The demise of blue plaques: it’s not about just bricks and mortar
There will be no blue plaque affixed to the façade of the London house in which Jacqueline du Pre lived. Memorial plaques are scrapped by the organisers, English Heritage, because public spending cuts have slashed their budget from £130m to £92m. Given that each plaque costs an average of £965 to install this is a banal and pettifogging economy.
Blue plaques humanise the largely anonymous buildings of the capital, inspiring Londoners and visitors alike. They remind us of the difference individuals can make in history. And they are a salutary prompt to us to pause from in our busyness and reflect on the weight the past brings to bear upon our flimsy present.
Just 869 of the blue-glazed clay plaques have been erected since the first marking the birthplace of Lord Byron in 1867. The slow procession of personal greatness since then has continued uninterrupted, save in time of war, through far more austere economic times than this. It would be an unnecessary blow to our collective morale if some way could not be found to keep the scheme alive.
FollowThe case for an independent Falklands
At the time of the Falklands War a brilliant cartoon by the Peter Brookes transformed the outline of the islands into the tattered remnants of a war-torn Union Jack. The image sprang vividly to mind 30 years on when I saw the president of Argentina, , brandishing a metal plaque depicting the disputed Malvinas archipelago and demanding their “return” to South American rule.
The power of Brookes’ masterful drawing lay in its ambiguity. His bullet-riddled flag could be an image of plucky defiance but also of imperial collapse. Three decades later those islands are still a blank canvass on which any image of bellicose nationalism or high-minded sovereignty may be superimposed.
History repeats itself, Marx famously said, but the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. This time the fighting, which took 900 lives in 1982, has been confined to the advertising columns of British and Argentinean newspapers. Kirchner, the current occupant of the Casa Rosada once home to a military junta responsible for the torture and murder of more than 9,000 political dissidents as well as the Invasion of the Falklands, took an ad in The Independent and Guardian on the anniversary of what she described as 180 years of illegal rule. Britain’s response to Kirchner’s indignation – out-sourced to that bastion of diplomacy, The Sun newspaper – was an ad in the English-language Buenos Aires Herald demanding the Argies get their “HANDS OFF” our islands.
While it is good to see the Argentinean government supporting the UK newspaper industry, and far preferable for The Sun to want to fight them on the advertising pitches rather than on the South Atlantic beaches, there was something self-serving about the selection of facts by both sides.
Kirchner was wrong to say Argentina was “forcibly stripped of the Malvinas… in a blatant exercise of 19th century colonialism”. Colonisation involves the repression or exploitation of indigenous peoples, as the Argentine military did in clearing their plains and pampas. But the Falklands which Britain annexed were, as Dr Johnson noted in 1771, “thrown aside from human use” a place “not even southern savages have dignified with habitation”. Kirchner’s ad was a catalogue of half-facts which even got wrong the distance between the Falklands and the UK.
The Sun was right to point out that British sovereignty of the islands stretches back before the Republic of Argentina even existed. But, overstating and over-simplifying as is its forte, it relied on arguments about self-determination which successive British prime ministers have studiously ignored elsewhere – as with the people of the Chagos Islands whom Britain evicted just four decades ago to allow the US to build a military base on Diego Garcia. Still, it gives the lie to the old gag that The Sun doesn’t care who runs the country so long as she’s got big tits. Mrs Kirchner’s “Hands off my Malvinas” appears not to have featured on Page Three.
There is nothing wrong with the basic ideal that people who are comparatively well-off should not require state benefits. Those earning more than £60,000 do not need winter fuel allowances or free pensioner bus passes. Nor do the need child benefit, and under new rules from today they will no longer be eligible for a payment of £20.30 a week for their first child as before. The change should save the public purse £1.5bn a year.
But good ideas do not always work in practice. Because tax is determined on an individual’s earnings, while benefits are fixed according to the income of a household, the new measure is throwing up a range of anomalies and administrative complexities. The most absurd of these is that a single-earner family with an income of £51,000 will lose money whereas a couple who both earn £49,000 will not.
That is not all. For some families with three children because child benefit is tax-free the change will be the equivalent of a £4,000 salary cut. Others will face marginal income tax rates as high as 65 per cent creating an incentive to work less and producing “incoherence in the welfare system”, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The changes will create potential difficulties for cohabiting or estranged couples, creating a potential “marriage penalty”. The requirement for couples to disclose their earnings to one another runs counter to the general principle of taxpayer confidentiality and the policy of separate taxation of married couples.
Around 1.2 million families will be affected by the new system, yet only 200,000 have opted out of receiving the benefit. That means that up to a million people currently on PAYE will at the end of the year be forced into the complexities of the self-assessment tax system under which excess child benefit will be clawed back.
David Cameron has insisted that 85 per cent of families will be unaffected by the new system. But the sense of manifestly unfairness and costly inefficiency created by the way the changes have been devised mean that this badly thought-through policy will have to be revised.
“Chronically under-reported” was the phrase used by the poet Benjamin Zephaniah when he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme at the start of the week. He was talking about the phenomenon of the number of people who die in police custody. It was hard to disagree with his verdict when one of the programme’s reporters disclosed that 953 people have died in this way in England and Wales since 1990.
It was such a shocking figure I went online to check. It turns out it may be a conservative figure. The Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody has suggested that 5,998 deaths were recorded for the 11 years from 2000 to 2010. There is some controversy about their figure – and to what extent they died because of the physical restraint methods used by the police. But this is clearly an issue of such proportions that it is surprising we hear so little in the media about it.
One explanation may be that a large proportion of those who die have mental health problems. Today suggested that almost half of those who died last year were in this category; the independent panel suggests the proportion is as high as 92 per cent. Either way mental health is one of the areas which the modern media fastidiously ignore – which is why it took an outsider like a poet to place it so high on the news agenda.
Many media outlets now go in for occasional guest editors. It is a welcome development. They bring with them a different perspective on reality. The picture of the world portrayed by the media is much more peculiar than is generally appreciated. Most of us accept that worldview uncritically, except on those few occasions when journalists write about something which touches us personally. Then we realise how far their truth is from ours.
But news is a shifting landscape anyway. One of the Today presenters, Evan Davies, twittered over Christmas that he was grateful for another of the programme’s guest editors because, without his input, there was only enough real news around to fill about 15 per cent of the new show’s three hour slot. When there are not big events smaller ones must be pressed in to fill the space. You may have wondered why there seem to be more people killed on the roads at Christmas, according to the bulletins. But the personal tragedy of people dying on the roads sadly occurs all the year round without making it onto the news. It is just that when there is no other news around these accidents are elevated in status.
Where there’s hope – life after terror
It would be nice if there was a happy ending to every story we have to tell in our Christmas Appeal for the work of the children’s charity Unicef in the rescue and rehabilitation of boy soldiers and girl sex slaves from armed militias in Africa. But real life is not always like that.
Take the case of the girl who is, perhaps ironically, called Hope. When Unicef allows journalists access to rescued children it always gives them pseudonyms. That is because fitting them back into family and village life can be hard because many of the children were forced by marauding gunmen to commit atrocities in the places from which they were seized – either that or be killed themselves. It is best, on their return, if the full horror of their stories is not associated with rescued individuals.
Hope was just 11 years old when she was seized by drug-crazed gunmen from the quasi-religious Lord’s Resistance Army which rampages across the central of Africa from South Sudan to the Central African Republic – which is where Independent reader’s donations are currently funding the work of child rescue.
Some 64 children saved from rebel warlords are currently being cared for by Unicef in the CAR capital, Bangui. But it was from a village in South Sudan that Hope was abducted. “I cried for so long when my little girl was abducted,” her mother Mary said. Neighbours tried to console her and told her to pray, but there was nothing that would help.
Then one day Mary was listening to the radio and heard her little girl’s name being announced – FM radio announcements are one of the ways in which Unicef and its partners help reunite rescued child soldiers with their families. This was the last thing Mary had been expecting. Hope had been gone two long years and her mother feared that she would never see the child ever again.
Early the next morning the whole family gathered and went to the transit camp mentioned on the radio. But Hope was not at the transition centre. She had been shot in the leg during a gun battle with government troops, who eventually rescued her, and was now recovering in hospital.
More Al Jazeera is good for the US
Nobody should imagine that it is about to provide a countervailing voice of the same weight as Rupert Murdoch’s vehemently right-wing US cable channel Fox News, but the increased penetration of Al-Jazeera into the United States is a salutary development.
The Pan-Arab news channel, which is owned by the Qatar royal family, is now available in 260m homes in 130 countries but its availability in the US has been limited, thanks largely to an aggressive hostility to the channel by the American establishment. But Al-Jazeera has just bought Current TV, the ailing channel founded by the former US vice-president Al Gore, which will boost its reach ninefold to about 40 million US homes.
Current was founded as a pioneering attempt to promote user-generated television but it ended up a liberal-left political talk station whose values are very much a match for Al-Jazeera. They share, in Al Gore’s words, a mission “to give voice to those who are not typically heard… to speak truth to power… and to tell the stories that no one else is telling”.
It will be an uphill struggle. Within hours of the deal being announced America’s second-largest TV operator, Time Warner Cable, dropped Current TV from its list of channels presumably because many Americans insist al-Jazeera is a pro-Islamist “terrorist network” in cahoots with al-Qaeda.
It is precisely because of such blinkered and small-minded attitudes that al-Jazeera’s alternative voice must be heard beyond the metropolitan New York and Washing areas it currently reaches. Not all of its stances may be agreeable but the station has won serious respect in a short time winning two major US journalism awards in 2012. Some 40 percent of viewing traffic on Al-Jazeera English’s website comes from the US. Its voice should be heard with increasing volume as it double the number of US news bureaux it staffs. Providing a far wider range of independent and diverse points of view is a healthy increase in plurality which can only be good for a country which prides itself on being the land of the free.
Can these men restore trust in our public institutions?
Pie crust promises, my Mum used to call them. Easily made and easily broken. I’m not so sure about easily made; my hands are apparently too hot for pastry. But my Mum could knock up fabulous short crust in minutes. So the analogy made perfect sense to her. She would use it about New Year’s Resolutions.
Tomorrow is the day for them and, let’s face it, there’s a lot around that is in serious need of resolving. The Olympics and the Jubilee gave a glowing veneer to what would otherwise have been a rather grim omnishambles year with a double dip recession, a deepening eurozone crisis and a hose-pipe ban that somehow transformed itself into the wettest year on record. Now the new year offers the prospect of more job insecurity, longer hours, overstressed colleagues and pay that lags behind inflation – for those lucky enough to remain in work.
And that’s just the economy. In public life we are surrounded by once-respected institutions – parliament, police, paymasters, priests and press – in which trust has taken a battering. Then there is abroad: will 2013 be the year when Iran passes the point of no return in their drive for a nuclear bomb, will the United States fall off the fiscal cliff, will the sun continue to rise in the East (where 13 is not an unlucky number) even as it sets here in the West? Will we frack our landscape into seismic shock or water-table pollution? Will the world continue to sleepwalk into the four degree temperature rise which will make global warming irreversible? Or can a few good New Year’s Resolutions sort all this out?
Perhaps we should not be so pessimistic. After all, history builds nodal points into the affairs of humankind which offer the prospect of change. Within a few short months we will have a new Governor of the Bank of England, a new Director General of the BBC, a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Maybe between them they can usher in simultaneous economic, cultural and spiritual renewal.
“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” Brecht had his Galileo idealistically say. But this disconsolate country could do with more than one. We should not have unrealistic hopes. But Mark Carney the new man at the helm of both monetary policy and financial regulation has a good track record as head of Canada’s admittedly smaller central bank.
Tony Hall comes to the BBC with not just a solid journalistic reputation but having now sorted out the financial, artistic and political mess at the Royal Opera House and found clever high-tech ways of making its work more accessible by beaming its productions live to cinemas around the country. And Justin Welby, a former oil executive turned priest, will arrive as the new Cantuar with useful experience of managing complex processes and organisations which should come in handy in a bitterly-divided church which has lost much moral authority in speaking to the rest of society.
The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents
It makes it more poignant that this has happened at Christmas, a radio reporter said to one of the parents at the school in America where 20 infants and six adults were killed by a gunman last week. As banal remarks go, it outstripped the usual “so how do you feel” question to the unhappy individuals in the vortex of the latest media tornado. It betrays, of course, something of the sentimental contemporary view of Christmas which routinely forgets that the child in the manager is born to be crucified. The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents is neatly elided in the secular calendar between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. But the remark speaks of something more disquieting.
Perhaps I am out on a limb here but I felt a curious sense of unease at the blanket media coverage of the events. There has been a melodrama about much of the writing which is otiose in a situation where the events are dramatic enough without prurient adornment. It feels at times like a self-indulgent peddling in a grief which is too profound for casual journalism to fathom.
That kind of writing might be excusable in the United States where heart-breaking detail might in some way influence the debate on the politics of gun control. But what we write and read here will change nothing, just as the previous litany of names like Columbine, Virginia Tech and the Batman shooting at Aurora changed nothing. They are just the mass shootings we remember – there were 13 other such attacks in 2012 alone according to the Washington Post. Each produces the same howls of outrage and the same futile round of arguments as the previous massacre.
In America the House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican party deeply in hock to the National Rifle Association which vehemently opposes bans on guns with arguments about how this is “more of a mental health problem than a gun control problem”. Many Democrat politicians, fearful the NRA could oust them, acquiesce. What makes things even more complex is that most gun legislation is set by states rather than the federal government – and gun shows and the internet are exempt from regulation. Britons railing against this, forgetting Dunblane and Hungerford, do little more than insist we are rationally and morally superior to our purblind American cousins.
When a licence to kill is not some James Bond fiction
Whenever a new James Bond film hits the screens an expert is wheeled out to opine that 007’s infamous “licence to kill” is as fictional as the secret agent himself. You could be forgiven for believing otherwise. A licence to kill, and another to torture, and another lie and dissemble, seems to come with the job.
The murder of a prominent human rights lawyer in Belfast involved the collusion of the British state, a report by a former war crimes prosecutor has just concluded, a full three decades after the event. Next it was announced in the High Court that the Government was to pay over £2m to the family of a Libyan dissident who was abducted with the help of the British secret service and flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by Colonel Gaddafi’s secret police. The British government admitted no legal liability but the huge payment spoke for itself.
So that’s all right then. We’ve paid a whacking settlement to Sami al-Saadi and owned up over the murder for Pat Finucane. Yet this is one very British stitch-up after another. The Hillsborough police cover-up and Jimmy Savile scandals have also shown how institutions close ranks rather than root out bad behaviour from their midst. At the heart of British public life there so often seems to lurk something secret, unaccountable and apparently irreformable.
The classic defence for all this is “a few bad apples” low down in the blame chain. But collusion in Ulster was widespread. And British involvement what the Americans euphemise as “extraordinary rendition” – flying people off to foreign lands where they can be tortured out of sight of the West’s delicate sensibilities – goes to the highest levels of MI6. Perhaps higher.
One moment summed up for me the long and labyrinthine saga that was Leveson. Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, appeared on the Today programme the morning after the mammoth inquiry issued its report into the ethics of the press – and its dubious relationships with both police and politicians.
Only minutes before she appeared, the programme had interviewed one of most grievous victims of the intrusion, mendacity and casual malice of the press, Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine vanished in Portugal in 2007. McCann, with his wife Kate, have had to put up with five years of innuendo insinuating that the parents killed the little girl.
The McCanns, who have conducted themselves with a tortured dignity as they coped with the open-ended horror of their daughter having disappeared, had given evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the press. At the end they had felt that the judge’s report did not go far enough – they wanted “a properly independent [statutory] regulation of the press” – but, Gerry McCann told Radio 4 listeners, they were prepared to welcome the Leveson recommendations so long as they were implemented in full.
Immediately afterwards the Tory Culture Secretary came onto the same programme and twisted the words of Madeleine’s father within minutes of him delivering them. Ms Miller claimed that self-regulation by the press was what the McCanns wanted to see – despite the fact that Gerry McCann had just said the exact opposite.
There is nothing so deceitful as the human heart, said Jeremiah, though since I am a journalist you had better go check the exact quote yourself (17:9). Deception, duplicity and self-delusion have been threads woven continuously through the Leveson fabric. They have characterised the testimony of press barons, tabloid hacks and politicians right up to the Prime Minister.
David Cameron ducked and weaved throughout the entire process. He original set up the inquiry to divert attention from the row over his decision to employ as his chief spin doctor a former News International executive implicated in the phone-hacking scandal.
When it became clear, as the inquiry proceeded, that Leveson had statutory measures in mind the PM loosed his vocrabulous attack dog, Michael Gove, to undermine the process. When that failed to win public sympathy Mr Cameron told the inquiry it should be about protecting “the people who’ve been… thrown to the wolves by this process”. It would only be adjudged a success if it passed what he called “the victim test”.
The thing we don’t like to think about with child soldiers
I am about to make a statement of the blindingly obvious – so obvious that, paradoxically, you need to stop and think deeply about it for a moment. The thing it is most difficult to get your head round about child soldiers is the fact that they are literally two things – children and soldiers. Most of us cannot cope with those two facts simultaneously. In thinking about them we switch from one notion to the other.
Nothing quite helps with the psychological process of assimilating that dual reality as looking at pictures drawn by children who have been rescued from combat. In today’s Independent Saturday magazine we print a selection of them together with a perceptive commentary by Dr Rachel Calam, who is Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the University of Manchester who first began training the psychologists who rehabilitate such children in Uganda a decade ago.
The Independent’s Christmas Appeal this year is asking readers to donate to the work of Unicef which is running a major programme to negotiate with rebel factions for the release of such children in the Central African Republic. The charity runs transit centres where children who have been released are given psychological help, put back into school and then given vocational training. It reunites them with their families or resettles them with foster carers. To do the work Unicef relies entirely on donations from the general public.
Nothing quite brings home the fact that these soldiers are children as the drawings they do. In some ways they are like the make-believe artwork of all boys – stick men, pointing guns, with dashed lines for bullets tracking from their barrels. But here there is also the blood and the bodies – and the knowledge that these are not the fantasies of play by which children explore the world and learn in an environment free of consequences.
Here the consequences are real and all too grim. These children have witnessed killing. Some have even killed themselves, after being brutalised by the rebel armies’ training programmes which force their hapless recruits to kill other children or even their own parents.
These drawings are the dark obverse of what Wordsworth called emotion recollected in tranquillity. They are attempts by the children to process, control or come to terms with the terrible things that have happened to them, Professor Calam says in the magazine.
To launch an appeal for child soldiers is, The Independent knows, a bold thing to do. Fundraisers have told us that the public does not give so readily for such a cause in the way that they do in response to more straightforward humanitarian plights like those of children starving in a famine. The child soldier raises all manner of myths and intuitive prejudices.
“You cannot recapture a lost childhood, for the innocence has gone,” says Rachel Calam. “But you can offer a stable and secure background in which these children can experience kindness as the norm rather than violence and aggression.” It is the start of a long slow process of rebuilding to a normality that the rest of us take for granted.
Children who have had their innocence stolen from them are some of the most damaged children in the world. They need our help perhaps even more than many others. Please give generously.
To donate please visit the campaign homepage at Independent Voices ind.pn/childsoldiers or ring 0800 037 9797. Money raised will help fund Unicef’s work with former child soldiers in Central Africa Republic
Drawings from a place we can only imagine in our worst nightmares
Anyone who has been stopped by a small teenager with a big gun at a roadblock in Africa will tell you that it is all too easy to forget that the person in front of you – often wildly pop-eyed with drugs – is a child. But take the gun away, remove them from the guerrilla army and put them back in the classroom and they will produce drawings which all too readily bring home their age.
The drawings on these pages have been assembled by a number of charities who rescue child soldiers and try to restore to them the childhood of which war has cheated them. It is estimated that today some 300,000 children – between the ages of 7 and 17 – are involved in more than 30 conflicts worldwide. Abducted boys are forced to become combatants and girls to become domestic labourers and sex slaves.
The Independent’s Christmas Appeal this year is asking readers to donate to the work of Unicef in the Central African Republic where it has an extensive programme to negotiate with rebel groups to get these children freed. It runs transit centres where children who have been released are demobilized, put back in school, given psychological help and vocational training, and reunited them with their families or resettled with foster carers. To do this work Unicef relies entirely on donations from the general public.
“You cannot recapture a lost childhood for the innocence has gone,” says Dr Rachel Calam, who is Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the University of Manchester. “But you can offer a stable and secure background in which these children can experience kindness as the normal adult behaviour rather than violence and aggression.”
Professor Calam, a specialist in parenting and behavioural problems in children, first came into contact with the psychological problems of child soldiers a decade ago in Uganda when she ran a workshop on post traumatic stress at Makere University in Kampala for Ugandan psychologists who had been working with rescued child combatants.
“Childhood is a process whereby the individual gradually becomes more independent, and learns how to cope with life and form long-lasting relationships,” she says. “For these children all their experience of these educational, social and intimate relationships have been distorted. They have undergone initiations to dehumanise them, being made to kill other children or their own parents. Those who can’t keep up on forced marches are killed. It is done so that they know they will never be able to return to their home villages, to make them feel dependent on the militia and to terrorize them into compliance.
