Brexit: the High Court speaks for the British Constitution

Today, the British High Court decided that the government could not, on its own authority alone, launch the procedure that would take Britain out of the EU.

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Lord Chief Justice
presided over the historic hearing

That’s the exercise known as “triggering article 50”, referring to the relevant article of the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty. It states:

Any member state may decide to withdraw from the union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

Sounds straightforward. Britain voted for Brexit on 23 June and, despite the regrets of Remain supporters like me, all we have to do now is trigger the article 50 process and go. But, as always, the devil’s in the detail.

The first awkward bit of detail is a problem I’ve mentioned before: just how far out do we go? Do we leave the Single Market? Do we leave the Customs Union? All options have their merits and their disadvantages. They need to be weighed and judged. And the great question is – by whom?

‘By whom’ takes us straight to the second tortuous detail, which is the one that was addressed by the Court today. It’s all about those words “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. Just what are those requirements in a nation without a written constitution?

Many of us feel that much of British history has been about the conflict between an executive power originally represented by the monarch and a body that has increasingly come to represent the people, Parliament. All the progress there has been towards freedom, and there’s a lot further to go, has gone hand in hand with increasing the authority of the Legislative power over the Executive.

Now the peculiar characteristics of British power is that this long process has moved executive authority from the Monarch to Ministers who are themselves Members of Parliament. So that ancient tension has now been internalised within Parliament, opposing a powerful minority, the members of the Government, to the majority, all other MPs.

Those of us who would like to see British liberties protected and, ideally, extended are on the side of the Parliamentarians. Unfortunately, a great many people see far more efficiency in action being taken by the Executive untrammelled by such oversight. They particularly favour that approach if they see the government about to take action they like – so, for instance, a lot of Brexiters want Parliament to back off and let the Prime Minister, Theresa May, trigger the exit process herself, on her own authority, without referring the matter to Parliament at all.

In its judgement, the High Court’s view is that this isn’t the right way to go. Brexit is a key decision for the nation. The government should not be able to take it alone. It should, at the very least, obtain Parliament’s assent to it.

The irony is that if the government asks for that approval, it will almost certainly get it. A few MPs will stand up for the Remain cause and vote against triggering Article 50. Far more will see doing so as a defiance of the will of the people expressed in a referendum, which they consider wrong, or at least career-limiting.

David Lammy is a Labour MP who says he would vote against triggering Article 50. But, he claims, the real issue isn’t whether individual MPs vote for or against, it’s that they should have a vote at all. As he says, “it’s about whether you believe in a sovereign parliament.”

David Lammy:
anti-Brexit parliamentarian strong on principle

I do believe in parliamentary sovereignty, so I’m in favour of their getting that vote. That’s a curiously topical matter. Just yesterday, Lord Chilcot, who wrote the damning report on British involvement in the Iraq War, was questioned by MPs. His view was that the problem was caused by the dominating personality of Tony Blair, who drove his government into the war and refused all parliamentary scrutiny. It seems particularly appropriate that the next day a court has ruled that, on an equally crucial issue, parliament must have its say.

The government will appeal the decision, so that might still not happen. My hope is that the Supreme Court upholds the High Court, and Parliament gets to take the decision – even if it goes against me and in favour of Brexit.

So much for the matter of principle. .

At a more pragmatic level, and in the longer run, having Parliament take the decision does suggest that there’s a glimmer of hope for those of us who’d like to remain in the EU. MPs consulted about Brexit may also be consulted about the final Brexit terms. It will be quite a time before negotiations reveal what those terms will be, but when they’re known, Parliament should vote again.

That takes us back to the first point of awkward detail I mentioned earlier. What kind of Brexit is going to be on offer? Many people tell me that Brexit means Brexit and that means getting out of every single European institution. Well, I think if we get that far, the prospect may start to look so utterly appalling that more MPs might feel they can, in conscience, vote against it. So, in order to avoid a disastrous Brexit, they might refuse a Brexit at all.

That’s why, for both principle and pragmatism, I think the High Court’s judgement is the best piece of EU news we’ve had since that sad night of 23 June.

An excellent reason to salute it.

Luci's diary: size matters

There’s a comfortable size, right? And then there’s uncomfortable.

The right size for a dog is about the right size for a cat. Well, a large cat anyway. Like, say, our cat Misty. But lighter. He’s just a bit on the heavy size, is our Misty. When he lies on you, well, you really know you’ve been lain on. If he’s at your kibble bowl, it’s not a lot of good trying to push him away. Barking helps, but only because it wakes up human number 2 who’ll come out and tell him to leave my food alone, if I make enough noise about it.

About cat size. The right size for playing. The right size for a dog.

Still, I’m not really talking about Misty. More about his size. We can look each other in the eye, we two, him and me, without having to look up or down. That’s what I call about right. Size-wise.

Smaller’s OK too. Smaller runs around and yaps a bit but generally you can see it off. Or if you can’t, you can certainly outrun it.

See what I mean? Comfortable. I can cope with that.

Then there’s uncomfortable. I never thought you could have too much dog in this world. But the truth is you can’t have too much right-size dog. You can easily have a lot too much dog in just one dog, if you see what I mean.

Ruddy great galumphing beasts. Paws the size of food bowls. Silly slobbering mouths full of massive teeth.

“Hello, little dog,” they say to me, and before I can even say back, “little? I’m the right size,” they say, “let’s play, little dog, let’s run around and jump up and down and look silly.”

And they go ahead and do it, as though your peaceful enjoyment of a pleasant walk just didn’t matter. They bound up and down. I don’t mind the up so much, but the down’s a bit of a pain in the backside. Literally. That’s exactly where one of those far-bigger-than-necessary dogs came down on me the other day. On my backside. 

See, some of those lumpy outsize dogs aren’t just big, they’re surprisingly nippy. I’m pretty fast on my paws myself, but when you’ve got legs that long, you can cover as much ground in one step as I can in two. Maybe three. That’s why he was able to come down on my rear end like that before I could get away.

A puppy, his human said he was. He felt like about fifty puppies to me. A right-size puppy’s a gentle, feather-like creature, you barely notice it jumping on you. I know when I jump on human number 1, she says silly things like “oww – that hurts!” but that’s just her way, she’s just joking. Anyway human number 2 laughs, so it can’t be hurting her, can it? 

Though I notice he doesn’t laugh half so hard when I land on him. Odd.

Still, all that’s beyond the point. What the real point is is that proper-size dogs are just right. They play nicely and they’re fun. So why is the park – my park – so full of big lump dogs? What is the point of that?

And what I don’t understand is why human number 2 lets them get away with it.

“Yes,” he says, with that laugh of his, “I can see he’s a puppy. Just wants to play. I don’t know why she’s so shy of other dogs.”

You don’t know why? How would you feel if a human ten times bigger than you came down on your backside with his ruddy great paws? Would you still be laughing?

Then you might understand what the difference is between the right size and too big for comfort.

An age-old plight returns for Jews in Brexit Britain

There are moments that sear themselves into the memory. One of those, for me, was the day I first set foot on German soil.

Throughout my childhood, I was far closer to my Jewish grandparents than my gentile ones (should is say goyishe ones?) So I have a deep-rooted memory of the collecting tin on a mantelpiece, with a map of Israel on the side (not the same map as today, I might underline). Coins dropped in it went to help the brave settlers carve their inspiring new country out of the wilderness. There was little talk of the fact that there had been people there before them, for whom it wasn’t a wilderness, but home surrounded by long cultivated farmlands.

On the other hand, there was theme to which conversation would return from time to time, not so often as to feel like an obsession, but often enough for a child to feel it was important: the relatives who disappeared, in particular the ninety members of my grandmother’s extended family from her home city of Vilnius (Vilna, we called it), who vanished without trace during the German occupation of Lithuania.

We used language a little carelessly, just like those today who, in discussing Israel, allow their opposition to Likud or Zionists to slip, often unintentionally, into criticism of all Israelis and then, perhaps without noticing it, of all Jews. So back in those days, criticism of the Nazis easily became criticism of Germans, as though the words were synonyms, and often we lost track of the distinction between Germans in Hitler’s days and Germans since the war.

So it was no surprise that I reached the age of 24 without ever having visited the most significant power of Europe, home of its biggest economy. Somehow, some atavistic repulsion put me off.

Then came the day when I was staying with friends in Eastern France, as little as twenty minutes drive from the German border. They persuaded me to take a look at the other side.

Staufen: Faust sold his soul in a lovely village

They took me to Staufen im Breisgau, the village where Faust is said to have sold his soul to Mephistopheles. No choice could have been more appropriate: I had a sense of travelling to sup with the devil.

My friends drove a Range Rover. The car’s passenger compartment is high off the ground, so getting out isn’t simply a matter of opening a door and swinging your legs out. There was a step on the way down, so setting foot on German soil really was a bit of a ritual. I paused with one foot on the step and the other just a few inches above the ground.

“How am I going to tell my mother about this?” I thought, and “how will she react?” And then my foot was down and I was in Germany, the nation from which the killers of our ninety relatives had come.

Since then, I have come to know the country far better. Why, my wife and I even lived there for nearly four years, and enjoyed our time in the country. I came to appreciate its warmth and courtesy, and to admire the way so many, including many of the young, have made quite some study of the Nazi period, and learned to understand the horror and shame of the behaviour of their grandparents’ generation. The words “nie wieder”, never again, mark the souls of many Germans. A majority, I feel. This makes them far more wary of any drift towards xenophobia and helps them resist it more effectively than do the British. Far too many people in Britain suffer from the illusion that the war against Hitler means they are immune to such an obscene deviation. They harbour a sense of superiority close to complacency which leaves them more at risk than most of drifting into excess.

Why am I talking about all this now?

Because under German law, as one element of the nation’s attempt to make partial atonement for Nazi crimes, those of its citizens who faced persecution under Hitler as well as their descendants, are entitled to claim German nationality.

Who from among the country’s victims would want to become citizens again? Well, a small number always have, apparently. There were about 25 applications a year from Britain until recently. Right now, however, there are 400 in the pipeline.

What’s changed?

Brexit, that’s what’s changed. Jews don’t like being bottled up. It hasn’t worked that well for them in the past. I worked for a while with a Jew who had three passports and the right to a fourth. Why, even I have two. Always good to have a bolthole. Why did I want one? It always struck me as possible Britain would leave the EU and I was keen to make sure I could get back there even if that happened.

So when Britain voted to leave, Jews descended from Germans began to wonder whether it might not be time to exercise the rights granted to them by the nation their ancestors fled. After all, today it’s Britain that’s building walls and Germany that is holding a door open.

Beautiful irony, isn’t it? The children and grandchildren of refugees from Germany now turn to that country for refuge.

Which, when you think of it, is a sad indictment of how far Britain has fallen.

And again: just what does 'Brexit means Brexit' mean?

“Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May and the backers of Britain leaving the European Union keep assuring us.

Like a lot of slogans, it’s pretty meaningless. Does it mean leaving the Single Market and Customs Union too? Or just the EU institutions themselves? A hard Brexit in other words, or a soft one? 

No one’s saying, least of all May.

Well, if she isn’t saying, she’s certainly been hinting of late. People voted to get control of immigration, she tells us, and I suspect she’s right. You can’t tell from the referendum results, because it wasn’t mentioned in the question, but listening to the conversations in the media or simply in the streets, it’s clear a great many people voted Leave to put an end to free movement of people into Britain. A great many of them are worried that Poles are taking their jobs, or they simply don’t like hearing Polish on the streets – “this is England and people should speak English”.

They forget that at one time a lot of Celts must have resented hearing Anglo-Saxon spoken in this same green and pleasant land. But then they probably wouldn’t care even if they did remember.

May has been playing to this particular group, with promises about control of immigration. That’s not possible without a hard Brexit including departure from the single market, since membership of market requires acceptance of freedom of movement of EU citizens. So, though she hasn’t made it completely explicit, for May it seems that “Brexit means hard Brexit”. That would leave Britain having to deal with the EU on the same terms as any other member of the World Trade Organisation, except for any more favourable terms it could extract by negotiation. Tough, considering that the EU is the world’s biggest trading bloc, and right on Britain’s doorstep.

Business isn’t keen on this option.

Still, the uncertainty continues. May isn’t committing herself to hard Brexit. She claims she’s playing her cards close to her chest and doesn’t want to reveal her negotiating stance to other EU leaders. Many of us have wondered whether it might be because she doesn’t have much of an idea what her stance is. Basically, she can’t get off the fence.

Well, yesterday we had the excellent news that car manufacturer Nissan would be building two more models at its plant in Sunderland, in North East England. That secures 7000 jobs in the plant itself and many others in the supply chain. It doesn’t just protect jobs in a region that desperately needs them, it provides new ones.

A matter for nothing but celebration.

However, it’s odd. The Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn made it clear this summer that Nissan wouldn’t be investing any further in its UK operations if it couldn’t guarantee continued easy access to the European Single Market.

Carlos Ghosn leaving Downing Street after meeting Theresa May

The British government has let it be known that it gave ‘assurances’ to Nissan before the new investments were announced. But, in typical May economical-with-information style, no one’s saying what those assurances were. Was it a guarantee that Britain would remain in the Single Market? A soft Brexit, in other words? That seems to contradict the position she’s been taking for several weeks. And does it depend on her? Doesn’t it require the agreement of the other EU states?

Alternatively, has May assured Nissan that Britain would either remain in the Single Market or compensate the car manufacturer for any financial loss it incurs as a result of leaving? That would be costly. She can’t offer such a deal to Nissan and not to other car makers. She can’t offer it to car makers and not to other exporters.

We continue to live in interesting times. There are a great many more questions than answers. And one of the more intriguing is still what on Earth does “Brexit means Brexit” really mean?

Two Jews wandering through European cities, to the delight of us all

Trieste is a movable city. Apparently.

In the early nineteenth century it was in the Austrian Empire. Not many people think of landlocked Austria as a naval power, but back then it was a significant maritime nation and Trieste was one of its great ports.

The great Austrian seaport of Trieste

In 1867, a Hungarian element was added to Trieste’s nature, when it became a major port of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

But then at the end of the First World War, it was finally shifted again, into Italy where it remains today.

And all those changes of citizenship, which affected the citizens as much as the city, happened without anyone having to move anywhere.

Most of the people of Trieste were in some sense Italian. They didn’t speak Italian, but then in the late nineteenth century the notion of an ‘Italian’ language was so fluid as to be practically non-existent.

My Italian professor at college liked to tell the story of the new King of Italy, previously King only of Savoy in the far North West, sending two officers to represent him at the court of his new territory, the erstwhile independent Kingdom of Naples. Before heading abroad to this posting, the officers spent some time learning the foreign language, Italian. It was only after they had been in Naples for six months that they realised the Neapolitans had taken them for English: they wore strange uniforms and spoke a language nobody knew, and the locals found no other way of accounting for them.

The Italians of Trieste spoke Triestino. And they thought of themselves as Triestini.

It was a hugely cosmopolitan city: though they were in a minority, there were more Slovenes in Trieste, on the border of Slovenia (then also Austrian and now a separate state), than in the Slovene capital of Ljubljana. There were of course many ethnic Germans too, since Trieste belonged to a German-speaking state, and naturally many Jews, as in most of the major cities of Europe of that time.

Now picture one of those Triestini, Aron Ettore Schmitz. His name tells you so much about him, doesn’t it? That Aron, together with the Schmitz, says German-Jewish, which came from his father. Ettore is pure Italian, as was his mother. He grew to manhood at the time Freud was publicising his new methods of psychoanalysis and became fascinated by the problems of consciousness and the sub-conscious. He would wander his great city of Trieste and think great thoughts, passing many of them through the filter of Freudian analysis.

Gradually those thoughts turned into books. At the cost of terrible effort, he mastered Italian and wrote them in that strange language. No one was interested in the rambling meditations of a Triestine Jew so he published the book himself, and it lay on a small number of bookshelves gathering dust. It was called La Coscenza di Zeno; later, when it gained the fame it richly deserved, it was translated into English, most commonly as The Confessions of Zeno or as Zeno’s Conscience. It’s a stream of consciousness narrative as this Jewish man wanders around Trieste struggling to understand life and his place in it; the strongest memory it left in me, especially at a time when I was still smoking to excess, was the theme of the “last cigarette” – whenever anything happens in his life, Zeno smokes his “last cigarette” which sadly turns out only to be the last only until the next one.

Italo Svevo

Schmitz didn’t publish the book under his own name. He adopted a pseudonym that reflected his ancestry: he chose the word for Swabian (from South West Germany) as his surname, and a word for Ialian as his forename – Italo Svevo.

By great good fortune, Svevo chose to learn English from a young Irishman in voluntary exile working at the Berlitz school in Trieste at the time. He found the notion of a Jew wandering around a city and commenting on it far more interesting than most Italian literary critics did. He must also have been an exceptional teacher of English – I wish I could have been taught by him, as I know no one who handled the language better than he did. His name was James Joyce.

He took up the cudgels for Zeno’s Conscience and made it his objective to ensure it received a proper publication in its French translation. The French being the French latched on at once to a great literary phenomenon and received the novel with extraordinary enthusiasm. The Italians being the Italians only needed the French to admire one of their own novels to realise that it must deserve a great deal more than the obscurity in which they had left it.

Svevo’s literary career took off. As did that of Zeno and the wonderful, sparkling, magical, comical story he inhabits.

And what about Joyce? Inspired by Zeno, who was in turn modelled on Schmitz, he too wrote a book about a Jew wandering around a city and commenting, in a stream of consciousness, on all the strange things happening in it. But as befits Joyce, the city’s not Trieste but Dublin, the Jew’s not Zeno Cosini but Leopold Bloom, and the book’s not Zeno’s Conscience but Ulysses – another wonderful, rambunctious, brilliant, hilarious epic.

I don’t really know why I told that story. Except that I find it charming. And it was brought to my mind yesterday by a fine Reith lecture on the BBC, given by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

To whom, many thanks.

AT&T wants Time Warner. But who truly benefits from mergers?

The biggest pricks are certainly the men who feel the need to prove that theirs are bigger than anyone else’s.

Sadly, some of those men are women, and there will probably be more of them as women start to break through the glass ceiling in increasing numbers, and join more and more boardrooms.

Nothing in business is so good for proving testosterone capability than the acquisition of another company. It’s usually a relatively civilised process, with negotiations, give and take, intelligent analysis, proper legal documents and so on. But to the executives of the acquiring company, it tends to be seen as a proof of their manhood, as though they were the human equivalent of a tyrannosaur gobbling his prey (and I say ‘his’ advisedly).

The irony is that the real beneficiaries of such deals are on the other side: they’re the shareholders of the acquisition target, who sometimes make far more for their shares than they could possibly be worth in anything like a rational valuation. Things aren’t so good for the staff of that company, who often find themselves paying with their jobs for their former bosses’ greed, or the customers, frequently pressurised to ‘upgrade’ a product or service with which they were satisfied, to the competing but not necessarily competitive version offered by the acquiring company. But, hey, who cares about employees or customers when you’re off to the bank with a cheque that may well see you right for the rest of your life?

Meanwhile, the acquiring company can discover at leisure all the problems the acquisition entails. In principle, they should have been unearthed during the purchase process, in what’s known technically as ‘due diligence’. But when you’ve got a manhood to prove, how long are you going to take over that? And which are you going to believe? The ghastly little accountant from you own company, with the fish-lens glasses, who says the target’s never going to achieve even 10% growth and might even contract? Or the genial Chief Executive from the other side, with his ready smile and his willingness to take you to wonderful restaurants visitors to the city never find, and who assures you it would take really determined effort to keep growth next year below 70%?

I’ve watched executives falling over themselves to buy companies whose sales have been in steady decline for years and whose products are way below standard and far behind the times. They even pay huge prices for them. And when you’ve paid a huge price, you can’t admit you’ve bought a dud. So they spend the next few years trying to persuade themselves that the albatross around their neck, for which they paid top dollar, is actually a soaring eagle. Eventually, they’re either forced to admit their error or (more likely) they’re forced out by another group of executives prepared to fire the staff who came with the acquisition and leave the customers in the lurch.

Time Warner: target of AT&T’s latest acquisition bid

Right now we’re witnessing the first steps in one of the bigger acquisitions, worth $85.4bn. AT&T wants to buy Time Warner. I don’t know how it’s going to work out. Regulators may or may not stop the deal. If they don’t, here are two predictions of which I have little doubt: the staff of Time Warner will find they’ve been royally screwed, and the customers of Time Warner will find that they’re being charged more for less of a service.

Will it work out for AT&T? Maybe. If they can use a step towards monopoly as a means to price-gouge customers, it might do. Otherwise, they’re likely to find themselves worse off. Why? When I worked, briefly, for the civil service many years ago, an excellent point was made to a group of us on a training course. We were asked how many people it takes to do four times the volume of work done by one person. The answer is five: four to do the work and one to supervise the four.

People often justify mergers and acquisitions on the basis of economies of scale. Now there’s a fine mirage. A bigger organisation seldom requires less management – mostly it requires a hell of a sight more. There’s nothing to guarantee that dumping one company on top of another, despite their different cultures and backgrounds, would necessarily be beneficial. Why should it be, after all? And indeed few mergers are successful.

On the other hand, the executives who pull off the acquisition get a good burst of testosterone out of it. That’s worth a lot. There may be a reckoning coming, but hey, that’s a couple of years away – and who knows, if the executive is at all smart, he (or she) may have traded this success into a new and better post somewhere else.

Where they may be able to pull the same thing off all over again.

Aberfan: man-made disaster

Fifty years ago today I was thirteen years old. I wasn’t highly alert to what might be happening outside the world of school and friends and family. 

Hey, I was thirteen.

Even so, I looked with incomprehension mixed with revulsion at the pictures on TV from a small Welsh village I’d never heard of, where a slag heap had slid down a hill and engulfed a school. 116 children, younger than I, had died as well as 28 adults. I might never have heard the name of Aberfan but after that, I’d never forget it.

Aberfan child coffins: the aftermath of a catastrophe made by man

A slag heap. The waste product of a coal mine. Surely an industry as old and established as mining knew how to handle slag? But it turned out that they didn’t. They’d simply planted it on the slope of a hill that was soaked with rainwater and natural springs. Underneath all that slag, the ground had become saturated and slippery and the whole thing had, eventually, come tumbling down.

A few hours later, and the school would have been empty. But as it was all but a handful of the village’s children were wiped out.

Perhaps even sadder was the other irony, that many had warned of the disaster to come. A year earlier, the head of the school, Ann Jennings had presented a petition about the tip from mothers of pupils, to the local council. No action was taken. And Ann Jennings would be one of the victims of the slip.

One of the most shameful repercussions of that terrible day in 1966 was the behaviour of Lord Robens, then Chairman of the National Coal Board. He denied that the slip could have been prevented, a statement that was found to be false by the enquiry into the disaster. He denied that the Coal Board had any responsibility towards Aberfan other than to stabilise the remains of the tip. When he finally agreed to get rid of it insisted, he had the gall to insist that £150,000 of the money raised for the village by the disaster relief fund (nearly 10% of the total) should be diverted to help pay for that work.

Robens had been a Labour MP – Labour, for Pete’s sake – and even a member of one of the great Labour governments, Attlee’s. The National Coal Board had been set up as a result of the nationalisation of the coal mines.

One of the central aims of socialism is to ensure that the sources of economic wealth, the means of production, should be held by the whole of society on behalf of the whole of society. This strikes me, as it would anyone who feels inspired by socialist views, as a highly laudable objective. I have to admit, though, that it’s hard to see a satisfactory way of achieving it. The shortcut adopted by many socialists or social democrats, from many countries, in the middle of the last century, was to nationalise industries. That means bringing them under state control.

It seems to make sense. At first view, the state represents everyone and belongs to everyone. So if it owns the means of production, then everyone owns them.

The problem comes at second view. Because do we all really own the state? Isn’t it, in reality, controlled by an elite as isolated and opaque as occupants of the board rooms of private industry? If they control the state, how can we say that we own what the state owns?

The lesson of Aberfan seems powerful to me. State ownership is not popular ownership. In that  little Welsh village, a state-owned industry did terrible damage to the people. It was ungenerous in its assistance and then it tried to leech on the support others gave.

Stateism isn’t socialism. The State is capable of being just as oppressive towards people as any private industry. State ownership isn’t in itself a route to liberation, it’s merely an economic tool to be used where it’s useful and avoided where it isn’t: some industries are better state-owned than privately-owned, some are better state-owned today but not tomorrow, others it’s best to keep well away from the state.

Socialism, if it’s to be worth anything, is about doing far more than demanding nationalisation. It’s about helping people like the inhabitants of Aberfan. Doing what we can to make sure that avoidable suffering is never inflicted on them again and, where it’s unavoidable – as in natural rather than man-made disasters – to come to their aid. The rest is just a means to those ends.

For today, though, on the fiftieth anniversary of that catastrophe, we should put all that aside and just focus on the victims. And remember the incomprehension so many of us felt back then. Even callous thirteen-year olds.