Wild world v the mobile phone

Once upon a time, not so long ago, if you heard a person talking to themselves in the street you assumed they were mentally disturbed or deficient. Now you assume they’re talking to someone somewhere else.

That someone may be sitting in a restaurant or bar ignoring the person they’re actually with. But that’s OK, because that person too is present in body only.

Their mind is on the friend far away who they are texting, or Facebooking, or Skyping, or Snapchatting with.

All those invisible waves, all those conversations, all that mostly pointless information filling the air between us all. It’s pretty weird when you stop to think about it.

As a society we’ve become addicted to our mobile phones and estranged from the world that’s really around us.

Which is a pity, because there’s a lot of stuff to see if we keep our eyes open to it.

Like birds, those wonderful, fascinating, beautiful creatures that live lives so different from ours while largely sharing our space.

Look about you, especially at this time of year, and there’s a David Attenborough-style wildlife documentary permanently going on around us.

I had a great illustration of this the other day as I was crossing the green near my home.

A few yards ahead of me a young woman was walking into town, eyes glued to her phone.

Suddenly she recoiled in shock, uttering a cry that may have been: “What the…?”

She hadn’t noticed the blackbird that flew fast and panicking close by her. But she couldn’t fail to react to the sparrowhawk pursuing it.

It was so intent on its prey that it only avoided flying straight into her face by doing the hawk equivalent of a handbrake turn.

Some wild things just never seem to notice all the amazing human life that goes on around them all the time.

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England reach the World Cup semi-final only to lose a desperately close match 1-0 to the host nation.

They then lose the third-place play-off too, 2-0 to highly-fancied Argentina. Unlucky, lads.

Not a prediction, but genuine events of the weekend just passed.

The lads in question are the England hockey team.

Meanwhile, in the footy, England won their seventh World Cup match in a row. The women’s 3-0 win in Belarus means they are all but certain to finish top of their qualifying group and go into next year’s finals in Canada among the favourites.

If you missed those achievements by our national sides, you can perhaps be forgiven on a weekend of so much sporting excitement.

There was the first cricket Test of the summer, with England struggling to take full advantage of Joe Root’s imperious double century at Lord’s.

There was the second Test in New Zealand, where England’s rugby union side were soundly thrashed by the All Blacks – 28-27. (And where a streaker was variously described by BBC radio co-commentators as “well-endowed” and “he or she”, either frustrating or tickling your imagination, depending on your imagination.)

There was England’s Justin Rose trailing in the wake of Germany’s Martin Kaymer in a vain bid to retain his US Open golf title.

There was England’s (or Kenya’s, if you happen to be Kenyan) Chris Froome unsuccessfully defending his Critérium du Dauphiné cycling title – with much more than one eye on the next title he has to defend, the Tour de France.

And Scotland’s Andy Murray, who also has a rather more significant defence coming up, failing to keep even one hand on the trophy at Queens Club.

No shame to you, with all that going on, if you happened to take your eye off the hockey ball.

In case you missed the final too, England’s conquerors Holland were whupped 6-1 by Australia.

With all this important sport to keep track of, small wonder if more trivial matters such as the increasing domination of the global economy by a small cabal of multi-national companies slip out of the global news agenda.

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“It’s a very traditional British landscape image,” the artist says. “A classical British landscape, rolling hills and little stone houses.

 “The surveillance base is just another element in the landscape.”

The Constable-inspired image, shot in North Yorkshire, is the work of photographer Trevor Paglen. It will be unveiled on Thursday at Gloucester Road station in London, home of the Art on the Underground project. The 60-metre long print goes the full length of the District Line platform.

It is part of a series of photos the American Paglen has taken of surveillance installations from Nevada to Afghanistan. The “blank spots on the map”.

“I think mass surveillance is a bad idea,” Paglen says. “When people understand that they are constantly monitored they are more conformist… and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.”

He’s right. Check him out at www.paglen.com

Muslim schools aren't the only ones in bad faith

In the town I grew up near, what school you went to depended on a number of things.

My parents weren’t rich, so that was one option closed off. Not that they’d have sent me to a would-be posh school anyway.

We weren’t Catholics, so that was another avenue closed.

I wasn’t a girl, so there’s another.

But I was quite bright, so I ended up at the old-fashioned, self-satisfied boys’ grammar school.

Luckily for me, all that old divisiveness was on the way out. So I was able to switch in the sixth form to the new comprehensive that had previously been a secondary modern.

Not all comprehensives were, or are, as good. The change between systems was not always well managed – partly because the heads of the new schools were often old grammar heads who weren’t committed to the new idea. Or who simply weren’t up to the new job.

But the idea itself was right.

The more you mix with people of different backgrounds, different views and different abilities, the more tolerant and understanding you’re likely to be. And the more variety of opportunity you, and they, will have.

Which is why faith schools are such a bad idea.

Instead of opening doors, which is what education should do, they close them.

As has been so forcefully remarked on in the case of Birmingham’s Muslim schools, they breed intolerance. Lack of understanding. Very bad science. Potential sectarian (and perhaps racist) violence.

With the enthusiastic urging of first Tony Blair and latterly Michael Gove, faith schools have sprung up like mushrooms in the night.

There are now more than 7,000 of them in the UK. Of those 6,751 are funded by the state, but free from what Gove likes to call “unsympathetic meddling”.

Free, in other words, to perpetrate and perpetuate all those bad things I just listed.

Free also to brainwash innocent young minds with mad, bad, dangerous twaddle like Creationism.

Of course, most faith schools aren’t that extreme. But there are believed to be more than 60 schools teaching Creationism as if it was fact, not magic.

That’s five times as many as there are Muslim schools.

According to the most recent available figures (2012), there are 42 Jewish schools, 12 Muslim, three Sikh, one Hindu – which leaves about 6,942 Christian ones.

They shouldn’t get state support. It’s debatable whether they should get state permission to exist.

Meanwhile, deep in Berkshire, there is a shadowy school, open only to a select few, which brainwashes pupils in a cult of world domination.

Though not a faith school, like them it teaches its pupils that they are superior to other people.

Though it doesn’t count as state-funded, its official status as a charity means it benefits from massive tax breaks. Even though most of its pupils’ parents are very rich already.

As British as roast beef, it is directly responsible for many of our most intractable-seeming problems.

Its old boys (they are all boys) have infiltrated every area of business, science, religion, the media, the military and government. One of them is the prime minister.

It is called Eton.

A regular sort of guy

I can think of only one person who would use the phrase “a regular sort of guy” without any intended irony.

In fact I remember him saying it about himself, and not just once.

That person is, of course, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, former prime minister of this realm.

And like so much of the rubbish that has passed his lips before, during and since his term of office, I'm sure he believed it.

It's a symptom of what has been called his “messiah complex” – I said it, so it must be true!

Neither of those phrases (regular or messiah) is exactly original in respect to Blair.

But apparently they're good enough for the author Robert Harris. A man who was once a friend of Blair's and who, it's probably safe to say, isn't now.

I found Harris’s what-if-the-Nazis-had-won novel Fatherland thoroughly gripping when I read it, many moons ago.

And if I can’t really comment on his more recent bestseller The Ghost, that’s at least partly because I didn’t fancy a book about Blair. Or someone curiously like him – a deposed PM accused of war crimes.

Harris has now told Total Politics magazine that Blair seemed a regular sort of guy when they first met in the 1990s, but that becoming PM had changed him.

“Who knew he would become a great friend of George Bush and would want to keep bombing people?” he asked.

Who indeed?

Moving on to his life post-Downing Street, Harris accuses his old mucker of being “passionately interested in making money” and living “this strange life with the billionaire super-rich on yachts and private jets”.

It’s all to do with what Harris identifies as the former leader’s narcissism.

Which makes it all the more bizarre that Harris says it was “a tragedy” for Britain and the Labour Party that Blair quit national politics after being forced out of No 10 in 2007.

The truly sad thing is that he was ever in politics at all.

---

With possibly only another year to run, is the government running out of steam?

Casting an eye over what, electorate willing, may be their last Queen’s Speech I could find only one Bill to get really angry about.

That was the coyly named Infrastructure Bill. Which is the one that will give free rein to companies engaging in shale gas mining. Or fracking, as it’s better known.

Once again the Tories have listened only to moneyed interests and ignored the impartial advice of experts.

People such as Professor David Smythe of Glasgow University, who offered detailed evidence of how fracking could seriously contaminate water sources.

And that, of course, is only one of the potential dangers.

Would you want big, mostly foreign-owned, mining companies fracking under your home?

If the Infrastructure Bill becomes law – and it’s hard to see who’ll stop it – they won’t need your permission.

---

We’re on the verge of the biggest party in football – arguably in all of world sport. And I nearly forgot to mention it.

I was going to fill this space with an interesting anecdote about birds and mobile phones. (That’ll have to wait until next week. Bet you can’t wait.)

Can it be that I’m getting old? Tired, not of life certainly, but of football.

Of course, England have precious little chance of going far into the tournament, but that’s never killed my enthusiasm before.

Yes, the on-going shenanigans over the choice of Qatar to host in 2022 have cast a sorry shadow over everything to do with Fifa, the game’s governing body.

Yes, there are real worries over Brazil’s fitness to stage the contest its teams have graced more than any others over the years. The stadiums may not all be ready, the transport chaotic, the natives justifiably restless at the expense of money that might have been put to better use.

Yes, the best players may be too shattered to play well, if not actually injured.

And yes, international football may be of a lower standard than the club game, where players aren’t virtual strangers to each other.

But heck, this is the World Cup.

I should be excited, itching for it, like any self-respecting football nut.

My interest will probably perk up once the action kicks off on Thursday. Probably.

Another loser anthem, wo-oh

I’ll admit it here: I’m not really one for standing up and belting out the national anthem.

Partly because the whole idea of “nation” makes me a tad uneasy. “My country, right or wrong” must have a claim to being the most stupid slogan anyone ever tried to live their lives by.

Partly because even if I believed in God, I’d have trouble seeing why He should do any special favours for the Queen.

And, let’s face it, our national tune is a particularly spiritless dirge.

Give me the uplift of France’s glorious Marseillaise every time.  Mind you, there’s a line in there about “watering our furrows with an impure blood” which could make a fellow a little queasy in these supposedly more enlightened times.

Even Deutschland Uber Alles has a jauntier tune than our dreary number, but let’s not go there…

If it’s entirely necessary to have a national song, what could be more apt (or a better tune) than Jerusalem? I’m fairly certain “those feet” never did in fact touch England’s pleasant pastures, but the “dark satanic mills” can always raise a grim, knowing smile.

If they had a proper song like that to sing, maybe England manager Roy Hodgson wouldn’t have to tell his players to lift up their hearts and voices when it was played. Maybe.

Hodgson has a point when he compares the traditionally lacklustre, gum-chewing demeanour of English players at anthem time to the hand-on-heart enthusiasm of so many opponents.

But do we really want our boys to be (or behave like) unreconstructed nationalists?

I’m not convinced it would make them better players. The point, surely, is the team, not the dear old Queen?

And is there really any reason to believe more in the clutching of a national shirt than the kissing of a club badge? And that, as we know, often seems to accompany the desire to seek better-paid employment under a different emblem.

But sure, Roy, if it makes you happy. Let the boys sing out.

As he says: “I think we’re great until the second verse comes along because we don’t really know that...”

That’ll be the one about scattering her enemies, confounding their politics and frustrating their knavish tricks.

Some of those pesky foreigners certainly know some knavish tricks, don’t they? Diving, shirt-pulling, name-calling, ref-baiting – antics no self-respecting Englishman would ever get up to, what?

But politics? That’s where the stuff in verse six come in, obviously.

You know the one. That’s the one with the lines:

“May he sedition hush
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush”.

No doubt there are a few patriotic Englishman who would sing that bit just now with proper verve.

---

I know (because I used to work there) that the Sunday Times is housed in a big building – but surely even there “millions of secret documents” must make an inconveniently big pile.

And who is going to plough through them all to determine that they really do prove what is claimed? That Fifa’s decision to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was taken under the influence of money.

Whoever would have imagined such a thing?

That money might have played a part in awarding the world’s most glamorous sporting tournament to a country where hardly anybody actually plays the game. Largely because it’s too blooming hot.

A country whose national team has never qualified for a World Cup finals and whose league champions, Lekhwiya, might just give Lowestoft Town a decent game.

A country barely twice the size of Norwich.

Whose second-largest “city” is three quarters the size of King’s Lynn.

Whose total official population outnumbers only four-to-one the number of visiting fans a World Cup can expect to draw.

Which, at the time of the vote in 2010, had not one stadium good enough or big enough to host the event.

And which, however hard it might try, couldn’t possibly have the eight host cities normally considered the minimum for the tournament. Let alone enough naturally-occurring grass to cover enough pitches.

But a country which, strangely, is very, very rich indeed.

And now they suggest that money might have changed hands, and that that might have influenced the decision?

Whether Fifa itself is the right authority to probe this amazing allegation must be open to some doubt.

But there is a silver lining (and not just to certain unspecified persons’ pockets).

The normal timescale for the awarding of World Cups (or Olympics) to host countries is seven years ahead of the event.

Which means there’s still a year for one of the daftest decisions in sporting history to be overturned and a better one arrived at.

Not just switching the tournament from summer to “winter” but moving it to somewhere with a real football tradition – real teams, real stadiums and real fans.

The fox in the henhouse

Even a cursory glance at the weekend newsstands made the picture pretty clear. The national headlines told the story. Historic triumph for Ukip, shambolic disaster for Labour.

And the figures to back that up?

Labour 2,101 council seats, up 338.

Ukip 163 seats. That's fewer than half the number Labour added to a total that was already more than 10 times what Ukip now has.

Labour now runs twice as many councils as the Tories. Ukip still runs the same number it did before. None.

Funny triumph. Strange disaster.

The real story, though – the real political firebomb – was still lurking, to be revealed only on Sunday night.

Now Ukip really can claim a historic triumph. First national election for 100 years to be won by neither Conservatives nor Labour; first to be won by a party with no Westminster MPs.

Except that this wasn't a national election. It was a European election.

And that's the crucial point.

Such success as Ukip did achieve in the council vote can be put down to the fact that the poll took place at the same time as the European one.

Most of its votes were votes AGAINST Europe, not FOR a fully privatised health service, fewer rights for working people and more tax breaks for the rich.

Perhaps ironically, it is part of a Europe-wide tide of disaffection with the Union.

The tide that saw the ultra right-wing Front National top the poll in France, while left-wing anti-austerity groups won in Greece and Spain.

Whatever Nigel Farage may claim, the fox isn't in the Westminster henhouse.

He's in no position to affect egg-production, or anything much else, in city or county hall.

But he may be about to wreak havoc among the chickens of Strasbourg and Brussels.

****

I'm getting to like that Chris Packham more and more.

The TV naturalist – now settled in for a three-week Springwatch stint at Minsmere – has a fine habit of speaking unpopular truths.

He delivered several in an excellent interview in last week's Radio Times.

His big point – one which needs saying loudly and often – was about the thing nearly all politicians seem to consider their most important goal. Economic growth.

“If there's one mantra that we need to break,” Packham said, “it's that economic growth is a good thing.

“It isn't. It's a recipe for global disaster.”

Just so.

****

Changed your password lately? You really should, you know.

What do you mean, which password?

We live in an increasingly password-protected world, and I sometimes wonder just how secure it all is.

Never mind remembering my passwords, I can't even work out exactly how many I've got.

As a freelance working regularly for three different employers, I have about a dozen directly work-related ones.

Then there are the ones for banking and online payments. If you include PINs and “memorable names” etc, that's at least another dozen.

And then there's social media, my library login, those for updating the three websites I run, and three email accounts.

Thank goodness for those “Forgotten password?” links.

There's a lot of helpful advice around about password security.

They should be at least six (or eight, or nine) characters long. They shouldn't be your name, your middle name, your mum's name or your pet's name. They shouldn't be any word found in a dictionary. They certainly shouldn't be “password” or “123456789” or “98786754321”. They should include capitals and lower-case letters, numerals and other symbols.

You shouldn't use the same one for your email, your bank account or your workstation as you use for anything else.

And you should change them regularly.

All sound advice. And yet.

When ebay announced last week that all its users' passwords had been hacked, I promptly did what we were all recommended to do. I set out to change mine.

And the first thing I discovered was that I couldn't remember what it was.

No problem. Hit “Forgotten password?”, key in your email address and a link to set a new password will be emailed to you.

Bearing in mind all of the above, this is a process I go through a lot.

But it does make alarmingly clear that however many walls you barricade yourself behind, there's always just one little doorway in.

In this case, it's the single password that gives access to your email account.

Let that get into the wrong hands and almost everything else about you – all you own, all you are – potentially goes too.

Scary.

And there's another thing about that ebay hacking.

If a database containing email and physical addresses, phone numbers, birthdates – and passwords – of 128 million users was hacked “between late February and early March” how come we didn't hear about it until late May?

And how come, when we finally did hear, it was on the news, not from ebay itself?

 

 

What's in a nation?

Do you feel proud to be English? Or British? Or East Anglian? A Norfolk bor or a Norwich maw?

Does it make much difference to you – I mean a real, deep-in-the-gut, quality-of-life difference – whether Norwich City, or England, or Team GB, win a football match or an Olympic medal?

And if the answer to any of the above is an unreserved “yes”, what’s that all about?

Well, if nothing else it’s a startling piece of evidence that we’re still a tribal species.

And if you doubt that for a moment, just consider the torrent of thinly disguised racism that distorts the currently over-heated national debate about immigration.

And yes, I did say “national”. It’s hard to get away from.

But what, when you get right down to it, is the nation?

If Scotland votes in September to leave the UK, will Andy Murray and Chris Hoy suddenly stop being “us” and become “them”?

If it’s going to change the whole nation of Britain, of Britishness, shouldn’t you and I have a vote too?

Of course, it’s about the Scots’ right to self-determination. Just as the Falkland islanders determined last year that they wanted to remain British – despite being nearly 8,000 miles from these shores.

It’s democracy, innit?

But there’s a problem here. Everything depends on where you draw the boundaries of your electorate.

Take Scotland away and the likelihood of the rump of the UK having a Conservative government rises enormously.

Draw the boundary round just East Anglia and that prospect increases further. But tighten it to include just Norwich (120 times as many people as the Falklands) and you might get Labour rule.

Allow self-determination to my street, or my house, and the political colour changes again.

What’s happening in Ukraine is interesting (even if a little scary).

The recent referendum in the Donetsk region in the east of the country – in which 89 per cent apparently voted for local independence – was declared by the government in Kiev to be “an illegal farce”.

But then Ukraine’s own independence, declared in 1991, was just as illegal under the laws of the old Soviet Union.

Ultimately, the true balance of power lies in whatever agreement can be reached between those who want to rule and those who are prepared to let themselves be ruled.

Back here, the Scottish vote could leave us in an unprecedented and messy situation.

If the nationalists get their way, Scotland will leave the Union in March 2016. At that point, 59 Scottish MPs will depart Westminster.

At present, that’s 41 Labour, 11 Lib Dem, six SNP and one lone Tory. You can see how their departure might alter things in Westminster.

If they were to go right now, David Cameron would have an outright majority and not have to rely on Lib Dem support.

So here is an all-too-plausible scenario.

Scotland votes in September for independence. Labour wins a national majority next May – but only with the support of those north-of-the-border MPs who will have only 10 months to serve before leaving for a different nation.

How will the rump UK feel about those Scots taking long-term decisions for the country they’re leaving behind? And what happens afterwards?

Like I said: messy.

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Two days from now we go to the polls – at least some of us will.

As usual at any local or European election the biggest contingent will be the can’t-be-bothered.

Which is one reason why UKIP are sure to do well – far better, one presumes and prays, than they can possibly hope for in next year’s General Election.

It may seem ironic, but in fact it’s inevitable, that those who care most about Europe are those who want it scrapped. (What the future might hold for UKIP’s MEPs should that wish come true, we can only speculate.)

The contending parties have at least been busy trying to remind us there’s a vote to take part in. Well, most of them, anyway.

Last time I counted, we’d had no fewer than five Lib Dem election leaflets through our door, and two each from Labour, UKIP and the Green Party. Nothing from the Tories, which means either

a)      they’re taking this rustic corner of East Anglia for granted, as well they might;

b)      they’re leaving it to the last moment for maximum impact; or

c)      I chucked their best effort straight in the recycling bin without even noticing it, which I admit is entirely possible.

Two others factors are playing into UKIP’s hands.

With an unpopular Government, and an Opposition failing woefully to cash in, there’s bound to be a substantial protest vote. And that’s no longer good news for the Lib Dems, who are now the ones nearly everyone wants to protest against.

And then there’s what we might call the Farage factor.

How the Greens could do with someone like chinless Nigel.

Well, not exactly like him, obviously. But someone who could whip up a similar level of hype in the media.

Someone who could draw that amount of attention to the one party whose policies are actually worth protesting FOR.

Miley's no better than she should be... but no worse than she was

Back in the pleistocene era, that long-ago age in which I was born, Elvis Presley was king.

That was the era, we’re told, when two closely related phenomena were invented – pop music and teenagers.

Right from the start, part of the point of both was to get up the noses of the new teenagers’ parents.

Hard to believe now, maybe, but Elvis achieved that with his sneer and his impertinent dyed, greased quiff. Not to mention the trademark pelvic thrust.

You might wonder how the human race propagated itself before Elvis’s generation invented sex.

Only one thing was missing from this intoxicating new mixture, and that ingredient was invented/discovered [cross out whichever doesn’t apply] by the pop-teens of the next decade.

The year 1967 was a momentous one for youth culture. It would be remembered as America’s hippy Summer of Love. But before that it was the year the Rolling Stones became masters of the art of getting up parents’ noses. Partly by putting stuff up their own.

First their song Let’s Spend the Night Together so shocked America it had to be re-titled and re-cut as Let’s Spend Some Time Together.

Then came the infamous drug bust, which splashed them across all the nation’s more lurid front pages. And dumped Mick Jagger in Brixton Prison.

Who’d have thought then that pouting, hedonistic rebel would 35 years later become Sir Mick?

But that’s the way it goes. Each generation’s young shockers grow up to become staid and dull.

Leaving the young that come after them to reinvent the wheel. Or at least to invent again the cocktail so neatly summed up by Ian Dury as sex ’n drugs ’n rock ’n roll.

Not that there’s much rock ’n roll about the insipid music purveyed by Miley Cyrus. But she seems to be doing a cracking job of infuriating parents.

Not by her music. And not by her offstage life, which as far as I can read between the lines may actually be squeaky clean. But by her act on stage, which is anything but clean.

In fact, it’s downright smutty. Lots – and lots and lots – of talking and acting dirty. And talking (as distinct from taking) drugs.

Which is fine, up to a point. Well, two points really.

The first is that it all seems so phony, so calculating, so deliberately contrived to sell a new image as a naughty girl. The key word there being “sell”.

And the second – the thing which has actually upset so many parents – is that her audience is still so impressionably young.

It’s one thing to foster teenage rebelhood as Elvis, the Stones and so many others have done.

Quite another to force on primary-school children the notion that behaving as if you’re in a cheap porn movie is the way for a girl to succeed.

I’m not sure, though, that the new naughty Miley is really any worse than the goody-goody version we had to endure before.

The scrubbed-up, everything-lovely, Disney Channel sickly-sweetness of Hannah Montana was every inch as carefully designed and manufactured.

It’s shiny, materialistic, grab-what-you-can “wholesomeness” at least as damaging to the morals of our young. Not to mention their teeth.

... but Elena deserved all the love and respect 

  

The obsession with them is so great, the top sports stars must sometimes get mightily sick of journalists. Some of them don’t much bother to hide their contempt.

And then there are those who are engaging, polite, who seem genuinely pleased to meet you.

Elena Baltacha was very much one of the latter kind.

The expressions of grief at her death last week revealed how loved and respected she was on the national and international tennis circuits. She was – and deserved to be – as well loved by all who knew her at a less exalted level too.

Two years ago I interviewed her for the EDP and spent a very pleasant hour or so in her company. She was as warm and open with me as she was with all the staff and other members at the tennis club in Ipswich where we met.

At the time, though she had been British No.1 for most of the previous decade, she was uncertain of her place in the forthcoming London Olympics. She wanted it, she told me, mostly to fulfil a thwarted ambition of her mother’s.

In 1980, three years before Elena was born, her father Sergei was in the Soviet football team that won Olympic bronze in Moscow. Her mother, Olga, was picked for the pentathlon but couldn’t go.

“My brother was one year old at the time and she had to stay home to look after him,” Elena explained. “So I’d love to take part in the Olympics, not just for myself but for my mum.”

But for the injuries and illness which afflicted her whole career, Elena might have been the shining light in world women’s tennis that Britain has so long craved. I’m glad she at least made those Olympics.