Holiday Job

Priti Patel goes on holiday to Israel. Like you do, she has meetings while she's there with a range of political contacts, including the Israeli Prime Minister. Theresa May, due to meet Netanyahu in London, had no idea he'd just been talking to her colleague. "It was just a holiday", said Patel. "And Boris knew." Well, he did - eventually. But not before it happened, and as a result officials had no chance to warn Patel that encouraging the Israeli army to think they'd get UK backing for a project on land they'd pinched from Syria might not be in our national interest. Not just a holiday, then. She actually managed to fit in 12 meetings, and apologised to Theresa May for not asking permission in advance. Oh, hang on a minute, make that fourteen. Eventually, and it takes a while, she is encouraged to resign.

Boris Johnson is no better. He languidly tells MPs he can't see anything wrong with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe training journalists, but she's not. And the Iranians are increasingly suspicious of her as a result of Johnson's words. He goes to the Commons. He apologises if anything he has said has been misunderstood, and implies that his remarks were "taken out of context." But they weren't understood, and they weren't taken out of context. Simply, he got it wrong, and should say so, with a clear, honest apology.

They can't do it. They simply can't face the fact that they told a lie. And, as an obsessive remoaner, it does occur to me that these were two of the star performers in the campaign which promised extra money for the NHS and as a result - according to its mastermind Dominic Cummings - won the Brexit vote.     

See "Code of Conduct (revised)" in Poems from the News, also on this website. 

Poetic Licence

Poet A wins an Exmoor poetry competition - until someone points out that his poem is very similar to one by poet B. He tries to explain. "I was working on a poem about my childhood experiences in Exmoor and was careless. I used poet B's poem as a model for my own but rushed and ended up submitting a draft that wasn't entirely my own work."

Fair enough, you might think. Strange types these poets, at the mercy of the sub-conscious, never knowing whether or not the gold they're producing is their own, or an echo of someone else. But then you look at the facts. Both poems have 18 lines. 16 of those lines are identical. The two that have been changed - very much for the worse - allowed poet A to slip in an Exmoor reference which wasn't in poet B's. Otherwise, it's ninety per cent theft.   

Guess who?

"All of this 'Russia' talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts & Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!...Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary and the Dems the focus???? also, there is NO COLLUSION."

You guessed it. Not a teenager letting off steam, but the leader of the free world. He doesn't want to run the country, he wants to re-run the campaign - having a five star general leap on to the stage shouting "Lock her up!" is the best fun he's had in years. 

But it's not funny. A sober reminder of the personal costs of this stuff in last night's Storyville documentary coming Home, about an American soldier who left his unit, was held and tortured by the Taliban for five years, and then returned to the US in a deal involving Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo. Because of Obama, and all the politics involved, Trump was on this in a flash, passionately telling rallies that six young, beautiful Americans had died trying to rescue this deserter, who in the old days would simply have been shot. and of course, they loved it, and are still yelling for this guy to be thrown into jail for the rest of his life. Army experts, used to debriefing prisoners who've been tortured, say this man's had worse treatment than anyone since Vietnam, and should not be in prison for a single day. Oh yes, and the progrramme aslo does the legwork, asks the questions, and sets the record straight: none of the six young men were actually searching for this soldier when they were killed. It made a great story, and he told it with passion. Just turns out not to be true.  

Lobbying for Failure

Not quite sure whether to laugh or cry. Theresa May, rightly appalled by the Brexit prospects, starts chatting up individual European leaders, asking for concessions. European leaders are actually considering concessions, but then realise that if they grant them, this will be written up by the British press (and it will) as Theresa's triumph against the hated foreigners. So they quickly and unanimously decide not to offer those concessions. Thanks, guys - great job. This is going to be a disaster and we have no-one to blame but ourselves.   

Internet - for good and bad

Today's Guardian feels like another bad taste of social decline. A horrendous story about survivors of the Las Vegas shootings, who've been targetted by trolls saying "I hope someone truly shoots you in the head." Because, of course, I'm a troll so I know you were lying in the first place. Ok, so it's a fairly sick person who's thinking that way but boy, do social media do a great job of reinforcing that by offering them an instant audience.  That's on page 23.

Then I turn over, to page 25, which has a story about a 27 year old Pakistani activist, who's about to become Pakistan's first transgender doctor. She was followed on her way home by three men, who threatened and abused her. she felt nobody would protect her - except her community on Facebook. they spread the word, shamed the police into taking action and - Sara Gill believes, probably saved her life. Maybe it's not all bad.  

Men getting it wrong

Finally, justice for Eni Aluko, the England footballer smeared by the FA. (If you want my detailed account of the Eni Aluko affair, the poem Sweet FA is in Poems from the News, another part of this website). Aluko herself has been astonishing throughout, composed, objective and consistent, despite being put under all kinds of pressure.

The FA, predictably, don't come out of it that well. Clarke, their chairman, was particularly inept at the MP sub-committee showdown, by which time it was clear that his organisation had made huge errors. A sensitive man, a canny operator even, would have recognised that this was a good moment for caution and humility. But no, he's used to being in charge, so he thinks that a show of casual dominance will go down well. He dismisses accusations as "racism fluff", before it occurs to him that maybe that's not the route to take. Somebody raises a previous case of ill-treatment, which received wide press coverage, but he hasn't a clue what they're talking about. And  then, when he's accused by the PFA, rightly concerned for his failure to investigate the ill-treatment of one of their members, he insists on launching a tirade about the failure of the PFA to act on abuse. As it happens, he gets his facts wrong, but it's the tactic that's childish - "it wasn't me, sir, and even if it was look at him - he's far worse."

This is exactly the route Trump took, when it was pointed out that "He knew what he signed up for" might not be the ideal way to console a young widow grieving for the loss of her husband. Trump doesn't consider that he might have got it wrong. "what about Obama?" he says. I'll bet his treatment of grieving widows wasn't any better."  As it happens, predictably, it was miles better, and there are grieving widows aplenty to prove it. But these fantastists aren't talking about the truth; they just want an alternative world, in which they didn't cock it up. 

Ken Burns' Vietnam

So that's it. All over, just like that. A mere ten hours of compulsive watching, and we've done the Vietnam war. I remember, way back, watching the Ken Burns series on the American Civil War. A bit solemn, but so patient, and with wonderful photographs. The jazz was similarly good to look at, though a bit more controversial in terms of what he did and didn't cover, what kind of look-in contemporary music got. But Vietnam is safely distant in one sense, although - as the programme showed - in some cases the wounds still linger on. But the detail and the photos were stunning, and they've assembled an amazing array of witnesses - Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, first hand accounts of what went on, from a range of angles. There is a sad, wise recognition that american exceptionalism has been a hugely expensive curse for the whole planet, let alone America, but although that wouldn't got down well in the White House for the rest of us it's long overdue. It's moving to watch people grow over the length of the war - how a loyal marine gradually becomes a vet against the war, and then witnesses John Kerry's astonishing testimony to congress about what the war has cost. Plus, of course, the astonishing soundtrack. We always said there was no time like the sixties, and here's the proof.   

Enjoying Economics

I know, I know. Those two words have never, ever been placed together before. Economics is a dreary edifice of impersonal information, presented by people who wish to demonstrate why things (particularly money, business things) have to be as they are, even though some of the effects seem to be disastrous. But not any more.

My fresh optimism has been created by reading two books in close succession:
23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang, and
Doughnut Economics, by Kate Raworth.

Chang takes you gently through some very complicated territory, with an approach that seems like a Dummies Guide. There are 23 ‘Things’ and each of them starts with a “What they tell you” section, followed by a “What they don’t tell you” section. It could be childishly simplified, or deeply condescending, but it’s neither. He knows a lot, and brings in all kinds of evidence but only when it’s needed, so the whole effect is to clarify and explain. It’s not difficult to read, but with every chapter you feel yourself getting wiser.

Raworth has a simple, basic insight, so amazing it’s astonishing that no-one’s latched on to it before. The potency of economic theory is carried as much through the visual (diagrams, graphs) as through the words. So if we want to know what’s wrong with previous economic theories, we need to look at their visuals, and really analyse them, rather than taking them for granted. And of course, if we’re going to see things differently in the future, we’ll need new visuals, which reflect the actual nature of our lives – interconnected people, with a range of interests and needs, living on a planet whose resources are under threat.

These are not angry outsiders, throwing stones at the evil people who have led us astray. They’re both economists, who know their field and its history, who understand how things have got to where they are. But they’re not shrill, or full of themselves, or bristling with spite because their truths have not been sufficiently recognised. They’re both clear, positive and humane, using their intelligence to point forward to a more constructive approach which might at least give us a chance of survival. Don’t take my word for it. Get hold of them, and read them both. You won’t regret it. 

Growing Up

Years ago, when I was trying to educate myself about child psychology (Bowlby, Winnicott, people like that) I remember taking on board the idea that maturity was about recognising that other people existed, equally, had their own reality, and that "how I see things" might not be the only way to see things. Fairly basic insight, but just at the moment it seems quite precious.

Two recent articles on this theme. Jeffrey Sachs, not a particular hero of mine (because of his enthusiastic involvement in the "let's educate Russia about capitalism" drive) had a really sensible piece about American exceptionalism, and how the US needed to grow out of the idea that they had a God-given mission to show the rest of the world how it's done. Not world-shaking, not before time, but welcome nonetheless. And the current Ken Burns TV history of the Vietnam war is soaked in that awareness that having their US version of the truth made them miss completely what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese.

Then there was Peter Hain, writing about Northern Ireland negotiations, and how trivial exchanges - e.g. about a shared interest in football - could actually oil the wheels of high-powered political deliberations. which is exactly what's missing in the Brexit fiasco. All the noise, all the press releases, are about what we want, what we'll do, what we need. Not a glimmer of how things look to the Europeans - who for excellent reasons think we're out of our minds.   

Right knee, operation no. 4. Progress report.

For a couple of weeks I felt pretty despondent. Got over the op well, was up and about, increasingly independent – but had no more flexibility in my right knee than before the operation. And that’s despite my surgeon’s triumphal demonstration at the very end of the op, deliberately bending the knee so I could see the change.

But apparently this is OK. The stuff stopping my knee bending is more to do with post-op swelling than the dreaded scar tissue, and between my two weekly appointments at Bridgnorth physio I’ve made some measurable progress (the magic protractor, just like maths at school), so that I now transfer on to their weekly one-hour session in the gym, moving round various pieces of equipment, but also having some intensive 1:1 work in increasing flexibility in the knee.

At the end of October I get to see my surgeon again. This is a more realistic time scheme within which to review progress, and they’ll ensure that my physio continues for as long as is necessary. If despite that there are still serious flexibility problems then he may perform a manipulation – anaesthetic but not invasive surgery, wrestling the muscles into submission.

Which is fine, but I could/should have been told all that two weeks ago, when I had had no physio and was terrified that the knee was settling into concrete by the day. (It didn’t help that after my first knee op this wasn’t a problem; then I was trotting up and down stairs using alternate legs like a reasonable human being. The problems only set in later).

But I am a lot happier about it now, and cosily settled into my routine of 12 exercises, ten times each every day, with a couple of walks into Wenlock, hours sitting with my knee raised but nestling between two bags of frozen peas, and then a good-night injection into the gut before I go to bed. Thank God for Netflix, BT sport and the local library. 

Fear and Lies

For once, Trump's classic summary "sad" is exactly appropriate. Paul Watson, a senior NHS official, forced hospital leaders to repeatedly chant "We can do this", criticising them for not doing it loudly enough.

Watson sort of gets it. He tries to cover his tracks by saying it was meant as "light relief", but it clearly wasn't, as in his next breath he's insisting there's a serious message there: "If it seems cheesy or patronising then so be it but it does have the merit of being true."

So there. This is about power. These aren't just any hospital leaders. They're leaders of hospitals deemed to be failing, and he's just accused them of putting patients' safety at risk. Before the chanting stunt he offered them a choice - "Do you want the 40-slide version of our message or the four-word version?" Cunning, that. It means they were asking for it, that in a way it's their fault - which presumably is why none of them told him to grow up, or to get stuffed. Welcome to Jeremy Hunt's NHS. Does that sound like an atmosphere in which you'd want to do good work?    

Stewart on Lawrence

A real TV treat. To accompany the TV showing of Gertrude Bell's Letters from Baghdad, BBC4 have put out two one-hour episodes of Rory Stewart talking about the legacy of T.E.Lawrence.  It's been gorgeous - some fabulous photography of landscape and architecture, but also a detailed, clear analysis of what was going on in Lawrence's mind, and why that might matter now. And it's all done by a guy who idolised Lawrence as a kid, and then explored vast stretches of the middle East on foot, staying in bedouin tents. But also by someone who at a ridiculously young age was a governor in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who saw the idioocy of occupation in heartbeaking detail. as his conclusion spells out, it's tragic that the American military are encouraging their officers to study Lawrence - because he's a winner at fighting in the Middle East - whereas Lawrence himself would actually be telling them "don't do it better; don't do it at all." 

This series is from some time back - it shows Stewart walking thoughtfully through a Damascus souk - but I can't think how or why I missed it. Yet again, thank God for catch-up. 

Getting Ahead

I have to confess, I smiled. I shouldn't, because it's a sad story for a number of pupils, and tragic for the guy at the centre of it, but there is still a strange symmetry about the story of Mo Tanweer, the deputy head at Eton who's just lost his job for handing over exam secrets to his pupils. Go on, guess what he used to do before he went into teaching. that's right. He actually was an investment banker.

Maybe he thought he was going into public service, paying something back for the riches he'd acquired. But you can be sure they were rubbing their hands. Just the kind of hot property they wanted to acquire, a guy at the cutting edge, who'd give them an edge, let them mark out their place at the front of the field. It was always one of the drawbacks of league tables, that they fired up the guys who like to be on top, to whom it's more important to bewinners than to educate the kids in their charge.  

Climate Change

Do you really need more warnings about climate change? asks Bill McKibben, as he calmly details the various weather events taking place in North America this week. And yes, of course, if you widen it to the whole planet it's far. far worse. As he knows. He's been warning about this for thirty years. But he manages to stay calm and focused, to mount yet again the unanswerable argument:

"Global warming is the first crisis that comes with a limit - solve it soon or don't solve it. Winning slowly is just a different way of losing. Winning fast enough to matter would mean, above all, standing up to the fossil fuel industry..." But that's enough. Don't take my work for it. In my paper version, it's on p.25 of the Guardian on Monday, 11 Sept. I'm sure you can find it online.

A voice of sanity

Amidst the mess and the nonsense, there are a few people thinking clearly and - usuallu - talking sense. Owen Jones, Ha-Joon Chang and, today especially, John Harris. He's made sense all through the various campaigns, ducking the hysteria and the generalisations to talk to actual people. In today's Guardian he has a terrific piece about EU nationals coming to Peterborough in search of a better life. they work hard, they move from being casual to full time, employees to employers.

Which raises a question, that Harris phrases with impeccable calm:   "Most of the EU citizens i have spoken to in Peterborough do not have a left-wing thought in their heads; they believe in a credo of self-reliance, hard work and home ownership. In a British context, these ideas are as Tory as they come. So how come so many Conservatives now want to slam the door on their most devout adherents?"

NHS staffing

"NHS England to spend £100m recruiting GPs from overseas." Hang on a minute. Back in October, in the heady days of the Tory Party Conference, I swore I heard Jeremy Hunt promise delegates that we'd have an NHS staffed entirely with pure white Brits. It wasn't right to be taking other country's doctors away from where they were needed (even though it is actually cheaper than training them ourselves), so the new post-Brexit Britain would be treated by a medical workforce that was 100 per cent Brit. Yeah, right.

We should be used to it, but they have no shame. They will say whatever it takes, for today's headlines, to solve this week's crisis. If they have to say the opposite a month later that's fine. Nobody remembers, nobody cares. It's just a game.  

Partition

There's been a ton of programmes about the India/Pakistan partition of 1947, almost all of them excellent. I feel substantially wiser, and grateful to all the people who've clearly taken this as an opportunity to invest time, thought and money in public education. Lord Reith, for once, might be smiling. Gurinder Chadha's "India's Partition:The Forgotten Story" was possibly the best of the lot, coming towards the end of the sequence, but offering a stunningly clear account of how different elements combined to produce this exceptionally bloody result. There was a lot of rather silly (apparent) toing and froing, from the UK to India, back to the UK and then to a different part of India, as though Chadha,, was jumping on and off various buses around London. But the quality of the programme was the expert witnesses it gathered to explain precisely what was going on, at each stage of the process, and from them we got the sense of how impersonal forces combined with individual personalities (Nehru, Gandhi and Jinna in particular, but also the Brits involved) to produce a toxic juggernaut which by the end was unstoppable - though it could certainly have been handled more wisely - i.e. by taking time, calculating likely consequences, rather than staying out of violent clashes and getting the hell out as fast as possible. There may be parts of our colonial record we should celebrate, but this isn't one of them. 

The State

You can't please some people any of the time. Peter Kosminsky spends a lot of time researching and then making the state, a drama in four parts, one hour each, shown on four successive nights. It's about Brits going to Syria in support of Isis. I thought it was fascinating, and really well done. A bit formulaic, heavily constricted by the need to get in tons of useful information that had been gathered, but not stupid or preachy, and light years ahead of most of the thinking that we get about Isis from politicians or the TV news. you could begin to understand why people like these could initially be attracted by some of what they hear, even if that - inevitably? - leads to later disillusion as they taste the grim and complex reality of what's involved. The Daily Mail was predictably scathing. Kosminsky was a white, middle-aged Oxbridge graduate - he hadn't actually been to Raqqa to find out for himself. Stuart Jeffies in The Guadrian wasn't much better: "Isis Drama fails to offer any answers on radicalisation." Oh right. That's why we watch plays, is it? So they'll give us the answers. Some days I think that if I could speak another language I'd emigrate.  

Hate and the Beautiful Game

It took me a while, but I finally caught up with Gareth Thomas' TV documentary about homophobia in English football. And it is that specific - there's a prominent gay American soccer player who's happy to have come out there, but wouldn't have done so here. And Thomas' own experience in British rugby (backed up by referee Nigel Owens) indicates that that's a much more civilised world in this respect. So Thomas goes looking for answers. He trawls through trolling on line, and listens to the abuse in the stands. He sees how some clubs are much better geared than others to combat it - Cardiff, for instance, have a well-trained team who will identify, remove and then ban fans who abuse black players - but would they be as vigilant about homophobic chants? As with Thomas' own case, it needs prominent players with the nerve to come out - and once that happens, they'll get backing from sponsors (great positive story) and some of the press. But before that happens, the powers that be need to get their act together, produce and then enforce a common pattern of resistance to open homophobia. Thomas tries. He really does. He works out a possible code of practice, with a supportive lawyer. He tries, endlessly, to make an appointment with one top official. He talks to another, gets a load of platitudes and good intentions, and comes out shaking his head "I don't know whether to laugh or cry." As a record of intelligence and determination confronting stupidity and inertia this is a wonderful programme; as an indication of the state of football, it's deeply depressing. 

Simple Solutions

And yes, it's Trump again. Sorry about that, but it's hard to resist, when the man just keeps on throwing up tasty little nuggets of controversy. (There's also the sense that this can't possibly last, that any minute now all the toys will go out of the pram and he'll stump back to Trump Tower, to gaze at his gold reflection.) 

This is a tiny scrap, which most media haven't picked up, but I think it's significant. After a reasonably conventional quote regretting the latest terrorist outrage (in Barcelona) Trump gets to musing about "what General Pershing did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!"

What Pershing did (or may not have done - there are serious doubts about this story's  authenticity) was to dip bullets in pig's blood, shoot 49 of the terrorists, and then instruct the 50th to go back to his mates and report what he'd just seen. Could anyone seriously believe that such an action would simply cancel out the impulses behind the current wave of terrorist attacks? Trump, apparently. Just as he believed it was simple to "drain the swamp", easy to lock up Hillary and build the wall, no problem to simple scrub out Obamacare. But look where we are now on each of those innocent childish dreams. Government actually is much harder than it looks.