WHAT do you call James Bond in the bath? Bubble-O-Seven.
I was probably about seven myself when I first laughed at that one. But I reckon it’s good to start early to appreciate the funny side – the sheer inane hilariousness – of spies and the world of secret intelligence. Or perhaps that should be “intelligence”.
I got a good chuckle almost immediately on opening up the website of SIS – the Secret Intelligence Service, formerly known as MI6. What did it was the line: “With the exception of Sir John Sawers and Prof Keith Jeffery, all people featured on this website are actors.”
Bet RADA’s cast-offs are scrabbling for those jobs. Pretend to be a spy for a day or two while we train our (no doubt secret) cameras on you. But why bother paying actors? I’m sure they’ve got all of us on camera anyway.
Who are these people who take themselves so seriously and who can’t be identified? Well, obviously, I don’t know. But there’s a page on the website helpfully headed Who We Are, so that should help.
But it doesn’t really. Apart from an artfully angled photo of a bit of a building, which should at least help to identify where they are, there’s not much clue there to anyone’s identity.
It does, in typically po-faced manner, state: “The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was established in 1909 as the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau. The Foreign Section’s responsibility for overseas intelligence collection has been retained ever since by SIS under a variety of names and acronyms. The Foreign Section’s responsibility was placed on a statutory basis in the Intelligence Services Act 1994.” And so on.
There’s a mildly amusing tale to be uncovered under those names and acronyms.
About the time Sexton Blake was mutating from a Sherlock Holmes clone into a prototype Bond, in 1909, the Secret Service Bureau was established by the Committee of Imperial Defence. The bureau was soon abbreviated to Secret Service, SS bureau, or even just plain SS.
Which would obviously have had an unfortunate resonance later, had it not in the meantime already mutated into the rather unglamorous-sounding MI1(c) under the leadership of a naval officer called Mansfield Cumming – who obviously, being a Navy type, didn’t like “appearing under the auspices of the War Office”.
Well, who would, eh? But it is at this point in the official story that I begin to wonder whether those chaps at the MI6 (sorry, SIS) website don’t have a bit of a sense of humour after all.
Official Whitehall designations after this include Foreign Intelligence Service, Special Intelligence Service, and the charmingly enigmatic, oddly personalised, “C’s organisation”.
All of which conveys beautifully the gentleman’s club, boys-in-the-dorm, role-playing, jolly-good-game spirit of the whole thing. The distinction becomes a little blurred, in fact, between the passing around of Sexton Blake comics in the dorm and the passing of files stamped “Top Secret” across smoky tables.
“C”, of course, was Cumming, a man probably with no discernible sense of humour – certainly about himself. A man whose pompous single initial is still used, hilariously, by the present incumbent of the role, the non-secret Sawers, or The Chief, “the only serving member of the Service who is officially named in public”.
All the other roles, when not taken by actors, are played by people who live their lives pretending to be other people. A bit like actors, in fact.
People whose real lives are probably somewhat less exciting than those of George Smiley, Richard Hannay, Bond, or any of their countless other fictional versions, but who no doubt enjoy the element of subterfuge all the same.
The job ads stress it: “Where else could you watch history in the making and pretend you had a boring day at the office?”
Job ads? For C’s organisation? My, how times have changed.
In my day, one went to the right school, the right college, and waited for the discreet tap on the wrist, the quiet invitation to sherry.
I was always a little disappointed not to get the tap. Unless I got it and didn’t notice. Or unless I’m double-bluffing now, which of course you wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t admit.
Now you just go to sis.gov.uk/careers and click “Who we’re looking for”. (The disappointingly banal answer is “people with a host of different skills, backgrounds and experiences” – though that does include “operational officers” as well as administrators, IT technicians, drivers and telephonists. It sounds like any other job ad when you drill down to the detail.)
They must, as ever, be looking for people who can use terms like “the national interest” with no sense of irony or amusement. And who enjoy keeping secrets, even from best friends and closest family.
No doubt the time I’ve spent on the website researching this column has been duly logged. The very act of writing it, though, has clearly ruled me out of a job with the organisation – even if I weren’t already disqualified for several other reasons.
I couldn’t help it, though. The sheer fact of SIS having a public website, and taking out ads in the press to promote it, both tickled my funnybone and piqued my interest.
Especially at a time when, as they admit, “there are fewer vacancies than usual on the site due to public sector cutbacks”.
Even the spooks are in hard times, it seems.
Monday, 20 February 2012
Thursday, 2 February 2012
It's not just your genes, but how you wear them
IT’S one of the oldest, and most intractable, debates going: nature v nurture. Are you the way you are because of your genes, or the way you were brought up?
Pop science of the downmarket, fancy-that variety seems obsessed these days with the nature side of the argument. It is, I suppose, a step on from the idea that your character is formed by the star sign you were born under. But only just.
Talk of a “crime gene”, a “gayness gene”, a “warrior gene”, is so simplistic as to be not just misleading but – to all intents and purposes – wrong.
Crime, for example, cannot be innate because the very concept of “crime” can only apply within a developed society. It can only have arisen after societies did. Which, in evolutionary terms, may not be that many ages ago.
A gene for liking high heels? Oh, do me a favour. It’s hard to imagine greater poppycock. Yet I read a supposedly serious discussion of it in one of our popular prints.
It may seem like harmless rubbish, but there’s a dangerous agenda lurking just below the surface.
“It’s in my genes” could be the most arrant excuse for evading responsibility for one’s own actions.
Conversely, “it’s in their genes” could be a vicious way of branding a whole section of society – a racial group, say – with some supposed defect.
That, in fact, is precisely the gobbet of pseudo-science the Nazis used to justify the mass murder of Romanies, Jews and the mentally ill. Which is about as far from harmless as it’s possible to be.
Sure, we’re the product of our genes. They make us the colours, heights and shapes we are; they make us more or less intelligent; they influence our character. But (I really want to shout this bit in big loud capital letters) only in reaction with our environment. Which includes the people around us – our society at large as well as our families.
People in relatively rich countries, such as ours, are not only fatter than they used to be, they’re taller too. It’s not our genes that have changed, but our diet.
Americans aren’t more religious than us, less keen on public health provision, or more inclined to carry guns because of their genes. It’s cultural.
And here’s a fascinating thing I didn’t know. The Japanese have blue apples.
It’s not their fruit that’s different – or their eyes. It’s just that the same Japanese word covers both green and blue. They literally can’t “tell” the difference.
Which sounds odd until you realise that English only got the word “orange” in the 16th century. Until then, carrots were yellow. It’s not the carrots, our eyes or our genes that have changed. Just the language.
I got that fascinating fact (about Japanese apples) from a new book by a New York professor, Jesse J Prinz – Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives.
It ought to be required reading for every Daily Mail reader – except that their upbringing and culture may not have prepared them for it.
The partially sighted leading the blind
THE internet is a wonderful research tool. It’s been readily available for less than half my career as a journalist yet I can’t really remember how we used to manage without it.
Of course one has to remember the usual warnings. That Wikipedia, brilliant as it is, is not totally reliable. That it’s always worth cross-checking, and looking up its sources. Not to mention applying that too-often-forgotten tool, your brain.
It’s worth bearing in mind that online, just like in the real world, there’s usually someone trying to sell you something.
Then there’s the net’s prodigious capacity to distract, to lead you off at tangents.
All human life (and much else) may be there, but I’d like to see the Google or Bing that can find a literal needle in a real haystack. And I’d like to find the grim nugget of history that I set out in search of just a few paragraphs ago.
In 1209 Simon de Montfort (father of the man often credited with calling the first English parliament) did a nasty thing in southern France. After capturing one Cathar castle, he had the eyes of 100 men gouged out. He left one man with one eye to lead them to the next, stronger, castle as a gory warning to its defenders.
This I remember (and have checked). What I can’t recall is which Roman, Greek, or other earlier macho-man is said to have done the same thing – and presumably gave Simon the idea.
I’ve looked. Indeed, I’ve wasted some time looking. But all I’ve come up with is some stuff about classical beggars, some arcane details of the Catholic mass (?), a page about a Danish jazz-player (!) – and lots of people trying to sell me Roman blinds. Whatever they are.
Oh, and also, I suppose, this little disquisition, which has ended up having nothing to do with the subject I sat down to write about (see main piece above). Well, almost nothing.
Pop science of the downmarket, fancy-that variety seems obsessed these days with the nature side of the argument. It is, I suppose, a step on from the idea that your character is formed by the star sign you were born under. But only just.
Talk of a “crime gene”, a “gayness gene”, a “warrior gene”, is so simplistic as to be not just misleading but – to all intents and purposes – wrong.
Crime, for example, cannot be innate because the very concept of “crime” can only apply within a developed society. It can only have arisen after societies did. Which, in evolutionary terms, may not be that many ages ago.
A gene for liking high heels? Oh, do me a favour. It’s hard to imagine greater poppycock. Yet I read a supposedly serious discussion of it in one of our popular prints.
It may seem like harmless rubbish, but there’s a dangerous agenda lurking just below the surface.
“It’s in my genes” could be the most arrant excuse for evading responsibility for one’s own actions.
Conversely, “it’s in their genes” could be a vicious way of branding a whole section of society – a racial group, say – with some supposed defect.
That, in fact, is precisely the gobbet of pseudo-science the Nazis used to justify the mass murder of Romanies, Jews and the mentally ill. Which is about as far from harmless as it’s possible to be.
Sure, we’re the product of our genes. They make us the colours, heights and shapes we are; they make us more or less intelligent; they influence our character. But (I really want to shout this bit in big loud capital letters) only in reaction with our environment. Which includes the people around us – our society at large as well as our families.
People in relatively rich countries, such as ours, are not only fatter than they used to be, they’re taller too. It’s not our genes that have changed, but our diet.
Americans aren’t more religious than us, less keen on public health provision, or more inclined to carry guns because of their genes. It’s cultural.
And here’s a fascinating thing I didn’t know. The Japanese have blue apples.
It’s not their fruit that’s different – or their eyes. It’s just that the same Japanese word covers both green and blue. They literally can’t “tell” the difference.
Which sounds odd until you realise that English only got the word “orange” in the 16th century. Until then, carrots were yellow. It’s not the carrots, our eyes or our genes that have changed. Just the language.
I got that fascinating fact (about Japanese apples) from a new book by a New York professor, Jesse J Prinz – Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives.
It ought to be required reading for every Daily Mail reader – except that their upbringing and culture may not have prepared them for it.
The partially sighted leading the blind
THE internet is a wonderful research tool. It’s been readily available for less than half my career as a journalist yet I can’t really remember how we used to manage without it.
Of course one has to remember the usual warnings. That Wikipedia, brilliant as it is, is not totally reliable. That it’s always worth cross-checking, and looking up its sources. Not to mention applying that too-often-forgotten tool, your brain.
It’s worth bearing in mind that online, just like in the real world, there’s usually someone trying to sell you something.
Then there’s the net’s prodigious capacity to distract, to lead you off at tangents.
All human life (and much else) may be there, but I’d like to see the Google or Bing that can find a literal needle in a real haystack. And I’d like to find the grim nugget of history that I set out in search of just a few paragraphs ago.
In 1209 Simon de Montfort (father of the man often credited with calling the first English parliament) did a nasty thing in southern France. After capturing one Cathar castle, he had the eyes of 100 men gouged out. He left one man with one eye to lead them to the next, stronger, castle as a gory warning to its defenders.
This I remember (and have checked). What I can’t recall is which Roman, Greek, or other earlier macho-man is said to have done the same thing – and presumably gave Simon the idea.
I’ve looked. Indeed, I’ve wasted some time looking. But all I’ve come up with is some stuff about classical beggars, some arcane details of the Catholic mass (?), a page about a Danish jazz-player (!) – and lots of people trying to sell me Roman blinds. Whatever they are.
Oh, and also, I suppose, this little disquisition, which has ended up having nothing to do with the subject I sat down to write about (see main piece above). Well, almost nothing.
Monday, 16 January 2012
I'm only writing this to keep in trim...
WHEN do you reach your mental peak? And, more vitally, when do you start to slide off it?
It was thought that memory, and the ability to think, began to decline in healthy people at about the age of 60. Now a study published in the British Medical Journal suggests those powers start to deteriorate at 45.
So am I really less smart than I was a decade ago?
I don’t think so – but maybe that’s just my memory playing tricks on me.
A closer look at that study provides some reassurance.
It was based on observation of 7,000 people over a 10-year period, which sounds like quite an impressive sample and a serious, committed approach. But there’s a ‘but’. Quite a big one.
Those 7,000 people were civil servants in Whitehall. Every last one of them.
So in fact the survey doesn’t show that “people” start to lose mental ability at 45. Only that Whitehall civil servants do.
And that may say more about the boredom of bureaucracy and the nature of the Whitehall hierarchy than it does about the human brain.
Stop working out and your muscles will soon start to weaken. Keep exercising and they’ll stay in shape. If you’ve never done enough exercise at all, your muscles will always have been flabby and they’ll stay that way.
The same goes for the brain. Use it or lose it.
It’s not how old you are, but what you do that counts. Your little grey cells need exercise too.
----
IT may seem perverse, at a time when everything from libraries to lollipop ladies, nurses and the police, are facing savage cuts, to commit £32billion to a new railway. But this is one rare time when I think the government has got it right. Probably.
There are, inevitably, people along the route of the proposed new high-speed London-to-Birmingham line who will be upset. Several of them Tory MPs. Which is certainly no reason to oppose it.
The Queen’s alleged fear that the passing trains might startle her horses at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire is either a red herring or a most amusing piece of nimbyism. (And that from someone whose “back yard” is rather bigger than yours, mine, or indeed anyone else’s.)
I have more sympathy with Europe minister David Liddington’s plea for “a less environmentally destructive and less costly way” of upgrading rail links between England’s first and second cities.
The current proposal is less damaging to the landscape than a new motorway, for example, would be. And rail travel is certainly far more environmentally friendly – in real, rather than cash, terms far cheaper – than road transport.
But there must be some question whether laying down a whole new line is actually a better option than improving the existing rail network to the proposed standard.
The devil in that comparison must be in the detail, including the disruption to traffic if the upgrade option were to be chosen. And those kind of details are precisely what we don’t know yet and therefore can’t judge.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England rightly favours rail over road. But its head of planning, Fiona Howie, warns: “If HS2 is taken forward it must be designed and routed carefully to minimise its impact on our countryside.”
Which might sound obvious but is none the less true for that. Again, devil in the detail.
The claim by supporters of the plan that it will create a million jobs outside London and erode the north-south divide must be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
A slight suspicion lurks that David Cameron – who is alleged to have said (‘privately’), “we have to build it” – likes the idea of the high-speed line as a solid, lasting, personal legacy. Even though the so-called HS2 was first proposed by Labour when it was in power.
Rather as Boris Johnson has assumed the glory of the Olympics even though it was proposed, and “won” for London, while Tony Blair was in No.10 and Ken Livingstone in the mayor’s office.
HS2 is at least likely to leave a longer, and more useful, legacy than the Olympics.
And there is at least a chance that Ken will be back in office in time to enjoy this summer’s party.
So, who said this?
“Our people are depressed. They want something important, something dramatic, which would encourage them to look about and see in what way they can get the trade of the country going again.”
It wasn’t anyone talking about either the HS2 or London 2012.
It was Lord Ashfield, chairman of the Underground, recommending to Parliament in October 1921 the £6million job-creation scheme that would become the Northern line.
We could do with more of that kind of thinking now.
More capital projects like the HS2 and fewer cuts elsewhere.
It was thought that memory, and the ability to think, began to decline in healthy people at about the age of 60. Now a study published in the British Medical Journal suggests those powers start to deteriorate at 45.
So am I really less smart than I was a decade ago?
I don’t think so – but maybe that’s just my memory playing tricks on me.
A closer look at that study provides some reassurance.
It was based on observation of 7,000 people over a 10-year period, which sounds like quite an impressive sample and a serious, committed approach. But there’s a ‘but’. Quite a big one.
Those 7,000 people were civil servants in Whitehall. Every last one of them.
So in fact the survey doesn’t show that “people” start to lose mental ability at 45. Only that Whitehall civil servants do.
And that may say more about the boredom of bureaucracy and the nature of the Whitehall hierarchy than it does about the human brain.
Stop working out and your muscles will soon start to weaken. Keep exercising and they’ll stay in shape. If you’ve never done enough exercise at all, your muscles will always have been flabby and they’ll stay that way.
The same goes for the brain. Use it or lose it.
It’s not how old you are, but what you do that counts. Your little grey cells need exercise too.
----
IT may seem perverse, at a time when everything from libraries to lollipop ladies, nurses and the police, are facing savage cuts, to commit £32billion to a new railway. But this is one rare time when I think the government has got it right. Probably.
There are, inevitably, people along the route of the proposed new high-speed London-to-Birmingham line who will be upset. Several of them Tory MPs. Which is certainly no reason to oppose it.
The Queen’s alleged fear that the passing trains might startle her horses at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire is either a red herring or a most amusing piece of nimbyism. (And that from someone whose “back yard” is rather bigger than yours, mine, or indeed anyone else’s.)
I have more sympathy with Europe minister David Liddington’s plea for “a less environmentally destructive and less costly way” of upgrading rail links between England’s first and second cities.
The current proposal is less damaging to the landscape than a new motorway, for example, would be. And rail travel is certainly far more environmentally friendly – in real, rather than cash, terms far cheaper – than road transport.
But there must be some question whether laying down a whole new line is actually a better option than improving the existing rail network to the proposed standard.
The devil in that comparison must be in the detail, including the disruption to traffic if the upgrade option were to be chosen. And those kind of details are precisely what we don’t know yet and therefore can’t judge.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England rightly favours rail over road. But its head of planning, Fiona Howie, warns: “If HS2 is taken forward it must be designed and routed carefully to minimise its impact on our countryside.”
Which might sound obvious but is none the less true for that. Again, devil in the detail.
The claim by supporters of the plan that it will create a million jobs outside London and erode the north-south divide must be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
A slight suspicion lurks that David Cameron – who is alleged to have said (‘privately’), “we have to build it” – likes the idea of the high-speed line as a solid, lasting, personal legacy. Even though the so-called HS2 was first proposed by Labour when it was in power.
Rather as Boris Johnson has assumed the glory of the Olympics even though it was proposed, and “won” for London, while Tony Blair was in No.10 and Ken Livingstone in the mayor’s office.
HS2 is at least likely to leave a longer, and more useful, legacy than the Olympics.
And there is at least a chance that Ken will be back in office in time to enjoy this summer’s party.
So, who said this?
“Our people are depressed. They want something important, something dramatic, which would encourage them to look about and see in what way they can get the trade of the country going again.”
It wasn’t anyone talking about either the HS2 or London 2012.
It was Lord Ashfield, chairman of the Underground, recommending to Parliament in October 1921 the £6million job-creation scheme that would become the Northern line.
We could do with more of that kind of thinking now.
More capital projects like the HS2 and fewer cuts elsewhere.
Friday, 30 December 2011
Quiz of the year - will it all get worse from here?
NEW Year’s Eve 2010, you sit down to a pub quiz. Among the questions are these:
1 What major industrial plant is located on the Japanese coast at Fukushima?
2 Of what country is Benghazi the second largest city?
3 In which capital city is Tahrir Square?
Be honest, now – would you have answered any of those questions confidently, or correctly, a year ago? And are they all fairly easy now?
Together they hint at what a remarkable, transformative year 2011 has been.
And that’s without mentioning the sudden closure of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspaper, or the enthralling (and on-going) public inquiry it led to.
Or the sudden changes of government in Greece and Italy and the threat (also on-going) of European economic meltdown.
The even more startling regime changes in Tunisia and Libya (Egypt was hinted at in question three). Or the protests, rioting and governmental shifts in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco and Syria.
The astonishing, widely under-reported, number of people who took part in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York. Or the long-running, peaceful spin-off protests in other cities, including London.
From Washington to Moscow, Cairo to the Cape, 2011 has been the year of the protester.
Democracy, so much better at absorbing protest without really changing, has in one way shown itself superior to autocracy.
Even without elections, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and George Papandreou in Greece were ousted without having to be hunted down, dragged from a drain and beaten to death.
In that way, Muammar Gaddafi became as iconic in the bloody manner of his death as he was grimly comic in the manner of his 42-year misrule of Libya.
Whether democracy’s greater flexibility will ultimately prove more durable, or less grim, remains an open question. One to be answered only by the history of the future.
As does the question whether 2011 will be looked back on as one freakish year of upheavals – or just the beginning of a deluge of greater upheavals to come.
VITAL QUESTIONS FROM THE FREEZER
THE television highlight of 2011 was undoubtedly the BBC’s brilliantly filmed Frozen Planet series.
That a series set purely in the apparent wastelands of the Arctic and Antarctic should be so beautiful, so gripping, and so much talked-about was a wonder in itself.
The contrived ‘controversy’ over the filming of new-born polar bears in captivity was a red herring.
Series producer Vanessa Berlowitz dismissed it summarily, and quite rightly, on Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour last Friday. To try to shoot the scene in the wild would have been life-threatening – not just to the crew but, even more crucially, to the bears themselves.
Far more importantly, travel writer Sara Wheeler was asked in the same programme about the melting ice-caps: “When you’re there, how much does it worry you?”
Her measured reply concluded: “I don’t know what the right-wing agenda is, to pretend that global warming isn’t going to cause serious problems for all of us.
“Because the scientists who are there, bringing the data back, don’t know the answers, but they know that something bad is going to happen.
“And they also know that it’s not the earth that’s going to suffer.
“The planet will be OK, it will restore itself, as it always has. It’s us that are at risk.”
Indeed so. But I think I can offer Ms Wheeler some insight into that right-wing agenda.
It’s not just that they’re in what psychologists call a state of denial – though millions of people seem to be. It’s also partly the typical right-winger’s blinkered selfishness.
The 19th-century pit-owner didn’t want to know too much about the grinding poverty of the workers whose toil kept him in luxury.
The man in the 21st-century street doesn’t want to know too much about how his comfort depends on the desperation of generations not yet born.
At the end of 2011 his quietly nagging fear must be that the reaping of the whirlwind may not be so far off after all...
2011: the environmental harvest
1 What major industrial plant is located on the Japanese coast at Fukushima?
2 Of what country is Benghazi the second largest city?
3 In which capital city is Tahrir Square?
Be honest, now – would you have answered any of those questions confidently, or correctly, a year ago? And are they all fairly easy now?
Together they hint at what a remarkable, transformative year 2011 has been.
And that’s without mentioning the sudden closure of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspaper, or the enthralling (and on-going) public inquiry it led to.
Or the sudden changes of government in Greece and Italy and the threat (also on-going) of European economic meltdown.
The even more startling regime changes in Tunisia and Libya (Egypt was hinted at in question three). Or the protests, rioting and governmental shifts in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco and Syria.
The astonishing, widely under-reported, number of people who took part in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York. Or the long-running, peaceful spin-off protests in other cities, including London.
From Washington to Moscow, Cairo to the Cape, 2011 has been the year of the protester.
Democracy, so much better at absorbing protest without really changing, has in one way shown itself superior to autocracy.
Even without elections, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and George Papandreou in Greece were ousted without having to be hunted down, dragged from a drain and beaten to death.
In that way, Muammar Gaddafi became as iconic in the bloody manner of his death as he was grimly comic in the manner of his 42-year misrule of Libya.
Whether democracy’s greater flexibility will ultimately prove more durable, or less grim, remains an open question. One to be answered only by the history of the future.
As does the question whether 2011 will be looked back on as one freakish year of upheavals – or just the beginning of a deluge of greater upheavals to come.
VITAL QUESTIONS FROM THE FREEZER
THE television highlight of 2011 was undoubtedly the BBC’s brilliantly filmed Frozen Planet series.
That a series set purely in the apparent wastelands of the Arctic and Antarctic should be so beautiful, so gripping, and so much talked-about was a wonder in itself.
The contrived ‘controversy’ over the filming of new-born polar bears in captivity was a red herring.
Series producer Vanessa Berlowitz dismissed it summarily, and quite rightly, on Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour last Friday. To try to shoot the scene in the wild would have been life-threatening – not just to the crew but, even more crucially, to the bears themselves.
Far more importantly, travel writer Sara Wheeler was asked in the same programme about the melting ice-caps: “When you’re there, how much does it worry you?”
Her measured reply concluded: “I don’t know what the right-wing agenda is, to pretend that global warming isn’t going to cause serious problems for all of us.
“Because the scientists who are there, bringing the data back, don’t know the answers, but they know that something bad is going to happen.
“And they also know that it’s not the earth that’s going to suffer.
“The planet will be OK, it will restore itself, as it always has. It’s us that are at risk.”
Indeed so. But I think I can offer Ms Wheeler some insight into that right-wing agenda.
It’s not just that they’re in what psychologists call a state of denial – though millions of people seem to be. It’s also partly the typical right-winger’s blinkered selfishness.
The 19th-century pit-owner didn’t want to know too much about the grinding poverty of the workers whose toil kept him in luxury.
The man in the 21st-century street doesn’t want to know too much about how his comfort depends on the desperation of generations not yet born.
At the end of 2011 his quietly nagging fear must be that the reaping of the whirlwind may not be so far off after all...
2011: the environmental harvest
- In the year the world’s population topped seven billion, greenhouse gases rose to record levels, the melting of the Arctic ice almost topped the 2007 record, there were record extremes of both heat and cold in the US, droughts and heatwaves in Europe and Africa and record numbers of weather-related natural disasters.
- 2011 began with floods in Australia which covered an area the size of France and Germany combined, and ended with a tropical storm that killed 1,000 people and made 300,000 homeless in the Philippines.
- Thailand had its worst floods in 50 years, while both China and the Horn of Africa suffered their worst droughts in 60.
- In one seven-week spell early in the year, Argentina, Chile, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Tonga, Burma, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Sulawesi, Fiji and New Zealand were all hit by major earthquakes.
- And that was before the quake off Japan on March 11 that unleashed a tsunami which killed 15,500 people, caused the meltdowns of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima and led to 160,000 people fleeing the area or being moved away.
- The big wave is now reckoned to have cost around £134billion in lost production and physical damage. Decommissioning the station is expected to cost a further £10bn.
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Have we lost the true meaning of Saturnalia?
THE music was divine, the children’s voices heavenly, the acoustics in the old church near perfect. The deep baritone in one of the rear pews was pitched not to the treble of the choir but the lower notes of the accompanying organ.
For the first “Oh come let us adore him”, the baritone fell silent. At the second he joined in gently. At the third he came in on full boom, contributing his part to a joyous wall of sound that filled the church.
Never mind the Christian setting, the Christian message of the lyric, this was one atheist who was thoroughly enjoying the singalong. I know, because that man was me.
And I know I was not unwelcome in joining in, either. The vicar, Canon Kevan McCormack, made it quite plain in his excellent speech at the close of the school concert that all were welcome, of whatever religion or none.
That tolerance, and caring for others, were the important features we all shared and should encourage.
A message and an attitude which – of course – is not confined to the Church of England, but which nevertheless seems to sum up that church at its best.
One of my friends made a nice seasonal joke the other day. Maybe, on reflection, it wasn’t really a joke at all. It was more a statement of attitude, again one I rather share.
It went like this: “I’m sick and tired of all these Christians who have forgotten the true meaning of Saturnalia.”
Quite. Celebrating the birth of a new year, a new season, at the very dead of winter, is a splendid tradition that goes back a lot further than the birth of Christ.
New religions have always thrived best when they have adopted, and subtly altered, the rites, rituals and holy places of the older religions they have displaced.
Christianity has always been masterful at this, which probably accounts for its very survival in early centuries, as well as its widespread success from medieval times on.
A tradition of drinking, carousing and eating well with gathered family and friends around the winter solstice was well established in Rome – and no doubt a great many other places – long before Christianity was around to lay claim to it.
We know from their often astonishingly precise alignments that stone-age monuments such as stone circles and burial chambers were built by people who placed great importance in the winter solstice.
Father Christmas may have got his red coat from a Coca-Cola promotion (he used to be in green) and be more associated now with consumerism than Christ. But if you’re looking for “true meaning”, his origins appear to lie in the High German, Old English or Anglo-Saxon god Woden. So perhaps we should celebrate him every Wednesday.
Isn’t there something decidedly pagan in the Yule log, the ceremonial tree and the wreath?
And, come to think of it, don’t some of those old carols we all enjoy singing so much have more than a touch of the older religion about them? The greenwood and the fertility rite. The Holly and the Ivy.
So yes, as Canon McCormack puts it, we can all enjoy the lovely church buildings, the lovely music, the singing and togetherness.
And yes, we can – and should – all remember those less blessed than ourselves, be it through famine, war, pestilence or poverty.
And, as the great Dave Allen used to say, may your god go with you. At this time as at all times. Whichever god that may be. If you happen to have one.
Happy Hanukkah.
****
MY first reaction to news of the death of North Korea’s Great Leader Kim Jong-il was: “How could they tell?”
I wish this was original but it was in fact how Dorothy Parker, wit among wits, greeted the demise of former US President Calvin Coolidge in 1933.
My second reaction was to wonder what change – if any – it will bring about in that most benighted, most cut-off of countries.
By all accounts, change isn’t something they’ve had much of in North Korea since it was severed from the South (where change has been extreme and rapid) in the 1940s. Apart from the change between years of desperate famine and those of relative plenty.
Were those pictures of anguished wailing really typical of North Koreans’ reaction to the demise of their dictator?
Were they carefully selected for their propaganda value? Or do they reveal just how thoroughly people will accept and believe what they are told to believe?
Is it true that the North Koreans were shown film of their team celebrating the one goal they scored at South Africa 2010 – actually in a 2-1 defeat by Brazil – and told they had won the World Cup? Or is that just what WE were told?
How many impossible things can a people be made to believe before breakfast?
Including us?
For the first “Oh come let us adore him”, the baritone fell silent. At the second he joined in gently. At the third he came in on full boom, contributing his part to a joyous wall of sound that filled the church.
Never mind the Christian setting, the Christian message of the lyric, this was one atheist who was thoroughly enjoying the singalong. I know, because that man was me.
And I know I was not unwelcome in joining in, either. The vicar, Canon Kevan McCormack, made it quite plain in his excellent speech at the close of the school concert that all were welcome, of whatever religion or none.
That tolerance, and caring for others, were the important features we all shared and should encourage.
A message and an attitude which – of course – is not confined to the Church of England, but which nevertheless seems to sum up that church at its best.
One of my friends made a nice seasonal joke the other day. Maybe, on reflection, it wasn’t really a joke at all. It was more a statement of attitude, again one I rather share.
It went like this: “I’m sick and tired of all these Christians who have forgotten the true meaning of Saturnalia.”
Quite. Celebrating the birth of a new year, a new season, at the very dead of winter, is a splendid tradition that goes back a lot further than the birth of Christ.
New religions have always thrived best when they have adopted, and subtly altered, the rites, rituals and holy places of the older religions they have displaced.
Christianity has always been masterful at this, which probably accounts for its very survival in early centuries, as well as its widespread success from medieval times on.
A tradition of drinking, carousing and eating well with gathered family and friends around the winter solstice was well established in Rome – and no doubt a great many other places – long before Christianity was around to lay claim to it.
We know from their often astonishingly precise alignments that stone-age monuments such as stone circles and burial chambers were built by people who placed great importance in the winter solstice.
Father Christmas may have got his red coat from a Coca-Cola promotion (he used to be in green) and be more associated now with consumerism than Christ. But if you’re looking for “true meaning”, his origins appear to lie in the High German, Old English or Anglo-Saxon god Woden. So perhaps we should celebrate him every Wednesday.
Isn’t there something decidedly pagan in the Yule log, the ceremonial tree and the wreath?
And, come to think of it, don’t some of those old carols we all enjoy singing so much have more than a touch of the older religion about them? The greenwood and the fertility rite. The Holly and the Ivy.
So yes, as Canon McCormack puts it, we can all enjoy the lovely church buildings, the lovely music, the singing and togetherness.
And yes, we can – and should – all remember those less blessed than ourselves, be it through famine, war, pestilence or poverty.
And, as the great Dave Allen used to say, may your god go with you. At this time as at all times. Whichever god that may be. If you happen to have one.
Happy Hanukkah.
****
MY first reaction to news of the death of North Korea’s Great Leader Kim Jong-il was: “How could they tell?”
I wish this was original but it was in fact how Dorothy Parker, wit among wits, greeted the demise of former US President Calvin Coolidge in 1933.
My second reaction was to wonder what change – if any – it will bring about in that most benighted, most cut-off of countries.
By all accounts, change isn’t something they’ve had much of in North Korea since it was severed from the South (where change has been extreme and rapid) in the 1940s. Apart from the change between years of desperate famine and those of relative plenty.
Were those pictures of anguished wailing really typical of North Koreans’ reaction to the demise of their dictator?
Were they carefully selected for their propaganda value? Or do they reveal just how thoroughly people will accept and believe what they are told to believe?
Is it true that the North Koreans were shown film of their team celebrating the one goal they scored at South Africa 2010 – actually in a 2-1 defeat by Brazil – and told they had won the World Cup? Or is that just what WE were told?
How many impossible things can a people be made to believe before breakfast?
Including us?
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Taking the long nuclear view
MY Aunt Lorna turned 96 this week.
I’m not in the habit of marking family birthdays – even within the family, never mind in print – but this one seems worth mentioning.
Not just because there aren’t many people left who were born before the Battle of the Somme, but because Lorna Arnold remains a passionate, powerful intellect. A woman of unsurpassed knowledge in her field who is still well worth listening to.
Not least here in Suffolk, where the Sizewell power stations generate as much controversy as electricity.
You may have seen Lorna on television. She turns up quite frequently in documentaries about the Cold War, the nuclear industry or the atom-bomb. She featured in last year’s fascinating BBC4 series The Secret Life of the National Grid.
You are perhaps more likely to have seen her, fleetingly, last March when The One Show discussed the catastrophe at Fukushima.
It’s fair to say that after leading a long, fairly secret life of her own, Dr Lorna Arnold OBE has become in her 80s and 90s a talking head, one of TV’s go-to experts.
After early experience in the War Office – she was the first British woman to enter Berlin with the Allied Control Commission after the German surrender in 1945 – and the Diplomatic Corps in Washington, in 1959 she joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority. She was appointed to the authority’s historical department in 1967 and went on to become the official historian of British atomic power.
She has written books on British atomic policy, on nuclear testing in Australia, on the H-Bomb and on the 1957 Windscale fire. Recently she has been engaged in writing her memoirs.
It’s doubtful whether anyone knows more about the history of the nuclear industry, and its production of both power and weapons.
And like many of the scientists she has worked alongside over more than 50 years, she has changed her views as her knowledge has increased. And those views deserve and demand respect.
More than respect, indeed. Her experience is valuable – vital – never more important than now, with the whole future of energy production once again in the melting-pot.
And with enough nuclear weaponry still out there to make the world uninhabitable for a long time to come if anyone should start throwing it around.
Here, from a short series of new films made by Oxford production company TalkWorks, are a few of the things she has to say:
ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS
“I think nuclear weapons are a somewhat overlooked danger today.
“We went through a period of great public anxiety, almost panic, about the dangers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War but … you can’t maintain that level of anxiety and fear.
“You get used to it, it just becomes part of everyday life. I’m very much afraid that is when things become dangerous.
“It also becomes dangerous when you have decision-makers who are not experienced, who don’t understand what they are dealing with.
“I felt much safer when we had ministers like Heath and Healey in the government because they knew about war from first-hand experience and behaved accordingly. But [today’s politicians] do not know what they are dealing with, and that is a very dangerous situation.”
ON NUCLEAR ENERGY
“At the time I joined the UKAEA, civil nuclear power seemed to be a great new future for mankind, a wonderful source of clean, efficient power which would be – as Churchill said – a perennial fountain of world prosperity.
“It was an exciting and most hopeful time. An enormous amount of skill, hard work, enthusiasm and money contributed to this great project.
“Unfortunately, as time has gone on it has been shown that though nuclear energy has been in many ways efficient and has provided up to 25 per cent of Britain’s electricity, it has been a very expensive method of generation.
“It has a great many unforeseen problems and dangers.
“The problems of nuclear waste are still not solved.
“Nuclear accidents, though rare, if they occur can be devastating.
“The rich sources of the raw material, uranium, are pretty well worked out. It is becoming a scarce and very expensive resource because of the difficulty of mining and refining it.
“It is quite possible that if many countries wanted to develop nuclear programmes, there is only about enough economic uranium in the world to fuel one more generation of power stations.
“So there is not much future, as far as I can see, in civil nuclear power.
“One sad effect of the concentration on civil nuclear power has been the neglect of research and development in renewables.
“I think on the whole civil nuclear power was a very interesting, very valuable but very limited option.
“I think it is drawing to its end and something new has got to be found in its place.”
Friday, 2 December 2011
The public versus the privatisers
NIGEL Lawson, the man who towered over the British economy in the 1980s, is a shadow of his former self. He has become small and wizened, a walnut where he used to be a pumpkin. Still talks rot, though.
As George Osborne prepared to stand and deliver his autumn statement, BBC News propped up Lawson outside Parliament to give his view.
Which boiled down to supporting the chancellor in his squeeze on working people because it was “needed” to keep interest rates low. As if low interest rates were somehow more important than people’s lives and futures.
As chancellor himself from 1983 to 1989, Lawson presided over much higher interest rates than we have now. As well as reducing taxes on companies and the higher-paid while increasing Vat, thereby putting more of the burden on the less well-off. Well, he is a Tory.
He was also a key figure in the first wave of mass privatisations. Or, as another former Tory chancellor, Harold Macmillan, put it, “flogging off the family silver”.
It is partly because of what Lawson did then that we are up the creek now.
Lacking a manufacturing base for our struggling economy, while gas, electricity, telecoms and British Airways continue to make profits for private companies not the public good.
Lawson also played a central role in preparing for Maggie Thatcher’s carefully prepared, sustained and vicious attack on the coal industry.
Thatcher’s enthusiasm for nuclear power stemmed from her eagerness for the assault on coal.
She was not going to be brought down, as previous Tory PM Ted Heath had been, by a stoppage of the coal supply to power stations. She was going to make sure the electricity continued to flow into the nation’s homes and businesses no matter who she picked a fight with.
The miners’ strike of 1984-5 was a turning-point in industrial relations in Britain.
It so happened that for three months of that period I was on strike myself, over a matter not obviously related (the loss of newspaper jobs through the imposition of new technology).
Striking miners occasionally visited our picket line, and we visited some of theirs. To use a phrase recently hijacked by our ruling toffs, we were all in it together.
And of course, as history knows, we lost together.
The eventual defeat of the miners, and the devastation of their industry, was a shattering blow to the whole of trade unionism. Which was exactly what Thatcher intended all along.
What Lawson, particularly in his earlier role as energy secretary, helped her plan and prepare for.
This week’s strike by public-sector workers was billed as the biggest walk-out since 1926. In terms purely of the number taking part, it was. One day of protest, however, hardly equates to the bitter, protracted disputes we lived through in the 1970s and 80s.
It does have this in common, though, with the miners’ strike. That it was a fight picked by a Tory government. And that no one will have been more pleased by it than those who provoked it.
Just like in the 1980s, it gives them a chance to split the populace into an “us” and a “them”. To divide and conquer.
Which is not to say that the unions and their members were wrong to take action. Frankly, they had little choice.
And this, surely, is merely the beginning, the marking-out of the battleground between the government and the people they supposedly represent.
Osborne’s statement, though conveniently hidden from full media attention behind the strike, drew more of those lines.
The pre-publicity was mostly for what you might call the good news. Extra spending on schools, youth unemployment, the building of houses, railways and roads – including a possible new toll road from Felixstowe to the Midlands. New (though piffling) investment in the space industry, green technology and research into animal disease.
The detail showed that the bill will be picked up by public-sector workers and the low-paid.
The independent Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that Osborne’s new policies will cost 710,000 jobs in the public sector, compared with the 400,000 it had previously expected as a result of the government’s spending cuts.
Welfare campaigners say his decision to scrap an increase in child tax credits will result in an additional 100,000 children dropping below the official poverty line.
He signalled the end of national pay bargaining within two years and set a two-year one per cent ceiling on public-sector pay rises – measures surely designed to provoke the unions into further action.
Osborne, of course, is banking on the majority public mood supporting him as he casts the public sector and their union leaders in the role Thatcher cast the miners and Arthur Scargill.
I wonder.
I wonder if Len McCluskey, general secretary of the union Unite, isn’t perhaps nearer the reality.
People, he says, “have seen their living standards get squeezed while the rich get richer.
“They look at the teachers, lollipop ladies and civil servants marching and then they look at the millionaires in cabinet, and they know which side to support.
“Trade union members aren’t some inconvenient troublemakers making life hard for the public: they are the public.”
---
THE Bhopal disaster of 1984 was and remains a massive example of man’s inhumanity to man. Of the shocking disregard of rich people in one country for the lives of poor people in another.
At a conservative estimate, the leak of poison gas from the American-owned Union Carbide factory killed 15,000 inhabitants of the Indian city.
To say that the company’s admission of responsibility came grudgingly and late, and that the compensation event-ually paid was insufficient, is to put it mildly.
Anything further from the “Olympic values” of “Respect, Excellence, Friendship” would be hard to imagine.
Dow Chemical, the company which now owns Union Carbide and the fatal Bhopal plant, is a major sponsor of London 2012 and is scheduled to have a massive advert in the form of “an artistic wrap” around the main Olympic Stadium.
But Lord Coe (right), chairman of the organising committee, airily brushed aside the protests of outraged Indian athletes at a Parliamentary hearing last week.
He said: “I am satisfied that the ownership, operation and the involvement either at the time of the disaster or at the final settlement was not the responsibility of Dow.”
Which sounds to me – as it does to the Indians – like a slippery avoidance of responsibility.
Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001 and insists the legal claims surrounding the incident were resolved long before it acquired the company.
That is still being contested in the Indian courts.
Meanwhile there are many people in Bhopal still suffering from the crippling effects of the disaster – in their own health and in the loss of family members.
Local experts say pollution from the disaster is still causing deformities and cancers among families using contaminated groundwater.
Respect, Seb? Friendship? Or is it all just about money?
In this case a measly £7million – money which would go a lot further if it were put to alleviating the misery suffered by the people of Bhopal.
If the Indian Olympic Association votes next week to boycott the Games, don’t blame them. Blame Coe.
As George Osborne prepared to stand and deliver his autumn statement, BBC News propped up Lawson outside Parliament to give his view.
Which boiled down to supporting the chancellor in his squeeze on working people because it was “needed” to keep interest rates low. As if low interest rates were somehow more important than people’s lives and futures.
As chancellor himself from 1983 to 1989, Lawson presided over much higher interest rates than we have now. As well as reducing taxes on companies and the higher-paid while increasing Vat, thereby putting more of the burden on the less well-off. Well, he is a Tory.
He was also a key figure in the first wave of mass privatisations. Or, as another former Tory chancellor, Harold Macmillan, put it, “flogging off the family silver”.
It is partly because of what Lawson did then that we are up the creek now.
Lacking a manufacturing base for our struggling economy, while gas, electricity, telecoms and British Airways continue to make profits for private companies not the public good.
Lawson also played a central role in preparing for Maggie Thatcher’s carefully prepared, sustained and vicious attack on the coal industry.
Thatcher’s enthusiasm for nuclear power stemmed from her eagerness for the assault on coal.
She was not going to be brought down, as previous Tory PM Ted Heath had been, by a stoppage of the coal supply to power stations. She was going to make sure the electricity continued to flow into the nation’s homes and businesses no matter who she picked a fight with.
The miners’ strike of 1984-5 was a turning-point in industrial relations in Britain.
It so happened that for three months of that period I was on strike myself, over a matter not obviously related (the loss of newspaper jobs through the imposition of new technology).
Striking miners occasionally visited our picket line, and we visited some of theirs. To use a phrase recently hijacked by our ruling toffs, we were all in it together.
And of course, as history knows, we lost together.
The eventual defeat of the miners, and the devastation of their industry, was a shattering blow to the whole of trade unionism. Which was exactly what Thatcher intended all along.
What Lawson, particularly in his earlier role as energy secretary, helped her plan and prepare for.
This week’s strike by public-sector workers was billed as the biggest walk-out since 1926. In terms purely of the number taking part, it was. One day of protest, however, hardly equates to the bitter, protracted disputes we lived through in the 1970s and 80s.
It does have this in common, though, with the miners’ strike. That it was a fight picked by a Tory government. And that no one will have been more pleased by it than those who provoked it.
Just like in the 1980s, it gives them a chance to split the populace into an “us” and a “them”. To divide and conquer.
Which is not to say that the unions and their members were wrong to take action. Frankly, they had little choice.
And this, surely, is merely the beginning, the marking-out of the battleground between the government and the people they supposedly represent.
Osborne’s statement, though conveniently hidden from full media attention behind the strike, drew more of those lines.
The pre-publicity was mostly for what you might call the good news. Extra spending on schools, youth unemployment, the building of houses, railways and roads – including a possible new toll road from Felixstowe to the Midlands. New (though piffling) investment in the space industry, green technology and research into animal disease.
The detail showed that the bill will be picked up by public-sector workers and the low-paid.
The independent Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that Osborne’s new policies will cost 710,000 jobs in the public sector, compared with the 400,000 it had previously expected as a result of the government’s spending cuts.
Welfare campaigners say his decision to scrap an increase in child tax credits will result in an additional 100,000 children dropping below the official poverty line.
He signalled the end of national pay bargaining within two years and set a two-year one per cent ceiling on public-sector pay rises – measures surely designed to provoke the unions into further action.
Osborne, of course, is banking on the majority public mood supporting him as he casts the public sector and their union leaders in the role Thatcher cast the miners and Arthur Scargill.
I wonder.
I wonder if Len McCluskey, general secretary of the union Unite, isn’t perhaps nearer the reality.
People, he says, “have seen their living standards get squeezed while the rich get richer.
“They look at the teachers, lollipop ladies and civil servants marching and then they look at the millionaires in cabinet, and they know which side to support.
“Trade union members aren’t some inconvenient troublemakers making life hard for the public: they are the public.”
---
THE Bhopal disaster of 1984 was and remains a massive example of man’s inhumanity to man. Of the shocking disregard of rich people in one country for the lives of poor people in another.
At a conservative estimate, the leak of poison gas from the American-owned Union Carbide factory killed 15,000 inhabitants of the Indian city.
To say that the company’s admission of responsibility came grudgingly and late, and that the compensation event-ually paid was insufficient, is to put it mildly.
Anything further from the “Olympic values” of “Respect, Excellence, Friendship” would be hard to imagine.
Dow Chemical, the company which now owns Union Carbide and the fatal Bhopal plant, is a major sponsor of London 2012 and is scheduled to have a massive advert in the form of “an artistic wrap” around the main Olympic Stadium.
But Lord Coe (right), chairman of the organising committee, airily brushed aside the protests of outraged Indian athletes at a Parliamentary hearing last week.
He said: “I am satisfied that the ownership, operation and the involvement either at the time of the disaster or at the final settlement was not the responsibility of Dow.”
Which sounds to me – as it does to the Indians – like a slippery avoidance of responsibility.
Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001 and insists the legal claims surrounding the incident were resolved long before it acquired the company.
That is still being contested in the Indian courts.
Meanwhile there are many people in Bhopal still suffering from the crippling effects of the disaster – in their own health and in the loss of family members.
Local experts say pollution from the disaster is still causing deformities and cancers among families using contaminated groundwater.
Respect, Seb? Friendship? Or is it all just about money?
In this case a measly £7million – money which would go a lot further if it were put to alleviating the misery suffered by the people of Bhopal.
If the Indian Olympic Association votes next week to boycott the Games, don’t blame them. Blame Coe.
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