Sometimes reports appear in the press which, ostensibly unrelated, set off the car alarm in one's mind.
The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.
The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".
The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.
Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge. The BBC's version is here. Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.
So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.
Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug. And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.
Thursday 26 June 2014
Wednesday 25 June 2014
Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and the press
The professional Yorkshireman Godfrey Bloom, it will be remembered, lost the UKIP party whip because he was recorded telling some party workers at a meeting that they were "sluts".
I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.
Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.
Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.
I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.
This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence". David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.
Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".
The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?
And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".
What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.
In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".
So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.
Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.
It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.
So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies. Who would have thought?
I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.
Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.
Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.
I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.
This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence". David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.
Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".
The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?
And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".
What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.
In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".
So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.
Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.
It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.
So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies. Who would have thought?
Wednesday 18 June 2014
Tony Blair and the real villains in Iraq
What to make of the extraordinary events in Iraq recently, as Al Qaida 2.0, in the form of ISIS nasties, advance with Blitzkrieg speed across the country, murdering and burning as they come?
Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.
I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.
It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.
"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific. There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".
Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.
Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.
I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.
It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.
"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific. There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".
Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.
Thomas Piketty and the success of capitalism
The Guardian reports this morning that queues developed in London yesterday outside the lecture theatre where French economist Professor Thomas Piketty was booked to speak. Most of them, according to vox pops the paper conducted, hadn't read Piketty's book Capital, and you can hardly blame them for preferring to get its message in an hour or so rather than wading through many hundreds of pages.
The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".
So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.
Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.
But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.
I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.
What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous. "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.
The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.
Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.
Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.
Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.
The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".
So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.
Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.
But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.
I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.
What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous. "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.
The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.
Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.
Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.
Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.
Tuesday 17 June 2014
The Trojan Horse letter - British values and the limits of tolerance
In the wake of the Trojan Horse saga alleging a plot by fanatical Muslims to make state schools teach, er, according to Muslim principles, the government has decreed that teaching British values should be part of the curriculum.
This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike. No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument. And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?
I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.
And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.
A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.
The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture. This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.
Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.
But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes? Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.
The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.
If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.
This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike. No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument. And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?
I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.
And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.
A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.
The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture. This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.
Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.
But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes? Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.
The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.
If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.
Sunday 15 June 2014
Roy Hodgson and the quarter finals
Having got the statutory whinge about the World Cup out of the way a few days ago (The World Cup is for the mentally negligible), it's time to pontificate about England's opening performance against Italy last night.
What is the aim of England football managers? Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.
I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.
If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.
Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead. I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.
Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.
I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.
What is the aim of England football managers? Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.
I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.
If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.
Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead. I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.
Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.
I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.
Friday 13 June 2014
Independent Scotland - a North Korean Brigadoon?
I have put a couple of quid on the Nationalists winning the Independence referendum. This isn't because I think they're going to win - I hope they won't - but because, if they do, my winnings will add to the gaiety of the occasion. The bookies were offering 11/4, meaning that if you put £4 on and the Nats win you'll get £11 back. Odds on a victory were more generous: a £1 stake will get you £4. So the bookies think the No campaign will win.
I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.
The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.
Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak. I don't want to get my head kicked in".
Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.
As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.
As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere. The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".
Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others. In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.
This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.
And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.
I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.
The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.
Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak. I don't want to get my head kicked in".
Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.
As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.
As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere. The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".
Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others. In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.
This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.
And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.
The World Cup is for the mentally-negligible
Is there anything edifying about the World Cup at all?
If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too. We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.
Ah, but the football, you say. It's all about the football.
OK then, the football. After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty. Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?
The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent. The whole thing is squalid beyond belief. Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.
Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.
If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too. We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.
Ah, but the football, you say. It's all about the football.
OK then, the football. After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty. Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?
The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent. The whole thing is squalid beyond belief. Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.
Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.
Thursday 12 June 2014
Why I love . . . #11 Lonesome Dove
I can't remember what peculiar combination of circumstances led me to go into Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago and pick up a copy of Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove. Sometimes you'll read a reference to something in the paper or on the internet which sticks like a little burr; and then after a time someone else mentions it, and lo and behold you're in a bookshop and there it is.
I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages. Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles. And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil. All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.
McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye. McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women. Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory. And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.
In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.
As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard. And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.
As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.
It was over much, much too soon. All nine-hundred pages of it.
I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages. Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles. And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil. All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.
McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye. McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women. Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory. And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.
In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.
As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard. And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.
As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.
It was over much, much too soon. All nine-hundred pages of it.
Tuesday 10 June 2014
Starting with The Young Ones - Ofsted and Islam
Amidst the sadness of yesterday, there was some amusement to be had. No, I'm not referring to the untimely death of Rik Mayall, a man who made a very funny TV programme thirty years ago, and some progressively less funny ones thereafter. I'm talking about the Ofsted report into conditions in Birmingham state schools which has reported a series of attempts to Islamify education, together with a culture of fear, intimdation and bullying of staff.
Despite the seriousness of the Ofsted revelations there are laughs to be had, for as with so many of the most enjoyable political events the Trojan Horse row is embarrassing for all sides.
It's embarrassing for Ofsted because it beggars belief that schools which only a year ago they said were outstanding could have plummeted so rapidly in standard. Recent inspections have been made in the light of the - perhaps fake - Trojan Horse letter detailing an Islamic plot, and it looks suspiciously as it Ofsted haven't been looking for Islamification until now. In other words Ofsted, failing previously to do its job properly, has moved the goalposts. Sir Michael Wilshaw declined to take questions about his report yesterday, no doubt fearing that some of them might be awkward.
It's embarrassing for the Tories too, because the culture of autonomy, started under the Blair governments and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove, assumed that all the people running schools outside of local authority control would be fit to do so. Ofsted's report shows that it ain't necessarily so. Whither Academies and Free Schools now?
But most of all it's embarrassing for Labour and its supporters. Why? Well the most obvious thing about the Wilshaw report is that, apart from a few instances of anti-Christian assemblies being given by Al Qaeda sympathisers, it appears to have uncovered very little in the way of Islamic extremism. What's so particularly worrying about the situation Wilshaw details is that it appears to have arisen from from the application of basic run-of-the-mill Islamic principles - girls marginalised in learning, segregated classrooms, evolution dismissed, arts classes cancelled, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing abandoned. Whatever else this is, extremism it's not. It's just consistent with the way Islam thinks.
To be clear, I've written previously here that I don't blame the school governors for trying to Islamify their schools. If you have a democratic system of governor oversight, Muslims have as much right as anyone else to do the overseeing. Our outrage that these people should have the temerity to try and run schools their way is fake, and our surprise is jejeune. Who knew this could possibly happen? Who could possibly have thought that if you invited hundreds of thousands adherents of one of the world's great religions into a country whose culture still substantially derives from an earlier loyalty to a substantially different one, conflict might ensue?
A lot of people on the Left certainly didn't see it coming. All governments have presided over lax immigration rules (and lax enforcement of them), but the Labour party has long been immigration's champion. Britain's liberal ruling classes, cheered on by their friends in the media (and, it must be said, in the CBI), have for decades made reservations about immigration a taboo subject. Moreover, as David Goodhart's book The British Dream details, Labour governments and Labour local authorities have devoted much money, resources and intellectual capital to the idea that immigrants should retain their own identities rather than subsuming themselves in British culture. No doubt it seemed a good and respectful idea at the time. But as events in Birmingham demonstrate, there's a downside. That flapping sound you can hear emanating from the Midlands is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
I've written a lot here about racism and racist language. Although I'm a devotee of free speech in almost all circumstances, I concede that a country which has taken on a lot of people who look different needs to make a titanic effort to absorb them successfully. A curtailment of the right to be offensive is a price worth paying. You only have to look at the latte-shaded England football team to see the success of that assimilation project. But if it was worth criminalising white people resentful at seeing their towns transformed in a way they didn't like for the cause of long term unity, it surely must also be worth applying similarly draconian solutions to what is a much bigger problem.
Absorbing Afro-Caribbean immigrants was relatively easy. They came from a Christian or post-Christian culture which fitted pretty well with Britain in the late 20th century. Integrating people with a different culture altogether, with radically different views on the family, relations between men and women, the role of women in society, the right of girls to be educated (I could go on here), is going to be much harder. The place to start would seem to be in schools. With the young ones in fact.
Despite the seriousness of the Ofsted revelations there are laughs to be had, for as with so many of the most enjoyable political events the Trojan Horse row is embarrassing for all sides.
It's embarrassing for Ofsted because it beggars belief that schools which only a year ago they said were outstanding could have plummeted so rapidly in standard. Recent inspections have been made in the light of the - perhaps fake - Trojan Horse letter detailing an Islamic plot, and it looks suspiciously as it Ofsted haven't been looking for Islamification until now. In other words Ofsted, failing previously to do its job properly, has moved the goalposts. Sir Michael Wilshaw declined to take questions about his report yesterday, no doubt fearing that some of them might be awkward.
It's embarrassing for the Tories too, because the culture of autonomy, started under the Blair governments and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove, assumed that all the people running schools outside of local authority control would be fit to do so. Ofsted's report shows that it ain't necessarily so. Whither Academies and Free Schools now?
But most of all it's embarrassing for Labour and its supporters. Why? Well the most obvious thing about the Wilshaw report is that, apart from a few instances of anti-Christian assemblies being given by Al Qaeda sympathisers, it appears to have uncovered very little in the way of Islamic extremism. What's so particularly worrying about the situation Wilshaw details is that it appears to have arisen from from the application of basic run-of-the-mill Islamic principles - girls marginalised in learning, segregated classrooms, evolution dismissed, arts classes cancelled, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing abandoned. Whatever else this is, extremism it's not. It's just consistent with the way Islam thinks.
To be clear, I've written previously here that I don't blame the school governors for trying to Islamify their schools. If you have a democratic system of governor oversight, Muslims have as much right as anyone else to do the overseeing. Our outrage that these people should have the temerity to try and run schools their way is fake, and our surprise is jejeune. Who knew this could possibly happen? Who could possibly have thought that if you invited hundreds of thousands adherents of one of the world's great religions into a country whose culture still substantially derives from an earlier loyalty to a substantially different one, conflict might ensue?
A lot of people on the Left certainly didn't see it coming. All governments have presided over lax immigration rules (and lax enforcement of them), but the Labour party has long been immigration's champion. Britain's liberal ruling classes, cheered on by their friends in the media (and, it must be said, in the CBI), have for decades made reservations about immigration a taboo subject. Moreover, as David Goodhart's book The British Dream details, Labour governments and Labour local authorities have devoted much money, resources and intellectual capital to the idea that immigrants should retain their own identities rather than subsuming themselves in British culture. No doubt it seemed a good and respectful idea at the time. But as events in Birmingham demonstrate, there's a downside. That flapping sound you can hear emanating from the Midlands is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
I've written a lot here about racism and racist language. Although I'm a devotee of free speech in almost all circumstances, I concede that a country which has taken on a lot of people who look different needs to make a titanic effort to absorb them successfully. A curtailment of the right to be offensive is a price worth paying. You only have to look at the latte-shaded England football team to see the success of that assimilation project. But if it was worth criminalising white people resentful at seeing their towns transformed in a way they didn't like for the cause of long term unity, it surely must also be worth applying similarly draconian solutions to what is a much bigger problem.
Absorbing Afro-Caribbean immigrants was relatively easy. They came from a Christian or post-Christian culture which fitted pretty well with Britain in the late 20th century. Integrating people with a different culture altogether, with radically different views on the family, relations between men and women, the role of women in society, the right of girls to be educated (I could go on here), is going to be much harder. The place to start would seem to be in schools. With the young ones in fact.
Friday 6 June 2014
Jake Newsome - trolling Ann Maguire
A man has been jailed for six weeks for posting messages on Facebook about the Leeds teacher Ann Maguire, tragically murdered by a pupil.
The man, one Jake Newsome, wrote that he was "glad" Ms Maguire had been stabbed and "felt sorry" for the perpetrator, who should have "p****d on her too".
In my view people like Newsome are loathsome creeps. But should being a loathsome creep be a crime? If Newsome had made his unpleasant remarks to a friend in private, would this have been an offence? No. Neither would it have been if he had made them at, say, a debate about educational reform. If it isn't a crime to say these things, however unpleasant, why should it be a crime to write them on Facebook (or anywhere else)? Facebook is just a public conversation writ large. If Newsome had written them to a newspaper and the newspaper had been daft enough to publish them, would that have been a crime? No. Should it have been? I don't think so.
It's not clear from the news reports under which legislation Newsome was charged. An interesting criminal law blog suggests (here) that it could have been either the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003, but that in both cases the outcome would have been the same (it's worth reading the analysis and critique of the law on this site, which is one of the only places I've been able to find where the writers seem at all bothered about the way the CPS is applying these laws).
But the relevant provisions of both these Acts were set up essentially to make life difficult for stalkers and emissaries of abusive letters. The 2003 Act was legislated (and the 1988 Act amended in 2001) by the last Labour government to recognise that the advent of the internet required that the wording of the existing hate mail legislation be reworded. Did Labour intend that people like Mr Newsome should clog up the courts and be criminalised for saying things that lots of us find offensive? Probably not, but in a way it doesn't matter because that's what's actually happening. And I find it very disquieting, because what's offensive is a matter of opinion. Who is to say that my opinion matters more than yours, or the other way round?
These laws fail one of the most basic tests of legislation, which is that we know what it means. I have no idea what sort of conduct will and won't attract the attention of the CPS, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think anyone knows what is the definition of offensive. Being prosecuted (or not being prosecuted) depends essentially on the CPS's whim. If you read the blog on the link above you'll see that there's some discussion about whether the CPS obeyed its own guidelines on whether to prosecute. The writers conclude that it probably didn't, but in a way that's not the most important thing. Of much more significance is the idea that the CPS can prosecute you, if it feels like it, for a crime no-one can properly define. What would Orwell have thought of this? Not much, one feels.
What Newsome wrote was horrible. But not as horrible as prosecuting him for it. One is a transgression of manners and taste. The other is a transgression of freedom of speech.
The man, one Jake Newsome, wrote that he was "glad" Ms Maguire had been stabbed and "felt sorry" for the perpetrator, who should have "p****d on her too".
In my view people like Newsome are loathsome creeps. But should being a loathsome creep be a crime? If Newsome had made his unpleasant remarks to a friend in private, would this have been an offence? No. Neither would it have been if he had made them at, say, a debate about educational reform. If it isn't a crime to say these things, however unpleasant, why should it be a crime to write them on Facebook (or anywhere else)? Facebook is just a public conversation writ large. If Newsome had written them to a newspaper and the newspaper had been daft enough to publish them, would that have been a crime? No. Should it have been? I don't think so.
It's not clear from the news reports under which legislation Newsome was charged. An interesting criminal law blog suggests (here) that it could have been either the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003, but that in both cases the outcome would have been the same (it's worth reading the analysis and critique of the law on this site, which is one of the only places I've been able to find where the writers seem at all bothered about the way the CPS is applying these laws).
But the relevant provisions of both these Acts were set up essentially to make life difficult for stalkers and emissaries of abusive letters. The 2003 Act was legislated (and the 1988 Act amended in 2001) by the last Labour government to recognise that the advent of the internet required that the wording of the existing hate mail legislation be reworded. Did Labour intend that people like Mr Newsome should clog up the courts and be criminalised for saying things that lots of us find offensive? Probably not, but in a way it doesn't matter because that's what's actually happening. And I find it very disquieting, because what's offensive is a matter of opinion. Who is to say that my opinion matters more than yours, or the other way round?
These laws fail one of the most basic tests of legislation, which is that we know what it means. I have no idea what sort of conduct will and won't attract the attention of the CPS, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think anyone knows what is the definition of offensive. Being prosecuted (or not being prosecuted) depends essentially on the CPS's whim. If you read the blog on the link above you'll see that there's some discussion about whether the CPS obeyed its own guidelines on whether to prosecute. The writers conclude that it probably didn't, but in a way that's not the most important thing. Of much more significance is the idea that the CPS can prosecute you, if it feels like it, for a crime no-one can properly define. What would Orwell have thought of this? Not much, one feels.
What Newsome wrote was horrible. But not as horrible as prosecuting him for it. One is a transgression of manners and taste. The other is a transgression of freedom of speech.
Thursday 5 June 2014
Borrowing from the future
"What happened to the world my generation built?", asks the dramatic headline in today's Graun. The article, by one Harry Leslie Smith aged 91, recounts in harrowing detail the privations of poor people before the advent of the welfare state. Mr Smith fears that we are returning to the era of his childhood.
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
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