A Muslim woman from East London, Rebekah Dawson, has been charged with intimidating a witness. Should she be allowed to wear the full-face niqab in Court?
Personally I don't support the outright ban the French brought in a couple of years ago. It seems unnecessarily restrictive. But self-evidently it's harder to communicate with someone whose face you can't see, and it's not hard to think of contexts where this might prevent proper functioning of civil society or commerce.
It's also not hard to think of contexts in which a young girl might be forced to wear a niqab. By her parents, for example.
If Ms Dawson wears the niqab in the witness box, she will effectively be giving evidence from behind a screen. We allow witnesses to do this where national security is apparently at stake, but not defendants (It's curious how Ms Dawson has had the support of Liberty, the civil rights pressure group, who are not on the whole well disposed to secret agents giving evidence in private). Of course, a Defendant can decline to give evidence at all, and if so the Judge can invite the jury to draw inferences from that failure. A Defendant could also (in my day - it's a long time since I was a criminal lawyer), draft a statement with his brief in a police station, give no interview and subsequently no evidence in Court. Again, inferences could be drawn.
If you were starting from scratch you might say that a Defendant should be allowed to wear the niqab, but that inferences could be drawn from her desire to keep her face out of the jury's sight. Because undoubtedly we communicate with our faces as well as our words. It doesn't seem unreasonable to say that the jury should be entitled to see how the evidence is given as well as hear the words themselves; after all, being in the grasp of the criminal process already puts constraints on so many aspects of a person's liberty. So removal of the niqab is not a qualitative shift in the Defendant's position vis a vis the state.
The Judge in Ms Dawson's case has ruled that she can wear it in court, but not when she gives evidence. A very British compromise. But while our willingness to meet other people half way is one of the most characteristic and attractive things about our culture, it can also be a weakness. Some of the people we are compromising with have a very much sharper and less forgiving attitude.
Tuesday 17 September 2013
Monday 16 September 2013
Living standards and economic growth
I am having a wrangle with a friend at the moment about who will win the next election. He thinks the Tories will scrape home, whereas I think the combination of UKIP's rise and the Lib Dems' scuppering of boundary reform will do the same for Labour. We agree that one of Labour's difficulties lies in presenting a coherent argument about the economy, but whereas he says Labour is thinking hard about how to get better public services for the same money, I think that's not enough - they should be looking to get better services for less money: after all we know we can't afford current spending, so whoever wins in 2015 will have to make cuts.
My friend is a Labour insider, and I think his slip is revealing, because it seems to show that even in its most intelligent core the party has not come to terms with the financial crisis. You can see this in all its utterances about the economy, but most recently with its change of tack on growth. First Miliband and Balls said austerity would prevent growth; when that turned out not to be true they said it was the wrong kind of growth; now the mantra seems to be that growth may be back, but living standards are still falling.
There are two assumptions here, namely that rising living standards are our due, and that they are unequivocally a good thing. Neither assumption bears examination. Leaving aside the environmentalist point that rising living standards are destroying the planet, higher wages for some mean fewer jobs for all. In the private sector, higher wages increase a company's cost base and erode its competitiveness. In the public sector, higher wages for dustmen, for example, mean less money to spend on education.
But its worse than that. High wages were what got us into this mess in the first place.
Britain became prosperous because 150 years ago we made things and sold them to the rest of the world. Then we sold the machines for making things abroad and discovered to our horror that foreigners could make them cheaper - and often better - than we did, because wages and living standards were lower in the Far East. Then to make up the income gap we borrowed money to keep our economies going. Then when that got harder and harder, our banks devised all sorts of ingenious products to enable risk to be spread, so that loans could be made to people who might well not be able to pay them back. Then when it turned out that quite a lot of people couldn't pay them back, no-one knew exactly which banks were exposed to default. Inter-bank lending dried up. Hence the 2008 crash.
The bankers may have been repellent, but they got rich on the proceeds of lending to westerners who were greedy for credit.
Viewed in this context, it was the expectation of high wages and high living standards which led to the erosion of manufacturing capacity and hence to the debt ridden mire in which we're currently floundering. If you are a person who has had no pay rise for the last five years, that is not much fun. But our best hope may be that our living standards drift downwards while those in the Far East drift upwards. It would be fairer, and it would give more people jobs in the West.
Higher wages are the last thing Britain needs. There is a curious delusion that cuts across party lines to the effect that in this country we are somehow entitled to affluence. We aren't. We can only justify affluence - and the Social Democratic public spending that affluence might make affordable - by making things or providing services that other countries want to buy. Higher wages just make that happy position harder to achieve.
My friend is a Labour insider, and I think his slip is revealing, because it seems to show that even in its most intelligent core the party has not come to terms with the financial crisis. You can see this in all its utterances about the economy, but most recently with its change of tack on growth. First Miliband and Balls said austerity would prevent growth; when that turned out not to be true they said it was the wrong kind of growth; now the mantra seems to be that growth may be back, but living standards are still falling.
There are two assumptions here, namely that rising living standards are our due, and that they are unequivocally a good thing. Neither assumption bears examination. Leaving aside the environmentalist point that rising living standards are destroying the planet, higher wages for some mean fewer jobs for all. In the private sector, higher wages increase a company's cost base and erode its competitiveness. In the public sector, higher wages for dustmen, for example, mean less money to spend on education.
But its worse than that. High wages were what got us into this mess in the first place.
Britain became prosperous because 150 years ago we made things and sold them to the rest of the world. Then we sold the machines for making things abroad and discovered to our horror that foreigners could make them cheaper - and often better - than we did, because wages and living standards were lower in the Far East. Then to make up the income gap we borrowed money to keep our economies going. Then when that got harder and harder, our banks devised all sorts of ingenious products to enable risk to be spread, so that loans could be made to people who might well not be able to pay them back. Then when it turned out that quite a lot of people couldn't pay them back, no-one knew exactly which banks were exposed to default. Inter-bank lending dried up. Hence the 2008 crash.
The bankers may have been repellent, but they got rich on the proceeds of lending to westerners who were greedy for credit.
Viewed in this context, it was the expectation of high wages and high living standards which led to the erosion of manufacturing capacity and hence to the debt ridden mire in which we're currently floundering. If you are a person who has had no pay rise for the last five years, that is not much fun. But our best hope may be that our living standards drift downwards while those in the Far East drift upwards. It would be fairer, and it would give more people jobs in the West.
Higher wages are the last thing Britain needs. There is a curious delusion that cuts across party lines to the effect that in this country we are somehow entitled to affluence. We aren't. We can only justify affluence - and the Social Democratic public spending that affluence might make affordable - by making things or providing services that other countries want to buy. Higher wages just make that happy position harder to achieve.
Thursday 12 September 2013
Britain without the BBC
It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust.
The Corporation quite often does this sort of thing. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to the conclusion that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It thus cost £175,000 to find out something anyone with two eyes and ears could have told them for nothing.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money overpaying departing staff? Answer, it wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. Across the Corporation more lowly staff must be reduced to scratching their heads, having of course torn all their hair out over the last few weeks.
Meanwhile the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down with its nest-feathering profligacy, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud.
I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
The Corporation quite often does this sort of thing. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to the conclusion that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It thus cost £175,000 to find out something anyone with two eyes and ears could have told them for nothing.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money overpaying departing staff? Answer, it wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. Across the Corporation more lowly staff must be reduced to scratching their heads, having of course torn all their hair out over the last few weeks.
I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
Tuesday 10 September 2013
General Patten and the BBC mutiny
That luminary of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, has apparently described the appearance of former and current BBC bosses before the committee as "an unedifying experience". In the dispute about whether severance payments were necessary, and whether the BBC Trust knew about them or not - Mark Thompson says they did, Lord Patten says they didn't - it seems to be common ground that in the period 2009 to 2012 the BBC paid out £3 million to departing senior staff that contractually it didn't have to. In anyone's terms this is a disgrace.
The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay). If you want to own a TV you have to fork out. Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services? Not in a million years.
Senior BBC executives are paid too much. Mark Thompson was paid £460,000. The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate. Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.
The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly. The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us. How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?
The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire. Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.
BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust. People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments? Bound to get into the papers, old boy.
What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.
There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.
What lessons to learn from this?
One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly. Ofcom anyone?
Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.
P.S. It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust. The Corporation quite often does this. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money? It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud. I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay). If you want to own a TV you have to fork out. Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services? Not in a million years.
Senior BBC executives are paid too much. Mark Thompson was paid £460,000. The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate. Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.
The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly. The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us. How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?
The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire. Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.
BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust. People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments? Bound to get into the papers, old boy.
What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.
There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.
What lessons to learn from this?
One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly. Ofcom anyone?
Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.
P.S. It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust. The Corporation quite often does this. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money? It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud. I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
Friday 6 September 2013
Why I love . . . #9 Prefab Sprout
Please may I introduce you to Simpson's Coefficient, a new concept which measures the relationship between the quality of a band's music and the coolness of their name. A low reading is obtained by having a cool name (Queens of the Stone Age, for example) and terrible music (Queens of the Stone Age again), whereas the highest reading so far recorded has been for the band with the worst name of all but the most heavenly music. Step forward Prefab Sprout.
In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red. The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers. Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down.
Things then went rather badly wrong. Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.
I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect. To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable. His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd. "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss" (I Never Play Basketball Now).
But also humour. Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".
Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".
The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").
And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold. Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.
I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade. Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind. But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself. As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis. Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.
But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?
In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red. The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers. Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down.
Things then went rather badly wrong. Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.
I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect. To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable. His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd. "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss" (I Never Play Basketball Now).
But also humour. Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".
Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".
The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").
And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold. Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.
I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade. Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind. But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself. As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis. Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.
But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?
Wednesday 4 September 2013
Vasily Petrenko and the wally on the box
The RLPO conductor, showing a lack of awareness of the consequences of speaking his mind which almost rivals my own, has given us the benefit of his thoughts on women conductors. They are, apparently, distracting to red-blooded men.
The holes in Vasily Petrenko's argument are immediately obvious. One, orchestras are extensively populated by women these days. Two, gay men are probably over-represented in orchestras in comparison to their distribution amongst the population at large. Are they not just as likely to be distracted by a handsome man? Three, what makes Petrenko think the players look at the conductor anyway? Stories are legion about the musicians who didn't notice who the conductor was. I once asked a gnarled ex-pro what it was like to work for a legendary late 20th century great. "Oh he didn't give us too much trouble", was the response. That pretty much sums it up.
Personally I have played for and watched a number of women conductors. Marin Alsop is very impressive. Others less so. But that goes for men as well. For every Mark Elder, there are a dozen, puffed up, vain, grandstanding hacks. No wonder the players concentrate on listening to each other instead of watching the wally on the box.
The holes in Vasily Petrenko's argument are immediately obvious. One, orchestras are extensively populated by women these days. Two, gay men are probably over-represented in orchestras in comparison to their distribution amongst the population at large. Are they not just as likely to be distracted by a handsome man? Three, what makes Petrenko think the players look at the conductor anyway? Stories are legion about the musicians who didn't notice who the conductor was. I once asked a gnarled ex-pro what it was like to work for a legendary late 20th century great. "Oh he didn't give us too much trouble", was the response. That pretty much sums it up.
Personally I have played for and watched a number of women conductors. Marin Alsop is very impressive. Others less so. But that goes for men as well. For every Mark Elder, there are a dozen, puffed up, vain, grandstanding hacks. No wonder the players concentrate on listening to each other instead of watching the wally on the box.
Tuesday 3 September 2013
The one about George Monbiot and the sheep
The always interesting (and never more so than when he is admitting he got something wrong) George Monbiot writes in the Graun this morning attacking the National Trust's attempt to get the Lake District listed as a World Heritage Site. Far from being beautiful, Monbiot sees it "as one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe", bemoaning the extent to which sheepfarming has stripped the landscape of its trees and flowers, denuding the landscape and wrecking habitats. "You'll see more wildlife in Birmingham", he concludes.
Notwithstanding the fact that last week in the Lake District I saw buzzards, a peregrine, dippers, linnets and stood in a river to find an otter looking quizzically up at me from a distance of about ten feet, I have some sympathy with Monbiot's view. The hills beloved of Wordsworth and Wainwright would originally have been far more forested, and had much more wildlife. I believe that Scafell means "bald mountain" in Norse, which rather suggests that the other hills were more hirsute.
How recent is their denudation? The many dozens of hut circles on the moor near our family house suggest that the area has sustained a human population for at least three or four thousand years. It is suggested that the occupants were forced to move on because their forest clearances destroyed game habitats, so the problems of sustainability are nothing new.
I don't find the Lake District depressing. First, although he's right about the mountains, the valleys are much more wooded than Monbiot suggests. Secondly, the beauty of the country lies partly in the evidence of its human occupation. It's not just the green patchwork fields and the way in which the buildings huddle into the landscape. Those buildings, made from the same stones that outcrop around and about, were devised and built by people whose instinctive feel for what would be appropriate and practical just happened to result in some of the most beautiful human settlements ever made. Architects please note.
Actually, the remarks Monbiot makes about the Lakes and sheep farming are much truer of Scotland and red deer. But that's another post. In the face of the ruination of most of the rest of Britain, the Lake District offers a vision of how man can live in harmony with the environment which is deceptive and imperfect, but it may be about the least worst we've got.
Notwithstanding the fact that last week in the Lake District I saw buzzards, a peregrine, dippers, linnets and stood in a river to find an otter looking quizzically up at me from a distance of about ten feet, I have some sympathy with Monbiot's view. The hills beloved of Wordsworth and Wainwright would originally have been far more forested, and had much more wildlife. I believe that Scafell means "bald mountain" in Norse, which rather suggests that the other hills were more hirsute.
How recent is their denudation? The many dozens of hut circles on the moor near our family house suggest that the area has sustained a human population for at least three or four thousand years. It is suggested that the occupants were forced to move on because their forest clearances destroyed game habitats, so the problems of sustainability are nothing new.
I don't find the Lake District depressing. First, although he's right about the mountains, the valleys are much more wooded than Monbiot suggests. Secondly, the beauty of the country lies partly in the evidence of its human occupation. It's not just the green patchwork fields and the way in which the buildings huddle into the landscape. Those buildings, made from the same stones that outcrop around and about, were devised and built by people whose instinctive feel for what would be appropriate and practical just happened to result in some of the most beautiful human settlements ever made. Architects please note.
Actually, the remarks Monbiot makes about the Lakes and sheep farming are much truer of Scotland and red deer. But that's another post. In the face of the ruination of most of the rest of Britain, the Lake District offers a vision of how man can live in harmony with the environment which is deceptive and imperfect, but it may be about the least worst we've got.
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