Sky Sports and the 18th century huzzies
Andy Gray, the disgraced Sky Sports presenter, could have saved himself a lot of bother had he taken the trouble to read a bit of 18th century literature. Not, some might suggest, the natural reading matter of the former Scotland striker. But he might have learned from the great satirist Jonathan Swift that it is possible to conduct a discourse at two levels – the hidden one of them far more offensively sexist than anything the £1.7m a year ex-soccer pundit managed to come up with in his off-air comments.
For where digital technology has sullied the reputation of Mr Gray it is about to do the opposite for Dean Swift. Until now academics had thought that the 65 letters, published first in Swift’s masterly A Journal to Stella in the 1760s, had been censored by editors concerned to preserve the great cleric’s reputation. The two Dublin spinsters to whom they are written are addressed by Swift variously as “agreeable bitches”, “naughty girls” and “huzzies” along with very dodgy references to the “horror” and “filth” of the female body.
But digital imaging analysis by an Oxford academic (female) suggests it was Swift himself who made these alterations as part of a flirtatious game of handwriting cat and mouse. “The reader has to undress the text to enjoy it fully,” says Dr Abigail Williams. If only Mr Gray had had so subtle an interlocutor.
FollowPolitical momentum is not something most of us fully understand. It’s clear enough when inexorability has set in, as with the final months of Gordon Brown. But before that it is pretty much the preserve of political experts, like Andy Coulson.
The Labour MP Tom Watson blogged a few weeks ago that Mr Coulson would step down as David Cameron’s director of communications on 25 January. He resigned on January 21st, which is still a mean feat of prediction from Mr Watson. Or perhaps he had been told. Perhaps the Coulson resignation was timetabled, but brought forward to shelter beneath the kerfuffle over the Alan Johnson one.
What is intriguing is the way that a little story has snowballed and could yet get even bigger. It began with a “rogue reporter” from the News of the World being jailed for hacking into the cellphone messages of the royal household and Mr Coulson resigning as editor of the paper, protesting ignorance but accepting responsibility. Then came complaints about phone-hacking from a wide group of celebrities and politicians.
Law cases were initiated forcing the disclosure of documents. That resulted in the suspension of an executive on the paper. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns the paper, made a number of out-of-court settlements, including £700,000 to the leader of the football players’ association. Labour’s former deputy leader John Prescott began demanding to know why the Metropolitan Police had not properly investigated suggestions that his phone had been hacked, along with that of 3,000 other named individuals.
Despite all that it seemed a story that was going nowhere, even though Mr Coulson was now press chief at 10 Downing St. Yet as more and more apparently inconsequential details emerged it began to be clear that the police had been remarkable dilatory in pursuing the case, certainly compared to the zeal with which they investigated the Labour government over claims of ‘cash for honours’. Why?
What changed everything was that the saga then became intertwined with another – the bid by Mr Murdoch to buy the 61pc that he does not already own of the tv station of BskyB.
Clever or cowardly? Before too long we will know about Jeremy Hunt
It may be that Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, is being very clever. He may be being tactical in his decision to give Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp another six months to modify its bid to buy the broadcaster BSkyB. He may want to ensure that Mr Murdoch has no grounds for a legal challenge when the deal is eventually referred to the Competition Commission.
On the other hand it may also be that the Conservative party is so craven in its fawning upon Rupert Murdoch – whose four national newspapers are widely said to be able to delivery electoral victory – that it puts the best interests of party before nation. Certainly that is how many people will see it.
The phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World has raised questions about the propriety of the Murdoch press, much as the blatant political bias of Fox News in America has raised questions about whether democracy is safe in his hands. But the central issue here is whether it is in the public interest that Mr Murdoch should take control of the 61 per cent of BSkyB which he does not already own.
The broadcasting regulator Ofcom has clearly ruled that there is a risk if control of the news is in too few hands. If the deal is approved, it has warned, 51 per cent of Britons will be getting their news from a Murdoch source as against 32 per cent now. That is why it wants the bid referred to the Competition Commission.
News Corp’s lawyers are now arguing, on what seem largely spurious grounds, that Ofcom’s report is biased. There is certainly the suspicion of bias around in plenty. Just days after David Cameron stripped the anti-Murdoch Vince Cable of the power to decide on referral the prime minister went to a Christmas dinner at the home of News International’s chief executive, at which Mr Murdoch’s son James was present. Jeremy Hunt, who was told to take the decision in place of Mr Cable, has a track record of pro-Murdoch comments and has had a number of private unminuted meetings with Murdoch executives with no civil servants present.
In such circumstances an immediate referral of the bid to the Competition Commission is the only sure way of ensuring that private bias does not turn into public favours.
Take a look at a Kakapo and you get a pretty good idea of why it is endangered. It is not just the heaviest parrot in the world but it can’t fly. It is an extraordinarily unsightly bird with a blotched yellow-brown owly face atop its green feathered splay-footed body. It only comes out at night but even in the dark another Kakapo might be forgiven for thinking it too ugly to mate with.
And you can take a good look at a Kakapo now thanks to the breath-takingly fine-detailed photo by Shane McInnes which has just won first prize in an international contest to capture The World’s Rarest Birds. The competition aimed to secure images of the 566 most threatened birds on earth and it has managed – amazingly – to motivate photographers to uncover nearly 90 per cent of the species currently categorized as either Endangered, Critically Endangered or Extinct in the Wild.
There is, of course, something deeply depressing about the idea of such creatures being wiped from the face of the globe under our stewardship. But there is something enormously uplifting about the photographs that have been taken of a Christmas Island Frigatebird in swooping flight or the impossibly orange Asian Crested Ibis or the elaborate contortions of a Red-Crowned Crane in courtship display. They are both inspiration and admonition to us all.
Until the last 10 minutes there was little drama in Tony Blair’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry into the lessons that should be learned from the inglorious business of Britain’s connivance in the American invasion of Iraq. But then one woman whispered a single sentence from a few feet behind the former prime minister.
I have been largely under-whelmed by the Chilcot inquiry. Like most of the population I made up my mind about Tony Blair long ago. What has emerged from the inquiry set up by Gordon Brown when British troops finally left Basra in 2009 has only reinforced existing prejudices of both Blair detractors and apologists. That was, presumably, why so many of those who Twittered through Blair’s four hours in the not-so-hot seat on Friday were preoccupied with things like whether the exPM had had his eyebrows shaped to look more arched and evil. One man even mused that Blair’s strange habitual hand gestures made him look as though he was fondling a pair of large imaginary breasts.
From the outset I had grave reservations about the war and yet I have never doubted Tony Blair’s good faith. It is perfectly possible for the man to be wrong and yet not be a liar. The real world is not binary. Nor do there seem to be right-or-wrong answers to many of the 105 detailed questions that Sir John Chilcot and his process-obsessed colleagues sent to Blair ahead of the hearing.
Blair had explanations, of sorts, for most of the key points. Were the Cabinet properly informed? Of course, though they were more concerned at the political fallout of going to war alongside a right-wing president than they were about the reliability of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. No, they weren’t all in on all the planning but then Margaret Thatcher hadn’t even included her Chancellor in her war cabinet. And most of the government’s position was anyway public. The then Leader of the Commons Robin Cook was well-enough informed to have resigned.
David Cameron and his imaginary friend
Does the Prime Minister have an imaginary friend? Once psychologists believed it was a cause for concern if a child had a companion invisible to the rest of the family. But now it seems that imaginary friends are a normal part of children’s cognitive, linguistic and emotional development. Apparently nearly two-thirds of kids up to the age of seven have them.
You can see why a politician would find one useful. Children call on their imaginary friends when they feel upset or when someone has said something nasty to them. They give them someone to boss around when they feel powerless. They will come out to play when real friends have found other things to do.
Not all imaginary companions are friendly. Some are uncontrollable, which at least gives you someone to blame when the lamp in the living room is found to be broken or a particular public spending cut turns out to be rather unpopular.
The latest research also shows that children do not dismiss or forget the imaginary friend as they grow older. Nine per cent still have one at the age of 12, though the older you get the more likely you are to keep it a secret.
Perhaps David Cameron’s imaginary friend is Nick Clegg? If so the Liberal Democrat leader needs to know that, the research shows, a child doesn’t necessarily play with the same fantasy companion throughout childhood. Some children have multiple or serial pretend friends. Sounds more and more like modern politics.
Why Sarah Palin really is to blame
Is Sarah Palin to blame for the shooting of the Arizona politician Gabrielle Giffords in which six other people died? When journalists ask a question like that in a headline or at the top of an article the answer, almost always, is No. If it were not, they would have preferred a bald assertion to the innuendo of a question. Yet sometimes things are not quite so straightforward.
Had anyone, a month ago, asked the populist potential presidential candidate, in public or in private, if she wanted Ms Gifford dead she would have said No. That is what we assume, at any rate, for we take basic human decency as the default among those who stand for public office.
Mrs Palin’s critics blame her because she published on her website last year a map of 20 key Republican target seats with the crosshairs of a rifle sights on each – including the Arizona constituency of Gabrielle Giffords. She left it up even after the congresswoman warned that such “actions have consequences” and asked Mrs Palin and others to tone down their language.
Add to that the Palin campaign slogan “Don’t retreat, instead reload”, and a general tendency – everywhere from shock jock radio to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel – to rhetorical rage and overheated hyperbole, and it is hard not to conclude that an identification between guns and politics is being nurtured which is reckless in a country which has seen four sitting presidents, not to mention several other prominent public figures, assassinated.
Supporters of Mrs Palin respond that words are very different from actions. But there can be no doubt that political discourse, like so much else in modern life, has been coarsened. In a culture where guns seem universal – Arizona has just become the third state to allow people to carry a concealed weapon without requiring a permit – the combination is incendiary.
We should guard against the temptation here to freight personal tragedy with greater political significance than it should carry. The nine year old who died, Christina Taylor Green, was born – it was widely noted – on September 11th 2001. She had featured in a book on “children of hope” born on 9/11. But it is not her birthday which causes the anguish among her family this week, so much as the date and random nature of her death.
Yet nor should we be naïve. When the bodyguard who assassinated Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, appeared in court in Islamabad the other day he was showered with rose petals by sympathisers, including a number of lawyers. Mr Taseer’s offence had been to call for changes to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws after a Christian woman in Punjab who was sentenced to death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad, something she denied doing. There are those for whom human lives are expendable in pursuit of a bigoted political or religious ideology.
Unity governments are bad for Africa
On the face of it the solution to the political stand-off in the Ivory Coast is a government of national unity. The elections there have been won, international observers say, by the opposition leader Alassane Ouattara. But the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo has refused to stand down. Both men have had themselves sworn in as president.
The initial response from outsiders was forthright. African neighbours called on Gbagbo to stand down. So did the international community. There as been mediation by the African Union and moves for sanctions from the United Nations. There was even talk of military intervention, though that has now faded.
It is a disconcertingly familiar tale. In Kenya in 2007 and in Zimbabwe in 2008 Presidents Kibaki and Mugabe lost elections but clung to power. Each time the AU failed to uphold its own policies on leaders who fail to relinquish power. And the international community, after huffing and puffing, suggested a power-sharing government which allowed a discredited president to cling to power.
It is a short-term solution to instability and violence. In Ivory Coast 200 people have been killed or have disappeared and there are reports of mass graves. In Kenya 1,000 people died and 300,000 were driven from their homes. There was widespread violence after Zimbabwe’s 2008 sham election. Both Kenya and Zimbabwe calmed after unity governments were formed. Yet in both countries the real political problems have remained unresolved. Ruling groups have refused to co-operate with domestic or international inquiries into the election violence. They have blocked prosecutions. In both corruption has continued with merely a more democratic distribution of the spoils.
But almost nothing has been done to address the causes of the widescale violence. On land reform, constitutional change, youth unemployment and ethnic tensions progress in Kenya has been painful. In Zimbabwe the ZANU-PF party, which never had any intention of sharing real power, has blocked reform of the military and intelligence services. Instead Mugabe’s military cronies have secured independent funding through control of the Chiadzwa diamond fields. There is stonewalling on security services reform in Kenya too.
Beware the old cliche that in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ = ‘danger’ + ‘opportunity’
There are nearly five million sites on the internet that will tell you that the Chinese character for the word crisis is a combination of the sinographs for two other words: ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. The notion first entered popular culture in the West thanks to President John F Kennedy who mentioned the concept in a speech, counselling that in a crisis we should “be aware of the danger – but recognize the opportunity”. Management gurus, pop psychologists and New Age hokeys then adopted the notion but more recently it has begun to be used by political commentators contemplating what the rise and rise of China means for the rest of us.
When we look forward through the year to come the presence of China seems likely to loom more prominently. For those with eyes to see it did a fair amount of looming last year. 2010 ended with Beijing trying to put pressure on other governments not to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony because it was being awarded to the human rights campaigner Liu Xiaobo who is languishing in a Chinese jail for publicly demanding political reform.
But that was far from all. Look back over the year and you see consistent signs of China flexing his muscles. There have been tensions with its neighbour India over the mountainous province of Arunachal Pradesh which China claims, clashes with Japan over the Senkaku islands and live-fire exercises to threaten Vietnam in the South China Sea.
Then there was the scary moment in April when China mysteriously took over a seventh of the total internet for 18 minutes, sending out bogus signals that diverted traffic that included data from US military and government websites – the Senate, army, navy, marine corps and Nasa – as well as leading companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo. It could have been a simple router misconfiguration. But it could have been a deliberate experiment to assert some level of control over the internet.
The month before Canadian researchers discovered a spy network containing more than 1,300 computers, many of them in China, that had got into governments’ systems. There had already been at least 35 severe Chinese cyber-attacks on Western targets in the decade to 2009 as well as a tightening by Beijing of controls on its 380 million domestic internet users. And Google satellite maps have begun mysteriously to show the names of towns in Arunachal Pradesh in Mandarin, not English or Hindi.
On top of all that China, having overtaken Japan as the region’s most powerful economy, has been modernising its missiles, submarines, radar, cyber-warfare and anti-satellite weapons. It still spends only a sixth of what the United States does on military hardware. But it is building affordable “asymmetric” weapons which pose a threat to the traditional US dominance of the trading lanes of Far Eastern seas.
All this may be what one American commentators styled an “adolescent foreign policy” intended to send out signals that China is arriving as a great power. But others grow anxious that China’s military spending is hard to reconcile with its rhetoric about being interested only in territorial defence.
You might think the logo on the side of the cup doesn’t much matter; it’s the quality of the coffee that counts. But you would be wrong. Wake up and smell the marketing.
If branding wasn’t important why would the coffee giant Starbucks be ‘refreshing’ its logo in a move which has caused consternation among its customers. Yesterday it announced that it is to drop the words Starbucks and Coffee from its logo – leaving only the image of the bare-breasted mermaid it calls The Siren. Immediately feedback on its website immediately became over-stimulated in a way which you can’t just put down to too much caffeine.
When you are spending spend £2 on a latte, drinkers fulminated, you at least want people to know where you got it from. People are buying much more than a drink. We give a great experience, as the head of Starbucks once put it. If you are selling a brand, as much as a product, you need to keep up with a market that thrives on constant novelty.
The plan is to broaden the focus of the business to sell other products – or as their business jargon puts it, they want “the freedom and flexibility to think beyond coffee”. But there may be hubris in Starbucks imagining that it is now established enough to survive with a wordless logo like Apple or Nike. Its share price fell on the news. The Siren, they should recall, was a mythical creature who lured the sailors of ancient Greeks to their deaths.
No lights on the Coptic Christmas tree
It is Christmas today for Coptic Christians, who still work to the old Julian calendar. But it is not a time for celebration. The lights on their Christmas trees have been switched off in mourning for the 21 people who died when a church was bombed in Alexandria on New Year’s day. This is a worrying development, and not just in Egypt where 70,000 police and conscripts are guarding churches for Christmas mass.
Several weeks before the attack a website linked to Al-Qaeda published the addresses of Coptic churches it said should be attacked. The church in Alexandra was named, as were several in Holland, France and Britain. Alongside videos on how to build a bomb was the instruction to “blow up the churches while they are celebrating Christmas”.
The situation is complex as well as tense. Egypt’s ancient Christian minority, around 10 per cent of the population, feels neglected and oppressed. The violence is the worst for in a decade but tensions have been simmering – with disputes over church building, divorce and religious conversions – for three decades. Six Christians were killed last Christmas Eve. In recent months radicalised Islamists have been holding venomous weekly anti-Christian demonstrations. Christian youths have been protesting on the streets five nights.
The government, anxious not to offend the Muslim majority, has ignored, or colluded in, all this. To act as a counterweight to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood which is main political opposition to the autocratic regime of President Mubarak, the pro-Western Mubarak regime tacitly allowed the growth of a non-political Muslim groups known as the salafis, who imported Wahabi ideologies from the Arabian Peninsula. But more extreme salafi elements have now made common cause with al-Qaida. The group which threatened the church in Alexandria has links with the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq faction which massacred 68 Christians in a church in Baghdad in October.
Disentangling religion and politics here will be a long and sophisticated process. Greater pluralism is needed in Egypt, but care must be taken in a country where, as with Iraq and Pakistan, democracy is tainted with tribal and sectarian loyalties. A shift towards civil institutions separated from religious ones is needed. The building of mosques and churches must be treated more even-handedly. The electoral system must give Copts more equal political representation. Above all Egyptian law must treat all citizens equally, regardless of religion. The present approach is not working.
The problems with PIN-number philanthropy
It all sounds so simple.
Press 1 for cash
Press 2 for balance
Press 3 to top up your mobile phone
Press 4 to make a donation to charity
The government announced last week that it wants to give us the ability to make a donation to charity every time we use a cash machine. Stung by the criticism that his Big Society idea is empty political rhetoric without the money to fund it, David Cameron has decided that instead of taxing us he will ask us to stump up the cash voluntarily – so that charities can take over the tasks which were previously the responsibility of the state. Pin-number philanthropy is just part of a review to encourage more giving and turn 2011 into “the year of corporate philanthropy”.
Philosophers have something they call the “principle of charity”. It means addressing your opponent’s argument in its strongest form, rather than making cheap-shot political gibes or Richard Dawkins style fun-poking at a mere parody of your opponent’s case. So let’s leave aside the idea that a government promoting Big Society community empowerment is like building a brick wall from the top layer first.
The Cameron argument goes something like this. Britons lead most of Europe in charitable giving. Last year 28.4 million adults donated £10.6bn to charity. The average monthly gift was £12. But we don’t give anywhere near as much as people in the United States. There has not been such a strong emphasis here on private philanthropy because of the public funding of welfare. (A questionable causal connection, but let’s leave it for the time being). So if the government can make it easier to give, people will give more.
There are some plausible numbers to support all this. More than half of us now shop online yet only 7 per cent of us give money online. Yet eBay’s scheme to which allows shoppers to add a small charitable donation, with a single click, raised more than £2m in Britain last year. And where a seller pledges a donation to charity as part of the sale their chances of selling rise by 34 per cent in the UK. Such one-click cost-free “give as you go” schemes encourage giving by people who would be intimidated by Gift Aid form-filling rules.
