Waiting for the Bombers...

Early this afternoon, under the awning of a cafe table in the centre of sunny Bradford, I read the last 18 pages of Robert Fisk’s 1,286-page book The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Getting through it – on trains, buses, in cafes, the office and our back yard – has taken just over two months.

From that sententious opening you would be correct in assuming that I think I am not quite the same man I was on July 24 when, hesitatingly, I bought the book in Waterstone’s. I knew it would be polemical, I knew it would take me to places I did not want to go, above all I knew it would expose me to views of invasions and conflicts, from Afghanistan to Palestine, that I did not want to accept. The fact that Fisk lived in Beirut, had lived there for the best part of 30 years, had risked his neck to interview all concerned in these conflicts and invasions, unlike officially embedded correspondents or those who gaze upon terrible events from afar and pass judgement in the safety of book-lined studies, may have played a part in persuading me to take a chance and buy it.

Yes, all right, it is too long and there were times when I wondered whether Fisk was taking a perverse pleasure in the litany of horror he chronicles, from the massacre of Armenians by Turks, to the torture in the jails of Iran and Iraq and shoot 'em up policies of Israel and the United States. Then I realised that by putting names to the liquidated, the disappeared, he was bringing the corpses back into history. I didn't like it. You may not have the stomach for it. But, at least we have a public record of the things done to real people that have been obscured by silence or jargon - "targeted killings" or Donald Rumsfeld double-speak: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." I was an apologist for these people who talked about Iraq as a line in the sand in thje West's valiant "war against terror". I was a nodding dog because, though I should have known better, I didn't want to listen to those who said the 2003 invasion of Iraq was wrong and that it would lead to greater disaster. Reading this book made me realise that everything I thought I knew about the Middle East was wrong or at least was more wrong than right. If that doesn't satisfy you, tough; you'll just have to take my word for it: that book has made a difference. 

The coincidence of finishing it on the day that MPs in Parliament were debating whether to send in RAF bombers against the executioners of Islamic State merely reminded me of history’s barbed-wire ironies, the snagging statements of intent by presidents and prime ministers whose words cause others to bleed.

As MPs rose to address the nation, and posterity, I read: it was little wonder that as the West’s moral and physical power was smashed in the Middle East, a new wave of al-Queda-style bombings reached us across the world, even taking the lives of more than fifty Londoners on 7 July 2005 when the city’s tube and bus systems were attacked by suicide bombers. Prime Minister Blair still insisted this had nothing to do with Britain’s role in Iraq – a claim that seemed all the more mendacious when it was revealed that the British security apparatus had already warned of just such attacks after Britain occupied southern Iraq...

No one grasped that the leader of the Islamic side in this so-called war – bin Laden – was now irrelevant. The billions of dollars spent in trying to find him proved that we had still not understood the reality of the attacks of 11 September, 2001: bin Laden had created al-Qaeda, but his role was now largely ceremonial, theological rather than military...al-Qaeda now existed in the minds of thousands of Muslims. The monster – as Western journalists like to refer to their enemies – had grown up and propagated.

Who created that monster? We did. Fisk’s book rewinds history back to the start of the Great War and the botched settlements in the Middle East that followed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine and Arabia. But if you read William Dalrymple's Return of a King, you can trace the origins of present day bitterness in Afghanistan back to Britain's first botched venture into the country back in the early nineteenth century. Fearing a joint attack on its Imperial interests in India byTsarist Russia and Napoleonic France, Britain sent out an armed embassy loaded with gifts; but in seeking friends and allies we backed the wrong tribal leaders, which later resulted in military defeat in the first Afghan War followed by British reprisals of such savagery that they would never be forgotten or forgiven by future generations. I bought and read Dalrymple's fine book last year.

The monster emerged in the form of the Taliban in Afghanistan and then al-Qaeda and now Islamic State. Different groups with different agendas perhaps, but all nourished by spilt blood and broken promises.  Professor Paul Rogers, from Bradford University’s department of Peace Studies, suggested as much when he told me: “The Taliban were supposed to be defeated in six weeks; Saddam Hussein in three weeks. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been going on for 13 and 11 years respectively. It is tempting to say we should destroy Islamic State, but you have to be incredibly cautious. The toughest elements of IS are Iraqis who fought against the Americans after 2003. I think they will probably welcome it (US and British bombing) because it supports their case against the West.”

Fisk’s book, published in 2006, concludes with the Iraqi insurgency and its ramifications, the shock waves of which are still making the horizon quiver. Interestingly he includes a quote from T S Eliot, made in 1946: Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion; and that meddling in other people’s affairs which was formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. Nations which once shrank from condemning the most flagitious violation of human rights in Germany, are now exhorted to interfere in other countries’ government – and always in the name of peace and concord. Respect for the culture, the pattern of life, of other people...is respect for history; and by history we set no great store.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then farce. Those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them...Given the present circumstance we may extend that dialectic: the only lesson we learn from our mistakes is to repeat them with more expertise.

Today's debate in the Commons was ostensibly about bombing IS in Iraq - at least that was the message from the Conservative chief whip's office yesterday; but I gather that during the seven-hour debate some Tory MPs were bidding up RAF air strikes to include Syria. Well, that's not what the House overwhelmingly voted in favour of. It would be the mother of all ironies if the West ended up bombing the enemies of Syria's Government when just 13 months ago David Cameron was all for bombing the Assad regime. 

Three days before finishing Fisk’s great and shaming ensemble of recollections, press cuttings and polemic, I saw a small story on page 25 of The Independent. The headline, ‘Rabbi’s car firebombed after he criticised Israel’s actions in Gaza’ didn’t prepare me for what I read underneath.
The torching of Rabbi Ahron Cohen’s Volvo estate happened not in Israel but in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, two weeks after the George Bernard Shaw-bearded rabbi publicly voiced disapproval of Israel’s military policy in supposedly independent Gaza. An anonymous neighbour said: “His views have angered a lot of people around here. A lot of families have boys in the Israeli army.”

I don’t imagine that Home Secretary Teresa May will be discussing with her officials whether these fighters for Israeli freedom should be allowed back into Britain, after all Israel is not a threat to our way of life, is it?

But What Have Wayne or David Got to Say About Isis?

The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson is in Baghdad: therefore the situation with the masked and scarved gunmen of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) must be serious.

The inextricable tangle of tribal rivalries at the heart of it certainly looks ugly and hopeless. Lebanon in general and Beirut in particular used to be like that in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a wretched internicene conflict of different religious militias. Do-good outsiders who wandered between the jaws of it were taken into darkness for four to five years. Remember Terry Waite, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy? 

At least they survived. Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft did not. Accused by Saddam Hussein of spying, he was hanged in March 1990, a fate that was to befall the Iraqi leader after the invasion of Iraq. American journalist Daniel Pearl was captured by Al Qaida in Pakistan, that wonderful country, and beheaded by his captors in 2002. The video of it was posted on the net.

We, for whom a crisis is the telly or the boiler going on the blink or the barn owl population taking a bit of a dip, seemingly don't have the capacity to measure up to the import of these terrible events. If Wayne Rooney or David Beckham had warned (on television news, of course) that ISIS are worse than the Taliban in Afghanistan we might have take more notice.

Instead ISIS insurgents executing Shia men with machine guns came as a bit of surprise on Monday.  We thought everybody was watching the World Cup.

One consequence of all this is the turn-around in diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Why, only a few years ago Ben Afleck was making Argo - about the US hostage crisis. Now we're the best of friends with Iran it seems, with the re-opening of the British embassy in Tehran to prove it.   

Nothing should surprise us in the murky world of real-politick. Were ISIS to achieve the impossible and take Baghdad, I wonder if the EU would send envoys to the city to work out a mutually beneficial trade arrangement.  Or am I thinking of Ukraine? 
 
 

Sanctioning Food Banks

More than 900,000 food parcels were handed out to just over 37,000 people in Yorkshire and Humberside in the past year by the Trussell Trust alone. Welfare reforms or cuts combined with the rising cost of living is the reason food banks are so busy even though the rate of inflation has gone down to 1.6 per cent and more people than ever are in work.
 
David Ward, Liberal-Democrat MP for Bradford East, whose constituency has seen a drop in Job Seeker’s Allowance claimants of about 900 over the past year, said he wondered if scaring people into jobs was part of the overall strategy. 

“Maybe the aim is to make it a hostile environment for people who are unemployed. The trouble is, the background to all this, is that the public at large believe the welfare system is dysfunctional and needs sorting out. They are pretty unsympathetic to people who are claiming benefits - the skivers, the scroungers, as they see it.

“But the system from the Department of Work and Pensions that comes through Job Centres is inefficient. There are delays, letters get sent to the wrong address, or people try to ring up and can’t get through. One man who I saw was given 14 job inquiries to follow up in two weeks. He had been to 11. But because he had not been to all 14 his Job Seeker’s Allowance was stopped - ‘sanctioned’ it’s called. It could take you seven months before you’re back on Job Seeker’s. What are you supposed to do if you haven’t got any money?” 

Sanctioning has always been a feature of the benefits system. In Bradford, between 2009 and 2010 sanctions handed out to job seekers totalled 4,370. Two years later the figure was 9,320, implying a tightening up of the regime. The people who make the most referrals to Trussell Trust food banks, I was told, are Job Centre staff, the same people who, under pressure to meet targets, issue these sanctions. There is an appeals system, but you have to be canny or assisted to negotiate it. You have to be patient too because the backlog of pending cases is so great you can be waiting for 12 months - without money. Commonsense and discretion are not encouraged among Job Centre staff, I was told. If you are one of the lucky ones whom this part of the changing world has passed by, be grateful without feeling too self-satisfied. Being down on your luck may not have changed, but the manner of the help available has. 

Never having been in the benefits’ system I have no experience of its methods and means. I don’t know how it feels to be summarily sanctioned for contravening strict rules for the unemployed, to be told that state help will be withdrawn for four, seven, thirteen or even twenty-six weeks. 

Suppose I am not a feckless mumper acclimatised to living off the state. Suppose what little self-esteem I had vanished when I lost my job or had to stop working. Suppose being caught up in the welfare benefits command and control web with its system of sanctions and punishments and the sense of humiliation that goes with obeying Jobsworths proves unsupportable. Suppose what money I had saved up against ruin and despair had gone – there are so many ways to get financially wiped out these days.  When you ain’t got nuthin’ you got nuthin’ to lose might be a stimulating idea to those in transit from one interesting cultural experience to another, but the naked reality is, I suspect, more heart-gripping and desperate. But David Ward is right. Public sympathy is in short supply if the following online newspaper comment made recently in Bradford is anything to go by:- 

Charities should not undermine Government policy, which is to use starvation to force the lazy to get a job. It’s the only weapon left to use on benefit scroungers who think the state is just there to keep them in idleness. Poverty is a choice by the thick and the do-nothings. They have to be taught to live with the consequences. The next Conservative Government will do away with the freebies like health and education. The poor will then have to shape up or bear the consequences. (pcmanners)

In one supermarket we go to they’ve taken to security coding bacon, cheese and better cuts of meat because people have been stealing them. Two or three years ago a manager in another store told us that thieves nicking electrical goods was costing the store about £3,000 a week. I assumed this form of daylight robbery was connected to drugs. I don’t think people nick rashers to buy heroin, besides most of it has already been smoked. People are stealing food because they’re hungry.West Yorkshire Police, I was told, were after the addresses of food banks in Bradford so they could refer petty felons to them; evidently they saw no point in charging hungry people with stealing food. 

If ever there was a suitable time to revive Edward Bond’s play Bingo, this is it. In this play a mumbling, stumbling Shakespeare, retired to his New Place mansion in Stratford-upon-Avon, wondering if his writing career really amounted to much. “Was anything done?” he keeps asking rhetorically.  Bond draws a telling parallel between the insights into social injustice and cruelty uttered by King Lear and Shakespeare’s personal implication in Stratford land enclosures and the consequent poverty and hardship that came from it.

The old monstrous King gives his kingdom away to two of his three daughters and they, after proscribing his followers and blinding his ally the Earl of Gloucester, abandon Lear to the elements. In the midst of a terrible storm Lear is struck by a lightning bolt of insight which reveals the true state of his kingdom to his shattered but reorganised wits:-

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O I have ta'en
Too little care of this...Unaccomodated man is no
More but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.  

Bingo was first published by Methuen in 1974. My battered 1976 edition contains, just about, a seven-and-a-half page introduction by Bond. In it he says this:- I wrote Bingo because I think the contradictions in Shakespeare’s are similar to the contradictions in us. He was a ‘corrupt seer’ and we are a ‘barbarous civilisation’.  Because  of that our society could destroy itself. We believe in certain values but our society only works by destroying them, so that our daily lives are a denial of our hopes. That makes our world absurd and often it makes our own species hateful to us. Morality is reduced to surface details and trivialities. Is it so easy to live like that? Or are we surrounded by frustration and bitterness, cynicism and inefficiency, and an inner feeling of weakness that comes from knowing we waste our energy on things that finally can’t satisfy us?

It might explain why in a welfare state democracy, when people are stealing food to survive and others are being denied the means of survival by the state, painting pictures, writing books, listening to music and going to the theatre, feel self-indulgent activities. Socially we have come a long way from the England of Elizabeth 1, where terrible things occurred every day. The England of Elizabeth II in which I grew up encouraged the belief that the state would always offer a safety net to those who fell on hard times; that in spite of those who selfishly exploited it, having it there was a better idea than not having it there. I never had to use it, wouldn’t have had the first idea how to exploit it; but just knowing that a safety net existed allowed my generation to live a bit more courageously, to charge off all over the world or take up ventures that didn’t necessarily lead to a retirement pension and a silver cigarette case after fifty years. In short, old buggers like me have no experience of this brave new world of welfare sanctions, food banks and people nicking bacon and cheese to keep themselves going.

The likes of cpmanners  can’t wait for the day when the mumpers, the skivers, the scroungers – the poor – are dealt with once and for all. But even Hitler’s final solution backfired. His attempt to turn European Jewry into smoke resulted in the creation of state of Israel: the leader of the Third Reich was Israel’s true founding father. The mistake that pcmanners and all those like-minded make is that they will never be poor, that they have enough of the right stuff, the moxie, the will, to triumph over the worst that adversity can throw at them. Am I alone in hearing in that stentorian voice of malice – They have to be taught to live with the consequences – the angry, self-justifying, note of fear?  

Is History About to Repeat Itself?

With Russia making threatening noises about foreign intervention in neighbouring Ukraine and the the European Union sending in its foreign affairs supremo, the Baroness Cathy Ashton, I was reminded of events 22 years ago which arguably helped to provoke the first war on the European mainland since 1945.

But because I am a bear of astoundingly little brain I thought I'd better Google back to refresh my diminishing little grey cells. In 1992 the New York Times carried a report, parts of which I reproduce here:-

In a triumph for German foreign policy, all 12 members of the European Community, as well as Austria and Switzerland, recognized the independence of the former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia today.
In a series of separate statements, various European governments asserted that the Belgrade Government no longer had a right to rule the two republics.
"Slovenia and Croatia have held referendums that showed clearly that their people want independence," a statement issued by the Danish Foreign Ministry said. "It is now time to fulfill the desire their people have expressed."
In Belgrade, the Serbian-dominated Government denounced the decision on recognition as "contrary to the sovereign rights of Yugoslavia." The Government said it would continue to function until all six Yugoslav republics reached an agreement on their future relations.

The action by the European Community marked an important diplomatic victory for Germany, which has vigorously supported Slovenian and Croatian independence. German officials announced last month that they would recognize the two republics regardless of the wishes of other European countries, and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher lobbied intensely for the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Mr. Genscher said in a radio interview today that he was "very happy" with his success. He asserted that Croatia "has achieved the highest imaginable standard of respect for minority rights."
Leaders of Croatia and Slovenia today expressed gratitude for Germany's support. Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel of Slovenia said recognition of his republic's independence was due largely to "the wise policy of the German Government."
But Serbian leaders deplored the European Community's decision and singled out Germany for special criticism. Vladislav Jovanovic, the Serbian Foreign Minister, described Germany's role as "particularly negative," and said he regretted that other European Community leaders had decided to follow the German lead.
"It is a very serious precedent to encourage unilateral secession in one multinational state," Mr. Jovanovic said in an interview broadcast on British television.
 Although most European governments favored eventual recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, some had sought to postpone today's announcement so recognition could be part of an overall peace settlement in the Balkans. But German officials insisted that recognition was the only way to force the Serbs to accept a settlement.
Germany's decision to press for quick recognition of the two republics, disregarding appeals from the United States and the United Nations, marked a new assertiveness that some Europeans find disconcerting.

Quite apart from the novelty of European Community members, as they were called then, taking the moral high ground on the principle of supporting the outcome of referendums, there is the suggestion that the EC embodies the principle of national sovereignty. I fear that people in the western half of Ukraine, at least, believe that. We should not encourage them in that chimera. But I daresay we will.

Remember what happened next in what was then Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1999? I can remember Srebrinicia, the term "ethnic cleansing", and television pictures of Sarajevo under Serbian artillery bombardment and sniper fire. I remember NATO warplanes over Belgrade and Kosovo. I daresay centuries of sectarian hatred and tribal mistrust played a big part in the killings - more than 100,000 - and the destruction. You would have thought the wise men of Europe would have realised that after the death of a strong leader, in this case Yugoslavia's President Tito, the destructive forces that he had contained were bound to explode at the slightest encouragement. Newly reunited Germany gave it, and boom!

If the freedom fighters on the barricades in Kiev ever do get their way and find themselves embedded in the European Union they will find that they have swapped the devil they know for one they are not familiar with. 

Do Writers Have to Be Shits?

Ever since Lady Caroline Lamb declared that Lord Byron was "mad, bad and dangerous to know", poets have had a lot to live down to.

Either by temperament or vocation they must booze, brawl and fornicate to excess, occasionally spouting verses by heart. They must fall in and out of love, break up homes, not care a damn about money or possessions, be vain, touchy and proud. What they must not do is be ordinary or grandly heroic.

Unacknowledged legislators of the world? I've never cared for Shelley's assertion. I would not care to be a citizen of a country ruled by any of the poets I have met or known. And the best ones I have read had no interest in running anything other than guns, a betting book or a gauntlet of disapproving bourgeois types.

The passionate fondness I had for Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Bukowski had nothing to do with bad or inconsiderate behaviour that I wished to emulate - at least not beyond the age of 30. I have never been a drug addict or a violent drunk. There is a passage from Yeats's poem The Circus Animals' Desertion I once had the facility to quote that sums up my literary passion:-

Players and painted stage took all my love/ And not those things that they were emblems of...

I once asked Alan Bennett if all writers, especially famous ones, were shits. Actually, the epithet I probably used was "bastards" as I was interviewing him for a family newspaper in which bastards were occasionally permitted, but shits never. In fact I've just found the article and this is what was reported:-

"Why do so many writers turn out to be four letter words as human beings?"
"It's not true of Chekhov, who was good in his life. Not true to Kafka either. But to put words on paper is a presumptuous thing to do; you are shouldering people aside to do it. To be a writer at all seems to be a defect because it's an immodest act. I suppose if writers were more or less at one with their work it would be less interesting."

In the afterword of James Andrew Taylor's warts and all biography of the late poet, novelist and broadcaster Vernon Scannell, Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell, there is another quote from Bennett which stems from Philip Larkin's line, They fuck you up, your mum and dad. Bennett says:-

"If your parents do fuck you up and you're going to write, that's fine because then you've got something to write about. But if they don't fuck you up, then you've got nothing to write about, so then they've fucked you up good and proper."

Taylor says Scannell's parents and the "exquisite miseries of his time in the army" gave Scannell an "inexhaustible wellspring of emotional experience on which his poetry could draw." I'll say. Between 1948, when he was 26, and his death in 2007, he had 51 books of poetry and prose to his adopted name (his real one was John Bain) and countless broadcasts and readings.

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s he was a literary star whose appearances at poetry and jazz evenings all over the country sold out venues, including London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. The BBC and various magazines always seemed to be offering him opportunities to broadcast or publish for payment. Lucky four letter word.

Yet there was a side to Scannell's character that I did not know about until this week when I read through Taylor's eye-opening book. In 1992, in a review I wrote of his fourth and final volume of memoirs Drums of Morning I said:-

Behind the mask I sense a man of little or no faith; one who is grateful and sometimes ashamed to have endured.

In one of his last poems Scannell wrote We are betrayed by what is false within, a perceptive line that sums up his own Jekyll and Hyde conflict out of which he made poetry.

I met him at the 1984 Ilkley Literature Festival and over the next six years or so had a periodic acquaintance that included a couple of visits to his small terraced house of Millstone grit in North Street, Otley. He was willing to talk literature with anyone who had a feeling for it and to me at least, for a while, was disposed to be a kindly encourager, though I did not push it. I took an interest in several of his books and reviewed them.

One of them was Argument of Kings, his third volume of memoirs in 1987. In it, apparently for the first time, he admitted to deserting from his regiment in North Africa during the war and being imprisoned in Alexandria, and then doing it again after the Normandy D-Day landings.

He made this public seven or eight years after Mrs Thatcher's Government awarded him a Civil List pension of £700 a year for services to English Literature. Oh what a lucky man he was, you might think.

And yet Vernon Scannell, the man with the refined middle-class, quietly spoken, voice, was a lifelong alcoholic subject to mood swings that turned him from a genial companion into a fist-swinging maniac. In pubs he fought men, at home he punched out women, just as his father had occasionally punched out his young son.  Although he repined his behaviour in his diaries and sometimes in his poems, he didn't make a sustained effort to change it.

I wasn't aware of this when I talked to him because he didn't let on. Neither did I know until I read Taylor's book that he was a bigamist, a jailbird and a serial deserter from situations he didn't like or found onerous. He walked away from his family just like he walked away from the Army, although in the end his various lovers appear to have forgiven him - because he was a poet, a man of letters.

Had he been a humble brickie or a milkman it might have been different. Andrew Taylor's researches allowed him to chroncile the discrepancies between Scannell's version of events in his fiction and autobiography and recorded fact. From a fairly early age Scannell had persuaded himself that imagination was every bit as valid as authentic experience or the memory of it.

"The poet's only allegiance is to the truth, not to a formal dogma, but the truth as he sees and feels it. To speak the truth is style," he wrote.

Speaking the truth in his poetry but living a lie in his life became a sub-text in his stories. He reacted to the insecurity of his self-doubts and shame by getting pissed and lashing out, and later blacking out all memory of it. I don't know if he struggled to reconcile his principled attitude to poetry and the unprincipled opportunism of his life; it gave him something to write about, if nothing else.

Vernon Scannell was the sum of his own contradictions. He hated sentimentality in literature, yet his diaries are full of it; he is forever lamenting his minor literary status or seeking to assure himself of love for his latest flame, even into his sixties. In the way he talked about literature he did his best to embody generosity and largeness of spirt - which is why so many women seem to have fallen for him - yet he could be jealous and petulant about his peers if he felt over-shadowed by their fame or good fortune.

In spite of all the negatives, though, Scannell's life could be seen as the triumph of hope over experience. He had a goal - to be a poet - and, as Alan Bennett put it, shouldered people aside to achieve it. In his own terms he made something of his life. Towards the end, in 2007, propped up in bed at home in North Street, sustained by Schubert and chilled Guinness, he defied cancer to write by hand his last poems.

I once wrote of shouldering people aside because I thought that was probably necessary; but, as the song goes, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. I don't think it's a necessary part of the job description to be a four letter word to write something worthwhile. Especially not in this age.

I Just Don't Have the Energy...Again

Hoping for the Government to do something about the price hikes in the cost of energy is like a man in jail hoping that those who banged him up will do something to get him out.

Bad as those hikes are, worse is yet to come...and is set to keep on coming for many years, as good old Britain borrows more billions to comply with the European Union's carbon capture directives.

Ed Miliband signed up to these in 2008 when, as Gordon Brown's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, he put through Parliament the Climate Change Act. According to Christopher Booker and Richard North, who know their EU from their elbow, this piece of folly commits this country to forking out £18 billion a year for 37 years until 2050 on measures to reduce carbon emissions in the belief that this will prevent polar bears from wandering down the high street in Great Yarmouth.

Gentle skimmer, 37 times £18 billion comes to, er, £666 billion, a devilishly large number of billions for a country more than a trillion quid in debt.

Why hasn't David Cameron challenged the Labour leader to own up to his role in this nightmare in the House of Commons? For there is a direct correlation between the cost of climate change policies and the escalating costs of gas and electricity. The eight major energy suppliers are simply passing on their costs to the consumer to boost profitability.

More to the point, why hasn't any politician made this point? The reason isn't hard to fathom. All the major political parties signed up to the Climate Change Act. Until a few years ago they were vying with one another to be greener than green lest the righteous brothers and sisters of the eco movement, biting their nails over the future of the planet - Prince Charles famously declared humanity had but seven years to do it - won the support of voters.

Happily all that has gone grey about the gills in spite of the best endeavours of the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change and its network of fervant believers in academia and the media. Climate change has been a fact of nature since the world began, millennia before the ancestors of Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg built bonfires to roast a leg of raptor for supper.

In happier times, before the Conservatives thought up the wheeze of flogging off public assets, you could bob along to a properly designated shop and pay your gas or electricity bill. More, you could talk to somebody face to face if you had a problem. Energy prices, like the rates, used to fluctuate. Not any more.

Until such time as Britain has the sense to begin divorce proceedings against the EU and find a way out of the sinking ship, the price of power is going to keep on rising annually. We are being covertly coerced into using less electricity by people whose index-linked incomes paid from the public purse mean they will never have to choose between heating and eating.

Meanwhile, forget about switching power suppliers, they're all part of a cabal playing follow-my-leader. Instead, think of ways of generating your own power. Nikola Tesla, the man who popularised Alternating Current against Edison's more expensive and limited Direct Current, maintained that electricity could be provided free of charge by tapping into the energy generated by nature. Evidently, his idea was not well received.

Hence that devilish sum of £666 billion.

A less charitable spark might conclude that the current media fright about the darkness that awaits when the power runs out is just another media scare - like salmonella, mad cow disease, manmade global warming. If it has an ulterior purpose can it be to make us pay the inflated price hikes coming with a feeling of almost gratitude for having power at all?

I wouldn't be surprised if we were being worked on in this way. It's like boxing: make your opponent worry about your jab, then hit him with an unxpected uppercut.

In the words of T S Eliot...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters.
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury...

So begins East Coker (hah!), the third section of Eliot's Four Quartets. When I was a boy coke was something that only arty people snorted. For everybody else it was an alternative domestic fuel to coal. In those days you could be poor but warm in winter. Now you can be relatively well off and cold, as the statesmen and rulers, chairmen of many committees and distinguished civil servants, burn your money.

The Burqa Way of Life...

If like me you think the wearers of niqabs, hijabs and burqas make the Lone Ranger look modestly under-dressed, you'll be gritting your teeth in irritation as the nation once again goes through yet another bout of soul-searching over Islamic religious/cultural issues.

Islamophobia generated by the boogeymen of the English Defence League had nothing to do with this one. It was the veiled Muslim woman in the London court, on trial for embezzlement, who made it a point of issue by declaring that she would not remove her veil for religious reasons.

Coincidentally young Muslim female students at a Birmingham college set their (veiled) faces against a decree that face coverings would not be allowed on campus. They got the college authorities to take a step back on that by resorting to social media protests and a threatened demonstration.

The prevalence of this mode of dress on the streets of Bradford has antagonised me. I've long suspected it was supposed to do just that. I daresay others have too though they are reluctant to say so publicly for obvious reasons in this increasingly PC country in which police officers are liable to get arsey with anyone who describes a criminal suspect as Asian-looking or Muslim.

The last novel of my friend David Tipton, the publisher and writer who died last November, was called Black Ghosts. I only ever saw a hand-written manuscript first draft. Tipton said the title was inspired by the sight of Muslim women swathed in black burqas in and around the area of inner-city Bradford where he lived.

Tipton, a well-travelled libertarian who seemed to get on well with his immediate Muslim neighbours, objected to the message embodied in the veil and other obsidian habilments: that as a man he was a potential violator of women of the book and must not be tempted by their physical attributes - hair, eyes, lips and all the rest. When we came to Bradford, separately, in the Seventies Muslim women who wanted to look Asian tended to wear colourful saris.

As far as I am aware there is no prescription in Koranic law for women to wear any of the above-mentioned items, merely an injunction to dress modestly and appropriately according to the climate of the country where they live. The passing of the sari for the tent-like burqa has been retrograde.

As it happens I prefer people - not just women - to dress modestly rather than garishly or sluttishly. I'm not talking about the stage costumes of Rock stars, actors or performance artists. The line between personal expressiveness and flagrant exhibitionism is drawn by taste or the lack of it. Inherent human qualities should not be reduced to the external fads of transient fashion.

Some Muslim women in Bradford go about in hijabs, elaborate scarves wound about their hair and neck. These arrangements are curious - the women seem to have big hats or bonnets over their hair. I rather like them.

Historically, of course, my generation and others further back grew up with head-scarves. Little films made in northern cities in the early years of the 20th century show men in caps, ladies in hats and factory girls in shawls and scarves. The latter covered the top of the head and were loosely tied under the chin; or they were tucked up round the top of the head like a pie crust.

In public the tradition has always been for the face to be visible, for we believe the face defines the lineaments of character. Instinctively we distrust those who obscure their face in public with a hood, a mask, a helmet or a scarf. It is a tradition that should be respected rather than eroded.

The top and bottom of the whole business about veils, for me, is that I'm fed up with the attempts by an alien culture since the 1980s to impose its values on this country. So it's okay if they don't speak English or if some of their young men drive without tax and insurance, or if they marry their first cousins and expect society to pick up the social and medical costs of special treatment for the idiocy these marriages frequently breed. Burning Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was okay in 1989, sharia courts are okay too in the twenty-first century.

If I've become intolerant in my old age it's not because Right-wing racists have won my support. I attribute it to the changes this country has gone through demographically especially over the last seven or eight years. Everything changes otherwise it dies, atrophies, I know that; but these changes were imposed from above, by the European Union and by the last Labour Government; they did not come about from generational evolution. So now, often, I feel a stranger in my own country. Worse, I think I am being made to feel like that.

Xenophobia? Perhaps. Prejudice? Yes and no. At the best of times, as my family and friends would testify, I dislike the encroachment of prattling humanity on my little bit of breathing space. I like to listen to sound of my own thoughts - not the incessant jabbering of somebody else on a mobile phone in a bus or a train. I can't walk through central Bradford without some invasive chugger standing in my path ostensibly for the good of a cause.The increasing propensity of public figures to misuse words such as "iconic", "vibrant", "diversity" fratches my fellow feeling. The Old Adam in me flares up and, like the exasperated television journalist played by Peter Finch in the film Network, the desire to shout "I'm not going to take this any more!" swells my soul like a sail.