Tim Collard's blog on (and off) the Daily Telegraph

This blog is based on the one I write on the Daily Telegraph website (blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/timcollard). But it also contains posts which the Telegraph saw fit to spike, or simply never got round to putting up.

I'm happy for anyone to comment, uncensored, on anything I have to say. But mindless abuse, such as turns up on the Telegraph site with depressing regularity (largely motivated my my unrepentant allegiance to the Labour Party), is disapproved of. I am writing under the name which appears on my passport and birth certificate; anyone else is welcome to write in anonymously, but remember that it is both shitty and cowardly to hurl abuse from under such cover. I see the blogosphere as the equivalent of a pub debate: a bit of knockabout and coarse language is fine, but don't say anything that would get you thumped in the boozer. I can give as good as I get, and I know how to trace IP addresses.

Saturday 31 October 2009

Poor (?) Lord Ashcroft's in trouble again

Poor Lord Ashcroft, to employ a fantastically inappropriate adjective, seems to be in trouble with the government of Belize again.
Ashcroft – one of the most English names imaginable, reminiscent of woods and agriculture, of the great English countryside. The name could only denote a denizen of a green and pleasant land. I have never been to Belize, but with its tropical location it is surely both green and pleasant too.
It’s not easy for expats. I’m not saying that their loyalties are necessarily divided: it should be perfectly possible to give both parties their due, to be a good resident of one while remaining a good citizen of the other. (Well, unless the two nations are actually playing each other at football.) It’s taxation which presents the difficulty. However dual one’s loyalties, one is inclined to think it a bit much to be expected to pay their taxes twice over. (Some think it a bit much to be expected to pay them even once, but that’s another matter.) Hence the ubiquity of Double Taxation Agreements between countries, ensuring that such a contingency does not arise.
So perhaps the resentment of the Belizean authorities against Lord Ashcroft derives from disappointment. Perhaps the local financial authorities are smarting at having been told that they may not dip into Lord Ashcroft’s capacious coffers, because he has emptied them with a liberal hand into those of Mr Alistair Darling. It surely cannot be otherwise, as he is Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party and is directing large chunks of cash into funding its campaigning in vital marginal seats. And he wouldn’t be doing that if he weren’t a fully paid-up UK taxpayer, would he?
We don’t know. There are, quite rightly, laws protecting confidentiality on matters of personal finance. There are also laws covering political donations. If we can’t enforce the latter without breaching the former, I suppose we just have to throw our hands in the air and leave it all to the judgment of Heaven. Jolly convenient for friend Cameron and his exciting band of Ashcroft-supported A-listers.
But somehow this example of an unanswered and unanswerable question takes me back to the Sixties, which was full of them. I hardly qualify as a flower child, but I was undeniably born in that decade’s inaugural year, and many will think that my unquenchably idealistic left-wingery is qualification enough. So indulge me as I brush the dust from the old guitar:
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone,
Dear David Cameron?
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone,
My dear old Dave?
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone?
Tell me, Mr Cameron.
When will we ever learn,
When will we ever learn?

Has he fled beyond the seas,
Is he here, or in Belize?

Tell us where he pays his tax,
“We’re not telling that to hacks!”

Say where his returns are filed,
“Depends where he’s domiciled!”

He’s given lots of cash to you,
Any to the Treasury too?

“He’s a zillionaire, you see,”
(Says David Cameron)
“Just like my friend George and me.”

“Our kind don’t like paying tax,”
(Says David Cameron)
“That’s only for the little chaps.”

Sorry, children, this year I'm not giving in to Halloween blackmail

What are the ethics of (a) offering sweets to children not your own and (b) submitting to blackmail? I thought I’d ask because millions of us are going to be faced with the issue today. It’s Halloween, in case you’re living on Mars. Whatever we may think about this ghastly American import (see Damian Thompson’s blog post, to which I say Amen) we’re stuck with it. My wife reminded me to go out and buy a few packets of sweets. We forgot last year, and though our defiance was not punished with a hail of eggs against the frontage of the house, we might not be so lucky this year.

So much for submitting to blackmail. Now the other part. Handing out sweets to children (I’m damned if I’m going to give them money – besides my own two have taken all that) has become an uncomfortable business these days. As all football fans know, there is a certain Premiership manager who is alleged by opposing fans (without the slightest vestige of truth) to make a habit of pursuing children with a packet of sweets and an ingratiating smile. I do not wish to be confronted either with PC Plod or with a huge bloke with a shaven head and lots of tattoos, brandishing a packet of Maltesers and asking me what the hell I was doing offering them to little Tyson. And it’ll be no better in the more upmarket areas of town. Except that there, in addition to PC Ponsonby-Plodde, it’ll be a revolving-eyed harridan barking that little Jocasta has gone down with 57 different allergies and it’s all your fault.

Perhaps it’s better to pull up the drawbridge and to risk the eggs. No concessions to terrorists!

Friday 30 October 2009

Oh no, house prices are going up again

I see from today’s papers that there has been a minuscule rise in year-on-year house prices. A fairly minor statistic, you might think – funny how that’s front-page news.

But, of course, in papers of conservative inclination it always is – Private Eye has a running joke about it. In reality, house price fluctuations should only be of interest to those actually on the point of buying or selling, which is quite a small minority. But we know that there are vast swathes of Middle Britain where the state of the housing market is regarded as an indicator of financial, social and moral well-being, if not as a direct correlative to the size of the male Middle British appendage. See daytime television for confirmation of this. Actually, for Pete’s sake, don’t.

And don’t you just want to plank anyone who talks about “properties”? It’s a house, you plonker, it’s a BLOODY HOUSE! It’s for LIVING IN! We’re not playing Monopoly here!

It may be political suicide to diss Middle Britain, but that won’t stop me doing so. These are the “hard-working families” to whom all our parties suck up so fawningly. Well, I’ve always been rather derisive of the term “hard-working families”. It seems to straddle the fine line between bullsh*t and nonsense. I know: I’ve been one.

When I was last a nuclear family, in the early years of the present decade, I was a civil servant: ’nuff said. My wife was self-employed, which is no doddle, but it gave her the freedom to take four months annual holiday. And as regards our teenage sons, the word “hard-working” could only have been used in the context of sledgehammer irony. In fact, like most of the bourgeoisie at that time, our family fortunes depended not on hard work or anything like it, but on the precipitous rise in the value of our house (now, of course, her house).

OK, Gordon Brown has his client base in government offices and quangos: but David Cameron has one too, based on secure salaried jobs, asset price bubbles and an unbreachable sense of entitlement, from which derives Tory policy on inheritance tax and the prospect of a peerage for Kirstie Allsopp.

The Britain of the early Noughties. No real effort, no risks, no enterprise required. But it’s gone, and it’s not coming back. No secure jobs, no mortgages, no free money materialising magically from one’s des. res., and the house price statistics back on page 94 where they belong. A government which really wanted to promote enterprise would strip away virtually all taxes and regulations from small business and tax the big ones and their bloated, flabby salariat to hell and beyond. It’s people getting rich which grows the economy, not people staying rich. And the sooner we see another 50 per cent off house prices, the happier I’ll be.

Thursday 29 October 2009

The East Asia Summit: China, Rio Tinto and the mysterious arrest of a Chinese-Australian

Did you know there was an East Asia Summit going on? It was supposed to happen a year ago in Bangkok, and then there was a coup, so they moved it to Chiang Mai, then to Phuket, then to the world’s whoring capital Pattaya, and that had to be cancelled too, so now it’s happening in the more sedate resort of Hua Hin. (Memo to brewers: if you want a piss-up organised on your premises, don’t ask the Thais.)

One of the bigger real issues relates to the arrest in China of a man called Stern Hu. Yes, OK, let’s can the “Hu Hee” jokes. Hu is a perfectly normal name in China – the Supreme Leader bears it – and he adopted the name “Stern” after Isaac the great violinist. That’s several steps upmarket from a waiter I once knew who assumed the moniker “Stallone”. Mr Hu is a naturalised Australian, and was until his arrest in July the chief representative of Rio Tinto. He has been charged with bribery and the revelation of state secrets.

Serious stuff, eh? Well, that depends. China is far from being the only part of the world where doing successful business is likely to involve the odd brown envelope; of course it is against the law, but the law, like most Chinese laws, is only selectively applied. (We’re talking about a country where all extra-marital sex is illegal.) As for revelation of state secrets, well, releasing any information which has not been expressly passed for release by the authorities is against the law. It happens all the time, of course – I’m doing it now – but you can be pulled up for it if it’s in the national interest to do so. So Mr Hu is both guilty and not guilty, according to how sane (or, alternatively, bourgeois-liberal-decadent) one is feeling.

Kevin Rudd, the Sinophone Prime Minister of Australia, is at this meeting. Australia is in the tough position of having to pretend it is in Asia, as it would be foully racist not to, while not forgetting that it is the only country for thousands of miles which disapproves of chaps getting flung into the slammer at a whim. What he is up against, as he probably knows as well as I do, is the fact that the Chinese do not believe that a man called Hu can be an Aussie. We’ll see how far Mr Rudd gets.

Of course there is a backstory to this. Hu’s arrest was uncomfortably close in time to Rio Tinto’s refusal to allow the Chinese aluminium giant Chinalco to boost its stake in RT from 9 per cent to 18 per cent. The message was received and understood: China will not be allowed to muscle in on the world’s metals markets. OK, the Chinese said: say goodbye to Mr Hu, then.

Now, let’s try to maintain a little objectivity here. No-one wants to see the commodities markets dominated by China or anyone else. But that isn’t really what we’re looking at. Three firms – Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale – enjoy a virtual monopoly over the world trade in iron ore. China is where most of the world’s construction is going on, and the world’s economy is grateful for it. That the Chinese should want a stake in this market is hardly unreasonable.

That the Chinese should respond by arresting an Australian on highly dodgy charges is of course unreasonable. But if the Chinese are treated as people who must be shut out of world markets, how do we expect them to behave? The way forward is surely to lock China into world trade, where everybody’s prosperity depends on everyone else being reasonably sensible. The Chinese can grasp that – they’re not Russians, after all. Talk some sense into them all, Mr Rudd.

Friday 23 October 2009

Even in Saudi Arabia, men are afraid of nagging wives

A wife suing her husband for divorce on the grounds that she is listed on his mobile as “Guantanamo” would be good for a chuckle anywhere in the world. But who would have thought it would come from Saudi Arabia, of all places?

Arguably this is the best publicity the Kingdom’s had for years. There we all are, assuming that all Saudi marital disputes are settled by a clip round the ear, a beating by the religious police, or at best by the recitation of forbidding words from the Koran, and now we find that the blokes can feel just as oppressed by the old ball-and-chain as we do. Meanwhile, the Kingdom clearly isn’t short of feisty ladies who take no nonsense from their lords and masters. This one is petitioning for divorce, but has indicated that the prisoner may get away with a large monetary payment to her, in which case she will deign to stay married to him. Sounds like a bit of a double whammy to me.

One sympathises with the poor chap, though one’s main feeling is admiration for the indefatigability of human nature. Even given some of the most misogynistic legislation the world has ever seen, the character of the ferocious old battleaxe cannot be suppressed. Wasn’t it Horace, or possibly Boris Johnson, who once said “You can expel Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come creeping back”?

I’d love to have a drink or two with this guy and compare battle-scars, but I dare say he doesn’t get to go down the pub much.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

We may aw well forget about mortgages - and jobs too

So now the banks (three hearty cheers!) are telling us that they will start to limit the supply of mortgage funding, not only according to the size and regularity of our incomes, but also by the thriftiness of our spending habits. For those on average and below-average incomes, I give the following Irish translation; until now there have been no mortgages available at all, from now there’ll be no mortgages at-all-at-all.

As a freelance, and one of those who used to be on the property ladder until landing on a socking great property snake called a divorce, I know that a house now falls into the same bracket as a Ferrari; something only to be contemplated when filling in one’s lottery numbers. No whingeing; I claim no natural right to a three-bedroom semi. But Lady Thatcher’s property-owning democracy is now surely in its death throes.

In any case the banks’ criteria make no sense. The idea of buying houses on a mortgage was born in the days when the bank could reasonably expect that a chap with a steady job would keep it for life. These days there’s no real reason to discriminate between the chap with a regular job and one on a fluctuating freelance income; the former is no less likely to be on his beam ends next year, and (may I venture) the latter is more likely to be keeping his income up by bobbing and weaving, whereas the other will probably be traumatised into hopelessness.

Ultimately the banks will get onto this too, and will start only lending money to those who are rich enough already, helping them leverage London property from the stratosphere into the ionosphere. The problem with tolerating a swathe of super-rich in our country is that service providers will start to feel that an infinitesimal sliver of the billionaire market is going to be more profitable than any amount of market share among the plebs, who can simply go to hell. Adam Smith (whom I honour greatly) said that it was not the benevolence of the baker, butcher etc. which encouraged him to feed us, but his self-interest. What he didn’t say was that, if the self-interest of the baker, butcher etc. encouraged him to direct all his efforts towards someone else, we’ll bloody well starve.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Well, sort of a bit disenchanted with an economic structure which leaves us out of account altogether. We can’t get mortgages, so maybe we won’t bother with the regular jobs that exist to service them either. We won’t pay stupid prices for accommodation whose only virtue is a location close to a workplace. We’ll live from hand to mouth, but we’ll live free.

The much-bewailed lack of jobs for young graduates (= cushy sinecures) may be a beacon of hope. I have always told my two student sons: don’t get a job, get a skillset. (After several thousand evenings of seeing their father come home from the office in a vile mood, they’re both determined never to set foot in one.) And then, if democracy survives (and that’s a great big Lacedaemonian “if”) we can hold a nice straightforward election: us v. them. You do the math.

Monday 19 October 2009

How Brown could throw the Tories into disarray: a sudden referendum on Europe

I heard an audacious proposal to upset David Cameron’s apple cart last night. It came from a Labour MP whom I had better not identify.

Let us assume that the Czech President finally ratifies the Lisbon Treaty, as he now seems certain to do. Now, suppose that the Prime Minister then addresses Parliament, pointing out that the Treaty is now formally in force. However, he adds, he is aware that there is a strong feeling in the country that this step should really be ratified by a referendum of the British people. He therefore proposes to hold one, on the first Thursday of May 2010.

But, he will continue, the Lisbon Treaty is now part of the internal structure of the EU, so that the referendum cannot be on Lisbon alone: the option of an EU without Lisbon no longer exists. The referendum must therefore be on the question of continued UK membership of the European Union. He and his party will be campaigning for a Yes vote. Four weeks after the referendum, a General Election will be held.

That would be quite a coup de maĆ®tre. At a stroke the Tory campaign is thrown into utter confusion; presumably they would have to make common cause with the government on the referendum campaign while trying to undermine it for General Election purposes, and so will come over like John Kerry on Iraq in 2004. Every little Tory dissension on Europe will come out of the woodwork, clicking like a death-watch beetle, whereas Blairites and Brownites will be singing in perfect harmony for once, with Lord Mandelson on mellifluous lead vocals. Labour will be able to wave its implementation of its manifesto promise triumphantly in everyone’s face, countering the accusation that this is a wholly Machiavellian manoeuvre, even though it is.

The one possible drawback is that people might be so disgusted by all this that the referendum vote is lost. (Yes, I know that if the franchise were limited to Telegraph blog readers it would go down in flames, but sadly that is not the case.) But then the General Election would be too, and then wouldn’t Messrs Cameron and Hague have a fine mess to clear up?

There’s rather an unBritish whiff of scorched earth about all this, and somehow one cannot envisage the current Prime Minister embarking on quite such a white-knuckle strategy. But it’s a nice thought.

Thursday 15 October 2009

China and Russia are back together again

The Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” would appear to be on a roll again. Following the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic comes the 60th anniversary of Sino-Russian diplomatic relations, as Stalin was naturally the first to recognise the regime of his fellow-psychopath Mao. What more natural than that not-really-Supreme-Leader Putin should come over to demonstrate the enduring strength of the relationship?
The usual impressive announcements were made. “Views were exchanged” on mutual energy cooperation.

Cooperation is also going smoothly on the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia, although one hears from other sources that they are bickering about prices. Banking cooperation deals have been signed with a value of $1 billion, presumably involving lines of credit that will be used if and when the bickering stops. The total figure for all these deals is an impressive $4 billion.

I remember these communiquĆ©s well from my time as a diplomat. You have to have a big headline figure, which generally represents an aspiration rather than an actuality. It’s there to cover the fact that there’s no substance to these “big visits” at all. On the Chinese side it’s the prelude to a “Russia Year”, which of course is just a goodwill gesture. Apart from the need for certain Russian natural resources, which the Chinese know they’ll get anyway as the Russians can’t afford to brass them off, there’s nothing in this relationship.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t come in useful to both sides in worrying the West; the combination of the UN’s two principal dictator-protectors (known to me as “Tyranny International”) always makes us shiver a bit. And the Chinese may well be a bit miffed that St Barack has given Russia a free pass on human rights in exchange for a bit of help over Iran; still, it may encourage them to be a bit more helpful in the international arena.

Still, we should watch the progress of China’s “Russia Year” with considerable interest, using matchsticks to prop our eyes open if necessary. Perhaps by the end of it they’ll be the only ones left prepared to take Macho Man Putin with any seriousness at all. And that’s just out of politeness.

Sunday 11 October 2009

England's World Cup qualifier - the decline of televised sport

It’s been a crap week for televised sport in this country. Once the ICC Champions Trophy was finished there wasn’t any more cricket, and it was a week without footie because of the internationals at the weekend, and then we couldn’t watch Ukraine-England either. The “rights” to televise it had been bought by a Mickey Mouse Irish company which had gone bust, and so in true dog-in-the-manger style no-one could televise it at all. You can’t even watch it in the pub.

But wait, the powers-that-be said, do not repine – you can get it on your computer for only £11.95. Yeah, we all thought, great: sit down with your mates huddled around a 15-inch laptop and watch the whole thing in dodgy picture quality with a crate of Albanian lager. The shape of things to come.

All this “rights” stuff is a perversion of the “choice” it’s meant to represent: it’s governed by the great imperative of Revenue Protection. This, for the uninitiated, means quite simply that the service provider thinks it is a million times more important to stop people who haven’t paid from receiving the service than to ensure that those who are entitled to receive it can. All national major sporting events should be on the BBC. End of story.

All right, it wasn’t a great game. We lost 1-0, and evidence that there is anything more to Rio Ferdinand than a face like a duck was not forthcoming. And yes, I’m sure more money is made the way they do it now. But football needs more money like…oh, I don’t know, fill in your own cheesy simile. All I can say is that this stinks.

Friday 9 October 2009

The Jewish names missing from a Guardian list of Nobel Prize winners

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama has unsurprisingly drawn a barrage of diverse comment in today’s press. For me the most interesting reaction came from Simon Rogers on the Guardian website. Not in anything he said about Obama, though. He published a list of all Peace Prize winners since 1901, under the perfectly reasonable question “How does Obama compare?”

Close examination of this revealed a few slips. In 1978, for instance, the laureate was named as President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Half accurate. Some of us may remember that Sadat shared the prize that year with another statesman, one Menachem Begin by name. But Begin’s name was conspicuous by its absence. Further down, the award in 1994 to Yasser Arafat was noted. But had he received the prize alone? I rather thought that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had shared it with him. You wouldn’t have discovered that from Mr Rogers’s list.

I owe this fascinating discovery to the blog forum Harry’s Place. Within 40 minutes of posting, the no doubt vermilion-faced Rogers added his own comment. “Hi, I’m afraid rather than conspiracy, we’re also just capable of making a mistake in complicated data entry (which affected a number where there were two or more winners). This has been rectified [it has].” (He’s also capable of making a mistake in his grammar, eh?)

Data entry? OK, but no one has yet found any other mistakes in recording the many occasions on which multiple awards were made. I am not implying in any way that the Guardian or Simon Rogers are guilty of deliberate falsification. It was an oversight, no doubt under deadline pressure. Even so, what an odd business.

Thursday 8 October 2009

Our poverty attracts the pity of the Chinese

I know our economy has been taking a bit of a bashing recently, but I was a bit taken aback at something my wife said yesterday. Apparently two Chinese friends, independently and on separate occasions in the last week, told her of their surprise at how poor everyone seems to be here.

Both ladies were too polite to amplify, but both had been our guests at a recent party, and no doubt the modest circumstances chez Collard had contributed something to this observation. Still, even I didn’t realise I qualified for the Third World’s pity just yet.

It needs of course to be placed in context. Many of the Chinese living here, especially in the academic world, come from very wealthy families; they’d have to be, to pay full-cost fees for post-graduate as well as undergraduate degrees. So they’re hardly directly comparable to the struggling middle classes of a standard English town. But there are other factors involved.

Only ten or fifteen years ago China’s opening to the outside world had shown the Chinese just how wealthy the Western world was. Going to the West, insofar as that was possible, was like a voyage to Eldorado; one expected untold wealth and luxury, and for the first generation of escapees that was what one got. For those who stayed back home, imagination had to suffice. People would ask, brazenly, how much one earned, translate it into renminbi, and their eyes would start to revolve, thinking how much that would buy in 1990s China.

Which was of course the snag. With so much of the population living on or around the breadline, China has had to keep the basic cost of living very low indeed. Housing, transport, clothing, food, all had to be accessible to those who had remained on Communist-era wages. Thus when middle-class incomes started to shoot up like rocketing pheasants, that income was virtually all disposable. When Chinese come to Britain, therefore, they are not prepared for the fact that most of our monthly incomes, even the higher ones, are swallowed up in fixed costs before they’ve had time to settle in our bank accounts. Somewhere inside them the expectation still remains that we ought to be a lot richer; we’re Westerners, after all. But the reality is that middle-class jobs in Beijing or Shanghai pay hardly less than in the UK, so they have far more cash to buy bling and make whoopee than we do.

So, when you see statistics for the average income in China (£1,275 per annum in 2006) take them with a pinch of monosodium glutamate. There are a billion peasants on far less than that, and several million in the cities with a hell of a lot more. At least they’re becoming sensitive to the plight of us poor sods over here.

Monday 5 October 2009

President Blair - a steal at £3.5 million. Unbeatable value for money

The papers are all full of the exciting news that Tony Blair, if he follows his manifest destiny and is inaugurated shortly as the first President of Europe, will earn about £3.5 million during his 30-month tenure of office. I wonder how this stately figure was arrived at.

The prevailing post-Thatcherite wisdom is that rewards are equivalent to one’s value in the open market. I’m sure it’s not only we socialists who feel a smidgen of doubt in this particular case. For all Mr Blair’s gifts and abilities, does the EU not think it could have had a perfectly serviceable President for rather less than three and a half mil? And I can’t imagine the salary was fixed to attract the right candidate. £3.5m is surely small change to Tony and Cherie these days, and it’s not exactly a secret that Blair wants this job so badly that he’d be quite happy to do it for nothing. After all, I’m pretty sure that he won’t have to put his hand in his own pocket at any time during those 30 months. Except for holidays, of course – whoops, I forgot, the Blairs tend not to pay for those either. So why the need to set the Presidential screw at this level?

It’s obviously a matter of status. One has to at least pretend to keep up with the Berlusconis. Like our former Deputy Prime Minister, one wants to be let it be known that one has one’s own personal Jag as well as the official one. Important people like to be rich, and vice versa. And, after all, that the EU likes to scatter other people’s money with a lavish hand is not exactly news.

What is clear, though, is that this sort of thing has nothing to do with market values. And it’s not confined to the public sector, either, though in the private sector it’s shareholders’ money rather than taxpayers’. Beyond a certain level, probably not unadjacent to the Government’s arbitrarily chosen £150,000, the connection between salary and market value becomes so exiguous as to be nugatory. That’s why I don’t care how highly they are taxed. And the next person to tell me that high salaries are justified by the market value of the services provided, rather than a mere badge of self-defined status, will get my pint upended over their head.

Marek Edelman: death of a great man

I was just about to take the Telegraph’s obituarist to task for a failure to mention the death of Marek Edelman, when I discovered that he or she was in fact quicker off the mark than me. I thus have no need to recount the life story of the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but I do think that an extraordinary human being deserves a eulogy as well as an obituary.

The month-long fight of the doomed Jewish community against overwhelming force was a great act of resistance, even though the chances of survival were no greater than for those who went to the camps. Edelman was one of very few survivors of the ghetto’s total destruction, and had to hide underground for the remaining two years of the war, quite an achievement in itself. After the war he became a cardiologist of high standing, though this did not save him from further anti-Semitic persecution under the Gomulka regime. Once more he bounced back, as a Solidarity activist from the very beginning of the movement. One senses that he came out of his dreadful wartime experiences with an intense commitment to human freedom and dignity.

Edelman was never a Zionist; before the war he had been a leader of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist organisation, and he remained firmly Polish. In old age, he was not afraid to speak up for the Palestinians when he felt that the Jewish self-defence for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. He was thus a controversial figure in Israel; but whether or not one agreed with his views, it cannot be denied that he had earned the right to express them.

Marek Edelman, zikhrono livrakha!

Sunday 4 October 2009

What would we do without Tracey Emin, who doesn't like paying tax?

Hung be the heav’ns with black, yield day to night! Ms Tracey Emin, that modern equivalent of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner, has proclaimed that she is thinking of leaving Britain, saying that she “is simply not willing to pay tax at 50 per cent,” and that the UK doesn’t have enough tax breaks and other freebies for artists. What on earth will we do without her? Mr Cameron, Mr Osborne, this is surely the clinching argument!

An extra ten percent on whatever Ms Emin makes out of her, well, let’s call it “art” for the sake of politeness, over and above £150,000 a year doesn’t sound like sufficient cause to make one abjure the realm unless one had other reasons for doing so. And what exactly is her leverage? Even socialists have always understood that if large-scale industries are driven away by excessive tax rates then working people will lose their jobs. It may be blackmail, but we have no choice. I hardly think this argument applies to the world of celebrity art (motto: It’s art because it’s ME!) So what we are left with is a hissy fit, hardly front-page news in either the “art” or the art world.

Let me remind Ms Emin and other cry-babies that, in Mrs Thatcher’s first two terms, when according to one narrative the foundations of recovery were laid, the top tax rate held firm at 60 per cent. Only in 1988, by which time even many Tories agreed she was losing the plot, was the bold step of reduction to 40 per cent taken, and it led immediately to a consumer boom, 15 per cent interest rates to damp that down, and a boom-bust cycle in housing from which we still haven’t recovered. Yes, many profited hugely, but an awful lot more didn’t, which in a democracy may not be entirely without effect. Up here in the North-West you don’t meet many people who have reason to sympathise with Tracey Emin, and I imagine it’s similar in her home town of Margate. It’s often said that there are only two unavoidables in life: death and taxes. It’s considered undignified to whinge endlessly about the former; what’s so different about the latter?

So to everyone who’s stomping around making similar threats: it’s your decision, and please close the door quietly behind you. And don’t come back. The rest of us will manage somehow; I think you’ll find we’re intensely relaxed about people getting a little less filthy rich.

Friday 2 October 2009

Books? In a library? Are you kidding?

I was looking forward to the re-opening of the local library. It’s been closed for refurbishment since May, and been doing business out of the small junior library, which has space for only a small selection of books. But the main one has now re-opened, and I went in for a browse.

I am working on a history book of less than wholly serious import, and the history section of the public library here has furnished me with loads of anecdotal material, which is the only kind I’m interested in. But when I went into the redesigned library, the history section was peculiarly hard to find, as was virtually everything else. As usual, the redesign has taken the normal minimalist form; the old shelves against the walls have disappeared, and all that can be seen is a few smallish banks of shelves on wheels, for easy removal in case anyone is embarrassed by the presence of books in a library. You know, like those house makeover shows my wife likes to watch on TV: if you want to sell a house, they tell you, make sure all the walls are nice and bare, not a vestige of a book to be seen anywhere.

I found my beloved history section in the end: there were twelve shelves altogether. Nine of them were devoted to the two World Wars of the 20th century, and three to all the rest of history. That, of course, only leaves room for the most general stuff, and so I found.

I went to ask the librarian what had happened. She said “We wanted to create a more flexible space, for events and so on.” I pointed out that, flexible or not (we’d need Stephen Hawking to sort out that one) there was certainly a lot more space than there’d been before. What there was clearly a lot less of was, er, so to speak, not to put too fine a point on it, books. Yes, she agreed, the book count had been reduced by something like 30 per cent. Ah, I thought but didn’t say, well, so long as that makes more space for illiterate gorillas to do the hokey-cokey, that’s fine. I told her that I had probably better start looking for my history books in the local second-hand shops, and she did not demur.

One hears of this sort of thing everywhere. Is it the crying shame and bloody disgrace that I feel it is, or is it just that I’m pushing fifty? And can one, should one, fight back? In a democracy, should one not just accept that libraries must divest themselves of books because people are fonder of DVDs, schools must not bother with education because kids prefer video games, and the Reithian ideals of the BBC must prostrate themselves before the potty mouth of Jonathan Ross?

I’m inclined to try the road of resistance. And much good may it do me.

Thursday 1 October 2009

China's 60th anniversary parade marches into my living room

My lady wife has been behaving strangely. Yesterday she announced she was going to bed at 7 p.m. Why was this? Because she wanted to be up at 2 a.m. to watch the 60th anniversary parade live from Beijing. Of course it didn’t quite work out – she couldn’t sleep, because she was hungry, so she came down and ate half my dinner and tried to change the channel 10 minutes before the end of Man United-Wolfsburg, but that’s par for the course. However, at 2 o’clock, there she was.

I was content to watch the replay at a more civilised time. After all, it’s not exactly an unpredictable cliff-hanger. It’s just a huge number of people marching up and down and singing, waving sheets of coloured card to make precisely coordinated pictures. Somewhat daringly, I asked her how she’d got herself up in the middle of the night to watch all 146 balls-aching minutes of this orgy of leader-worship. She said I’d have enjoyed it too if I’d got up early enough to see the military parade at the beginning. I replied that I did not enjoy the sight of tanks trundling down Chang’an, for reasons which she well knew. But our weapons are peaceful, she said; we don’t go round invading other countries like certain people. I said I was well aware that Chinese weapons are only used against their own people, and the “clash of civilisations” argument took its predictable course. Sometimes it leads to me breaking into Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, but not today, or I’d probably have got a chopstick up my jacksie.

The thing is that my wife is neither a convinced Communist nor a raving nationalist. It was just nostalgia and a bit of homesickness. This is what she grew up with; she was singing along to the songs of her childhood, just as I might to the Beatles or Led Zep. And I had to admit that there was nothing offensive in what I saw, having missed the military tosh: yes, there was a richly decorated float for each province, and yes, that included Taiwan, which isn’t part of the PRC just yet: but the commentary was peaceful and only referred to improved commercial and cultural links across the Taiwan Straits.

Obviously the problem for us is the sight of more than 100,000 people, most of them children, marching in tight regimentation. I had to explain about Triumph of the Will. But then, what are our young people doing instead? Lovers of freedom would have to say they’d rather their kids were slobbing in bed and playing video games than goose-stepping through the streets, but sensible ones will hesitate just a little. And the kids can be corralled like this, not because they’re used to endless Maoist regimentation as my wife was in the Seventies, but because they’re used to doing four or five hours of homework a night under the loving but firm pressure of their parents. Snap judgments on China are out of place: the first ever Communist country to actually function economically demands more careful attention.