Where were you when that Creep got on TV?

Historic TV isn’t necessarily outstanding TV. Yesterday a little bit of history was made when the BBC invited Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party and recently elected Member of the European Parliament, on to its prestigious Question Time programme. It wasn’t great TV, but it is going to become one of those ‘where were you when…’ moments. The assassination of JFK it wasn't, but it had its significance all the same.

The BBC came in for a lot of criticism for inviting Griffin at all. This is a Party that doesn’t allow non-white members (though as a result of a court decision last week, it will be forced to amend its constitution shortly) and many of its members have a frankly fascist past (it’s hard to judge the present: they’re careful what they say).

Griffin’s a pretty loathsome individual, but banning an elected MEP from the BBC strikes me as a bizarre way of asserting democratic values. After all, it’s easy to favour freedom of speech if we’re only going to grant it to people who express palatable views – what dictator doesn’t allow people freely to express views he likes? The real test is whether we allow the people whose views repel us to speak out – whether it’s Griffin or some fundamentalist supporter of the Taliban.

In any case, it’s not for the BBC to decide who should and who should not be entitled to appear on publicly owned TV. I’d hate the idea that some committee of BBC grandees was taking that kind of decision. A properly run Democracy has to limit free speech, by banning incitement, conspiracy and libel (though in this country we’re much too tough in our definition of libel), but those limitation are stated in law made by elected legislators. That’s the right way to deal with those things. The BBC just has to make rules to ensure impartiality and apply them even-handedly, and when they invited Griffin, that’s what they were doing.

So much for the principle. The practical argument is just as strong. Because what Griffin did last night was squirm in the very spotlight into which he’d worked so hard to crawl. Did he deny the Holocaust? He couldn’t say – he’d changed his mind but couldn’t say why, what from or what to. Why did he attend a meeting with David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan? Duke is non-violent, claimed Griffin to general hilarity (a gentle Klansman? That was probably Griffin's most amusing idea of the evening).

He won’t have lost any of his core support – those guys aren’t open to rational persuasion. But people vaguely attracted by his party, perhaps as a protest vote, saw a sight that must have made them think again: he was evasive, disoriented, intellectually far weaker than the other panellists. Given the choice on offer of representatives of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, all simply and obviously far more competent than Griffin, such voters must have been left wondering whether choosing him could be a solution to any kind of problem worth tackling.

If that’s as good as he gets, and I suspect it’s as good as he is, I think Griffin should be trotted out every few months to amaze everyone as he cuts the ground from under his own feet.

Parallel lines don't meet

Do you ever get the sense that your life runs along multiple parallel tracks? And as with all parallel lines, those tracks simply don’t meet? My life is certainly like that.

That was brought home to me forcefully this week. Danielle, my wife, is away on a business trip – her first ever I think – to one of her favourite countries, Ireland (she’s enjoying it enormously, I like to think because of the wonderful personality of the Irish and not because she’s being accompanied, from luxury hotel to luxury hotel, by a male colleague from another of her favourite countries, Scotland). I thought I’d take advantage of her absence to have dinner with an old friend and business contact who happens to be working not that far from me for a few months. I’ll refer to him as ‘Geoff’, which happens to be his name.

So I got in touch with Geoff and suggested I’d come and see him on Wednesday night. We fixed it all up and several times in the last few days I planned how I was going to organise things – leave the office in time to walk the dog, get on the road just as the traffic was starting to die down, and so on.

But at other times I also devoted a little thought to the knotty problem of how, in a busy week, I was going to get my homework done for a course of evening classes I’ve been taking recently. Classes that are held on a Wednesday.

So at different times I was carefully planning how I was going to get to events taking place simultaneously, about 100 miles apart.

It was last night, Tuesday, as I was saying goodbye to a colleague after a presentation, that I mentioned that I would be having dinner with Geoff tonight. ‘Oh, wish him well,’ my colleague told me. A few minutes later, as I drove on to the motorway, my returned to the problem of the evening class. ‘I’ll be home too late, again, to do the homework tonight. Could I get some time over lunch tomorrow? Or perhaps tomorrow evening before heading to the class?’

Deep in the dim recesses of my mind an alarm bell started to ring faintly. ‘Tomorrow’. Hadn’t I referred to ‘tomorrow’ just recently? My stomach began to sink. Slowly the two versions of me, each on his own parallel track, turned towards the other, their eyes met, and a terrible awareness dawned.

Fortunately, Geoff took it well. In fact, he split his sides laughing. I expect I shall be in for a little gentle ribbing when we meet on Monday evening (he did check whether I was learning Swahili or Origami on Mondays).

In the meantime, I got to my class OK. Though I never did find the time to get the homework done.

Persecution - pass it on

It’s fascinating to examine the way human tolerance, or perhaps I should say intolerance, pans out. For instance, I used naively to think that people who’d been victims of intolerance would be more sympathetic to other victims and would not behave intolerantly themselves. What an illusion. The reverse is the case. It’s as though someone who’s been regularly kicked around likes nothing more than to find someone else they can kick in turn.

An example. Back in 1848, the Hungarians got very fed up with being pushed around by their overlords, the Austrians. They rose in revolt and were fairly ferociously put down for their pains. The Austrians, however, got the message. In 1867, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was set up and the Hungarians were made more or less equal partners in the Empire. Celebrations all round? Not quite. The Slovaks, the Croats, the Galicians, the Rumanians – they had nothing to be cheerful about. In fact, the Hungarians were pretty much as nasty to them as the Austrians had been to the Hungarians.

Then came the First World War and the Empires were broken up into the so-called Successor States. At last an opportunity to satisfy national aspirations. But again there were lots of dissatisfied people: the Slovaks, again, weren’t happy about being absorbed into Czechoslovakia, the Croats, again, weren’t happy about being a part of Jugoslavia. The Jews were recognised as a minority more or less everywhere but got their own state nowhere.

Then the Nazis came to power. When they invaded Czechoslovakia, that was pretty bad news for that new little nation. Or at least for the Czech part. The German-speaking Sudeten people were only too pleased to be absorbed into Germany. And the Slovaks, believing that the ‘independent’ state they were going to be given would actually be independent, were pretty pleased too.

Czechoslovakia was one of the nations reconstituted after the end of the War, so the Slovaks lost their illusory independence again. But then in the nineties, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they got it back and for real this time, when the Czech Republic had its reasonably peaceful divorce from Slovakia. At last there was cause for celebration, or so you might think. I met a young Hungarian-speaking citizen of Slovakia at the time, very worried about being part of a minority in the new country – previously his people had enjoyed some protection against the Slovak majority, from the government of the unified nation in Prague.

So it seems it doesn’t matter how bad a time you’ve had as part of a minority yourself. When you finally get to be the majority, you’re likely to be just as ghastly to other minorities. Perhaps it’s just like most child abusers being people who were abused as children themselves: the victims become the perpetrators.

So when I see Israeli soldiers firing on schools where civilians are sheltering, I have to learn to stop saying ‘how can they, of all people, behave that way?’ Instead, I have to learn to ask ‘how is it that we all, humanity, persist in behaving that badly?’

Spin zero

A curious experience yesterday: I accompanied a couple of colleagues to a meeting with a customer who wanted to complain about some software we’d delivered. There were too many defects in it, and though they’d been fixed since, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It was my job to explain, as the person responsible for Development, how this apparent failure of Quality Assurance could have arisen.

The secret to making a success of a meeting is in the preparation. That’s generally true enough, but it’s hard work, not something I try to do too much of unless it’s really necessary, and quite a lot of the hard work may be wasted anyway. E-mails or even phone conversations don’t always give you an accurate view of what a client’s concerns are, so you may well be forced to improvise pretty extensively once you get into the meeting and find out what you really need to be addressing.

In a general sense, however, I was well-prepared for yesterday: my task was justify the way I do my work, and that’s a subject I know better than any. So I just told them. I explained how many people we have in QA, how many we use from time to time from offshore, how many we have in documentation. I pointed out that if they told me that double that number would be a good thing, I would probably agree, because you can never do too much QA or write too much documentation – the more you do, the fewer the problems downstream and the less time other staff have to waste correcting them – but you have to balance that kind of effort with the general demands of work on products themselves. I told them that I was already taking 20% of the company’s revenue for Development and didn’t have the gall to ask for more (the standard in our sector is 10-11%). I showed them how we were changing the structure of our products to make defects less likely and easier to fix. And I pointed out that even with the most extensive QA, the ultimate test could only be carried out when we got onto a real system, with real volumes of data, and find the problems we couldn’t even guess at beforehand.

Finally I tried to demonstrate to them why I felt we were getting the balance about right, because although they’d had an unfortunate experience, generally defect rates were falling although we were delivering more and more complex products.

Interestingly, by the end they were nodding and agreeing, and the whole meeting lasted little over half the time allotted for it. They even agreed to our using their own test system for validation on real data at full scale in the future. So what I expected to be a tough meeting turned into a good one.

Afterwards, one of my colleagues said ‘I like the positioning you adopted.’ I was a little surprised. I wasn’t aware of having positioned anything. I’d just told things the way I saw them. His reaction was curious and pointed me towards an important general principle. The truth as you perceive it is sometimes the best thing to say: it’s the easiest position to prepare, because you know it already, and it comes across most convincingly.

I wonder whether we should call that ‘natural spin’?

Who gave birth to who? And does anyone care?

Interesting that the italian Northern League would like to ban women from wearing the niqab in public, the Islamic veil that fully covers the face. I thought at first this was just racism. The Northern League, after all, doesn’t like anyone very much outside its own circles. No time for non-Italians, obviously, but even among Italians it doesn’t have much time for Southerners. And the South, I expect, starts not far below Venice. In fact, since this initiative comes from the League in the Veneto, I rather suspect it’s backed by people who don’t like anyone from outside that province.

Since they probably only rate men, as long as they’re straight – no gays here, please – and I suspect only the ones from the cities, and they no doubt appreciate wealth, you’ll probably find that the only people they feel drawn to are a few dozen of the richest, middle-aged men, living in cities like Padua and Venice itself. Since some of those vote for other parties, that means that the people they might actually bring themselves to like can probably be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. Since those are the very people who are their rivals for power within the Northern League, I can’t imagine that they trust even them much.

So hatred for pretty much everyone in the human race, when all’s said and done.
However, the League made it clear that they were not motivated by racism at all. At the back of the initiative is a security concern. How can you check the identify of a woman – if it is a woman – who has her face completely covered?

So that’s all right then.

And yet, and yet. Places like Saudi Arabia had a bit of a bad time from terrorism and they sorted it out without banning the niqab. They found other solutions.

One can’t help feeling there might be a touch of anti-Islamic sentiment here. It’s hard to believe, though. These guys are Catholics, after all. The central doctrine of the Catholic Church in its present form came from Thomas Aquinas. And where did he get his principles from? Why, from the great Moslem scholar Averroes. How could Catholics hold Moslems in anything but veneration?

Of course, if you go back further, you’ll find that the very founder of the religion was Jewish. The New Testament never stops talking about Christ’s work amongst the Jews, his preaching to the Jews, his desire to reform and renew the Jewish faith. The debt of Christians generally, and Catholics in particular, to the Jews is undeniable.

That’s no doubt why, when things get tough for the Jews, they can always count on the unqualified support of the Catholics. Alongside the basic Christian desire to protect the oppressed, the Catholic sense of obligation to the Jews must have inspired Pius XII, Pope at the time of the Holocaust, to take such a courageous and uncompromising stand against the suffering being inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazis.

Or – hang on – did I get that right? Maybe that wasn’t how it worked out. I’d better just go and check my facts.

Making up for lost time

There are many things I’d like to be able to do at some time or other in the future. And then there are things I wish I had already done, some time in the past, but can’t work up the enthusiasm to do any time soon. Things like reading David Copperfield or doing a 10 km run. I’d like to be able to think ‘I’ve done that’ but I’m not sure I can inflict the sustained punishment required on my mind or body. On the book front, in particular, I’m close to having to admit that what I am is a voracious non-reader. I keep buying books I know will be interesting, and then I fail to read them. My bookshelves groan under the weight of all those volumes.

Last winter, Danielle organised a trip for a bunch of us up into the Black Forest near our then home outside Strasbourg. At one point we came across a collection of plaques planted in the snow, around a little chalet. The chalet had apparently belonged to Martin Heidegger. He was a Christian philosopher who brought a distinctly faith-inspired approach to Existentialism, or so I’m told (and who am I to question what I’m told? Especially since I haven’t read any of the work). What really amazed me was the information that Heidegger had made his peace with the Nazis and been allowed to serve as rector of the nearby University of Freiburg. He’d done this even though some years earlier he’d had an affair with a brilliant doctoral student of his, Hannah Arendt. Arendt was Jewish.

Curious stories keep crawling out of that whole pit of horror that was the Nazi time.

The reference to Arendt rang a bell with me. Nearly fifteen years ago I bought a copy of her Eichmann in Jerusalem. Seeing her name pricked my conscience. I’m finally reading the book.

It’s an extraordinary work which, in particular, gave us the concept of ‘the banality of evil’. You can quickly see why. There was nothing special about Otto Adolf Eichmann, a middle-ranking SS official who had served under Heydrich and played a dirty but essentially logistical role in the Nazis’ so-called final solution of the Jewish problem. He had organised transport to take the Jews to the killing centres. In 1961, he was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and taken to Jerusalem, where he was tried and eventually hanged in 1962.

Reading the account of Eichmann’s trial, I realise that I’ve know lots of little Eichmanns. I’ve worked with them. They’re nonentities. They fail at school, they fail at work. They’re convinced that they deserve better from life, that what’s needed isn’t more effort from them but a proper recognition of their natural talents. They’re the kind of people who can take charge of a project but need to be chased twice a day to make sure they’re getting on with it.

Unfortunately for sad little Eichmann, the project he was in charge of was a significant component of probably the most obscene act of barbarity in history, the Holocaust. It cost him his life, having cost a lot more innocent lives first.

My conclusion, anyway, is that there’s some good stuff on my shelves. It’s time I read it.



PS. This new resolution of mine spills over into films too. Danielle’s away this weekend visiting her mother in Strasbourg. So I could without boring her to tears make up for a 44-year old gap in my cultural education: I watched The Sound of Music. It’s really quite good, isn’t it? Just strange they used all those old songs I’ve heard so often.

Oh General, my General

It makes you proud, doesn’t it, to see the armed forces of the democracies locked in struggle with the powers of darkness? There we are, in Afghanistan, showing old Johnny Fundamentalist that he’s not going to plunge the country back into iniquity and corruption. And we’ve got a President of the country with all the votes you could possibly want, and a lot more than were ever cast, to help us prove it.

Of course, on a strictly puritanical view of the circumstances, you might feel that there were some shades of grey, morally speaking, about the admirable government in Kabul. Not so on our side, though. In particular, the men of steel who fight the good fight are above all reproach. Take good old Sir Richard Dannatt, until recently Britain’s most senior soldier. He had the courage to tell the truth to power. ‘You’re not sending enough troops,’ he told the government. And the ministers quaked in their boots (though they didn’t actually send any more troops).

At least Dannatt showed what it is to be a man of true military probity. He reminds me of a wonderful story about the Iron Duke, Wellington. On his return from India in 1805 as a victorious general, not a species the English were particularly used to at the time, there was considerable suspicion that one so popular might be a political threat to those already in or close to power and who therefore knew they were there by right. So they sent him to Kent, in command of a mere brigade. Many expressed shock and asked why he had accepted so humble an appointment. ‘For this simple reason,’ he replied, ‘I am a nimmukwallah, as we say in the East; that is, I have ate of the King's salt and, therefore, I conceive it to be my duty to serve with unhesitating zeal and cheerfulness, when and wherever the King or his government may think proper to employ me.’

Warms the cockles of the heart doesn’t it? What upright loyalty and sincerity. But isn’t Dannatt a man out of the same mould?

Judge for yourselves.

Having retired from his position but remaining on the army payroll until November, and therefore still taking the Queen’s salt in Wellington’s evocative image, he has accepted a position as an adviser on military matters to the Conservative Party. The Conservatives, hard though the Party itself may find it to believe, remains the opposition for the time being. For now, the Queen’s salt is still distributed by the government, formed by the Labour Party.

Ah, well. Perhaps the salt doesn’t taste quite as good as in Wellington’s day.