This, I thought, is where most of the remembering happens. Two old soldiers in their seventies from the British Legion had come to the old Territorial Army barracks, where, in the dark and the drizzle, some 30 young schoolboy and -girl cadets, aged 13 to 16, were stood on parade.
Tomorrow, on Remembrance Sunday, the grand commemoration of the nation’s war dead takes place once again at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. But it is in little towns such as Macclesfield that the majority of the nation does its remembering.
Only a few years ago it seemed that the annual memorial to those killed fighting for their country was gradually waning. No doubt it would eventually die with the old soldiers for whom remembrance was not a historical duty, but a living memory of the comrades-at-arms whom they saw perish on the field of battle. First, most of the surviving Old Contemptibles of the Great War had gone peacefully to their graves. Now, the veterans of the Second World War were following them. Soon, memory would become a second-hand affair and, inexorably, would fade away.
But then, five years ago, came the 50th anniversary of VE Day, when the nation surprised itself by stopping and observing a two-minute silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the time when the armistice was signed in 1918, to mark the end of the conflict that had been called, without irony, the war to end wars. On that day in 1995 the silence was marked everywhere – from offices to factories, from smart restaurants to ordinary pubs, from railway concourses to the streets of provincial cities. Even a crowd of football supporters fell silent.
Since then, there has been a revitalisation of remembrance. Which is why in Macclesfield this week two old soldiers, Cpl Len Johnson and Sgt Fred Baker, were visiting the cadets who had agreed to sell poppies at the local football ground, where Macclesfield Town are playing Brighton Hove Albion in a Division Three needle-match. It is why an old Royal Engineers wagon will be done up in bunting to parade the streets today. And why the Macclesfield Male Voice Choir, supported by the Cheshire Constabulary Band, will be giving a concert at St Paul’s Church tonight – which the organisers are expecting to be a sell-out “despite stiff competition”, said Len, “from the Marple Brass Band at the Methodist Church and Laurel and Hardy silent films in the Heritage Centre”.
FollowNo-one should be in any doubt that the general election in Burma last weekend was a mockery of the democratic process. There may have been 37 political parties involved but dozens of senior officers “retired” to stand for election. More than two-thirds of the 3,000 candidates who ran had close links to the military.
The elections, the first for 20 years, were boycotted by the National League for Democracy, which gained a landslide victory under its leader Aung San Suu Kyi who has been in prison or under house arrest ever since. Yesterday Burma’s supreme court, which is controlled by the military, rejected an appeal by Ms Suu Kyi against her house arrest which was due to run out on Saturday. The pro-democracy leader’s supporters fear the government will now keep her under arrest.
Burma’s generals are guilty of a raft of human rights abuses, including the forcible relocation of civilians, widespread forced labour and the jailing of over 2,000 political prisoners. But the international community has proved impotent in the face of this. The UN imposed sanctions a decade ago but these have been undermined by nations greedy for Burmese oil, including China, France, Japan, India, Malaysia, Russia, South Korea and Thailand.
In recent months the United States has shifted from its unrelentingly confrontational approach to Burma. Barack Obama has signalled a greater engagement with Burma, as with other regimes of which the US disapproves. Shunning all contact, Washington has decided, makes it harder to tackle regional problems like refugees, drug-trafficking and disease control. The junta’s growing links with North Korea adds to the risks of nuclear proliferation.
It is important not to go soft on the generals. But the stick of smart sanctions, targeted on senior figures in the regime, is being complemented by the offer of humanitarian aid, building on the relief given after the cyclone which devastated Burma last year, killing 150,000 people. It is important to continue this twin-tracked approach. These elections, though deeply flawed, could mark the start of a process of limited democratisation. The news that Ms Suu Kyi’s son was yesterday, at last, given a visa to enter the country to visit his mother, is another small concession. Sticks and carrots could turn out to be more productive than big sticks waved but never weilded.
On the menu – an undiscovered species
A good scientist never sleeps. Well, he or she is never off duty at any rate if Dr Ngo Van Tri of the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology is anything to go by. He was in a restaurant in the Megong Delta when he was served up grilled lizard and salad. Intrigued he asked to see a live specimen – and decided it might be a new species unknown to science even if it was familiar to local chefs.
The enterprising scientist then emailed pictures of the lizard to experts in the United States who jumped on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City from where they phoned the restaurant to place an order. Unfortunately the restaurateur, so excited by his sudden international celebrity, got drunk and served all the remaining lizards to customers in celebration. When the US scientists arrived there were none left. Fortunately local boys sent out into the forest returned with 60 more of the beasts. They were, indeed, unknown to herpetology.
Most intriguingly the creatures were all females. It turns out that the species has no males but reproduces by cloning unfertilised egg cells in a process called parthenogenesis – which sounds suspiciously like virgin birth. But that’s another story.
Good riddance to Phil Woolas. That seems to be the message of most of the political classes, and it is delivered with considerable glee. It could, of course, be personal. Some may have objected to his bullying and hectoring style. Others may not have liked his arrogance, remembering the way – launching, ironically enough, the Government’s “tackling extremism” roadshow – he publicly dismissed the views of a young Muslim woman as “a load of crap” when she suggested that our foreign policy might have contributed to the radicalisation of young British Asians. Or they may well have been shocked at some of the carryings-on in his election campaign in his Saddleworth constituency earlier this year.
Certainly the two high court judges seemed to be when they sat in an election court which found that Mr Woolas had knowingly lied about his Liberal Democrat opponent, falsely accusing him of having the backing of an illegal terrorist organisation. “If we don’t get the white vote angry he’s gone,” the court was told one Woolas activist had written to another in an election strategy they described, provoking arched legal eyebrows, as “shit or bust” – in a town which in 2001 experienced serious race riots. The judges decreed, contrary perhaps to popular opinion, that it is not acceptable for politicians to tell deliberate lies about one another, and declared his election as an MP void. Mr Woolas can appeal on procedural grounds but he is damaged politically beyond repair.
I think I may be a news addict. But I have evidence that the condition may not be incurable. Two days ago BBC journalists began a 48 hour strike and I found myself, in a welcome break from the relentless harrying of John Humphrys on the Today programme, listening to a chap on Radio 4 splashing about in the estuarial waters of the Wash describing the oyster-catchers you could hear shrieking in the background. It was a welcome reminder that there are other kinds of reality than the whirligig of events which are 24-hour news.
There is more to that thought than whimsy. We had several good examples last week of how the news reshapes reality. First Dr David Nutt, the government’s former chief adviser on drugs, who was sacked last year for being too political, produced a new independent guide to dangerous drugs which turned the official classifications upside down. Let us set aside the hysteria generated by tabloid headlines, he effectively said, and instead take a cold scientific look at the degree of harm different drugs do to the user and to wider society. Dr Nutt concluded that alcohol does more overall damage than heroin, ecstasy or LSD and suggested the government was putting its efforts into the wrong places.
Critics, rightly, had reservations about the method he used to estimate the overall harm of individual drugs. His formula for weighting the combined social and personal damage included estimates of each drug’s impact on the NHS, crime, the family, the environment, the economy and more. Those are judgements on which an expert neuropharmacologist like him has no more expertise than do a politicians. But his conclusion that drugs policy is currently driven by headlines rather than facts is persuasive. The debate should prefer scientific evaluations to social preconceptions or political prejudice.
Our approach to news is partly to blame here. There is an attack culture in modern journalism which it is easy for lobbyists to exploit. To get attention from the media nowadays all you have to do is say the opposite of conventional wisdom. Emma Thompson says that Audrey Hepburn couldn’t act. An Oxford academic pronounces that Jane Austen couldn’t write. The BBC says that Live Aid money was spent on buying arms.
Sex and drugs … and the extremely elusive search for objective truth
The line of logic of those who want chemists to give the contraceptive pill to 13-year-old girls is pretty clear. It will only be given to girls who come into the chemist asking for the morning after pill. Therefore it will only be given to girls who are sexually active already. They will get just a month’s supply so they have to go to a doctor or sexual health clinic thereafter. If they don’t get it “these most vulnerable women” will continue to have sex and become pregnant. It would be irresponsible not to prevent that.
But what about the law of unintended consequences? The counter argument is that the wider message being sent out by this pilot project on the Isle of Wight is that sex among 13-year-olds is normative. The more under-age girls who think that is what is expected of them the more teenage pregnancies there will be, because most of them have sex without contraception. Far from protecting a few young women from unwanted pregnancy it will increase the problem on a far wider scale. And that will increase, not reduce, the vulnerability of girls who are not “young women” but children.
Leave aside morality for a moment and ask is there an empirical way of discovering which of these arguments will prove factually correct? There is a parallel here with another controversy in which some people argue there is a way of reaching an objective truth.
Professor David Nutt, who was the government’s chief adviser on drugs until he was sacked for exceeding his scientific brief and making political statements, has just produced a new independent guide that overturns the official government dangerous drugs classification. He has added together the ill-effects to both the user and to wider society and concluded that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin, crack or crystal meth. Alcohol is three times more harmful than cocaine and eight-times more damaging than ecstasy or LSD.
Yes he can… but it won’t be anywhere near as easy as a lot of people thought
Everyone had a good chortle at Barack Obama when he was forced to repeat his famous campaign slogan “Yes we can” with the addition of a long pause , followed by the word “but”. The laughter came from the usual cynics – people who are ever adept at passing judgement but who never take the risk of doing anything more difficult than turning a waspish phrase. But it also came from naïve idealists – who see politics as a kind of fairytale or parable but who have no real understanding of the complexities the political art involves.
Obama’s accommodation with political reality reminded me of another seminal moment. Sitting in his kitchen in Wales, after it was announced he was to become Archbishop of Canterbury but while he was still the comparatively obscure Bishop Of Monmouth, Rowan Williams said, in a moment of terrifying illumination: “People are going to be very disappointed in me.” Of course they wouldn’t, I told him. “They will it’s inevitable,” he insisted. What Rowan had suddenly glimpsed, and Barack Obama has gradually learned, was the terrible burden of conflicting expectations.
As he approaches the midterm congressional elections on Tuesday it’s easy to make a list of all the things the American president has not got right in the past two years. He has not kept his promise to close down the Guantánamo detention centre, hasn’t quelled the rising voices of critics at home, has echoed George Bush’s bellicosity on Iran and has been crassly nationalist with BP whilst refusing to shut down offshore oil exploration. He’s allowed himself to be pushed around by the Israelis as they refuse to stop building settlements on Palestinian land. He has not introduced a carbon tax or reversed the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Yet there is a lot to set against that. His massive $787bn fiscal stimulus has been crucial in averting global depression. He’s prevented trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unravelling worldwide which would have meant even more people losing their homes. He has kept millions in work by bailing out the US car industry. He is one of the few world leaders not to be panicked by the latest voodoo economics into rushing prematurely into austerity – a policy which one wag in America described as the economic equivalent of creationism. Instead he’s embracing a “growth now” strategy.
Why women like ads about sofas… and other neologisms
Women, it seems, best remember adverts about sofas. Men, we’re told, most recall laddish beer adverts. So what breaks down the gender divide? Simples. It’s that pesky meerkat from the insurance price comparison advert.
Both genders were surveyed and it turns out that, for men and women alike, the Compare-the-Meerkat insurance ads are the most memorable of the last year. Which perhaps explains why its irritating Simples catchphrase has just entered the über-trendy Collins English Dictionary.
But you can tell a lot about a word by the company it keeps. Other new entries, thanks to the advent of micro-blogging site, include tweetheart (a person much admired by other twitterers) and tweet-tooth which describes an uncontrollable urge to post a Twitter.
Will they last? Bigotgate, describing Gordon Brown’s unfortunate encounter with a thitherto Labour voter in Rochdale, sounds long gone already. So, equally unsurprisingly, does Cleggmania. While David Cameron’s contribution, broken society, some would suspect a word of fiction rather than fact. Likewise funemployment – a noun purporting to mean the condition of enjoying being without work. It could come to some dictionary editors sooner than they might suppose.
“Keeping religion out of politics” is the subtitle of the new book by the philosopher Mary Warnock. Its publication, just after Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly addressed the same subject during his recent visit to the UK, offers an interesting counterpoint to a papal visit which did not bring the fire-and-brimstone condemnations of our atheistic society which many had predicted.
Baroness Warnock, one suspects, might have been happier had they come to pass, for that would have leant into her rather odd argument that in modern Britain religion and politics are hopelessly entangled giving the godly undue power over the godless. But where the philosopher selects her facts to fit her arguments the theologian pontiff did the opposite. He came in listening mode. He had listened before he came, and penned a series of well-judged speeches and homilies which acknowledge the great achievements of the British political tradition and urged us now not to throw those away in a bonfire of materialist utilitarian populism.
If you’d read Lady Warnock’s recent article on the book in the Church Times you would have found very little with which to disagree. Every parliamentarian has an equal right to express an opinion, and vote in accordance with moral conviction. Dogma must not replace conscience. Theocratic authority is no substitute for democracy, etc, etc. Nothing there to justify the book’s title: Dishonest to God.
This week’s conspiracy theories – from Dr David Kelly to Wayne Rooney
Scholastic philosophy is always a good place to start. The 14th century English thinker William of Ockham is best known for his insistence on a bias towards simplicity in the construction of theories. His technique is known as Ockham’s Razor, for its insistence on shaving away superfluous ideas. Go for simplest explanation first, he counselled.
It is not advice that has been widely followed with regard to the death of Dr David Kelly, the British weapons inspector whose body was found in woods in Oxfordshire in 2003 – after it was revealed he was the source for a BBC story suggesting that Tony Blair’s government had “sexed up” the case for the invasion of Iraq. Despite the official verdict by the Hutton Inquiry that the scientist committed suicide, theories have abounded that he may have been murdered by agents of the state.
A group of prominent doctors, disquieted by the officially reported causes of death, have repeatedly campaigned for a formal inquest into Dr Kelly’s demise. Last week the government responded by publishing the pathologist’s report which Lord Hutton had decreed should be classified for 70 years out of sensitivity to the dead man’s family. Now we have seen it there seem even fewer grounds for disputing that the scientist died after slashing his left wrist and taking an overdose whose effect was exacerbated by an undiagnosed heart condition. The new report was “convincing” said one of the campaigning doctors, Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine . He was “certainly satisfied” that the cause of death given was the correct one.
Not everyone agreed. If Dr Kelly’s death was consistent with a verdict of suicide, “then it must also be consistent with murder made to look like suicide,” one conspiracist swiftly proclaimed. And off the bloggers went: not enough blood, no fingerprints on knife, aversion to swallowing pills, missing dental records, mysterious man in black and boat seen in area, and all the rest.
Any reasonable person would concede that there are a number of loose ends in the case. But to jump from that to the existence of death squads in the employ of the British prime minister is another matter. Ockham’s law of logical parsimony recommends that, faced with a mystery, we select the hypothesis that introduces the fewest external assumptions and factors. But survey modern culture and you will find a consistent reluctance to believe the obvious.
The US government was behind 9/11 as a pretext for invading Afghanistan. The moon landings were codded up by Nasa in a studio. Princess Diana was murdered by the royal family. The Mafia shot John F Kennedy. Another US president quietly killed off 50 of his associates in what became known as the Clinton Body Count. Global warming is all got up by scientists to get themselves extra research funds. Aids came from a virus genetically engineered by the US government to kill off blacks and homosexuals.
Many Roman Catholics like me look slightly askance at the prospect of disenchanted Anglican traditionalists flooding across the Tiber, and not because they will be swimming with one hand and holding their ornate thuribles aloft in the other to keep them dry.
No, it is what they say they want to leave behind which makes us wonder about what they are bringing with them. Not to mention what it is they hope to find when they get to their promised land.
Take the Bishop of Fulham’s valedictory description of the church he seems determined to quit. The keynote address of the Rt Rev John Broadhurst to the Forward in Faith assembly – despite the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone in which it was delivered – contained some extraordinarily violent language. He characterised the Anglican Communion as a place of ‘lies’, deceit’ and described it at one point as ‘an evil institution’. He called it ‘myopic’ and bemoaned its ‘lack of consultation’. Later he was quoted as calling it ‘vindictive’, ‘vicious’ and ‘fascist in its behaviour’.
I would not, for one moment, wish the bishop anything other than well on his spiritual journey. But, as someone who values the vehicles for transcendence offered by the tradition into which I was born, I have to say that I am puzzled at the insistence of Anglicans like Bishop Broadhurst that opposition to women’s ordination is somehow the touchstone of catholicity. Plenty of committed Catholics I know in the Roman church regard the prospect of women priests and bishops as something devoutly to be wished.
The changing weather over Old Trafford
The sky was a pale blue wintry over Old Trafford yesterday, which seemed apt. For the news had come out of blue to most Manchester United fans that Wayne Rooney, who was named Footballer of the Year last season, had announced that he wants to leave the club.
The place was in shock, but few doubted it would happen. Street traders outside the ground had already discounted scarves proclaiming “Wayne Rooney – The White Pele” to just half price. Inside the United Megastore two customers were returning shirts bearing the player’s name. “I’ll have a Chicharito one instead,” one man said glumly.
So unexpected was the news that most United staff only heard it yesterday morning. “It has been a complete shock to lots of people inside the club,” one insider said.
“The overwhelming reaction is sheer disappointment,” said one of the licensed street traders, John Speed, 40, a lifelong United fan clad in the green-and-gold scarf of the fans’ protest movement which wants to force the club’s owners, the Glazer family, to leave. The Glazers have burdened what was once the world’s richest club with debts of £700 million.
