A good man murdered by ISIS. And the consequences we have to resist.

Some weeks ago, the BBC interviewed several Manchester taxi drivers, about their former colleague Alan Henning, the latest victim of the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria, which tries to call itself “Islamic State”.

His colleagues described a man who always had the time to help out others. Henning was particularly adept at fixing the electrics on a car; he would give up his own opportunity to take fares, working on other cars instead, if colleagues needed it.

It was that same willingness to help others which took Henning several times to Syria, to try to bring much-needed help to the victims of civil war in that country. It was on a visit nine months ago that he was abducted and held by ISIS, which apparently murdered him yesterday.

The qualities that drove him to travel to Syria are precisely the kind that Islam values. It is, after all, one of the pillars of the religion to provide alms to the poor; here was a man trying to help people made poor by conflict. Indeed, many of his fellow aid workers were Muslim, underlining the point that what they were doing was wholly in keeping with the tenets of their religion.

None of that stopped ISIS beheading him.

Alan Henning: driven by compassion, murdered by ISIS

Then again, ISIS has little or nothing to do with promoting Islam. It is a barbaric organisation in pursuit of power and more than happy to crush anyone who gets in its way. Indeed, not just happy, they seem to draw real pleasure from the prospect of killing, and killing in the most cruel and vicious way. Rape and torture follow in their wake wherever they go.

Equally, British government opposition to ISIS has little to do with religion or even with the protection of men like Alan Henning. The government has, no doubt, given up hope of rescuing any of the hostages held by ISIS: they will be murdered, one by one, as ISIS decides that the time is right, and no one in the West can do anything to stop them.

The government’s motivation is also primarily to do with power. On the one hand, there is popularity to be won by taking on and, it is to be hoped, defeating ISIS. To say nothing of the great photo opps that a war provides for an embattled Prime Minister.

Cameron visiting RAF crews in Syria
Support crucial to their effectiveness.
And, coincidentally, a good photo opp too

But there’s also another aspect that Cameron is enthusiastic to turn to advantage: the sheer savagery of ISIS has excited a wave of aversion in Britain, and with aversion comes fear. Cameron is whipping up that fear and using it as wonderful means to drive more people to support a government perceived is the last best defence against this terrorist group, and in order to limit still further pesky human rights legislation, always an annoyance to government.

There have already been calls by such significant Tories as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to require people returning from Syria to prove they were not engaged in terrorism, reversing the usual arrangement whereby it is up to the prosecution to prove that they were.

We recently saw a case of where the government is heading. An action was brought against former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg who had made a number of trips to Syria. Two days ago, as his trial on terrorism charges was about to start, MI5 admitted that it had maintained excellent communications with Begg, interviewing him several times and using him as a source on the situation in Syria, even guaranteeing him the right to return to Britain from Syria unmolested. The case fell apart.

Now I don’t know whether Begg is as clean as wind-driven snow, or up to no good. What I do know is that he hasn’t been convicted of any crime – indeed, the case against him had to be withdrawn by the prosecuting authorities. From the point of view of the law, he’s innocent.

And yet – the government decided it would not immediately unfreeze his assets. A man who has not been convicted of any offence, has his assets frozen on the mere say-so of the government.

The same government that now wants ministers to be able to overrule judgements of the European Court of Human Rights, on their own authority.

A lot of people will find Begg thoroughly antipathetic. They will feel that he deserves everything he gets. But what they are losing track of is when once you give the government the right to decide who deserves to have his or her rights protected, you give it that power over you rights too.

It’s worth remembering the words of the anti-Nazi pastor, Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist. 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew. 

Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me. 

Let's hope that Alan Hemming, brave and generous, receives a better tribute.

A tribute to outstanding thinkers. From another.

“In Our Time” is back on air on BBC Radio 4, after the summer break. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the season opened with a programme on Leonhard Euler, probably the most prolific scientist and mathematician who has ever lived. 

Leonhard Euler: prolific mathematician

He just couldn’t stop himself working and publishing on any subject that caught his interest, so ended up contributing in a huge number of areas: on the flow of fluids, on the capability of columns to support weight, on pure number theory (he’s the only man to have two numbers named after him), on mathematical methods for physics and much more.

I came to know a little about Euler a third of a century ago, in my misspent youth, part of which I devoted to studying an obscure eighteenth-century French scientist, Maupertuis, made only infinitesimally less obscure by my efforts. It was thanks to Maupertuis that I came to know what has become a favourite city of mine, Basel in Switzerland, and it was thanks to a visit there that I find myself over thirty years on the husband of a Frenchwoman and the father of three Frenchmen (well, they’re Brits too, but that doesn’t make as good a cadence).

Maupertuis went to Basel because, though it’s a relatively small city, it had an extraordinary flowering of scientific brilliance in the eighteenth century. Euler was its most prestigious expression, but it was perhaps even more striking that three generations of a single family, the Bernoullis, produced eight major scientists and mathematicians. Maupertuis travelled to Basel to study with one of them, Johann, and to live with another, also and confusingly called Johann (the son of the former and, though they presumably didn’t realise it at the time, also the man in whose house Maupertuis would eventually die some thirty years later).

The Bernoulli family: eight major scientists in three generations

It was one of the Bernoullis who sprang to mind when I heard Melvyn Bragg and his guests talking about Euler on “In Our Time” the other day. Daniel Bernoulli was one of the more important mathematicians from his family, not quite the equal of Euler but a close collaborator of his for a great many years, in St Petersburg and the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. 

In later life, Bernoulli said that there were two incidents in his career of which he would be proud until his dying day.

Daniel Bernoulli: two incidents game him particular pride

The first was a dinner during which Euler posed a mathematical problem that had defeated him and on which he’d been working for several days. It gave Bernoulli enormous satisfaction to have solved it before they left the table.

The second didn’t concern Euler directly. Bernoulli tells that he was once on a long journey by coach and fell into conversation with a fellow passenger. Eventually they came to introduce themselves to each other.

“I’m Daniel Bernoulli,” said Daniel Bernoulli.

“Oh, sure,” replied his companion, “in that case I’m Isaac Newton.”

I like both stories, not just because of their wit, but principally because they are both at first sight boasts but, when looked at more carefully, they turn out to be tributes to other greater thinkers.

Euler and Newton: who could deserve such tributes more?

It just takes a little patience, and a bit more money

A homeowner with a leaking roof called in a man who claimed to be a roofer.

“Ah,” said the roofer, “it’ll cost a lot and it’ll take at least a year.”

After grumbling a bit, the homeowner agreed to the terms, even though the sheer cost meant a lot of pain, cancelling a holiday, not entertaining friends, even eating rather less.

At the end of the year, the roof was still leaking.

“Yes,” said the roofer, “but it’s leaking less. If you’ll pay me rather more than last time and give me another year, I’ll get it fixed for you.”


A man flagged down a taxi and asked how much it would cost to drive to the airport. The driver quoted a figure that sounded excessive, but the passenger was in a hurry and accepted.

They drove for so long that the passenger was far too late for his plane. Then the driver pulled in and told him they’d arrived.

“But this isn’t the airport,” said the passenger.

“No, but it’s closer,” said the driver. “If you pay me even more I can get you to the airport in time for the next plane.”


An internet user was absolutely delighted to have been put in a position to receive £10 million from the manager of a Nigerian bank. He willingly paid the £60,000 asked for, since it was dwarfed by the amount he was due to receive.

He waited six months but no funds showed up. He wrote to the same e-mail address and, slightly to his surprise, received a reply.

“Good sir, there is now chance we make available not £10 million but £14 million. You please send £130,000 more and we transfer whole sum.”


The UK Prime Minister David Cameron campaigned in the 2010 election pledging: “We will protect Britain’s credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over a Parliament.”

At the end of the following Parliament, the deficit is still out of control but Britain has suffered austerity which has seen the proliferation of food banks, disabled people denied benefits, the poor made poorer, while only the wealthiest have done well.

At the Conservative Party Conference yesterday, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man in charge of our finances, told us that he was “humbled by how much more we have to do.” And he declared that “we here resolve we will finish the job that we have started.”

All he needs is the chance to impose five more years of austerity to make it happen.

George Osborne: didn't do the job, but would like to try again
What's not to trust?

Great to see the Tories suffering, but sad it should be by UKIP lying to and ripping off more voters

The discomfiture of the Tory Party would normally give me a pleasant surge of Schadenfreude, so I ought to be glad that the start of its conference has been overshadowed by adverse publicity. But when that publicity comes courtesy of gutter journalism by a tabloid and of a vicious far right-wing organisation, I take no pleasure from it.

The tabloid poison came from the Sunday Mirror. I don’t know the details because I refuse to read the articles, but apparently they trapped a junior Minister into sexting explicit pictures of himself, forcing him to resign. It seems to me that the role of the press is to expose incompetence or dishonesty in politicians, not to mount sting operations to embarrass them about their sexual weaknesses.

When it comes to being toxic, however, no one beats the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. It held its party conference this weekend, just before the Conservatives assembled for theirs. The conference was in Doncaster, where the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is Member of Parliament; on Friday, indeed, the conference focused on trying to win disaffected Labour voters to its banners.

We even had a UKIP member and long-time Labour voter telling us that she remained a socialist, but a “commonsensical socialist”. She’d joined UKIP because she felt it represented more closely what she believes. Presumably she feels that it’s socialist common sense to stand for xenophobia and scapegoating immigrants for a crisis that was caused by the failures of our financial system.

That was all on Friday. On Saturday, party leader Nigel Farage announced the defection of a Conservative MP to his party, the second in a month. Mark Reckless justified his decision on the grounds that “people feel ignored, taken for granted, over-taxed, over-regulated, ripped off and lied to.”

Mark Reckless joining the feckless
With an image of his party leader Nigel Farage gloating behind him

It was wonderful for UKIP to be able to announce this news just hours before the Prime Minister turned up for the start of the Conservative Conference. David Cameron, not a quick thinker, if he’s a thinker at all, was unable to answer the many questions from journalists, both on the defection and the ministerial resignation, preferring simply to walk grim-faced into the conference building.

A real coup for UKIP, in other words.

Except when you start looking into the reality behind the words. All that stuff about having a stand that should attract Labour voters was curious, when the joker they had up their sleeve wasn’t a Labour defection but another Tory. That does rather confirm the general view that UKIP is simply a more dangerously right-wing version of the Conservatives. Saturday’s message had little in common with Friday’s.

Sunday continued to build on UKIP's return to its Tory roots. The party announced a new tax policy that would generate savings of £43,000 a year – three-quarters as much again as median annual earnings in Britain – for anyone being paid a million a year. It would make no change at all to those on £10,000 a year.

So when Reckless talks about being “overtaxed” then, like any Tory, he means the people on top incomes.

As for being “ignored, taken for granted” and “ripped off”, if you’re on low earnings UKIP intends to treat you exactly that way.

Indeed, when a suggestion was made by a UKIP spokesman that the party might put a tax on luxury items such as shoes and handbags, Nigel Farage went out of his way to kill the idea right off. He told the BBC “I’m pretty certain that while I am leader that will not be in our manifesto.”

Reckless claimed sympathy with those who are being lied to, but if UKIP is trying to appeal to Labour supporters with the suggestion that it might tackle inequality in society, it’s not providing the most shining examples of truth-telling itself.

But then Reckless is hardly a man to turn down the opportunity to gain a political advantage by a falsehood. It seems that as recently as Friday, he left a voicemail for the Tory Party chairman Grant Shapps, assuring him that he would be attending the Party Conference. Within 48 hours, he was announcing his defection at a time designed to do the most damage to his former colleagues. It’s hardly unreasonable of Shapps to claim that Reckless “lied, and lied, and lied.”

Ignored, taken for granted, lied to, ripped off. Anyone naive enough to be taken in by the UKIP message is going to find out how that really feels. Which is why I take little joy over the news that has caused so much distress to the Tories. Couldn’t happen to more deserving people. But it shouldn’t be this way.

As for the woman who regards herself as a commonsensical socialist hoping to achieve her aims through UKIP, I have just one question: might that approach not prove just a little reckless?

In praise of praise for a place called home. However flat.

A journalist doing a piece about a village lost in the back of beyond is said to have interviewed, amongst others, the oldest inhabitant.

“Have you been here all your life?” he asked.

“Not yet,” replied the old man.

Since this morning I’ve been inspired by a book by a FaceBook friend, Cheryl Unruh, Flyover People. It’s an edited compilation of pieces she wrote for The Emporia Gazette and celebrates the joys of living a life in Kansas, which Unruh is clearly well on the way to doing (but hasn’t yet).

The title itself is appealing. When my (French) stepson came to live in England, kids at school started calling him “Frog”, displaying the innate kindness that children like to show to newcomers everywhere. Fortunately, he took to the name and started using it of himself, at which point it stopped being a weapon to tease him with. There's nothing better, when faced with a term of disparagement, than to adopt it and wear it with pride, as Unruh has done with the notion of a flyover state, a place one leaves mercifully below oneself as one travels by plane from one place of considerably more interest, to another.

It was an attitude I used to share at a time when, having made a number of visits to the US, I realised that I had only once set foot in a state without a seaboard. But then I visited St Paul, Minnesota, and fell in love with it. That made me realise that some of those in-between places deserve a better reputation than they enjoy. Unruh certainly gives me that feeling about Kansas.

“We know home when we see it,” she tells us, and as well as being charmed by the pen portraits she paints, I was amused by the sentiment. It’s hard to imagine a life that contrasts more strongly with my own. My grandmother once accused me of having completely filled the letter “B” pages of her address book, I’d moved so much; and though I’ve lived principally in Western Europe, the places I’ve called home have wandered across four language communities.

So it’s fascinating to read someone who displays a true rootedness. And that rootedness goes deep, is expressed in a boundless love for her rectangular state. I have to confess, but then I have a nasty sceptical mind, that sometimes I feel she protests too much, making a virtue of the sheer lack of what outsiders would see as features in her state. But there’s no doubting the sincerity of affection with which she takes us deep into the finest details, describing her husband taking photos of the pinpoints of light made by insects feeding on plant leaves. Nor can one be anything but inspired by the descriptions at the other end of the scale, of the immensities of skies of every shade of blue, forming a bowl over the vast swaths of varied greens on the plains beneath them.

The plains. That surely is the hallmark of Kansas, known even to people who know as little about the state as I do. It’s flat.

Members of the Kansas flatness research team at work

Its flatness was put to the test by a group of geographers from Texas and Arizona, Mark Fonstad, William Pugatch and Brandon Vogt. They set up a definition of flatness based on the ratio between the major and minor axes of an ellipse, as many surfaces can be approximated by ellipses or parts of them. 

This is true, in particular, of the surface of Kansas, and that of a pancake.

Since, sadly, they couldn’t gain access to “either a Kansas-sized pancake or a pancake-sized Kansas”, they had to resort to mathematical techniques to compare the two. I quote without comment the authors’ own words at this point, as they seem self-explanatory: “for both Kansas and the pancake, we approximated the local ellipsoid with a second-order polynomial line fit to the cross-sections.”

Who could disagree that this was an eminently satisfactory approach?

“We purchased a well-cooked pancake,” they inform us, “from a local restaurant,” and proceeded to microscopical analysis. 

“The importance of this research dictated that we not be daunted by the 'No Food or Drink' sign posted in the microscopy room,” a sentiment we can only applaud, as it granted us insight into a matter that might otherwise have remained a mystery. 

The mathematical index of flatness they used would give a value of 1.000 for perfect flatness. On this basis, the pancake scored 0.957, “which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat.”

What about Kansas? The state’s cross-section presented a problem.

“The state is so flat that the off-the-shelf software produced a flatness value for it of 1,” the authors point out. “This value was, as they say, too good to be true, so we did a more complex analysis, and after many hours of programming work, we were able to estimate that Kansas’s flatness is approximately 0.9997.”

There are results of scientific experiment that are ambiguous or uncertain. This is not one of them. This is conclusive.

“That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as ‘damn flat.’”

The conclusion? “Simply put, our results show that Kansas is considerably flatter than a pancake.”

The proof

There's nothing flat about Uruh’s writing, though. I haven’t finished the book yet, though I shall soon. And I’ve no doubt about her claim that the sheer flatness of the landscape makes the Kansas skyscapes all the more breathtaking.

The upside of flatness

Beefing about nationalism

“All meat sold in this store,” said the sign, “is British.”

That had me smiling wryly. Because I lived in France for ten years and out there they had signs proclaiming all the meat they were selling to be French. Indeed, during the mad cow disease crisis in Britain, French butchers were strident in their insistence that none of their beef was British.

A guarantee to make us feel safer
Well, unless you're French. Or from anywhere outside Britain

Now I have no objection to people demanding that their food be safe. To be frank, I’d also rather prefer it that way. I’m not convinced, though, that the fact that it’s being produced by compatriots offers any guarantees. I really don’t see why I should expect British farmers or food companies to be any safer than French ones – or vice versa. They all, after all, use the same techniques and products as each other.

But food is a visceral matter. I’ve known Jews or Muslims, for instance, who have abandoned every aspect of the practice of their faith who can’t free themselves of their dietary laws: once your body has learned that pork is unclean, it’s hard to shake that feeling. Bear in mind that it is a feeling, far more than a belief. The faith, say that certain rituals must be performed on certain days, is relatively easy to shake because it is a matter for the mind; but the body is far more basic and far more conservative.

So when we feel threatened in our food, we run for atavistic cover: back to what we identify as our community. So British (or French) food is safer because France (or Britain) is our country.

Nationalism is the belief that one country is better than others, simply because it’s ours. And the example of the fatuous posters about locally produced meat underlines how widespread and baseless, that belief is. 

It wouldn’t matter if that was as far as it went. But in England today we see the rise of a viciously nationalistic party, UKIP, which wants to further inflame national sentiment and build its popularity on it. So its primary stance is anti-immigrant and, make no mistake about it, their objection to immigrants isn’t truly economic or even political, it’s simply based on the crassest of gut-feel dislike of the foreigner for no other reason than he or she is foreign.

Unsurprisingly, as the two nations are so close, and not just geographically, France is seeing the parallel growth of an equally vicious, xenophobic nationalist party, the Front National, with views that mirror much of UKIP’s stance.

Both parties would, naturally, strongly maintain the superiority of their country’s meat over that of the other – or indeed any other. The people of their nation are better, the foodstuffs of the nation are therefore better.

Sadly, these attitudes are spilling over and infecting far too much of the life of each of these nations. The French FN is whipping up Islamophobia as part of its hatred of anything it sees as extraneous and those attitudes are spreading through an increasing portion of the institutions of society; in Britain, both the Conservatives and, sadly, Labour are trying to woo support among UKIP voters by making dangerous concessions to its views.

It’s no surprise that for all its talk of sympathy with the sufferings of Syria, Britain has let in just 24 refugees from that country.

Nationalism is toxic and it’s deeply anchored. Indeed, there’s only one sentiment capable of supplanting it. Curiously, that’s best exemplified by another matter of nationality of meat. 

When the European Union decided to ban beef imports from Britain because of Foot and Mouth, many Northern Irish farmers asked to be reclassified as Irish.

Wonderful, isn’t it? Many of these men are the descendants of Edward Carson who proclaimed “no surrender” to the attempt to push the North into an independent Irish Republic. Many would have voted for Ian Paisley’s party during his “Never, Never, Never” phase. Over their dead bodies would they ever be made to give up their British status and become Irish.

Until, that is, they were hit in their pocket books. Then, yes, being Irish was a legitimate demand and they pursued it energetically.

Come to think of it, that might be the best answer to the threats nationalism poses. Not guns and bullets. Just a little money to persuade its adherents that their bread might be better buttered on the other side. In the long run, it might be a lot more effective.

And, actually, cost a great deal less.

An example to us all: Tesco and the Holy Grail of private sector management skills

I’ve been accused by some of not being sufficiently enthusiastic about the great, internationally recognised truth, that they do things better in the private sector. Worse still I persist in remaining lukewarm despite having worked in private companies for thirty years.

I utterly reject that charge. 

There’s no “despite” about it. It’s all “because”.

In any case, how can anyone be anything but sceptical with the edifying example of Tesco before our eyes?

In its early days, Tesco was a decidedly downmarket grocer. “Pile it high and sell it cheap,” was the slogan of its founder, Jack Cohen. In the 80s and 90s, it moved upmarket, committing itself to quality and with prices that remained competitive but weren’t specifically aimed at being cheap. In 1995, it overtook long-time leader Sainsbury’s to become the number 1 grocery retailer in Britain.

But then the pioneering generation that had founded Tesco’s, and the equally entrepreneurial successors who took it upmarket and to the number one slot, began to give way to top executives who were only that: senior corporate executives. Hungry new low cost retailers entered the market and Tesco’s couldn’t react; it began to lose market share and profits.

On 29 August this year, the company had to issue a profit warning, cutting its forecast for the year from £2.8 billion to £2.4 billion. Now some of us might regard £2.4 billion as a not unreasonable sum – nearly a hundred thousand times more than the median income of a British employee – but last year, the company brought in just short of £3.3 billion.

Yesterday things turned even more embarrassing. Tesco had to make a further profit warning. It seemed that the previous forecast had, inexplicably, been overstated. Not by much – £250 million, and what’s quarter of a billion between friends? – but that was still enough to set a few nerves jangling amongst those friends (the City of London has the reputation for friendliness and loyalty one would expect from any major international financial centre).

Tesco: every little helps.
They seem to have lost sight of a little. It helped their forecast

Now, you don’t want to be too hard on those guys. After all, you can’t always find the staff these days. I mean, the Finance Director was such a washout that when they got rid of him, all they had to pay him was £970,000 to go away. What’s more his salary was £886,000, not even eighteen times median earnings. 

You know what they say: pay peanuts and you get monkeys. And, as we all know, monkeys can’t count. No wonder £250 million got lost in the accounts. 

It was no doubt a matter of chance that it was lost in a way that seemed to boost the company’s standing instead of undermining it.

Now the people who built Tesco’s had flair. Like them or loathe them, one can’t deny their business sense. In my career, I’ve met many executives who understand what leadership means and can inspire a company to do far better than might have seemed possible.

But I’ve met a great many nonentities of just the same calibre as Tesco’s seems to have recruited in recent years. What amuses me is that they still command eye-watering salaries. And they manage to persuade so many that the private sector management skills they exemplify are just what our railways lines, utilities or hospitals need to open up prospects of a brilliant future.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve met a great many incompetent hospital managers in a long career working with the NHS. But, as Tesco’s so aptly demonstrates, I remain deeply sceptical that the mere fact of being a private sector manager qualifies you to take over and make things better.

Perhaps the private sector could start by setting its own house in order first.