Friday Night Music - Strangeness and Charm

I've mentioned the glories of Lewis before. On Saturday at dusk not only the park gate is locked, but the swings and roundabouts chained up as well, in case any child should profane the Sabbath. The hospital's doctors have houses scattered across the island, so that remote communities have someone near - and I was told that a female doctor had been visited by a delegation, asking her to refrain from hanging up her washing on the Lord's Day - the washing in question being on an airer in the kitchen, but visible from outside.

On the more worldly side, everyone seems to drink a lot on Saturday night, and in the morning there's a lot of broken glass about in Stornoway. But 'when in Rome' - you respect the locals and on Sunday walk or go to church. If you are invited to a local home, the hospitality is humbling and the tea you get lasts you for the next two days. Small children, not yet school age, can play outside unaccompanied until dark, and I remember coming across a school on a main road, with the children's bicycles all propped against the outside of the school wall, by the road. Try that on the mainland.

And they do have this amazing church music - like nothing else in Britain. Or maybe in Europe.




Moving a little further south :

"The Clan Maxwell fared badly that day. In all, it is said that up to 700 Maxwells were killed, but this may be an exaggerated number. Many were wounded by downward sword strokes known as "Lockerbie Licks." And their chief, Lord Maxwell, who was one of the most powerful people in southern Scotland, was slain in cold blood by the Johnstones when he asked for mercy and offered to surrender. Although Sir Johnstone escaped punishment from the King for his actions, he did not escape the unforgiving hand of the next Lord Maxwell, son of the chief who was killed at Dryfe Sands. In 1608, Lord Maxwell shot Sir Johnstone in the back during a meeting held “under trust,” which rendered him an outlaw. Lord Maxwell was later captured and executed by hanging."

Quick Thoughts On Egypt

Everyone knows that an Egyptian prison can be bad for your health and your toenails, they stuff ballot boxes, suppress opposition etc, so when a lot of people come onto the streets declaring that the ruler should step down (29 years is enough for anyone, surely), one is sympathetic.

When their demonstrations are mainly peaceful (apart from a few clashes with the pretty nasty police force), one is more sympathetic still.

And when the government sends thugs out to attack them, the sympathometer is off the scale. I must confess I thought the anti-Mubarak people were all going to be horribly beaten at best on Wednesday night, as stone-throwing pro-Mubarak crowds pushed them back into the square. But they stood firm, fought back and were well in control today, despite deaths from what may have been sniper fire.

Naturally I'm on 'their' side. But who are 'they' ? They don't like Mubarak, that's for sure - but is that enough policy to run a country on ?

Not all the pro-Mubarak people were thugs, and I saw some being interviewed just outside the square. They looked prosperous middle class, and made some reasonable points. One eloquent guy asked what had happened to Iraq when Saddam went? He didn't want to see that in Cairo (and there has been looting. And didn't a lot of prisoners break out of jail?). Another reckoned that if Mubarak stepped down there would be anarchy.

I'd been impressed with the way the demonstrators had fought back - but according to one report many of the fighters were Muslim Brotherhood chaps doing jihad. I certainly saw the odd chap in robes chucking rocks with the rest.

And while the way ordinary people set up local vigilante groups to defend their neigbourhoods against looting was admirable, some of those same people were quick to believe government warnings of 'foreign agents' and to start their search for the 'Israelis' who are behind all the unrest (IMHO Israel were probably quite happy with Mubarak, who preferred anti-Israel propaganda to anti-Israel action). There are some eight million Egyptian Coptic Christians, members of one of the oldest churches in the world, who have kept the faith for 1400 years as second-class citizens in a Muslim country, and who have been discriminated against, as well as coming under murderous attack by Islamist extremists. Iraq*, where ancient Christian communities have been slaughtered or driven out, is a terrible warning of what could happen to them.

Over on the Left blogs and the Guardian op-eds, some idiots see their favourite flavour of socialist revolution as imminent, some idiots see Cairo as a useful exemplar for London, more see the bad guys seemingly losing - and cheer that process without too much thought as to what comes next. I worry that might be all too close to my position.

So I'm generally supportive but with no illusions. A corrupt quasi-dictatorship with a democratic front-end, a strong Islamist presence, and a young, over-educated and under-employed demographic profile offers plenty of ways for a transfer of power to go wrong.












* re Iraq - I supported the overthrow of Saddam, but no one can say the implementation's been anything but poor - with dreadful results especially for minorities like Christians. In my defence I'd say that

a) everybody who knew anything about the region and ever made the pages of the Guardian predicted that Iraq would be America's Vietnam, Baghdad their Stalingrad. And that all over the Middle East the "Arab Street" would rise, threatening regimes from Cairo to Casablanca.

What nobody, as far as I can recall (and I was keeping my ears open), said in 2003 was :

"If you overthrow Saddam, the Sunnis will kill all the Shias - and vice-versa"

b) one unknown blogger did seem to grasp the potential for disorder, writing in his third-ever blog post, back in 2003 :

"... will survival be the biggest worry for most Iraqis ? The US and Brits are going to have to turn themselves into aid workers and/or policemen with some speed. When a strong police state collapses, anarchy often follows ... Night is falling in Baghdad. Let's hope they don't wake up to a looted and burning city tomorrow. I'm very pleased - but it seems to me that for the Coalition the hard work has only just begun."

Boom Bang A Bang

I don't know. When the 7/7 bombers struck, the press was full of stories to the effect that

a) the bombs were home-made TATP explosive, as used in home-made Hamas rockets.
b) there was a fully-equipped cookshop in Hyde Park, Leeds, where the TATP was brewed.
c) said cookshop belonged to an Egyptian chemist who happened to have gone to Egypt. The chemist was named as Magdi Mahmoud al-Nashar, of Leeds University. Apparently he was detained in Cairo by Egyptian police and interviewed by a couple of Special Branch officers - after which it was quietly announced that no charges would be brought. He doesn't seem to be at Leeds any more.

Then we were told 'organic-peroxide' bombs. I assumed flour and peroxide as that seemed to be the choice of the 21/7 bombers. In fact the 21/7 wiki, for what that's worth, said "The explosives used by the bombers consisted of Chapatti flour powder mixed with liquid hydrogen peroxide, detonated by a booster charge. This was the same explosive mixture used by the bombers in the 7/7 bombings two weeks earlier."

Yet the 7/7 inquests are now apparently telling us the bombs were peroxide and black pepper. Sounds like a flavour of crisp.

"The bombs used in the attacks on three tube trains and a double-decker bus contained about 10kg of explosives made from a mixture of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and pepper and detonated by a 9-volt battery. Forensic explosives expert Clifford Todd said using this combination of materials for a bomb was thought to be "entirely unique" both in the UK and worldwide."

The Telegraph has most detail :

"The July 7 bombs and July 21 bombs were not identical, but they were, a source at DSTL said, "similar in principle". Both were a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, made by boiling down hair products, and an organic material - in the first case black pepper, in the second chapatti flour. The detonators were also similar - in the case of July 7, made from hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), made by combining hydrogen peroxide, hexamine tablets from camping stoves, and an acid such as citric acid or dilute sulphuric acid. In the case of July 21 the detonator was triacetone triperoxide (TATP), made by combining hydrogen peroxide, acetone from nail varnish and sulphuric acid. The differences amount to just two main ingredients - nail varnish rather than camping stove tablets and flour rather than pepper - and leave the possibility that both bomb-makers were taught by the same man. The cost of the devices was also relatively low - just £500 was spent on hydrogen peroxide."

It must be a pain boiling down all that hairdresser grade peroxide (17 vol?) when a chemical supplier can do you 100 vol.

Now call me daft, but why pepper ? Indeed, why flour ?

I guess you want something flammable (high heat of combustion per gram), fine particles, can be soaked in concentrated peroxide. I've forgotten my chemistry - wouldn't charcoal be better, or doesn't it burn fast enough - as I guess the speed at which the mixture burns affects the power of the bang?

I suppose the driver is that the fuel must be able to mix intimately with the H2O2 - which is a watery oxidiser. Can't mix that with, say, diesel, as oil and water proverbially don't mix.

Is there someone in the Kurram Valley or Mohmand grinding up various foodstuffs and evaluating them as explosives? Seems that there must be.

The King's Speech

About a third of the way into Tony Hooper's The King's Speech, I had a feeling I'd seen the plot before. Stuffy, hidebound, repressed type meets irreverent, vital colonial and is charmed/seduced despite themselves? Ah yes - Titanic, where it was toffee-nosed Kate Winslet who (despite the lack of a formal introduction) needed to find charming chancer Leonardo di Caprio (and the entire cast of Riverdance, travelling steerage to show her what life could really be - Catholics have natural rhythm, dontcha know) before she could unloosen her stays and do some bouncing over the bounding waves with him. I'm not a cinema buff, but I guess that theme goes back a long way.

This time it's Colin Firth's Duke of York (fated to become George VI after his elder brother's abdication), unable to string a sentence together in less than ten minutes due to his stammer, who needs the help of Geoffrey Rush's speech therapist Lionel Logue ("me Lionel, you Bertie") to unbutton his buttons - after which he can bounce about a room shouting swear-words as well as any Brit monarch in history. Rush plays Logue somewhat in the style of Professor Laurie Taylor - a kind of smug mixture of matiness and superiority, a man with a fiver each way on himself. In fact Logue's grandchildren described him as a 'very Victorian' character, not over-familiar - pretty much the opposite of what Rush gives us. "I don't think he ever swore in front of the king and he certainly never called him Bertie.*"

Writer David Seidler takes the usual pop at Christianity, Rush's Logue (in reality a Christian Scientist) dismissing the religious element of the Coronation Oath as 'this rubbish'**, and he absolutely murders British history. Baldwin didn't resign with the words 'Churchill was right' - far from it, he laid down his office confident that Churchill was well and truly sidelined and out of the way. Nor was the Duke of York a strong anti-Nazi - nor a Churchill fan, any more than Churchill, who supported Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, was a fan of his (although he later became one). And if the King couldn't speak by the outbreak of war in 1939 he really did have problems - Logue had been helping him for thirteen years by then.

That said, the direction is excellent, as are the performances. Two hours fly by, and you find, as war breaks out and the BBC mike lights come on, that you really want the big speech to go well. It's not an easy job to make gripping drama out of a man reading three typed pages - but it works. The camerawork is fantastic - London has never looked more gloomily beautiful, a fog-bound sepia fantasy - although again you have to wonder if Logue, whose practice was in Harley Street, really lived in a neighbourhood straight out of Oliver Twist. The cinema audience applauded at the end.


But I fear that a generation*** will grow up knowing that the King was helped by an ur-hippie teaching him to loosen up by jumping about while shouting obscenities. The dramatic core of the film is also its biggest lie.




* as a naval officer who served at Jutland, the Duke almost certainly had been exposed to an extensive armoury of swear-words, but off his ship would not have used them, nor tolerated others using them in his presence.

** oh, and Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang wasn't the idiot presented here, either.

*** unless the sell-out audience where I saw it is typical. They were MUCH older than a typical cinema audience.

Circles

Perfect pop music - Beach Boy harmonies, jangly guitar, loping bass - and drums the like of which you just don't hear these days.

"Just one thing could kill the pain
Of losing you,
But it gets me so dizzy that I walk right back again,
Back to you"

The other A-side on the EP, 'Disguises', is great as well, although a much darker, almost industrial sound.

Shoah

The Brits managed without a memorial day for the Shoah for 55 years after WWII - the first was in 2001. My views - that killing people is bad, and that the Germans did it - remain unchanged.

I know several people who lost relatives (as I know people who lost relatives in the 1947 Punjab massacres). One friend's aunts actually went back to live in Germany after the war - not sure I'd have wanted to without being heavily armed.

Sometimes an anecdote illuminates better than bare stats. From a profile of Martin Peretz, former editor of liberal US mag 'The New Republic' :

In the late fifties, when his father, Julius, was just about the age Peretz is now, the elder Peretz had an apartment in Tel Aviv. “He used to walk a lot,” Peretz says. One day, while sitting in a park, he found himself in conversation with another old man who also spoke Yiddish. The man invited Julius Peretz back to his apartment. His wife, he said, would make tei und lekach — cake and tea. So he went.

Julius Peretz had eight siblings, but all of them had died in Poland. He had emigrated to New York in 1922. On this stranger’s piano, he saw a class photo. “So there’s a picture on the piano of a group of girls,” says Peretz. “And he recognizes someone—second row, third from the left. It looks like his sister. But it couldn’t be, because the generation is a generation of younger people.” The stranger’s daughter is in the class photo, too, and they phone her. The name of the girl Marty’s father thought he recognized is Anja, and she lives—the daughter says—in a kibbutz on Israel’s edge, right up against the Jordan River.

Julius Peretz takes a taxi there—three hours, winding roads—and asks the guard to summon Anja. He does; she looks nothing like his sister. “She says, ‘There’s another Anja,’” says Peretz. “He brings Anja who looks like his sister, and there is the one survivor of his family.” She was Julius’s niece.

One survivor. We've been very fortunate in the UK over the last few hundred years. Not so elsewhere. The danger is that, secure and peaceful as we've been in this island, we're forgetting our own and other people's history - and are looking for potential danger and slaughter within ourselves - rather than outside.

Is This Serious ?

I saw a comment at Red Maria's traducing the saintly Sir Peter Vardy, philanthropic provider of half-decent education in the North-East. He's just nailed leftie paper Tribune after they accused his schools of teaching creationism (whatever that is - presumably the ridiculous idea that God said, 'let there be light', and there was light. Everyone knows that there wasn't anything at all, and then suddenly up popped a whole hot expanding universe - from nowhere, and with no reason. Makes far more sense).

The comment was "Money talks. ****s."

Who is this ignorant swearblogger, I thought. What's his blog like ? Lordy.

"Emergence

As dogma becomes exposed through increased communication, ideas begin to form from the emerging cognitive dissonance. These ideas are presented as rationalisations within the context and under the regulation of the existing memetic monopoly (as cause-and-effect demands). As knowledge advances and more of the unknown becomes known (diluting the power of the mythological other), these sporadic rationalisations become untenable and cognitive dissonance spreads with more veracity for it, eventually leading to a paradigm shift in political governance and identity creation."

And it's all like that. Page after page of cultural studies drivel, where occasional tiny grains of meaning glitter for a brief instant before submerging again under the turgid flow of his sentences. He's far more readable in two-word sentence mode - understanding is instant.

You do wonder if he's a student of John Hutnyk's. Or is the entire blog an elaborate hoax - a sort of Sokal of the blogosphere ?

Norman Dennis 1929 - 2010

Thanks to Ed West at the Telegraph for noting his passing.

"A Labour party member most of his life, and a compassionate socialist, he nonetheless became the leading critic of the British Left’s social liberalism which, he came to believe, was destroying society and in particular working-class life."

Peacefully, at home, on November 13, aged 81 years, Norman, beloved husband of Audrey, a loving father of Julia and John, father-in-law of Phil, devoted grandad of Robert, Sarah and Max. A short service at Sunderland Crematorium at 11.30am will be followed by a service at St Andrew's Church, Roker, at 12.30pm, to which all friends and family are warmly invited. Friday November 26.

Guardian obituary by Bob Hudson

In the late 1940s, a group of sociology students who would go on to shape and cement the discipline in Britain started their studies at the London School of Economics. Their number included AH ("Chelly") Halsey, Joe and Olive Banks, Michael Banton, Basil Bernstein, Percy Cohen, David Lockwood and Norman Dennis.

Unlike most members of this sociological establishment, Dennis, who has died aged 81, chose not to seek academic preferment (though chairs were certainly offered) but rather to focus his energies on community life, most notably in his home town of Sunderland. This preference became apparent in 1956 with his first major publication, Coal Is Our Life, the classic community study of "Ashton" (in fact Featherstone in West Yorkshire). Although this study tends to be overshadowed in popular opinion by the well-known Bethnal Green studies of the 1950s, it contains a much harder and less anecdotal edge, especially in analysing the ways in which economic forces structure social relations.

Dennis next turned his attention to the domains of housing and town planning. By then lecturing at the University of Newcastle and back in Sunderland, he was living in Millfield, an area which Sunderland council had selected for slum clearance against the wishes of most of the resident population. In his 1970 publication, People and Planning: the Sociology of Housing in Sunderland, he starkly exposed the social and technical weaknesses of the slum clearance programmes, the insensitivity of their implementation and the shallow nature of resident "participation". In undertaking this study, he achieved a rare degree of empathy with the people of Millfield. He became the secretary of their residents' association. and was in the vanguard of what would now be termed "communitarianism".

In 1972 his sense of empathy led to a further landmark publication. Public Participation and Planners' Blight was an excoriating analysis of the unwillingness of the bureaucratic-professional machine to listen to residents, and the failure of local politicians to challenge the narrative presented by their officials.

The previous year, he had been elected as Labour councillor for the Millfield ward, and I joined him as a fellow councillor for the same ward. It would be fair to say that his relatively short time as an elected member perplexed both the officials of Sunderland council and many of his political colleagues. However, the upshot was that many of the homes he defended from the slum clearance programme are still standing today as a testament to his description of them as "little palaces".

Some academics balked at the idea that a sociologist could be so intimately involved with his subject matter, thereby running the risk of "bias", but Dennis was never one for relativism – for him the possibility of an objective search for truth was not to be easily laid aside. It was a stance that led him into a final phase of work that (again) perplexed many – his association with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Institute for the Study of Civil Society.

Under this rubric he wrote a series of highly influential studies that railed against what he saw as the decay of the moral fabric of society. These included Families Without Fatherhood (1992 - pdf), Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family (1993 - pdf), The Invention of Permanent Poverty (1997), The Failure of Britain's Police (2003 - pdf) and Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000 - pdf). His call for a return to the moral world of the "respectable working class" of his childhood struck a chord with many, and he found himself transformed from an icon of the activist left to the academic darling of the right. At the same time, he remained an active member of the Labour party in Sunderland. The explanation for all of this lay in his commitment to "ethical socialism" – a philosophy he developed in English Ethical Socialism (1988), which he co-authored with Halsey. Central to this position is the doctrine of personal responsibility, even under unfavourable circumstances, for it is this multiplicity of personal decisions that will form history. In particular he saw reproductive and family decisions as crucial to human destiny, and (in Families Without Fatherhood) highlighted the adverse consequences of raising children without a father. In line with his opposition to postmodernism, Dennis felt no qualms in stating the moral truth as he saw it.

Dennis was born in Sunderland, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Green Terrace elementary school and Bede collegiate school, Sunderland. After graduating with a first from the LSE he worked at the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham, as well as spending time at Palo Alto, California, as a Rockefeller fellow. His heart, however, lay in Sunderland and he spent almost 40 years as a lecturer (and subsequently reader) in social studies at the nearby University of Newcastle.

A physically active man, and lifelong teetotaller, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia last July, though he remained active and alert until recently. Our families enjoyed a convivial meal in a Sunderland restaurant only weeks before his death, where he was in typically rumbustious form. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, and their two children, John and Julia.

• Norman Dennis, sociologist, born 16 August 1929; died 13 November 2010

Guardian tribute by Carol Roberton :

Norman wrote: "I went to the LSE instead of Corpus Christi, Oxford, partly because of [Harold] Laski, Miliband's mentor, but mainly because of RH Tawney" and he described how he had continued to advocate Tawney's "fellowship based on family" socialism.

But this, wrote Norman – "along with its closely related chapel and temperance socialism and the philosophies of the benign, enabling state in which co-operation and fellowship are the best bases for social organisation, not capitalist competition" – was "one of the great lost causes of our age. Who now has any memory that such ideas actually dominated Labour Party thinking, until they were all dumped into memory's hole of oblivion at the time of the countercultural revolution? I really ought to be on a national register of cultural monuments, as one of the sole surviving representatives of this point of view."

Norman the TV presenter - narrating this BBC documentary on the Durham miners.

Notice at Newcastle University.

Journal tribute from his daughter Julia.

For some reason there's nothing about his death on the Civitas website, despite the four of his books which are available there (links in the obit above). I'm very surprised at them - that's quite shameful.

His long essay "Defame Fathers, Create Crime?" is here.

Christian Institute tribute page - including an mp3 of 'Families without fatherhood'


With his passing, the ranks of radical, anti-our-new-Establishment sociologists are thin indeed. I can only think of Peter Saunders as keeping the flag flying.

Maybe Not So Good...

"The Dundee United and Scotland footballer David Goodwillie has been charged with raping a woman at a new year house party in West Lothian."




(frivolous comments about what is after all a serious criminal offence may be deleted)

"And this time, no more Mr Nice Guy!"

Baby Doc Duvalier returns to Haiti. That's all they need.

"Two white people wearing seatbelts — you've got to be cops"

"I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends.

On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan't miss some locals' assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan't miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements."

What Third World hellhole can this be? Haiti?

I'm not sure, but I think it's either Small Heath or Sparkbrook.

(via)

Grooming Goes Mainstream

There's a meme (hate that word) about ideas whose time has come - something like the five stages of grief but different - to the effect that first they ignore it, then deny it, then say it's wicked, and a stage or two more before it moves to general acceptance. Anybody know how it goes?

The issue of 'grooming' of under age girls by predominantly Asian gangs, covered on this blog here, here and here, seems to have gone mainstream, following the publication of a UCL report which, while widely publicised, seems impossible to actually find on the Web.

Now it's even the top story on Woman Sour. Far away are the days, seven years ago, when a Channel Four documentary on the subject was pulled, after pressure from West Yorkshire Police, because it might increase support for the BNP (aka 'increase community tensions'). What was once ignored by polite society, and only spoken of by racist knuckledraggers, is now almost prime-time, earnestly discussed by the great and the good. And now, when arrests are made, even the BBC no longer looks the other way.

But there was a price to pay for all those liberal blind eyes over so many years. It was paid by working-class Yorkshire and Lancashire girls like Emma, interviewed here. The Labour MP Ann Cryer, who's been a long-time campaigner on this issue, getting stick "from leading figures within her own party, not least from the former Labour leadership contender Diane Abbott", said 'Emma's description of her situation is pretty well identical to the situation of girls in Keighley whose mothers came to see me out of desperation, because they just couldn't get any action from West Yorkshire Police or Bradford Social Services'. The same West Yorkshire Police that was suppressing the evidence for political reasons, under its Chief Constable the late Colin Cramphorn, 'a man of liberal sympathies and a Guardian reader for many years'.

Just as 52 people had to die in London before the Labour Party started putting the lives of UK citizens ahead of not being like Norman Tebbit, girls have been raped and abused over a decade* while police, media and social services looked the other way.

On-street Grooming

Recent news reports have highlighted the prosecution of a gangs (sic) of predominantly Pakistani men for the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls. What's the best way to tackle this appauling (sic) crime without stereotyping and dividing communitites (sic)? We hear again from a young woman groomed by Pakistani teenagers from the age of 12 and then repeatedly raped. Ann Cryer, the former MP for Keighley, who's been speaking out on this issue for many years, and Yusuf Tai from Forward Thinking a group working with varied Muslim communities discuss possible ways to prevent crimes like this happening again.

* maybe a lot longer, if former Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell is right :

When I came to Blackburn in the 1970s, one of my main issues was the gangs of Asian men outside the old nightclub on top of the shopping centre who were picking up drunk white girls, specifically to abuse them. These were cars full of Asian lads in BMWs and Mercedes, offering lifts home to these young women, leading to incidents of rape and sexual assaults. From the first time I was posted to East Lancashire it has been a problem.

What Jack Straw has said so carefully is true: There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way. In recent years we have seen it specifically with victims aged just 14, 15 or 16-years-old who are out on the streets at night and groomed by predatory gangs. For people to just come out and call Mr Straw racist is wrong.

During the past decade there has been Operation Engage in Blackburn and Operation Awaken in Blackpool as the police has been able to feel more open about the situation. In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert - Jonathan Freedland

Freedland :

"The fear was that – for all his oratorical brilliance – Obama somehow lacked empathy, that he was a slightly chilly, aloof figure, that he struggled to connect emotionally.

We'll hear much less of that talk now.

For the address he gave at last night's memorial service for the victims of the Arizona shootings was elegiac, heartfelt and deeply moving."

Alas, it didn't actually move Mr Freedland, or connect with him emotionally - in the sense of altering his behaviour.

Here's that fine Obama speech :

"But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds...

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

And here's how much it moved Freedland :

"This was meant to be the Republicans' week, as they took control of the House of Representatives and its legislative agenda. Instead they look small – as well as defensive, fending off accusations that it was the violent rhetoric of the right that fuelled the current toxic political environment. None smaller than the de facto leader of today's Republican party, Sarah Palin, who preceded the Tucson address with an aggressive, self-regarding and petty-minded videotaped message that claimed she had been the victim of a "blood-libel"."

Maybe he was just too busy praising the speech to actually listen to it.

At Last ...

David Brooks in the NYT (emboldening mine) :

These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.

Yet such is the state of things. We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.

I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.

I've been saddened by the last few days, not so much by the dishonest media coverage - after all, 'Palin did it' is a more compelling narrative than 'he was a loony' - although it's still notable how all the outlets who just couldn't work out what could possibly make Major Hasan Malik shoot lots of people knew straight away that Sarah P. made Jared Loughner shoot lots of people. No, what's really bad is the nutty stuff in the comments at CiF and on left blogs. Jared Loughner's not the only reality-challenged loony out there, that's for sure.

"Free speech has no place in our society where the BNP are concerned..."

"... and this shows with the backing we receive from the prime Minister, David Cameron and other influential politicians who realise democracy is to fragile to be left in the hands and words of the nazi BNP.

Well done to the Police, shame you had no cause to lock him up."

This post by Dr Jason Sturgess at Saddleworth News refers to the hustings for the forthcoming Oldham West by-election, held in the fine old village of Delph, which I tootled through on my L-plated bike many a time in my youth, on that long ride from Worcestershire to Yorkshire (via EU Referendum). I think I'll let you be the judge on this one. More reports here and here :




BNP candidate is removed from 'open' hustings in Delph.

Dear Readers,
I was in email contact with Cllr Hulme who organised the event and he refused to invite 5 of the candidates included myself. I informed him that the meeting broke Electoral commission rules on hustings, the Millgate Arts Centre building recieves public funding and the meeting was advertised as an open event. The people of Delph should have been allowed to ask any questions to any of the candidates, in controlling the meeting like they did and only allowing on candidates whose parties are already discredited with scandals, deceit and lies was an insult to the people of Saddleworth and anti-democratic. Cllr Hulmes reasons were unjustified and when he lost the argument his emails reverted to All capitals and in bold ie, shouting in text language.
Stephen Morris English Democrats

Delph website disagrees :

After comments about the conduct of the Hustings Meeting held on sunday 9th January, the following statement has been issued by the Delph DCA & Traffic Group :

"Setting the record straight.

No hustings or candidates question time in this constituency has EVER had all the candidates on the platform and there is no legal requirement to do so. On Thursday night the Oldham Chronicle organised a question time with just three candidates on the platform.

It is simply not practicable to hold a question time with more than 5 speakers and with 10 candidates a choice has to be made. On Sunday the three main candidates were joined by the Green candidate Peter Allen whose party has a councillor on Oldham Council and Paul Nuttall the UKIP candidate who is also an elected member of the European Parliament for the North West.

The BNP candidate asked for and was given tickets to be part of the audience at the event. Unfortunately the candidate and his supporters organised a 'sit in' protest which disrupted the start of the meeting, their behaviour threatening a breach of the peace. Having repeatedly refused polite requests from the organisers to end their 'sit in' protest on the platform and return to their seats in the audience , the organisers had no alternative but to ask the police to escort the BNP candidate and his entourage from the building.

The organisers would like to thank the police for the calm and professional way they dealt with a difficult situation.

Delph proceeded to have a cracking election meeting which was lively, entertaining and informative.

We have to wonder why the BNP picked on a small village community group when as far as we know the Oldham Chronicle received no complaints from them about the candidates meeting they organised in Denshaw last Thursday night.'

Delph Community Association and Delph Traffic Group are non-political community organisations. No Councillor from any political party was involved in the organisation of this event"

I doubt that statement about never having all the candidates together is true. For years Oldham was a two-member constituency with usually only four candidates, and in the 50s Oldham West only had two candidates. Did they never sit in the same room ?

Candidates are :

* Debbie Abrahams (Labour)
* Derek Adams (British National Party)
* Kashif Ali (Conservative)
* Peter Allen (Green Party)
* David Bishop (Bus-Pass Elvis Party)
* The Flying Brick (Monster Raving Loony Party)
* Loz Kaye (Pirate Party of the United Kingdom)
* Stephen Morris (English Democrats)
* Paul Nuttall MEP (UK Independence Party)
* Elwyn Watkins (Liberal Democrats)

At the last election :

General Election 2010: Oldham East and Saddleworth[9]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Phil Woolas	14,186	31.9	−10.7
	Liberal Democrat	Elwyn Watkins	14,083	31.6	−0.5
	Conservative	Kashif Ali	11,773	26.4	+8.7
	BNP	Alwyn Stott	2,546	5.7	+0.8
	UKIP	David Bentley	1,720	3.9	+1.8
	Christian	Gulzar Nazir	212	0.5	N/A
Majority			103	0.2	−10.2
Turnout			44,520	61.2	+4.4

"A Mother Is The Truest Friend We Have ..."

(in which the writer lauds dishonesty, perjury and assisting an offender)

" ...when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts."

Thus Washington Irving. He'd have been impressed with Jacqueline Binley.
















Photo - the magnificently named Heathcliff O'Malley.

"The son of Conservative MP Brian Binley has been jailed and his wife has narrowly avoided imprisonment after they concocted a string of lies to cover up a drink driving offence. Former police officer Matthew Binley, 27, was arrested after he crashed his Alfa Romeo in Northampton, Northants, whilst twice the drink-drive limit. He had attempted to evade capture by fleeing the vehicle but was taken into custody after officers spotted him hiding in a nearby bush. His mother Jacqueline Binley, 50, tried to take the blame, claiming she had been the one driving his car.
Despite not being at the scene of the accident she told officers she had caught a taxi home minutes before police arrived and arrested her son. The pair admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice while Mr Binley pleaded guilty to a further charge of drink driving."

Now young (? 27 !) Mr Binley sounds like he's been just about all the kinds of fool a young fool can be.

"Matthew was dropped off at his Northampton flat at 11.30pm on May 22 last year after attending a friend's wedding and carried on the party at city centre nightclubs. However, for an unknown reason he decided to go for a late night drive in his Alfa Romeo, which he then crashed into a kerb before calling the RAC at 1.30am. The recovery driver noticed he 'appeared drunk' and immediately called police who found Mr Binley hiding in a nearby bush and arrested him on suspicion of drink driving. "

Now you or I might not decide on a quick spin round the block while soused - but we've all done things that with hindsight were inadvisable. Having pranged the car with no other vehicle or person involved, you'd think he'd give thanks for that fact, park the car as tidily as can, then put as much distance between himself and it as possible before calling the garage the following day. What possessed him to call the RAC ? (in the old days the RAC man would have called a taxi, not the police).

Having done the above, involving your blameless mother in an attempted cover-up is surely adding not just a cherry on the confection of foolishness, but a whole fruitbowl - with whipped cream and hundreds and thousands to boot, not to mention strawberry and chocolate sauce. But when a job (he was a police officer) is at stake, people will do a lot.

And she stepped up to the plate, despite considerable reservations. Fair play to her and to her fierce maternal instinct. The fact that it was a mad thing to do, with little chance of success, makes it all the more commendable.

'Wish Matthew would just bite the bullet and take the rap. I'm beginning to resent him asking me but I daren't tell him to his face.''

While she and her husband, MP Brian Binley, are entitled to think their son's been very silly, I hope Mr Binley is very proud of his wife (even if he can't say so publicly), and that his son's had the grace to apologise, to thank her, and to swear never to be such an idiot again.





(It's rarely that I bitterly regret not being a wealthy man. In such case, I would offer the Binleys a fortnight anywhere in the world, with all the spas, pampering and dining a woman could want*, and an expensive trip to the jewellers at the end. I know there are far more worthy people in the world, but something about this story just touches me, as it might touch any father with sons and a redhead wife)



* my experience in this area being limited, I'm making it up as I go along.


UPDATE - Susan looked at the story over my shoulder. "She's as daft as he is. I wouldn't lie for him if it were my son". Women are so unromantic.

We've Trashed Our Education - Now We'll Trash Yours

VSO - Primary Teacher Roles

We’re looking for primary teachers to work alongside teachers in the classroom and go overseas in roles as soon as possible in countries such as Thailand, Nepal, China and Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia. You’ll work with serving teachers in a cluster of primary schools, introducing them to more participatory, child centred methodology.

Lo, Nice White Lady descends from her flying machine to change the seating from those stuffy old rows into small groups of desks - after all, the children learn more from each other than from any teacher, don't they?

I can see the strategic goal driving this attempt to dumb down the remarkably successful Chinese education system, although I can't see the famously test-and-rote-heavy Chinese falling for it - they'll probably send them all to Tibet. But what have the poor Ghanaians, Rwandans and Nepalese done to deserve this?

FaceBook Friends

When a (tad mentally fragile is the impression I get) sensible shoe wearing 42-year old (from Brighton, natch), miffed at her significant other's infidelity, announced on Facebook that she'd taken an overdose, none of her 1,000-plus 'friends' called an ambulance.

Tangentially, I see that Facebook has 550 million users and is valued at 50 billion dollars.

We seem to be reliving the dot-com boom. Anyone remember Freeserve, Dixon's free (well, local-call-cost) ISP from pre-broadband days ?

Freeserve floated on the stock market in July 1999 (as Freeserve.com plc), at which point they had approximately 1.5 million subscribers and were valued at between £1.31bn and £1.51bn ($2.02bn and $2.34bn). By September 2000, Freeserve had more than 2 million active subscribers. This was vastly more than the incumbent telephone provider BT, something that was unique for a European ISP. Freeserve was bought by the France Télécom-owned company Wanadoo in 2000 for £1.65bn ($2.37bn).

I remember around float time thinking - "£1,000 per subscriber - and no subscription fee! How in heaven's name can they be worth even a tenth of that ?". I was an early adopter, getting Web access in the early 90s (when there was no local number to dial!), but even I was only spending a few hundred pounds a year online, and I just couldn't see how Freeserve were ever going to make hundreds, let alone thousands, out of each customer. They never did.

Facebook are valued at getting on for $100 per subscriber - which subscribers include my wife and four children. No way are they currently anywhere near making that sort of money out of them. The valuation is an order of magnitude lower than 12 years back, but it's still much too high.

Does anyone know what the theory behind this valuation is ? OK, there's advertising - but IMHO that's not going to be anything like $10 p.a. per user in post-cost profit - $5 billion a year. And if that were possible, what's the likelihood that it will stay the course and not go the way of MySpace? Up to now - admittedly a short history - Internet social network sites have been popular for a few years then the buzz wears off as something new arrives. Unless Facebook can somehow capture the 'something new' - i.e. make it more likely that new entrants to social networking will choose to implement inside rather than outside Facebook (e.g. Farmville, which my daughter and her friends all played last year but have now stopped), there's a risk that it'll in its turn suffer the fate of Bebo, worth $850 million only a couple of years ago and now worth $10 million as users moved to Facebook.

Let's assume it survives, and Mark Zuckerberg becomes the Bill Gates of social networking. I still can't see it as worth $50 billion - unless they can find a way of sucking in shopping sites, like some black hole of the Web. In which case Google vs Facebook will be a battle to behold.

BTW, is it just me, or has Google become a worse search engine lately ? It doesn't seem to pick up those obscure pages that perfectly match the search criterion any more. Instead you wade through pages of link-farming guff and big commercial sites before finding what you want on page 7.

Stealing The Bin-Bags ....

That the lazy Brits just don't want to steal :

Clothes donated by members of the public to charity are being stolen by organised criminals and sold abroad, depriving leading charities of millions of pounds for good causes. Gangs from Eastern Europe are believed to be responsible for a growing number of raids on doorstep collection bags and clothing banks, attracted by a trebling in the price for old clothing in the past three years.

Tuesday Night Music - Days Like This Keep Me Warm

Simple, but strangely uplifting. I've said before that the Polyphonic Spree were a Principal Edwards Magic Theatre for the Noughties.