An arrest that enables Serbia and Europe to turn a page
A grisly chapter in the history of the Balkans has been closed by the arrest of the Bosnian war crime fugitive General Ratko Mladić who has been on the run for an extraordinary 16 years. The former leader of the Bosnian Serb army was the most prominent war crimes suspect still at large. His extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague – where his civilian partner Radovan Karadžić is already on trial – marks a symbolic end to the chaos which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War. read more…
FollowPublic interest and private prurience
I was pleased when my 11-year-old hung a signed Ryan Giggs shirt in a frame in his bedroom. The Man Utd player was a role-model of talent, application, commitment, and achievement. Everyone said he was a nice guy who eschewed the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, flash-spending ways of the contemporary top-flight footballer.
On the way to school on Tuesday I had to explain to my son why the radio was reporting that his hero had been having sex with someone who was not his wife, allegedly as the BBC put it. Perhaps 11 is a good age to take another look at the feet of heroes. Perhaps. But I had no choice over the timing thanks to the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming who used parliamentary privilege to out Ryan Giggs as the footballer with the super-injunction trying to keep his private life private.
There has been a lot of self-righteous humbug talked in recent days about the wrongness of super-injunctions by newspapers desperate to discredit a system which prevents them from printing salacious celebrity sex stories. The press has been full of bogus exasperation about the 75,000 people who had posted Mr Giggs’s name on Twitter and said the law was therefore absurd – as was trying to gag the media in an internet age.
The High Court did not agree. When Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers applied to overturn the order “in the public interest” the court insisted there was “still something to be achieved by an injunction”. Indeed. My son does not use Twitter, but he listens to the BBC. This was only “Britain’s worst-kept secret” to social networkers and in the metropolitan media bubble.
Mission creep and perilous tactics in Libya
Few could have imagined when air strikes began in Libya in March that Col Gaddafi would still be in power two months later. But a stalemate has emerged. Nato air power has prevented rebel forces from being defeated but it has not secured victory for them. So the war is being escalated. Triploi has suffered the biggest air attack so far. The French have announced they will now send in attack helicopters. Britain is considering doing the same. There has been talk of Nato troops on the ground where British, French and Italian military advisers are already present. read more…
Contiguous. Now there’s an interesting word. You had to read between the lines to understand Barack Obama’s new vision for the Middle East. The American president began with an apologia designed to make some kind of coherent sense out Washington’s utterly inconsistent attitudes to the uprisings in the different countries of the Arab world. He could not, of course, because the economic interest and political values of the United States are in a permanent rictus of contradiction. read more…
From Red Nev to Green Gary. England’s most capped right-back, Gary Neville, seems at first glance an unlikely eco-warrior. As captain of Manchester United he hardly seemed a model of sensitivity when it came to the finer feelings of others, so far as opposing players and fans were concerned. He was a player of intense combativeness and bitter rivalries. read more…
A disappointing sequel to the historic Cairo speech
Barack Obama is caught, as his compatriots are so fond of saying, between a rock and a hard place. Yesterday he attempted to set out a coherent new vision of American policy in the Middle East. He was not persuasive. read more…
I think I may have crossed a line at the weekend and I’m not altogether happy about it. I’m talking about a football match, except I’m not. I’m talking about something wider, and deeper, I think. I say that in the hope of retaining any readers who are not interested in football, as I wasn’t until a few years ago.
What changed for me was my son, around the age of seven, becoming interested in football. I thought it would be a good Dad and lad bonding activity to go with him. That was four years ago and I seem to have got the bug.
Living in Manchester, as we do, or Trafford to be more precise, a friend asked me why I hadn’t taken him to watch Manchester City. There’s a myth in these parts that true Mancunians support City and that it’s only outsiders who support United; Cockney Reds they call the supporters who get the train up from London to support United week by week. It’s a fond delusion of City supporters. The United ground holds a third more than theirs so even deducting the outsiders that still leaves a vast majority of local folk, as you can hear in the accents. Anyway I didn’t take my son to the match; he took me.
From early on I learned there is something binary about the identity of the football supporter. You don’t just support your team, you also revile or denigrate your opponents. But I had learned that with my head, not my heart.
For United fans the main rivals, rhetorically, were their cross-town correlatives, City. The worst football chants were about our fellow Mancs but the real opposition was Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool. City were just a joke team with failure written into their DNA. Not any more. Thanks to the oil bonanza billions of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi royal family City have not just assembled a squad of international stars they knocked United out of the FA Cup which they then went on to win last weekend.
Watching the match I found myself rooting against the Sheikh’s ban of extravagantly overpaid mercenaries and cheering on the other team, Stoke, and feeling galled when they lost. Be careful you don’t become a bitter Red, a fellow supporter warned. It was a chastening admonition. Previously I had fallen into a concentric paradigm of supporting. I quite liked the idea of City winning, so long as they weren’t playing United. It was all good for the place where I live. But then something shifted.
So when does healthy rivalry become unhealthy? We know too well that it can from the parcel bomb sent to Neil Lennon, the manager of Celtic FC, along with the physical assault on him by an opposing fan who ran across the pitch to hit him. Football in Glasgow has become bound up in the vituperative sectarianism between Celtic’s Catholic supporters and Rangers’ Protestant ones. Sport has become the vicarious vehicle for carrying the bitterness of Northern Ireland over onto the mainland. Binary opposition has become more than a way in which people define their identity. It has become a pathology.
When is that line crossed? It’s when competition ceases to benefit all those involved because healthy competition can promote the common good just as obsessive rivalry can destroy it. It’s something to do with a loss of a sense of proportion. It’s what happens when irony evaporates and we forget that it is, after all, only a game.
So when a City fan at the gym said of the FA Cup win, and United’s record-breaking 19th victory in the English League, “Great for Manchester, isn’t it?” I replied that indeed it is. Now I just have to learn to mean it.
from the Church Times
A watershed moment for Britain, a glimmer of hope for a family bereft
The announcement that two men are, at last, to stand trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence is more than just a dramatic development in an 18-year-long murder case. It is a watershed in both race relations and criminal justice in contemporary Britain. read more…
No prizes for coming third: The fight to be Britain’s second city
The key fact of which you need to be in possession is that Digby Jones – or Baron Jones of Birmingham to give him his due style – is an Aston Villa fan. Only that could explain both the timing and the piquancy of his announcement. read more…
The University of McDonald’s comes nearer
Untangle the logic. Young people who can’t get into university should stop being snobby and get a job at McDonalds, says the UK head of the fast food chain. Young people who can’t get into university should see if they can persuade a private company or a charity to stump up £28,000 a year to get them in through the side door, the Tory universities minister says, if they have failed by the conventional meritocratic route. read more…
An important trial, but a questionable verdict
There has been something slightly surreal about the trial of 91-year-old John Demjanjuk, who was yesterday found guilty of being an accomplice to the murder of 28,060 Jews at a Nazi death camp during the Second World War. The apparently helpless nonagenarian spent most of the trial lying flat on his back, with his eyes closed and mouth agape, though many suspected him of malingering. A secretly recorded surveillance film had shown the Ukranian-born US car worker walking entirely unaided just before he was extradited to Germany for what will probably be turn out to be the country’s last big Nazi war crimes trial.
read more…
The rich should not be able to buy preference
Samuel Beckett was once asked why he quit his job as a university lecturer teaching the cream of Irish society. Indeed, the rich and the thick, was his riposte. The Tory minister David Willetts was forced into an embarrassing climbdown before the House of Commons yesterday after suggestions that he wanted to introduce a two-tier system in English universities which would favour those with money over those with academic ability.
Politicians who fly kites take the risk that they might be struck by lightening. That was what happened yesterday to a universities minister so clever he has been dubbed Two-Brains both of which seem a little short of political common sense. Smaller intellects might have understood how controversial it would be for a Coalition government which has trebled university fees and cut 10,000 from the available quota of university places to suggest that universities might create extra places for British students who would pay up to £28,000 a year for “off-quota” places.
By mid-morning he was back-pedalling furiously on an idea that critics portrayed as a Daddy’s chequebook exercise in old-style Tory privilege. In parliament Mr Willetts was forced to state categorically that the scheme to allow businesses and charities to fund extra places would not allow rich students unfair access.
Public schools, many of which have charitable status, would not be able to buy places, he promised, but he failed to dispel fears that family trust funds and social networking would not buy preference in a system where almost a third of applicants now fail to secure a university place.
The Coalition has made a mess of university funding. Graduates should pay something towards the indisputable benefits they will gain from a publicly-subsidised university education. But these reforms have been unleashed too suddenly, and with inadequate tapering down of public-funding, to create a proper market in university places. Some innovative thinking is now needed, but it should not be done in public causing needless alarm to students and their families. To date these proposals look like a half-baked attempt to paper over the chaos the Coalition has caused in universities. And Mr Willetts need to learn the basic political wisdom of what to do when in a hole.
