When a politician says the same thing three times in the course of a four minute interview I begin to suspect that there is not much depth to the idea he is proposing. The Tory MP Robert Halfon this week proposed that the Director of the BBC should be elected by the general public “to democratise the BBC Licence Fee”. When pressed on what he meant by this grandiloquent phrase he confessed that it would mean that voters could chose between candidates offering more Formula One or more arts programmes. If only life were so simple.
The temptation to reduce complex matters to simplistic choices is at the heart of populism. It can be a very effective political tool. We saw that this week when the bolshy Tory MP Nadine Dorries decried David Cameron and George Osborne as “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”. It was stinging because it came from one of their own backbenchers but its potency derives from the way it sums up in a single phrase the whole catalogue of disasters emanating from the budget for the rich with its taxes on pensions, grannies, charities, churches, conservatories, caravans and pasties. As the formidable Ms Dorris fulminated: “They are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others – and that is their real crime.”
Coalition apologists will counter by saying that this is not fair or accurate. But those are qualities which are not essential to populist thought. The charge is that the Prime Minister and his Chancellor are out of touch with ordinary people and the incremental detail is incidental. Populism offers easy emotion rather than rational argument.
It also gives the illusion of control where none exists. That extends beyond politics. Take the sad case of Claire Squires, the 30-year-old hairdresser from Leicestershire who set out to raise £500 for the Samaritans by running the London Marathon but who collapsed and died near the end of the 26-mile course. A shocked public responded by making donations on her JustGiving website. As I write donations have topped a quarter of a million pounds.
FollowWhat will you be doing to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday tomorrow? Me neither. Despite the best efforts of the BBC over the past week, which has gone into overdrive on tv and radio with Bardic offerings – with big gun historians like Simon Schama, James Shapiro and Neil McGregor on how the great globalisation of the Elizabethan era first put a girdle about the earth – our greatest writer is now more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the great man’s birthday is memorialised on St George’s Day. (It’s not known when he was really born, though he was baptised on 25th April 1564.) The modern English sensibility is embarrassed by notions of the nationhood of this blessed plot, so the day of our patron saint, like our national scribe, is best passed over quietly. The Celts of Scotland, Wales and Ireland can exalt in their special days, and ethnic minorities may celebrate their cultures. But all things English are best minimised for fear of triumphalism or cultural superiority – patriotism being the last refuge of the English scoundrel, though that’s Sam Johnson not the man from Stratford.
There will, of course, be the usual touristical pride, pomp and circumstance in Stratford on Avon, to observe the 448th birthday of the local glover’s son made good. But in the main the event will be feted in far-off places. A World Shakespeare Festival this week will perform all 37 of his plays across the globe in nearly 50 languages, including the midsummer madness of a Bollywood version of Twelfth Night. If Shakespeare is our contemporary, as the Polish critic Jan Kott once claimed – with his universal human preoccupations of love, death, power, jealousy, ambition and greed – that appears to be acknowledged elsewhere more than in his native land.
All around us there is the sound of our literary heritage slipping away in the long, melancholy susurration of a withdrawing ebb-tide. When a survey last month showed that only half of today’s children knew the Lord’s Prayer cultural commentators lamented that this meant they wouldn’t be able to understand Shakespeare, Tennyson or TS Eliot. Fat chance that many of today’s kids can be dragged away from their PS3s to become rapt in secret studies of poetry as difficult as that anyway.
Philanthropy. Who could be against it? The alliance of those opposing the Government’s plans to cap tax relief on large charitable donations by the very rich is formidable. Several thousand British charities, big philanthropists, Tony Blair and even the Conservative party’s own wealthy Treasurer, Lord Fink, have called on the Coalition to do a U-turn.
The Chancellor, George Osborne, is stubbornly refusing, though he has offered a “consultation” on the matter. His motives are clear enough. With massive public spending cuts on the way, including caps on benefits and disability pay, he needs to be able to say that he is being tough on the rich as well as the poor.
The problem is that Treasury plans to hit a comparatively few very rich people will have a disproportionate impact on charities. Just 7 per cent of charity donors last year between them gave almost half of the £11bn charities receive from the British public. Public spending cuts have already slashed charities’ incomes by 8 per cent. They can’t afford to lose more.
Certainly Mr Osborne should crack down on the rich with their wide range of scams – offshore accounts, turning income to capital gains, setting up companies to rent their own homes from themselves – to avoid paying tax like the rest of us.
Tax relief on charitable donations is another area in which the rich are privileged. If a basic-rate tax payer gives £1 to charity the state will give another 25p in Gift Aid to the charity. But if a higher-rate taxpayer gives £1 the state gives the 25p to the charity but also another 15p or 25p to the rich person in extra tax relief. So top philanthropists don’t just get a knighthood or dinner with the prime minister or a new art gallery named after them – they also get money back.
But that is not all. Individuals chose which charities they give to; but the Treasury has no choice about whether or not to stump up the Gift Aid. However personal or eccentric the choice – donkey sanctuary, home for orphaned chimpanzees, opera house or Eton College – society (that’s us taxpayers) has to pay the Gift Aid, so long as it’s a registered charity.
Sanctions worked in Burma and can they can now work in Syria too
It was a smart move of David Cameron’s to stand next to the woman who was until recently the world’s most famous political prisoner, the heroic Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and call for international sanctions on her country to be suspended. Not lifted, but suspended – now that the military junta which had kept her under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years has finally allowed her to stand for parliament. Sanctions only work if you are prepared to suspend as well as impose them. And there can be little doubt that, despite everything the cynics say about sanctions, this is a situation in which they have undoubtedly worked.
The conventional wisdom among sceptics is that sanctions are the desperate resort of the “something-must-be done” brigade when it is too afraid to send in an army. If sanctions worked, they say, Fidel Castro would have been toppled in Cuba five decades ago. And Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have still been in power 13 years after he invaded Kuwait, though there sanctions did appear to have starved the Iraqi dictator of the wherewithal to replenish his weapons of mass destruction.
It is, of course, inarguable that sanctions against Iraq were a moral disaster. Despite the imports allowed under the oil-for-food programme, sanctions killed between 670,000 and 880,000 children under the age of five who would have otherwise survived, according to figures from Yale University’s Global Justice Programme. General sanctions hit the most vulnerable hardest, with their business failures, unemployment, power-cuts and uncontrolled inflation. By shrinking the private sector, the critics argue, the middle class is weakened and the power of the regime increased. Worse still they are ineffective for, as in Sudan, Western disinvestment merely opens up opportunities for others, like the Chinese, though no-one ever said that sanctions are supposed to enrich those who impose them.
But sanctions, when they do work, are never the singular factor in producing the desired outcome. They worked, most famously, to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa not simply through their economic effect but by creating a sense of isolation, and a crisis of legitimacy, among the sports-mad ruling white minority. They worked in white Rhodesia because, at the same time, the black majority was waging an internal guerrilla war. They worked together with external military intervention against Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia. They worked against Libya with the stick of a bombing raid on Tripoli and the carrot of behind-the-scenes co-operation with Western intelligence services.
Why do we keep re-sinking the Titanic?
Why do we keep re-sinking the Titanic? Clearly once was not enough to judge by the flood of documentaries, dramas and articles which have filled the past days, weeks and months ahead of this weekend’s 100th anniversary of the great seagoing disaster in which 1,517 people died when the state-of-the-art steamship hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank the following morning.
She sank the first time under the weight of the dark water which flooded through the long gash in six of the watertight compartments at the front of the ship’s hull. She sinks again and again in the popular imagination under the burden of added cultural significance. History turned into myth within days of the sinking.
Once that myth began to form poetic truth took over from the historical version. So much so that the official historic consultant to James Cameron’s Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio, was told that “under no circumstances” could he alter the script because “this is what the public expect to see”. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but fiction is altogether neater than truth – and it tells us something revealing about our own times.
The economy with the truth began almost at once. The Titanic was not big news before she set sail. She was following in the wake of her White Star Line sister ship the Olympic which has made the same maiden voyage from Southampton to New York a year earlier. There was plenty of footage of that so after the disaster filmmakers surreptitiously spliced bits of it into their Titanic newsreel with giveaway details scratched or inked out.
So it went on, with the conscious duplicity reaching its nadir with the 1943 Nazi film version commissioned by Goebbels which depicted J Bruce Ismay, the president of the company that built the Titanic, as power-mad Jewish businessman who bullies the brave Teutonic captain into driving the ship too fast through the ice so he can manipulate the share price of the White Star Line. Warnings by the ship’s First Officer (a German, of course) were ignored. Moviemakers have continued, perhaps less consciously, to project their own agendas onto the events ever since.
Correcting some sloppy thinking on Africa
After listening to two hours of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme being presented live from Liberia (and London) on 11 April I posted to the BBC on Twitter at 8.34am:
@BBCr4today Disgraceful concatenation of patronising prejudiced negative sneering stereotypes from John Humphrys in Liberia.
Then at noon the Royal African Society posted:
‘You can’t come here with European eyes’: A letter to John Humphreys on his trip to Liberia – By Richard Dowden http://tinyurl.com/6loo98u @RoyalAfricanSoc
In it, the RAS director, Richard Dowden made some telling points about the BBC’s outdated view of Africa. But he got one big thing wrong. So on his website I posted:
For Richard Dowden to say:
At the time, I welcomed the Commission for Africa Report because it drew attention to the continent, but its treatment of the causes was superficial and purely external – what the rest of the world did to Africa, nothing about Africa itself. Now I realise it was another attempt to change Africa. There was no attempt to engage, no comprehension of another world out there, no respect for Africa. That aid-led solution is now trickling away into irrelevance.
is a travesty of what the 2005 CfA report said.
The report – which was written by a Commission which included a majority of Africans – had a dual focus throughout: on what the West should do, yes, but also on what Africa needed to do itself.
That meant Africans:
- improving governance, fighting corruption, creating greater transparency and accountability, better information systems and strengthening parliament, the media, the independent judiciary and civil society.
- It called for the removal of trading barriers between African countries and greater regional economic synergies.
- It demanded that African governments switch resources from defence to education and health, removing hospital and school fees, and improve resources for pan-African organisations to help women and children.
- It said that African leaders must promote economic growth and poverty reduction as part of the same economic strategy so that poor people could participate in growth.
- It demanded pan-African groups should monitor all this.
The idea that the report’s “treatment of the causes was superficial and purely external” is nonsense. This was very far from an “aid-led solution”.
It is good that the Today programme is planning regular broadcasts from Liberia over the next year. Africa needs to be visited at time other than those of famine, war and crisis. But Today needs to get its wide range of presenter talent to look at what Africa is doing in these new areas and examine what progress Africans are making there instead of revisiting negative stereotypes.
What George Galloway understands that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband don’t
The interplay between religion and politics is far from straightforward, as any thoughtful reading of Christ’s Passion will disclose. The minds of the high priests in Jerusalem must have been tormented by a fear of the consequences of the revolution that Jesus posed in political, social and religious terms. He was a threat to so much: the good opinion of the Romans, the authority of the religious establishment, the internal smooth-running of the social order and the emotional and psychological peace of the community.
Disentangling the one from the other is no easy task, particularly when the pressures of the present rob us of the easy perspective of the past. A week after the by-election in Bradford West a lot of half-baked thoughts have been aired about significance of George Galloway’s victory which saw a massive swing of 36 per cent from Labour but also one of 23 per cent from the Conservatives.
The Westminster village was wrong-footed and vented its irritation with its own lack of foresight by Twittering all their old grievances about Mr Galloway: the chequered history of the charities he has run; his praise in 1994 for the “courage, strength and indefatigability” of Saddam Hussein ; quoting things he said in 2005 about Syria’s President Assad as if he said them yesterday; and recalling how in 2006 he posed as a cat Celebrity Big Brother to lap milk from the hands of the glamorous actress Rula Lenska.
Mr Galloway’s ability to disturb is double-edged. In 2005 he put in an extraordinarily formidable performance, turning the tables on a US Senate sub-committee in which he lambasted America for its invasion of Iraq. So his success in Bradford should have surprised no-one.
Now put our money where your mouth is Mr Cameron
It is undoubtedly a good idea to take the £400m which has been lying forgotten for 15 years or more in dormant bank accounts and put it to a socially useful purposes. That is what David Cameron will announce today. And the cash is to be half-matched by a £200m donation from the big four high street banks. The resulting Big Society Capital bank, as it will inelegantly be known, will then lend the money, via intermediaries, to social enterprises, mutual societies and associations, charities and voluntary groups.
A banker might object that £600m is not very much. The new bank will certainly be a minnow next to leviathans like RBS, Barclays and HSBC whose balance sheets are bigger than the annual national income. But total social investments in the UK were estimated last year at only £200m. In that context the new bank could make a significant difference to putting some flesh on the vague notion which is David Cameron’s Big Society which he defined, when he announced it in 2009, as an vision to “take power away from politicians and give it to people”. In one sense there was nothing new in that. Charities, volunteers and community activists already existed as part of what Edmund Burke famously called the “little platoons” which stand between the individual and the state. The question is whether Mr Cameron can meaningfully extend that in new ways.
Critics have suggested not. They see the Big Society as waffle to disguise the impact of billions of pounds worth of cuts in public services, a good deal of it from the budgets of publicly-supported charities and community groups. Local people taking over the running of their local library, swimming pool, village shop or post office will not fill a gap of that size.
We should take more care before we send our citizens to face foreign courts
Remember the NatWest Three? They were the British bankers best known for their long fight against extradition to the United States to face charges of helping construct some dodgy off-balance-sheet deals which played a tiny part in what was, in 2001, the biggest bankruptcy scandal in American corporate history. One of them had a book out last week. It was big on indignation at the whole extradition business and rather less outraged about the $7.3m fraud to which they pleaded guilty when they finally got to a US courtroom six years later. Funny that.
A couple of days later extradition was back in the headlines when the High Court temporarily blocked the removal from Britain of the British businessman accused of arranging the contract killing of his bride on their honeymoon in Cape Town in 2010. Two judges ruled that it would be “unjust and oppressive” to order the man to face trial in South Africa because he is mentally unfit.
It is as well to remember those cases when reflecting on the new Home Affairs Select Committee report which says an overhaul in UK extradition laws are needed to restore public faith in the system. Of particular concern, it says, are the lop-sided arrangement with the United States which mean it is “easier to extradite a British citizen to the USA than vice versa”.
There have been several cases which give cause for concern. Christopher Tappin, a 65-year-old retired businessman from Orpington, recently appeared in court in El Paso, shackled and in an orange jumpsuit, facing a 35 year sentence for allegedly selling batteries that would ultimately end up in Iranian missiles. A 23-year-old Sheffield student, Richard O’Dwyer, who is fighting extradition on charges of infringing US copyright on the website he ran in the UK. And Gary McKinnon, who has Asperger’s syndrome, has been fighting extradition for 10 years after he hacked into the Pentagon computer system looking for info on UFOs.
The American ambassador Louis Susman warned the MPs against viewing the UK-US extradition treaty “through the prism of individual cases where sentiment and emotion can cloud reality and lead to misrepresentation.” The system was fair, balanced and “promotes the interests of justice in both our countries,” he insisted. He is wrong. And all the above cases offer pointers, in different ways, as to why.
Caroline Ferguson’s heart had stopped. Nothing was going right. First the doctors had detected that the foetal heartbeat had ceased within the pregnant woman’s womb. Now, with the Caesarian half complete and the dead baby removed and discarded in a dish, the mother’s heart had stopped. The medics sprang into emergency action.
After several scary moments the doctors restarted her heart and began tidying up. One doctor put a stethoscope to the baby’s chest to confirm he was dead. To his amazement he heard the faintest heartbeat. The child was rushed with a police escort to Alder Hey children’s hospital down the road. Caroline’s husband, Mike, was presented with a terrible dilemma. Should he stay with his unconscious wife or reborn child?
He hesitated and rushed to Alder Hey. There the staff asked if wanted the baby given an emergency baptism. Had they chosen a name? They had; they had decided their son would be called Charles. But her husband, in his panic, had forgotten the name. “Call him Mark,” he told the chaplain.
Yet when Caroline came round she was not surprised. While she was unconscious she had felt herself moving slowly down a long white corridor. At the end was a bright sunlight and a face. Then she heard a voice say: “Go back. Mark needs you. Go back.”
She was so disconcerted that she did not tell anyone. “I never told a soul. I kept it to myself. I never even told my husband,” she now says. “In fact I’ve never discussed this with anyone before.”
But then, some 30 years later, her husband died quite suddenly. Four months after that her mother died too. Caroline was, by coincidence, a senior manager at Alder Hey. “One of my jobs was managing the chaplains,” she says, “I turned to them…” Two years later she decided to become a Roman Catholic. “I don’t know why. I heard no voices, saw no angels, just the voices of the people in the chaplaincy.” Eight years after that she resigned her management job and joined the team as a Catholic chaplain.
The judge peered down at the incorrigible character in the dock before him. It was his 42nd conviction for being drunk and disorderly but the prisoner pleaded for leniency with all the fluency of his new-born sobriety. The judge softened and promised not to jail him, again, so long as he kept to his promise to give up drink completely. I will, I will, said the old tramp. “Good,” said the judge. “But I mean completely. And that means not even the teeny-weeniest sherry before lunch”.
Such was the tale an ancient court reporter told me – in the pub – in the days of my journalistic apprenticeship. Even then the business of class was hopelessly entangled with that of alcohol in the English mind. So it has again this week with the Government’s plan to bring in a minimum price of 40p per unit of alcohol in an attempt to stamp out binge drinking.
“Too many people think it’s a great night out to get really drunk and have a fight in our streets,” the Home Secretary told television viewers. The crime and violence caused by binge drinking, the Prime Minister added, “drains resources in our hospitals, generates mayhem on our streets and spreads fear in our communities.”
So, while the price of a magnum of Bullingdon Bollinger will remain unchanged, these staggering vomiting lager-oiks, and their teetering white-stilettoed girlfriends, are to have the price of their supermarket-purchased cheap booze nearly doubled in price. It’s for their own good, you see.
The upper classes have long indulged in moral panics about lower classes’ drinking. Drunkenness was first made a crime in Tudor times when chroniclers became alarmed at widespread inebriety. In 1606 Parliament passed “The Act to Repress the Odious and Loathsome Sin of Drunkenness”. In the 18th century came the Gin Epidemic in which the adverts read: “Drunk for one penny, dead drunk for two”.
A man who preferred dialogue to debate
Britain is famously suspicious of public intellectuals. They are seen as out of touch with worldly reality. Their cerebral subtlety is mistaken for weakness or indecision. They are viewed, in Jonathan Miller’s memorable phrase, as “too clever by three-quarters”.
Rowan Williams was so regarded by certain sections of the secular establishment, when early in his decade of office, he did an about-turn of the suitability of Dr Jeffrey John to be Bishop of Reading. Here, they said, was a man without the courage of his own convictions.
How wrong they were. A few stubborn dimwits, to borrow a phrase of the outgoing primate, persisted in this view. But most gradually began to see the enormous virtues of having a man of such integrity to speak to the nation on matters of moral significance. When he left behind his delicate chairmanship of matters Anglican, he swiftly demonstrated that there was no lack of clarity about his public and political vision.
Early on he raised grave doubts about the rightness of the war in Iraq. But he did so raising questions rather than screaming certainties at a time when, whatever the political morality, young men were being sent off to die on our behalf. As a society, he said, we were “lowering the threshold of war unacceptably”. He later was one of the few to express proper disquiet over the manner of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
First-principle analysis, he showed, was more important, not less, in times of crisis. In the wake of 9/11 he pointed out that terrorists can have serious moral goals. “There is sentimentality,” he added, “in ascribing what we don’t understand to ‘evil’; it lets us off the hook”.
He continued that approach in office. Counter-culturally at the height of the MPs’ expenses scandal he warned that the media’s “systematic humiliation of politicians” posed real risks for the health of democracy. And when he attacked the impact of the Coalition’s welfare, education and health reforms on poor people – “radical policies for which no one voted” – one of his principal criticisms was the lack of “proper public argument”.
