Mind what you get that British lion to roar for

If we ever successfully turned the European Union into the United States of Europe, we’d need to make sure roles were distributed among the constituent nations in a sensible way. We’d need the police to be British, the cooks French, the bankers German and the entertainers Italian.

Imagine how awful it would be if we ended up instead with French police, German entertainers, Italian bankers and British cooks?

Ironically, the only funny aspect of that joke is how desperately far from the truth it is. British police are struggling to emerge from a morass of scandal:

• they’ve been shown to have a regrettable tendency to abuse sexually women who call them for help against sexual abusers, 
• endemic racism seems a problem, perhaps most shamefully in the surveillance run, not on the racist murderers of Stephen Lawrence, but on the family of the victim, 
• investigations in recent years have revealed a sorry nexus of morally if not criminally corrupt relations between the police, politics and the media

You certainly wouldn’t want that lot running the European police. Not at least until it got its own house into significantly better order.

As for Germany, when we lived there we found the country easy-going, with plenty to amuse and delight us wherever we went. The banks, on the other hand, were painfully bureaucratic and backward.

In fact, the only true aspect of the joke is that the Italians are entertaining. Not always intentionally, mind: presumably they didn’t actually elect Berlusconi to be the clown he became.

You may have picked up the implication that I don’t go with the much-vaunted reputation of French cooks. I feel that cooks in France have tended to rest on their laurels a bit. You can of course eat exceptionally well in the most expensive places, but it’s sometimes difficult to find a reliable restaurant in France, serving a good meal at a reasonable price.

Meanwhile, Britain has become a nation where it’s far easier to find a good meal easily, and one that’s good value. Japanese, Indian, Italian, even French, any city boasts a selection which will take your breath away without breaking the bank.

Back in the seventies, it wasn’t like that.

• Sandwich bars offered two slices of doughy (white) bread with a choice of a slice of ham or cheese between them; excitement came in the form of a choice of two types of pickle 
• Salads were piles (and not usually big piles) of vegetables served with nothing remotely resembling a dressing; if you were lucky (or perhaps I mean unlucky), you got a little plastic packet of an abomination called ‘salad cream’
•  Main dishes were often ‘pies’, which came with a burned crust under which lurked meat-like objects possibly drawn from an animal, but not one anybody could identify, swimming in a dull brown fluid.

All that seems, these days, to be thankfully behind us. Which made a visit to Gibraltar a couple of years ago a fascinatingly nostalgic experience. Because the food seemed to be straight out of the seventies. It was like reliving my student life, without any of the pleasure that notion suggests. 

A rock and an airport in a seventies time warp

The place is also claustrophobic. It is after all a rock. The road goes round it. There are side turnings in the town, and you can get up to the top as well, but woe betide you if you go there after 5:00: the place shuts down.

Really, a seventies time warp.

Of course, there may be some people in the British Foreign Office wondering how we’ll bottle up the French fleet in then Med, when it next threatens our shores, if we don’t hold Gib. I suspect most of us have put the Napoleonic wars behind us by now, thankfully writing them off along with British seventies food.

The only aspect of Gibraltar that seems to belong to the 21st century is all the shops trading in gold, diamonds or currency. Which suggests Gib has all the innocence, purity and transparency that we’ve come to associate with international finance.

Spain has announced that it intends to go to the United Nations over the continued occupation of this rock which, geographically, clearly belongs to it. It’s imposing lots of painful controls on traffic attempting to cross the border. It’s upset that the island authorities have been creating artificial reefs that are spoiling local Spanish fishing. There have been incidents of unauthorised incursions into territorial waters.

Meanwhile the British government is talking firmly about the need to stand by the people of Gibraltar, to reject the unacceptable behaviour of the Spanish and to assert our sovereign rights.

For that place? For Gibraltar we’re prepared to put our relations with one of the main players in Europe, an ally and a partner, in jeopardy? What is the government dreaming of?

Guys, just remember London in the seventies, and add better weather. It isn’t worth losing a moment’s sleep over. Time to move on. Please.

Shades of 1984?

It’s wonderful when two items in the news reinforce the insights each provides. Synchronicity, one might call it, or does that imply that the events described are gratifying? Because these ones certainly aren’t.

First, there’s the furore over the revelations by Edward Snowden. It seems our esteemed British institution, GCHQ or the Government Communications Headquarters, has been tapping fibreoptic cables and gaining access to colossal volumes of internet and telephone communications – as many as 600 million phone calls a day. Mind-blowing stuff.

GCHQ. A building as impressive as the Pentagon.
And an organisation just as troubling.

I didn’t know there were enough people to say that much to each other on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s just proof that we always find things to talk about even when we don’t have much to say.

Now I have mixed feelings about GCHQ’s activities.

In the first place, it reassures me that nobody can do anything with 600 million phone conversations. At least, not with all of them. It seems there are nearly 6000 employees at GCHQ, so it’s pretty easy to do the arithmetic: if none of them did anything else, each would have to listen to 100,000 messages a day. Since there are fewer seconds than that in 24 hours, they clearly aren’t listening to the lot.

More positively, I actually favour intelligent intelligence work. It’s what has kept the terrorist attacks in the West down over the last few years. And as well as being more effective, it strikes me as infinitely preferable, morally, than invading another country, killing a lot of civilians, and then clearing off again with our tails between our legs with nothing resolved.

On the other hand, even if our governments are making good use of this intelligence right now, there’s no guarantee they always will. That’s where the other news item becomes so interesting.

A second scandal that has been running and running, and has erupted again int he last few days, concerns the police penetration of various environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, for several years from the mid-nineties. Some of the undercover cops took their James Bond fantasies a long way, forming relationships with a several women and then abandoning them, some with kids they’d fathered. All a little upsetting, if I can indulge in a little British understatement, particularly as the organisations targeted were often no more threatening to society than groups of tree-huggers.

What makes things worse is that allegations have now emerged, from one of those cops turned whistle blower, that some of the undercover operations were directed against the family and friends of Stephen Lawrence. He was the black teenager murdered by a racist white gang while he was waiting for a bus home, twenty years ago. It’s clear the spying wasn’t designed to uncover crime, but to try, by discrediting their targets, to protect the reputation of the Metropolitan police which was making a complete hash of its investigation of the murder.

Stephen Lawrence, victim of a racist murder
The police apparently ran an operation against his family

One of the friends targeted was Duwayne Brooks, a witness to the murder, who found himself facing charges of criminal damage. They were thrown out by the judge as an abuse of the legal process, which to a layman like me, sounds about as close as legal discretion will get to an accusation that the police tried to frame him.

So at the time that the Lawrence family, and Brooks as an eye witness, were depending on the police to help them obtain justice for an appalling crime, they were themselves targets for covert police action designed to discredit or even jail them. No wonder justice was for so long denied them (just two of the perpetrators have been convicted so far, and only last year, though it is well known who carried out the killing). We should probably just be grateful they escaped being made victims of even greater injustice themselves.

Now set that second story alongside the first. I bet you that somewhere among those 600 million phone calls a day, it will always be possible to find a few by some new victim of police harassment. And by selecting odd sentences out of context from some of them, and stringing them together, to present a damning picture of that victim. That could then be leaked to some open gutter masquerading as a newspaper, to turn the victim’s life into a living hell.

The Lawrence case shows what the police are capable of when they lash out in self-defence. Why not other parts of the security state? Why not ill-intentioned groups on the extreme fringes of our political life? Why not some of the deeply unhealthy elements in those fringes that now look poised to make a bid for a share of power in the future?

I’m keen on seeing intelligence intelligently used. But far less keen on the indiscriminate collection of information, with no clear security goal defined. Particularly as we know how easily secretive organisations can be tempted to abuse the power this gives them.

Charming traditions

One of the high points, or at any rate one of the points, of the recent Christmas break was that great English tradition of the Boxing Day hunt. 

On the 26^th of December, some hundreds of those who like to think of themselves as superior, turned out with pretty red coats and large horses to go careering across the countryside after a bunch of hounds, while some hundreds of thousands of people with no more sense but far less money turned out to support them. 

It seems that this year the supporters numbered about 250,000.

Oscar Wilde had it right. Fox hunting is the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.  

The unspeakable at play

Well, the uneatable has been illegal game since 2004, when Parliament decided that having dogs tear a fox to pieces at the end of a hunt wasn’t acceptable behaviour in the twentieth century, however much fun the unspeakable may have got from the process. And however time-honoured the tradition.

Of course, there have been a few accidents when hunts have actually led to the death of a fox but, hey, accidents happen. 

Remember Apartheid South Africa? They used to happen to activists who got too close to windows on the upper floors of police stations. 

What about these days in Russia? They happen to journalists who get to close to uncomfortable facts. 

At least in Britain, it’s foxes who tend to be the victims rather than people. Where Britain resembles the other two countries is in the fact that the police don’t waste their time or anyone else’s investigating these unfortunate incidents. Sorry, accidents.

So the unspeakable are still going strong, heavily supported, galloping around the countryside as though they owned it which, come to think of it, they probably do. And with their friends now in government, there’s some pressure to get the hunting legislation repealed.

It’s a curious business, that. I never liked the ban. Not because I’m fond of the unspeakable of lack sympathy for the uneatable. More because I just don’t like bans.  I reckon they ought to be kept to the bare minimum needed for a civilised society. 

So, murder: yes, ban it (much though I’d like an exemption made for certain individual victims I could name). in a week which saw the conviction, eighteen years on, of two of the men who killed the teenager Stephen Lawrence for daring to be black in a public place, it’s hard not to feel that certain bans are highly desirable. Ban rape, ban violence against the individual generally, ban burglary, theft, fraud, and so on. 

But can’t we keep bans down to the strict minimum necessary? 

Take cannabis, for instance. It seems that at least three million of my countrymen smoke it on a regular basis. That suggests that we have at least as many dope smokers as we have churchgoers. So just how useful is that ban?

It’s easy for me to oppose the ban on cannabis: dope doesn’t bother me. It’s easy to tolerate things I have nothing against. The real test of tolerance is when we have to apply it to things we don’t. It’s more of a challenge to oppose bans on things that make me uncomfortable. For instance, I don’t like the wearing of the niqab, the full face veil, but it’s not clear to me that entitles me to call for it to be forbidden?

Equally, I dislike fox hunting pretty intensely. But I’m not convinced it should be banned, principally because I dislike the idea that a majority, just because it is a majority, should be able to impose its will on a minority that is no threat to its wellbeing. 

What’s more, I’m less uneasy about hunting than I am about our knee-jerk tendency to reach for the statute book to deal with any problem. That’s another of our traditions in our great nations of the rule of law: faced with a problem,  legislate, if only to make it look as though the government is taking action.

I’d much rather see certain things wither away than be banned. Reading toxic newspapers. Binge drinking. Believing in things because a few centuries go someone claimed, without a shred of evidence, that they were the word of God.  

So where does that leave fox hunting?

Well, there’s pressure for the ban to be lifted. Will it be? No, it won’t. Polls show a hefty majority in favour of keeping it. No politician who wants to ensure his re-election is going to go out on a limb on this one.

So what will happen? Another great tradition will be respected: the unenforced law. On the one hand, the law will stay on the statute book, and those who loathe hunting will feel self-satisfied on that account. On the other hand, those who want to tear around tearing a little animal to pieces will go right on doing it knowing the police will do nothing against them. At the price of a little hypocrisy, everybody can get what they want. It’s win-win. Except for the fox, of course. 

Ah, traditions. Charming, aren’t they?