"As Ever..."

Dave Osler on the Labour candidacy for Tower Hamlets mayor (you remember, the one where the original (Bangla) candidate was deselected, and the guy (hideously white) who came second in the selection was passed over because "they could not go to the person who came second in the poll for the Labour Party candidate selection, John Biggs, without it looking like they were choosing a white British candidate in preference to a Bengali") :

"Even though I live in an adjoining borough, only two or three miles away from where all this has been happening, the world of Tower Hamlets Labour politics remains, as ever, impenetrable to outsiders."

As ever ? In the time of the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921 ?

Was it like that in February 1974 ?

General Election October 1974: Stepney and Poplar
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Peter Shore	24,159	77.6
	Conservative	Harry Greenway	3,183	10.2
	Liberal	F. W. Alexander	3,181	10.2	N/A
	Communist	Kevin Halpin	617	2.0
Majority			20,976	67.4
Turnout			60,458	51.5
	Labour hold		Swing

And 1979 ?

General Election 1979: Stepney and Poplar
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Peter Shore	19,576	62.6
	Conservative	Robert Gurth Hughes	6,561	21.0
	Liberal	Rif Winfield	2,234	7.2
	National Front	V. Clarke	1,571	5.0	N/A
	Independent Labour	Ted Johns	672	2.2	N/A
	Communist	Kevin Halpin	413	1.3
	Workers' Revolutionary	Peter Chappell	235	0.8	N/A
Majority			13,015	41.6
Turnout			58,637	53.3
	Labour hold		Swing

Or perhaps 1983 ?

General Election 1983: Bethnal Green and Stepney
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Peter Shore	15,740	51.0	N/A
	Liberal	S. Charters	9,382	30.4	N/A
	Conservative	Demitri Argyropulo	4,323	14.0	N/A
	National Front	V. Clark	800	2.6	N/A
	Communist	J. Rees	243	0.8	N/A
	Independent	B. N. Chaudhuri	214	0.7	N/A
	Independent	P. J. Mahoney	136	0.4	N/A
Majority			6,358	20.6
Turnout				55.7
	Labour hold		Swing

1987 ?

General Election 1987: Bethnal Green and Stepney
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Peter Shore	15,490	48.3	- 2.7
	Liberal	Jeremy Shaw	10,206	31.8	+ 1.4
	Conservative	Olga Maitland	6,176	19.2	+ 5.2
	Communist	S. L. Gasquoine	232	0.7	- 0.1
Majority			5,284	16.5
Turnout				57.6
	Labour hold		Swing

1992 ?

General Election 1992: Bethnal Green and Stepney
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Peter Shore	20,350	55.8	+ 7.5
	Liberal Democrat	Jeremy Shaw	8,120	22.3	- 9.5
	Conservative	Jane Emmerson	6,507	17.9	- 1.3
	BNP	Richard Edmonds	1,310	3.6	N/A
	Communist	S. Kelsey	156	0.4	- 0.3
Majority			12,230	33.5	+ 17.0
Turnout			36,443	65.5	+ 7.9
	Labour hold		Swing

1997 ?

General Election 1997: Bethnal Green and Bow
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Oona King	20,697	46.3	-9.5
	Conservative	Kabir Choudhury	9,412	21.1	+3.2
	Liberal Democrat	Syed Nurul Islam Dulu	5,361	12.0	-10.3
	BNP	David King	3,350	7.5	+3.9
	Liberal	Terry Milson	2,963	6.6
	Real Labour	Sheref Osman	1,117	2.5
	Green	Stephen Petter	812	1.8
	Referendum Party	Muhammed Abdullah	557	1.2
	Socialist Labour	Abdul Hamid	413	0.9
Majority			11,285	25.3
Turnout			44,682	60.3	-5.2

2001 ?

General Election 2001: Bethnal Green and Bow
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Oona King	19,380	50.5	+4.1
	Conservative	Shahagir Bakth Faruk	9,323	24.3	+3.2
	Liberal Democrat	Janet Ludlow	5,946	15.5	+3.5
	Green	Anna Bragga	1,666	4.3	+2.5
	BNP	Michael Davidson	1,211	3.2	-4.3
	New Britain	Dennis Delderfield	888	2.3	N/A
Majority			10,057	26.2
Turnout			38,414	50.2	-10.1
	Labour hold		Swing

2005 ?

General Election 2005: Bethnal Green and Bow
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Respect	George Galloway	15,801	35.9
	Labour	Oona King	14,978	34.0	-16.5
	Conservative	Shahagir Bakth Faruk	6,244	14.2	-10.1
	Liberal Democrat	Syed Nurul Islam Dulu	4,928	11.2	-4.3
	Green	John Foster	1,950	4.4	+0.1
	Alliance for Change	Ejiro Etefia*	68	0.2
	Communist League	Celia Pugh	38	0.1
Majority			823	1.9
Turnout			44,007	51.2
	Respect gain from Labour		Swing	26.2%

Or 2010 ?

2010 General Election: Bethnal Green and Bow[3]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Rushanara Ali	21,784	42.9	+8.4
	Liberal Democrat	Ajmal Masroor	10,210	20.1	+7.8
	Respect	Abjol Miah	8,532	16.8	-19.8
	Conservative	Zakir Khan	7,071	13.9	+2.0
	BNP	Jeffrey Marshall	1,405	2.8	N/A
	Green	Farid Bakht	856	1.7	-2.8
	Independent	Patrick Brooks	277	0.5	N/A
	Pirate	Alexander van Terheyden	213	0.4	N/A
	United Voice	Hasib Hikmat	209	0.4	N/A
	Independent	Haji Mahmood Choudhury	100	0.2	N/A
	Independent	Ahmed Abdul Malik	71	0.1	N/A
Majority			11,574	22.8
Turnout			50,728	62.4	+10.9
	Labour gain from Respect		Swing	14.1%

Walter Leigh - Concertino for Harpsichord and Strings

Been meaning to post this for ages. IMHO it's one of the great neglected pieces of English classical music. I'm always impressed by the sheer confidence of the first movement - as if he's been turning out harpsichord concertos for ever - and the second movement is lovely.



This is a somewhat hissy, midfi recording from my battered 1970s copy with Neville Dilkes and the English Sinfonia. While the vinyl is not available on CD (it also featured Warlock, John Ireland, Butterworth and Moeran) the Dilkes Concertino and the John Ireland is on CD here.




Walter Leigh was killed at Tobruk in 1942 in a friendly fire incident. He's buried here. Quite apart from the loss to his family - he left three children and a delightful wife, think of all that music we never got to hear, and never will hear.

Name:LEIGH, WALTER
Initials:W
Nationality: United Kingdom
Rank: Trooper (he's L/Cpl in the Regimental Diary - LT)
Regiment/Service: Royal Armoured Corps
Unit Text: 4th Queen's Own Hussars
Date of Death: 12/06/1942
Service No: 7931725
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: 10. A. 23.
Cemetery: KNIGHTSBRIDGE WAR CEMETERY, ACROMA


12/6/1942
RHQ, C and HQ Sqns left EL DUDA at 0630 hours for CAPUZZO area, arriving 1500 hours at BIR BEDER. A Sqn, 6 Stuarts, with 4 Stuarts, 3 Grants and 1 Crusader attached, remained at EL DUDA as rearguard to TDS. At EL DUDA the Sqn was machine gunned by one of our own fighters, resulting in the death of Sgt Shill, LCpl Duckering and LCpl Leigh. One OR was wounded. The deceased were buried at approx 428412. B Sqn. At 1430 hours, the Sqn (10 Grants) with 1 Crusader (3rd CLY) attached, was ordered to engage 8 Armd Cars and 9 M13’s at MADURET EL GHESCEUASC. Whilst engaging these, approx 12 Mk IIIs and 8 MK IVs, supported by 8 x 88mm and a number of 50mm guns, appeared from the direction of B.702 384402. From this action only 1 Tank succeeded in escaping. This was 2Lt Cartmell. Apart from this crew, only 2Lt RGH Walker and Cpl Murray have returned, both wounded. Nothing further is known about the rest of the Tank crews. A Echelon was attacked by high level bombers at 384416. Tpr Hyde and Tpr Hilliard were killed and were buried on the spot. No personal effects could be recovered. LCpl Chattaway, LCpl Vyse and Tpr Deacon were wounded. LCpl Chattaway died of wounds later the same day.

Leigh wrote a lot of film and incidental music. Everyone knows the famous Post Office film 'Night Mail', but the GPO commissioned many short films in the 1930s. Here's the composer's sister, actress Charlotte Leigh, explaining the new-fangled phone system (music by Walter and chorus of GPO switchboard girls). Love that enunciation :

I keep reading CiF threads in the Guardian where the right-on castigate the xenophobes and racists who've somehow turned up on the threads.

That's nowt to what you'll get when the Chinese People's Daily takes a pop at India. A lot of history gets dug up. Seem to be nearly all Indian commenters except for perhaps a few Pakistani nay-sayers. A fascinating cross-section of views.

"The Chinese are so drunk on their power and they are working hard to destroy our nation using every means possible, including arming the Maoists and giving nukes to Pakistan. This is only because they feel threatened by our rise and want absolute and uncontrolled domination over our people. But their children will pay, for if they fail to destroy us, the rest of our people will hate them for the next 1000 years for what their people are doing now."

It's not all jingoists though :

China should abandon its policy of being condescending towards neighbours who are smaller in size, population, etc.China should first learn the art of speaking to disgruntled elements within itw own territory as India has been doing. Without resolving the issue of tibet and the far western corners of xinchiang through methods that are peaceful, China cannot aspire to gain the confidence of the rest of the world, leave alone its neighbourhood.

Chinese Eugenics

Well strike a light :

In other sports, size is more important - and the government appears to be discreetly trying to influence this too. Top basketball coach Wang Libin says the government encouraged the exceptionally tall mother and father of Yao Ming, the 7ft 6in superstar of the American basketball league, to marry. They did the same for his own parents, and for him and his wife - both basketball players. Their daughter is only 15, but she is 6ft 4in tall and dreams of playing in the 2012 London Olympics. Now, he says, tall people are exempted from the one-child policy so that they can breed more tall offspring.

Hmm. If they'll do that for a few gold medals, what might they not do for a few Nobel-winning scientists ?

UPDATE - apparently a Chinese law of 1994 provides for the compulsory sterilisation of those who carry serious genetic disorders and wish to marry. "Wish to marry", eh - how quaint and old-fashioned that sounds to a Brit. I have to assume there aren't many Ed Milibands in China. In fact :

"it is illegal in almost every province for single women to have a child and that people who have children out of wedlock must pay "social compensation fees" (29 Feb. 2009, Sec.1.f). The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) reports that those who give birth to a child outside of marriage can face fines six to eight times the amount of their income from the previous year (US 31 Oct. 2008, 97). According to a 2005 article in Reproductive Health, very few children are born out of wedlock in China (11 Aug. 2005, 3)."

I'm not surprised. But has anyone told Andy Newman ?

The Fate of Empires - Part 2

More from Glubb Pasha :

The inadequacy of intellect

Perhaps the most dangerous byproduct of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies' luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and service on the part of the members. In a wider national sphere, the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse.

Thus we see that the cultivation of the human intellect seems to be a magnificent ideal, but only on condition that it does not weaken unselfishness and human dedication to service. Yet this, judging by historical precedent, seems to be exactly what it does do. Perhaps it is not the intellectualism which destroys the spirit of self-sacrifice—the least we can say is that the two, intellectualism and the loss of a sense of duty, appear simultaneously in The life-story of the nation.

Civil dissensions

Another remarkable and unexpected symptom of national decline is the intensification of internal political hatreds. One would have expected that, when the survival of the nation became precarious, political factions would drop their rivalry and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country.

In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grace.

Britain has been governed by an elected parliament for many centuries. In former years, however, the rival parties observed many unwritten laws. Neither party wished to eliminate the other. All the members referred to one another as honourable gentlemen. But such courtesies have now lapsed. Booing, shouting and loud noises have undermined the dignity of the House, and angry exchanges are more frequent. We arc fortunate if these rivalries are fought out in Parliament, but sometimes such hatreds are carried into the streets, or into industry in the form of strikes, demonstrations, boycotts and similar activities. True to the normal course followed by nations in decline, internal differences are not reconciled in an attempt to save the nation. On the contrary, internal rivalries become more acute, as the nation becomes weaker.

At this point I feel constrained to point out that "this time it really is different". In times past, if there was a crisis, at least the competing factions could agree that the crisis existed, even if they were at loggerheads as to what to do about it. But in the UK, while many British people think there's a crisis of national decline, our rulers - of all parties - disagree. Indeed, many of the phenomena evinced as symptoms of decline are celebrated by them. "We are comfortable with modern Britain and that we believe our best days lie ahead" is a typical comment.

Which brings us on to :

The influx of foreigners

One of the oft-repeated phenomena of great empires is the influx of foreigners to the capital city. Roman historians often complain of the number of Asians and Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in the ninth century, was international in its population—Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Egyptians, Africans and Greeks mingled in its streets.

In London today (written in 1978 - LT) , Cypriots, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans and Indians jostle one another on the buses and in the underground, so that it sometimes seems difficult to find any British. The same applies to New York, perhaps even more so. This problem does not consist in any inferiority of one race as compared with another, but simply in the differences between them.

In the age of the first outburst and the subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is normally ethnically more or less homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence, every type of foreigner floods into the great city, the streets of which are reputed to be paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great city is also the capital of the empire, the cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of empire exercises a political influence greatly in excess of its relative numbers.

Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but they often constitute a weakness in two directions. First, their basic human nature often differs from that of the original imperial stock. If the earlier imperial race was stubborn and slow-moving, the immigrants might come from more emotional races, thereby introducing cracks and schisms into the national policies, even if all were equally loyal. Second, while the nation is still affluent, all the diverse races may appear equally loyal. But in an acute emergency, the immigrants will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.
Third, the immigrants are liable to form communities of their own, protecting primarily their own interests, and only in the second degree that of the nation as a whole. Fourth, many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire. While the empire is enjoying its High Noon of prosperity, all these people are proud and glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence. Some day this phenomenon will doubtless appear in the now apparently monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire. It is amazing for how long such provincial sentiments can survive.

Historical examples of this phenomenon are scarcely needed. The idle and captious Roman mob, with its endless appetite for free distributions of food—bread and games—is notorious, and utterly different from that stern Roman spirit which we associate with the wars of the early republic. In Baghdad, in the golden days of Harun al-Rashid, Arabs were a minority in the imperial capital. Istanbul, in the great days of Ottoman rule, was peopled by inhabitants remarkably few of whom were descendants of Turkish conquerors. In New York, descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers arc few and far between. This interesting phenomenon is largely limited to great cities. The original conquering race is often to be found in relative purity in rural districts and on far frontiers. It is the wealth of the great cities which draws the immigrants. As, with the growth of industry, cities nowadays achieve an ever greater preponderance over the countryside, so will the influence of foreigners increasingly dominate old empires. Once more it may be emphasised that I do not wish to convey the impression that immigrants are inferior to older stocks. They are just different, and they thus tend to introduce cracks and divisions.

Frivolity

As the nation declines in power and wealth, a universal pessimism gradually pervades the people, and itself hastens the decline. There is nothing succeeds like success, and, in the Ages of Conquest and Commerce, the nation was carried triumphantly onwards on the wave of its own self-confidence. Republican Rome was repeatedly on the verge of extinction—in 390 B.C. when the Gauls sacked the city and in 216 B.C. after the Battle of Cannae. But no disasters could shake the resolution of the early Romans. Yet, in the later stages of Roman decline, the whole empire was deeply pessimistic, thereby sapping its own resolution. Frivolity is the frequent companion of pessimism. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The resemblance between various declining nations in this respect is truly surprising. The Roman mob, we have seen, demanded free meals and public games. Gladiatorial shows, chariot races and athletic events were their passion. In the Byzantine Empire the rivalries of the Greens and the Blues in the hippodrome attained the importance of a major crisis.

Judging by the time and space allotted to them in the Press and television, football and baseball are the activities which today chiefly interest the public in Britain and the United States respectively. The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor.

Food for thought, eh? And this was thirty years before X Factor. Next instalment - Glubb Pasha looks at 10th century Baghdad, then, would you believe, the Swinging London of the Muslim world.

Ed Miliband - the Verdict

R4's World at One today opened with a series of soundbites from friends and colleagues of Ed Miliband. I paraphrase :

"This illustrates the sort of person he is - in his college, one of his friends had a room where the radiators didn't work ..."

Laban, always looking for the good, waits for 'and he didn't hang around waiting for the college to fix it - he got a spanner and a key and fixed it for him. He's always been a good-natured, can-do type".

"And Ed presented this as an indictment of the college maintenance systems ... to him, everything was political"

*sigh*

The Fate of Empires - Part 1

An excerpt from The Fate of Empires, by Sir John Glubb ('Glubb Pasha'), soldier, historian and Arabist, who died in 1986. I found it here thanks to a link here, and OCR'd it into text. Published by Blackwell in 1978 (in total opposition to the then zeitgeist), it appears to be unobtainable - can't even find a copy on ABE Books.

While I'm not at all sure that the one-third of call centre employees who have degrees were motivated by the desire for academic honours (I think they probably believed the innovative market theory that you could quintuple the number of graduates with no impact on graduate salaries, and thought they'd get well-paid jobs), and I don't get a hint of Paul Kennedy's later thesis that 'while the point of becoming a great power is to be able to fight major wars, the way to remain one is not to fight them', the pattern Glubb lays out seems a fairly good fit with what we see.

Let us now, however, return to the life-story of our typical empire. We have already considered the age of outburst, when a little-regarded people suddenly bursts on to the world stage with a wild courage and energy. Let us call it the Age of the Pioneers.

Then we saw that these new conquerors acquired the sophisticated weapons of the old empires, and adopted their regular systems of military organisation and training. A great period of military expansion ensued, which we may call the Age of Conquests. The conquests resulted in the acquisition of vast territories under one government, thereby automatically giving rise to commercial prosperity. We may call this the Age of Commerce.

The Age of Conquests, of course, overlaps the Age of Commerce. The proud military traditions still hold sway and the great armies guard the frontiers, but gradually the desire to make money seems to gain hold of the public. During the military period, glory and honour were the principal objects of ambition. To the merchant, such ideas are but empty words, which add nothing to the bank balance.

The wealth which seems, almost without effort, to pour into the country, enables the commercial classes to grow immensely rich. How to spend all this money becomes a problem to the wealthy business community. Art, architecture and luxury find rich patrons. Splendid municipal buildings and wide streets lend dignity and beauty to the wealthy areas of great cities. The rich merchants build themselves palaces, and money is invested in communications, highways, bridges, railways or hotels, according to the varied patterns of the ages.

The first half of the Age of Commerce appears to be peculiarly splendid. The ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and devotion to duty are still in evidence. The nation is proud, united and full of self-confidence. Boys are still required, first of all, to be manly — to ride, to shoot straight and to tell the truth. (It is remarkable what emphasis is placed, at this stage, on the manly virtue of truthfulness, for lying is cowardice — the fear of facing up to the situation.)
Boys' schools are intentionally rough. Frugal eating, hard living, breaking the ice to have a bath and similar customs are aimed at producing a strong, hardy and fearless breed of men. Duty is the word constantly drummed into the heads of young people.

The Age of Commerce is also marked by great enterprise in the exploration for new forms of wealth. Daring initiative is shown in the search for profitable enterprises in far comers of the earth, perpetuating to some degree the adventurous courage of the Age of Conquests.

The Age of Affluence

There does not appear to be any doubt that money is the agent which causes the decline of this strong, brave and self-confident people. The decline in courage, enterprise and a sense of duty is, however, gradual.
The first direction in which wealth injures the nation is a moral one. Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men. Moreover, men do not normally seek to make money for their country or their community, but for themselves. Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash.
Education undergoes the same gradual transformation. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country. Parents and students alike seek the educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries. The Arab moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains in these very same words of the lowering of objectives in the declining Arab world of his time. Students, he says, no longer attend college to acquire learning and virtue, but to obtain those qualifications which will enable them to grow rich. The same situation is everywhere evident among us in the West today.

High Noon

That which we may call the High Noon of the nation covers the period of transition from the Age of Conquests to the Age of Affluence: the age of Augustus in Rome, that of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, of Sulaiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, or of Queen Victoria in Britain. Perhaps we might add the age of Woodrow Wilson in the United States. All these periods reveal the same characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated in the nation dazzles the onlookers. Enough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers. But, beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service. Indeed the change might be summarised as being from service to selfishness.

Defensiveness

Another outward change which invariably marks the transition from the Age of Conquests to the Age of Affluence is the spread of defensiveness. The nation, immensely rich, is no longer interested in glory or duty, but is only anxious to retain its wealth and its luxury. It is a period of defensiveness, from the Great Wall of China, to Hadrian's Wall on the Scottish Border, to the Maginot Line in France in 1939. Money being in better supply than courage, subsidies instead of weapons are employed to buy off enemies. To justify this departure the mind easily devises its own justification. Military readiness, or aggressiveness, is denounced as primitive and immoral. Civilised peoples are too proud to fight. The conquest of one nation by another is declared to be immoral. Empires are wicked. This intellectual device enables us to suppress our feeling of inferiority, when we read of the heroism of our ancestors, and then ruefully contemplate our position today. 'It is not that we are afraid to fight,' we say, ' but we should consider it immoral.' This even enables us to assume an attitude of moral superiority.

The weakness of pacifism is that there are still many peoples in the world who are aggressive. Nations who proclaim themselves unwilling to fight are liable to be conquered by peoples in the stage of militarism—perhaps even to see themselves incorporated into some new empire, with the status of mere provinces or colonies.
When to be prepared to use force and when to give way is a perpetual human problem, which can only be solved, as best we can, in each successive situation as it arises. In fact, however, history seems to indicate that great nations do not normally disarm from motives of conscience, but owing to the weakening of a sense of duty in the citizens, and the increase in selfishness and the desire for wealth and case.

The Age of Intellect

We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided the life-story of our great nation into four ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The great wealth of the nation is no longer needed to supply the mere necessities, or even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are available also for the pursuit of knowledge.

The merchant princes of the Age of Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by endowing works of art or patronising music and literature. They also found and endow colleges and universities. It is remarkable with what regularity this phase follows on that of wealth, in empire after empire, divided by many centuries. In the eleventh century, the former Arab Empire, then in complete political decline, was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah. The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the intellectual leaders of the world. During the reign of Malik Shah, the building of universities and colleges became a passion. Whereas a small number of universities in the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab glory, now a university sprang up in every town. In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain. When these nations were at the height of their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now almost every city has its university. The ambition of the young, once engaged in the pursuit of adventure and military glory, and then in the desire for the accumulation of wealth, now turns to the acquisition of academic honours.

It is useful here to take note that almost all the pursuits followed with such passion throughout the ages were in themselves good. The manly cult of hardihood, frankness and truthfulness, which characterised the Age of Conquests, produced many really splendid heroes. The opening up of natural resources, and the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which marked the age of commercialism, appeared to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in culture and in the arts. In the same way, the vast expansion of the field of knowledge achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to mark a new high-water mark of human progress. We cannot say that any of these changes were 'good 'or' bad '. The striking features in the pageant of empire are:

(a) the extraordinary exactitude with which these stages have followed one another, in empire after empire, over centuries or even millennia; and

(b) the fact that the successive changes seem to represent mere changes in popular fashion—new fads and fancies which sweep away public opinion without logical reason. At first, popular enthusiasm is devoted to military glory, then to the accumulation of wealth and later to the acquisition of academic fame.

Why could not all these legitimate, and indeed beneficent, activities be carried on simultaneously, each of them in due moderation? Yet this never seemed to happen.

There you have the UK round about now. What happens next in the story of Empire? Does it go on to greater heights? I think probably not ....

Quote of the Day

Lord Tebbit in the Telegraph. I must say he is a great blogger, in that, like Peter Hitchens in the Mail, he responds in each column to the comments from the last. More power to his keyboard.

The good news however is of the stirrings of revolt across the continent. It is not, as some have called it, the rise of the far right even in Sweden. A yearning to live amongst one’s one countrymen and women and to enjoy one’s own nation’s culture is neither left nor right. It is perfectly healthy.

To which I replied :

"A yearning to live amongst one’s one countrymen and women and to enjoy one’s own nation’s culture is neither left nor right. It is perfectly healthy."

Absolutely correct. Which is why I can't blame the inhabitants of Manningham, Blackburn or Sparkbrook for wanting (and getting) to live among their own countrymen and for enjoying their own nation’s culture. But the fact that the culture is not British has profound implications for us.

Fornicating Frontman

The cultural dominoes are tumbling. Nick Clegg was AFAIK the first openly Godless party leader in British history - and, while not the first politician to notch the bedpost, the first to share his score with the electorate.

Now Ed Miliband is (AFAIK) the first party leader to be openly cohabiting and the first to be openly producing children whose parents aren't married.

The Guardian are outraged that the Mail has pointed this out - after all, aren't all family structures equally valid ? (having lived communally for more than 40 years, he is survived by seven children)

Laban into the breach :

Why is that anyone's business?

Because the personal is political. The Miliband/Thorntons are stating that "they don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall".

A view which is perhaps defensible when Daddy was born into our ruling class and Mummy is a highly-paid lawyer. But for Mr and (especially) Ms Average that view's a disaster.

Remember the UNICEF report a few years back ?

"The UK is bottom of the league of 21 economically advanced countries according to a "report card"' put together by Unicef on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, trailing the United States which comes second to last."

Did you know that one of the indicators of child well-being used in that report was whether a child lived with both biological parents ?

"The use of data on the proportion of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive. Plenty of children in two-parent families are damaged by their parents relationships; plenty of children in single-parent and stepfamilies are growing up secure and happy. Nor can the terms 'single-parent families' and 'stepfamilies' do justice to the many different kinds of family unit that have become common in recent decades. But at the statistical level there is evidence to associate growing up in single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being – including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay. Furthermore such risks appear to persist even when the substantial effect of increased poverty levels in single-parent and stepfamilies have been taken into account (although it might be noted that the research establishing these links has largely been conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom and it is not certain that the same patterns prevail across the OECD)."

And what's one of the key producers of one-parent families ? Cohabiting partnerships a la Miliband.

# Cohabitation is one of the main routes into lone parenthood. Between 15% and 25% of all lone-parent families are created through the break-up of cohabitating unions.

# Children born into married unions are estimated to be twice as likely as those born into cohabiting unions to spend their entire childhood with both natural parents (70% versus 36%)

So there. The new Labour leader is setting a dreadful example - albeit one that's being followed by an ever-increasing number of his countrymen.

You could of course produce the beautifully circular argument, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies did a while back, that while it's true that cohabitees are more likely to split up, maybe they are just the sort of people who are more likely to split up. An unanswerable assertion.

"it is true that cohabiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones"

"it seems simply that different sorts of people choose to get married and have children, rather than to have children as a cohabiting couple, and that those relationships with the best prospects of lasting are the ones that are most likely to lead to marriage. "

So a/c/t the IFS, maybe cohabitees just aren't that serious about their children's welfare....

Aiiieeee!

"For Bush may come, and Blair may go, but I go on forever"

She's back. And while she seems less unbalanced than of old, her idiosyncratic mental hobgoblins haven't gone away, you know.

"Beneath the surface glamour and exciting TV shows about death, America still yearns for savage modesty and the right to burn uppity women."

Except they don't want to burn the uppity Sarah Palin or Christine O'Donnell, something which Ms Kennedy finds both inexplicable and infuriating.

"Who's gonna rule when the government falls ?"

I was just thinking of loading the Ruts' 'Secret Soldiers' to Youtube, and blimey if someone called rustykwak hasn't beaten me to it. 7 views so far ... a doomy variation on 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. But a lot has changed since both these songs were written. Whatever happens, it won't be like this, or that.

Nothing new, but have we learned ?
In early days the spirit burned
To fight the fights of the oppressed
But they were shot down like the rest

So what's it going to be and how long now ?
Who's going to rule when the government falls ?

Those Awful Stereotypes

One Timothy Egan in the NYT :

Beware, they told us in the train stations of northern Italy, of the Gypsy baby trick — an old ruse by Europe’s most reviled underclass. A woman will suddenly ask you to hold her child, and then just as you fumble to respond another Gypsy will grab your wallet.

Watch out, they cautioned us in the lovely Turkish port city of Kusadasi, for the Gypsies who prey on tourists along the waterfront. And old lady will bump you, while a teenage hooligan grabs your bag. The Gypsy old-lady trick.

Those Gypsies, known by the less pejorative term of Roma, are getting kicked around the continent again, hardy perennials of European scapegoats. Unspoken characterizations based on ancient stereotypes — they are shiftless, clannish, prone to petty thievery and to begging, prostitution and dark motives — are now out in the open.

Funnily enough, I was given a similar warning in Malaga some twenty years back - 'watch out for the gypsy flower-sellers' said the girl at the hotel desk. Now Laban pictured someone sitting in front of large flower-baskets in the style of the late Buster Edwards at Waterloo, and wasn't too worried.

About to cross a road - a lady of maybe sixty blocks the way, thrusting a carnation at me and smiling. A younger woman with her.

"Cuanto es ?"

"Una peseta - para fiesta" (it was nearly Christmas and large fireworks were being sold from open street stalls - not at all like the UK)

(Rapid calculation - about 0.5p. Much too cheap to be kosher)

"No. No peseta. No fiesta"

Would you believe, she wouldn't take no for an answer, stepped up to me and started pinning it. I leapt backwards about a yard. Which pulled her left hand (empty) out of my right-hand rear trouser pocket. Impressive - my eye had been on the hand with the carnation, had not had a clue.

I spoke to them both in English then. They seemed to understand and went away.

Quote of the Day

Ross on the Scottish Commonwealth Games team and their doubts about their Delhi accommodation :

"if a country that contains Dundee thinks it might be verging on the unlivable, then we should take their word for it"

From The Moral High Ground ...

Sunny Hundal at Lib Con asks :

“Why do media orgs report ethnicity of terrorist suspects?”

Not a clue, Sunny, not a clue.

Tell you what.

Why don’t you ask the guy who wrote “Another White Terrorist Against ‘Non-British’ Caught”?

UPDATE - I did point out his inconsistencies a fair while back :

I'll pass over the fact that he seems to be pre-empting the verdict. You could just imagine how Sunny would react if the Mail and Sun started producing 'Another Asian terrorist' headlines every time a wannabe jihadi got banged up - which a year or so back was about every other week. He'd have a fit.

For what it's worth I imagine the occasional 'of Somali/Algerian/whatever origin' that I hear on the news is a little Community Cohesion comfort blanket - a quiet way of pointing out that whoever-it-is is not a second generation Brit who captains the local cricket XI and helps out at the primary school.

He, for one, welcomes our new overlords

In the last year or so born-again Labour man Andy Newman's Socialist Unity blog has started to constantly beat the drum for soi-disant Communist China. I whacked a comment on his latest breathless report, but the spam filter nailed it, so here it is.

Andy - why the constant worship of our new Chinese overlords? The socialism of China has a highly nationalistic and patriotic flavour - one that you would hate and fear were a UK party to be offering it.

As a born-again cultural conservative I can appreciate what China's doing - looking after #1 while useful idiots all over the world embrace globalisation. As the new manufacturing powerhouse, they'll naturally be in favour of free trade and open markets - for others. The US firms which rushed into China, swooning over the size of the market ('if we only had 3% that could be x million customers'), are discovering that the Chinese have no intention of allowing roundeyes major influence.

Meanwhile military spending increases and the sabres are rattling in the South China Sea, while China is buying up as many resources in Asia and Africa (ores, coal, oil) as it can and developing strongly in future green technologies, especially solar generation.

They're driven by Chinese national interest, something I can completely understand. But Andy - and, to be fair, pretty much all the UK left - openly hate the concept of British national interest. What have they got that we haven't, Andy?

"a white British candidate in preference to a Bengali"

Imagine that the Tories have dropped a candidate in, say, Cirencester, for being a bit too nationalistic (i.e. having links to dubious right organisations), after a Guardian-led campaign against him exposed said links. The Tory #2 is an Asian solicitor and a very competent chap, but he’s dropped for a little-known white candidate.

Tory bloggers bemoan the enforced change, but point out that "they could not go to the person who came second in the poll, without it looking like they were choosing an Asian in preference to a white British candidate".

I wonder what the born-again Labour Party members at Socialist Unity would make of that ?

"Once the Labour Party NEC decided to suspend Rahman as candidate, in the face of Gilligan’s Islamophobic witchhunt, then they could not go to the person who came second in the poll for the Labour Party candidate selection, John Biggs, without it looking like they were choosing a white British candidate in preference to a Bengali. So they have ended up imposing the unloved Helal Abbas, who has little support. "

By putting John Biggs second in the poll, Labour activists of all ethnicities were indeed choosing him in preference to Abbas, who came third - on grounds presumably of proven ability (former council leader) and voter recognition. That was apparently OK as long as he was second - it was just putting a white British candidate first in Tower Hamlets that was unacceptable.

I can appreciate the realpolitik of it - and a Majority Rights type would doubtless say that the voters of Tower Hamlets would be rationally voting for their ethnic interests - but I say - and see - leftist hypocrisy - what we're seeing in Tower Hamlets is the sort of thing that white voters simply aren't allowed to do without having the BBC and Guardian on their backs until they cry 'Capivi!'.

It's also an interesting insight into the voters of Tower Hamlets - presumably the local Labour Party know and accept what their constituents would feel about a white candidate.

We seem to be further than ever away from a time when John Biggs can be judged not on the colour of his skin, but on the content of his character.

Sweden - Gets More Like Home Each Day

Yet another Swedish story that rings a bell in the UK.

A register of over 5,000 people who are either members or have registered their interest in the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), has been published on the internet.

Guardianista Schizophrenia

In the Guardian, of all places, I read this by Andrew Brown:

"... people here believed Sweden was the best country in the world because it was the most internationalist. This led to a fantastically generous policy on asylum and integration. Nearly a third of Sweden's population today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are more Iranians living in Sweden than there are Danes. In 2007, one small town outside Stockholm took in more Iraqi refugees than the whole of the US. Professor Jan Ekberg at Linné University has calculated that unemployment among immigrants means the excess cost of their welfare payments over the tax they pay is at least as high as the defence budget, and possibly 50% higher. "

Hmm. Sounds a vaguely familiar scenario, although I don't know where Andrew Brown's getting those population stats from. A/c/t Wikipedia :

As of 2008, 18% of the population had foreign origins (13% if excluding Finns and 9% if also excluding other Scandinavians), with 14% foreign-born and another 4% born in Sweden of two foreign-born parents.

And while I can't find the relevant info on the Swedish stats site, 44,000 immigrants pa in a population one-seventh of the UKs makes for a pretty high immigrant number, but probably not (yet) 33%. Like the UK and Spain, the birth-rate has been increasing following decades of decline - what on earth could be responsible for that ?

The BBC, in its report on 'far-right' (i.e. anti-mass immigration) election gains, puts the immigrant percentage at 14%. Back to the Guardian. Apparently the far-righters have new policies and new image - sound familiar ?

He moved the party away from Nazism and some forms of racism, but they were still pariahs. "No one would vote for them because they were seen as fascist yokels," says Niklas Orrenius, a journalist who has studied the movement for years. To be a known member was to risk sacking from any kind of job. Far-left activists beat them up, on one occasion breaking into a party gathering with iron bars. Last Friday two masked men attacked David von Arnold, a party candidate in Malmö, outside his flat and carved a swastika into his forehead. The respectable media largely ignored this as it ignores the party as a whole.

That sort of thing sounds familiar, too.

Andrew Brown is I think the Guardian's religious affairs correspondent. There's definitely one religion he subscribes to :

If you believe the international rightwing press, the answer is simple, and has been since 2004, when Fox News made a special report on the subject: Sweden, and especially Malmö, has become a laboratory for the creeping Islamisation of Europe. The most common child's name there is now Muhammad; police dare not go into immigrant districts, where only sharia law is respected; and soon all the Jews will be driven from the city. All this, flecked with varying amounts of spittle, is recounted as fact on the net and in US papers.

So Andrew gives us the evil rightie worldview - what's his actualite ?

A 2008 government report (on the massive Rosengard estate), which drew entirely on the experiences of teachers, police and social workers, described a place where Islamic orthodoxy was enforced by young thugs; women were forced to wear headscarves and children segregated in religious free schools. There was a small riot after one of the 20 or 30 unofficial mosques in cellars was closed when its lease was not renewed, and nastier riots when the Israeli tennis team played a Davis Cup match in the city last summer.

I like Mr Brown's methods of refudiating those right-wing, spittle-flecked slurs, with his "33% immigrants" figure and his 'young Islamic thugs' - you can read the article to see his refudiation of rape statistics. But with friends like Andrew Brown, who needs enemies ?