To be perfect is to have changed often – but not if your name is Nick Clegg
To live is to change, said Cardinal Newman, and to be perfect is to have changed often. That being the case, why is Nick Clegg being so widely reviled for his U-turn over university tuition fees which, before the general election, he stoutly opposed, and which as deputy prime minister he has now embraced?
Changing your mind, in many walks of life, is seen as a sign of strength. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” the economist John Maynard Keynes once asked imperiously. But in politics the template is that the lady’s not for turning.
In one sense politics is different, because a mandate is involved. Politicians offer themselves for election on the basis of promises, and it is reasonable to expect that they should fulfil them. The argument that because two parties have entered into a coalition they are not bound by their manifesto undertakings is very dubious. Coalition cannot not mean that all pre-election pledges are off ; compromise has to remain within certain boundaries if coalition partners are to maintain their political integrity.
FollowThere’s more than one way to kick a tramp
We all have feet of clay. A memory returns from time to time of a tramp who surprised me outside a London theatre demanding money. In some imperceptible way I felt his sudden appearance and looming presence was a threat to my young son and I told him to go away. “Why did you say that Dad?” my son said afterwards. “All he wanted was a cup of tea.” It was a good question.
I thought of him again when the news came through of the 77-year-old man who had collapsed on the pavement on his way to the doctors in well-healed Salisbury and lay there for almost five hours while people hundreds of people walked or drove by. Brian Courtney developed hypothermia and was almost dead by the time someone finally called an ambulance.
The tabloids were outraged but what was more revealing were the comments their online readers left beneath the story. It was reasonable to assume the man was drunk or sleeping rough. To speak to him risked being abused or thumped. Get real, one said. “I’m surprised there weren’t crowds of school kids all filming him on their mobile phones,” said another shamelessly. This is the way we harden our hearts.
But only in the frozen south. This would never happen in the north of England, opined a Lancastrian and a Geordie, dangerously, on one website. But then the neglected man’s daughter expressed surprise that it could have happened in friendly Salisbury which appeared full of kind people – who, in the event, left her father unconscious on the frozen pavement as they went about their Christmas shopping.
Is modern life diminishing compassion? Archaeological remains of early humans show disabled individuals were cared for by the rest of the group. Indeed evolutionary biologists have suggested that compassion has been an important component in the way we create community.
Big cities seem to attenuate that. In a place like London there are too many people, not enough time and so many important things to be busily done. In the capital anyone who talks to, let alone helps, a stranger is an object of suspicion. Only mad people speak to others on the Tube or in the streets.
The drifting economics of British winter
A bit of snow, goes the familiar refrain, and the country grinds to a halt. It’s not like this in Moscow or Chicago where they have snow ploughs and proper contingency plans.
We British love a good moan, but how much economic sense would it make to invest in fleets of snow-clearing equipment? When days of serious snow hit London last year the mayor, Boris Johnson, said it did not necessarily make sense to make a major investment in snow-ploughs if they were only used once every two decades. Though the capital is still relatively snow-lite at present, the mayor’s notion of once-every-two-decades is looking a little unrealistic. With global warming we can expect ‘freak’ weather to become more normal. But when does the cost-benefit analysis show that a major shift in thinking is required?
The major argument is always that snow hits the overall economy. If 10 per cent of the nation’s 30 million workforce is snowed in that costs Britain £600m a day. Not only is direct output lost but they don’t buy coffee, sandwiches and newspapers on their way to work.
But that is only true up to a point. Money not spent today doesn’t disappear like snow when the thaw comes. Some of the work we can’t do today we simply do tomorrow. And the things we can’t buy today often get bought later in the month. Likewise though there are fixed costs in snow-clearing – more ploughs, gritters and salt – some of the extra cost incurred, in wages for example, is returned to the economy in taxes and spending. And very cold weather boosts the profits of power companies.
Moreover, increasing numbers of people can work remotely or do deals online. Nor are the costs constant. Employers’ organisations will testify that the first day of snow is always the worst. After that people find that people do find ways to get back into work, though there can be longer-term problems with childcare when schools stay shut.
Having said that, councils who have sought to make public spending cuts by decreasing the stocks of salt and grit they hold – relying on just-in-time deliveries for replenishment – are indulging in a fool’s economising. That is where the rethinking needs to be done. But we do not yet need to start do the sums on snow-ploughs.
Refs blow the whistle on a selfish society
My mobile rang the other day when I was driving. I pulled over and stopped the car to take the call. Less than a minute later a posh four-wheel drive swerved violently in front of me and began reversing towards the side of my car. Seconds later it bumped into me and a bald man appeared by my window aggressively asserting that he wanted to get into his drive, which I was inadvertently blocking in the dark.
I was creating an obstruction, he barked, which was against the law, as he well knew since he was a magistrate. As, perhaps, I suggested, was backing his car into me. He did not reverse deliberately, he brayed, he had just omitted to put on the handbrake when he got out of the vehicle to remonstrate with me and the camber of the road had taken it into my side. Later he calmed down, perhaps because a passing taxi driver wound down his window to me, offered to act as a witness and gave me his phone number. Or perhaps because the magistrate began to recollect that allowing his vehicle to career out of control across the road might constitute a greater infringement of traffic law than obstruction.
Since this seemed pretty extraordinary behaviour for a justice of the peace I looked him up on the internet. He was a model citizen, giving generously of his time to local drug treatment services, youth work and the arts. So what caused him to lose control to such an extent that he could turn into an oafish bully?
He had given a clue. I’m fed up with parents from the school opposite blocking my drive, he fulminated. He had written to the headmaster to no avail. Parents’ cars still constantly blocked his drive. Out of pent-up frustration he had acted precipitately. It was, it seemed, just unfortunate that I was to be the scapegoat to bear the sins of all these other offenders.
The assertion of rights is not a sufficient basis for a healthy society. Who guards the guards? asked the Roman poet. Who judges the judges or, indeed as we have been reminded this weekend, who refs the refs? The entire cohort of Scotland’s senior football referees is striking as a protest against the growing levels of abuse directed at them by fans, players and managers. Things have gone well beyond the traditional grumbling about on-the-pitch decisions. Referees have received abusive phone calls at home. There have even been death threats. And if those are just the actions of a lunatic fringe, they are encouraged by vitriolic complaints by managers in post-match tv interviews. Even the former Home Secretary, John Reid, now the chairman of Celtic FC, used his club’s annual meeting to publicly question the integrity of a referee.
What the Pope was really saying about condoms
Everyone seems to have got what they wanted from the latest Pope and condoms story. Liberals have pronounced that the entire polar icecap of Catholic sexual morality has started to melt. Conservatives have insisted that nothing has changed in the Vatican’s opposition to artificial contraception. But is all this just wishful thinking all round?
Of course it is possible to say this is just the latest maladroit media comment from a Pope who has built a reputation for PR gaffes. But that takes us clearly to the central question it all raises: is Pope Benedict sending out a hesitant signal – running an idea up the flagpole, as the politicians put it when they deploy this favourite media-leak tactic – or has the pontiff slipped up again by not realising that what you actually say is not what people always hear?
Interestingly there is an awareness of that in the interviews Benedict XVI gave to the German journalist Peter Seewald for his new book, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times. Pointing out that no organisation does more for people with Aids than the Catholic Church, which cares for a quarter of all the world’s victims of the disease, Benedict laments this is not registered in “the tribunal of the newspapers”. The book explicitly deals with the Pope’s exasperation at the way his words or gestures are often over-interpreted, with their significance stretched well beyond his actual intent.
That being the case, though, one must assume that he is aware that when he talks of condom use, and the first example that comes to his mind is of a gay male prostitute – rather than a married couple where the man is HIV positive and his wife is not – he is will seem to be revealing that the Roman hierarchical clerical mindset is irredeemably androcentric, if not downright misogynistic.
On the morning school run I routinely get nagged to switch over to Chris Evans. One day last week I gave in, since some preposterous grumpy republican professor was on the Today programme suggesting that Prince William and Kate Middleton should get married in a garden shed and serve ham sandwiches to their guests. But if this is the Age of Austerity clearly it has not filtered across to Radio 2. There the presenter was taking bids for an auction in which the seven top bidders could spend a weekend driving seven of the world’s most exclusive sports cars.
People were ringing in to bid £10,000 for the pleasure. Then £20,000 and rising. By the time we got to the school gates the seven winners had bid around £60,000 a head for the 48 hours of speeding thrills. The auction was in aid of Children in Need. Yet even if the cause was worthwhile it still astonished me that there were quite so many people out there willing – and able – to find tens of thousands of pounds in hard cash for a weekend’s entertainment.
But then, if you look around, there are plenty of signs that these are not the lean years for many. A London hedge fund the other day made £250m on a single mining deal and has returned 90 per cent on its investments this year – when the rest of us are lucky to get 3 per cent at the building society. The banks are set to pay out a total of £7 billion in bonuses this year – though there are “fears” this could be cut to a mere £4bn. The couple who ran off from a Michelin-starred restaurant without paying, after pretending to slip outside for a smoke, aroused no suspicions because their £572 bill for two was a “pretty average” spend. The boom in e-books, a publisher claimed, was down to investment bankers buying books they will never get round to reading.
If “we are all in this together” some are travelling first class while huge numbers are condemned to steerage. That much was made clear last week by the blundering comments of the prime ministerial adviser Lord Young of Graffham who was forced to resign after saying that the majority of British people had “never had it so good” as they had had in “this so-called recession”. The only people complaining are those “who think they have a right for the state to support them”.
No time wasters, please; To Plato, time was a metaphor, to Newton it was an absolute, toEinstein it was relative … Today, time is money (and there’s never enoughof either). Paul Vallely traces a brief history and discovers some pockets of resistance read more…
Does the Queen clap? It’s hard to tell from the fleeting shots we were allowed of her at the service on the eve of Remembrance Sunday. There is clearly some BBC etiquette which restricts the number and nature of times the camera is allowed to linger on the monarch. We know she does not sing the national anthem, which might be permissible theologically but would offend against protocol or propriety. But when people perform before her does she, like the rest of the audience, applaud? We never got to see.
What the camera did record, as the Festival of Remembrance modulated from civic commemoration into a religious service, was close-ups of politicians singing the hymns. It was no surprise that David Cameron joined in; the prime minister is a known churchgoer. But Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband sang too, which set me thinking since they have both announced that they do not believe in God.
They may, of course, in the interim had a Damascene moment. More likely they had decided that too many people would be offended by them not singing. News stories saying “party leader shows lack of respect for the fallen” would probably lose more votes than ones suggesting “politician does the opposite of what he says”. To many of the electorate the latter would sound as newsworthy as “dog bites man”.
So is singing something that you don’t really believe a mark of politeness – or a lack of integrity? Nick Clegg, of course, is already fairly low on the scale of the nation’s esteem after his brazen U-turns on the ferocity of public spending cuts and on university tuition fees, on both of which he abandoned clear electoral promises.
Because it was there. Why would anyone want to make a career out of studying the 25,000 different melodies of a tiny bird called the Bengalese finch? You might assume that the answer would rank high in the lists of heroic irrelevance which marks out so much human endeavour. But you would be wrong.
Pet-owners who believe the animals which share their lives can ‘speak’ through their barks or miaows are fooling themselves, scientists believe. The vocalisations of cats and dogs are innate and unlearned. But birds learn a song by listening to other birds and copying – much as a human baby learns the language. So studying how individual brain cells control birdsong could provide insights into the complex neural networks involved in human speech.
It will be a long way off, for bird syntax – even that of the most complex of songbirds, like the Bengalese finch – is much simpler than that of human speech. But it is a start on a long road of discovery.
How long it will be before even the most advanced science has even the faintest inkling of the sense behind the syntax is another matter. We may never, for example, be able to work out the thought-processes which lie behind the statement of an institution like the world football authority, Fifa. But scientists at Cern have for the first time trapped anti-matter. So perhaps there is even hope for, one day, comprehending Sepp Blatter.
One of the great stalwarts of 20th century British journalism, Louis Heren, was given a piece of advice when he was a reporter in Washington. He passed it on to me, over lunch at the Garrick, when I was a young reporter on The Times and he was its recently retired august Deputy Editor. Whenever you are interviewing a politician, a US veteran journalist told him, always keep at the front of your mind the question: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me”. It would overly cynical to suggest that the maxim should be applied to every statement made by the current Coalition government in Britain. But it is unfortunate that ministers have in recent days made two significantly misleading statements to the public or to parliament.
First the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, claimed that graduates would not have to start repaying their tuition fees until they were earning £21,000 a year. The Independent yesterday revealed that payback will begin at as little as £18,000 which will leave thousands of the poorest graduates worse off. Now it emerges that the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has misled parliament by making out that figures quoted to justify cuts in housing benefit were from the Office of National Statistics when they turn out to be taken from a property website owned by the publishers of the Daily Mail.
These are not innocent errors but ones with political consequences. On housing benefit the real statistics show that landlords will have no need to drop their rents – as ministers have suggested – if benefits are cut. Rather they are far more likely to evict low-income tenants and find other tenants. That would mean that the housing benefit cuts could, after all, lead to mass evictions of people who rely on housing benefit to pay the rent.
In opposition the two Coalition parties laid much store on the need for greater government transparency. Indeed the Chancellor, George Osborne, went so far as to set up the independent Office for Budget Responsibility in protest against what he claimed was the dodgy use of statistics and fiscal forecasts of the previous Labour government. The public has the right to expect better of politicians, but most particularly those who have, in opposition, made a point of promising greater integrity.
Fantasies that glorify retribution
Fidel Castro is not a happy chap. Cuba’s state-run media has launched a fierce attack on a new video game in which the object is to assassinate this leader of one of the last redoubts of Communism before the fall of the Wall. It is not just any old video game. Black Ops raked in $360,000,000 in a single day when it was launched in North America and the UK last week. It is the latest in the series of Call of Duty blast’em console games. The last, Modern Warfare 2, was the biggest grossing video-game last year with some 22 million units sold by an industry that now dwarfs Hollywood.
Until now the six games in the series have concentrated on World War II as their background, with a couple of forays into a more anonymous contemporary locale. But the latest moves to a Cold War setting, with gamers being set a first mission of assassinating Castro on the eve of the 1962 Bay of Pigs missile crisis, the moment when the world came as close as it ever has to mutually assured destruction.
Havana is not amused. The CIA and Cuban exiles are said to have tried to bump off the grand old man no fewer than 638 times in real life. Having failed they are resorting to virtual reality, the Cuban news-site has complained. To add insult to infamy at the end of the game’s single player mode, a special Zombie level is unlocked in which Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon wield machine guns to save the Pentagon from the otherworldly threat.
We are clearly running out of enemies with which to satisfy the blood lust of the game manufacturers. In recent times we have already had controversy after the last version of Medal of Honor let players take on the role of Taliban fighters killing NATO troops in Afghanistan. (The Californian manufacturers removed the option after the game was banned from US military bases.) Then there was a game called Muslim Massacre in which players become an American soldier on a mission to “wipe out the Muslim race” progressing through various levels where they take on Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and finally Allah. In another players take on the roles of terrorists in a civilian airport shoot-up. Clearly no-one went broke underestimating the bad taste of the gaming public.
“OI! how long is this effin’ road gonna be closed for?” The voice cut like a circular saw through the quiet of the autumnal morning air. A phrase from Edmund Burke popped extravagantly into my mind — something about turbulent men, puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, with a selfish and profligate “disregard of a dignity which they partake with others”.
It was Remembrance Sunday, and the roads had been closed around the town hall in my home town of Sale for the service at the local cenotaph — a high plinth on which stands the statue of a crusader, helmeted head bowed, his hands resting on his sword, and by his side a long shield bearing the cross of St George. A crowd of perhaps 600 had gathered, sizeable for this little town that is now no more than a suburb of Greater Manchester — a motley assembly, with kids in buggies and dogs on leads.
We bowed our heads as the Revd Thomas Shepherd, Vicar of St Paul’s near by, led the prayers — understated, measured, and yet with a quiet dignity that took no affront at the cars that roared irritably along the diversion route. We even bore with patience the bawling of the irritable driver who had climbed from his car and punctuated the two minutes’ silence with his uncouth protest about the temporary road closure. It was as if this was how we expected memorial to be received by the world in which we live.
