, Darnell Martin's liberty-taking but nonetheless enthralling docu-drama of the rise and fall of Chess Records.

I saw it twice in three days and came away feeling vindicated in my long-held belief that there are better blues/souls singers than Aretha Franklin (R-E-S-P-E-C-T, SOCK IT TO ME, SOCK IT TO ME...no sir). Etta James, for one, played in this film by Beyonce Knowles, has a voice to rip your heart out. Bessie Smith and Odetta are others.

Billie Holliday is great singing the deeply bitter Strange Fruit, otherwise I've never cared for her pining after bastards. Mahalia Jackson refused to sing anything other than spirituals such as Go Tell it On the Mountain. Her voice reputedly induced a state of rapture in the young Van Morrison.

Michael Stewart, a writer friend, would like to time-travel back to the the period 1948-55 when such as Howlin' Wolf were on the prowl, delivering vocal thunderbolts like Smokestack Lightnin'. Jim Crow race laws, which prevailed from the 1870s to the late 1960s, treated blacks worse than dogs. But there were colour blind men such as Alan Lomax and the Leonard Chess, who helped to make a hell of difference and change the world.

Change the world? In the film the actor playing Willie Dixon says while older segregationists were using coercion to keep people apart, Chuck Berry's stage show brought together a younger generation of blacks and whites. Michael Stewart thinks it was the music that came out of the Mississippi Delta that inspired young whites and helped galvanise the Civil Rights movement as much as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

Folk music played a part too. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and a host of others including Joan Baez and a little guy from Duluth, Minnesota. Is there anyone who doesn't know by now that Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited refers to the road that follows the Mississippi River nearly 1,400 miles south from Minnesota to Louisiana, flowing through all the significant states of modern American music - Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana? Highway 61 is every bit as significant as Broadway, Sunset Boulevard or Route 66.

Smart cars, slick duds, glamorous women, especially smart cars, were more than status symbols. They were material proofs that black musicians with a powerful sense of worth had risen above their status as field niggers. Yet when white men play the blues (or blue men play the whites, as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, wittily have it) they make the mistake of dressing down in cotton-chopping denims.

Real blues and soul artists such as James Brown, Albert King, B B King and John Lee Hooker played and sweated in suits and ties. "Working class people don't dress down. Only middle-class white hippies do that. They always get it wrong," Michael Stewart said.

Black blues men weren't saints. According to legend, Robert Johnson made a Faustian pact with the Devil at a Mississippi crossroads in the mid-1930s. Either that or he was inspired by the guitar playing and singing of such as Lonnie Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw. Cadillac Records shows it all, the good, the bad and the ugly.

On the subject of what the blues is for, Leonard Chess tells a smacked up Etta James: "The blues is a way of releasing pain, not living it. Walter (that's Little Walter) holds on to it like a child, feeds it whisky and smack. You've got to let it go." Words to that effect.

A young Bob Dylan said the same thing. The blues is a way of getting out of your troubles, not singing yourself into them. That should prevent a lot of prattle, bad poetry and emotionally affected singing. Unfortunately it doesn't.

Grand Auto Theft Torino

2009-03-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

I've seen more than a few Clint Eastwood films, but I don't recall him dying in one. Even in the preposterous Where Eagles Dare, he blasts his way out of danger with effortless ease.

The closest I remember him coming to a bloody end is in Play Misty For Me, his first feature film as a director. More of which later.

Tonight I watched Clint Eastwood die. In Gran Torino he even plays dead in an open casket, as though to remind his fans all men are mortal and that even the brightest Hollywood stars must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.

Some reviwers gave the film four or five stars and raved about its anti-racist message. Suckers. The worthiness of a film's social statement does not make it great. D W Griffiths reputedly portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in a sympathetic light in Birth of a Nation, but those who know about these things still claim greatness for the film, contentious though that is.

Gran Torino is too deeply flawed in its story-line, character development and acting to be anything other than interesting and occasionally funny. There is a surprise in the manner of Mr Eastwood's demise, but without him the film would be a pile of doo-doo.

I speak as a cinema-goer not as a movie-critic. I always start out wanting to like what I watch. Hell, I'm sixty years old, I don't have time and eyesight to waste on shite, as they say in the boon docks.

Clint Eastwood's grumpy old bastard Walter Kowalski, who growls before he speaks, is the film's only interesting character; the others are there merely to serve the plot which takes several misleading directions.

For example, the callow Asian kid Walter befriends and tries to 'man up' doesn't do anything to justify this rites of passage theme. The priest, who looks like Mick Hucknall in the early days of Simply Red, remains callow in spite of the one scene in which, after the gang rape of a girl, he comes close to embracing the eye-for-an-eye values of the recalcitrant Walter. Walter's two sons and their families are cameo caricatures, even though he confesses that his lack of fatherly love for them has troubled him for most of his life.

As for the big finale, that's a rewrite (with a twist) of The Shootist, John Wayne's farewell to arms in which he plays John B Books, a dying gunman in need of an exit strategy. In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood is a dying Korean War veteran in need of a conscience-salving exit strategy. The difference is that Books takes the town's bastards with him.

The Shootist is a damn near perfect movie by Don Siegel - a much more poignant and poetic film than Sam Peckinpah's overblown The Wild Bunch. Siegel, who made Dirty Harry, was greatly admired by Eastwood, as can be seen in Play Misty For Me.

I watch The Shootist at least once a year, and I watch Play Misty For Me whenever it is on television, partly because I dislike Clint's self-admiring DJ character so much, ditto his girlfriend 'Toby'. Gran Torino, however, is no match for either film. It's no match for Changeling either, Clint's previous.

The Obama Game

2008-11-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

Listen: this is probably a waste of time, but not so long ago I used to be a journalist who counted for something. So I post this as a valedictory to the man who, in November 1989, predicted the end of Communism in former Czechoslovakia; who, the following year, sat in the office all night writing Margaret Thatcher's political obituary - against the-then editor's advice - a fortnight before she fell from power; and who, in March this year, wrote a newspaper blog declaring that Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries although, at the time, she was strongly fancied to see him off.

I felt then that Americans were unlikely to endorse a Democratic Party dynasty of Clintons having taken a chance with a dynasty of Bushes, with Iraq as the price they were paying. And if Senator Obama came through victorious in the primaries what elemental force would be strong enough to withstand the wind of history blowing him towards the White House as the first black American President of the United States?

Since then, a lot of dire predictions have been aired. He would win the presidency but be assassinated before he lived long enough to take the Oath of Office in January. Or else he would survive to become the 44th and worst President since George Washington dusted off his wooden false teeth for his first presidential public engagement. I have no idea what President Obama will be like in office; I suspect that idealism will be tempered by pragmatism as the messy imperatives of the real world impinge upon paper policies. If I harbour hope for any particular thing, it is that he wriggles off the hook of the Green lobby and takes a cooler look at global warming whose apocalyptic apostles are the 21st century version of The Weathermen of the 1960s.

But I'm an Englishman who, unlike Sting, has never been to New York or any other town or city west of Donegal. And like the majority of my countrymen I am easily impressed by clean-cut looks, sharp suits and, above all, a big calm confident smile. Why? Because in the collective consciousness of the English these are all post-war attributes of abundance and success, and my generation is still marked by memories of post-war austerity, disillusionment and sense of loss. When Bill Clinton presented himself to a Labour Party conference as though he was a constituency party delegate from America, he had hard-faced arsy party delegates whooping with delight. He put them in good heart and cheered their sectarian spirits simply by looking so full of health and vitality. As a boy, I saw an American military marching band play a jazzed up version of the St Louis Blues as they swaggered and swanked along Brettenham Road in Walthamstow, East London. I had never seen or heard anything like it. The bands I saw at football matches were Metropolitan Police bands and they soberly stood in one spot, often in pouring rain, valiantly playing a medley of light operatta numbers. This was different. Here was life, here was hope, here were pride and magnificence swinging trombones from side to side in the backwater of E17. Americans were like fizzed up bottles of Coca-Cola. They seemed larger than life, fuller of life, than anyone else. Here, we grew up being told what we couldn't do. Our reflex was defensive. In America, it seemed, 'no' was not even a consideration.

So no matter what mistakes President Obama makes - short of World War Three - my feeling is that his election will give the world a much-needed boost of confidence and encouragement. If he turns out to be brave as well, we can only hope that fortune favours the in-coming President longer than it favoured the out-going one.

An Imperishable Power to Move Us All - revisited

2008-10-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

The art of political speaking has changed. I won't repeat what I said on a previous blog on this subject, quoting at length from George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language. All of us are aware that political speeches have changed drastically. Here I present six examples over the past 75 years. The first four were made when speeches could actively make a difference.

On March 4, 1933, incoming US President Franklin D Roosevelt gave his inaugural address to the people of America at a time much like our own, a time of stock market collapses, a universal slump in trade, unemployment, uncertainty and a good deal of fear. I had never read this speech before, although I had heard its most often quoted phrase: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

You might like to know what immediately follows that. It's this: "- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Spot the cliche, the hand-me-down phrase. You cannot because there isn't one, not one in the whole speech. The nation waited for words of biblical import - as Americans tend to at times of crises - and the President reached down into his heart and soul and delivered them.

"The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubborness and their own incompetence...Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men..."

Restoring the "temple of civilisation" depended on the application of "social values more noble than mere monetary profit"...confidence was languishing because it could only thrive on "honour, on the sacredness of obligations, a faithful protection and an unselfish performance..."

After outlining how the US Government was to be the agent of change, President Roosevelt went on to say that self-respect would lead to respect for others in the field of "world policy". Society must move as an army, as one, with discipline and a sense of obligation. He concluded by asking for God's help.

Those of you who know more than I do about the ramifications of the New Deal might take issue with the President's ideas; but no one can doubt the heart-felt seriousness of this speech. Gordon Brown referred to its "imperishable power to move us all."

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On December 56, 1956, the House of Commons gathered to hear Aneurin Bevan respond to The Conservative Government's defence of its decision to send British forces to invade Egypt, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt's President Nasser and the subsequent attack on Egypt by Israel, France and Britain.

I am not concerned here with the nuances of the whole debate, nor with the pros and cons of what became known as Suez. Mr Bevan's speech is the sole object of my attention. Again, I had never read it before.

In the course of his speech Mr Bevan gaily referred to "Freudian lapses" (by a Government Cabinet Minister), Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, "a long story of moral decline" and to "Marianne" - the female symbol of Paris. These references alone, delivered in everyday speech, without a conscious wish to show off, were indicative of the civility of the whole speech. This made the withering satire in it even more impressive. Mr Bevan flayed the Government without once losing his temper or resorting to the self-justifying wisdom of hindsight. His witty use of light irony on such a serious matter made Conservatives sit back and laugh.

He started off in a disarming fashion. "When a nation makes war upon another nation it should be quite clear why it does so. It should not keep changing the reasons as time goes on." He then enjoyed himself inspecting these reasons, one by one, doing so with an air of mounting incredulity, like a health inspector in an appalling kitchen.

The claim that Britain had gone in to deal with all the outstanding problems in the Middle East earned the comparison with Madame Bovary.

What of the claim that Britain had invaded to ensure that Israel withdrew her forces from Egypt? "We went into Egyptian territory in order to establish our moral right to make the Israelis clear out. That is a remarkable war aim is it not? But unfortunately we had to bomb the Egyptians first."

Mr Bevan saved up his most devestating riposte for the Government's fifth reason: to allow the United Nations to intervene in the Canal Zone. It was as if "Mussolini and Hitler had made war on the world in order to call the United Nations into being...If it were possible for bacteria to argue with each other, they would be able to say that of course their justification was the advancement of medical science."

Who today would be able to employ that Kafkaesque image in the certain knowledge that it would be understood by the public at large?

"There is not the slightest shadow of doubt that we have attempted to use methods which were bound to destroy the objectives we had, and, of course, this is what we have discovered...The Government resorted to epic weapons for squalid trivial ends, and that is why, all through this unhappy period, ministers, all of them, have spoken and argued and debated well below their proper form - because they have been synthetic villains. They are not really villains. They have only set off on a villainous course, and they cannot even use the language of villainy."

Some said afterwards that Mr Bevan's was the greatest speech they had ever heard in the House of Commons. It changed behaviour, including the voting intentions of some senior Conservatives. Ah, but that was a time when Parliament was truly sovereign, not merely a cog in the wheel of a gigantic European unicycle .

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There can hardly be a person of my generation (I was born in 1949) who cannot recall a single word or phrase of Dr Martin Luther King's mighty speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, on August 28, 1963. His final acclamation still gives me shivers and brings tears to my eyes: "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

The occasion demanded a memorable speech. A quarter of a million Americans, many of them Blacks from the South, had gathered to demonstrate peacably to the whole world the necessity of the Civil Rights campaign. It was also intended to send a message to the Government of President John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the US Attorney General.

What is immediately striking about Dr King's speech is his awareness of its purpose. "We've come here today to dramatise a shameful condition." And this is precisely what he shaped his speech to do, cleverly using the metaphor of wealth associated with the American Dream as a metaphor for justice - the "bank of justice".

Rhetorical devices are also employed for both structure and emphasis, for like the other two speeches this one was written in lively, literate paragraphs. "Now is the time," is used four times at the start to sound the note of urgency. "The swelling summer of discontent of the negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality..." Shakespeare's "winter of discontent" that opens Richard III has been given a twist.

"We can never be satisfied" is repeated four times. "...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream". The "valley of despair" is contrasted to "going up to the mountain". Then Dr King begins his peroration with "I have a dream..." This is repeated no fewer than eight times with gathering force until he hits his final inspiring note, using the seminal image of the old fight against slavery: "Let freedom ring..." He says this six times.

The force of this speech was not aimed solely at changing national policy; its deeper purpose was to emotionalise sterility and release men and women from the bondage of their bigotry.

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I saw Margaret Thatcher only once in real life; it was at the Conservative Party conference in 1979, at Blackpool I think it was, the year she won the first of her three General Elections. What struck me right away was how small she was, like Princess Margaret. Television cameras seemed to make the Prime Minister look more physically imposing than she really was.

By the time she came to make her speech to the party at the Brighton conference, on October 10, 1980, the mood in the country had changed sharply. Interest rates and inflation were rampant, unemployment had gone past two million, manufacturing had been decimated. The Government itself was divided between 'wets' and 'dries', the former believing that economic recovery should not be pursued at the expense of social disintegration. They wanted Mrs Thatcher to do a U-turn and soften her tough economic policy.

The Prime Minister's job was threefold: to rally the party faithful, to impose herself upon her MPs, especially those in the Cabinet, and to offer some assurance to the country at large that she was not going to bend with the winds of change. Her speech-writer Ronnie Miller gave her the perfect image for expressing her intent. "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning."

Admire it or deplore it, the one thing you cannot say about that turn of phrase is that it is not instantly memorable. "The lady's not for turning" itself is tongue-in-cheek, based, as I'm sure it is, on the title of some melodrama. Rather than spit fire and brimstone at her critics witthin the party, Mrs Thatcher rather wittily put them in their place.

This speech had to be sober and reflect the seriousness of the times. It does that. Again, this is a speech composed in literate paragraphs. "Prosperity comes not from grand conferences of accountants but by countless acts of personal self-confidence and self-reliance...The state drains society, not only of its wealth but of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best..." She called for "wisdom and resolution".

While not uplifting like President Roosevelt's speech, nor scintillating like Mr Bevan's, nor soul-stirringly emotional like Dr King's, Mrs Thatcher's conference speech was without a single hackneyed phrase. It was cliche-free. And though written by another, it bore the stamp of Mrs Thatcher's personality as Prime Minister.

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Recently, I looked over a speech by David Cameron, a long speech of some 4,500 words. The subject of the speech was largely two-fold: to remind the public that Gordon Brown was responsible for creating the conditions of the current economic crisis by permitting unsound policies during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer; secondly, to set out what a Conservative Government would do to make sure that such a crisis does not happen again.

I was unable to read through the speech with concentration because its format did not invite concentration. It was an ensemble of paragraphs of two or three lines, often a single line. Unlike the liquid in the bottle in Alice in Wonderland, this speech did not invite me to devour it, let alone digest it. Had I done so I doubt if my stature would have altered appreciably, nor my standing.

The passages that I did read, on the theme of Britain in crisis, startled me somewhat gleefully, I must admit, by the inconsistency of the imagery employed to get the message across. The crisis was referred to as a boxing match - Mr Cameron did not intend to "pull his punches". OK, I looked for the KO blow.

Instead I was told that the banking crisis was a problem with "deep roots", presumably implying some history going back a long way. Hmmm. Then I was surprised to learn that the state of the economy had become like a "merry-go-round" out of control, I believe. Try to imagine President Roosevelt using such an image.

From there Mr Cameron told me that the economy was "a house on fire". Then he implied it was like a foundering ship because the time had come to "man the pumps" - unless he was suggesting that we all don plimsolls and get a spot of exercise to cut down on obesity and, at the same time, reduce our carbon footprint. At the point where he referred to the state of the affairs as a house of cards, ready to come "tumbling down", I must admit I gave up.

Had I written a poem about the state of the nation and used the same language in such a shoddy manner I would have been taken to task by friends who expect better of me. Why, then, should the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition - a serious-minded and sincere man he would have us believe - why should he be allowed to get away with bad prose in an important speech? His intention was to blame Gordon Brown for the mess we are in; but couldn't he have followed the example of Aneurin Bevan and done it with a little wit and panache, offering us at least the relief of laughter? You may also ask why he didn't deliver it during an emergency debate in the House of Commons - but that's another matter.

Clearly this speech had been assembled to be delivered to achieve a particular effect. Later, I watched Mr Cameron deliver part of it on television. He looked and sounded plausible; mind you, the extract I saw contained none of the mixed metaphors and cliches decribed above.

This was a hybrid bicycle of a speech, designed to sound good rather than achieve anything practicable. I could imagine Mr Cameron after he delivered it, pushing it squeakily home, with the odd piece falling off with a thunk!

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This section was added the night after Barack Obama's acceptance speech as President-elect of the United States. The quotes from his speech are in keeping with the inspirational quality of the first four. Although high-flown, there are no mixed metaphors, no hand-me down cliches. Instead, the Senator has echoed words and phrases embedded in the collective cultural consciousness of America - from Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy and Sam Cooke.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer...

"And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president too.

"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

"To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you...

"This is our time, to our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."

Francis Bacon: a Retrospective

2008-09-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

Philomena Hanna, Olivier Messiaen and Francis Bacon had one thing in common: they died on the same day - Tuesday, April 28, 1992.

A painter, a composer and a Roman Catholic mother of two.

Bacon and Messiaen died of natural causes in their eighties; but Mrs Hanna was shot dead in her prime as she was serving behind the counter of a chemist's shop in Belfast's Falls Road. A man walked in and fired five bullets into her. She was the 48th fatality from sectarian violence in Belfast that year.

Philomena Hanna's murder - commited by the Ulster Freedom Fighters, if the name makes a difference - made my heart sink a little more heavily at the time. I thought that anyone partial to philosophising about the horror of contemporary life should paint a simple picture of this woman's body, her blood spreading over the floor of the pharmacy where she had dispensed not only medicines but kindness to Catholic and Protestant alike.

Such a painting, a mixture of banality and pathos, would say more to me than any of Francis Bacon's screaming popes or his menagerie of Henry-Moore-type contortions with teeth.

Bacon's death at the age of 82, unlike Philomena Hanna's at the age of 26, was not a tragedy; simply the end of a process. I could not join in the acclamation for his work which, according to Lord Gowrie, former arts minister and chairman of Southeby's, made Bacon "The greatest British painter since Turner."

He may well have been "an extraordinary and unique personality and a very kind friend". But whereas I cannot say anything about his worth as a friend, I must say something about Lord Gowrie's estimation of Bacon's reputation as a painter and as an extraordinary personality.

Bacon's gallery of monstrosities, we are told in so many words, is a bleak but brutally candid vision of the horror and existential isolation of modern man. The artist, I read somewhere, was moved to paint his pictures of tortured meat by photographs and newsreels of Nazi concentration camps.

It took me some time to see that basically Bacon was old hat. Technically he was less accomplished than Salvador Dali, who was also preoccupied with disfigured human forms. His famous Screaming Pope, a skilfully blurred caricature of a painting by Valesquez, which must have delighted the more iconoclastic of his Soho drinking buddies, is not as original as Bacon's hagiographers would have us believe. Remember Edvard Munch's The Scream, and before that the human condition as imagined by Goya in later life?

I don't think Bacon had a unique vision or any vision at all. "I've no story to tell," he apparently told those hoping to hear the master explain his revelation. "We live, we die and that's it, don't you think?" he said at the turn of his eightieth birthday.

No I don't. And no art that I most admire persuades me to believe that either. Even at its darkest, the painting of Van Gogh is redemptive, and the Dutchman's life was far harder and much shorter than Bacon's.

Irrespective of Oscar Wilde's dubious assertion in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray that art has no ethical sympathy, Bacon's work is ethically vacant and artistically shallow - profoundly superficial. I do not believe he exhibited greater talent than either Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) or Paul Nash (1889-1946), let alone Lucien Freud, Stanley Spencer and sometimes David Hockney. Artistically, there is more accomplishment in a Walt Disney Tom and Jerry cartoon than in Bacon's second-hand contortions.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen had more reason than Francis Bacon to feel bleak about the human condition. For two years he was an involuntary guest of the Nazis in a concentration camp - an experience said to have inspired his 1941 composition Quartet For the End of Time. Eight years later he produced the sprawling, wondrous Turangalia Symphony, with its massive brassy fanfares, tapped woodblocks and what sounds like singing saws.

Messiaen may or may not have been "the greatest musician of his generation", as Pierre Boulez said. I just find it striking that a man who had first-hand knowledge of some of the worst horrors of the Twentieth century wrote music that was bright and affirmative whereas Bacon, whose knowledge of those horrors was second or third hand, had nothing at all to affirm other than a variation of W B Yeats' foul rag and boneshop of the heart. In this respect Bacon's vision has more in keeping with Galton and Simpson's Steptoe and Son.

I do not contest the fact that Bacon had great skill in the way he arranged his painted shapes on canvas. He knew how to make a visually arresting impact. It's just that I prefer Messiaen whose Catholic faith, according to Boulez, was a "very important contribution to the strong personality of his music". By the way, I am not a Roman Catholic.

Bacon or Messiaen? For me the composer's work - the little that I know - is eminently more appealing and, I think, will endure long after the fads and fashions of the international art market have altered once again.

Blaise Pascal described the darkess of night as "those terrifying spaces". Bacon's painting merely confirms that thought; but Messiaen fills those spaces with wondrous sounds. No individual act of terror by a gunman, no systematic act of murder, has yet persuaded me to look upon those dark spaces with anything other than wonder and, sometimes, awe. The dark places inside my head fill me with far more apprehension.

Music humbles and magnifies simultaneously more instantaneously than any other art form. It destroys fear, gives us courage and restores our willingness to hope for something better as we travel through the valley of shadow, with its fear and murder.

When Will There be Polar Bears in Great Yarmouth?

2008-09-03T10:30:00.001-07:00

Those scientific people who scoff at the idea of a god while simulatenously predicting the end of the world are enjoying themselves enormously at the moment.

Some of them are messing about in boats up in the Arctic, directing BBC cameras at chunks of drifting ice and declaring that this is hard evidence of ecological Armageddon, global warming - unless, of course, we change our wicked ways.

The self-righteous evangelical zeal with which they issue their Jeremiads is easy enough to understand: we all like to be right and sound important in public.

However, I would be grateful if they could answer one little question: Why hasn't Great Yarmouth got Polar bears swimming down its High Street on their way to Iceland (the supermarket)?

If, as they suggest, the ice cap at the North Pole is dissolving faster than jelly in a bonfire, where has all the water gone, where is it going?

For years eco-warriors have been prophesying that if the ice melted the seas would rise by a couple of feet at least and the East Coast of England, and much of London, would be covered with water.

Well chaps, the only type of H2O covering the fair isle of Ralph Vaughn Williams is rainwater, not salty seawater. So put away the old boy's First Symphony. Ice, being less dense a mass than water, floats. When it melts it does not, I am assured by one who knows, displace much seawater at all.

That's why all the PB's, the Polar bears, are happily sloshing their way about up near Iceland (the country) and beyond. So it doesn't look as though they will be visiting East Anglia yet awhile.

On the subject of Polar bears, someone has suggested on record that these glacier mint beasts are dying out. Upon inquiry I was told that, on the contrary, they are multiplying.

Or perhaps I was confusing Polar bears with black bears. There was a claim made in Bradford's Telegraph & Argus newspaper on August 28, that half a million black bears are slaughtered annually (including cubs) to supply the Coldstream, Welsh and other British Guards units with black bearskin hats.

Half a million? There can't be that many bears in the world, and the entire British Army totals less than half that. However, unlike Oscar Wilde, I have only my ignorance to declare. If too many black bears are being turned into soliders hats, I have a solution: why not cull a few Polar bears and instead of supplying the Coldstream Guards with black bearskins give them white ones.

The next time two Guards units parade through London, one could wear white bearskins, the other black. They could play chess, or chequers, marching and counter-marching along Whitehall, wherever Guardsmen are allowed to congregate these days without causing a security alert.

It would also be in keeping with the Government's policy of multi-cultural diversity, having white AND black bearskins.

But then, someone is bound to say rhetorically: "Why have soldiers at all!"

Apocalypse Soon

2008-07-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Propaganda, only propaganda is necessary. There is no end of stupid people. Adolf Hitler

If the Arctic should doff its polar cap
in deference to excessive heat,
Mother Earth will be up to her crack
in more H2o than tantalised
the Ancient Mariner. Yet some forecast
drought, Saharas, parched disaster.

Which fate awaits this spinning Ark:
death by drowning or dehydration?
There can only be one apocalypse.
For those who live by final warnings,
beware of hot air -
the true cause of global warming.

Only fools and fanatics claim
to know the Creator's mind;
without the cloudiest doubt
occluding theirs, they proclaim
the end of the world is nigh. Doom
even makes athiests believers of a kind.

West-Ministers & Euro-cats

2008-06-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

for Richard North, Christopher Booker and the people of Eire who said 'No' to the Lisbon Treaty

If only we could throw them back,
the West-Ministers and Euro-cats,
the way deep-sea fishermen
are obliged to abandon
haddock and cod;
throw them back
into the sea of oblivion,
to drown in the shoals of God.

Full Circle: 3

2008-05-02T01:03:00.001-07:00

BRITAIN’S intelligentsia has intensified its embrace of atheism and extended its intellectual sympathy, at least, to anti-American, anti-imperial, terror groups. Antipathetic to the values of the past the intelligentsia has run into the contradiction of trying to empathise with Islamic religious and cultural values they would otherwise eschew. Radical Muslims have been quick to take advantage of this dilemma. Multiculturalism, the separate development of different cultures, has displaced integration in Britain, with disastrous consequences for health, education and the latest in-phrase, social cohesion.

As a former senior race relations officer in Bradford told me: When we adopted multiculturalism in 1984 we thought there would be some reciprocity. There wasn’t. It has been a terrible mistake. Among jihadists, of course, there is no desire for reciprocity with the infidel – non-Muslims - only victory for the forces of Allah. Imam Samudra, one of four Muslims sentenced to death for the 2002 Bali bombings which murdered 202 people and injured hundreds more, told a Sunday Times correspondent in February 2008:-

To Muslim people I would say pardon – but Muslims only. While the unbelievers – they must be entering into hell. Allah says to all unbelievers that this road will bring you to hell…Your country, the United Kingdom, will lose of course because Allah says that only Muslims can win…Tomorrow is Islam.

But radical Muslims are not responsible for impaling British middle-class people on the horns of a dilemma: they have accomplished that themselves; by means of a mixture of short-sighted stupidity and guilt over Britain’s imperial past, they have surrendered ground to an alien religious culture utterly at variance with their own cherished liberal beliefs in a godless universe, abortion, women’s rights and equality for all. The road to ruin goes back to the late Sixties.

The radical chic of West Germany embraced the Red Army Faktion and held the FDR in contempt. In the United States, white middle-class American intellectuals embraced the Black Panthers and turned a deaf ear to the racism implicit in the separate development message preached by Elijah Mohammad and Black Muslim acolytes such as world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali.

Socialist Workers Party followers in Britain, and other Left-leaning political factions, identified the capitalist state as the source of political oppression and violence. From there it was but a step to pointing the finger of blame at the family as the sickest cell of capitalism’s corporate body politic. It became trendy to look at the family as society’s single most repressive structure which fostered alienation, anomie and all manner of sociopathic disorders. Alleged insanity was interpreted by radical psychiatrists such as R D Laing as a rational response to society’s collective mental breakdown. Laing’s 1961 book The Divided Self seemingly validated the anxieties of Swinging London’s angst-ridden middle class whose answer to the big question of What Am I To Do? was various. Some gave up materialism and took to making geodesic domes and living in the country. Others went into liberal studies in colleges and introduced students to film-makers such as Ken Loach. American hippies trekked out of the cities back to the land. Genuine idealism and self-indulgence combined to curdle the milk of human kindness that had flowed from the earlier liberating years of the Sixties.

The British pride themselves on being reasonably tolerant. People from other parts of the world have found Britain to be a fertile place in which to sow the seeds of their particular beliefs, most noticeably Islam. Over the years the British , whatever they might say about immigration into the United Kingdom, have come to respect people whose beliefs in the extended family, marriage and God are, seemingly, uncorrupted by drugs, alcoholism, divorce and child abuse. Many have colluded in the deception that forced marriage and izzat (family honour) are legitimate expressions of multiculturalism.

Little effort is required to accept radical Islamic claims that institutionalised Western violence – as expressed by the Judaic-Christian invention of capitalism – is chiefly to blame for the current state of international affairs especially in the Middle East. Just as well-to-do Russians in the 19th century sympathised with the anti-establishment aims of nihilists and well-to-do West Germans in the 20th century sympathised with the Robin Hood objectives of Baader-Meinhof, we are witnessing manifestations of similar behaviour among the well-to-do in the West today.

Among the anti-American white middles class of England, for example, there are those who admitted to feeling a frisson of excitement at the sight of the World Trade Centre imploding. The idea that punishment was being visited on mainland America for foreign policy crimes was greater, for these people, than the thought of the suffering inflicted on the people in the two hijacked aircraft, the people in the twin towers and the people in the streets of Manhattan. One writer known to me loudly declared that in the same circumstances he would like to think that he would be a terrorist. These Dostoyevskian Morlocks are still masquerading as concerned humanists. While they may not offer material support to Al Qa’ida they are quick to justify the depredations of the bombers, seeing acts of indiscriminate terror as being the equivalent of political acts.

Car bombings and suicide attacks on civilians are, they imagine, the legitimate voice of the voiceless, the authentic cry of distress rising from the people made wretched by the West. Evidently they see no irony in offering plausible justifications for terrorism by the God-fearing – even though they probably do not believe in God. They like to think of themselves as the true defenders of liberty; but in fact they are the unwitting dupes of the totalitarian enemies of democracy. George Orwell described exactly the same phenomenon in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn.

Fundamentalist Islam has been at war with the West since the 1970s. Black September was one of armed and militant Islam’s early manifestations. 9/11 was proof that Islamic terrorists do not require a political pretext for their actions, as they tell the credulous, because their actions are not political but religious. People forget that 9/11 and the Bali bombing occurred long before President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair sent American and British forces into Iraq in March 2003.

The present global phenomenon of Islamic terror attacks would not stop even if US and UK-Coalition forces were withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. White liberals would dearly love to see the ineffective peace keepers of the United Nations take over in Baghdad and Kabul. The world saw what UN blue helmets were capable of in Srebrinicia in the summer of 1995. There is no necessary correlation between the West’s foreign policy and Islamic terrorist acts. As for Muslim claims that they are upset by what they see happening to other Muslims, this is merely another argument to deceive the credulous.

In eight years of the Iraq-Iran War between 1980 and 1988, in which more than one million Muslims were killed, there was barely a squeak of protest from Muslims anywhere in Britain, let alone Western Europe. At the end of the war, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whether by luck or design, hit upon the idea of boosting his waning authority by denouncing Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. In this book Rushdie imagined what might have happened if Satan had hacked into the divine stream of consciousness between the Archangel Gabriel and Muhammad, all those centuries ago in the desert.

Khomeini’s fatwa had the desired effect in the Muslim world: it galvanised them, brought them together in an imagined global brotherhood. And after Khomeini died they simply switched their allegiance to his former enemy Saddam Hussein. Hypocrisy, we see, does not belong exclusively to cynical foreign diplomats in the West. Saddam cemented his popularity among Muslims by firing Scud missiles at Israel in the first Gulf War.

The move to unite Muslims world-wide along ideological lines is a more dangerous variation of pan-Arab nationalism that goes back to the time of Egypt’s President Nasser. Nasser was more than an Egyptian nationalist, he dedicated himself to the annihilation of Israel. Like the Nazis before them, Islamic terrorists are profoundly anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish. They hate America for defending Israel. They like to remind feeble Westerners that whereas we love life, they love death.

When their white liberal apologists suggest a variety of material deprivation as reasonable explanations for Muslims becoming suicide bombers they are, once again, turning culprits into victims. This is like saying the real perpetrators of the Holocaust were Western Europe’s Jews, who failed to be more sympathetic to the social and economic plight of the Weimar Republic.

The West must beware of Islamic blandishments and vigorously challenge the usual accusations of racism and Islamophobia. When Islamicists rhetorically ask why Jews and Catholics do not suffer the same public suspicion it is because Catholics and Jews do not dream of a global theocracy established and maintained by world-wide terrorism.

Culture & Terrorism: 2

2008-05-02T01:01:00.000-07:00

We know from 9/11 and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, that not all Islamic bombers are impoverished no-hopers from Palestinian refugee camps.

The people who planned, co-ordinated and carried out those attacks were mostly college or university educated, who had also spent time in terrorist training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan learning how to murder and maim civilians. Some of them were married with young families. Others were popular in their local community.

Whatever prompted them to step over the line between civilisation and barbarism has been attributed to a range of reasons and causes, from anger at the plight of the Palestinians to opposition to British and American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Any case may be argued, but only one thing is certain: this strain of terrorism, of megalomania, masquerading as selfless commitment to an historic cause is not new.

Western writers have been describing its symptoms in one form or another ever since Edmund Burke, Tom Paine and William Wordsworth wrote in their own ways about the ramifications of the French Revolution. In 1861, Ivan Turgenev’s greatest novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in Russia. The two main protagonists in this slim volume are Pavel Petrovich, a landed aristocrat of limited means who enjoys thinking of himself as a liberal, and Yevgeny Bazarov, a young university friend of Pavel Petrovich’s nephew. Bazarov is a doctor who says the cure for society’s social and economic ills is its complete destruction. Bazarov is a nihilist. The older generation reels back in bewilderment as Bazarov casually dimisses as irrelevant their cherished beliefs in art, philosophy, political reform, music and aesthetics. While they throw up their hands in consternation, Bazarov devotes himself to dissecting frogs. The empiricism of rigorous, unemotional scientific inquiry is the only useful tool that modern man has got, he says. But Bazarov is not an unconscionable monster: he is perhaps the last of the Romantic figures in 19th century European literature, a Byronic character unsuited to the ruthless epoch that he predicts as inevitable. Bazarov, impaled on his own human contradictions, dies while trying to save the life of a woman with whom he has fallen in love. What Turgenev shows so brilliantly is the way in which the Russian liberal intelligentsia, mistaking novelty for originality, fastened on to the latest political trend, as though it were a fashion, to make themselves more interesting. The novelist was attacked for being unsympathetic to nihilists.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky goes deeper and further into the psychology of the monomaniac. His novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils or The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov explore the extremes of delusional behaviour. To take two of them, Crime and Punishment and The Devils: in the first Raskolnikov, an impoverished young student of good but poor family, becomes fixated by Napoleon. He dreams of all the good he could do in the world if only he had the courage, like Napoleon, to ignore his conscience and take a gigantic step over the normal constraints and proprieties of life. The end, he convinces himself, is justified by the means providing that good triumphs over evil. Raskolnikov argues himself into the necessary state of mind and murders his miserly landlady, hitting her on the back of the head with the haft of an axe. Unfortunately he is interrupted by another woman and is obliged to kill her too. Driven demented by his crimes, he ultimately confesses to his crimes, redeemed from damnation by the selfless Christian love of Sonia. She is as poor as Raskolnikov. To feed her family she takes up prostitution; but, unlike Raskolinov, is uncorrupted. Raskolnikov serves as a blueprint for other dangerous characters. One Russian critic’s description of Raskolnikov as “a demon embodied in a humanist” could equally apply to the four Muslims, among them a cricket-lover, who exploded nail bombs on three London underground trains and one double-decker bus in the summer of 2005, killing fifty-six and injuring and maiming seven hundred.

Dostoyevsky’s most sinister terrorist, Nikolai Stavrogin, can be found in The Devils, published in 1871/72. Again, the Russian intelligentsia were outraged by the “harsh depiction of ruthless radicals”. Intellectuals then, as they would be later, were fascinated by young idealists willing to give up life for the sake of the cause of political freedom. The myth of revolution has always been breath-taking to the credulous and the supine. The life-denying force of nihilism was the antecedent to the anti-democratic force of Bolshevism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as preached by Lenin and carried out with unconscionable ruthlessness by Stalin – Machiavelli’s modern political autocrat.

In 1907, two years after Russia’s first revolution and ten years before its decisive one, Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent introduced the English-speaking public to the idea of terrorist bombing. In this book, though, the plot is thickened by the fact that Mr Verloc, the angel of destruction, is an agent provocateur working for the authorities. To provoke a backlash against London’s anarchists, led by Michaelis, Mr Verloc plans to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. But he sends his half-witted nephew Stevie to do the job. The bomb explodes prematurely as Stevie carries it across London, blowing him to pieces. Winnie Verloc revenges herself for the loss of her brother by killing her husband. She then goes off with Comrade Ossipon, who later deserts her. Michaelis is jailed, but in prison he writes his memoirs and is supported by Lady Mabel, his patroness. Conrad’s fictional bomber, Verloc, appears to anticipate the real Muslim bombers of 2005:-

He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea of calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in a street full of men.

In the late 20th century Czech writer Milan Kundera used the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces as the focus for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Kundera differentiates between patriotism of the heart and political idealism, which is depicted as a kind of mental aberration. The former is embodied in various ways by the three central characters, Tomas, Teresa and Sabina – a doctor, a photographer and an artist. Political idealism is embodied by Franz, a Swiss academic, whom Sabina meets in Geneva. She interrupts his eulogy about marching for freedom by expressing the hope that he is not going to be boring. Franz is carried away by the idea of “the grand march of History”, a disembodied ideal that steps over all objections and obstacles in much the same way that Raskolnikov imagined Napoleon stepping over the lives of men sent to oppose his political ambitions. Kundera, like Turgenev, has a sharp eye for those who are easily duped by what the British philosopher Karl Popper called “historicism”.

In November 1978, the world was horrified to see television pictures beamed in from Guyana in South America which showed the bodies of the followers of American evangelist Jim Jones.

Up to 900 men, women and children had committed suicide en masse in the muddy compounds of Jonestown. There is a recording of Jones speaking to them, encouraging them to drink the Kool Aid juice laced with poison. The forces of oppression were gathering, he said. On the airstrip outside Jonestown five people lay dead from gunshots, among them a US Senator.

Novelist and writer Shiva Naipaul went to Guyana. His subsequent book, Black &White, published in 1981, traced the influence of Jones back to ideas that had germinated in California in the 1960s: Black Power, self actualisation, ecology, direct action against State oppression – the ultimate form of this being Vietnam. These ideas bubbled heatedly in the cauldron that the United States became from President John Kennedy’s murder on Elm Street, Dallas, in 1963, to President Richard Nixon’s historic resignation in 1975. Twelve years of mayhem which had included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jnr, Senator Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

Into the cauldron went many preconceived ideas of race, marriage, family, the raising and education of children – de-schooling was an idea of American educational radicals – patriotism, careers, civil rights, political rights. Lots of rights, few obligations. It all proved too much for poor little rich girl Patty Hearst, an heiress whose ‘gangster period’ of personal development, included a spell with real gangsters, an urban guerrilla group which planned to redistribute wealth by robbing banks.

A crazy time for people driven crazy by the feeling that they had no control over anything; but a cool time for Weathermen, Yippees, the Black Panthers, Elijah Mohammad and his Black Muslims. What was a little street violence in Los Angeles and Chicago compared to America’s corporate terror in Vietnam? The ruins of a dream was what Naipaul found in the ruins of Jonestown.

In Western Europe, Left-leaning radicals eagerly embraced the dream of revolution. Coincidentally, 1978 was the year in which Jillian Becker’s study of the Baader-Meinhof gang, Hitler’s Children, was published.

Calling itself the Red Army Faktion, after a similarly-named Japanese organisation, the gang was the first in West Germany to organise itself into an underground urban guerrilla body. Shortly after this took place in 1970, the gang made world headlines with bank raids and street gun-battles. Later it was to dabble in bombings, both inside and outside the borders of the German Federal Republic.

Similar terrorist groups existed in Italy (the Red Brigade kidnapped and murdered former prime Minister Aldo Moro), the United States, England, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Most of them grew out of student protest movements in the late 1960s, the most radical of which shared the same ideological aim: the overthrow of capitalism. Capitalism was likened to fascism, imperialism, the exploitation of the worker. Becker explained:-

The chief characteristic of the student movements and the new left everywhere was a morally ambitious identification by affluent rebels with the poor, the victimized, and the socially outcast, and especially with the people of Vietnam, on whose behalf they protested that the United States was waging aggressive war against them…The West German movement had a special antagonism to what it called ‘authoritarianism’. All authority, without distinction, was considered ‘fascist’ by the German rebels.

International links with other groups and with the Palestinians were funded in a variety of ways including donations by West Germany’s middle class intelligentsia, whose economic fortunes had blossomed since the 1950s. They were eager to distance themselves from any association with authoritarianism, which meant fascism. Baader-Meinhof (Andreas Baader was a thief converted to Marxism, Ulrike Meinhof was a well-known magazine journalist married to a rich publisher) represented the ultimate romantic fantasy. Jillian Becker again:-

It (the gang) had the romantic, aesthetic, and even erotic fascination for many people which bandit gangs always had – especially and predictably, though not exclusively, for the young.

Those not so young but old enough to know better were also stimulated vicariously by acts of violence and murder. Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence on the young and the educators of the young in Europe and America should not be under-estimated, visited Ulrike Meinhof in prison. He also visited the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and gave it his stamp of approval – just as he had visited post-Stalinist Russia in 1954 and subsequently wrote an article full of untruths, as he later admitted.

Sartre did not invent the European climate in which terrorism flourished as a romantic alternative to dull bourgeois conformity; but to flatter his reputation as the leading avant-garde thinker of the day, he did much to encourage it. In part, says Paul Johnson in his book Intellectuals, to excuse his lack of real activity, and to bolster his waning reputation as a radical. He rushed about offering his support to all Leftist alternatives and idealogues such as Franz Fanon, the black African, whose 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth showed the way for black African racism to go, says Johnson.

This was an updating of existentialism: self-liberation through murder. It was Sartre who invented the verbal technique (culled from German philosophy) of identifying the existing order as ‘violent’ (e.g. ‘institutionalised violence’) thus justifying killing to overthrow it. He asserted: ‘For me the essential problem is to reject the theory according to which the left ought not to answer violence with violence.’…He thus became the academic godfather to many terrorist movements which began to oppress society from the late 1960s onwards. What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites but on other blacks.

The same can be said about every justification of armed and militant Islam. Al Qa’ida’s cadres kill more Muslims, just as the Provisional IRA killed more Irish Catholics than their respective enemies. Sartre’s support of Maoism made him a natural ideological influence for Poll Pot’s Khmer Rouge leadership in Cambodia (renamed, temporarily, Kampuchea). Johnson says the eight leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the ‘Higher Organisation’, had been educated in France where they belong to the Communist Party and had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and ‘necessary violence’. These mass murderers were his ideological children.

France, it should be remembered, was the chosen base for the Ayatollah Khomeini. French intellectuals of the Left abased themselves at the feet of what they regarded as a desert prophet, a kind of Islamic Ezekiel or Elijah, come to rid the corrupted land of Iran of the reign of its Shah.

The French Government of Jacques Chirac banned Muslims from wearing the veil; but from 1977 to 1979, following the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Khomeini and his followers were feted. In Britain too, the Shah of Iran was attacked by the Left as a stooge of the United States and British imperialism. The public, liberated by the second Enlightenment of the Swinging Sixties, applauded. Paul Johnson identifies three post-war influences on mass culture in the West:-

Hedonism
Agnosticism or atheism
A fascination with violence

The Evil That Men Do: 1

2008-05-02T00:59:00.001-07:00

Christianity teaches two overwhelming truths…that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy. It is of equal importance to men to know each of these points: and it is equally dangerous for men to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as knowing only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of philosophers, who have known God, but not their own wretchedness, or the despair of the atheists, who know their own wretchedness without knowing their Redeemer…

Against Indifference, p155, Pascal’s Reflections

The massacre of children and teachers at the school in Beslan by Chechan separatists in 2004, the triple attack from the air on the United States on September 11, 2001, the bombings in Bali, Madrid and, on July 7, 2005, on London’s underground and bus system, remind us that supposedly God-fearing men are wholly capable of ungodly wickedness.

The idea of the God-fearing committing ungodly acts seems a contradictory proposition, except to those who believe that religion is a curse. In fact there is no contradiction in Pascal’s proposition about the corruption in nature that persuades men they can know God without knowing their own wretchedness. It is one thing to justify mass murder in the name of God; but only a deluded lunatic would justify 9/11 according to the mind of God.

The utterances of the 9/11 terrorists, as re-enacted in the television documentary A Hamburg Cell make perfect if appalling sense. Here were well-educated young men who been convinced that the mind of God commanded them to slaughter as many Jews and Americans as possible. Such an act requires a longing for death and an abiding contempt for life. Intellectually, this is an untenable position if, as a devout man, one believes that life is a gift from God. Contempt for life to the truly Godly is a sin akin to blasphemy, like spitting in the face of God.

Throughout history men have tried to hate life as a philosophical condition for bringing themselves closer to a state of rapture in which they hope to perceive the mind of God.

The idea is that this life is not the whole story, that behind or in front of this world, there is another reality. This world is merely a cave of shadows, silhouettes on firelit walls. This path of hatred is taken by men and women who cannot confront the causes of their deepest fears. They embrace denial and solitude as a way of negating the risk of loneliness should human love prove transitory or illusory.

But to embrace one’s wretchedness without the possibility of redemption, as Pascal suggested, is to put one’s self into a false position, a position of error in which judgements are made from a permanently flawed point of view. Monks embrace asceticism cheerfully. Those who give up worldly things must do so willingly, in good heart and good conscience, otherwise their sacrifice will be vitiated by hatred.

In the Christian tradition the willingness to accept death and martyrdom has always meant laying down one’s life for the love of God or to save another. Martyrdom has never meant taking the lives of men, women and children in a school gymnasium, bus, underground train, hotel or office building.

The true martyr surrenders his life not out of hatred. At the point of death Christ asked God to forgive those who had betrayed, humiliated, scourged and crucified him. The religious terrorist, the ugodly God-fearer, dies in the blood of others: his choice is their fait accompli. And for what? No man knows the measure of the universe, therefore no man knows the mind of God.

Only the intelligent ones would think of presenting murder as martyrdom and cowardice as heroism. Ordinary people without the dubious benefits of higher education tend to have more humility. For all the heartache and heartbreak that life entails they embrace it with a relish that more fastidious natures find common or vulgar.

George Orwell observed in his wartime essay The Lion and the Unicorn that the most notable feature about the English intelligentsia was its severance from the common culture of the country. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

Great Goodness and great wickedness are alike in one respect: they both require imagination. The Final Solution, as devised in January 1942, and the Islamic bombings of 2001 and 2005 are examples of both wickedness and imagination.

The Nazis believed they would be doing the world a favour by ridding it of ugliness, cupidity and biological error. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the logical outcome of this idea. The Islamic terrorists in the United States and Britain imagined they were doing the will of Allah by murdering Jews and Americans. The only discernible difference between the Nazi and Islamic outlooks is that political power is not a reality for Jihadists.

In his book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Dr Bernard Lewis says:-
If one may speak of a clergy in a limited sociological sense in the Islamic world, there is no sense at all in which one can speak of a laity. The very notion of something that is separate or even separable from religious authority is totally alien to Islamic thought and practice.

Annihilating Israel and destroying the Great Satan, the United States, are very big ideas requiring enormous amounts of detailed planning and logistical calculation. Destroying the World Trade Centre was breath-taking in conception but wicked nonetheless. The loss of life was not in itself wicked: more people have been obliterated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, let alone by acts of warfare or terror. What made the 9/11 attacks wicked was the presumption by the perpetrators that they were carrying out the will of God.

Therefore we should not be surprised when the God-fearing carry out godless atrocities. Their awareness of their own wretchedness has been entirely varnished over by their conviction that everyone not like them is wretched, ungodly and therefore unfit to live. The flaw in nature identified by Pascal comes down to a lack of imaginative sympathy for the human condition, the flaw that Shakespeare has the old maddened King recognise in Act Three of King Lear. It is the inability to imaginatively connect with others that makes men hate themselves, and removes the final obstacle to indiscriminate murder.

Denial of the self in hatred is not the answer: a willingness to embrace the self that yearns to know and love itself through its creator may be.

Journalism

2008-04-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

Some people think that journalism and creative writing are two distinctly different things. In fact journalism - producing copy on whatever subject to the required length on deadline - demands a range of skills a lot of contemporary British writers could do with.

Jim Greenhalf had self-published three pamphlets of poetry before getting a job as a journalist in 1977. In the course of his work as a staff news reporter, columnist, news-feature writer and reviewer and feature writer, he covered not only big local and national stories - the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, the 1985 Bradford City Fire Disaster, the Ray Honeyford Affair, the burning of The Satanic Verses, the fall of Margaret Thatcher - but from 1989 to 1993 wrote many pieces about Europe and the first Gulf War.

Along the way he learned a good deal about word craft, headlines and design - alas not on computer. He drafted designs for the covers of all editions of Salt & Silver, for example, and every other of his books published by Redbeck Press.

The awards his journalism has won reflect his wide range of abilities:-

1988: Joint-runner up in the Yorkshire Press Awards for Sports Journalist of the Year

89/90: UK Press Gazette Columnist of the Year

90/91: Whitbread North-East Feature Writer of the Year

In addition, three times a runner-up in the BT Press Awards (North East) for feature writing, business writing and as a columnist

For his newspaper, the Telegraph & Argus in Bradford, he co-authored two best-selling books: Stories of the Century, Breedon Books and the Telegraph & Argus, 1999, and Bye Bye Broadway, Breedon Books and the Telegraph & Argus, 2005.

In 1999 the University of Leeds and Filtronik plc published Electric Century, a short book researched, compiled and written by Jim Greenhalf as a commision to mark the centenary of the University's School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

Three years earlier, Bradford Central Libraries published Boldness Be My Friend, an anthology of recollections about the late Labour MP Bob Cryer. Jim Greenhalf was commissioned to write the chapter about Bob Cryer's passionate interest in movies and movie-making.

All this work was done while Jim Greenhalf continued to do his day job.

Most of Jim Greenhalf's poetry plus the caustic, funny and sometimes poignant It's a Mean Old Scene: A History of Modern Bradford from 1974, and the volume of bitter-sweet short stories Father Jim, are published by David Tipton's Redbeck Press, at 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH. Tel: 01274-498135. Copies are still available of most volumes.

It's a Mean Old Scene - book review

2008-04-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's a Mean Old Scene: A History of Modern Bradford From 1974, Redbeck Press, £9.99

"Be warned, this is no typical local history book, no gushing amateur Bronte biography, no rose-tinted recollection of the grind of life in the mills, no wistful trip down memory lane ending in a demand for a return to the days when trolley buses rattled along the streets and families of ten left their front doors open all night. Indeed, take a look at the title: It's a Mean Old Scene was one of Bradford's most infamous and possibly perceptive pieces of graffiti that endured throughout the 1970s.

With candour and thoughtfulness, Greenhalf tackles head-on real life in Bradford since the mid-1970s. He is one of the few people in the city to comment openly about the race question, neither side-stepping the issue with deft politically correct moves not spouting mindless, bigoted invective...

This book is a curious mix of social commentary and personal recollection. Some of the best chapters to my mind are the ones which focus on Greenhalf's journalistic exploits. Particularly notable is the moving passage on the Bradford City disaster, which begins with a newspaperman's cynicism and blossoms into a portrait of the human condition.

It's 'dark twin' is the piece on the Ripper murders, and Greenhalf's soul-bearing on how deeply the gruesome killings got under his skin must have taken great bravery to write - it is certainly not glib, easy reading...

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the things Jim Greenhalf has seen, one thing shines through this book, and it's possibly something he might be hard-pushed to admit to himself: he has a great and deep love for Bradford. Unlike many people in the city, Greenhalf cares."

DAVID BARNETT, Telegraph & Argus, Bradford, May, 2002.