Europe, land of ironies

Ah, the nostalgia. The British Conservative Party is going through one of its periodic phases of tearing itself apart over the European Union. 

The European Union, Achilles heel of the Tory Party

It’s a great spectator sport and normally I’d sit back and enjoy it, but this time the stakes are a bit too high. This time Britain could end up outside the EU.

Europhobia is running quite strong in Britain. Various undead from the Thatcher years – Nigel Lawson, Michael Portillo – have been crawling out of their satin-lined coffins to pronounce. Lawson even talked about how much better things were when we traded with the whole world, as a great imperial power, and didn’t have to get too tied up with all those dull people on the continent. 

It’s a point of view. All it leaves out of account is that all that great trade we were doing was with colonies which had to give preference to British goods. And we were a lot poorer then than now in any case.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, David Cameron is giving us a fascinating display of political leadership skills. Frightened by the emergence of an unambiguously Europobe party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, the Tories are splitting between those who want to keep a clear space between themselves and the far right, and those who feel the best approach is to steal UKIP’s agenda by offering a referendum on getting out of the EU.

Now Cameron’s problem is that he governs in coalition with the Lib Dems who, insofar as they have any principles they’re not prepared to abandon to hang on to office, are pretty firmly committed to staying inside the European Union. They certainly don’t want a referendum which they might lose. So officially the government can’t back the demand for a referendum. But the Tory Party, and its leader David Cameron, can go along with the demand.

Follow this carefully. As Prime Minister of a coalition government, he can’t. But as leader of the major party of that coalition, a party desperate to grab back Europhobic territory, he can. In fact, he thinks he must.

Which means he hasn’t learned the fundamental lesson of intra-Tory fights about Europe: throw the phobes some raw meat and all they do is come back for more.

Even more fun, while Cameron is backing the people who want an in-out referendum on the European Union, he’s off in the US promoting a trade deal. With the same European Union.

In the meantime, his Chancellor of the Exchequer and best mate George Osborne, was in Brussels trying to persuade the rest of the much-maligned European Union to help him track down tax dodgers. Having been there ten days earlier in efforts to block the Union putting a cap on bankers’ bonuses (he failed). Because protecting bankers’s income is right up there at the top of the to-do list of a Tory Chancellor.

The sad thing? The people who’ve been voting UKIP include above all people who’ve been plunged into the worst kind of mess as a result of the antics of those very same bankers. Many such voters back UKIP and denounce the EU which is trying to tackle the source of their problems.

The latest? It came out yesterday. The British Office of Fair Trading recently dropped an investigation into price-fixing by oil companies. Who’s reopened it? Investigators from the EU. Those same UKIP supporters are also victims of profiteering by the energy companies. And want to take us out of the European Union that's trying do something about it.

Irony’s great, isn’t it? But a bit sad sometimes.

When the ice saints go marching by

It’s always a good moment when we say goodbye to the Ice Saints.

My wife, whose roots are in the German-speaking world where the ‘Eisheiligen’ are much better known, introduced me to these characters. They mark the definitive end of the winter and, at long last, the start of Spring. Up here in the north of the northern hemisphere, at least.

They start on 11 May, with St Mamertus, followed by St Pancras on the 12th, St Servatius on the 13th and St Boniface on the 14th. With Boniface it’s all over: the last late frosts give way to the start of summer on the 15th, St Sophia’s day (is it a coincidence that we get four ice men followed by a summer woman? Perhaps I won’t go there.)

‘Vor Bonifaz kein Sommer,’ say the Germans: before Boniface there’s no summer, and ‘nach der Sophie kein Frost’: after Sophia no frost.

No wonder, then, that’s it’s for the best when those guys have gone by. Though I should mention in passing that there’s one I have a bit of a soft spot for: I rather like St Pancras. 

St Pancras
Don't know much about the saint,
but I really like the station

I think it’s great to have a saint named after my favourite station. Now that I don’t work in London any more, I don’t go there often, but I get a real kick when I see it from time to time: the pianos are still there with anonymous members of the public just sitting down and hammering out a tune to pass the time and entertain the passers by; so’s the statue of John Betjeman, who penned an ode to the station; and now there’s even a hanging sculpture over one end of the concourse. Lots of fun.

St Pancras, where passengers get entertained by occasional pianists

Don’t get me wrong. I like Grand Central station with its huge concourse, I love the Gare de l’Est with its extraordinary destinations that I find it hard to believe you can reach by train: Budapest. Warsaw. Moscow. Moscow for Pete’s sake! But even so, you can’t imagine a St Grand Central, can you, or a Saint Gare de l’Est for that matter?

But there’s a St Pancras and when you see his station, it’s no wonder he’s a bit special.

In any case, all that ice saint stuff doesn’t really work any more. When Europe switched to the Gregorian calendar, that cost ten days. So the actual weather that goes with the old ice saints belongs a bit later in the month.

Probably safest to go with the old English saying, ‘ne’er cast a clout till may be out.’ Not that I think that’s the month of May. Much more likely to be mayflower, called after that famous boat that got the United States going. Hawthorn blossom. Don’t take off a stitch of clothing till it’s in full bloom.

The Mayflower.
Puritains to America, summer to Britain
I know who did better out of that deal

No sign of that yet in England. So I’ll wave goodbye to St Boniface tomorrow, hello to St Sophie the day after. But I’m keeping the coat on until those white flowers have really taken over in the hedgerows.

Mayflower
More reliable than the Ice Saints

Magic of a second chance after a first-time screw up

Charles Venables, the government minister in J M Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows, tells us that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

Barrie strikes me as a deeply suspect individual (what is Peter Pan really about?) and this play is a vehicle for some pretty troubling social attitudes. Despite my reservations, however, I can’t help enjoying it and I particularly like the sentiment about second thoughts.

Of course, I work in business where it’s a fundamental principle that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Where the mantra is getting things right first time. Doesn’t stop companies getting things wrong again and again, or not getting them done at all, very often, but the mantra’s there.

So it was wonderful to have a second chance to get something right this morning. I’ve already recounted how two weeks ago I screwed up by taking us to the wrong place for an early morning bird-watching walk, in the breathtaking splendour of Ashridge Forest. That meant that we were up at 5:00 a.m. for nothing, and I’d spoiled my wife’s birthday: she'd set a lot of store by the charms of early morning bird watching in a delightful setting.

Even at stupid o'clock, Ashridge is a magical place
for a walkin the sunshine

Fortunately, the Ashridge National Trust people had organised another walk for this morning and though it meant a 5:00 start all over again, it was a tremendous relief to have an opportunity to correct things so soon. This time, I made a point of checking the details the night before, even looking at the map to be sure I knew where we had to go (like instruction manuals, I feel a real wimp if I have to consult a map). We were at the right place and a few minutes before time. A major success compared to the last occasion.

We’ve had nearly two weeks of nearly summer weather here in England, which is pretty long for any kind of summer compared to the last few years. It was no surprise therefore that we left this morning facing a grim weather forecast, with the skies turning grey and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees down on the last few days (and that’s real degrees, not the trivial little Fahrenheit ones). Why, it was even beginning to spit a little rain as we set out on the walk.

But still, England’s weather hadn’t fully plunged us back into November yet (that didn’t happen until this afternoon), and we had moments of glorious sunshine when, if we got out of the wind, it felt positively warm. As the guides warned us, we didn’t do so much actual bird watching as bird listening: the leaves are out and birds are mostly concealed, but on the other hand they’re pouring out their hearts in song. The first two species we were introduced to were jackdaws and yellow hammers, and I was just enchanted: town dweller that I am, I’m much more used to the sound of the jackhammer.

Two hours walking through fabulous scenery in sunshine that kept constant quite a lot of the time more than made up for the stupid o’clock start. And finishing it all of with a full breakfast in the National Trust café really put the icing on the cake (not that we had cake: it wouldn’t have gone with the bacon or egg).

Second thoughts had more than made up for my total lack of thinking first time round. And my wife got her wish at last.

Happy birthday, again, Danielle. Just a couple of weeks late.

No bird pictures, I'm afraid.
But here's a Whitebeam catching the sun,
with all of Bucks and Beds laid out behind it

What did immigrants ever do for us?

As everybody knows, that magnificent imperial power, Rome, was founded by Romulus and Remus, two twins who as babies had been suckled by a she-wolf.

Founders. Started well, ended badly. But later came glory

Later on, things turned a bit sour between the twins, and Romulus killed Remus, which is presumably why, in The Life of Brian, John Cleese never asks  ‘what have the Remans ever done for us?’ 

In other versions of the Roman story, it wasn’t Romulus who struck the fatal blow but one of his mates. There was no doubt some squeamishness about a founding myth involving fratricide, though given the way brothers sometimes behave towards each other, I should have thought a desire to inflict fratricide is frequently a pretty strong desire in a lot of siblings, closely followed by an equal inclination in their parents to commit infanticide.

Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect two twins to launch a whole city – and anyone who has followed the story so far will no doubt have been struck by its gritty realism – so they had to enlist the help of others. That they did by inviting anyone who wished to come and join them, with no questions asked. So a great many unsavoury individuals, the kind of people with often pressing needs to be elsewhere fast, congregated to the site of the new city, which was built by as undesirable a collection of criminals and outlaws as you could hope to see anywhere.

They were all men, which rather limited the city’s hopes of longevity. They needed to find some expedient to attract a few women to join them. But these were men who were perhaps short of the capacity to attract, or didn’t think that attraction was a sufficiently reliable method, and didn’t find more energetic means unduly reprehensible. So they invited a nearby tribe, the Sabines, to a slap-up meal. As soon as festivities were over, they seized all the females in an act which set the bar pretty low when it comes to the treatment of guests, and which has come to be known as the rape of the Sabine women.

Nicolas Poussin:
a case of extreme bad manners towards guests?

When the far from gruntled Sabine men came back to wreak horrible revenge on the Romans, the women intervened between the two sides, calling on the ones not to kill their fathers and brothers, on the others not to kill their husbands and sons. Clearly, the refusal to take rape seriously and the inclination to be lenient in handling it, has long antecedents. 

But what interests me more was what the myth reveals of Roman attitudes towards assimilation: the Sabine women had been completely absorbed into the people of the city, as had all the wastrels who’d drifted to it in the period of its foundation. That Romans really believed in that kind of assimilation is revealed by their later history: huge numbers, down the centuries, gravitated to the city as slaves; in time, many were freed and as soon as they obtained their freedom, they were granted citizenship as well. The same happened throughout the empire, with Roman citizens in every province, many of them locally born.

In other words, the Roman Empire, one of the most successful the world has seen, which despite almost constant war around its periphery, kept the peace and stimulated prosperity in huge areas of Western Europe for four or five centuries, was built on the shoulders of immigrants. Romans spoke a huge number of languages and believed in a huge number of gods; the Empire testifies to the vibrancy and power that multi-culturalism, through the assimilation of the foreign born, can give a society.

Now fast forward to just a couple of hundred years ago and the words of Emma Lazarus, some of which are inscribed on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Beacon to the world:
calling for the wretched refuse of other nations

It’s true that these words weren’t always honoured in practice, with successive waves of immigrants to the United States often having a torrid time of it when they first arrived, not infrequently at the hands of the immediately preceding wave. Somehow down the centuries, however, the US has been able to absorb Englishmen and Scotsmen, Irishmen, Scandinavians and Germans, Italians and other Southern Europeans, turning them all into US citizens. 

They took Anglicans and Baptists, Quakers and Catholics, Jews and more recently Muslims, Hindus and representatives of pretty well any faith on Earth or those with none at all. And, with a constitution keeping the state and faith firmly apart, guaranteeing that the former would be secular, assimilation into a huge, multi-cultural melting point has generally worked well.

Give the US another generation or two, and the Hispanic immigrants now forming the main inward flows, from the US's near neighbours in the Americas, will have been as well integrated as Minnesota Swedes or Chicago Irishmen. And they may even have taken further steps towards absorbing that great minority, the black descendants of the slaves who made the wealth of the south back in the eighteenth century.

‘The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ Isn’t that so like the Roman founding myth? Come to us, whoever you are, and whatever you may have been in your past, to help us build a country. It worked for Rome, and it’s worked pretty spectacularly for the United States too. Just like the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana has guaranteed peace for its friends for sixty years, though at the price of more or less uninterrupted war with those threatening the edges of its sphere. And it has driven unprecedented levels of prosperity for large parts of the world.

Immigrants. The restless, striving masses, driven to achieve, injecting new blood into societies to take them to unimaginable heights.

So why do we get so upset about them?

Celebrate the gifted amateur, but spare a thought for the other variety

Don’t we all admire the gifted amateur? So inspiring. So selfless. So courageous.

Do you remember the film Chariots of Fire? Look at Lord Andrew Lindsay. He joined Harold Abrahams, the driven, striving Jew, running not just for the joy of athletics but to mark a victory over anti-Semitism, in attempting the ‘Caius dash’ round the courtyard of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. Lindsay helps push Abrahams along to success, while not quite making it himself.

At the 1924 Olympics, Lindsay takes a silver medal, the ideal result: so good as to suggest that he might have taken gold had he pushed himself harder like all those nasty semi-professionals, including Abrahams or the Yanks, but just off the top step of the podium, so as to maintain a becoming modesty.

Then of course Lindsay steps aside from his other event, the 200 metres, to give Eric Liddle the chance to compete in his place. Liddle wouldn’t run in the 100 metres because his Christian principles wouldn't allow him to take part in heats held on a Sunday; Lindsay’s sacrifice made it possible for him to win his gold medal at the longer distance.

Wonderful stuff, eh? Self-effacing. Noble in the truest sense of the word. All for the spirit of the thing. He even tells Liddell that he’s doing it ‘just to see you run.’ I can’t remember if he adds ‘old chap’, but you can feel the words are there. Such a decent fellow, so civilised. It would almost make me want to doff my cap, if I was into that kind of thing and owned a cap.

But Lindsay is the quintessence of the gifted amateur. What about the other kind?

I have to admit that for a long time I saw myself as one of them. The flattering idea was born in an interview when my soon-to-be boss declared me to be ‘ideally unqualified’ for the job, and appointed me anyway.

Sadly, however, more recently I’ve had to accept that I naturally belong to the ungifted category. And nowhere more so than when it comes displaying any kind of skill in manual work.

For instance, some months ago I proudly constructed two woodsheds at the bottom of our garden. I had help, I confess, but not that much. I did most of the work myself.

Honest.

True I was working from kits. So the construction didn’t really require great skill. All I had to do was assemble the parts in the right order. Which makes it slightly galling that I didn’t quite manage that simple task.

Most flagrantly, I came unstuck with the roofs, These were made from overlapping planks of wood. Put them one way round, and rainwater would run delicately off one plank onto the next one, which is below it. Trouble is, put it the other way round and the rain will, equally delicately, run down to the next plank, which is above it, form a pool and then leak through.

Onto the logs underneath.

Work of the ungifted amateur:
the roof traps the water and leaks it gently onto the wood beneath

It does seem terribly unfair that, given that the roofs could only be put on in one of two positions, I got it wrong in both cases.

The result is that having gone to considerable trouble and expense to make sure we had good, seasoned, dry wood to burn in our stove this winter, my wife has struggled throughout the season to kindle a flame from damp fuel.

Fortunately a wonderful builder is putting in a path in our garden for us.

‘I can sort that for you,’ he assured us, ‘in about five minutes.’

It was welcome news as I hadn’t been able to unscrew either roof in thirty minutes of trying. And he was good as his word, correcting the problem in a way that made me understand what ‘in a jiffy’ really meant.

Fixed by the  professional
The water flows away and the shed does its job of protecting the wood

It’s comforting to know that our two sheds, intended to protect our wood from rain, will now be doing just that instead of exactly the opposite.

I suppose I can console myself with the thought that at least I equalled Lord Andrew Lindsay’s performance. I took the silver medal. Though, sadly, there were no other competitors to finish behind me. And what I came second to was a lump of wood.

Did the earth move for England this week?

Every four years we in England re-elect the councils who run our counties.

Well, that’s a summary and, like most summaries, it’s inaccurate. Thursday’s elections concerned most of the counties but not all of them. And ‘county’ means the countrified bits that may surround large towns, but don’t include them: they mostly have their own councils.

The Conservative Party being mostly led and funded by people who’ve made a lot of money and therefore don’t have to put up with living in the grime any more, it’s Conservatives who dominate the nicer areas of the country and the counties tend to be solidly Tory. That means it’s difficult to draw lessons from the results of county council elections: if the Tories sweep the board, that’s a good result, if they lose control of ten or twenty, that’s poor.

But just because it’s hard to learn a lesson never stops people from drawing easy lessons, and I’m no exception, so here are my thoughts on Thursday’s elections.

The big deal was the success of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party.

Normally independence parties spend their time fighting some distant colonial power. In many instances, that has meant the overweening power of London. Turns out to be much the same for UKIP: little angers them so much as those upstarts who dare to rule them from Westminster.

In their case, though, what they particularly hate about London is that it’s handed over some powers to Brussels (please pronounce this word as though it were ‘leprosy’). 

That city is the inoffensive though uninspiring capital of Belgium, a fictional country bringing together Flemish, French and German speakers, and threatening to tear itself apart in regular crises every five to ten years. It’s perhaps those Belgian qualities that so fit Brussels to be the capital city of that other artificial construct, the European Union: it sits atop countries, languages and religions linked by the fact that they are all European, and divided by pretty much everything else.

UKIP hates Brussels.

So it demands the independence of the UK from Brussels. At which point it could concentrate its ire on London.

Concentrating ire is what UKIP’s good at. It loathes:

• the European Union 
• immigrants 
• government 
• politics 
• taxation 
• gay rights 
• immigrants (in case you missed the point first time)

It’s less clear what it actually favours. As UKIP has begun to be a force in the land, stories have begun to emerge about it. One of the more amusing was leaked information about internal debates over whether to call in consultants to build them some policies. For payment, of course.

Buying policies. And they said conviction politics were dead.

Last week’s elections have shown that UKIP has struck a chord. A lot of other people don’t like Westminster and like Brussels even less. UKIP didn’t win a single council and they won only 6% of the seats, but they took an awful lot of votes. The BBC likes to work out what the votes cast in such elections would look like if they were projected across the whole of the country: on that count, UKIP would have had 23%, only 2 points behind the Conservatives on 25%, with Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 14%.

It really feels as though we’re into an era of four-party politics.

Clearly, we have to start to take UKIP seriously. We can’t just go on writing them off as a bunch of clowns with more than a trace of racism and homophobia.

Except, unfortunately, to me they seem to be just a bunch of clowns with more than a trace of racism and homophobia.

In their hatred of government and politics, they only prove that the Tea Party phenomenon isn’t limited to the United States. In Britain – or rather England, as UKIP speaks above all for English concerns – we too have a group of people whose hatred of politics has driven them to set up a political movement, whose hatred of government has led them to drive for power.

What happens when an anti-political movement takes its anti-government stance into government? The United States shows us: paralysis at the centre, where Congress can’t even act to keep the most lethal guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

UKIP in government in Britain? Well, it’s not going to happen. A protest vote in county council elections is one thing, but the Tories will tack to the right to take votes back, and faced with electing a real administration, many voters will prefer a party of government.

But what if, despite all that, UKIP really took power? It would be a lot less pleasant to be a foreigner in Britain. It wouldn’t be amusing to be gay. It would be a lot uglier to be Muslim or to believe in such radical ideas as a woman’s right to choose. And it certainly would be even less fun than today to be poor.

It’s curious that the UKIP logo builds in the symbol for sterling:

On the money? Or in the money?

Presumably the intention was to celebrate the great historic power of the pound (not even UKIP can believe it has much power today – surely?) But what it gives us is a party of the right that proclaims the majesty of money.

At least that’s honest.

Consolation of Faith

Religious belief is a source of great consolation. Particularly in today’s complex world with all its miseries. Or so I’m told.

Let’s leave to one side the nagging doubt that makes me doubt that, even if it were true that faith was comforting, that wouldn’t necessarily make it true. I remember walking away from a funeral and being told by the deceased woman’s brother that he ‘couldn’t believe that she wasn’t still with us.’ Sadly, I felt that told me a lot more about him than it did about her.

Instead let's concentrate on just how much consolation faith really brings.

After all, for months now we’ve had constant debate about the rights of gay people to be treated equally in our Western democracies. Gay marriage ignited terrible animosities in Britain and worse ones still in France; in the US, it continues to excite controversy. I’m not sure that a belief system that labels gays as cursed brings much consolation even to its adherents, let alone to the gays themselves.

But all the vitriol over gay marriage is as nothing compared to two stories that featured on the news today.

With elections coming up in Pakistan, the BBC this morning chose to remind us of what happened in Quetta at the beginning of this year. A suicide bomber walked into a snooker hall and detonated his bomb, killing eight of the Hazara community living in the city. People ran to the site, volunteers as well as the emergency services. That was the moment the attackers set off a second bomb, attached to an ambulance. In all, 120 were killed.

Hazara Shia burying their dead

Why? Follow this carefully. Not many of us in the West know much about the distinction between Sunni and Shia Islam. To most people, Sunnis and Shiites are all justMuslims with some differences in detail of belief. But not, it seems, to certain Pakistani Sunnis. A legal party is running in the elections on a platform that wants Shiism designated non-Muslim. They don’t want the Shiites driven out of Pakistan, far less killed, so a candidate explained to the BBC, they just want them officially declared outside the faith.

It was that party’s armed wing that carried out the Quetta attacks.

What is the religion of the Hazara community? You guessed it. Overwhelmingly Shia. And short of consolation right now, I imagine.

This afternoon, the BBC turned its attention to the fighting now escalating in Burma. That nation seemed at last to be taking important steps towards a better way of life, with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and a general relaxation of military control. But now sectarian fighting is raising ugly new concerns.

On Tuesday, a trivial accident occurred on a street in the town of Oakkan: a young woman on a bike collided with a monk. Infuriating, I’m sure, the kind of thing most of us might expect to react to with some well chosen expletives.

I remember the ghastly bike riders I came across in Amsterdam. Step into a cycle lane, and they bear down on you, bell ringing and insults turning the air blue around you. At least, I assume what I heard was insults, but Dutch is a bit like that, isn’t it? It can make anything sound like an expletive. Perhaps the cyclists were mouthing endearments, but on balance I doubt it.

Still, I didn’t feel inclined to respond to their behaviour by killing anyone or burning down their houses. But the cyclist in Tuesday’s incident in Burma was Muslim, so Buddhist monks went on the rampage, attacking mosques, burning down houses, killing one person and injuring nine.

Muslim houses burning after Buddhist violence in Burma

Read that sentence again. That’s Buddhist monks. If any religion is committed to peace and non-violence, surely it’s Buddhism. But in Burma monks are going out in gangs to terrorise Muslims. Leaving them presumably as disconsolate as the Shias in Quetta.

Remind me again. Religious faith is a source of consolation to us all. 

Have I got that right?