MY friend Ira stunned me this week.
Not when he said even he now wanted Gordon Brown to quit as PM and Labour leader. Surely nobody outside the Westminster village and Brown’s close associates actually wants him to stay.
No, it was when he used the phrase “the party I love”, meaning the Labour Party. Without irony.
The truth is, I once loved the party. Not in the way you fall in love with a new person, a new idea – but the way you love your family. Right or wrong, they are your people. You grew up with them. You belong.
Ira, clearly, still feels he belongs. It’s been so long since I felt that, I’d almost forgotten it was possible.
I fell out of love with Labour a long time ago. Round about the time a new leader called Blair set about demolishing everything that had kept it in touch with its roots and true to its principles.
There are still principled people in the Labour Party. My sister is one, Ira is another.
They may even still make up a majority of the party. But they certainly don’t form a majority of those in Parliament – still less in government.
I once thought Brown was one of the few at the top who still had principles. It seems now that his only principle is clinging on to power. For the little time that’s left him. And for all the good it can do anyone.
Of course, those of us who wish he’d go now – or that he’d already gone – do so in the hope that under another leader Labour might suddenly transform itself back into what it once was. Some hope.
It would, in truth, be a miracle. Even if the new leader was one of the good guys – Alan Johnson, say, or one of the Miliband brothers.
It would be a still greater miracle if the reborn party were to win the next election.
Which may be why nobody seems prepared to stand against Brown for the leadership right now.
Because all the conceivable candidates know that whoever leads Labour into the election will be a loser, their future chances blighted forever.
Perhaps they are all hoping for a one-term David Cameron government. A short, sharp disaster after which a re-fashioned Labour Party can ride back triumphantly to pick up the pieces.
The trouble with that long game is that it fails to take account of what Cameron and his crew might do. And how long they might stick around.
There must also be a question-mark over whether Labour can recover at all from the depths they are now in.
When they trail in behind UKIP in the European poll, and even the British Nasty Party gets a couple of members in to Strasbourg, you know things have got pretty dire. (Although you can blame the relative success of those parties on the fact none of the others seemed to take the Euro poll as seriously as they should.)
I heard the Lib Dems’ Simon Hughes at the weekend describing Labour as a party which no longer had a reason for being. And in a way he’s right.
Not for the reason he gave, which was frankly bonkers. There was, he claimed, no place for a working-class party any more because there was no longer a working class.
On the contrary, as capitalism hits the buffers hard, ordinary folk worldwide are facing hard times. The need for an old-fashioned party of labour is as great as ever.
That party should be Labour. But that was the party Blair and his confederates killed.
It’s hard to say just what the Labour Party, at parliamentary level, stands for now. Almost as hard as it is to spot a principle, or a real policy, on the Tory side of the House.
AS the leaflet flopped onto the doormat its message looked like a case of mistaken identity – or maybe libel.
“People like you,” it said, “voting BNP.”
People like me don’t vote BNP. Never have. Never will.
Then after their relative success in getting two MEPs elected – the same number as the Green Party and the Scottish Nationalists – BNP leader Nick Griffin tried again to play that “people like us” card.
And again got it utterly, nastily, wrong.
The vote for him, he said, showed that people were sick of discrimination.
There is, he claimed, racism “against people who look like me”.
By which, presumably, he meant paunchy middle-class white males.
A group so discriminated against they run the government, occupy most seats in Parliament and in company boardrooms, take home most pay and drive most of the big cars. Poor souls.
IT’S long been remarked that big international companies – like AIG, for instance, or General Motors – are as powerful as many countries.
Twenty years ago the world watched stunned as big countries collapsed and flew apart, their rulers shamed and discarded.
As the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania in 1989, so perhaps GM, LDV and Setanta in 2009.
As Communism then, capitalism now?
Friday, 12 June 2009
Monday, 1 June 2009
Conspiracy? Or is that what they want us to think?
I ONCE met a man who was in regular contact with aliens from outer space.
Or so he said. And being a callow young reporter at the time, I believed him. Or at least I thought I might have hit on a decent story.
It certainly seemed interesting enough until he showed me the evidence.
In the top corner of his TV screen would appear from time to time little squares of strangely moving lines. This, he insisted, was how the aliens transmitted their messages.
But hadn’t he noticed, I asked, that they always appeared just before a commercial break? Perhaps they were indeed messages – not to him, but to help the broadcasters get their timings right?
He found that unbelievable and duly wrote me off either as gullible or as part of the great conspiracy.
Which goes to show several things:
• That some people will believe almost anything – except what seems most obvious.
• That people like to think they know things other people don’t.
• That we are surrounded by conspiracies – or at least by conspiracy theories.
Who killed Marilyn Monroe, and why? Ditto John F Kennedy – and what was the connection between their deaths? If any?
Where do Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto fit into the picture? Or is it not all the same picture?
And what about Princess Diana?
Was her death the result of an evil conspiracy masterminded by Prince Philip, as Mohamed al Fayed seems to believe?
Was she the sacrificial victim of some weird satanic cult?
Had she got too close to revealing the truth about the leaders of the world’s great nations – that they are all extra-terrestrial lizards in disguise?
Or was it just that her driver was drunk and driving too fast and she wasn’t wearing a seat-belt?
For many people that last explanation is just too mundane, too messy to fit in with their image of an iconic woman.
And of course her early death and the questions surrounding it all feed into the loop that inflates the icon.
The real flesh-and-blood woman has disappeared from the myth as surely as she has gone from life.
The same feedback loop, exponentially inflating the icon, applies equally to Monroe and JFK.
And – dare I say it? – to a once obscure Jewish preacher and reformer from the Galilee region of Roman-era Palestine.
In every case the death became not just part of the legend, but the core of the legend.
And just look how many question-marks litter this column. They all imply at root the same question, the question that intrigues and motivates the human race more than any other. The question: Why?
The mundane fact is that most of us, most of the time, don’t know the answer to that vital question. Which is why people have to keep making up answers.
And for some people, the wilder and wackier those answers are, the better they like them.
Were the towers of the World Trade Centre really felled by missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes?
I doubt very much whether the technology exists to make that possible – and even if it did, why bother when it would be so much easier just to send in the planes?
But that is only the wildest of an astonishing array of conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks.
Even Time magazine was prepared to give credence, just weeks after the event, to a theory that George W Bush’s government deliberately ignored warnings that the attacks were coming.
Personally, I’d be prepared to believe almost any wickedness of the Bush administration.
But perhaps that’s the point.
A good conspiracy theory has to be just believable enough to make you wonder.
It should give its believers a nice feeling of superiority over everyone else.
And it should provide the illusion of meaning and sense to things that otherwise seem senseless and meaningless.
And, of course, the biggie – the essentially meaningless thing in all our lives – is death. It’s the thing we all want, and lack, a big answer to.
Which is why all the great conspiracy theories revolve around death. As, incidentally, do those most tenacious of all wild, unprovable theories, religions.
Religious groups of various kinds, from American fundamentalists to Hamas, figure largely as both believers and subjects of conspiracy theories.
They figure too in David Aaronovitch’s new book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Aaronovitch has plenty of theory about theories. After debunking myth after myth he comes down clearly on the side of cock-up over conspiracy to explain the ways of the world.
Which is probably fair enough. Most of the time.
But why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? What really happened in Rendlesham Forest on Boxing Day, 1980? Who did roll away the stone? And what is the real connection between the Bush and Bin Laden families?
Or so he said. And being a callow young reporter at the time, I believed him. Or at least I thought I might have hit on a decent story.
It certainly seemed interesting enough until he showed me the evidence.
In the top corner of his TV screen would appear from time to time little squares of strangely moving lines. This, he insisted, was how the aliens transmitted their messages.
But hadn’t he noticed, I asked, that they always appeared just before a commercial break? Perhaps they were indeed messages – not to him, but to help the broadcasters get their timings right?
He found that unbelievable and duly wrote me off either as gullible or as part of the great conspiracy.
Which goes to show several things:
• That some people will believe almost anything – except what seems most obvious.
• That people like to think they know things other people don’t.
• That we are surrounded by conspiracies – or at least by conspiracy theories.
Who killed Marilyn Monroe, and why? Ditto John F Kennedy – and what was the connection between their deaths? If any?
Where do Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto fit into the picture? Or is it not all the same picture?
And what about Princess Diana?
Was her death the result of an evil conspiracy masterminded by Prince Philip, as Mohamed al Fayed seems to believe?
Was she the sacrificial victim of some weird satanic cult?
Had she got too close to revealing the truth about the leaders of the world’s great nations – that they are all extra-terrestrial lizards in disguise?
Or was it just that her driver was drunk and driving too fast and she wasn’t wearing a seat-belt?
For many people that last explanation is just too mundane, too messy to fit in with their image of an iconic woman.
And of course her early death and the questions surrounding it all feed into the loop that inflates the icon.
The real flesh-and-blood woman has disappeared from the myth as surely as she has gone from life.
The same feedback loop, exponentially inflating the icon, applies equally to Monroe and JFK.
And – dare I say it? – to a once obscure Jewish preacher and reformer from the Galilee region of Roman-era Palestine.
In every case the death became not just part of the legend, but the core of the legend.
And just look how many question-marks litter this column. They all imply at root the same question, the question that intrigues and motivates the human race more than any other. The question: Why?
The mundane fact is that most of us, most of the time, don’t know the answer to that vital question. Which is why people have to keep making up answers.
And for some people, the wilder and wackier those answers are, the better they like them.
Were the towers of the World Trade Centre really felled by missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes?
I doubt very much whether the technology exists to make that possible – and even if it did, why bother when it would be so much easier just to send in the planes?
But that is only the wildest of an astonishing array of conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks.
Even Time magazine was prepared to give credence, just weeks after the event, to a theory that George W Bush’s government deliberately ignored warnings that the attacks were coming.
Personally, I’d be prepared to believe almost any wickedness of the Bush administration.
But perhaps that’s the point.
A good conspiracy theory has to be just believable enough to make you wonder.
It should give its believers a nice feeling of superiority over everyone else.
And it should provide the illusion of meaning and sense to things that otherwise seem senseless and meaningless.
And, of course, the biggie – the essentially meaningless thing in all our lives – is death. It’s the thing we all want, and lack, a big answer to.
Which is why all the great conspiracy theories revolve around death. As, incidentally, do those most tenacious of all wild, unprovable theories, religions.
Religious groups of various kinds, from American fundamentalists to Hamas, figure largely as both believers and subjects of conspiracy theories.
They figure too in David Aaronovitch’s new book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Aaronovitch has plenty of theory about theories. After debunking myth after myth he comes down clearly on the side of cock-up over conspiracy to explain the ways of the world.
Which is probably fair enough. Most of the time.
But why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? What really happened in Rendlesham Forest on Boxing Day, 1980? Who did roll away the stone? And what is the real connection between the Bush and Bin Laden families?
Friday, 15 May 2009
Apocalypse now and then
NUCLEAR war across the northern hemisphere has left most of the world uninhabitable and most of its people dead. In Australia, life goes on – but the deadly radioactive clouds are coming, blown on unpredictable but unstoppable winds.
No, of course that’s not true. If it was, I wouldn’t be here to write it and you wouldn’t be here to read it.
But when Nevil Shute used that scenario as the basis for his novel On The Beach it must have seemed horribly plausible.
Published in 1957, the book was set in the not-distant future of 1963. When in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear war, those who had read Shute’s work must have thought he was frighteningly prescient.
In 1956 another book had described a different end to the world as we know it.
A new virus has attacked rice crops in Asia, causing massive famine. Now a mutation has appeared which infects wheat and barley.
If it isn’t stopped – and there seems no way to stop it – the Western world will quickly starve too. Already Britain and Europe are descending into violent anarchy…
This is the story of John Christopher’s horrific vision The Death of Grass. It’s often bracketed with the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, which appeared about the same time.
Wyndham’s books are a cracking good read, and his description of society breaking down is generally good. But it takes a stretch of imagination to believe in triffids – deadly walking plants – or the Kraken, deadly alien beings from outer space.
The disaster at the heart of The Death of Grass, though, is all too believable.
Scientific predictions suggest now that such an event is highly possible. Which is why it makes perfect sense that Penguin has just re-issued Christopher’s book as a Modern Classic.
One of the biggest arguments against genetically modified crops is that if most of the world’s grain is of just one strain, it would only take one strain of virus to kill the whole lot off.
In the farms of the world right now there is more grain being grown to feed more people than ever before. And fewer strains than ever before.
An article in this month’s issue of the respected journal Scientific American is headed: “Could food shortages bring down civilisation?”
The answer given by the writer, leading US environmentalist Lester R Brown, is a clear “Yes”.
His argument boils down to these key points:
One warning suggests sea levels could rise enough this century to flood most major cities, including London (and, incidentally, most of Suffolk). Imagine the chaos that would bring, not just in the flooded areas, but in the shrinking portion of habitable land. That’s one thing Wyndham may have got right in The Kraken Wakes.
We are, as Frazer in Dad’s Army had it, all doomed. Or are we?
The sheer range of predicted catastrophes may be the broadest since the Book of Revelation – but humanity seems always to have lived with a strong sense of its own imminent downfall.
When I was growing up it was the Bomb. In the 1950s if it wasn’t the death of grass or triffids it was little green men or The Blob.
In the 1930s, as historian Richard Overy details in his new book The Morbid Age, people were increasingly worried about a coming war they feared would bring civilisation to an end.
As we know now, they weren’t entirely wrong.
As 1939 approached, the Jews of Europe lived in a state of gradually increasing trepidation. But they went on with their daily lives until the day the horror became total, escape impossible.
Even when it might have been possible to escape, most didn’t.
It seems there’s a gap which the human mind cannot bridge. A gap between rumour, fear and belief that allows the unthinkable to remain literally that.
You might imagine the worst, but you can’t really believe it until it is no longer escapable.
Such was the feeling of impending doom pre-war. And such, perhaps, is the mood of impending environmental catastrophe today.
At one level, we believe at least some of the predictions of horror. At another, we get on with our daily lives as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
Perhaps all the doom-mongering is simply natural human paranoia – these days given credibility by science, where once it was religion.
On the other hand, just because you’re paranoid…
No, of course that’s not true. If it was, I wouldn’t be here to write it and you wouldn’t be here to read it.
But when Nevil Shute used that scenario as the basis for his novel On The Beach it must have seemed horribly plausible.
Published in 1957, the book was set in the not-distant future of 1963. When in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear war, those who had read Shute’s work must have thought he was frighteningly prescient.
In 1956 another book had described a different end to the world as we know it.
A new virus has attacked rice crops in Asia, causing massive famine. Now a mutation has appeared which infects wheat and barley.
If it isn’t stopped – and there seems no way to stop it – the Western world will quickly starve too. Already Britain and Europe are descending into violent anarchy…
This is the story of John Christopher’s horrific vision The Death of Grass. It’s often bracketed with the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, which appeared about the same time.
Wyndham’s books are a cracking good read, and his description of society breaking down is generally good. But it takes a stretch of imagination to believe in triffids – deadly walking plants – or the Kraken, deadly alien beings from outer space.
The disaster at the heart of The Death of Grass, though, is all too believable.
Scientific predictions suggest now that such an event is highly possible. Which is why it makes perfect sense that Penguin has just re-issued Christopher’s book as a Modern Classic.
One of the biggest arguments against genetically modified crops is that if most of the world’s grain is of just one strain, it would only take one strain of virus to kill the whole lot off.
In the farms of the world right now there is more grain being grown to feed more people than ever before. And fewer strains than ever before.
An article in this month’s issue of the respected journal Scientific American is headed: “Could food shortages bring down civilisation?”
The answer given by the writer, leading US environmentalist Lester R Brown, is a clear “Yes”.
His argument boils down to these key points:
- Water shortages, soil loss and global warming are placing increasing limits on food production.
- Food scarcity and rising food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
- “Failed states” export disease, terrorism, drugs, weapons and refugees – and a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.
One warning suggests sea levels could rise enough this century to flood most major cities, including London (and, incidentally, most of Suffolk). Imagine the chaos that would bring, not just in the flooded areas, but in the shrinking portion of habitable land. That’s one thing Wyndham may have got right in The Kraken Wakes.
We are, as Frazer in Dad’s Army had it, all doomed. Or are we?
The sheer range of predicted catastrophes may be the broadest since the Book of Revelation – but humanity seems always to have lived with a strong sense of its own imminent downfall.
When I was growing up it was the Bomb. In the 1950s if it wasn’t the death of grass or triffids it was little green men or The Blob.
In the 1930s, as historian Richard Overy details in his new book The Morbid Age, people were increasingly worried about a coming war they feared would bring civilisation to an end.
As we know now, they weren’t entirely wrong.
As 1939 approached, the Jews of Europe lived in a state of gradually increasing trepidation. But they went on with their daily lives until the day the horror became total, escape impossible.
Even when it might have been possible to escape, most didn’t.
It seems there’s a gap which the human mind cannot bridge. A gap between rumour, fear and belief that allows the unthinkable to remain literally that.
You might imagine the worst, but you can’t really believe it until it is no longer escapable.
Such was the feeling of impending doom pre-war. And such, perhaps, is the mood of impending environmental catastrophe today.
At one level, we believe at least some of the predictions of horror. At another, we get on with our daily lives as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
Perhaps all the doom-mongering is simply natural human paranoia – these days given credibility by science, where once it was religion.
On the other hand, just because you’re paranoid…
Friday, 8 May 2009
Harmony in black, white & colour
RIDING through east London on a train the other day I had one of those wish-I-had-a-camera-handy moments. If I’d been quick enough, the picture would have been worth at least 1,000 words.
Instead of writing this column I could just have printed the picture and let it speak for itself.
On a public tennis court four schoolgirls were playing a game of doubles. On one side of the net, in shorts and T-shirts, were a blonde girl and one who might have been Chinese. On the other was a girl with long braided hair and brightly-coloured Caribbean-style clothes. Her partner was all in black from head to foot, only her eyes showing in the now familiar Muslim manner.
I did wonder for a moment how the Muslim girl could move effectively in such restrictive attire.
I did marvel that her parents should send her to school so concealed yet allow her to play openly with girls whose different cultures were on display in bare limbs.
But the obvious enjoyment all four were having in the game made it a most striking image of what is – or could be – good in our society. It was a happy and a hopeful scene.
There can be few issues more emotionally charged in this country – and likely to get more so – than that of immigration.
Most of that emotion is heated, irrational and based on ignorance. If only we could all mix as those tennis-playing girls were, with pleasure and at least a chance of understanding.
We’re a mongrel race, we British. It’s our strength. If you doubt that, just consider our language.
English has always been happy to accept new words and make them its own. As a country, that’s generally been our tendency – and our strength – too.
This little land is a melting-pot of people, cultures, ideas and lifestyles and all the better for that.
And I mean a melting-pot. Multi-culturalism, so-called, is fine as long as we are all happy to enjoy, learn from and share each others’ cultures.
Cutting ourselves off in enclaves of this culture or that, without sharing or learning from each other, is where danger lies.
If we allow our cities to become segmented into sectors defined by national or religious groups – a black area, a Muslim area, a Polish area – we risk alienation, distrust, misunderstanding, fear.
The old adage about having nothing to fear but fear itself seems applicable. But it doesn’t take account of where fear comes from – ignorance.
If only we could all get together on the same tennis court. Or even just in each others’ supermarkets and at each others’ dining-tables.
Bordering on the un-British
IF I have a complaint against someone, I can’t threaten their reputation by telling you about it here. Not, at least, until the matter has gone through all the relevant court procedures.
The law of libel places a restriction on freedom of speech that can be frustrating at times. But it exists for a good reason.
The protection it offers against the damaging effects of rumour is a powerful restraint on journalists. But not, apparently, on official organisations such as the UK Border Agency.
The agency, which came into being in its present form only last year, is responsible for controlling immigration.
In its own words: “The Agency was formed in April 2008 to improve the United Kingdom’s security through stronger border protection while welcoming legitimate travellers and trade.”
Note the use of that emotive buzzword “security”. And just how welcoming is “welcoming”?
In its first nine months the agency issued civil penalties against 21 Suffolk businesses. You may have read about some of them in these pages.
The agency is very keen on telling the local media about its successes in uncovering evidence of illegal workers in mainly Chinese and Indian or Bangladeshi restaurants.
Of those 21, however, two were cancelled and another five resulted in reduced fines once the businesses concerned had a chance to appeal.
I am grateful to Paul Simon of Hadleigh for gaining these figures under the Freedom of Information Act and alerting me to them.
As Paul says: “It is very unfair that the UK Border Agency appears to be so trigger-happy in issuing immediate information about its raids even before a business has a chance to invoke the appeals procedure.
“Given this country’s sense of fair play, it borders on the un-British to name and shame companies in this way – even though one in every three cases was either totally exonerated or was able to produce sufficient evidence for fines to be reduced.
“In these tough economic times it seems especially unfair that the reputation of some Suffolk businesses may be damaged by a government body in advance of the full facts being uncovered.”
Just so. I couldn’t do it – quite rightly – so why should they?
Instead of writing this column I could just have printed the picture and let it speak for itself.
On a public tennis court four schoolgirls were playing a game of doubles. On one side of the net, in shorts and T-shirts, were a blonde girl and one who might have been Chinese. On the other was a girl with long braided hair and brightly-coloured Caribbean-style clothes. Her partner was all in black from head to foot, only her eyes showing in the now familiar Muslim manner.
I did wonder for a moment how the Muslim girl could move effectively in such restrictive attire.
I did marvel that her parents should send her to school so concealed yet allow her to play openly with girls whose different cultures were on display in bare limbs.
But the obvious enjoyment all four were having in the game made it a most striking image of what is – or could be – good in our society. It was a happy and a hopeful scene.
There can be few issues more emotionally charged in this country – and likely to get more so – than that of immigration.
Most of that emotion is heated, irrational and based on ignorance. If only we could all mix as those tennis-playing girls were, with pleasure and at least a chance of understanding.
We’re a mongrel race, we British. It’s our strength. If you doubt that, just consider our language.
English has always been happy to accept new words and make them its own. As a country, that’s generally been our tendency – and our strength – too.
This little land is a melting-pot of people, cultures, ideas and lifestyles and all the better for that.
And I mean a melting-pot. Multi-culturalism, so-called, is fine as long as we are all happy to enjoy, learn from and share each others’ cultures.
Cutting ourselves off in enclaves of this culture or that, without sharing or learning from each other, is where danger lies.
If we allow our cities to become segmented into sectors defined by national or religious groups – a black area, a Muslim area, a Polish area – we risk alienation, distrust, misunderstanding, fear.
The old adage about having nothing to fear but fear itself seems applicable. But it doesn’t take account of where fear comes from – ignorance.
If only we could all get together on the same tennis court. Or even just in each others’ supermarkets and at each others’ dining-tables.
Bordering on the un-British
IF I have a complaint against someone, I can’t threaten their reputation by telling you about it here. Not, at least, until the matter has gone through all the relevant court procedures.
The law of libel places a restriction on freedom of speech that can be frustrating at times. But it exists for a good reason.
The protection it offers against the damaging effects of rumour is a powerful restraint on journalists. But not, apparently, on official organisations such as the UK Border Agency.
The agency, which came into being in its present form only last year, is responsible for controlling immigration.
In its own words: “The Agency was formed in April 2008 to improve the United Kingdom’s security through stronger border protection while welcoming legitimate travellers and trade.”
Note the use of that emotive buzzword “security”. And just how welcoming is “welcoming”?
In its first nine months the agency issued civil penalties against 21 Suffolk businesses. You may have read about some of them in these pages.
The agency is very keen on telling the local media about its successes in uncovering evidence of illegal workers in mainly Chinese and Indian or Bangladeshi restaurants.
Of those 21, however, two were cancelled and another five resulted in reduced fines once the businesses concerned had a chance to appeal.
I am grateful to Paul Simon of Hadleigh for gaining these figures under the Freedom of Information Act and alerting me to them.
As Paul says: “It is very unfair that the UK Border Agency appears to be so trigger-happy in issuing immediate information about its raids even before a business has a chance to invoke the appeals procedure.
“Given this country’s sense of fair play, it borders on the un-British to name and shame companies in this way – even though one in every three cases was either totally exonerated or was able to produce sufficient evidence for fines to be reduced.
“In these tough economic times it seems especially unfair that the reputation of some Suffolk businesses may be damaged by a government body in advance of the full facts being uncovered.”
Just so. I couldn’t do it – quite rightly – so why should they?
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
New (and old) poems online
Departing from the usual, this is not a newspaper column, but a piece of shameless self-promotion: new poems of mine have appeared online in both Stride and Shadowtrain - and now in Great Works too; at the same time I've just put PDFs of much of my earlier poetry up on my own site.
You can find all these things by clicking on the links in the righthand column - or here:
Great Works
Shadowtrain
Stride
The News Pages etc (poems 1978-85)
You can also find a splendid (and very kind) appreciation of my long-ago editing of the sadly shortlived mag Molly Bloom on Alan Baker's excellent Litterbug blog.
OK, chest-beating over. For now :-)
You can find all these things by clicking on the links in the righthand column - or here:
Great Works
Shadowtrain
Stride
The News Pages etc (poems 1978-85)
You can also find a splendid (and very kind) appreciation of my long-ago editing of the sadly shortlived mag Molly Bloom on Alan Baker's excellent Litterbug blog.
OK, chest-beating over. For now :-)
Saturday, 18 April 2009
No more Sex, Death on the wane
IT was, by any standards, one of the great Test matches. Four blistering August days in the long hot summer of 1976 and a line-up of all-time greats on both sides.
Even the umpires, Bill Alley and Dickie Bird, have a kind of legendary status.
England opener Dennis Amiss, returning to the international scene at age 34, made a double-century – and still ended up losing. On the other side Viv Richards, ten years younger and with most of his greatness yet to come, struck a mighty 291.
It contributed to a huge West Indies first-innings total of 687 for eight declared. Having made a respectable 435 in reply, England ended up being asked to repeat exactly that score to win.
They fell short by 232 runs as Michael Holding returned the astonishing match figures of 14 wickets for 149. And all with a day to spare.
And why is that amazing game of cricket chiefly remembered? Not for any of those feats I’ve just listed, but for one moment of radio commentary.
Brian Johnston may have remarked: “The bowler’s Roberts, the batsman’s Knott.” If he did it might have been mildly amusing, but no one would have remembered for more than a minute.
But with Holding bowling to Peter Willey, Johnners’s comment became an instant classic. (Willey, curiously, was the only England batsman in that Oval Test not to lose his wicket to Holding.)
Names can be such a source of amusement. A source which may be under threat if we are to believe a very odd report by Richard Webber of King’s College, London.
For his survey, Webber compared data from 2008 with the British census of 1881. And he found that the instances of people with “amusing names” had fallen by up to 75 per cent.
And if it’s OK for a geography professor to play around with funny names, it’s good enough for me.
Apparently there were just 785 people in Britain last year called Cock, as against 3,211 in 1881. The number of people called Balls fell in that period from 2,904 to 1,299.
The number of people named Smellie decreased by 70 per cent, Dafts by 51pc, Gotobeds by 42pc, Shufflebottoms by 40pc and Cockshotts by 34pc.
Best of all, you might think, the number of Deaths fell by almost half. And all that in a period when the population of Britain roughly doubled…
Professor Webber doesn’t mention it, but I’m pretty sure the surname Sex disappeared completely during that time.
So what happened to all the Smellies, Cocks – and Sexes? Were they more likely than the rest of us to meet Death? Or less likely to breed?
There may, I suppose, be a slight element of the latter, which I’ll come to in a moment. But really, Webber seems to be stating the obvious when he explains: “If the number goes down it’s either because they changed their names or they emigrated.
“In many cases, people probably changed their surnames as they came to be regarded as in bad taste.”
Which, I believe, is why the last Mr Sex resorted to Deed Poll.
Back in about 1900, Mr and Mrs Bottom of Durham obviously felt they couldn’t do anything about their name – but did they really have to call their daughter Ophelia?
The poor girl got stuck with it too – she was a spinster of about 80 when I encountered her. And I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d have grown up differently, perhaps had more luck finding a husband, if she’d been plain Jane Smith. Or even Jane Bottom.
We all know of people whose names provoke a laugh. And they don’t have to be the obvious Ivors or Ivans.
Hazel is a lovely name for a girl. Unless your surname happens to be Knutt.
What could possibly be wrong with the name Jenny? Or Taylor? But put them together and some wiseacre is sure to corrupt it to ‘genitalia’ – as an old friend of mine found to her constant annoyance when she was at school.
You could draw the moral that you can’t be too careful when choosing names. Or maybe that kids will find something to pick on whatever you do.
My experience as a writer of sports headlines for the News of the World tells me that you can make some sort of pun out of almost any name. And if you can make a rude one, you can be sure some schoolkid has beaten you to it.
In some ways, I found the obvious “jokes” on my surname that followed me around at school a relief from the unkinder personal comments that provoked other nicknames. (No, I’m not going to tell you what they were.)
I don’t know whether my friends Dykes, Huggins and Haw felt the same. Or Peter Willey.
Even the umpires, Bill Alley and Dickie Bird, have a kind of legendary status.
England opener Dennis Amiss, returning to the international scene at age 34, made a double-century – and still ended up losing. On the other side Viv Richards, ten years younger and with most of his greatness yet to come, struck a mighty 291.
It contributed to a huge West Indies first-innings total of 687 for eight declared. Having made a respectable 435 in reply, England ended up being asked to repeat exactly that score to win.
They fell short by 232 runs as Michael Holding returned the astonishing match figures of 14 wickets for 149. And all with a day to spare.
And why is that amazing game of cricket chiefly remembered? Not for any of those feats I’ve just listed, but for one moment of radio commentary.
Brian Johnston may have remarked: “The bowler’s Roberts, the batsman’s Knott.” If he did it might have been mildly amusing, but no one would have remembered for more than a minute.
But with Holding bowling to Peter Willey, Johnners’s comment became an instant classic. (Willey, curiously, was the only England batsman in that Oval Test not to lose his wicket to Holding.)
Names can be such a source of amusement. A source which may be under threat if we are to believe a very odd report by Richard Webber of King’s College, London.
For his survey, Webber compared data from 2008 with the British census of 1881. And he found that the instances of people with “amusing names” had fallen by up to 75 per cent.
And if it’s OK for a geography professor to play around with funny names, it’s good enough for me.
Apparently there were just 785 people in Britain last year called Cock, as against 3,211 in 1881. The number of people called Balls fell in that period from 2,904 to 1,299.
The number of people named Smellie decreased by 70 per cent, Dafts by 51pc, Gotobeds by 42pc, Shufflebottoms by 40pc and Cockshotts by 34pc.
Best of all, you might think, the number of Deaths fell by almost half. And all that in a period when the population of Britain roughly doubled…
Professor Webber doesn’t mention it, but I’m pretty sure the surname Sex disappeared completely during that time.
So what happened to all the Smellies, Cocks – and Sexes? Were they more likely than the rest of us to meet Death? Or less likely to breed?
There may, I suppose, be a slight element of the latter, which I’ll come to in a moment. But really, Webber seems to be stating the obvious when he explains: “If the number goes down it’s either because they changed their names or they emigrated.
“In many cases, people probably changed their surnames as they came to be regarded as in bad taste.”
Which, I believe, is why the last Mr Sex resorted to Deed Poll.
Back in about 1900, Mr and Mrs Bottom of Durham obviously felt they couldn’t do anything about their name – but did they really have to call their daughter Ophelia?
The poor girl got stuck with it too – she was a spinster of about 80 when I encountered her. And I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d have grown up differently, perhaps had more luck finding a husband, if she’d been plain Jane Smith. Or even Jane Bottom.
We all know of people whose names provoke a laugh. And they don’t have to be the obvious Ivors or Ivans.
Hazel is a lovely name for a girl. Unless your surname happens to be Knutt.
What could possibly be wrong with the name Jenny? Or Taylor? But put them together and some wiseacre is sure to corrupt it to ‘genitalia’ – as an old friend of mine found to her constant annoyance when she was at school.
You could draw the moral that you can’t be too careful when choosing names. Or maybe that kids will find something to pick on whatever you do.
My experience as a writer of sports headlines for the News of the World tells me that you can make some sort of pun out of almost any name. And if you can make a rude one, you can be sure some schoolkid has beaten you to it.
In some ways, I found the obvious “jokes” on my surname that followed me around at school a relief from the unkinder personal comments that provoked other nicknames. (No, I’m not going to tell you what they were.)
I don’t know whether my friends Dykes, Huggins and Haw felt the same. Or Peter Willey.
Friday, 17 April 2009
Google knows what you're up to
“LOOK, look, that bloke on the bike – I’ve got an anorak that colour, and a saddlebag like that – do you think it’s me?”
Well yes, Mark, it might be.
“And look, that’s my house. And there’s my neighbour’s car. And there’s my broken bit of drainpipe. But I fixed that ages ago, so they must have taken the picture last summer.”
Well yes, that’ll be why the trees are all in leaf and the chestnuts in blossom. And frankly, I don’t care much, beyond the mild interest of seeing what sort of street you live in.
This was a genuine conversation – one of a few like that I’ve already witnessed or taken part in. I reckon there must have been many thousands of them taking place in offices all up and down the land these past few weeks.
Even in places such as Ipswich, where the camera cars have been seen but the pics aren’t up yet, the chatrooms and messageboards have been full of it. Google must be delighted with their investment.
For now. How long, I wonder, before the novelty of Street View wears off?
Google Maps are great. The ability to hover over satellite pictures of almost anywhere on Earth, with identifying labels if you want, is fun and can be useful.
Finding somewhere on a map, then zooming in on a single street, a single house, in photo view, has helped me a few times to find my way.
And there are some brilliant surprises. Like being able to peer down, in remarkable detail, on the eerily deserted streets and buildings of Chernobyl.
Or getting a close view of the so-called Boneyard in Tucson, Arizona, where more than 4,000 out-of-service US military aircraft are mothballed in case they’re ever needed again. Close enough to clearly identify each plane.
Not that there is any spying potential in this. The online photos are not exactly a live view. The Tucson golf course where Aussie Geoff Ogilvy won the recent World Matchplay title still appears as a patch of desert scrub.
And I’m not sure there’s really much spying potential, either, in the new generation, Street View.
A bit of mild passing fun, perhaps, in spotting yourself on your bike. And maybe a tiny embarrassment potential for the cheating wife or husband caught where they shouldn’t be.
But, realistically, your chances of being spotted “in the flesh” are vastly greater than any risk of being caught months later when Google gets its snaps online.
No, I wouldn’t worry too much – or get too excited – about down-your-street Googling. Its very openness prevents it being much danger to anyone.
I’m much more concerned about the CCTV cameras that track our every move in real time – without us ever getting to see what they see.
And, incidentally, the rights of ordinary folk like me who are apt to be hounded by security guards, or even the police, if we merely turn up on the street with a camera.
But technology does pose very serious risks to our liberty and privacy.
The government’s hare-brained ID cards scheme; its bid to copy all our emails; its computerised tracking of car registration-plates via “safety” cameras; its burgeoning databases of everything from our tax records to our DNA. It all adds up to an array of state snooping the Soviets could only dream of.
And then there’s Google. Once just a nifty search engine, it’s now bigger than most governments. And potentially even better informed.
Most of us make use of some of its services. So it can tell what web pages we look at, how often and for how long.
It can tell what we buy – what books and records we like, what services we subscribe to. All, of course, in the aim of targeting you with the right advertising. Which you may regard as a good thing, at least in part.
But you can tell quite a bit about someone’s political views, for example, from knowing the books they read. They might know, if they care to look, that I recently re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And then if you use Google as your diary… your roaming email service… to post your private thoughts in a blog… to store your family photos, maybe your private documents…
It can now even track your movements – or at least the movements of your mobile phone. If you want it to. Or, perhaps, if government or security services want it to?
That may not happen now. But it can, so it will.
And of course Google now knows what maps you look at, which streets you choose to take a virtual walk down.
OK, Google “takes your security seriously”. It should. Its whole enormous business depends on being trusted.
And let’s face it, we love it. But can we guarantee it will always deserve our love?
Because all that information could add up to an awful lot of power for whoever gets their hands on it.
And remember – Winston Smith ended up loving Big Brother.
Well yes, Mark, it might be.
“And look, that’s my house. And there’s my neighbour’s car. And there’s my broken bit of drainpipe. But I fixed that ages ago, so they must have taken the picture last summer.”
Well yes, that’ll be why the trees are all in leaf and the chestnuts in blossom. And frankly, I don’t care much, beyond the mild interest of seeing what sort of street you live in.
This was a genuine conversation – one of a few like that I’ve already witnessed or taken part in. I reckon there must have been many thousands of them taking place in offices all up and down the land these past few weeks.
Even in places such as Ipswich, where the camera cars have been seen but the pics aren’t up yet, the chatrooms and messageboards have been full of it. Google must be delighted with their investment.
For now. How long, I wonder, before the novelty of Street View wears off?
Google Maps are great. The ability to hover over satellite pictures of almost anywhere on Earth, with identifying labels if you want, is fun and can be useful.
Finding somewhere on a map, then zooming in on a single street, a single house, in photo view, has helped me a few times to find my way.
And there are some brilliant surprises. Like being able to peer down, in remarkable detail, on the eerily deserted streets and buildings of Chernobyl.
Or getting a close view of the so-called Boneyard in Tucson, Arizona, where more than 4,000 out-of-service US military aircraft are mothballed in case they’re ever needed again. Close enough to clearly identify each plane.
Not that there is any spying potential in this. The online photos are not exactly a live view. The Tucson golf course where Aussie Geoff Ogilvy won the recent World Matchplay title still appears as a patch of desert scrub.
And I’m not sure there’s really much spying potential, either, in the new generation, Street View.
A bit of mild passing fun, perhaps, in spotting yourself on your bike. And maybe a tiny embarrassment potential for the cheating wife or husband caught where they shouldn’t be.
But, realistically, your chances of being spotted “in the flesh” are vastly greater than any risk of being caught months later when Google gets its snaps online.
No, I wouldn’t worry too much – or get too excited – about down-your-street Googling. Its very openness prevents it being much danger to anyone.
I’m much more concerned about the CCTV cameras that track our every move in real time – without us ever getting to see what they see.
And, incidentally, the rights of ordinary folk like me who are apt to be hounded by security guards, or even the police, if we merely turn up on the street with a camera.
But technology does pose very serious risks to our liberty and privacy.
The government’s hare-brained ID cards scheme; its bid to copy all our emails; its computerised tracking of car registration-plates via “safety” cameras; its burgeoning databases of everything from our tax records to our DNA. It all adds up to an array of state snooping the Soviets could only dream of.
And then there’s Google. Once just a nifty search engine, it’s now bigger than most governments. And potentially even better informed.
Most of us make use of some of its services. So it can tell what web pages we look at, how often and for how long.
It can tell what we buy – what books and records we like, what services we subscribe to. All, of course, in the aim of targeting you with the right advertising. Which you may regard as a good thing, at least in part.
But you can tell quite a bit about someone’s political views, for example, from knowing the books they read. They might know, if they care to look, that I recently re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And then if you use Google as your diary… your roaming email service… to post your private thoughts in a blog… to store your family photos, maybe your private documents…
It can now even track your movements – or at least the movements of your mobile phone. If you want it to. Or, perhaps, if government or security services want it to?
That may not happen now. But it can, so it will.
And of course Google now knows what maps you look at, which streets you choose to take a virtual walk down.
OK, Google “takes your security seriously”. It should. Its whole enormous business depends on being trusted.
And let’s face it, we love it. But can we guarantee it will always deserve our love?
Because all that information could add up to an awful lot of power for whoever gets their hands on it.
And remember – Winston Smith ended up loving Big Brother.
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